Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, took Canada to task for its management of wildfires that have led to poor air quality across the United States.

"This is a big problem," Zeldin said Friday on Newsmax's "Carl Higbie: FRONTLINE." "There are now just under a thousand wildfires in Canada. ... This isn't a first-time occurrence.

"This is something that was faced last year and prior to that as well."

"But beyond that is the way that a decision is made to proactively prevent, to mitigate this from happening in the first place, to be able to detect as soon as the fire starts to scale up, mobilize, respond quickly to put a fire out right away," he added.

"Most of our country here does it pretty well," Zeldin said.

Zeldin said the federal government's air quality website was its most-visited webpage Friday.

"The problem is that so much is burning at one time that it ends up causing this massive environmental impact, not just to their own people, but to us as well," Zeldin said.

"It's really important to be able to proactively engage in wildfire prevention and forest management, to engage in mitigation activities that prevent a fire from spreading in the first place," Zeldin added.

Zeldin cited last year's blazes in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles as an example of poor fire management.

"You have to plan in advance, utilizing new technology to make sure that you're detecting the fire right away, that you have the resources to be able to put the fire out as soon as it starts," Zeldin said.

"There are a lot of lessons that we here in our country have learned," he added. "Because this isn't the first time this is hitting Canada, there might be just less tolerance and more frustration from Americans who are speaking up."

Zeldin said he had a productive conversation with Canada's ambassador to the U.S. to discuss the wildfires, but said Americans are fed up.

"There is just not as much rope as you've seen in past years, because this continues to happen," Zeldin said. "The first priority is putting the fire out."

"No matter how much we speak about what to do in the future, there's going to there's going to be a time for a conversation to be had, you know, a month, two months, three months down the road to make sure that a year from now, this isn't taking place again," Zeldin added.

"Right now, what is most important is that these fires are put out as quickly as possible."

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