Canada must “wake up and smell the smoke” and recognize rapid climate action as the only response to a season of wildfires and heat emergencies, Drs. Melissa Lem and Larry Barzelai of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment write in an op ed for the Vancouver Sun.
With hundreds of fires now burning across British Columbia, and across North America, Lem and Barzelai recall the scene during last year’s wildfire season. “Urban doctors’ offices and emergency rooms filled with patients complaining of sore throats, eye irritation, and wheezing as we sampled what so many families in rural B.C. fear and endure each summer.”
Last year, the province saw a record 19 air quality advisories between July and September. This year, the fires are burning again, and “heat records are being smashed around the globe.”
The op ed points to the mental health issues that often face wildfire survivors, and cites science attributing more than half of global warming to fossil fuel use. Then it contrasts the C$35 million the federal government has budgeted to support a work force transition off coal with the $4.5 billion it’s spending to buy out Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline.
Lem and Barzelai declare the climate crisis a public health emergency, stressing that Canada “must divert more resources to a just and rapid transition to renewable energy sources, instead of enacting contradictory measures that ultimately increase our use of fossil fuels. The health of our forests, air, and people in big and small communities across this nation depends on it.”
Marion Bergevin 
SF is a shining example of what can be done to transition off of fossil fuels…but we should be in “Climate Change crisis” mode now! We’re past only recycling and banning plastic bags and “grasping at straws” stage! The world is “frying and dying” from global warming with wildfires, consuming carbon sink trees… our oxygen source, spewing huge carbon ppm of smoke into the atmosphere, and cycling for more droughts and fires!
There are said to be 100 corporations, (mainly fossil fuel corps.), responsible for 71% of global carbon! Since all governments are in the pockets of oil corps.,(despite it being less than 7% of Canada’s GDP; 270,000 jobs!), government lobbying is useless in crisis! Instead…targeting a list of those 100 companies, e-mail/phone # of C.E.O.s; shareholder harassment/ divestment calls, boycotts, social media blitzes…should be done now…to save this planet from the 6th extinction, “Anthropocene Era!”
Also…a global coalition/solidarity movement and drive by ALL environmental groups and their members in “1 Campaign on Climate Change!” is what we need to address this global crisis NOW!