Front Burner - Are Canadian summers as we knew them over?

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

This summer is on track to being the second-worst wildfire season in Canadian history. It started earlier than usual with emergencies declared in the spring in Manitoba and Saskatchewan and is hitting locales that aren't typically fire-prone like Vancouver Island and Atlantic Canada. Meanwhile, fires from neighbouring provinces gave parts of southern Ontario some of the worst air quality in the world.So what does this mean for the Canadian summers of our childhood, spent mostly carefree and outdoors? What needs to be done for us to adapt to the prospect of more fires and heat to come — especially for kids growing up in this new reality? Denise Balkissoon, executive editor of The Narwhal, joins us to talk about how to navigate the ambient dread of our country's changing climate.Denise published a piece today about this in the Narwhal, which you can read here: www.thenarwhal.ca/seasonal-depression-summer-climate-change/For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

You know, shopping for a car should be exciting, not exhausting, and that's where Car Gurus comes in. They have advanced search tools, unbiased deal ratings, and price history, so you know a great deal when you see one. It's no wonder Car Gurus is the number one rated car shopping app in Canada on the Apple app and Google Play, according to AppFollow. Buy your next car today with Car Gurus and make sure your big deal is the best deal at Car Gurus.ca. That's C-A-R-G-G-U-R-U-R-U-R-E. us.ca.car gurus.com.ca. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Ali Jains, in for Jamie Poisson. Looking back on the summer, I think I know now what the magic of childhood is. It's the intensity of it. It's vividness. The fact that almost everything is being experienced for the first time.

but not as it's felt by the child. But as it's remembered by us when we're older, when it's been transformed by memory, transformed into something to be hoped for again. That's the conclusion of an episode of The Candid Eye, a documentary series on CBC that aired in 1958 called Memory of Summer. The goal of this episode was to capture the magic, of childhood, as the host followed a group of children around while they spent their summer

outdoors. They are random atoms, I thought, free, unconstrained by the world around them. How marvelous it must be to be so completely a child of nature. Nearly 70 years later, that's still the ideal. Summer in Canada is a time for kids to play outside. Explore nature. Get as much fresh air as possible before being stuffed back in. into their classrooms for the school year, at least on the good days.

Sweeltering heat mixed with drought has left much of the country scorched and tinder dry. Toronto currently ranks second on the global ranking for worst air quality. A wall of flames engulfing fire crews in northern Saskatchewan. The wildfire crisis in eastern Newfoundland is deepening. Scorching, sweaty, and punishingly humid. It's the first taste of extreme heat. It can be hard to capture just how consistent and persistent extreme summer weather has been lately in this country, but I bet you've noticed. This summer has been Canada's second worst

fire season on record. The ones that first dominated the headlines were in Saskatchewan, northern Ontario, and most critically, Manitoba. On May 13th, a couple were killed about an hour northeast of Winnipeg. It's the same area where Sue and Rich Noel shown here with their sons, were trapped on their property by a fast-moving fire and died. A state of emergency was declared there in late May that lasted until the end of June. About 22,000 people were evacuated from their homes and communities. The CBC's Zubina Ahmed spoke with Brandon Perry from Flynn-Flawn after he arrived in Winnipeg. A little distraught.

Everything happened so fast, but I don't know, trying to keep hopes high, and hopefully we have a home to go back to. I'm glad I'm here, but I'm very tired. We're all very tired. This is Serena Moore from Pugatawagan First Nation. It was very hard, and lots of smoke. You couldn't even go out, and staying inside was worse. Then, a few weeks later. At 12.1 p.m. today, we declared a provincial state of emergency.

Manitoba's Premier, again declaring a state of emergency to secure accommodations for new evacuees. When Premier Wab Kanoom made that announcement, there were about 13,000. thousand evacuees scattered throughout the province. In BC, while this wildfire season may not have been quite as dramatic as in some years, fires have burned in areas where you don't normally see them, like the one that crews are currently fighting near Port Albany on Vancouver Island. The BC Wildfire Service describes this blaze as aggressive and explosive. The agency says the extreme fire behavior is unusual for Vancouver Island. Where it's also unusual, the Maritimes. Well, right now I'm sitting in an evacuation alert zone here in Conception Bay South.

We have about 10,000 of our residents on evacuation alert. Newfoundland and Labrador has been battling various wildfires since May, but things really ramped up there in early August. The Kingston fire, burning on Newfoundland's North Shore, has destroyed at least 100 homes. What do you say to someone that they lost her home? This town counselor spent the day telling people their homes are gone. We have people here.

Well, not five cents in their pocket. And that, to me, is heartbreaking. When another forest fire broke out in Patty's Pond near St. John's, the province had to divert water bombers away from the North Shore to save the capital. Unfortunately, the way the wind was blowing that day, when they pulled up water bombers to attack Patty's Pond. The fire erupted into an inferno and pretty much cleaned out my community. As fires rage and evacuation orders climb in New Brunswick and,

and Nova Scotia, both provinces are limiting where people can go outdoors. Crown lands are off limits in New Brunswick. Get out of the woods and stay out of the woods. This just days after Nova Scotia issued a similar ban. No hiking, camping, fishing, or ATV use in the forest. Those who don't comply face a $25,000 fine. But even those Canadians who haven't faced the fires head on have noticed their impacts. That smoke seen throughout much of Canada, Saskatoon, Montreal, Toronto, all blanketed, people being worn to limit their time outdoors.

Toronto's air quality has been among the worst of any major city in the world over the past three days. And then, of course, there's the heat. The rising temperatures broke more than 60 records across Canada in places like Bay Como, Quebec, Edminton, New Brunswick, and Happy Valley Goose Bay in Newfoundland and Labrador. This is like the dress rehearsal, a dry run of what we're going to see that will be normal in 2050. Was summer like this when you were a kid? How often were you outdoors? In a playground, on a basketball courts, in a lake or a forest? How often were you told that it was too hot to play outside or the air too dangerous to breathe? What will our children's memories of summer be?

A season to be hoped for? Or a season of dread? Today, we're joined by Denise Balkassoon. She's the executive editor of the Narwhal, an investigative journalism website that focuses on environmental reporting. And she has a piece out today titled, I have seasonal depression in the summer now. We're going to talk to her about how Canadian summer

is not necessarily the carefree season it once was for many, including children, and how to navigate the ambient dread of our country's change in climate. Hi, Denise. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So you wrote this piece last summer that really stuck with me, where you talked about struggling with whether or not to keep your kid home from soccer that week when the temperatures were hitting like 40 degrees. And, you know, I've just spent several minutes in the intro talking about, I mean, major emergency horrors, people having to evacuate their homes, not knowing if and when

they'll even be able to go back. But today I do also want to talk about all of the little ways that this extreme weather is touching everyone's life in Canada this summer, you know, even those of us who are sheltered from the worst of it for now. And so talk to me a bit about the kinds of like little day-to-day decisions that you're having to make right now about how to allow your kid to enjoy summer? I mean, we had the same issue this summer with outdoor camps. I, you know, very optimistically in February or March signed up for two weeks of outdoor soccer camp. My kid is obsessed with soccer, but both of those weeks of camps happened during, you know, weeks where the weather report was, feels like 38 degrees Celsius. And the camp, especially one of them,

was not prepared at all. They didn't even have a shade tent, like not even one. So then it's like ad hoc parent activism, finding a shade tent, putting it up, reprimanding, you know, the poor teenagers running the camp or just doing what they're told. And so it was deciding, again, is it okay to send your kid in that weather? Am I a bad mom for doing that? Am I a worse mom? If I just keep them at home, like you want your kid to be active, right? And the interesting. internet is also sometimes a scary place. So we had those kinds of conversations all summer, especially because it's relatively new for us here in southern Ontario, although other parts of Canada have dealt with us for many, many years. But there's a lot of smoke in the air this year, too.

And so that made it harder as well. Mm-hmm. I mean, beyond those soccer camps, you know, talk to me about how your own summer plans have been changed this summer by the smoke and the heat. Sure. Well, my husband's family has a very unfancy cottage. It does not have air conditioning or even ceiling fans. And we had to cut our trip there short because they have a Fahrenheit thermometer. It was 85 degrees inside the cottage at 10 p.m. So nobody could sleep. So we had to come home a day early. We went camping on Lake Erie with some friends, which we do. Every summer we've done for 10 years in a row, except for 2020. And one of my kids, friends had a tick that, you know, he had to pull off her and then you have to worry about that. Warmer winters mean more ticks survive the cold. Ideally, it stays above four degrees for them. So longer springs and falls give them extra time to feed and breed. We are still going to the Cortha Lakes this weekend, but that was looking kind of dicey

last week because there was a fire there that has thankfully been put under control. And so it's just these minute-to-minute decisions, which, you know, as you said, that opener, this is nothing. There are people that have to leave their homes. So I'm not trying to overblow it. It's more that it's not as simple as it used to be to just be like summer, carefree, fun. Obviously, you know, this isn't just about lakes and forests and those kind of like great outdoors kind of spaces. When you think about summer, in big cities in Canada, especially Montreal and Toronto, you know, it's like we wait all winter through the sucky weather and everyone being inside and miserable to finally get to summer

and the cities just explode with life. Like we've got street festivals, markets, concerts, outdoor sporting events, you know, people hanging out in the parks. It's like this is what, you know, we live for all year is like that that excitement of like really like outdoor vibrant city life. And, you know, if you look, for example, at the August long weekend this year, you know, Carabana was going on in Toronto, the Ocega Music Festival in Montreal, and both cities were smoky and blistering hot. And, like, obviously it makes those things so much harder to, like, physically endure, let alone enjoy. So, you know, how do you think this is impacting our enjoyment of city life? Well, one thing.

that I personally learned from COVID is that you need to get outside no matter what the weather. So I think the evolution will be learning to enjoy different seasons a bit more and appreciating them a bit more and appreciating the cold a bit more. I have a column in the narwhal this week about just how much I used to actually hate winter and now I really think it's a beautiful time. And so I think if I can put a tiny positive spin on it, just appreciating the rest of the year. But it is going to be, it's for people that make their livelihoods on outdoor concerts and things like that, the planning is going to be really difficult. I mean, they were deciding in the prairies whether or not to hold all sorts of sporting events and festivals. I have no

idea how we're going to have the World Cup here in North America in the summer. I don't want people to just do the same thing they've always done and then, you know, have a bunch of fainting and medical emergencies. My family is Trinidadian, so I go to Carabana, and actually this year there wasn't as much emergency response, but last year it was just like stretcher after stretcher of person who was clearly, you know, had heat exhaustion or hadn't drank enough water. You know, I also think, like, adaptation is something that we need to do and we need to do on a societal level, not just an individual level. And for me, being outside when it's that hot, instead of retreating, into air conditioning is understanding that the world's changing, just facing it and dealing

with the sadness that that brings. But maybe, hopefully, that will lead more people to be like, actually, can we do something about this? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I mean, when you talk about adaptation, you know, when you were mentioning this soccer camp and how woefully unprepared they are, like, obviously this is just a little soccer camp, but if you're looking at like, you know, so many school boards across the country have issues where there isn't air conditioning in the schools. And like kids are out in July and August, but like a lot of daycares, including my kids' daycare, are in TDSB schools. Only 30% of Toronto schools have central air. The rest must rely on fans and open windows. On hot and smoky

days, schools face an impossible choice, open windows and let in toxic air, or shut them and swelter. But it's also a problem in Quebec schools where the heat can also be sweltering. It's increasingly a concern in BC, which is a place where, you know, for a long time, people haven't needed air conditioning, but increasingly they're needing it. You know, earlier this summer during the first heat wave in Toronto, the city actually had to close five outdoor pools. According to city staff, the intermittent closures were necessary in order to let lifeguards cool down following provincial requirements related to heat and humid X levels exceeding 45. Which is obviously ironic because that's a place that anyone in the city can go to cool down for free.

But like there's a million examples I could give. But how concerned are you with the ways that Canadian cities and provinces are like adapting their infrastructure to keep people safe, especially kids? I mean, I'm extremely concerned. My kid is in a TDSB school. It was 33 degrees at 8 a.m. one of the weeks because their teacher had a thermometer in there. I think it's absolutely outrageous that the province has not planned for better air conditioning in schools, in long-term care homes, you know, all these places where vulnerable populations are. It's very clear that fossil fuels are what is causing climate change, and so therefore I think it's very clear where the money for this mitigation should come from and for governments to just not deal with it. it makes me really frightened, you know, and there's a teacher that I know in the TDSB where she

found an elementary school kid just wandering the halls in a heat exhaustion days. And I really fear that what is going to take to get some movement on that is hospital visits or even the death of a child because I don't know what it is we're pretending. Like it's not going to change. And if we don't deal with it incrementally, which, you know, the time for that is kind of passed. But if you make a plan to do however many schools a year, that's so much more achievable than just getting to the point that we're at now where there's nothing. And our kids lost so much schooling during COVID. And are we now going to close because of extreme heat too? It's pretty shameful, actually.

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When we look at fires, there's a real shortage of water bombers in this country. Manitoba, for example, has had an order for three new water bombers that won't be fulfilled until 2031. Earlier this summer, the chief of Pugatawagan First Nation in northern Manitoba told CBC that the community was having to resort to using the hoses that they know. normally used to flood the hockey rink to stave off a major forest fire. And so do you think, you know, it is enough being done by various levels of government to adapt to the fact that these fires aren't a one-off freak event anymore. Like this is the reality of summer in this country now. I mean, I think the answer is clearly not. I think that there probably are, especially on inside the fire services themselves. There is year-round planning. You know, we've, we've done enough

welfare coverage to know that there are people that think about this year round. But if we don't have the resources, then what good is that planning? And I think actually the equipment is not even the first thing. I think the personnel is the first thing. Like here in Ontario, our fire service is understaffed by hundreds of people in Northern Ontario. And so that also means that those need to be jobs that people are willing to do. These are skilled jobs that people deserve real salaries for, and they're taking care of everyone. And again, yeah, I find it quite shameful, actually, that we're pretending that that's not going to be the way things are from now on.

You know, we know that in so many ways, low-income and racialized communities are hit by all of this the hardest. You know, in cities, low-income neighborhoods are less likely to have shade. Lower-income renters are much less likely to have air-conditionings in their homes. Many indigenous communities, as we've been talking about in Canada's north, are regularly facing evacuations from fires. You know, talk to me about how unequally people across this country and, again, kids across this country are experiencing this.

I think the fact that First Nations are on the front lines of wildfire evacuations is pretty well established at this point. It's really hard to say exactly what the solution is in a proactive way. I mean, do we need better fire fighting capability 100%. What does it actually mean to mitigate fire in the short term? There are prescribed burns happening more. You know, it's so ironic, this is what indigenous communities have done for centuries, if not millennia. And because we ignored their wisdom, this is part of the reason that things have gotten so bad.

And so now we are finally going a little bit back towards that way. But in the meantime, we have all these emergencies. in Ontario there has been a movement to have a maximum temperature in buildings in rental units the same way that there was a minimum temperature for many years because we know that cold is bad for people's health not safe to be in. The Ontario government has really resisted passing that. There is one municipality which is Mississauga that has mandated maximum temperature as of 2020 and it is that a unit cannot exceed 26 degrees Celsius. And so that means whether it's through air conditioning or some other means, a landlord has a responsibility to make sure that it doesn't go over 26. We also reported on a community in St. Jamestown where, you know, it's a really old apartment building. And even if people have air conditioners, they can't always afford to run them. And there might not be an understanding of how dangerous extreme heat can be. And so they have what they call community

activators, I believe, who go from unit to unit to explain to people that, like, when it's hot, if you cannot afford to keep your unit cool, you have to leave. You have to go to the library. You have to go to the park. You need to be cool. It's dangerous for your health to stay. And I think that's the kind of program that really needs to be replicated in every urban community. Because if people don't know, then they won't take care of themselves. And then we'll have, as you said, in Montreal, all their seniors that die every year in really old rental buildings that were made to keep us warm, right? Like traditionally Canada is a place where that is our biggest concern. Are people warm enough? And now our buildings just aren't ready.

Just zooming out for a minute. I didn't have my first kid till 38. I'm pregnant now at 41 with my second. And honestly, the main reason that I held off and deliberated for so long on even having kids was the prospective bringing new life into a world on fire. And I mean, I'm incredibly glad that I decided to go for it. But I still have to deal every day with the grief of watching my kid grow up in a world where it's, normal for his daycare to have to keep kids inside at playtime because of the heat where we have to cut our time short at the playground because the air quality is some of the worst in the world and where I know that like this is just the beginning like he's going to be growing up in something I mean way worse than what we're seeing right now and I mean how are you kind of dealing with just the reality of living in that day-to-day grief especially as a parent um I mean, some days it's harder than others, for sure.

I personally am very lucky in terms of climate grief specifically that I get to spend my day with a group of incredibly smart people trying to bring as much information as we can to people in Canada about these things. because I don't want, I don't want there to be a sense of paralysis, right? So we cannot play down the reality, which is we are on a very long trajectory of warming. And that is going to change the world. It is changing the world. But it's not inevitable that it keeps getting worse and worse and worse.

we also try to like really point out that there have been very big environmental issues that have been like actively reversed you know in our lifetimes and so that includes we used to have smog days all the time in Ontario and then we phased out coal plants we used to have a hole in the ozone layer and like a conservative prime minister and a conservative American president are the ones that decided that they were going to deal with that problem. We used to spray DDT on crops and bald eagles were almost endangered because it thinned their eggs and there weren't any bald eagles being born and now they're resurging. And so, you know, we run a lot of stories about indigenous lead conservation, about people who, you know, their homeland's already

were destroyed and their environments already were destroyed. And here they are generations later insisting on taking care of them. Something I think that a lot of parents also grapple with is how you actually talk about all of this with your kids. You know, regardless of their age, really. Like, I mean, in my case, my son is two and a half. It's not like he understands any of this. But still, we'll be outside and I'll kind of have to remark on how smoky it is. And he'll be like, oh, yeah, very smoky. but it's not like he attaches any value judgment to that. He's just experiencing it. It's just his reality, which obviously is disturbing on its own. But as kids get older and they understand more that this is not normal, that this is a problem, how do you think that we should be talking to them

about what's going on? I don't know. That one I really don't know, especially because my kid's 11 and quite sensitive, and so we actually don't listen to CBC Radio. My husband and I listen to them as podcasts because there was just a time where it was very clear that the news was affecting them in a way that they were not mature enough to, you know, like filter. And so I think, again, for me, at least I can say I'm doing my best. I think it's important for kids also to know that there are people working on this every day. But also, it's not fair. Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know what we say to our kids, actually. And I think that there are people that are really avoiding thinking about that or thinking about, you know, their culpability or their accountability. Because that question is kind of impossible to answer. In the piece that you just published in the narwhal, you talk about this dystopian novel, Juice, by the Australian author Tim Winton. And talk to me about the general themes in this book, because I think it actually really relates to, you know, what we were just talking about, about kids experiencing this as their normal reality. Yeah, so it's set a couple of generations. in the future. He's not really clear as to how many, but it is at a point where summer in Australia is unlivable. But it's when he's, I guess, like a teenager, he comes to understand that the

world wasn't always like this and that it was made this way by a technology or emissions that people new work making the world warmer, hotter, inhospitable, and that the families or the corporations that made billions of dollars off of fossil fuels have made so many billions that even these many generations later, there are people that live hidden away in these bunkers all over the world in air conditioning, leading, still very weird lives, but at least safer, you know, and cooler. And so then he's invited to join basically a force of assassins that finds them and kills them out of revenge. And not to make the world better. That's all over.

Now it's just like being really, really angry. I'm not into assassination genuinely. But the book really does tap into an anger that I think is kind of important because I think it's really easy to feel sad and quite. frankly, depressed and have all that grief. But if we don't have anywhere to put it, it only harms us, right? Whereas if we put our anger somewhere or, you know, even our love for our kids and for the natural world and all the beauty that's there, if we have somewhere to put it, I don't know. That's the thing that needs to happen. But I think this is the first time that I really read like an artistic treatment of climate that was just so quite frankly

pissed off. I appreciate it. I mean, talk to me more about that catharsis. Like you sort of touch on this already, but talk to me more about how that sort of has helped you kind of take this grief and think about like how to channel it into something productive. You know, I think we are very much encouraged not to think of climate change as being a decision that is being made by really a very small handful of actual human beings, right? Like, sure, people drive cars. We're very adamant at the narwha that we are not hard on people. We are hard on systems. And so I'm not even talking about like your day-to-day oily gas worker at all. I am talking about people that have known for very many decades where this was going and decided not to pursue other technologies and

decided to pursue fortunes that are kind of made up, right? Like, after, one billion dollars, like what are we even talking about here? And there's a real hesitation to just really accept that. And at the very least, if all we're talking about mitigation, if we're not talking about stopping using fossil fuels every single day, there's an oil executive from somewhere in the world saying, we're going to be using oil for the foreseeable future, 2050, or whatever, if that is the true. then, okay, that's a public resource and we're making billions of dollars off it. How are we going to keep people safe right now? How are we going to get air conditioning

in kindergarten? Then if that's what we've decided, we absolutely are going to do. It's not like there's no money for that. What would you want people to take away from this conversation? That every single day there are communities, there are indigenous communities, there are scientists who are working in ways that seem very small to fix one tiny part of the environment that matters to them. And it's not over yet. Denise, thank you so much for this conversation. Yeah. Thanks for asking me. I think it's an important one to have. all for today, you can find a link to Denise's new piece in the narwhal in our show notes.

I'm Allie Jains. Thanks so much for listening to Frontburner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow.