But the problem goes much deeper than pools. The incident illustrates how the city and the province are struggling to protect residents and workers from the accelerating threats amid a changing climate.
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In fact, the city had been warned much earlier about how heat puts lifeguards at risk — four years earlier, in fact, according to Ministry of Labour records provided by CUPE local 79, the union that represents recreation workers.
During an intense heat wave in July 2021, lifeguards at the Pine Point outdoor pool in Etobicoke initiated a work refusal — a legal right provided to Ontario workers to refuse conditions they believe to be unsafe. According to ministry records, the lifeguards said they had been exposed to unsafe levels of heat and humidity without reasonable access to shade.
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A Ministry of Labour inspector who visited the pool in July 2021 sided with the workers. The city had violated provincial health and safety laws, he found, ordering it to “protect workers from the hazard of heat-related illness while working in the hot summer days.” The city had not provided any way to measure humidity levels, the order states, without which workers couldn’t follow the plan to take increasingly longer breaks as the humidex rose to higher and higher levels. The humidex-based plan the city uses is one designed by the Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers, and is widely used by Ontario employers.