This article originally appeared in the Financial Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Philip Cross, June 28, 2024
Last week, Statistics Canada released a study of the impact of extreme heat events on mortality in 12 large Canadian cities. To great fanfare in media reports, it concluded extreme heat events caused an increase of 900 deaths over the 20 years 2000-2020. In other words, despite all the breathless reporting about” killer heat waves,” no one bothered to calculate that this averages just over 45 deaths a year. Relative to the 21 million people living in these 12 cities, the increase in annual mortality equals a microscopic 0.0002 per cent of their population. You are twice as likely to die from tuberculosis. Your hernia has a 10 times greater chance of killing you than a heat wave does.
What’s more, almost all the increased deaths attributed to extreme heat were in Montreal and Toronto. Apparently, this is because more people in these cities live in apartments, which typically have less air conditioning. For the rest of Canada, the impact of heat waves on mortality was mostly a non-event.
***TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE, VISIT THE FINANCIAL POST HERE***
