More people in Canada and the U.S. die of extreme heat every year than any other natural disaster.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
If only someone could have seen it coming.
Amid a blistering heat wave last month, Torontonians made a beeline for their public pools – only to find many of them closed after pool staff cited unsafe working conditions. Reinforcements arrived later in the day, when the pools were restored to their normal business hours.
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow has since correctly identified that there are “gaps” in the city’s heat-relief strategy. “The gaps were: Why didn’t they see that a week earlier?” she told The Globe and Mail’s editorial board.
The better question is: Why did no city staffer see that gap six-plus years ago? That’s when Elliott Cappell, whose two-year term as Toronto’s first (and only) chief resilience officer ended in 2019, identified pool workers’ safety to the Parks department as a potential flaw in the city’s heat plan. “Pools are one of the most obvious examples, because you need them when it’s hot, when the workers are going to be unsafe,” he said in an interview. “So we had that discussion, and it really wasn’t integrated or taken seriously at the time.”
Ask a doctor: What are the signs of heat illness?
Or: Why did no municipal official see the gap more than two decades ago? That’s when Eric Klinenberg published a seminal “social autopsy” of a deadly 1995 heat wave in Chicago that found that most deaths occurred indoors and alone, and that people who lacked social contacts, reasons to leave the house and easy access to public spaces were disproportionately impacted.
“Chicagoans who lived in neighbourhoods with high population density, with busy commercial streets and vibrant public spaces, suffered far fewer deaths,” he wrote, “while neighbourhoods that had been abandoned by employers, stores and residents had much higher death rates.”
This was the story, too, from B.C.’s heat dome in 2021. The province’s coroner found that 98 per cent of the 619 deaths occurred indoors, more than half involved people who lived alone, and 33 per cent occurred in neighbourhoods that were identified as socially deprived.
The outrage over closed pools misses the deeper problem: a broader shortage of what Mr. Klinenberg dubbed “social infrastructure” – pools, yes, but also community centres, libraries, parks and accessible transit – to support the 32 per cent of Canadians without home air conditioning.
Research has shown that the community care made possible by social infrastructure – which can include private spaces such as main-street businesses and religious institutions – can mitigate the worst effects on these communities. A 2014 study of four rural Canadian communities recovering from a natural disaster found “a consistent significant positive correlation between cohesion and resilience.”
Building and bolstering multiuse social infrastructure also offers a quicker and more affordable route to climate resiliency. Programs to distribute air conditioners are unsustainable, as doing so is expensive and energy-intensive. A 2023 study of more than 500 tsunami-affected Japanese neighbourhoods showed that social infrastructure “measurably and cheaply reduced mortality rates among the most vulnerable population,” while offering other social benefits, too.
Instead, cities are too often caught scrambling for Band-Aid solutions or planning for a climate that no longer exists, rather than the rapidly warming one we actually have. When more people in Canada and the U.S. die of extreme heat every year than any other natural disaster, that is unacceptable.
Canadians take winter seriously. Most jurisdictions have laws requiring landlords and employers to maintain a minimum temperature for rental buildings and workplaces, and fleets of plows prepared for significant snowfall.
The reverse is not true for heat events. That must change, because an array of trends projects more hardship to come: the necessary densification of cities is worsening the urban heat-island effect as concrete and asphalt trap heat overnight, and more Canadians want to age in place, meaning that more vulnerable seniors will be living alone.
Governments may keep on failing to prepare for entirely foreseeable climate events, but Canadians can still cultivate the strong community connections that can save lives. Simple measures – getting to know your neighbours, being involved in your neighbourhood, checking in on others – can go a long way.
Canadians shouldn’t have to go it alone. But in the absence of political will, communities will have to create their own networks of care – because being alone is the problem.