I first started writing this column in April. I hadn’t really slept for the past three nights. Maybe four. It’s hard to keep track of time when you’re not sleeping. It wasn’t from stress or noise or insomnia. It was the heat.
Temperatures had climbed into the high 20s. Since my buildings hadn’t switched over from heating to cooling yet, there wasn’t much to be done. The choice was between opening all the windows and living with the street noise or living in a pressure cooker. Either way, I wasn’t sleeping.
A few weeks later, wildfire season started. It seemed like it should be an abstract concern, now that I’ve returned to Ontario after having spent a decade out west. Wildfires season has become an annual event in Alberta and British Columbia. It’s part of why we left. I guess I can’t escape it. There’s nowhere to hide from climate change.
It feels pretty bleak right now. Wednesday was bad. Thursday is supposed to be worse. The smoke is coming, whether we like it or not. They say a bad wildfire day is the equivalent of smoking seven cigarettes, without the nicotine hit. It’s much worse than that. When the haze wafts in, it’s like sitting near a campfire — only you can’t put it out or escape. You can only take refuge.
This is our new climate reality. We can blame jerks flicking cigarette buts or failing to put out campfires, or we can invent conspiracies about environmentalists setting fires to advance their agenda. But there have always been morons setting fires. We didn’t invent stupidity in 2023. The reality is that the world is hotter and drier now. That means that fires burn hotter and spread further. So we get more wildfire smoke. It’s not complicated.
The planet is hotter, and we need to adapt. Fortunately, there are pragmatic things that cities like Toronto can do. That means not only being prepared for the impact of wildfires, but also adapting city life to hotter temperatures over longer periods of time.
Preparing for wildfires is complicated. There’s only so much that cities can do. After all, the City of Toronto isn’t going to put out wildfires in northern Quebec. But we need to be able to breathe when smoke comes, and we need to be prepared for the possibility of resettling people displaced by wildfires.
The first step is ensuring that we have adequate ventilation. There was some enthusiasm for doing so during COVID, which would have been helpful right now. Some people noted during the pandemic that public-health crises often lead to public-health improvements. The obvious case is how a cholera outbreak in London lead to widespread adoption of indoor plumbing. They thought that improved indoor ventilation might be the silver lining of COVID. We’re still working on it.
The solution to this doesn’t necessarily have to be driven by the government. It should obviously give some thought to improving ventilation in public buildings and encouraging ventilation in private buildings. But households can take matters into their own hands. Air purifiers aren’t hard to come by. And they do help. In fact, the Government of Canada recommends using them for wildfire smoke. They should make the case loudly before every wildfire season so that people can plan accordingly.
The harder part is dealing with people displaced by wildfires. We have a hard enough time housing our current population. If we had to absorb 20,000 displaced people, as was the case in Alberta, we’d be in trouble. Routinely having 1 per cent rental-vacancy rates doesn’t allow much wiggle room for private accommodations.
Fixing our housing-supply crisis by building enough housing would clearly help. But short of that, governments need to come up with some creative contingency plans. While we’ve got a shortage of residential real estate, we’ve got some slack in commercial real estate. It’s hard to turn most office buildings into proper apartment buildings. Might there be opportunities to repurpose some commercial space to house vulnerable people displaced by wildfires or seeking refuge from heat emergencies? It seems like something we should think about.
Even if we ignore wildfires, extreme heat can be unpleasant, both indoors and outside. There are things we can do to make both more pleasant on hot days.
Let’s start indoors, with my own pet peeve. Toronto has a bylaw governing internal heating and cooling systems. It’s largely aimed at slumlords who might be tempted to throttle the heat in winter — particularly if electricity is included in the rent. Buildings are required to ensure that units have the ability to maintain a minimum of 21 C between September 15 and June 1. From June 2 to September 14, buildings with air conditioning are required to ensure a maximum temperature of 21 C.
The unintended consequence of this bylaw is that apartment buildings with central air conditioning often wait until June 1 to turn it on. After all, they need to switch between heating and cooling. That takes time. They can’t just toggle it back and forth.
Being a little cold during fall and spring might be a problem. But it’s unlikely to lead to medical emergencies, unlike indoor temperatures in the mid-to-high 20s. Easing the requirement for internal heating in fall and spring would give buildings more flexibility to turn on the air conditioning earlier without worrying about violating the law. Many would choose to switch over earlier, as mine did.
Then there’s the public realm. While we can’t control the climate, we have some control over the temperature in our neighbourhoods. We can do that both by providing more shade and keeping the ground cooler.
Toronto has a lush tree canopy. It can make for cool summer walks. The problem is that it’s unequally distributed. There’s plenty of tree cover in Rosedale. Less across the bridge in St Jamestown. We need more equitable tree cover. Shade shouldn’t be a luxury good.
Related: we could use more parks. This is a tricky in a city that is largely built out. After all, we can’t just wedge in our own Central Park. There are some big proposals for increasing greenspace in the core, such as the Rail Deck Park, but many of these are years away — if they ever come to fruition. They’re also concentrated. What we need is more small parks and parkettes dispersed throughout the city.
Then there’s the matter of ground-level temperatures. Believe it or not, we have some control over that. A lot of city infrastructure — asphalt, for example — throws off heat. By contrast, vegetation helps cool neighbourhoods. Don’t believe me? Sit down on your driveway, then sit down on the grass. Which is hotter? It sure isn’t the grass. There are a lot of good reasons to have more permeable surfaces in cities. Even if we put aside the benefits for flood-mitigation — an increasing concern with climate change — it would help to keep temperatures a bit cooler.
According to the U.S. National Integrated Heat Health Information System, temperatures can vary by 20 degrees Fahrenheit (just over 6.5 C) in different parts of the same neighbourhood at the same time, driven by the urban heat-island effect. That’s a big impact, given that one study estimated that a 2 C to 3 C increase in temperature can lead to a 4 per cent to 7 per cent increase in mortality attributable to heat.
Extreme heat is here whether we like it or not. Toronto will need to adapt. There isn’t a silver bullet, but there are many pragmatic tweaks we can make to live with the effects of climate change. We shouldn’t get caught off guard by the next April heatwave or — god forbid — wildfire disaster.