Tag: diversity

Heat wave in Ontario and Quebec raises alarm about dangers of sweltering schools

This article was written by Kristy Kirkup and was published in the Globe & Mail on June 24, 2025.

Alexandra Mullins and her son Emmett sit in the playground of his Ottawa public school on Monday. He was sent to the emergency room after experiencing heat exhaustion last week.

Parents, teacher unions and health groups speaking out about the dangers in education institutions that do not have air conditioning

Five-year-old Emmett Mullins, pale and warm to the touch when he returned from school on Thursday, started vomiting at home.

Emmett’s symptoms were not a result of a viral illness. He was overheated.

Earlier that afternoon, he had fallen asleep in his hot classroom watching a movie. His mother, Alexandra Mullins, was advised by Telehealth Ontario to take him to an Ottawa emergency room.

At the hospital, Emmett’s temperature and heart rate were found to be elevated, and he was dehydrated. He was given a Popsicle with electrolytes and closely monitored before he was able to return home.

Ms. Mullins has joined a growing chorus of parents, along with teacher unions and health groups, who are speaking out about the dangers associated with sweltering schools – especially during a heat wave that has gripped much of Ontario and southwestern Quebec.

Many schools, including the one Emmett attends in the nation’s capital, do not have air conditioning.

“We are already at a point where kids are going to get hurt,” Ms. Mullins said Monday. “I would be very surprised if there weren’t more kids in the city that ended up with heat exhaustion at the end of today.”

Record-breaking temperatures on Monday prompted both Ottawa and Toronto to take precautionary measures, including setting up cooling stations, with forecasters anticipating no relief in sight for days.

Christie MacDonald, the emergency services department head at the London Health Sciences Centre, said children and elderly patients are more vulnerable to health effects associated with sweltering temperatures.

Patients can experience a range of heat-related symptoms, such as feeling unwell and being unable to sweat, as well as signs of heat stroke such as confusion and chest pain.

“The heat impacts them dramatically,” said Dr. MacDonald, who advises drinking lots of fluids, and also looking out for family and community members who may not have the ability to get to a cooler area.

Ms. Mullins said that while the dangers associated with cold temperatures, such as frostbite, are commonly understood, many often think about heat as being solely uncomfortable. There is a need to address how to manage the heat because classrooms are getting warmer because of climate change, she said.

Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones on Monday placed the onus of action on school boards. She told reporters that school boards across the province have plans in place, including modifying classroom locations.

“I will leave it to the school boards to make sure they put the pieces in place to keep their students protected, because each school is different and unique for what they are looking at in terms of where the students are best protected,” she said.

In Ontario, there is no maximum threshold for temperature that prompts a shutdown of workplaces established by the Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development. Educators are encouraged by their school board to protect themselves and their students by drinking lots of water, wearing light clothing and avoiding direct sunlight.

“People are sweltering in the classrooms with the inability to do anything to actually address it, other than go outside and sit under a tree,” said Karen Littlewood, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation.

Students and teachers, she added, end up trying to survive the day in the face of scorching heat.

Some parents have opted to keep their children home. Ms. Littlewood said there are staff who cannot tolerate the heat for medical reasons and must call in sick.

“Nobody can work under those conditions,” she said. “Kids can’t learn under those conditions. People go home sick, and then you have other illnesses that are exacerbated by the fact that you have this extreme heat.”

While there is no maximum temperature to force a shutdown, Ms. Littlewood said, educators can call the ministry and action is taken if a classroom falls to 17 C during a cold spell.

Ms. Mullins also pointed to this discrepancy, saying that if a furnace wasn’t working in her son’s school in January, children would be sent home.

“It wouldn’t be given a second thought,” she said.

`Superdiversity’ project maps a changing Canada

Interactive website tracks immigration, social trends at neighbourhood level in country’s largest cities

This article was written by Nicholas Keung and was published in the Toronto Star on December 16, 2024.

Have you ever wondered how your local community stacks up when it comes to diversity in ethnicities, income levels, languages spoken or educational attainment?

Residents of Canada’s six largest metropolitan areas can now explore that through a website launched on Monday that tracks the transformation of the country by immigration down to the neighbourhood level.

Coined “Superdiversity,” the project crunches immigration and census data into interactive graphics and maps that showcase Canada’s changing landscapes and how socioeconomic indicators such as wealth, income, employment status and education play out across ethnic groups, generations of newcomers and neighbourhoods.

“We’re hoping to just help anyone come to a better understanding of the society that surrounds them, that they’re part of,” said University of British Columbia professor emeritus Daniel Hiebert, a cofounder of the project.

“This is really about social change and the ability to show it based on data.”

Since Ottawa changed its immigration rules in the 1960s that favoured those from the U.K., continental Europe and the U.S., Canada’s population has become increasingly diverse. The proportion of newcomers from the “traditional” source countries has dwindled to about 15 per cent from nearly 90 per cent.

The Superdiversity website shows how the annual admission of permanent residents — broken down into economic, family and humanitarian classes — evolved from fewer than 150,000 in 1980 to more than 450,000 in 2023, as well as how the nationalities of each subgroup of newcomers changed over time, to now being dominated by those from India, China and the Philippines.

It also documents how the annual inflow of temporary residents — divided into asylum seekers, international students and different types of work permit holders — skyrocketed in just a few years from fewer than 200,000 to more than 1.6 million today, and how the source countries shifted under each category.

“When you see people who came from a particular country with a particular migration stream, with a particular age group and with a different gender pattern, you can see how these fit together to produce certain social outcomes,” said project cofounder Steven Vertovec, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Germany.

“By treating groups only as ethnic communities, we didn’t see the complexities and diversity within groups. You just treated all Indians as the same, all Italians and all Asians as the same.”

Vertovec said multicultural thinking can mask the diversity in education, health care and social needs among people within the same ethnic group who may have come in different waves and under different circumstances.

The visuals on the website also home in on Canada’s six largest cities: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and OttawaGatineau.

Today, about a quarter of Canada’s population was born outside the country. The religious backgrounds of newcomers have shifted dramatically from Christianity to Hinduism, Sikhism and Islam.

Hiebert said there are more than 6,000 combinations of ethnicity and religion in metropolitan Toronto, and Muslims alone come from more than 100 ethnicities.

“So it’s a really different set of origins and also very different set of religions coming out the other end,” he said. “Whenever government wants to create a committee to advise them on something, they want representative folks, right? So how do you choose a representative person when you’re dealing with this kind of complexity of society?”

One interactive graphic shows how Indigenous people, Canadians overall, multiple generations of permanent residents and those with temporary status fared in terms of home ownership, incomes, employment status and education levels by ethnicity.

For instance, about 60 per cent of recent Chinese immigrants (who came between 2016 and 2021) are universityeducated, as opposed to about 40 per cent among those from the Philippines. However, the Chinese have a much lower rate of labour market participation and higher rate of lowincome population than the Filipinos, who lag way behind on home ownership.

One map on the website depicts the location of immigrant groups, including the largest minority groups and recent arrivals, as well as high and lowincome areas of the city and a few other relevant social status indicators.

Another looks at how the degrees of ethnic diversity, socioeconomic status, immigration generation, admission category, income and education intersect in neighbourhoods, indicating the level of mingling of people from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

“It’s kind of a mental exercise to think, What’s going on in each of these different areas?” said Hiebert. “Why are some more versus less diverse? We also give the ability to look at other forms of diversity, like income diversity, where we see the mixing of rich and poor.”

Many neighbourhoods that show a mix of incomes and ethnic diversity can be found in areas bounded by Queen Street West to the south, Lawrence Avenue West to the north, Bathurst Street to the east and Scarlett Road to the west. This contrasts with neighbourhoods such as Pine Grove and Elder Mill in Vaughan, with less income and ethnic diversity.

“Complexity can be a way of seeing and getting a better grip on the world around you without being daunted,” said Vertovec, warning against populists who imply threats through oversimplified perspectives on the world.