Chris Selley: Let your kids outside, for God's sake, even if it's a bit smoky

Yahoo

15-07-2025

Environment Canada offers some reasonable-sounding advice for living with poor air quality caused by smoke from wildfires, which is currently afflicting several parts of Canada — and causing hysteria in one part of Canada, or at least in its media, or at least in one particular newspaper.
Environment Canada identifies the people at particular risk as seniors, infants, folks who work up a sweat outdoors, and those with lung or heart conditions. It advises such people to assess their own sensitivities to poor air quality, in consultation with their physicians if they feel it necessary, and act accordingly.
That wasn't nearly dramatic enough for the Toronto Star, which has a remarkably sensationalist tabloid sensibility when it comes to public-health matters. At one point on Monday, the top of the Star's homepage featured four separate stories about the terrible danger the air quality posed to your heart, lungs and offspring.
One of the articles posed a familiar question to experts: Should children be wearing N95 masks?
'The answer is 'not really,' according to Dr. Jeffrey Brook, an associate professor at the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health,' the Star reported. 'The level that we're seeing here (is) what children are dealing with day in and day out in other countries in the world,' the Star quoted Brook. He added: 'It makes sense to be prudent, but not to panic.'
(One might also recall how recently kids grew up in houses yellowed by second-hand smoke, not to mention eating in restaurants and flying in planes and driving in cars full of it. They didn't all die before 40.)
Experts disagree on the mask question, as they do on most things, which is why 'experts say' is such a lousy way to frame a news article.
'On smoky days,' the University of Alberta reported on its website, its professor of medicine Dr. Anne Hicks 'recommends … using respiratory protection like masks when there is no option to avoid the smoke.'
Quoting Jamie Happy with Alberta Lung, Global News reported that 'as soon as the AQHI (Air Quality Health Index) hits five or higher (out of 10), people should consider limiting their time outdoors or wearing a N95 mask.' (The AQHI hit eight in Toronto on Monday.)
The Star, meanwhile, quoted Toronto family physician Dr. Jennifer Green to the effect that kids shouldn't wear N95 masks, because 'in children, N95 masks often don't fit properly, often aren't worn properly and really are not a solution.'
Doesn't that just take you back five-and-a-half years or so? To when recent Order of Canada recipient Dr. Theresa Tam told us masks were worse than useless against viruses because we hadn't gone on the two-day ministry-approved donning-and-doffing course, as if we were purebred morons?
It sure took me back. This sort of messaging only undermines the larger cause of public health. And speaking of which: 'I think for a child with underlying asthma, who must be outside, I would recommend wearing an N95 mask,' Green told the Star, somewhat paradoxically. 'But really, as much as possible, we should be keeping all children inside.'
We should be keeping all children inside as much as possible. In July. Even if they're not especially vulnerable to smoke. After screwing up their lives for three years during COVID-19.
No. No, we should not be doing that. Obviously.
Whether you think school closures were justified or not during the pandemic, at all or to the truly extraordinary extent Ontario took it, at this point we should be exploring every avenue to remedy the damage. And that does not mean trapping kids inside because the air quality's a bit crap.
That pandemic-era damage is huge. Of course it is. One of the most bizarre rhetorical phenomena of the pandemic was people arguing it wouldn't really do kids all that much harm not to go to school for a year or two. If that were true, why on earth do we spend so much money on K-12 education in the first place?
The anecdotes from teachers and child-care workers about socially maladjusted and academically delayed kids keep piling up. So does the academic research: 'The pandemic has left its mark on their behaviour, mental health, social skills and their education,' BBC reported last month. 'Childhood experiences … tend to have an outsized effect on life trajectories because they can alter brain development, behaviour and overall wellbeing.'
Standardized test scores have crashed in Britain, where schools were closed for considerably shorter periods of time than in Ontario and Quebec. And we did basically bugger-all to compensate for it except graduate struggling kids anyway and send them out into the world and hope for the best.
Meanwhile, perhaps not coincidentally, the verb 'swarming' has gained new prominence with respect to gangs of feral youths attacking innocent people — homeless people, pizza franchisees. We will never know if they reoffend, because we can't know their names.
The most Toronto Star part of the whole affair: Alongside the article advising children to stay indoors if at all possible, the paper ran another article quoting an expert explaining that people aren't even safe from wildfire smoke inside. You should close all your windows, a University of Waterloo professor advised (because, obviously, everyone has air conditioning). You should even consider taping the windows shut, the Waterloo prof advised, because homes have 'leaks and cracks' through which wildfire-smoke particulates might invade your home.
That's absolutely bananas. How far should parents go? Pull their kids out of day camps or sleepover camps? Cancel all their kids' summer recreational activities, hopefully including some unstructured capering around in their neighbourhoods? I don't think parents are that dumb or hysterical. The media they consume shouldn't be either.
National Post [e-mail]
Chris Selley: Toronto dares the Carney government to punish it for ignoring housing demands
Chris Selley: We'll thank Travis Dhanraj for 'pulling back the curtain' on CBC News