Tag: air-conditioning

This article was written by Ben Cohen and was published in the Toronto Star on June 26,0225.

Forty ­two people were sent to the emer­gency room in Toronto dur­ing the heat wave this week, when tem­per­at­ures reached life ­threat­en­ing, record­ set­ting peaks, accord­ing to Toronto Pub­lic Health (TPH).

The city and an MPP at Queen’s Park are try­ing to address the prob­lem by giv­ing out hun­dreds of free air con­di­tion­ers and draft­ing laws that could force land­lords to install them. Tem­per­at­ures may have fallen from Sunday when an all­time humi­dex high of 46 was recor­ded at Pear­son air­port but the city will almost cer­tainly exper­i­ence heat waves of sim­ilar or greater intens­ity in the future, accord­ing to cli­mate experts. They’re already an annual occur­rence that a TPH study in 2007 found kills an aver­age of 120 people in the city each year. The health agency hasn’t tracked heat wave deaths since.

Air­con­di­tion­ing is a power­ful life­sav­ing tool dur­ing a heat wave. Nearly all deaths from elev­ated tem­per­at­ures hap­pen indoors, where heat can accu­mu­late if it isn’t addressed by a cool­ing sys­tem. Accord­ing to the latest Stat­ist­ics Canada data from 2021, 287,861 house­holds in Toronto, or 13 per cent of all homes at the time, didn’t have air con­di­tion­ing.

It’s people liv­ing in homes like these, par­tic­u­larly older people, who are most likely to die from the heat, as seen dur­ing the B.C. “heat dome” in 2021, which killed more than 600 people.

“Ninety­eight per cent of them died indoors and most were over the age of 70,” said Dr. Sam­antha Green, a fam­ily phys­i­cian who researches heat. “Those are the folks we need to pro­tect.”

To that end, the city launched a $200,000 pro­gram last month to give low­income seni­ors free port­able air con­di­tion­ers this sum­mer. Nearly 1,500 people applied and 500 were suc­cess­ful, selec­ted through a ran­dom draw. But the ini­ti­at­ive didn’t arrive in time to help seni­ors sur­vive this week’s heat wave. They will be installed next month.

Mean­while, at Queen’s Park, an NDP MPP is plan­ning to try to force land­lords to install indoor cool­ing in the sum­mer by cap­ping the max­imum allow­able tem­per­at­ure indoors. It’s a pro­spect that has been bat­ted around at both the pro­vin­cial and muni­cipal level for years, and which med­ical experts say has become an urgent neces­sity as heat waves intensify.

“We need this law on the books, as soon as we can get it on the books, to pro­tect the most vul­ner­able people,” said Green. City hall is about halfway through a year­long study into whether it should pass a sim­ilar bylaw. Last year, coun­cil also voted to ask the Ford gov­ern­ment to legis­late it pro­vin­cially.

NDP MPP Jes­sica Bell intro­duced a motion in 2022 that wasn’t suc­cess­ful but she said she will be rein­tro­du­cing it this fall.

“Air con­di­tion­ing isn’t just about com­fort any­more, it’s about keep­ing people healthy and alive dur­ing heat waves,” she said. “This is a warn­ing to the Con­ser­vat­ives. It isn’t a mat­ter of if, it’s a mat­ter of when Ontario will suf­fer the extreme heat event like the one Brit­ish Columbia exper­i­enced.”