Thanks.
I am speaking to you from a house in Yellowknife's Dene territory that is atop permafrost. This part of the world is already 2.5°C warmer than it was when an 80-year-old elder was born. We're deep into adaptation. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on our foundation here to try to keep it from sliding down into Great Slave Lake. In 2014 we had, in fact, two and a half months of wildfire smoke, and it ringed Yellowknife. It didn't really even matter which way the wind was blowing, because there was a fire in almost every direction.
We published a study in the British Medical Journal Open recently showing that in fact we had a full doubling of our emergency department visits for asthma over the course of that time.
We did community-based interviews and asked people how it felt to live in smoke for that long. We got all sorts of answers, such as they felt isolated, they felt anxious, they didn't have enough physical activity, they felt disconnected from the land and it made them really worry about what climate change means for their children.
I'm a sort of voice from the future, in a way, because as Minister Wilkinson pointed out earlier, the north is warming at triple the global rate. What we need to know is that we're going to get worse until mid-century. Since I've done the wildfire research, I often get the question from media, “Dr. Howard, is this a new normal?” I have to say, no, it's not. It's going to get worse.
We need to prepare our hospitals for this adaptation that's already built in. “Canada's Changing Climate Report”, produced by Environment and Climate Change Canada, showed that we will continue to warm until at least the 2040s. That's when a child born today will only be in their twenties.
We need to make sure that our hospitals have adequate ventilation. We actually had to close our operating room for part of that summer, because it was filled with smoke and we couldn't operate. From having presented with some architects at a national architecture conference, we did an audience poll, and only about 40% of the audience were taking into account future projections of precipitation and heat as they built the buildings of the future.
We see from COVID, then, that not preparing for something does not protect you when it happens. Even to just adapt to what we're already facing, we have a lot to do.