44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 24, 2021 02:00PM
- Nov/24/21 3:31:43 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to present a petition regarding the Trans Mountain pipeline.
It is of critical concern to the petitioners that the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion not take place. They point out that a diluted bitumen spill would devastate local ecosystems and economies throughout British Columbia, but particularly in the coastal zone and anywhere along the 800 water bodies, tributaries and rivers the pipeline would cross.
The petitioners call on the government to cancel any plans to put public money into, or to approve any expansion of, the Trans Mountain pipeline.
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- Nov/24/21 3:36:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I believe that this request for an emergency debate is widely supported on all sides of the House.
I am requesting an emergency debate on the dire impacts of the climate emergency, particularly as they are now affecting my home province of British Columbia. This started with the heat dome in the latter part of June and early July, when nearly 600 people died within four days. We went through a summer of wildfires and we now have this atmospheric river, which has decimated our infrastructure and has caused death, destruction and the loss of homes and farms, and it continues. We see the impacts now as well in the loss of infrastructure in Newfoundland and Labrador.
This is very timely, and it is entirely within the rubric of our rules for emergency debate. The situation is not chronic; it is a gathering emergency, and all of us on all sides of the House from every party would appreciate a ruling that allows us to discuss, debate and, one hopes, with a spirit of collaboration and cross-party alliance, make common cause with the people of British Columbia, the first nations and the people across this country suffering in the climate emergency.
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- Nov/24/21 6:19:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, as this is our first opportunity for either of the members of the Green Party to speak to this motion, I want to make it clear that we will be supporting it. We very much support a hybrid Parliament.
I just came back from being at COP26 in Glasgow, where no one could enter the hall who was not double vaccinated. The health rules were that we should also keep masked, maintain physical distancing, maintain all public health measures and get tested daily to ensure we were not COVID-positive.
I do not feel safe in this place, even if every member is double vaccinated, because we are too close. We cannot speak if we are not at our very own desks. We cannot vote if we are not at our very own desks. The situation here is not compliant with public health rules across Canada, and I am very grateful that this motion is being put forward.
I deeply regret what happened from March 13 of last year and into the spring. However, we finally had hybrid sessions and we were able to vote remotely. We should follow that practice for our safety and the safety of our communities.
Shame on anyone who does not see the importance of protecting public health.
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- Nov/24/21 6:31:56 p.m.
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moved:
That this House do now adjourn.
She said: Mr. Speaker, I am truly honoured to be the first member to rise this evening to speak to such a crucial issue.
I first want to acknowledge that we are gathering today on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.
To me, it is clear that we are in the midst of a climate emergency. I just participated in the 26th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Glasgow. This was my 12th time participating, and the situation is graver now than it was the first time.
I am desperately concerned that the climate emergency is outpacing any government's actions to take control of the situation, and I want to address this issue while cognizant of the time. I take to heart the remarks from earlier today by my friend and colleague the hon. member for Abbotsford, who also wanted an emergency debate. We want to focus on what has just happened in our home province of British Columbia. However, there is a context here, and any action we take now that ignores the root causes of what just happened invites worse to come. We need to take account of root causes and we need to take appropriate actions.
With the Speaker's indulgence, my intention is to start with the global, move to the national and then focus most of my remarks on the provincial and the local and what we do now. I hope we can approach this issue tonight, all of us members of Parliament from five different parties, in a way that reflects the best of us in recognizing that we have more in common than in difference.
I am looking across the way right now to my friend from Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, who referenced earlier today that it was in his riding that Lytton burned to the ground in 15 minutes earlier this summer. I do not think we can only look at the floods that just happened. A lot of events have taken place and hit the same communities, particularly the same first nations communities, over and over again within the period of time during which the House was adjourned, from the end of June until reconvening on Monday.
We have to recognize that we are in a climate emergency, as the House did on June 17, 2019. Some of us were in our seats then. Through a motion from the former minister of environment, Catherine McKenna, the House voted that we were indeed in a climate emergency and had to take account of that. However, nothing has changed. We do not act as though we are in an emergency.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the large scientific body also known as IPCC, has released unequivocal research. It presented a report on 1.5°C in October 2018. The news was so terrible that the IPCC called for immediate action. Three years have now passed, and the situation is even worse than it was in October 2018.
We were told by the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change in their emergency report on 1.5°C, which is the target of the Paris Agreement, that we are at desperate risk of missing it. It is not a political target. The reason the IPCC was asked to produce the report they produced was to inform policy-makers, politicians and government leaders around the world about the difference between a 2°C global average temperature increase and 1.5°C. I will not go through all the details of the report. I cannot in the time available. However, as one of the government leaders, the Prime Minister of Barbados, just said a few days ago in Glasgow, 2°C is a death sentence for us; only at 1.5°C do we survive.
What the IPCC sketched out was not that 1.5°C makes us live in a safe world, but that it is one we can survive in. It would allow coral reefs to survive, mostly. It would protect our Arctic, mostly but not entirely. We would experience permafrost thaw, but it would not be a fatal level of permafrost thaw. Over and over again, that report, which is seminal, pointed out that 1.5°C was essential.
Then we had, this summer, the report of the first working group, the sixth assessment report of the IPCC, which was labelled by the Secretary-General of the United Nations as code red for humanity. It said that everything they had warned about in 2018 is happening faster and with greater severity than they had anticipated.
We know globally that we are now on track to shooting well past 2°C, well past the danger zone. This is not about bad weather. This is about whether human civilization can survive. That is what we are talking about. No issue could be more riveting and the stakes could not be higher. Still, on a day-to-day basis we have this ability to function as though there is still time.
Sadly and tragically, the Government of Canada chose to use only part of the IPCC advice, the part saying that if we hold to 1.5°C, by mid-century, 2050, we should be at net zero. I need to enforce this and I need to say it slowly, particularly for my Liberal colleagues, because I am not sure that the government understands the way this information is being manipulated by someone, somewhere.
The IPCC has never said the goal is net zero by 2050 and then we will get through all this and human civilization will survive. They have said very clearly that there is only one pathway to hold to 1.5°C, and it starts with at least 45% reductions globally, which is a lot, against 2010 levels by 2030. If we do not do that, net zero by 2050 is meaningless. It will be too late. We will have taken a very significant step toward the unbearable risks of unstoppable self-accelerating global warming triggered by what some people call points of no return or tipping points. The important thing to say is that we still have time.
Time is running out, but it is not too late. We must act immediately to reduce greenhouse gases and make changes to protect nature, and forests in particular.
We have just barely enough time, and in COP26 we did not do what needed to be done, not Canada, not anyone. As the UN Secretary-General António Guterres said, COP26 was not a failure in that 1.5°C, as a possible end point for the global warming nightmare, is possible but it is on life support. That is where we are, so by 2022, and preferably before then, this country needs to do more.
I know I risk being heckled, but at the national level, if we are serious about the climate emergency, this must be said: We cannot be serious about the climate emergency while building the Trans Mountain pipeline. We cannot be serious about the climate emergency while subsidizing fracking and LNG and all of the fossil fuels. We must bring in a just transition act. We must take care of workers. We must make this transition.
Moving from global to national, we know we have a lot of work to do, and I support many of the measures that have been put forward by the government. However, in their totality they are insufficient to ensure that my children alive today will be in a livable world when they are my age. That is something that affects all of us deeply and personally, and I am grateful that we have a chance to talk about it.
As I am talking about the personal side, let me shift to British Columbia. This climate emergency hit really close to home this summer. In British Columbia, the heat dome, as it was called, was more than a heat wave: It killed nearly 600 people in four days. One of those who were affected and did not die is my stepdaughter. She is in her thirties and happened to be at my husband's family farm in Ashcroft, British Columbia, not far from Lytton, where the temperature at the farm hit 50°C.
I do not think any of us here can really imagine what that is like. She said it was like having a hair dryer blowing on her face all the time, outdoors. It hurt one's skin. She nearly died and had brain edema. Another family member was a first responder, pulling people out of shacks and trailers and putting them in ambulances and knowing they would not live.
We have to do a much better job, when we talk about what do we do now and what have we learned. We need health care protocols that are radically revamped, that look at the question of what they do when they find someone whose organs are already cooking. It is not the protocol they were using in the summer in B.C.
We had wildfires from early April until the end of September. That wildfire season in British Columbia saw 1,600 wildfires destroy over 868,000 hectares. That also contributed to how bad the flooding damage was, because the ground had become hydrophobic, meaning it expelled the water that fell on the ground. The ground could not absorb water; the ground repelled it. The flooding was worse because of the fires.
Of course, the flooding was described as an atmospheric river. We learn new terms as we go through this. During the fire season, we learned that there were things called pyrocumulonimbus clouds. Those are clouds that shoot sparks. They create more fires.
We are not in a normal climate situation. We have entered the world of a climate emergency. I should say more, of course. As people know, the flooding destroyed highways. When will Coquihalla Highway ever get repaired? There are massive amounts of damage: 18 highways and five bridges significantly impacted by the flooding; the loss of life; the terrifying experience for people caught in mudslides; the horror of losing farms. I mentioned my husband's farm in Ashcroft. We have, for the second time, taken in climate refugees. In the summer, we took in people who were on wildfire alerts. Now there are people who have lost everything in the floods.
This is unbearable, but there are things we can do. We must be serious about doing them and it is a national effort. We know, from the Speech from the Throne, that there is finally a commitment. I have heard it before, actually. I remember the previous Conservative government promised a national adaptation plan. The goal here is to act to reduce the damage of the climate emergency to the greatest extent possible by reducing our dependence on fossil fuels as quickly as possible, making transitions to renewable energy and so on.
There is an impact that is baked into our atmosphere. There are levels of climate damage that we will not be able to avoid, so we have to avoid those levels of climate impact to which we cannot adapt, such as, as I mentioned, runaway global warming that would mean that we could not really survive on this planet as a species. We have to adapt to those levels that we can no longer avoid.
Adaptation involves a lot of elements. Yes, the ministers for public safety, public security and infrastructure must be seized of this. This is a whole-of-government approach. I rarely urge the Government of Canada to consider something that a U.S. administration is doing, but the U.S. President has appointed John Kerry, who used to be secretary of state in the Obama administration, not as the head of his environment department but as a key member of the National Security Council inside the White House.
That is because the President of the United States fully understands that climate change is not and will never be an environmental issue. Rather, it is a threat to national security, kind of like a military enemy from a bygone era.
We are faced with a national security threat that requires a whole-of-government approach. It is particularly important, as I look at the member for Nunavut, that we have to think about what is happening in our Arctic. We have to think like a circumpolar country. We have to know that we have to keep the permafrost cold enough so that it does not thaw. The permafrost contains methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas, and if we lost the permafrost of the world we would be releasing four times more carbon than humanity has burned since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
We know that we have to keep our Arctic cold enough, as Sheila Watt-Cloutier told us years ago. To protect the human rights of the Inuit peoples, we must keep the Arctic cold, and to protect traditional hunting and culture. Also, for the sake of all species on this planet, we need to keep the Arctic cold to keep that methane in the permafrost and keep it from thawing.
There are some really significant drivers here. Let us think about what we do creatively.
In the immediate short term, we need more resources for British Columbia. We need to help rebuild key roads and railroads so that supply chains are protected and the economy recovers. We need to help individual farmers and homeowners who did not have insurance. We need to find a way to help families rebuild their lives on a very personal level. We have to think about rebuilding, retooling and adapting to the climate emergency that we now experience.
We have to think creatively about things that we do not often think about. In this emergency, we needed volunteers jumping into their boats and rescuing people. It is not comfortable for governments to think, “Well, those are uninsured people. Is that really a good idea?” If the people of Abbotsford and Merritt had not shown up and sandbagged key infrastructure, the situation would have been much worse. How do we think creatively about climate adaptation corps to respond to emergencies and create resilient communities where people are deputized to go out and save lives?
A major event happened in my community over Christmas two years ago. There was off-the-charts, climate-induced crazy weather. Large trees were blown down across the roads. It was Christmas, and everybody lost electricity. This happens in major weather events. We lose our land line and cell coverage and we cannot move around, and in this case it was because trees were across the road. People in my community are smart people and know that, when the power is out because trees are down, it is illegal to go out with chainsaws to cut up the trees and help their neighbours, but everybody did it. They took care of each other through Christmas. They are not going to leave someone in their 90s who is living on their own because it is illegal to cut trees to move them off the road.
We need to figure this out. How do we empower people who know how to react in an emergency and create trained, legal, appropriate responses that engage our volunteers? I know the hon. member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola will agree with me that there were great acts of bravery throughout the communities with individuals acting, and we need to harness that.
The bottom line is that we are looking at climate emergencies that have killed hundreds of people in the last number of months in British Columbia, with nearly 600 in the heat dome and more now through the floods. What we need to think about is that the global average temperature is now 1.1°C above what it was before the Industrial Revolution. We are trying to see if we can hang on to 1.5°C, which is not a safe zone and will be worse than what it is like right now at 1.1°C.
There is nothing more important than protecting young people, our children and grandchildren, against the major threat of climate change.
We are not doing everything we need to do yet. We still do not act on a day-to-day basis as though we understand that we are in a climate emergency. I would urge the government, since we have already bought Trans Mountain and we have all those workers and all that equipment, to just change the mandate of that Crown corporation and put those people and that equipment to work to rebuild, to repair our highways, and to help protect against the next major climate event.
We know that in the last 24 hours on Cape Breton Island, where I am from, we see roads washed out, and we see roads washed out near Corner Brook, Newfoundland, Labrador. There is no one part of this country that is safe and secure any more than there is one place on this planet safe and secure in the climate emergency.
We have to all pull together, and as the Speech from the Throne said:
“Now, we must go further, faster.”
I am sad to say that I do not see in the Speech from the Throne the things we must do, but we know what they are. Tonight is a good opportunity to put forward those good ideas and together say, “We work for our communities, we work for Canada and we will save the planet.”
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- Nov/24/21 6:52:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is critically important. It is going to have a big price tag. I was struck when the hon. Prime Minister spoke in Glasgow, and made reference to Lytton. Lytton is still there and it needs to be rebuilt. The people of Lytton are there and it is a major first nations community as well, with scattered first nations around it.
It is important that we leave no community behind in this, but it is not going to be inexpensive. For decades, studies have shown that the costs of ignoring climate change were going to be far larger than the costs of action. We now find ourselves in the unenviable position where we need to do both harder and faster.
Fortunately, rebuilding communities does stimulate the economy, getting all the people possible who can get to work to help farms rebuild. There has been so much loss, a devastating loss, that it is hard to imagine how some families will pull everything together, but they need to know there is going to be a source of funds to get their farm back up and running. They need to know that their home can be repaired, even if the insurance companies say they are not covered for this kind of flood. We are going to have to rethink how we respond to what used to be called natural disasters which are no longer natural.
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- Nov/24/21 6:55:46 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, in the same spirit of working across party lines, I want to salute the hon. member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola for attending COP26, not just for a couple of days, but for the full two weeks. I saw his comments in the media recently that the nature-based solutions that were talked about at COP are really important.
I would suggest too that students in the summer plant trees restoring what I referred to as hydrophobic soil. On the hill that was burnt off in 2017, the Elephant Hill fire, nothing is growing back because the soil just became baked. The top surface was destroyed by the heat of the fire. We need to get trees, and not just any trees, but trees that are right for that ecosystem. That will help restore our salmon. That will help bring things back. Those jobs and that ecosystem are key parts of responding to the climate emergency.
I just say to his point about about small communities, that absolutely, they do not have the money to come up with 20%. We need to be much more creative of how we are going to help particularly small, impoverished rural and remote communities cope with an increased, and I am afraid to say inevitable, level of extreme weather events that wipe out their infrastructure. We need to be really creative.
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- Nov/24/21 6:58:32 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by congratulating my colleague from Lac-Saint‑Jean for getting re-elected, and I thank him for his question. When he talks about his family, I of course think about his father, and I send them my best wishes.
It is obvious that we have a problem here in Canada. We say all the right things, but we take very little action. I recognize that it is difficult for the federal government to have a good relationship with Alberta. I am thinking back to the stop acid rain campaign, which sought to do away with chemicals that damage the ozone layer.
Here in Canada, we have done great things at the global level to protect life on this planet. We could never achieve our goals without extraordinary moral and political courage.
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- Nov/24/21 7:00:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am very concerned. The impacts of the climate crisis are understood to be intersectional. Whether we are looking globally to developing countries or within Canada, it is the poor, the indigenous and people of colour who are most often victims of climate events.
In the case of the heat dome, I was horrified that Premier John Horgan said they had no way of knowing and they thought it was just going to be hotter weather. I was horrified that both the federal and provincial governments, British Columbia and Canada, continued to increase fossil fuel subsidies at the very moment they should have been cut, but I totally agree there are things we could do.
They include things like shade, more urban forests and more opportunities to let people go into parks. It was horrifying to me that Vancouver officials did not want people going into the Strathcona Park area for fear they would set up tents again, but that was life-giving shade. We need more attention to how we survive, more attention to cooling centres and more attention to social networks of resilience that get people out of their homes into safe, cool locations where they are given water and have access to ice.
It is saving lives that counts on a minute-to-minute basis, and we need to be much better prepared.
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- Nov/24/21 8:53:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, may I add my congratulations on seeing you in the chair as the Deputy Speaker.
I would say this to my hon. colleague from Burnaby South. If we are prepared to do everything possible, and this is a politically difficult question for my hon. friend, that would require the federal NDP leader to be prepared to disappoint the Alberta NDP leader by cancelling the Trans Mountain pipeline, and the provincial premier, Mr. Horgan, by cancelling LNG pipelines and subsidies and banning fracking. Is the hon. member prepared to commit to doing that?
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- Nov/24/21 10:05:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, congratulations for your position once again in the chair.
To my hon. colleague for Vancouver Centre, knowing her medical background, one of the areas of infrastructure that we have not talked about that will need massive overhauls for adaptation to the climate crisis is our hospitals and our medical infrastructure. We had a recent study done on Vancouver Island looking at the Nanaimo hospital. We realized that during wildfires surgeries were cancelled because the air quality inside the hospitals was not adequate. The air conditioning did not meet the needs of heat dome situations.
Does the hon. member have any comments on that aspect of adaptation?
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- Nov/24/21 10:49:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to focus on one aspect, which is that in disaster after disaster so many of us assume that our devices are going to work. Whether it is wildfires in the interior or wild storms on the coast, community after community discover there is no land line, no cellphone, no way to hear what is going on. I spoke at length with a deputy fire chief in Ashcroft once. I asked what they do when they are on evacuation alert and how their community know the evacuation was now on. This fire chief said, “We considered what to do for technology, and we have decided to get a really big bell for the fire station that we can ring”.
What does the hon. member think we can do to better network people in disasters for better preparedness and to get the information that they desperately need?
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- Nov/24/21 11:17:44 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my question is one with a great deal of grief attached to it. The so-called net-zero climate change act commits us to the wrong target. It was increasingly clear at COP26 in Glasgow that the world was not looking for net zero by 2050. That is dangerous. It is looking for significant cuts this decade. I wonder if the hon. member has any comments.
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- Nov/24/21 11:40:59 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague from Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon for an excellent speech and for making it personal.
I received an email from a friend. As the hon. member will know, we have deep family connections within his riding. I give a shout-out to Mike and Brandi who lost everything. They lost their home and farm. When reading their email, I started crying at the part about not being able to find their dog Posie right before the helicopter came. It was bad enough they had to shoot the livestock that could not be rescued, but when I read about the poor dog terrified in a flooded basement in the dark, his rescue of the dog and getting it to the helicopter, that is when I started losing it.
Every single person in these communities has suffered deep trauma. The pain is not something we can really talk about in this place. When we talk about euthanizing animals, it is much more deeply personal. I just want to pledge the support of Green Party members and supporters, and the members of Parliament in this place, for whatever it takes to help every single community, every single farmer, every single resident rebuild and get their life back.
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