Questions on IAQ at July 2025 Board of Health meeting
Two members of CIATO spoke at the Board of Health meeting on July 7, 2025, regarding a progress report on Toronto Public Health’s 2024-2028 Strategic Plan and Toronto Public Health’s new public dashboard of health impacts related to climate change. On both topics, we continued our call for Toronto Public Health to include IAQ in their policies. It’s especially important that IAQ and recognition of the health impact of poor IAQ are included in public health policies related to climate change. Climate change-related events generate harmful air pollution which inevitably comes indoors. With extreme heat, heavy rain, and smoke advisories becoming regular occurrences, people are being told to shelter indoors, but what happens when the ventilation and filtration are inadequate? Three Board members asked TPH staff questions on IAQ but the answers provided were incomplete and unsatisfactory. We are going to keep pushing for answers! In the meantime, please watch our deputations, the Board’s questions, and especially watch the answers coming from Toronto Public Health – we would love to hear your comments!
July 7, 2025
YouTube
CIATO Speaker, progress report on Toronto Public Health’s 2024-2028 Strategic Plan
(1:19:30; scroll to 2:49 to hear Board member Dr. Stephanie Zhou’s questions)
CIATO Speaker, Toronto Public Health’s dashboard of health impacts related to climate change.
(3:46:46; scroll to 3:57 to hear Councillor Lily Cheng and Alejandra Bravo’s questions)
Call for IAQ Policy to be Included in Net Zero Strategy
The City of Toronto has an ambitious plan to reach Net Zero emissions by 2040, and a part of this strategy is HVAC upgrades to transition from gas-burning furnaces to heat pumps. We spotted this as an opportunity to improve access to clean indoor air, because HVAC upgrades can be paired with updated air handling systems and installation of MERV-13 filters, but without an indoor air quality policy to ensure clean air delivery, we might be setting ourselves up for Sick Building Syndrome version 2.0. It’s not just a matter of reducing emissions and reliance on fossil fuels, it’s a matter of making our buildings safe from airborne diseases, pollution in our built environments (eg. microplastics, PFAS), and air pollution from climate change-related events. That’s why CIATO is calling for the City of Toronto to include a clean indoor air policy as part of the TransformTO Net Zero policy. We submitted a letter to the Infrastructure & Environment Committee and Louise Hidinger, Ph.D. spoke on our behalf before the committee on June 11, 2025.
June 11, 2025
Speaking Out About the Measles Outbreak in Ontario
Ontario has the unfortunate distinction of having the biggest outbreak of measles in the western hemisphere. The province’s public health units have been unable to contain the spread. Ontario’s public health units have focused their strategy entirely on vaccination. In public health messages, there is no mention of simple precautions that can be taken to prevent transmission of measles and other airborne diseases. Without airborne precautions in addition to vaccination, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to contain the spread of measles.
CIATO really brought it to the Board of Health on June 3, 2025, with 10 speakers appearing before the Board. We also rallied members of the community to send letters about the lack of public health messaging they have seen, and the impact it is having on their lives (thanks to those who participated in our letter drive!). We got Board members to start asking questions about indoor air quality and issues about public health messaging, including messaging given to schools. We are going to keep pushing for a public health communications campaign that mentions airborne disease transmission, especially as the start of the next school year is just a few months away. Let’s contain this outbreak before it spreads any further!
June 3, 2025
Delegations to Toronto Board of Health
Over the past few months, measles cases have been rising steadily. Ontario’s public health units have been slow to act and currently, Ontario is averaging at least 100+ new cases every week. This comes as no surprise: measles is actually a respiratory virus and is primarily transmitted through the air. The usual strategy for containing measles is to vaccinate and contact trace, which is exactly what Public Health Ontario and its agencies are doing. But we can see that’s not working – besides vaccination, we need multiple layers of protection to protect against airborne transmission. On May 6, several members of CIATO spoke before the Toronto Board of Health, to criticize their messaging, particularly on social media posts, and to urge them to inform the public on how to protect themselves against airborne diseases. Hear what our speakers had to say by clicking on the links.
May 6, 2025
Letters and Delegations to TDSB
It’s been 5 years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Toronto District School Board still hasn’t put an Indoor Air Quality Policy in place. It’s likely the only school board in the entire province that hasn’t switched to MERV-13 filters in all schools (nearly all TDSB schools still have MERV-10 filters, not effective for filtering out infectious particles or PM2.5 fine particulates). TDSB schools may have an air purifier in each classroom, but without a policy to govern their use, most of them are sitting idle, often unplugged or pushed into a corner. One of our members advocated before the TDSB Governance & Policy Committee on April 23, to ask for an effective Indoor Air Quality Policy that includes a policy for usage of the air purifiers. Three members advocated before the TDSB Finance, Budget & Enrolment Committee on April 29. We also sent a letter to each Committee with details about our requests and proposals for what to do next. Let’s get clean indoor air in our public schools!
April 23 and April 29, 2025
Letter to TDSB Trustees
CIATO responded to the TDSB’s 2024-2025 Climate Action Plan with a detailed letter to highlight its shortfalls, request more substantive actions, and an accelerated timeline to help get the TDSB to net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2040 in order to align with the City of Toronto’s Net Zero strategy. Two of our members were delegates at the TDSB Planning & Priorities meeting on April 9, 2025. We are going to continue pressing for changes to the Climate Action Plan to get HVAC upgrades, including replacement of furnaces with heat pumps, and installation of MERV-13 filters in ALL schools.
April 9, 2025
Letter and Presentation to Toronto Board of Health
Did you know that many of the exposures to cancer-causing agents actually come from breathing polluted air? Last October, the Toronto Board of Health directed Toronto Public Health (TPH) to prepare a report on recommendations to reduce environmental and occupational-related cancers. TPH released their report on March 26, 2025 and we saw that it overlooked the impact of indoor air quality on cancer risk. We also saw this as a great opportunity to ask again about a review of ventilation standards, requested in March 2022 (!), that TPH has yet to deliver (we have been trying to chase down an answer since December 2024 and still no answers!). We sent a letter to the Board of Health and TPH, detailing all these issues. Three of our members spoke at the April 1, 2025 Board of Health meeting, and delivered deputations that really helped to get IAQ on the radar.
April 1, 2025
(1:18:00 to 1:47:23)
Letter to Net Zero
Remember the wildfire smoke that blanketed Toronto in June 2023? Climate change-related events like wildfires and flooding generate harmful air pollution which can enter and concentrate inside buildings. As the City is already looking for ways to reduce emissions and reliance on fossil fuels, we are advocating for an incentive program for HVAC upgrades/retrofits that aligns with the City’s Net Zero goals. In March 2025, we collected our comments and sent a letter to the Environment, Climate, and Forestry Division of the City of Toronto, as part of the public consultation process for strategies to reduce building emissions.
March 11, 2025
Letter to BudgetTO
We are asking the City of Toronto to invest in clean indoor, by implementing a city-wide IAQ policy and bylaw, a CO2 monitoring system for public buildings, and an incentive program to help people upgrade and retrofit HVAC systems. Starting in October 2024, we participated in the public consultations for the City of Toronto’s 2025 Budget. In January and February 2025, we wrote a joint letter, and spoke before the City’s Budget Committee.
January 28, 2025
Letter to TDSB Trustees
The start of the 2024-2025 school year came and went with little guidance from Toronto Public Health (TPH) about how to protect against airborne infectious diseases. So, in November 2024, we wrote a letter to the Trustees of the Toronto District School Board, asking that they request TPH provide more robust information on airborne disease transmission and appropriate protections against airborne diseases. In response, TPH sent an information letter to the school boards and a Respiratory Viruses Digital Toolkit that contains two new infographics “4 Steps for Self-Protection” and “How Do Respiratory Viruses Spread?” but they have not been promoted. We’re working to get these infographics more widely seen by the public.
November 8, 2024
Letter to Toronto Board of Health
In March 2024, the City of Toronto asked for public input on Toronto Public Health’s Strategic Plan for 2024-208 – so we got together to write a joint letter, talking about how the removal of pandemic-related public health protections have impacted our lives, and what we want to see going forward. Several of us spoke at Toronto Board of Health meetings in the 4 months following, to raise awareness of the lack of equitable access to clean indoor air.