The City of Toronto on Wednesday published an expanded heat-warning response framework that adds twenty new cooling centres, lengthens summer pool hours across the city and creates a new at-risk resident registry for high-rise buildings without functional central air. The release, signed off by chief medical officer of health Eileen de Villa and deputy city manager Tracey Cook, anticipates a 2026 heatwave season that Toronto Public Health describes as likely to exceed 2025's record.
Toronto recorded 29 days under formal heat warning in 2025, nearly twice the sixteen-day total in 2024 and more than triple the average for the decade ending in 2020. Five heat-related deaths were confirmed by the chief coroner of Ontario in 2025, all of them in residents over the age of seventy living in older apartment buildings without central air. De Villa said heat was "now a structural city risk and needs to be planned for like a snowstorm or a flood."
The expanded framework adds twenty new cooling centres across the city, including five in Scarborough where the existing network had been thinnest, and it extends operating hours at fifty-four city pools from 10pm to midnight on declared heat-warning nights. The city has also committed C$8.4 million to subsidise window air-conditioning units for low-income residents in buildings flagged as high-risk by Toronto Community Housing.
The new at-risk resident registry, modelled on a Montreal pilot from 2023, will allow residents of high-rise buildings without central air to opt in to daily wellness checks during declared heat warnings. The city has begun outreach in Thorncliffe Park, Crescent Town and St. James Town, the three census tracts with the highest heat-related illness rates in 2025.
Mayor Olivia Chow, who formally declared her re-election candidacy on Monday and faces Toronto city councillor Brad Bradford in the October 26 vote, said in a video statement that heat response had become "a basic test of municipal competence." Her opponent's campaign accused Chow of "playing politics with a climate emergency" by tying the rollout to her election launch and pledged a more aggressive cooling-centre expansion if elected.
Toronto's heat-warning framework now operates at three levels: a heat warning at 31 degrees Celsius with a humidex above 40, an extended heat warning when those conditions persist for three consecutive days, and an extreme-heat alert reserved for daytime highs above 35 with overnight lows above 22. Public health expects to issue the first warning of the 2026 season within the next two weeks, according to forecasts from Environment Canada.