But first, a word from The Incline.

Hello, dear reader. I hope you’ve been keeping cool during this latest, record-breaking extreme heat event (heat is also the main topic of the newsletter today!).

As summer winds down, I’ll be finally taking some time off from newslettering. This is for two reasons.

The first is that I have so many outstanding projects to get done. There’s a lot on my plate and I need a little time to focus so I can really address them.

The second is that the issue I covered in my last post has been escalating considerably. I can’t say too much about it at this point (because there is a lot I simply do not know right now), but I’ve been informed that formal complaints about The Incline and my general political activities in the community have been made to officials with the City of Hamilton. I need to take some time so I can step back, assess what my options are, and figure out what I can and cannot say while this matter is outstanding.

I have not dealt with a formal complaint like this before. I’m unsure what might come of it or what impact it might have on my current job and future employment prospects. And I don’t know what this means for my political activities in the community. What I can say is that I don’t want to aggravate an already tense situation by posting for the sake of posting. I am already seeking assistance in this matter and will do my part to ensure a speedy resolution.

I want to thank all the people in the community who have shown their support over the past week. The posts, messages, and new subscribers have reminded me of what a strong and caring community we have in this city. I truly appreciate the support and thank everyone who has stuck with me this long.

I am aiming to be back to regular posting in September, though will keep everyone updated as things progress. Until then, tell your friends about The Incline, get involved in your community, go meet neighbours and friends out in the real world, do in-depth reading on something you’re passionate about, watch a council meeting, make sure your voter registration is up-to-date, and learn one new fact about Hamilton. That way, we’ll have a lot to talk about when I get back.

See you very soon! Okay, on with the newsletter!

The Heat

Fall is coming. The grasshoppers and cicadas are making themselves known, chirping and buzzing, ushering in the coming cool days. Sometimes, depending on which way the wind is blowing, you can smell it in the air. The smell is one of crispness, blended with decaying plant matter and muddied soil. Halloween candy is popping up at stores around the city and the return to school is nearly upon us.

But summer is putting up one hell of a fight, clinging ferociously to Hamilton and much of Ontario. Most representative of this persistence is the uncomfortable heat that we have all endured.

Seems like much of this summer has been positively sweltering. With little rain, blistering sun, and our only relief coming from the obfuscation of the sun thanks to excessive wildfire smoke in the air (that’s healthy, right?), it seems like the whole city has just been trying to survive, rather than thrive, since mid-June. The average summer temperature recorded up until yesterday at the NavCan weather station at the Hamilton International Airport has been 28.6 degrees Celsius.

Those kinds of temperatures bring with them a host of issues. The still, warm waters of Hamilton Harbour are the perfect conditions for the growth of dangerous blue-green algae toxins, which have once again bloomed at the much-beleaguered Pier 4 Park Beach. This bloom required Public Health to close the beach and notify Hamiltonians that coming into contact with the water there can be dangerous. The dry temperatures have also worried the Fire Department, which has issued an immediate fire ban in an effort to prevent an avoidable catastrophe. And, of course, sustained high temperatures has meant the return of

Our first heat warning of the year started on June 22, 2025. It was upgraded to an “extended heat warning” on June 24 before coming to an end a day later. Then there was a little two day warning from July 5 to 7, before we launched into a nearly week-long heat event from July 11 to July 17. Another two day event settled from July 24 to 26, quickly followed by another on July 27. That one lasted until July 31. Our latest kicked off on August 9, becoming an “extended” warning on August 11 before being cancelled today.

That brings the total number of heat warning days to 24 out of the 55 days there have been of summer so far. That means that we’ve been under heat-related warnings for 44% of the summer. A full 24 days of extreme heat beats the 2019 to 2023 average number of heat warning days, which was 14.

***

But what is a heat warning, anyway? Sometimes you see warnings from the City of Hamilton, other times from Environment Canada. Who’s in charge!?

Well, both groups have a role to play. Environment Canada provides the scientific data necessary to understand current temperatures and projected forecasts. This data helps to, as Environment Canada notes on their website, “support public health and emergency management officials across Canada.” Hamilton Public Health takes that data and makes a determination about our own local Heat Warning. If they issue a warning - assuming the data they get from Environment Canada indicates we’re looking at two or more consecutive days of daytime highs of at least 31 degrees Celsius or a humidex over 40 degrees Celsius - then a host of city policies kick in. Cooling locations are opened and advertised, open swims at public pools become free, and residents are encouraged to reduce their risk of heat-related illnesses by staying indoors or in a cool place.

Our own local heat warning system is actually quite new. Prior to 2007, Hamilton had no local heat protocols, which became a notable problem during the sweltering summer of 2005. The only option available to the city was the declaration of a State of Emergency if temperatures rose above 40 degrees Celsius, which was cool comfort to those enduring days of +30 degree weather that summer. After Toronto adopted a heat alert system, Hamilton piggybacked off theirs, but that policy was deemed to be ineffective, given the dramatically varying temperatures on either side of Lake Ontario.

Just after Victoria Day, 2007, a unique made-in-Hamilton heat alert system went into effect, featuring a multi-stage ramp up based mainly on humidity. Under that system, a “heat advisory” was triggered if the humidex climbed over 40 degrees Celsius for one day. That became a “heat warning” after two days, followed by a “heat alert” after three days of a humidex of +40 degrees or one day of a base temperature over 45 degrees Celsius.

There were critiques about the program from the beginning. People working to eliminate poverty asserted that the criteria for issuing an alert was too high and noted that there was almost nothing the city did after issuing advisories, warnings, and alerts, forcing Hamiltonians to fend for themselves in the heat.¹

For three years, the system lay dormant, with the city’s temperature never quite meeting the threshold for the alert system to be activated. In the interim, the city strengthened their policies around extreme heat, finally instituting some of the recommendations from anti-poverty activists, including the cooling centres and extended pool hours we know today. Then, in early July, 2010, Hamilton issued its first local heat warning after three consecutive days of +32 degree weather.²

The city’s next heat alert was issued over a year later, in late July, 2011. During that heat wave, The Spec did a bunch of vox pops across the city to figure out how Hamiltonians were dealing with the temperatures. Among the most enthusiastic about the heat was an employee at the Stoney Creek Dairy who was thrilled at the lines of customers “out the door”. Less thrilled was a visitor from the UK who remarked that “It’s not this hot in England…it’s like we’re competing with Dubai right now.”³

Hamilton experienced heat alerts almost yearly from that point on. In 2015, the system was revamped to ensure coordination from all levels of government, doing away with the city’s advisory/warning/alert system. The new Harmonized Heat Alert Response System (HHARS) created “levels”, with level one being triggered when the base temperature was 31 degrees Celsius or over, up to level three after three or more days. The following year, the Chief Medical Officer of Health issued nine heat alert days. The system was quietly adjusted to avoid reference to the “levels”, sticking with just a plain old “heat warning” for events spanning one or two days and “extended heat warnings” for those at three or more.⁴  

***

The spiciest day this summer came just a few days into the season. That old reliable NavCan weather station at the airport clocked a daytime high of 34.1 degrees Celsius on June 23, during that first heat warning of 2025. But how does that stack up against hot days from Hamilton’s past?

Well that question is actually quite hard to answer. Canada first began to collect reliable weather data in the 1870’s, with the quality of data collection and forecasting growing dramatically in the early 20th century to the point where, in 1935, Canadians could tune into the Trans-Canada Network (the early CBC) and get a fairly reliable weather forecast for their area.⁵

That’s why there’s some debate as to Hamilton’s hottest ever day.

Some will claim that July 14, 1868 was the hottest day ever in Hamilton’s history. The Evening Times had little to say about the heat, dedicating their front page to advertisements for a great hat sale held by John Egan at his “City Hat Store” at #8 King Street and a rather dull piece of serialized fiction told from the perspective of a dying man, reflecting on his mother. The only “heat” referenced by the paper that day was the ongoing investigation into accusations against the city’s Chief of Police for accepting bribes from prisoners. The Spec’s reporting on that day was also light on information about the heat, though the paper did note that the heat and drought “is visible in the stunted appearance of the raspberries brought into market.”

The following day, the Times reported - in their “Melange” section of short news briefs - some deaths around Ontario from the heat and one Mr. R. Osborne’s recording of a maximum temperature of 106 degrees Fahrenheit (41.1 Celsius) in the shade at Central Public School at 3:00 PM on July 14. But that issue wasn’t of primary importance to the editors of the Times, who focused instead on imploring the “City Fathers” to introduce “a by-law suppressing the intolerable nuisance of permitting the city to be turned into a goose pasture.” Some things never change.

The Spec, alternatively, dedicated a lengthy column to the heat, beginning with the line: “It is probably hardly necessary that we should inform our readers that the weather is exceedingly warm…”. The Spec’s tips for beating the heat? Staying out of the sun and avoiding alcohol, except in the case of those with a “feeble pulse”, who should take “iced whiskey or win and water [which] will very generally afford relief.”⁶

Others will claim Monday, July 13, 1936 was Hamilton’s hottest day, with a recorded high of 41 degrees Celsius. Amidst a devastating drought in the western United States and Canada, Hamilton’s temperatures jumped, leaving few with a way to cool down. The Spec reported that, over the weekend, five residents died from heat stroke while a Toronto-area teenager drowned after loosing consciousness, trying to stay cool at Hamilton Beach. Over the course of the heat wave, which lasted from July 8 to July 15, at least 80 people would die, leading The Spec to report that the city’s mortality rate had not been higher since the Flu Epidemic of 1918/1919.

Mass fainting events were reported after an Orange Order parade on the grounds of Dundurn and Saturday baseball games were postponed. Sales of beer and buttermilk skyrocketed, as did trips up the Mountain so overheated lower-city residents could take in the cool breezes atop the Escarpment.

The Hamilton Police even took the dramatic step of ignoring the Sabbath law and allowing the city’s ice dealers to deliver their frosty product to those fortunate enough to own refrigerators. Just as shocking to The Spec was the decision by Chedoke Golf Course mentor Alfie Sims to close his pro shop at 6:00 PM after few people braved the summer heat to get in a round.⁷

But the most recent date with extreme temperatures had to be July 7, 1988, when the base temp rose to 38.8 degrees Celsius. That summer, Hamilton was gripped by record heat, drought, and smog, which settled over the city and refused to budge. The Spec’s local section ran stories about the best kind of air conditioners to buy, printed pictures of what was supposed to be the city’s skyline from the Sydenham Hill (the photo showed nothing but a hazy blur), reassured local homeowners that their crispy grass was “just taking a rest”, and warned residents that the weather would stay hot for a long while.

Remarkably, The Spec was prescient, running an editorial that read, in part: “Some scientists opine it’s a foretaste of the greenhouse effect that will make the local climate hotter and drier as airborne pollution wraps the planet in an envelope of dirt, as deforestation thins down the oxygen trees feed into the atmosphere.” The editorial wasn’t about climate change specifically; it was lauding Hamilton’s steel manufacturers for their efforts to recycle water through the plants. The editorial did not mention the impact of the plants’ burning coal on the smog crisis that sent scores of Hamiltonians to hospital that year.⁸

***

We know that human-caused climate change is real, and poses an existential threat to humanity’s survival on this planet. It isn’t some abstraction or far-off problem that will never impact us. This summer should be a stark reminder that climate change is here and is impacting our day-to-day lives. We have endured a full 24 days of extreme heat and there are still 39 more days of summer to go.

Yes, there have been temperature spikes in the past, but back-to-back consistent days of emergency-levels of heat, breaking records year after year, should be enough to prove to even the most hardened of skeptics that it is time to act.

Big businesses need to be held accountable for their impact on the environment, we need to shift away from designing our cities around cars that are growing in size and consumption, and we need to get serious about real, renewable energy. In Hamilton especially, our local steel manufacturers need to work toward green steel and stop the persistent burning of fossil fuels that have contributed to days of poor air quality in the city.

If we don’t make changes, we will keep breaking heat records. And the day might come where the casualties of the Heat Wave of 1936 seem low in comparison. Even though every person is impacted by extreme heat, it is always the most vulnerable who suffer the most in these situations.

Sure, we’re dealing with persistent heat warnings. But those warnings should be telling us something - telling us to act before extreme heat becomes the norm.

1  _{Marissa Nelson. “Heat wave can be brutal enough to wilt autumn colour display,” Hamilton Spectator, July 13, 2005 (Spec archive link); Raveena Aulakh. “Hamilton to launch its own heat alert program,” Hamilton Spectator, May 28, 2007 (Spec archive link); Nicole MacIntyre. “Hot topic: City urged to act sooner with heat alerts,” Hamilton Spectator, July 15, 2008 (Spec archive link).}

2  _{Joey Coleman. “After three days, it’s official” Hamilton Spectator, July 8, 2010 (Spec archive link).}

3  _{Matthew Van Dongen. “Some like it hot” Hamilton Spectator, July 20, 2011 (Spec archive link).}

4  _{Nicole Thompson. “Canada’s hot new heat advisory” Hamilton Spectator, July 31, 2015 (Spec archive link); Matthew Van Dongen. “City is mulling free air-conditioners for vulnerable residents” Hamilton Spectator, May 25, 2017 (Spec archive link); Joanna Frketich. “Health, wealth and inequality,” Hamilton Spectator, November 30, 2024 (Spec archive link).}

5  _{“From Telegraph to Mobile Apps - 150 years of Canadian weather service history” Environment and Climate Change Canada, March 23, 2021 (Link)}

6  _{The Hamilton Evening Times, July 14, 1868 (Spec archive link) and July 15, 1868 (Spec archive link); The Hamilton Spectator, July 14, 1868 (Spec archive link) and July 15, 1868 (Spec archive link)}

7  _{Various stories, The Hamilton Spectator, July 13, 1936 (Spec archive link); “July 8-15, 1936: 80 die in Hamilton’s worst heat wave” The Hamilton Spectator, September 23, 2016 (Spec link).}

8  _{Various stories, The Hamilton Spectator, July 8, 1988 (Spec archive link).}