Trending
To the Journal editor:
Everybody up here knows the drill. You come over a rise in a whiteout and there's a car nose-down in the ditch. You stop. You pull them out, or you sit with them until somebody with a chain shows up. Nobody asks where they're from. Nobody sends a bill. Next time it's your car.
They do the same thing at the Soo, across an international border. Sault Ste. Marie has been one town with a line through it since 1817. The two cities keep a fire mutual-aid agreement, renegotiated in 2023. Between 1998 and 2022, firefighters from the Canadian side crossed the bridge to fight fires on the American side eight times. There is no record of it going the other way. That takes a signed agreement and coordination with customs. They do it anyway.
Now hold that up against what our congressman sent to Ottawa on July 15.
He had already written the right letter. In August 2025, Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Watersmeet, told a Canadian colleague that "the air our citizens breathe does not respect international boundaries," and offered to work "in good faith."
Eleven months later he signed one saying Canada "has the tools to prevent and has chosen not to," that "our patience has run out," that "the United States will look elsewhere, and act on our own," and that we ought to be "reconsidering how much benefit of the doubt this relationship continues to earn."
The first letter reads like it's from up here. The second reads like it was drafted in Washington.
And here is what ought to bother us. Lightning starts most acres that burn in Canada, in woods you cannot drive to. Some of the smoke that shut down the farmers market and dropped the Mackinac Bridge to 20 miles an hour blew in from Minnesota. Meanwhile the U.S. Forest Service spent the spring proposing to close the Houghton and L'Anse research labs, in his own district. He said nothing publicly. Not a release, not a letter.
Loud toward the neighbors. Quiet at home.
Two letters, same man, 11 months apart. Which one sounds like us?