June 7, 2006, National Post

Suburban living no real remedy to poor air quality

April Lindgren

TORONTO - Ontario suburbanites in places like Markham, Oshawa, Caledon and Burlington believe the air they breath is cleaner than that of downtown Toronto, but they are just plain wrong, concludes a new study.

"The bottom line is that people do not understand that their air quality is equally bad on smog alert days everywhere in the Greater Toronto Area," concluded Eva Ligeti, executive director of the Clean Air Partnership. "You have to get very far away from the GTA for air quality to improve."

The partnership, a charitable organization that promotes improvements in local air quality, commissioned a telephone survey that found the majority of residents contacted in Oshawa (56 per cent), Burlington (60 per cent), Caledon (66 per cent) and Markham (69 per cent) think their air quality is better than that in downtown Toronto.

The reality, however, is that last year there were 48 smog alert days in each and every community surveyed, as well as is downtown Toronto, Ligeti noted.

Air quality samples taken as part of the study confirmed the bad news for suburban residents.

The concentration of particle pollutants that trigger smog alerts was the same in all the samples, concluded University of Toronto researcher Greg Evans. The microscopic particles are generated by automobile emissions and by coal-fired power plants in both Ontario and the northeastern United States.

"When winds are light southwesterly and the weather conditions are static, smog spreads like a flooding river over the whole region causing major increases in adverse health effects," warned Dr. David Pengelly, a member of McMaster University's Institute of Environment and Health in Hamilton. Last summer, Ontarians in the GTA would have had to travel north of Parry Sound and as far east as Kingston if they wanted significantly fewer smog alert days. Even then, Sudbury had 20 smog alerts days, there were 10 in Sault Ste. Marie and 25 in the Ottawa area.

Evans's research did show that when it came to another category of pollutants, ultrafine particles emitted exclusively by automobiles, local residents do have some ability to control what goes into their lungs.

"The concentrations of ultrafines vary dramatically depending on how close you are to a major roadway," he told reporters. "So if you want to go for a jog, you might want to do it in the morning rather than the afternoon and you might want to stay away from the busier roads."

The poll on air quality perception also found that 73 per cent of respondents, all of whom live outside Toronto's downtown, rated the general air quality in the centre of the city as poor. At the same time, 58 per cent believed the air quality in their own suburban neighbourhood was good.

When asked whether a community's air quality would have an impact on decisions about whether they would choose to live in a community, 40 per cent of respondents said it would have a major impact and 47 per cent said it would have some impact.

The survey of 452 people was done in late May and has a margin of error of 4.6 per cent 19 times out of 20.