It’s a question likely being asked by more and more people amid Alberta’s heatwave: Is staying cool amid extreme heat that triggers warnings a human right?
“It makes perfect sense that we treat access to cooling as a fundamental human right, the same way we think of access to warmth in winter as a fundamental human right to keep people from freezing to death or suffering unduly,” said Blair Feltmate, the head of the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo.
During the 2021 heat dome, more than 600 people in British Columbia died prematurely due to extreme heat, while 86 people in Quebec died for the same reason in 2018, he said.
“People can die just as quickly or suffer greatly due to extreme heat in the summer as (those who) suffer the effects of extreme cold in the winter.”
A local group is pushing for more protections for those who can’t afford air conditioning or aren’t allowed to have one in their home — as our region continues to break heat records.
Climate Justice Edmonton (CJE) addressed the impact of extreme heat on the health, safety and social lives of renters during an event outside city hall on Thursday, sharing how the City of Edmonton could protect tenants’ rights to be safe, healthy and cool in their homes.
“The summers are getting harder and harder to survive, even just trying to get good sleep (or) trying to cook in my house,” said Juan Vargas with Climate Emergency Unit, an advocacy group pushing for more widescale action in Canada to confront the climate crisis.
Vargas said Climate Justice Edmonton put out a community survey and found, in some cases, people had air conditioning but were forced by their landlord or building manager to remove it.
In other cases, people couldn’t afford to buy an air conditioner or heat pump — or pay for the higher electricity costs that come with running one.
Climate Justice Edmonton’s campaign, Right to Be Cool, makes several demands.
First, it calls on the city to develop and implement a maximum temperature bylaw for rental housing by the summer of 2025.
That would mean apartment units and subsidized housing could not go over 26 C, or tenants would be able to take action against their landlords.
Vargas said the idea is being explored in places like Vancouver, Toronto and Hamilton.
“The idea really is to set a standard, force landlords to stay below that standard and keep hundreds of people alive, potentially.”
City councillor Michael Janz said he lives in a building without air conditioning and has experienced firsthand the discomfort of overnight temperatures in the mid-20 C range.
“I barely slept last night. My kids barely slept last night,” he said. “I don’t think my cat even slept last night.
“The heat is unbearable. It affects your health.”
Landlords should be held to higher safety standards when it comes to cooling in the summer, he said.
“Just as you should expect your heating to work in the winter, you should expect that as the climate gets hotter and as temperatures rise, there should be some reasonable level and some measures taken to cool and to create an environment where we have cool apartments.”
The second demand is to invest in expanding public cooling spaces in every neighbourhood and create more public third spaces — places outside the home and the workplace where people and their pets can gather when it’s so hot outside.
“Could they be community halls? Could they be faith centres? Could they be other spaces where people can go, without having to spend a dollar — not like a shopping mall or something — but somewhere where people can go and be cool just for a little while?” Janz said.
“This is the coldest summer we are going to have for the rest of our lives. It is only going to get hotter. We know that.”
The third demand is to launch a public inquiry on the impacts of heat and smoke on health, illness and death.
“The health care impact is huge,” Vargas said of people ending up in hospital with heat stroke and exhaustion, as well as other illnesses brought on by exposure to high temperatures. “The preventative aspect of it just means that people are way better off.”
The fourth demand is to support a universal heat pump program. Heat pumps transfer heat in or out of a home as needed and are said to be more energy-efficient than other methods of heating or cooling a home, such as the combination of an air conditioner or furnace.
“Heat pumps are a really big part of the solution. They are effective in the summer. They’re effective in the winter. They can be entirely electrified,” Vargas said.
The group says all the demands are necessary as extreme conditions become more common every summer.
“It was really important to build a campaign that spoke exactly to those experiences of people who are honestly falling through the cracks right now and (those are) tenants,” Vargas said. “These are the impacts of the climate crisis, and we see them impacting people who are less well-off, or we see them impacting people who just can’t afford a house.
“For us, it is a very clear intersection between the impacts of the climate crisis and what it looks like to live in the city.”
Feltmate said there are two main actions in addressing climate change: through lowering greenhouse gasses, which is a global issue that requires buy-in from other major developed industrial nations such as India, China, Russia, Brazil and the U.S.
The second is making adaptations at a more local level, such as installing air conditioners and heat pumps, as well as glazing on windows, awnings on homes and planting more trees to provide shade.
“Yeah, there’s a bit of an upfront cost associated with it, but it’s very minimal relative to the benefits derived,” he said. “Adaptation, once it’s implemented, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.”
He added the horse has left the barn when it comes to climate change and humans can’t ignore it.
“Extreme weather is simply going to get more extreme going forward, the most we can do is slow it down. We need to adapt and we need to adapt rapidly.”
Janz, who attended Thursday’s event, said he supports the actions in the demands, but there is no timeline for when city council could actually implement them.
He said he’s not ready to make a motion just yet and needs some more information, but has started conversations with some of his council colleagues about it.
“All cities across Canada are trying to figure out how we do this, because the reality is, 37 per cent of Edmontonians rent.”
Janz said the demands would require widespread uptake in terms of bylaws and construction standards.
“This needs to be something on the radar of landlords for sure. It needs to be something on the radar of the construction industry as we’re building new buildings and new apartments.
“As the federal government is putting out more money towards housing acceleration, we need to think about how cooling is just as much a part of this as insulation and heating for winter.”
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