- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- South Okanagan—West Kootenay
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 61%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $128,729.57
- Government Page
Mr. Speaker, today we are speaking to Bill C-317, a private member's bill from the member for Lac-Saint-Louis. This bill asks the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, in consultation with the provinces, indigenous governments and municipal governments, to develop a national strategy for flood and drought forecasting. The strategy must assess the need for using new technologies in forecasting, the need for modelling to identify risk areas, the establishment of a national co-operative forecasting system and the preparation of a proposal for the establishment of a national hydrological forecasting service.
It is really hard to disagree with the premise of this bill. Floods and droughts are becoming more frequent and intense, causing billions of dollars of damage to infrastructure while destroying homes, crops and livelihoods. Home insurance premiums are steadily rising and in many cases homeowners cannot get flood insurance at all. Over 10% of Canadians cannot get flood insurance for their homes. In my riding of South Okanagan—West Kootenay, floods have devastated communities and rural areas.
In 2018, the town of Grand Forks was inundated by the Kettle and Granby rivers. Five years later, the community is still struggling to deal with the fallout of that event. Families lost their homes, businesses were forced to close and whole neighbourhoods have disappeared.
In 2021, an atmospheric river event caused catastrophic damage to the communities of Princeton and Merritt, just west of my riding, and caused over $5 billion in reconstruction. Those communities are still trying to recover.
This year has been literally off the charts for extreme weather around the world. Air temperature records were set on every continent. Ocean temperatures were so high that scientists could scarcely believe the data they were seeing. Ice sheets and glaciers were disappearing before our eyes. Catastrophic wildfires raged across Canada, Europe and around the world. Precipitation patterns have been thrown out the window. Intense rainfall events brought flash floods to major cities around the world.
I just came back from Ghana and Cameroon in Africa. Everyone there was saying the dry season has failed to materialize. The rain just will not stop.
We are living the effects of climate change and we must adapt to the consequences of our addiction to fossil fuels, because even if we stopped all our carbon emissions tomorrow, the floods, droughts and fires we are experiencing now will keep happening for centuries to come. It will not get better and we can only hope we will act quickly enough to make sure it does not get significantly worse. It is obvious that we would benefit from better forecasting of these extreme weather events. That is, of course, what this bill seeks to do.
Now, in Canada, operational flood forecasting is a provincial responsibility but the rising threats and rising costs call for better forecasting that is more coordinated across provincial boundaries. The data that goes into flood forecasting modelling and drought forecasting must come from multiple jurisdictions.
In my riding, floods mainly result when deep snow packs are met with sudden heat waves or intense rain on snow events, or both. As the rivers rise, we anxiously watch the river gauge levels. While the rivers in my riding do not cross provincial boundaries, they do cross the U.S. border, sometimes multiple times. So when the Kettle River is rising, we watch the gauge at Westbridge, operated by the B.C. government, then the gauge in Ferry County in Washington, operated by the U.S. government, and then another gauge operated by the U.S. government at Laurier.
A similar thing happens in the Okanagan Valley. During spring freshet, the flow of the Okanagan River is usually highly regulated by a series of small dams at each of the lakes but at that time, the Similkameen River is 10 times larger than the Okanagan, flowing out of the North Cascades at Princeton, crossing the border, and joining the Okanagan River at Oroville, Washington. The massive spring flow of the Similkameen literally swamps the Okanagan River, and even though the Okanagan is regulated by a dam operated by the International Joint Commission in Oroville, that dam is overtopped by the Similkameen flow and water moves upstream into Osoyoos Lake. That is how Osoyoos Lake floods with water coming upstream from Washington state and blocking the outflow of the Okanagan River.
These are a couple of examples showing why flood forecasting and operational decisions resulting from that forecasting need to be coordinated across all levels government, even international levels. The Red River in Manitoba is another famous example of that.
I mentioned earlier that snowpack monitoring is a critical part of flood forecasting in Canada, particularly in British Columbia, where mountain snowpacks linger well into the warm spring and summer months. The snowpacks in the B.C. mountains are the deepest in the world. In British Columbia, most snowpack measurement stations are operated by the provincial government, but some are run by agencies managing large hydro dams such as BC Hydro, and companies like Rio Tinto and Metro Vancouver. Again, coordination is important.
Another reason that coordination is critical is that forecasting and quantifying future precipitation events is notoriously difficult and requires modelling with very large computers. Canada's federal system has resulted in flood forecasting systems being managed separately by every province and territory, as well as some municipalities and conservation authorities. Coordination is minimal, and data collection often does not mesh between jurisdictions. Early warning systems vary as well.
This means that the ability to forecast flooding varies considerably from province to province, from watershed to watershed. The strategy called for in this bill could be helpful, but it is also important to point out that we are moving in that direction already.
The flood hazard identification and mapping program run by Natural Resources Canada is providing valuable information for all levels of government outlining exactly what areas are threatened by rising waters.
Now droughts are a somewhat different problem, operating on a longer time scale than floods, but they are still devastating to Canadians, especially Canadian farmers in dry landscapes who rely on water for their crops. The Okanagan Valley is one of the best examples of that. As dry summers come earlier and last longer, the demands for irrigation water grow. Those demands begin to come up against increasing demands for domestic water needs.
The Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada research centre in Summerland has scientists dedicated to developing better projections for future drought conditions. Droughts are also impacting water flows in the Columbia River system. Those flows are controlled by the Columbia River Treaty, and under the present treaty, Canada is obliged to provide water to the United States for power production.
Recent summers have seen Canadian reservoirs drawn down so much that local residents are having difficulty accessing recreational opportunities while American boaters enjoy full pools above their dams. Water temperatures in the Columbia River are now often lethal to salmon migrating upriver to the Okanagan River in late summer, negating much of the positive impacts that salmon restoration programs have made. This calls for international co-operation, and in this case, a renegotiated Columbia River Treaty that recognizes the impacts of climate change on the availability and quality of our precious water resources.
While flood and drought forecasting is critical, we should not forget another aspect of extreme weather brought to us by a changing climate, and that is catastrophic wildfire. Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops is setting up an institute for wildfire science, adaptation and resiliency. There, Dr. Mike Flannigan is perfecting predictive modelling that could tell us where wildfires would occur in the coming weeks.
This would allow wildfire crews to deploy to regions in anticipation of significant fire behaviour. That way we can be on the ground fighting fires when they are small, before they turn into monsters that destroy millions of hectares of forests and are only extinguished by winter snows. We need a national wildfire forecasting service as well as a national wildfire fighting force that could respond promptly to the predictions produced by that forecasting.
As I said at the beginning, it is hard to disagree with the premise of this bill. I can only say that the need for better predictive powers to forecast floods, droughts and fires is so patently obvious that I would have thought that the government should not have to wait for a Liberal MP to bring forward a private member's bill to debate in this place to force the government to do that.
The bill gives the government two years to develop a strategy for the preparation of a proposal for the establishment of a national hydrological forecasting service. I know the federal system is messy at times, and some provinces might object to federal efforts to build a better forecasting service, but these efforts should have begun years ago.
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- Nov/24/23 1:38:05 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I know my colleague from Lac-Saint-Louis is a champion for all things water in the House and in this country. I would like to thank him for mentioning my old friend, Bob Sandford, who I worked with in the Rockies back in the early 1970s and has gone on to be a global spokesman for water issues on behalf of Canada.
It is hard not to agree with the bill before us because the issues are so dire and the need is so great, but it makes me wonder why the government has not been doing this over the last eight years. What we really need for flood protection in Canada, on top of the prediction, is to have communities ready for floods. It is one thing to say a flood is coming in the next two days, but it is another thing to have a community ready. We need dedicated federal funding to help communities reshape their defences for floods ahead of time, and we do not have that.
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- Jun/2/23 11:49:12 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, natural disasters, including wildfires and floods, fuelled by climate change are making it difficult to get home insurance. Canadians cannot buy a home when there is an active wildfire within 50 kilometres and that covers most of the summer in B.C., and 10% of Canadians cannot get flood insurance. Canada is the only major country where the government does not have a backstop for earthquake insurance.
Canadians cannot afford to wait while their homes and businesses are destroyed.
Will the Liberals act to make sure Canadians have the insurance protection they need?
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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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- Dec/8/22 7:39:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we are living the effects of climate change. There are real effects on people and real effects on our economy.
Last year, in British Columbia, we had a series of catastrophic wildfires, one of which burned down the town of Lytton. At the same time, a heat dome brought temperatures in the high 40s to southern B.C., killing over 600 people in metro Vancouver.
That fall, an atmospheric river destroyed every highway connecting the southern B.C. coast with the rest of Canada, and some of those highways have only now just been reopened. Floods devastated the towns of Princeton and Merritt, numerous first nations communities and some of the best agricultural lands in the province.
The true costs of those events have yet to be calculated, but the federal government has pledged $5 billion in support to British Columbia to help communities rebuild. This year, B.C. has largely been spared, but this spring, it got a storm track, which is now called a derecho. We have had to learn a whole new taxonomy of climate disasters. It caused almost a billion dollars in insured damage losses to parts of Ontario and Quebec.
Then in the fall, hurricane Fiona became the strongest hurricane to make landfall ever in Atlantic Canada. Houses were washed out to sea and lives were lost. Again, the federal government has promised aid to the tune of over $300 million.
The Canadian Climate Institute reported in September that the impacts of climate change will slow Canada’s economic growth by $25 billion annually by 2025. That is half of the projected GDP growth in 2025 and 12 times all insured weather-related losses in Canada in 2021. Those impacts will increase to almost $100 billion annually by 2050.
My question to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, the question that triggered this adjournment debate, was based on that report. The Canadian Climate Institute report also found that proactive measures that help communities and Canadians adapt to climate change could reduce the impact of climate disasters. In fact, the report notes that a combination of global emissions reductions and Canadian adaptation measures could reduce the negative impacts by 75%.
Shortly after I asked this question, the government tabled its national adaptation strategy. The strategy included $1.6 billion in new funding to broadly address climate adaptation. About a third of that amount is to top up the disaster mitigation and adaptation fund. That fund has been chronically underfunded and oversubscribed. Many communities trying to rebuild after fires and floods do not get the help they need.
Will the government stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and redirect those billions of dollars to help communities prepare for climate change?
We will save many times that investment by reducing the direct impacts of extreme weather on Canadian communities, and more importantly, reduce the tragic consequences of these climate disasters on the lives and livelihoods of Canadian families.
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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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