Extreme Heat Project FAQs • Georgia Strait AllianceGeorgia Strait Alliance

Across the world and the Salish Sea, heat waves and smokey skies are becoming regular parts of our summers. We know the deadly cost of these events: the Heat Dome of 2021 was the deadliest weather event in Canadian history; at least 619 people died as a consequence of the extreme heat from June 25th to July 1st. The town of Lytton burned to the ground and is still struggling to rebuild. Over a billion sea creatures are estimated to have died in the heat. This was a climate disaster: this heat wave was amplified by human activities that are changing the climate and supported by a lack of bold climate action on the part of our governments.

Why is Georgia Strait Alliance advocating for extreme heat protection?

Groups like ours have been working to stop the worst impacts of climate change for decades. Major polluters and Canadian governments first ignored the crisis, then acted slowly on making changes, and have now shifted to making things worse by expanding fossil fuel extraction while promising they will magically get better. As our work continues to focus on advocating for climate action and habitat protection for the Salish Sea, we are now dealing with climate change as a crisis, and the death and illness that comes with extreme heat is one of the most urgent matters to deal with. Temperatures are going up, wildfires are becoming both more common and larger, and the risk to people’s health is growing. During the 2021 Heat Dome event, at least 619 BCers died from heat related causes in less than a week. Many thousands more were made ill by the heat or found basic life tasks like cooking and cleaning were too hard to do. We are advocating for cooling and indoor air quality measures because they will save people’s lives and health during an environmental crisis. Climate change is here and we have to act to protect those most affected by its impacts.

Why a maximum temperature, and why 23°C?

In the summer and fall of 2022, our Extreme Heat project went into neighbourhoods impacted by the 2021 Heat Dome. We talked directly to people about how the heat impacted their ability to live their lives and affected their health. It was clear to us that we needed to research what a healthy temperature range looks like to be able to put forward solutions. When we looked into what temperature standards are out there, we kept coming back to the World Health Organization guidelines on health and housing issued in 2018. They looked at the gold standard studies on links between temperature and health risks. The guidelines said, “there is no demonstrable risk to human health of healthy sedentary people living in air temperatures of between 18 and 24°C.”

We went with 23°C because not everyone in rental housing will be healthy; disabled people are more likely to be renters than the average, and more than 30% of Canadian renters have either a long term illness or a disability. Whether because of the impacts of their conditions directly, the role of medical aids, or the effects of the medicines they take, these are the people who face difficulties physically regulating temperature. When we talked to people in neighbourhoods vulnerable to heat last summer, so many said their pre-existing conditions were worsened by warmer temperatures.

Why an indoor air quality standard, and what would that standard look like?

Wildfire smoke inundating our communities is becoming more and more common as the climate crisis supercharges fire season. Four of BC’s largest 5 fire seasons have occurred since 2017. 2023 is already the largest fire season we’ve ever had, and we’re facing weeks and possibly months more fire risk. Some experts think that fire seasons will only grow longer, and the possibility exists they may become a year-round phenomenon. Our region had a taste of this last year, with smoke inundating BC cities into October. The health effects of wildfire smoke pollution are still being studied, but range from systemic inflammation to elevated heart problems and cancer rates to worsening flu season to impacts on the brain itself. Smoke from Canadian fire seasons is as deadly as vehicle pollution and costs our health system billions.

The World Health Organization guideline on air quality recommends a specific standard for PM2.5, the fine particles that are of most concern from wildfire smoke (annual PM2.5AQG level of 5 µg/m, 24-hour PM2.5 AQG level of 15 µg/m) that we believe should govern indoor air quality.

Why make this mandatory? Why put this burden on landlords?

If we don’t set these as binding, legal requirements, tenants are going to suffer in future heat and smoke events. Illness will spike and lives will be lost. Some portion of the rental market will simply not be able to afford a portable air conditioner or air filtration system. AC units appropriate for apartment sizes start at $299 and go up based on cooling and area. In a time when 53% of Canadians are living paycheck to paycheck and a growing number of BC renters facing “crisis” levels of rent, this is an expense many people simply won’t be able to make. Even for those who can afford it, some landlords are not allowing tenants to install their own air conditioners. The lack of funding and rights means that the lives of these renters are at risk.

Beyond emergency measures like portable AC, the long-term solution must be a thorough retrofit program. Heat pumps (which both heat and cool, and do so at extremely high levels of efficiency) are better solutions for cooling than portable air conditioners. Landlords BC, an industry organization, has a lengthy report discussing the use of heat pumps in multi-unit buildings, and it’s well understood that these devices will work at the scale of an apartment.

There is a lot you can do around regulating temperature with building envelopes and materials, like cool roofs or insulation. For air quality measures, there are important steps we can take to limit indoor exposure to PM2.5: strong seals on windows and doors to limit smoke particles from entering, room pressure control, HVAC systems with upgraded filters, and the use of portable HEPA units. These upgrades are beyond the ability of tenants to enact, and must be done at the building level.

Won’t landlords just pass on the cost burden of cooling to tenants who struggle to afford rent as it is?

Many GSA staff are long-time renters, and understand sensitivity to the idea of rents increasing because of mechanical cooling and air quality standards. We believe this is a question of properly designed regulations by the province, and a well-designed retrofit program. There are many actions that the BC government can take to protect renters from bearing the costs of these improvements or facing losing their housing. Retrofit assessments can be done independently, with an assessment as to how many and which tenants must actually be temporarily moved during the period of retrofit, and provisions made for those renters that will be impacted. Retrofit funding can contain conditions that do not allow landlords to pass on costs. The province can enact vacancy control, removing the economic incentive to use renovations as a cause to evict. Tenant protections must be part of the process. Life saving retrofits should not be an occasion for profiteering.

Right now homeowners in BC have a number of cost-saving measures available to them for upgrading to heat pumps, with funding coming from the BC government, the federal government, BC Hydro, and FortisBC. There are no rebate programs for renters, they cannot on their own get a heat pump installed and there are also no broadly available programs for multi-unit buildings. We know, however, that this kind of retrofit program is going to happen. Landlords BC, an industry association, is working with the City of Vancouver and the BC government on a retrofit pilot project, and have talked in the press about needing funding for further retrofits. We believe that it must be part of the climate transformation BC requires: a program of sufficient scale to both lower energy usage across buildings, one that defends the rights of tenants, and protects the lives of people throughout the province.

What does an emergency outreach program look like?

It’s clear that the government of BC, like every government, has trouble reaching parts of the population during heat alerts. The reliance on traditional and social media to carry messages is less and less effective as the former declines in trust and the latter sees users and brands walk away.

Also clear is that while anyone can suffer from the impacts of heat and smoke, some neighbourhoods are more at risk than others (Vancouver Coastal Health has a number of maps and case studies that touch on these and other climate-related health hazards). These geographic clusters provide an immense opportunity: you can do direct outreach into these neighbourhoods to prepare for and provide crisis response during heat and smoke events.

GSA has already experimented with this idea: both last and this summer, we’ve had teams of community organizers knocking on doors in at-risk neighbourhoods in Burnaby, Nanaimo, Richmond, Vancouver, and West Vancouver. We’ve asked people about their experience with extreme heat events, and we’ve provided maps of community cooling areas and tips for dealing with the heat. We’ve reached thousands of people with a small budget and minimal capacity. The government of BC can surely fund something larger and more effective to inform and provide resources for these neighbourhoods.

Part of that resource package must be portable air conditioners for those most at risk. While heat pumps and at-scale retrofit programs are the gold standard, we cannot let people suffer illness and risk death while those are designed and implemented. Air conditioners will save lives, and we cannot leave people at risk when the tools exist to save their lives.

What is the government of BC doing right now to provide mechanical cooling to most at-risk?

Not nearly enough. They’ve started a very small scale, boutique program to get air conditioners to those at risk. It’s not sufficient in size; the program offers 8,000 units when 382,000 people in BC live in poverty; it’s overly complicated, making it hard for renters and landlords to know what to do; and, It has too many barriers for access. As the policy analyst and disability advocate Gabrielle Peters says, “If you were to deliberately and consciously try to design a roll out of air conditioning funding in a way that would have the least number of people having access to it, who are actually eligible for it — I don’t think you could design a more effective methodology than they have.”

Nonetheless, it demonstrates that the province of BC knows the right thing to do is provide cooling for people in neighbourhoods at risk. Now we must build the community of advocates that will make them do it right. Regulation, funding, and scale are all desperately needed to save lives right now and in the future.