Analysis shows a new normal is emerging, with wildfire smoke creating persistently higher health costs.
Key insights
- Canada is getting smokier, as elevated wildfire smoke exposure becomes the new baseline—and a part of summer reality.
- Long-term exposure to increased toxic wildfire smoke is associated with an estimated 2,500 premature deaths annually in Canada.
- The cost of wildfire smoke totalled $231 billion—or an average of $19 billion per year—between 2014 and 2025, driven primarily by long-term chronic mortality.
- The toll of climate change is already costing Canadians and slowing the economy. The health costs associated with wildfire smoke are making it worse.
Smoky summers are now a way of life in Canada. Air quality alerts, evacuation orders, cancelled soccer games, and staying shuttered indoors are now as much a part of the season as ice cream and beach days. What was once a mostly regional problem is now a common experience across the country.
Our analysis shows that smoke has also become a persistent public health concern, harming Canadians’ health and well-being, their livelihoods, and resulting in billions of dollars in broader economic costs every year.
Following the smoke
To estimate the health impacts of wildfire smoke, we assembled more than a decade’s worth of air quality monitoring data from hundreds of monitoring stations across Canada, including the National Air Pollution Surveillance (NAPS) network and provincial monitoring systems.
PM2.5 is a fine particulate pollutant associated with a broad range of health issues, from throat irritation and coughing to premature death. We assembled hourly and daily PM2.5 measurement data, spanning a 12-year period starting in 2014, to isolate wildfire smoke events from historical background air pollution levels, and to estimate population exposure in a total 81 health regions across every province and territory covering most of Canada’s population.
We then applied Health Canada’s Air Quality Benefits Assessment Tool (AQBAT) to translate Canadians’ smoke exposure into health impacts and economic costs.
A higher, smokier baseline
Our analysis determined that after the record-breaking 2023 fire season health impacts associated with wildfire smoke in 2025 continued to be substantially higher than pre-2023 levels. That suggests that elevated smoke exposure has become part of Canada’s new normal.
In 2025, wildfire smoke across Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario is estimated to have contributed to approximately 8 million excess health events, including 4.4 million days of respiratory symptoms and 2.4 million restricted activity days—results covering three provinces that suggest the health burden of smoke remains well above pre-2019 levels.
To put a dollar figure on the scale of the national health toll, wildfire smoke caused an estimated total of $5.3 billion in acute health damages between 2014 and 2025. These acute damages capture the immediate and visible effects of smoke exposure, including respiratory symptoms, asthma attacks, emergency room visits, and millions of days when Canadians were unable to work or play outdoors. All of these have an economic cost, from direct health care costs, to lost wages, and lower enjoyment of summer activities. Our findings are broadly consistent with recent Canadian research (Matz et al., 2026).
But these acute costs represent less than 3 per cent of the total burden. For every dollar of visible acute smoke damage, another $43 accumulates through long-term premature mortality. Over the same 12-year period, chronic mortality costs totalled approximately $226 billion—roughly $19 billion every year.
While these annual numbers are striking, zooming out shows a wider trend of intensifying smoke—and worsening damages—over time.
Looking at Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario—the three provinces with consistent air quality monitoring data available for 2025—average annual acute damages rose from $256 million in 2014–2016 to $409 million in 2021–2024. The 2025 result, at $399 million, sits squarely within that new, elevated range.
Analysis of 2025 results suggests Canada has not returned to the lower damage levels experienced a decade ago. In other words, while 2023 remains the worst wildfire season on record, higher smoke impacts appear to be persisting.
Figure 1
The long shadow
Based on our analysis, the long-term exposure to elevated wildfire smoke is associated with an estimate of about 2,500 premature deaths annually in Canada.
This means that the most visible measures of acute health costs on smoky days—emergency room visits and asthma attacks—represent only a small share of the overall health burden.
Wildfires making Canadians sick
Wildfire smoke is becoming a persistent public health burden with economic costs measured in billions of dollars every year. With smoke arriving now on an annual basis and the lingering health effects settling in, the new normal will afflict millions of Canadians annually, requiring more public health spending to deal with acute and chronic effects, and dragging down economic productivity.
In the 2022 report, Damage Control, the Climate Institute identified a number of ways in which climate change was already slowing economic growth and eroding Canadian’s income, not accounting for the impacts of wildfire smoke.
This new analysis shows that the health effects and economic costs of climate change are still being uncovered—and that the full extent of their burden is growing.
Climate change is no longer a future or distant problem. The evidence increasingly points to the here and now. Canadians are paying the price today through worsening health, mounting health costs, and a growing economic burden.
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Dave Sawyer is Principal Economist at the Canadian Climate Institute and Head of 440 Megatonnes.