- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- South Shore—St. Margarets
- Nova Scotia
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $136,927.65
- Government Page
- Jun/8/23 11:29:28 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith and I served together on the fisheries committee, and she is very passionate about the fisheries issues, as am I.
I am surprised she did not ask me about Bill C-365 from the 42nd Parliament, which was introduced by our colleague on the fisheries committee, the member for North Okanagan—Shuswap. His bill sought to amend the Criminal Code to establish specific penalties related to the theft of firefighting equipment. It also would have created an aggravating circumstance for sentencing if the mischief involved firefighting equipment. Finally, it would have established sentencing objectives in relation to the theft of such equipment.
Rather than expressing support for the firefighters, which the member had a chance to do, the Bloc and the Liberals at that time, although I know the member is of the class of 2021 and was not there, all voted against the bill that would have penalized people for stealing firefighting equipment to help us fight these fires.
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- Jun/8/23 11:26:13 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, as an MP who understands his riding and was on the ground during these fires and talking to firefighters, I know what started the fires. The reason I wrote that is because the Halifax fire was a fire in the suburbs. The minister should know this, but he apparently does not. It was not a forest fire. It ran through houses. Sixteen thousand people were evacuated, not in a forest but in a suburb.
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- Jun/8/23 11:14:35 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am splitting my time with my colleague, the member for Chicoutimi—Le Fjord.
As we know, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O'Neill, said, “All politics are local.” I am going to focus on what has been happening in my community, my district, in the last two weeks.
At 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, May 28, two weekends ago, first responders in Halifax arrived in the Westwood Hills subdivision in Halifax. This is in my district, 10 minutes from my house. They were responding to reports of a house on fire. They were there in minutes. The fire was driven by winds of 40 kilometres an hour, and it was spreading rapidly through the house and moving to other homes in this family suburban neighbourhood. It was engulfing homes and hopscotching from house to house. It was missing some, burning others and skipping and bouncing over streets. Cellphones screamed with an alert for residents to immediately leave their homes. Over the next hour, as the wind drove the flames across neighbourhoods along Hammonds Plains Road, more than 16,000 people were evacuated.
Many, not knowing what to do, went to the homes of friends and family outside the evacuation zone. Others went to the comfort centres, which were set up quickly by volunteers. Some were set up within an hour, such as the ones at the Black Point fire hall and Black Point & Area Community Centre on St. Margarets Bay and the Canada Games Centre in Bayers Lake. They were set up by volunteers, such as Janet Fryday Dorey, who opened the Black Point comfort centre and kept it open from then until this day.
The volunteers at the centres were and are remarkable. They put their lives and families on hold to provide comfort, food, clothes, a place to sleep, a person to talk to, a place to help find accommodation and a place to regroup in this trying, confusing and emotional time. There were volunteers like my neighbour, Peggy Pippy, who ran food and clothing drives for victims.
To give some idea of the desperation of the evacuation, I want to share an experience. Captain Kevin Corkum and firefighter Conor Scott were working at the firefighting command post on Hammonds Plains Road in Halifax on that Sunday when an emergency call came in. A family could not get to their elderly father, who has dementia and was at home on Yankeetown Road. This was inside the evacuation zone, where the fire was raging.
Fire crews had retreated from the area because of the speed of the fire, which was making it unsafe for them to battle the intensity of the flames. Captain Corkum said, “When the 911 call came in [saying] that there was a person in the house, we knew that fire conditions were going to be bad on that road.... But that's what we do. We're the fire service. Our main objective is life safety.”
Captain Corkum said that he and firefighter Scott, wearing only basic personal protective gear, and with no oxygen equipment, jumped into the chief's pickup truck to attempt to save the man. Firefighter Scott said, “There were moments when it felt like we were driving through a wall of fire”. Captain Corkum reported that “as they travelled toward Yankeetown Road, day turned into night, and visibility was zero.” They could not see the civic numbers and ended up passing the home twice before they found the driveway. “As we pulled up, everything around the house was on fire. There were trees on two sides, maybe 20 to 30 feet away, and everything was on fire,” the captain said. Captain Corkum was driving and instructed firefighter Scott that he had 30 seconds to check the house for the man. Both doors were locked, so Scott ended up kicking in the front door.
Captain Corkum said, “The elderly gentleman was in his chair unaware of what was going on, unaware of the danger [around him].” Corkum and Scott grabbed the man, lifted him up and carried him into the truck, with only minutes, maybe even seconds, to get out, and “Captain Corkum said it was one of those moments that ‘you're there doing what has to be done.’” “It's the first time,” he said, “in my 22 years that I'm looking around...and I'm like, ‘I really don't know that I'm 100 per cent going to get out of this’”.
According to Captain Corkum, “Luckily...they were able to make it through the smoke and embers to get the man to the command post, where he could be assessed by paramedics.” After, Scott said, “My heart grew a little bit. I was very, very happy when we passed him off”.
He continued:
And then it was just moments later before we're on to the next task. But there was this brief, beautiful moment where we knew he was going to get back to his family.
Corkum and Scott “then went on to help evacuate a home in Upper Tantallon, where a family was still packing items” and could not escape.
Captain Corkum said to the media, “It was an unprecedented fire for me, just with the speed and the forward momentum that fire had and just the sheer amount of fire”. He went on to say, “I've never seen anything like it in my 22 years, that's for sure.”
According to Brendan Meagher, “even though the pair knew it was dangerous, they kept going.” He stated:
They kept going, they got to the house, they got in and they got him in that truck and...they got out of there and they saved his life.
I believe, as do most Nova Scotians, that what they did was remarkable and heroic.
According to Captain Corkum, this was only one story of those told during these devastating fires. I'm sure there are many people with many stories of real heroism that we will hear from in the coming days.
I would like to share with members another experience I had during this time in my riding last week. The next day after that fire, Monday, May 29, after attending the morning news conference with the Halifax deputy fire chief, I drove two hours south to the town of Shelburne. I went to the fire hall and command centre, which was managing the fire for the municipality. I met with Fire Chief Locke. He and his crew had just arrived back from Clyde River, where they were battling the spread of the Barrington Lake fire. It was quickly becoming the largest fire in the history of Nova Scotia, with 65,000 acres on fire. In Clyde River, the fire had jumped the highway, as it had jumped across the lake a few hours earlier. Chief Locke told me that the freight train speed and the power of the fire overcame the firefighters, who had to abandon their hoses and gear and jump into their trucks; they barely escaped with their lives.
He has been a firefighter for 50 years, and he had a hard time with his emotions as he described what his team faced. The flames they were battling reached 200 feet high and whirled around them. This happened time and again to crews battling this beast.
Half the county was evacuated. Yesterday, the fire was only declared held; it is not growing beyond the 65,000 acres. More than 200 kilometres of the area has been destroyed. The Halifax fire is now 100% contained.
The two fires incinerated more than 300 private property houses and buildings, destroying homes, dreams, family treasures, vehicles and everything dear to these families, and to us, including pets, dogs and cats, that were lost in the flames. The job of rebuilding for these families is immense. It is going to take time before everyone can return home safely. Knowing that the fire cannot resurface and restart is essential.
The 190 professional volunteer firefighters who have kept the Barrington Lake fire out of the towns of Barrington and Shelburne are exhausted. They worked 18 hours a day. A member of my constituency team, Tyson Ross, is one of these firefighters; he slept in his own bed for the first time two nights ago. However, they know the work is not done. They need to get the 65,000 acres secure and fire-free before residents, who simply want to go home, can do so safely.
They left their jobs to save their communities. They left their families to risk their lives to save others. They left their own evacuated houses in the fire zone to save the houses of their neighbours and strangers. The words “thank you” seem desperately insufficient for what they have done for our province and these communities, given what we owe them.
Nonetheless, I will conclude by thanking the volunteer firefighters who fought and controlled the fires at Beech Hill Road and Pubnico. I want to send an enormous thanks to the hundreds of firefighters who fought, and got under control, the Halifax fire, and who have enabled all but a few thousand of the 16,000 residents to return home. From the bottom of my heart, I thank the 190 firefighters who have fought, and continue to fight, the largest fire in the history of our province, known as the Barrington Lake fire, and the Lake Road fires in Shelburne County, over the last 14 days.
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- Jun/5/23 11:55:13 p.m.
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Madam Chair, what the hon. member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue's community and that of the member for Manicouagan are going through right now is very similar to mine.
One of the experiences I had, and it was not a good time but a very difficult time in the community of Shelburne, was that, when the lobster season was ending, I asked the government if it would extend the lobster season to get the traps out of the waters because the lobster fishermen were most of the volunteer firefighters, and they were also evacuated from their homes, so they could not get to their boats and could not get on the water. The government accommodated that and continues to accommodate that.
I was behind the lines with the volunteer firefighters. Most of our firefighters in rural Canada are volunteers. They are putting in 18-hour days around the clock to try to deal with this, and for the rest of the day, they are sleeping at the fire station where they are.
I am wondering if the member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue could share with us any of what he is hearing about the role of the volunteer firefighters in his community and that of Manicouagan and other communities in Quebec.
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- Jun/5/23 11:27:10 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I do appreciate that this co-operation has been real, but the only way I could do that was to actually be in the communities, as I was, back and forth to Barrington, Shelburne, Tantallon every day. However, there was not courage from me. There is courage in the firefighters and the people fighting these fires. That is where all the courage and the heroes are.
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- Jun/5/23 11:22:28 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, that is a great question. In everything, we can always do better, but in this case, because this was so unprecedented, I think things came together fairly well. I heard, and still hear, enormous frustration from residents of my community who ask why all of it did not happen with a faster response. With 40-kilometre-per-hour winds and this thing rolling through like a freight train, it was very difficult to react as quickly as people wanted everyone to.
The member talked about federal resources. I think that is a great idea. I think one of the things this experience has taught me is that the federal government's role is coordinating and trying to find all the assets that are across the country. Right now, there are not any available. That was a challenge. The federal government should have some ability to have some equipment to add. This is not the first or primary job of the armed forces. We were thankful they could come in, but they are not professional firefighters. They do not have professional firefighting equipment. They do not have water bombers. There were six water bombers that had to come on Friday night from Montana. There were three from Newfoundland and a number from New Brunswick. For Nova Scotia, that will be part of the analysis afterwards. It needs to have a little more ability. I think it is an important area we should be looking at from the federal government to see what kind of resources we could have available more permanently.
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- Jun/5/23 11:10:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we have heard some very good speeches tonight on this important issue. I would like to start by thanking the member for South Okanagan—West Kootenay for bringing this forward.
I would like to make more of a personal comment. I am not the first member of Parliament who has had to deal with wildfires in the riding, but two of the largest wildfires in Nova Scotia are in my riding, and one of them is still out of control. Therefore, I would just like to personalize this a bit with what the last eight days have been like in my province.
Going back to Sunday, May 28, two Sundays ago, as members of Parliament, most of us were either flying to Ottawa to come here to do our jobs, as we do every week, or we were preparing, like I was, to leave early on Monday morning. It was late in the afternoon of that Sunday when my phone started to go with an alert that there was a fire and an evacuation going on 10 minutes from my house.
There was a major fire in the community of Tantallon, which I am sure nobody in the House had ever heard of until eight days ago. It is a wonderful community up behind exit 5, as we call it, off the 103. It is the exit where people get off to go to Peggys Cove and St. Margarets Bay. It is a community of families and young families. There are three day cares there. There are a lot of retired folks, including quite a few retired RCMP and Canadian Armed Forces personnel, up there. There is an RCMP detachment in Tantallon, right there by the Sobeys. There is one street in and out of this subdivision, and it has no fire hydrants. On the back of it is the wilderness that is Nova Scotia. It is about a 15-minute drive from downtown Halifax.
That day, the wind was about 40 kilometres an hour in Nova Scotia. On the first evening of the evacuation on that Sunday, I went to the newly opened comfort centre in the Black Point fire hall, which is about 30 seconds from my house. It was opened quickly by one of the two volunteer managers of the community centre, Janet Fryday Dorey. As people streamed in, they were really just in a state of shock.
I talked to one couple who were sitting on their porch at about 3:30 in the afternoon having a beverage, as people tend to do after they have cut the lawn or done their chores on the weekend. They were sitting there and said that in so-and-so's back yard there was a fire going. Then the fire started to get bigger and within moments it had spread to their house and very quickly, because the winds were 40 kilometres an hour, it spread to the next house. The couple said, “We'd better get out of here”. They quickly got in their car and left. There was a roofer working on a roof next door who saw the fire happening, got off the roof and started to knock on people's doors to get them evacuated.
When they came in, they were saying they did not know what was happening, that their neighbourhood was on fire and they did not know where to go or what they would do. This was not a comfort centre where people could sleep. It did not have showers. Community members started to come in, saying, “I have a room” and “I have a place for somebody to stay if they need it.” People from a couple of local inns in Hubbards came in and said, “If there is anyone who is evacuated, they can stay here for free.” Then food started to arrive. For Nova Scotians and most Canadians, food is the first response to a crisis, and food started to come in so that people had food to eat.
I was there until about 11 o'clock at night. I got home when the centre closed. My cellphone rang, and it was the Minister of Emergency Preparedness calling on a Sunday night. On that first night, he phoned me, the local member of Parliament, to ask what was happening from my perspective, which I greatly appreciated. I was still a bit in shock.
I knew there had been a fire starting in the south of my riding two days before. It started around a lake. I also knew that on that same day, 20 minutes down the road in a community called Chester Basin, another fire had started on Beech Hill Road. It was out of control, and the winds were blowing at 40 kilometres an hour.
This modest fire in Shelburne County on a lake started on Friday night, May 26, at a party on a lake, when a fire was set to keep people warm. It was accelerated by the wind that Sunday and started to spread across the county.
The next morning, the deputy fire chief of Halifax and the Department of National Resources were holding a media briefing to say what was going on. That was in Tantallon for the fire in Tantallon, not the Shelburne one. There were over 100 fire trucks from around the province on the scene in Tantallon, where in the space of two hours, over 16,000 people had been evacuated from their homes and had to find a place to live temporarily.
The fire only got worse on Monday and Tuesday. In Shelburne County, the fire doubled in size every single day. If anyone knows Shelburne County at all, it is the big lobster fishing community in the southern part of my riding. There are two main towns and a lot of villages. The two main towns are the town of the Shelburne and the town of Barrington. This fire spread between the two of them. They are 30 kilometres apart. Over the next few days, half of that county was evacuated.
That fire is still out of control. It has grown to 25,000 hectares, or 65,000 acres. Luckily, we had some rain on the weekend and it has not grown. It grew a bit on Sunday, but it has basically been stable. Some 5,000 to 6,000 people in that community were evacuated.
Part of the fire in Halifax spread into the riding of Halifax West, and over 20,000 people were evacuated in Nova Scotia. During the week, while we were fighting the fire in Shelburne, an additional fire began behind the town of Shelburne, and another one in East Pubnico.
There were a number of volunteers at the comfort stations. The Red Cross was running the comfort station in Shelburne, and the Salvation Army was feeding and running a station for the firefighters. My lead constituency assistant is a volunteer firefighter and has been fighting this fire every day since it started in the woods. I was back in the woods with them. They brought me back one night.
We had communities shut off. We had firemen shut off. Firemen had to drop their hoses in communities like Clyde River and run for their lives to get on their equipment to escape the speed of this fire. It is feet down in the Earth now. It is a fire we are going to be dealing with in Shelburne County for months and months to come.
The Halifax fire is 100% contained. There are still about 5,000 people evacuated in Halifax. The amount of work that has to happen to allow the rest to go back is huge in terms of determining safety, determining water quality, because most are on wells, and restoring power. The premier, the minister of emergency preparedness provincially and the federal Minister of Emergency Preparedness have been working well with all of the municipal officials as one team.
This is unprecedented. We have never had this happen in Nova Scotia. There was no playbook for dealing with a suburb of Halifax burning at the same time as the largest fire in our province's history in Shelburne County.
I just have to thank all the firefighters and all the first responders, as well as all the volunteers who are still helping to feed the firefighters. I ask for the patience of all those who are still evacuated; I ask them to please not go back until the evacuation orders are lifted. It is not safe. There is no going around it on an ATV or by boat. People will put themselves and others in harm's way if they do that. I ask them to please listen to local officials so we can deal with this as expeditiously as possible.
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- May/29/23 2:11:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am speaking from the fire command centre in Shelburne County on the wildfire crisis at both ends of my district, here and in Halifax.
A massive wildfire in Halifax, where I was this morning, forced the evacuation of 18,000 people. That is as many people as are evacuated currently in western Canada. Most left with only the clothes on their backs, as the fire moved extremely fast. There are no fatalities and no missing people so far. The Halifax fire continues to burn out of control, and many homes have been lost.
I was at the Halifax comfort centres last night and this morning. The stories are heartbreaking. People rushed to their cars as the fire swept into their backyards, forced by 40-kilometre-an-hour winds.
Here in Shelburne County, we are battling an out-of-control wildfire covering 20,000 acres. The communities from Port Clyde to Barrington West have been evacuated and are under threat. More than another 2,000 people have been evacuated.
To professional and volunteer firefighters, saying thanks does not seem like enough as they risk their lives to save our communities. I thank the countless volunteers helping these families. Our prayers go out to the families in these uncertain and tragic days. Please pray for our communities.
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