44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 5, 2023 11:00AM
- Jun/5/23 2:15:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, forest fires are currently burning across Quebec on a terrifying scale. The fires cover an area roughly equivalent to the Island of Montreal. People have had to be evacuated from Abitibi—Témiscamingue and northern Quebec, as well as the north shore. The smog filling the sky is a reminder that this situation is not normal.
Once again, at a time of crisis, we can count on the solidarity of the men and women who have been evacuated and who are co-operating with public safety authorities. We can count on the solidarity of the SOPFEU, the firefighters have come from all over Quebec, as well as the rest of Canada, France, Portugal and the United States, to battle the blaze. They are all working together tirelessly to fight this devastating fire. We can also count on the solidarity of members of the armed forces who are providing operational support in many ways, starting with aid for evacuees. Lastly, we can count on solidarity between levels of government, because we can and must work hand in hand when dealing with a disaster of this magnitude.
These forest fires will be put out. We will face them together, and we will defeat them together.
On behalf of the Bloc Québécois, I wish everyone good luck.
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- Jun/5/23 6:58:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise to ask for an emergency debate on the urgent and escalating wildfire situation in Canada.
I want to first say that our hearts are with the 30,000 Canadians who are still out of their homes and the many hundreds who have lost everything in these fires. I thank the firefighters on land and in the air for their brave and dangerous work keeping all of us safe.
More than 400 fires are burning right now across the country from Vancouver Island to Nova Scotia. More than 3.6 million hectares have been torched so far this year, and it is only the first week of June. We have a long, hot fire season ahead of us.
Local and provincial first responders have been overwhelmed. It is clear that we need to re-evaluate the federal role in wildfire protection and response to develop a more proactive process, instead of the present reactive one, and we must do as much of this as possible as quickly as possible in the next few weeks, before summer truly arrives.
This process and support to affected parts of the country should be informed by the urgent debate of Parliament, so I therefore ask for an emergency debate tonight here in the House of Commons.
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- Jun/5/23 10:13:48 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, provinces are doing well. British Columbia has been facing large forest fire seasons, and since 2015 there has been a relentless series of bad forest fire seasons.
In British Columbia we have developed programs, techniques and processes that gradually get better. There are always things to learn about how to deal with people who have been forced out of their homes. That part of the process has been very disrupting to families, to people. We have learned a lot in British Columbia about that process. We are learning a lot about communication between different teams in the field. There are always things we can learn from each other—
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- Jun/5/23 10:29:07 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for the question, because it is one I was hoping to be asked. I hope to provide a good response to it on behalf of the many indigenous people who have provided me with the lessons, history and knowledge that go hand in hand with the prevention of these terrible disasters.
In the boreal forest of Treaty 8, Treaty 10 and Treaty 11 territories, there is a tradition of prescribed burns, where indigenous people burn x amount of land in order to prevent an even greater fire from being produced. Without prescribed burns, this fuel gathers, builds and becomes dangerous. That is exactly what happened when we banned the ability of first nations and Métis communities to have prescribed burns; unfortunately, this is still a reality in Canada. If we want to ensure that indigenous people get to the point of restoring the lands, which they have done for thousands of years, we have to make sure that we listen and get laws out of the way that are currently prohibiting indigenous people from practising the traditional ecological work they are supposed to do.
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- Jun/5/23 10:30:33 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague for that question, because it is something that we often do not have the opportunity to speak about in this place. Indigenous people have long stewarded Turtle Island, North America, when catastrophes happen, from floods to natural disasters, such as forest fires, as well as huge, immense, prolonged winters.
We have a history, stories and knowledge. The history that is present here and that we often talk about is short. It is a small piece of what Canada is. Canada is an immensely ancient place, a place with tradition and knowledge. Indigenous people have been installed in a position to care for and administer this.
We know about prescribed burns. When we take care of forest fires at a low-risk level by destroying the fuel in the forest early, rather than stacking it up by banning prescribed burns, then we deal with what would become a much worse fire, which is what we are seeing in Alberta today. If we had invested and allowed indigenous people the jurisdiction and the resources to do what traditional wildland firefighting looks like, we would not have had this issue; we would stand a chance.
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank the minister for her work on the emergency that we are in. I also want to thank my colleague from South Okanagan—West Kootenay for calling for this important debate today.
The Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs just wrote an op-ed in The Globe and Mail yesterday and cited how Canada is becoming more and more reliant on over 90,000 volunteer firefighters. It also highlighted in its op-ed that, number one, it wants to make sure that the government sends a clear message to firefighters that they are needed, valued and appreciated. It highlighted that the tax benefit for firefighters who do over 200 hours of volunteer work get about a $450 benefit. They get a $3,000 tax threshold relief. They have been calling for that relief threshold to be raised from $3,000 to $10,000, and the right thing would be to support this. It is identified in my private member's bill, Bill C-310.
Will the government support what is really a small token given the inflationary costs and the costs on firefighters? They are being stretched to the max. Some of them are working right now. On top of the normal work they do, they also fight wildfires. Will the government honour this ask?
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- Jun/5/23 10:51:57 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member gave a good overview of the federal contributions to wildfire fighting in Canada.
In my speech, I mentioned the fact that a growing number of experts, including Mike Flannigan, have been calling for the formation of a dedicated firefighting service in Canada; something that would complement what the armed forces do, but people who are specifically trained for this. He suggested maybe 20 teams of 20 each, which is about how many people we bring in from other countries every fire season. I am wondering if the member could comment on that idea, which would be available to all provinces as needed.
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- Jun/5/23 10:52:47 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we are doing many things.
One of the things we are doing is investing to train more community-based firefighters across the country this season. That includes 300 indigenous firefighters and 125 indigenous fire guardians. We are also receiving hundreds of firefighters from other countries to support our efforts over the coming days and weeks.
It is a multipronged approach, and it is something we continue to gauge and respond to as the needs vary through this emergency situation.
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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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- Jun/5/23 11:21:30 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is wonderful to get that first-hand account of what not one, but two, big fires can be like in the one's neighbourhood. I know these are not everyday occurrences in Nova Scotia.
I would like to ask the member to give further detail on how Nova Scotia has been handling this. How has the federal government been helping? Can he share some ideas on how we can do this better in the future? We have parts of Canada that do not deal with fire on a daily basis. In the midst of it all, would it be better to have some federal resources to call on immediately? That way we would not have to wait a day or two, as Nova Scotia did, even though we were trying hard.
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- Jun/5/23 11:24:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, when we have no-burn rules that have come from our provincial governments, saying that people should not burn, or should be very cautious when we have dry seasons like we have, people should not think they can control the fire because they are someone special. That seems to still happen in Nova Scotia during all of this.
These are ridings that rely on their own water, their own wells and septic systems. When people go back, they cannot drink the water; they have to have it tested. The provincial government of Nova Scotia is going to be providing, starting tomorrow, free water testing to make sure that, when people go back, that gets done.
Primarily, people need to think about what they do on their own property. They need to make sure it is clean so there is not material there to catch fire. Most important, I ask people, when we are in this type of situation, to please not be lighting even local campfires or local bonfires at night just because they think they can control them.
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- Jun/5/23 11:37:38 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for the update on the situation in Quebec, especially around Sept-Îles.
When I was getting prepared for my speech tonight, I was looking at the long-term forecast for the rest of the season across the country, and what really stood out for me were the areas that will be affected. The hottest, driest areas were in northwestern Quebec, northeastern Ontario and basically all of British Columbia. Until now, British Columbia has largely escaped fires, at least west of the Rockies, except that one started just north of my hometown this afternoon.
I am wondering if the member could perhaps talk more about the mid-term and long-term consequences of a fire season like this. What do we need to do to be more prepared?
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- Jun/6/23 12:00:18 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate my two minutes to speak to this emergency debate on the wildfires, and I appreciate all of my colleagues here tonight.
We are taking up a debate that operates at two levels. We have spent most of this debate on the first level, and that is appropriate. That first level is the immediate, the now. It is what we have just gone through, which is not over yet. As my hon. colleague from South Shore—St. Margarets pointed out, the idea of forest fires raging in areas of Nova Scotia, my home province, where the month of May is not known to be hot and dry but rather cold, miserable and very rainy, is so unknown to a Nova Scotian that it is rather chilling.
As my hon. colleague from South Shore—St. Margarets said earlier tonight, the fire is deep, several feet underground still. That is the immediate. That is the now. That is knowing that over the last 10 years in this country, the month of May has had an average area burnt of 150,000 hectares. The last 10 years have already been affected by global warming, so if we were to go back 100 years, it would have been less. This month, May 2023, saw in excess of two million hectares burnt. That is the immediate. That is the now. That is the courage of the firefighters we salute. That is the patience and forbearance of people who leave their homes without question, get to safety and do it in an orderly fashion.
However, I think we also know that right now we are at the very edge of being too late on the larger question of the climate emergency. This place voted that we were in a climate emergency on June 18, 2019. That same year, Greta Thunberg used fire as the analogy that should have caused our generation and our leaders to do what was required to avoid getting to this point. As she said, “Our house is on fire.... I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”
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