Scores of wildfires devastating large swaths of Ontario continued to burn through Friday morning, including 21 new blazes, releasing smoke and particles into the air that continued to affect major cities including New York, Detroit and Chicago.

Premier Doug Ford of Ontario said that there were 191 active fires across the province on Friday and that 81 of them were not under control.

Mr. Ford responded sharply to criticisms of his province’s handling of the fires by Republican politicians in Michigan and Ohio, where the smoke from the wildfires has created hazardous air quality.

“If there are some politicians out there chirping away, well maybe what you should do rather than complain, is send support, send help, because we have done the exact same thing, that’s what you’re supposed to do,” he said during a news conference in Toronto on Friday, enumerating the ways in which Ontario has helped in crises in the United States including past California wildfires.

After several days of hazardous air quality in Toronto, where smoke from the fires turned the sky orange, Friday morning dawned clear with blue skies. By noon the city’s air quality had returned to good condition.

The fires in Ontario have been concentrated around Thunder Bay, a city on Lake Superior about an hour’s drive from Minnesota. They have caused dramatic evacuations in at least 15 communities, which are home to more than 1,500 people, with new evacuations announced Friday.

Wildfires tend to gravely affect Indigenous communities living in remote, rural areas in Canada. Several of those evacuated this week were First Nations reserves, including Cat Lake, Eabametoong and McDowell Lake, fly-in communities that needed to be evacuated by air.

More than 850 fires remained active across Canada, with 113 categorized as out of control, according to the government.

Firefighting is the remit of regional governments in Canada, in this case the province of Ontario, rather than the federal government. But on Thursday, the province said it needed federal help to cope with the spreading wildfires, including from the army.

“In response to the significant threat of wildland fire activity in northern Ontario, the province has issued a formal request for assistance to the government of Canada to be prepared to expedite the deployment of federal resources to support evacuations,” Jill Dunlop, the Ontario minister for emergency preparedness, said on social media on Thursday.