- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- South Okanagan—West Kootenay
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 61%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $128,729.57
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- Mar/23/23 7:12:45 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the government has been moving in the right direction, but it must show a lot more ambition to really make a difference, and to really help Canadians and Canadian municipalities adapt to these extreme weather events. I will be watching next Tuesday's budget closely to see where the government will be acting and how much priority it will be putting into climate adaptation.
I know it is always hard for governments to make big investments that might not pay off in the current election cycle, but that is what Canada needs from the federal government now. We need these dedicated funds for adaptation projects in every community. It will save money. It will save livelihoods, and it will save lives.
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- Mar/23/23 7:05:37 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, this adjournment debate tonight arises from a question I asked regarding the impact of climate disasters on our country and specifically on our municipalities, and how the federal government must step up to help in a significant way.
We are living the effects of climate change because the chemistry of carbon dioxide and the physics of the greenhouse effect are locked in. We are trying, as we must, to reduce our carbon emissions to make sure we can get to net zero as soon as possible. However, even if we got there tomorrow, and it is clear we will not, we would still face the catastrophic fires, record-setting rainfall events, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and other extreme weather we are now seeing every year. That could go on for centuries, so we must adapt to these changes. They impact our farms, forests and water supplies.
The most immediate impact from extreme weather events is on our built environments, such as homes, businesses, highways and railways, destroying livelihoods and, tragically, sometimes taking lives. Almost by definition, impacts on our built environment are impacts on municipalities, and it therefore falls to municipalities not only to clean up and rebuild after these disasters, but increasingly to plan for the future and build resilient infrastructure. Communities simply cannot do this by themselves. What little capacity they have to raise funds for capital expenditures is quickly swamped by the scale of work that confronts towns and cities after floods and fires.
In 2018, the city of Grand Forks, in my riding, was flooded. After a couple of years of hard work and painful decisions, the city came up with a plan to rebuild in a way that would minimize the chances of a future disaster. That plan was budgeted to cost over $60 million for a city that regularly raises only about $4 million in property taxes. Luckily, the Province of British Columbia and the federal government came through with promises to pay most of that. However, in the past five years, costs have continued to climb and the city is still very much stretched to meet the fiscal challenges of that catastrophe.
The federal government has relied on the disaster mitigation and adaptation fund to provide money to municipalities through the provinces for disaster support. This fund has long been oversubscribed and underfunded. In last fall's national adaptation strategy, the federal government provided a top-up to DMAF, which was welcomed news, but it is still nowhere near enough. There must be more invested in adaptation projects that actually prevent future problems rather than just building back better after disasters. Analysis suggests that every dollar invested in adaptation saves up to $15 in the future. It is a huge return.
The minister tells me that the government will be providing up to $5 billion to B.C. after the 2021 atmospheric river event. We have to at least contemplate spending a similar amount in municipalities across the country every year to prevent future damage to infrastructure and livelihoods. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities is calling for the total $2 billion top-up to DMAF, and long-term stable funding for projects of all sizes. I believe that long-term funding for adaptation must be at least $2 billion a year. Otherwise, we will continually face enormous cleanup bills that will get larger every year.
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- Feb/10/23 11:47:22 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, Canadians have seen what happens when we are not prepared for climate disasters: Homes are swept out to sea, and vital transportation corridors are destroyed by floods. Municipalities across Canada are asking for help, but the Liberals are not stepping up. Instead, according to Postmedia, the government is underfunding disaster adaptation by $13 billion.
The Federation of Canadian Municipalities is calling for action, so will the Liberals listen and immediately increase disaster adaptation funding?
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- Sep/26/22 8:39:07 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to talk about the experience I have had in my riding in Grand Forks, where we had flooding in 2018. The regional district did a study as to what could and should have been done better to help the recovery process. There were things that came up as things that hindered the recovery and the rebuilding process. One was the inflexibility of the federal government in taking into account local solutions. The local governments were putting forward innovative solutions that would have helped people quicker and at a lower cost, but the federal government programs were totally inflexible. Four years later, the City of Grand Forks is still waiting for the full amount of money that was guaranteed to it, and those people are very frustrated.
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- Sep/26/22 6:42:44 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member for Cumberland—Colchester represents the area where my mother's family came from, my ancestors, so I appreciate that.
It is important to work together in this place to get help for Canadians when they need it. One example I did not give is the Town of Oliver in my riding, which had a landslide that caused $10 million in damage. It did not qualify under DMAF for funding, and there were years of lobbying on my part. I tried to help them. The government eventually changed DMAF so that small communities can now access funding of under $20 million. It was too late for Oliver, but those changes can be made, and we need to work here together to make changes when Canadians need them.
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- Sep/26/22 6:30:34 p.m.
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moved:
That this House do now adjourn.
He said: Mr. Speaker, it is truly an honour to rise here this evening to begin this debate on the federal government's response to hurricane Fiona and the devastation it has brought upon Atlantic Canada. As the NDP critic for emergency preparedness and climate resilience, I felt it was an urgently needed debate, and I would like to thank the Speaker for granting my request and the Conservatives for agreeing that it is a necessary discussion.
I want to start by saying that my thoughts are with all the Canadians on the Atlantic coast who have been affected by this catastrophic storm. My thoughts go to the friends and families who have lost loved ones, to those who have lost their homes and to those who have lost their livelihoods.
I lived on the island of Newfoundland for three years, including some months in a remote lighthouse, so I know very well both the ferocity of Atlantic weather and the resilience of Atlantic Canadians. I have travelled widely in Atlantic Canada over the past 40 years or so, including visits to P.E.I. and Nova Scotia just this year, so I am familiar with many of the communities that have been devastated by hurricane Fiona.
Hurricane Fiona was no ordinary Atlantic storm. It was the strongest storm ever to make landfall in Canada. Atlantic Canadians remember hurricane Juan in 2003 and hurricane Dorian. Fiona combined the intensity of Juan with the size of Dorian. Fiona recorded the lowest-ever atmospheric pressure in Canadian history and packed winds of up to 180 kilometres per hour. The storm surges swept across the coast like a series of tsunamis.
The human cost has been catastrophic. Several lives have been lost. Hundreds of homes were destroyed by storm surges or high winds, and many were swept out to sea. Roads, wharves, airports and other infrastructure have been badly damaged. Fisheries infrastructure has been destroyed in the middle of the fishing season; agricultural crops were compromised just before harvest, and close to a million Canadians are still without power.
I must pause to say that I will be sharing my time with the MP for Victoria.
We knew this storm was coming. As it tracked north up the Atlantic coast from Bermuda last week, the forecasts were uniformly calling for a record-breaking weather event. I want to give credit to the scientists of Environment Canada for their strong modelling, which informed preparation for hurricane Fiona. It was those strong warnings, I am sure, that kept the injuries and deaths to an absolute minimum. I have heard people comment time and time again that it was a miracle that more people were not injured and killed, so for that I thank the science and the warnings that went out.
I received a call from the Minister of Emergency Preparedness on Saturday, and I thank him for that update on the federal response. He mentioned that the armed forces would be helping with cleanup efforts. I have since heard that the naval vessel HMCS Margaret Brooke will be travelling along the south coast of Newfoundland to carry out wellness checks in many of the small outports there that have no road connection.
These are critical tasks and I am happy to hear they are being done, but important questions remain: How prepared were the armed forces for this storm that we knew was on its way ahead of time, and is there more that could and should have been done in the days before the storm?
I know that most communities have armies of volunteers that step up in these situations to help with organizing accommodations and food and other emergency supplies for residents who have lost or been evacuated from their homes. I thank the volunteers, as well as the neighbours who helped people clear down trees from houses and driveways and first responders who are helping with immediate and emergency cleanup, including the power company workers who are working around the clock to bring power back to hundreds of thousands of cold and hungry Canadians.
As critical and important as these initial responses are, perhaps even more important is that we look ahead to the coming days and weeks and, unfortunately, often years for the government role in rebuilding efforts that must take place. It is late September, and winter is not far away in Canada. We have systems and programs for government support to help people who have their homes damaged by disasters, but those systems are embedded in bureaucracies that often turn anxious weeks into anxious months, while winter sets in and families still have no place to go. They are forced to rely on the kindness of neighbours or relatives, or forced to move out of their communities entirely while waiting for help to rebuild their homes and their lives.
We have government programs, such as the disaster mitigation and adaptation fund, which are meant to help communities hit by overwhelming events such as fires, floods and hurricanes. In my experience, these communities, especially small communities, are left to do a lot of the heavy lifting in the rebuilding process, while they have neither the financial capability to pay for those actions nor the manpower capacity to navigate the bureaucracy to access the programs.
There are a couple of examples from my home province of British Columbia. The town of Princeton was badly flooded by the Tulameen and Similkameen rivers in last fall's atmospheric river event in southwestern B.C. It faced about a $20-million bill in costs to repair infrastructure. Ordinary federal-provincial government revenue-sharing agreements dictate that Princeton and other similar communities would pay 20% of those costs. It might sound like a good deal to a large community, but the entire annual tax budget of Princeton is only about two or three million dollars. It simply cannot afford 20% of a disaster. We need to come up with a permanent change to these cost structures to accommodate small communities.
Second, there is the example of Grand Forks, a town in my riding that was devastated by flooding in 2018. After months of wrangling, some intense and difficult work by the community itself and difficult decisions to radically change parts of the community, a funding agreement was reached whereby the provincial government would cover about $38 million of the cost and the federal government about $20 million.
The City of Grand Forks waited an entire year to get a response from the federal government on their first request for funding under this agreement. They received repeated messages from the federal government that the basic agreement was changing and they would have to be responsible for more and more of the costs. They had to repeatedly resubmit detailed funding requests. It was a bureaucratic nightmare for a small community that was trying to recover from a natural disaster nightmare.
This kind of behaviour from the federal government has to change. We have to have a kinder and more co-operative relationship between the federal government and communities in these situations.
I will finish by commenting on more long-term issues. We spend about $5 billion every year fixing damages from weather-related disasters in Canada. Those costs are largely born by individuals and insurance companies; the federal government is covering only about 10% of those costs. That annual expense is expected to rise to $50 billion by 2050, 10 times what it is now.
If we are to face the rising costs of these climate events and if we are to maintain our economy and communities in this onslaught of fires, floods and hurricanes, we have to start investing serious amounts of money in climate adaptation. We need investments in community infrastructure that protects Canadians, so they do not see their homes wash away on a storm surge; investments in heat pumps that would allow low-income Canadians to have air conditioning, so we will not have a repeat of the 619 people dying in a heat dome event in metro Vancouver last year; and investments in FireSmart programs to protect neighbourhoods at the interface with forests.
Reactive funding is necessary, but surely we can see the economic and community needs that point to investing for the future we all know is coming. In the meantime I just want to reiterate my support for the people of Atlantic Canada. I know they will use all of their ingenuity and strength to recover from this catastrophe, and I hope all levels of government will be there to help them when they need it.
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- May/17/22 3:13:55 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, when we left off for question period, I was talking about how Canada is uniquely positioned to become a renewable energy superpower. During the natural resources committee's study on critical minerals, we learned that Canada is the only nation in the western hemisphere with all of the minerals and metals needed to produce the advanced batteries, electric motors and wind turbine generators that will be needed in the low-carbon economy. The International Energy Agency's net-zero energy scenario estimates that the global value for select critical minerals will grow substantially over the next two decades, reaching today's level for coal market value of about $400 billion U.S. by 2040.
The opportunity is there for Canada to both reach net zero and prosper, but we cannot continue down the path that Liberal and Conservative governments have chosen when it comes to spending money on the oil and gas sector. Canada currently spends more per capita on those subsidies than any other developed country. We cannot keep paying companies to clean up their own pollution.
New Democrats know that public funds are best spent supporting the transition to renewable energy and helping Canadians struggling with the high cost of living, rather than on profitable oil and gas companies. Instead of spending billions on new oil pipelines, we should be building hydrogen infrastructure for heavy transportation hubs, stronger provincial interties to distribute clean electricity across Canada, and electric vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing, and we should be training and employing workers now working in the oil and gas sector in these new opportunities. They are opportunities that will last into the future.
This is where the puck is going.
We need to stop providing those subsidies to oil and gas companies, which delay climate action, and instead spend that money on climate action. Increasingly, we need to spend money on climate adaptation, since the effects of global warming are locked in. We have to talk about the cost of climate inaction, and that cost is rising every year.
Right now, Canadian governments, businesses and citizens spend more than $5 billion annually to fix the destruction caused by increased fires and floods. That is predicted to rise to over $40 billion by 2050. At the moment, the federal government puts up just over $300 million of that cost. It is past time that we faced up to the rising costs of climate change.
We must realign the disaster mitigation and adaptation fund to spend more on adaptation, so that we protect communities from disaster rather than rebuild them after the fact. Last year, British Columbia communities such as Lytton, Princeton, Merritt and many more, were badly impacted by fire and floods. Small communities such as these do not have the monetary resources to rebuild under present funding formulas.
We must have a clear strategy for the future that faces the facts of climate change, both limiting the extent of future changes and dealing with the changes that have already taken place. Canada's future is very bright, but first we must invest in that future, not in the past.
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- Nov/24/21 7:12:53 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the federal government spends a few hundred million dollars each year on climate adaptation, mainly through the disaster mitigation and adaptation fund. It is chronically oversubscribed. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities said, basically, that it should be 10 times that size.
Where is the ambition? We need ambition here, just like we need ambition on climate mitigation.
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