A new report says governments should consider extreme heat a natural disaster.
That's as climate change raises the risk of soaring summer temperatures in much of Canada.
The report penned by experts at the Intact Centre on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo says Canada should be ringing the alarm bells about the risk of intense heat.
Heat is not listed as a natural disaster on the federal government's website, even though it has proven deadlier and more common in Canada than most of those other threats.
The heat wave that hit British Columbia last summer killed nearly 600 people -- the majority of them in a one-week span at the end of June.
In Quebec in 2018, 89 people died due to extreme heat, most of them in poorer neighbourhoods in Montreal.
The report says more than 17-million people live in the urban centres most at risk of extreme heat events.