According to story featured this weekend on the CBC ...

 http://cbc.ca/stories/2002/07/07/fires020707

Quebec forest fires burn out of control, but finally a change in wind direction is clearing the air along parts of the East Coast and in Ontario, but now the smell of burnt wood and the smoke is covering Montreal. Not only the Western forests are burning, but the drought is also severe in the Northern Eastern forests in Canada, leading to a huge forest fire that sent such a cloud of smoke into the air that it literally darkened the sun, and the burning smell and smoke cloud travelled over a thousand kilometers. The fire was started by dry lightning and is travelling at about the speed a person walks and in the last week has consumed hundreds of square miles. Over 50 fires are burning in Northern Quebec, and dry lightening has also started a couple of dozen new large fires in the Western United States in the last few days, (hundreds of fires were started by lightning in the American west, but only a couple of dozen have escaped to become new large scale fires.

However in both Canada and the United States there is a drought, flooding sandwich, with the flooding being the filling in the middle, leaving a strip up the center of the continent water logged.

 http://cbc.ca/stories/2002/05/15/west_nile020515

According to this story, the water logged conditions have led to a fierce outbreak of mosquitoes, a sell out in bug repellant, and now West Nile Virus monitoring is being expanded.