Driving through the plains of Ontario always reminds me of my home state of Iowa. A lot of it is agricultural. and the road can be numbingly straight.
But as Jake Neher and Jack Hallauer — two Michigan native colleagues — and I headed toward the Toronto exurb of Brampton to tour a Magna International plant, I experienced something I never felt in Iowa: a burning in my throat from wildfires.
This past summer, locales from Chicago to New York were canceling outdoor activities because of the Ontario forest fires and the heavy smoke hanging over large swaths of North America.