As Canadians celebrate Canada Day, a national holiday to celebrate the formation of the Canadian confederacy, a searing and punishing ‘heat dome’, which has been gripping much of the Pacific Northwest this past week, has begun tapering off in western Canada.

In the past week, the city of Edmonton, capital of Canada’s Alberta province, has witnessed some of its highest temperatures in 100 years, with each day since June 26 registering temperatures in the mid to high-30s and making multiple entries into Edmonton’s top five hottest days ever recorded. This led the city of Edmonton to activate its extreme weather response on June 26, which involves opening sites for people to take shelter from the heat, handing out water to those in need and more.

For one of Canada’s northernmost metropolitan cities that experiences annual bouts of extreme snowfall and cold, a heat wave of this length and intensity was unexpected. It has led to a slew of panic buying of fans and air conditioning units. Parts of the city have also been instructed to conserve water-usage for shortages. Many Edmontonians have also been driven to book hotel rooms for the week to escape the searing and unrelenting heat that has, in some cases, cracked roads and melted plastic waste bins left in the sun.

Students like me ran off from our one room stifling apartments to the cool basements of the university spaces and even the library. With daytime highs entering into the late-30s and nighttime lows barely going under 20 degrees, it has been very uncomfortable to sleep in the absence of a fan or some form of AC. I have even purchased a table fan in order to survive such extreme weather patterns.

Though not as severe as areas like the US northwestern states of Oregon and Washington, or Alberta’s neighbouring province in the west, British Coloumbia (in some parts of which temperatures have reached nearly 50 degrees), the heatwave has proven to be a severely dangerous and, in many cases, a fatal phenomenon in Edmonton history over the past week.

⚫ The author is a student at the University of Alberta doing his masters in International Relations