- 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 10:19:23 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to follow on that theme of the long term. Will the government be there to help the people of Atlantic Canada in the long term?
We have seen data that, right now, we spend about $5 billion a year in Canada fixing the problems of climate and weather events across this country. Every year, that is $5 billion. The federal government puts up about a tenth of that. Yes, Atlantic Canada gets storms every year, but they are becoming harder, faster and more devastating. It is predicted that, by 2050, we will be spending $50 billion a year. We could get ahead of that if we invested in the long term in some of these things that would make our shorelines more impervious to storms. Where I come from in British Columbia, we can make our rivers less likely to flood urban areas and make our forests less likely to burn cities down.
Could the member comment on this need for investing in the future to save us money in the future, save lives, save infrastructure and save homes by making those investments ahead of these disasters, instead of always reacting?
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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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- Sep/21/22 6:45:59 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, if the parliamentary secretary could get her minister to respond to the two letters I have sent about this issue over the last few months, I would appreciate that.
It is great to hear announcements of government investments in climate adaptation. In B.C. there have been projects jointly funded by the federal and provincial governments this year amounting to almost $30 million, but that is in stark contrast to the after-disaster rebuilding funding announcements this year in British Columbia, with the federal government funding over a billion dollars to help communities rebuild after floods and fires.
Some of these funds are simply advances; the final cost will be higher. If my math is correct, that is about 30 times difference between the investments before a disaster and the payouts after. We need to significantly increase those investments in climate adaptation in Canada. This would not only save communities from future disasters but lower the future costs of rebuilding after these events.
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- Sep/21/22 6:40:05 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, just before we rose for the summer break, I asked a question about climate adaptation, about being better prepared for the increasingly destructive climate disasters that are affecting our country.
We have had a series of terrible years of catastrophic weather in Canada. Last year was a terrible year in my home province of British Columbia, with a heat dome that killed 619 people in metro Vancouver, a series of fires that destroyed the town of Lytton and many other rural areas, and then a rainfall event that destroyed all of the highways through the Coast and Cascade ranges. It flooded a huge area around Abbotsford and the interior communities of Princeton and Merritt.
This year brought the derecho storm in May that devastated the Windsor-Quebec City corridor, with winds of up to 190 kilometres per hour, intense thunderstorms and several tornadoes. The damage to the power system from that storm was greater than that of the 1998 ice storm. It was the sixth-costliest weather event in Canadian history, with insured losses of $875 million.
This fire season in B.C. was quieter than last year. One fire on the edge of my riding evacuated some rural communities and destroyed one house. Another just over the hill from my house gave me and my neighbours some nervous moments, but the heat was in many ways longer lasting than last year and there is still a series of fires burning in coastal forests in British Columbia that rarely face that threat.
Now the east coast is bracing for Hurricane Fiona, one of the strongest storms in years to threaten the Atlantic provinces, with wave height predictions of up to 30 metres. That is 100 feet. It is clear that we are not talking about the impacts of climate change in the future tense anymore. This is happening now.
At present, Canadians, whether governments, businesses or individual citizens, spend more than $5 billion every year to repair the destruction from weather events. This is predicted to balloon to $40 billion by 2050. The federal government has been covering less than 10% of these costs. It is time that we faced up to the costs of climate change and made significant investments with provinces and communities to minimize the impacts that we know are coming. The federal government has to be a better partner with communities, especially small, rural communities that cannot pay for these costs themselves or even put up front a significant portion.
Princeton and Merritt, which were flooded last year, had to face 20% of cleanup costs. That was more than double their annual tax base. Grand Forks, a community in my riding that was flooded in 2018, faced costs of $60 million to repair the damages. The federal government promised $20 million, but even now, four years later, there was a year delay in getting the first payment to the municipality. Ten public servants consecutively handled the file, each requiring the submitting of claims and supporting documentation that had been lost or not passed on. The federal government provided claim template forms, only to have completed forms returned with requests for additional details that were never originally requested or required, and despite a clear contribution agreement signed in 2019, federal infrastructure officials have repeatedly and unilaterally changed the scope of allowable expenses.
The government must do better to support communities and their citizens who are being forced to deal with the impact of climate disasters.
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- Jun/3/22 12:04:27 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, last month hurricane-force winds destroyed large sections of the power grids in Ontario and Quebec, and floods inundated the West Point First Nation in the Northwest Territories and the Peguis First Nation in Manitoba. A report from The Globe and Mail showed that even more Canadian communities are at serious risk of flooding.
Extreme weather is costing Canada more than $5 billion every year, and that will only increase. When will Ottawa fund significant proactive measures to protect our communities instead of just helping them clean up?
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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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- Jan/31/22 3:58:17 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague mentioned, as did the previous questioner, the terrible floods we had in British Columbia last November. It was a terrible year in British Columbia, with the fires that destroyed Lytton and the fires through the southern interior, including in my riding. It is clear that we are being impacted by climate change right now.
We do have to commit to mitigating these issues. We have to stop putting carbon in the atmosphere so that this does not get any worse. It is clear that we are being impacted right now.
Does he think the federal government should be more ambitious in funding climate adaptation projects, things like FireSmarting communities and reinforcing infrastructure to help stop flooding? Should we not be upping the game in that department?
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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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