APRIL/MAY 1019 • CHATELAINE 53
ina Mawson stood at her living room window
in July 2017, watching water bombers fill up
to battle the forest fires closing in on her
home. She knew she had to get her family out
of town—fast. Two giant plumes of smoke
had joined in the sky like a grey-scale rain-
bow over Williams Lake, B.C., and Mawson,
who has asthma, was having trouble breath-ing. She worried about her family, especially her 11-month-old
daughter, who also suffers from asthma. “We were surrounded
by fire and smoke,” she says. “It was terrifying.”
Four days after the fires broke out, Mawson and her husbandshut down their legal practice and packed up their cars. They
left Williams Lake shortly before the official evacuation order
forced 24,000 people from their homes. As Mawson squeezed
family photos and special stuffed animals into her husband’s
car with their two daughters and two dogs, her head pounded
and her face was turning purple—she couldn’t get enough oxy-
gen from the ash-heavy air.
As they drove away, she was overcome with a mix of emotion:
relief that they were getting out alive, fear that their home would
be incinerated and frustration that more wasn’t being done to
tackle climate change. “I just wanted to be out,” she says. “That’s
all I could think about.”
Even if your lungs haven’t been compromised by forest fire
smoke, no matter where you live in Canada, climate change is
putting your health at risk. Stronger heat waves and increasing
air pollution are sending hundreds of people to the hospital
every year. At the same time, bugs are moving into newly warm
regions, bringing debilitating diseases with them.
A 2017 Health Canada poll found that 79 percent of Canadiansaccept that climate change is happening; of those, just over half
think it’s a health risk now and 40 percent agree it will be in the
future. The truth is, climate change is already exacerbating pre-
existing conditions and making otherwise healthy people sick.
“Climate change is a public health emergency,” saysCourtney Howard, an emergency room doctor in Yellowknife
and president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for
the Environment. “This is a climate code blue. When a code
blue is called in the hospital, we don’t panic. We walk quickly
to the bedside of the person who needs help. We push hard,
we push fast—and we don’t stop until we have the healthiest
outcome possible.”
The Lancet calls climate change “the biggest global healththreat of the 21st century” and says tackling it could be our
greatest health opportunity. “We need to adapt to the prob-
lems; we can no longer avoid them,” says Howard, who authored
the Canadian section of The Lancet’s recent report on the
health impacts of climate change. Fortunately, there’s plenty
we can do to protect ourselves. Here’s how climate change is
affecting your health—and what you can do to fight back.
The air we breathe is more polluted than ever
In Canada, we’re lucky to breathe some of the cleanest air in the
world, but according to Health Canada, human-caused air pol-
lution still claims 14,400 lives every year—more than twice as
many as diabetes.
While we’ve made gains in regulating and reducing air-borne
toxins in Canada—phasing out coal power, for instance—climate
change is ushering in longer and more severe episodes of air pol-
lution. The worst offenders are wildfire smoke and periods of
high ground-level ozone, a toxic gas that forms when pollutants
interact with sunlight and worsens in warmer weather.
Not only are wildfire seasons getting longer, the fires are also
burning in more areas. “As the climate changes, we expect wild-
fires will cause episodes of the worst air quality most people will
ever experience,” says Sarah Henderson, a senior scientist at
the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.
Exposure to wildfire smoke can cause everything from head-
aches and coughing to heart attacks and life-threatening
asthma. When Henderson and her colleagues compared the
2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons to 2016, they found an 18 percent
increase in physician visits for asthma and a 38 percent increase
in prescriptions filled for Ventolin inhalers. “It doesn’t ta ke too
much smoke for some people to feel the effects,” Henderson
says. Symptoms typically resolve once the smoke clears, but the
long-term consquences are unknown.
Inhaling ground-level ozone, a significant contributor to smog,
also causes breathing problems such as coughing and throat
irritation. It can exacerbate lung conditions, leading to hospi-
talization and even death. Poor air quality in general has been
associated with several adverse health effects, including heart
disease and cancer. Seniors, children and pregnant women are
especially vulnerable, and air pollution has been linked to low
birth weight and premature birth.