Tag: heat wave

This article was written by Dean Flannery and was published in the Toronto Star on June 25, 2025.

It’s been hot in Ontario, and dan­ger­ously so. For the past few days, my phone has been blast­ing out reg­u­lar health warn­ings about the extreme tem­per­at­ures.

Not that I’ve needed the reminder. Open­ing my front door this week has been like open­ing the oven door when the broiler is run­ning. On Monday, tem­per­at­ures hovered between 33 and 36 C. With the humi­dex, it felt as hot as 46 C at times, the kind of heat that can make you feel ill fast if you don’t take steps to cool your­self — assum­ing you have the means to do so.

But what about those who depend on oth­ers to keep their envir­on­ment healthy?

That’s the situ­ation for stu­dents across Ontario, where heat waves can occur even in spring and fall and most pub­lic schools lack air con­di­tion­ing. This week, thou­sands of kids are spend­ing their last week of school in spaces that are uncom­fort­ably hot and offer lim­ited oppor­tun­it­ies for cool­ing.

In Toronto, only 30 per cent of pub­lic schools have cent­ral air con­di­tion­ing. In Hamilton, it’s 50 per cent — and the more than $50 mil­lion it would take to fix that state of affairs is bey­ond the school board’s budget.

Yet instead of invest­ing in cool­ing infra­struc­ture, Premier Doug Ford’s gov­ern­ment has taken to blam­ing school boards for excess­ive classroom heat. Mean­while, kids are left with a patch­work of pro­to­cols to help them cope, which can include being kept indoors and cycled in and out of des­ig­nated cool­ing spaces such as lib­rar­ies and gyms.

So just how hot is too hot for classrooms? Some school boards give admin­is­trat­ors the option to cut the day short if out­door tem­per­at­ures reach the high 40s — but even the Toronto Dis­trict School Board acknow­ledged this week that it was unlikely to do so, because of the bur­den on par­ents.

As kids can’t simply leave class and call it a day, they have to endure real harms to their well­being, not to men­tion their abil­ity to learn and write exams. You may be inclined to shrug off these harms, given the lim­ited dur­a­tion of heat waves. But you’d also be shrug­ging off the province’s oblig­a­tion to provide stu­dents with fun­da­ment­ally safe learn­ing spaces all year long, not just when the cost of doing so is con­veni­ent.

There’s also the fact that schools are work­places, where put­ting teach­ers in the pos­i­tion of hav­ing to deal with nat­ur­ally dis­tressed kids and inad­equate options for relief is not only an unjus­ti­fi­able occu­pa­tional bur­den but also a gendered one: 76 per cent of teach­ers in Ontario are women.

The need for invest­ment is urgent, and it’s not going away. Kids today are deal­ing with heat events that are more fre­quent and more intense than what their par­ents or grand­par­ents dealt with. In an April 2025 report on the need for bet­ter cool­ing in child­care spaces, the Cana­dian Envir­on­mental Law Asso­ci­ation estim­ates that a 10­year­old in 2024 would’ve exper­i­enced 36 times more heat waves than a 10­year­old in 1970.

In recog­ni­tion of this increased expos­ure, CELA and the Cana­dian Part­ner­ship for Chil­dren’s Health and Envir­on­ment are call­ing on the fed­eral and pro­vin­cial gov­ern­ments to cre­ate a com­pre­hens­ive plan to address the need for invest­ment in health­ier, more cli­mate­resi­li­ent schools and child­care spaces.

These calls for lead­er­ship rather than excuses come at an oppor­tune time. Queen’s Park and Ott­awa, so often engaged in stul­ti­fy­ing jur­is­dic­tional battles, have been unchar­ac­ter­ist­ic­ally aligned in their desire to fast­track infra­struc­ture projects. In an era of sweep­ing power moves, they’d be wise to apply some of this energy to clean­ing up the linger­ing messes that have been exacer­bated by chronic under­fund­ing of our social infra­struc­ture.

Build­ing cli­mate resi­li­ence in schools starts with estab­lish­ing a legal max­imum for indoor tem­per­at­ures. CELA and CPCHE want Ontario to amend the Edu­ca­tion Act or pass reg­u­la­tions to set the threshold at 26 C in both schools and child­care spaces, and they want it to offer ded­ic­ated infra­struc­ture fund­ing to make this a prac­tical real­ity. Far from arbit­rary, the pro­posed threshold is based on BC Centre for Dis­ease Con­trol ana­lysis of the heat dome that struck Brit­ish Columbia in 2021, killing hun­dreds.

Amid a rap­idly warm­ing cli­mate, air con­di­tion­ing in schools can no longer be con­sidered a lux­ury. It’s an essen­tial pub­lic health inter­ven­tion — one that Ontario politi­cians enjoy in their work­places and that kids deserve, too.