July 11, 2023, was like any other summer day for Amber Vigh. She was getting ready to take her nine-year-old son, Carter, to the summer camp she ran at the local arena in 100 Mile House, B.C. In preparation for an afternoon trip to the water park, she did what had become routine during British Columbia’s wildfire season: she checked the air quality index on her phone.

“It was like a one or a two,” she recalls. “You couldn’t smell smoke at the time we left. It was like any other beautiful summer day.”

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Carter had lived with asthma for years. Vigh knew the routine — inhalers packed, activities adjusted on smoky days — but that morning gave her no reason to worry. There were no active wildfires near their home in 100 Mile House, and the closest major blazes were in other parts of British Columbia. Air quality forecasts showed little immediate risk, but the data Vigh relied on came from monitoring stations in Williams Lake, nearly 100 kilometres from her home, or Kamloops, nearly twice that.

That evening, Carter was sitting on the couch when he began to cough. “All of a sudden, it just happened,” Vigh says. “He started coughing, and we did all the things we were supposed to do.” She and her husband gave Carter his puffer, water and a cool bath. When his breathing worsened, Vigh rushed him to the hospital. “I just thought he needed his oxygen [levels] topped up,” she says.

At the hospital, Carter fell in and out of consciousness. Medical staff cycled through the room as doctors from across the province were consulted. After several rounds of CPR, Vigh was told there was nothing more they could do. “I never thought in a million years I was leaving that hospital without him,” she recalls.

A coroner later told the family Carter’s cause of death was asthma exacerbated by wildfire smoke. Microscopic particles had drifted from fires burning across the country, building up in Carter’s lungs. “It went from zero to 100 in the blink of an eye,” Vigh says. “I feel like we used all the information that we had at the time, and it wasn’t enough.”

Carter’s death is a heartbreaking symbol of what doctors and researchers across the country are warning: Canada’s children are on the front lines of the climate crisis. As wildfires, extreme heat and air pollution intensify, pediatric hospitalizations are rising, and most cases go unrecognized as climate related. Parents like Vigh, as well as doctors and public health experts, are hoping for clearer policy action and education that moves responsibility of individual families and creates systemic safeguards for children.

“We have become complacent as a society in thinking that this is just the norm,” Vigh says. “There needs to be guidelines set.”

According to Health Canada, rates of heat-related emergency department visits among children aged two to 12 increased between 2005 and 2023, with higher baseline levels and more frequent spikes during years with more extreme heat events. Among adolescents aged 13 to 18, the same pattern emerges more starkly, with emergency visits peaking in 2018, the year of a North American heat wave.

Another study published last........

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