Editor:
It was a surprise to read in the June 13 Rocky Mountain Outlook that Canmorites are happy with their town.
It is 25 years ago that parts of Canmore were identified as the most polluted places in the province and the situation has only deteriorated since with the increase in wood burning.
All the other features – pathways, parks, coffee shops, sense of community, are meaningless if the town is an unhealthy place in which to live. Wood smoke has been known, for centuries, as the cause of the illnesses that today we associate with cigarette smoking.
This is hardly surprising as both wood and tobacco leaves are composed of cellulose-based plant material and they produce smoke with a similar chemical composition and a similar impact on human health.
Wood smoke has been called the new second hand cigarette smoke although the health implications are not new and wood smoke is more dangerous than the milder cigarette smoke.
Montreal is to be commended on banning the further installation of these hazardous products and aims to have them all shut down by 2020. All municipalities need to take these measures if urban centres are to be healthy places in which to live.
There is also the cost to the health care system of treating smoke-related diseases. No Canadian government department has calculated these costs, but in borrowing data from more environmentally alert countries, the cost to the health care system is $15,000 for each wood stove per year and over $20,000 for each of the new outdoor furnaces.
The cost for each fireplace depends on how often it is used, but as with cigarette smoke, the health implications are never zero.
Wood smoke, and later coal smoke, have been known as health hazards for centuries because the output of dangerous chemicals is so high that no sophisticated monitoring equipment is needed to identify a health threat – this is one source of pollution one can smell.
In fact this is a better indicator than Canada’s primitive Air Quality Health index which is a poor indicator of the health implications of air pollution. As a number of specialists have pointed out, wood smoke is so dangerous that if one can smell wood smoke, then your family has a problem.
The other reason that residential wood or coal burning has been known as a health hazard is that even without modern data-gathering techniques the health impact was glaringly obvious.
This information has been kept from Canadians even though the British, for example, were pouring millions of pounds into making their urban centres residential-smoke free because no health care system can support the cost of treating smoke-related diseases.
It is the health equivalent of everyone in urban centres being smokers.
It is particularly troubling that the topic has been kept out of the school curriculum.
I avoid staying in Canmore because it is so polluted that one can even smell wood smoke on the colder days in summer.
However, while one can avoid Canmore, no one can avoid paying towards our health care system and we all have to pay towards the cost of treating smoke related diseases.
All Albertans should be concerned about the burden placed on the health care system by those who burn wood, in any urban centre.
Hopefully we will see a day when wood burning has been eliminated in all urban centres, following the example of Montreal.
Alan Smith,
Alberta Director Canadian Clean Air Alliance
Red Deer
