“Climate change and the impacts on health are not some abstract environmental issue that will affect us some at some point in decades from now. We can measure its effect on health in Canada today,” Ian Culbert, executive director of the Canadian Public Health Association, told Global News.

The report, published in The Lancet on Tuesday, found there were an average of 4,000 annual deaths associated with wildfire smoke between 2021-25, compared to an average of 1,050 annually in 2003-12.

The data comes as Canada has experienced repeated intense wildfire seasons – the past three of which are among the 10 worst on record. As fires scorched across much of the country, with particularly hot spots in B.C., Alberta, the Northwest Territories and northern Ontario, smoke continued to billow into major urban centres creating hazardous air quality conditions.

“You don’t have to live beside a forest fire to experience its health effects,” Culbert said. “Smoke travels enormous distances, so wildfire increasingly becomes a population health issue for communities far removed from the fires themselves.”

Scott Weichenthal, a professor in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at McGill University, told Global News the casualties of wildfire smoke are far greater than the death toll numbers suggest.

PM 2.5, or fine particulate matter, is commonly the metric quantified as it is a primary pollutant that can travel deep into the lungs and enter the blood stream.

“When wildfires happen, PM 2.5 goes up and we know that PM 2.5 is a cause of premature death – I think that’s where those numbers are coming from,” he said. “But in addition to PM 2.5 fires release a whole range of harmful things, many of which we know cause cancer.”

1:51 Climate change makes Ontario wildfire conditions twice as likely: report

“Mortality is not the sort of total, it doesn’t reflect totally the impacts of these events on people’s exposures or health effects,” he added.

During intense wildfire seasons, many people look to various Air Quality Indexes, but Weichenthal said these measures of PM 2.5, ozone and nitrogen dioxide are representative of the acute and immediate health effects.

“If you have an existing heart or lung condition, you’re going to be more sensitive to any kind of short-term spikes in pollutant concentrations, which is why we see increases in hospitalizations for heart and lung problems during these wildfire smoke events,” he said.

In terms of long term consequences, Weichenthal said people who live in more polluted areas are at greater risk of dying from cardio respiratory effects, but more research is needed on how prevalent air quality-induced cancers and other ailments are.

According to the report, Canada lost 5.2 million hectares of tree cover in 2024, which is 148 per cent more than in 2016. Wildfires accounted for 86 per cent of this loss. The loss of essential tree cover also makes heat an even more pressing issue.

In 2025, 80 per cent of the heatwave days experienced across Canada were directly attributable to climate change, the report found.

Further, people in Canada were exposed to approximately 36 more hours annually during which heat posed a moderate or higher risk of heat stress during moderate outdoor activity.

Vulnerable groups, including older adults, young children, pregnant women, and those with pre-existing conditions, face the greatest risks.

“This isn’t just, it was a hot summer,” Culbert said. “This is directly the effect of the rising temperature of the planet.”

0:34 Deaths in Canada increase on days of extreme heat: StatCan

The ongoing El Niño event, which is expected to peak around December and weaken through early 2027, is setting next summer up for hot and dry conditions. While El Niño typically creates uncharacteristically hot weather, on top of climbing temperatures, the effects on the population could be exacerbated.

“The data that we’re seeing is really serious, and the trends are moving in the wrong direction,” Culbert said.

The Canadian Public Health Association said all levels of government need to take further action to protect communities as the consequences of climate change continue to pile up.

“[We] understand that we’re in a context where fossil fuel extraction is being ramped up, which is the opposite of what we want to see,” Culbert said. “But we want our recommendations to make sense in the context in which we’re living.”

One of the association’s recommendations is to create a permanent climate and health adaptation fund as current Health Canada funding ends in 2027-28.

“Public health really needs predictable, sustained capacity to prepare for heat, wildfire smoke and other climate related threats,” Culbert said. “These aren’t one-off emergencies anymore and so public health really needs the capacity to be in response.”

The federal government is set to update the law on medical assistance in dying (MAID) in Canada, permitting Canadians to decide whether they want to end their lives ahead of time.

On Wednesday, Justice Minister Sean Fraser and Health Minister Marjorie Mitchel are scheduled to reveal more details about Canada’s new MAID law, which will include changes to include changes to the Criminal Code to ensure that a doctor who provides medical assistance in dying to someone who is eligible on an advance directive “will not be treated as a criminal in Canada going forward.”

Speaking in Ottawa earlier this month, Sean Fraser said the government will “grant access to medical assistance in dying to people who have provided consent at a time when they still have capacity but know that they have been diagnosed with an illness that will take that capacity from them subsequently.”

6:05 Canada announces changes to MAID

This is sometimes referred to as an “advance directive” or “advance request” in medical parlance.

It often involves a mentally competent person making a written request for MAID, with the intention that it would be honoured later, if and when they lose the capacity to make the decision for themselves: for example, in people suffering from worsening Alzheimer’s or dementia.

“That means, specifically, I give my consent in advance in this capable state to receive medical assistance in dying (at a later time),” said University of Toronto bioethicist Kerry Bowman.

In 2024, Quebec became the first, and so far only, province in Canada to allow residents to authorize an early request for MAID.

In Quebec, only a person who has been diagnosed with “a serious and incurable illness leading to incapacity to give consent to care” may give advance request for MAID. They must also identify a physician or specialized nurse practitioner who agrees to assist in the process.

4:40 Ottawa moves to keep MAID ban for mental illness

Bowman said the principle of advance directives is “profoundly ethically complex,” adding that it can be hard to predict how a person’s disease will progress.

“The concern is you’ve almost got a stranger making a decision for a stranger. Do we really know ourselves in that state?” he said.

The Quebec law allows a patient to withdraw or modify their MAID request. However, the question of withdrawing consent becomes complicated when some patients have “no capacity to withdraw” in the advanced stages of illness, Bowman said.

“I’m not necessarily against it. But I do think most of us are enormously underestimating how ethically complex this is,” he said.

2:21 Health Matters: Dying With Dignity Canada condemns MAID changes

Advocacy group Dying With Dignity Canada, which has long advocated for advance directives, says the federal government’s approach is “fundamentally flawed” because it downloads implementation to the provinces and territories.

“At best, this legislation will create a patchwork of systems across the country, thus further increasing inequity in MAID access, instead of a federal framework that would ensure that all people across Canada could have access to advance requests for MAID if they are eligible,” Helen Long, the group’s CEO, said in a statement.

“At worst, some people in Canada may never have access to advance requests in their province or territory,” she added.

Equitable access to advance requests is fundamental to death with dignity, Long said.

“Without the option of an advance request, Canadians are forced to make an impossible choice: die earlier than they want to in order to ensure they have capacity to consent… or risk losing capacity and be forced to live in a situation they would find intolerable,” she said.

A new Canadian approach to treating a common heart rhythm condition could change the game for patients who deal with atrial fibrillation or AFib.

AFib is considered the most common arrhythmia and occurs in the upper chambers of the heart.

Affecting one to two per cent of the general population, the irregular heartbeat can cause symptoms such as shortness of breath and fatigue, but can lead to severe consequences such as stroke or heart failure.

Fatigue caused Jon Davies of Edmonton to suspect something was wrong.

“I used to go mountain hiking and played a lot of squash and then that sort of quickly went away as I got into my early 50s,” he told Global News in an interview. “I just figured it was old age and having a desk job and not enough exercise maybe.”

His wife, Nora, said he was often tired and would sleep a lot.

He was eventually diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, but when speaking about treatment options, he was left in shock.

“They told me that my heart had enlarged so much that it wouldn’t make sense for them to treat it surgically, so that’s when they said you’re going to stay on blood thinners,” Davies said.

Until this year, he said he’s had to accept the “status quo,” adding he got a second opinion with the same result.

People with AFib often receive treatment either through medication or with what’s known as “catheter ablation.”

“Patients are usually sedated or put to sleep entirely and we put little tubes in the groins and we pass wires into the heart, cross over to the left side of the heart and what we try and do is kill the tissue around the pulmonary veins,” said Dr. Paul Angaran, cardiac arrhythmia director at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.

The process involves creating tiny scars in the heart, according to the Mayo Clinic. During AFib, faulty signals can tell the heart to beat irregularly. The scars prevent those faulty signals from reaching their target.

“Typically we burn, so we use energy sources that overheat the tissue, and sometimes we can use energy sources that freeze the tissue,” said Dr. Gianluigi Bisleri, the director of minimally invasive and robotic cardiac surgery at St. Michael’s Hospital. “But either way, we create these scars that become permanent and stop the irregular heart rate.”

But Angaran said not everyone with AFib will see such a treatment be effective.

Angaran joined with Bisleri to develop a new approach for helping people with AFib.

The result is a two-part robotic technique using ablations from outside the heart and then going inside using a catheter technique.

“It allows us to not only use the robotic technologies which give us more dexterity, more ability to reach and see the heart, but also to treat broader areas of the heart with the ablation,” Bisleri said.

Using both minimally invasive robotic surgery and catheter technology is a Canadian first, Bisleri said.

Patients interested in the procedure must be referred to Bisleri and Angaran, but the former told Global News while a referral is simple there isn’t enough awareness of their approach.

Patients need to wait a few weeks or months between each procedure, with Angaran noting doctors want patients’ scars on the outside to have healed before they proceed with the internal procedure.

One of their first patients was Davies, who learned about the procedure by searching online.

Davies had the first part of the procedure, the robotic technique, in September and is expected to return to Toronto in the coming weeks for the catheter ablation.

“It’s nice to be able to potentially, you know, take that diagnosis and direct it in a much more human, in a way that, you know, appreciate much more than the alternative,” he said.

Angaran told Global News that in patients with long-standing persistent atrial fibrillation, the long-term success rate through this approach could hit as high as 70 to 80 per cent.

Infectious disease experts say Canada’s flu season started about seven weeks earlier than usual this year, but with proper interventions, there is no need to sound the alarm bells just yet.

According to data from Health Canada, 6.1 per cent of tests detected influenza in the week ending Oct. 17.

For the same week in 2025, 0.8 per cent of tests came back positive.

Health Canada defines the epidemic threshold at five per cent, a mark Canada didn’t surpass until mid-November last year.

“It’s still within the range of not being unusual, but it absolutely started earlier,” Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at the University Health Network in Toronto, told Global News.

Bogoch said it is difficult to know exactly why flu season started earlier this year but noted that Australia’s flu season ended later than usual.

B.C. has been hit particularly hard early in the season with positivity rates between 10 and 15 per cent seen as early as late-September, according to one expert.

“It started also on the west coast of the United States where it’s warmer all the way down in California,” Dr. Brian Conway, medical director of the Vancouver Infectious Disease Centre, told Global News. “So evidently, the virus has entered from the Pacific Rim, perhaps the southern hemisphere that’s ending its flu season and it has made its entry into the West Coast, particularly into British Columbia.”

Doctors say the dominant flu strain this year is of the H1N1 strain, which is what caused the 2009 swine flu epidemic.

H1N1 is a subtype of Influenza A and spreads the same as any other respiratory virus.

Bogoch said typically a year dominated by H1N1 sees less hospitalizations than an H3N2 dominant year.

“But I can’t stress this enough, at an individual level, it doesn’t matter. Influenza is influenza is influenza and you might feel really ill,” he said.

South of the border, American health officials have identified a genetic mutation of the H1N1 virus that is spreading amongst the population. The G155E mutation allows the virus to better evade human immunity.

Dr. Jesse Papenburg, an infectious disease specialist at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, told Global News he has not heard of the mutation being in Canada yet, but ultimately it would not change the way that health officials respond.

1:45 Respiratory virus season in Manitoba

“We saw that last year where there was an H3N2 strain subclade K that had very important genetic changes, changes in places that we know are important for the immune system to be able to recognize it,” he said. “At the same time, what we saw in the field was that the vaccines still offered protection that was somewhere in a similar ballpark to what we see usually with estimates ranging from 40 to 60 per cent.”

The vaccine this year does cover the H1N1 strain, but Papenburg said it is impossible to know just how effective it’ll be until people start getting it.

“The truth is that we will only know how well the vaccine works once we’ve proved enough cases to be able to do interim analyses on vaccine effectiveness in the field,” he said. “People should never be basing their decision on whether or not they should get vaccinated based on the fact of this.”

Regardless of the strains the vaccine targets, Papenburg said what it does reduce is the severity of the illness, decreasing the likelihood of hospitalization or death but almost 50 per cent.

“We’d love to see it higher than that. But at the same time, reducing your risk, especially if you happen to be in one of the vulnerable populations where the risk is already really high, it’s really substantial,” he said.

Most provinces begin launching vaccine appointments around mid-October, but several provinces began offering the shot earlier this year.

2:12 Quebec vaccination demand more than doubles since last year

P.E.I. and Nova Scotia began offering vaccine appointments in early October. B.C. began offering the vaccine to vulnerable populations on Oct. 5 and expanded that to all people on Oct. 13. Alberta told pharmacies to start giving out doses as soon as they arrived, ahead of the Oct. 19 launch date.

Saskatchewan and Manitoba have been offering flu shots since Oct. 13 with Quebec following suit one week later. Ontario is currently offering vaccines to vulnerable populations with eligibility opening to everyone on Oct. 26.