44th Parl. 1st Sess.

November 9, 2023 10:00AM

Ms. Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands, GP)

Nov/9/23 5:36:33 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, may I just pause to say that I appreciated the words reminding us of why we wear our poppies. Let us remember to thank and honour our veterans and our current men and women in uniform. Here in Adjournment Proceedings this evening, I am returning to a question I asked June 12. It was a question for the hon. member for Scarborough Southwest, who at the time was our minister for emergency preparedness. The emergency to which we are referring is, of course, the climate crisis, the climate emergency. We have lived through quite a lot in my province of British Columbia. The summer of 2021 saw a heat dome, and in four days, 619 British Columbians died. We also saw forest fires throughout B.C. Then in November 2021, we had the atmospheric rivers that wiped out billions of dollars of infrastructure. The repairs are still taking place. I think it was July 1 that Lytton burned to the ground. There are still no properties built there. Back in June of this year, I asked the former minister of emergency preparedness how we could better prepare. My assertion was that we are not prepared. I noted in my question that in California, insurance companies are now saying they are not going to insure for fires and floods because it is not an avoidable risk. The insurance industry is alarmed. The response I had from the hon. minister was quite to point in saying the government is working to try to develop a national flood insurance plan. However, again, how do we manage these risks? There are multiple. There are the direct deaths in heat domes, the threat of fires, the threat of floods and the threat of hurricanes. We certainly experienced hurricane Fiona. We have had the experience, which is undeniable, that burning fossil fuels has created an unstable global climate for which we are not prepared. I had hoped in raising this question tonight in Adjournment Proceedings that we could talk about how we better prepare. Obviously there is much more we could do to reduce emissions and reduce the ultimate impact that we are experiencing. Mr. Speaker, within your home provinces of Nova Scotia, and I have the history of being from Cape Breton, we never had a hot, dry May, but several hot, dry Mays, one after another, left Nova Scotia experiencing wildfires this summer. We had a wildfire season across Canada like no other. My position is this, and I am hoping the minister can engage with this in Adjournment Proceedings and that the government will respond. We need to create a standing emergency preparedness committee, with federal, provincial, municipal and indigenous governments. In that, we need to grapple with what to do to save lives. Earlier this summer, I met with the mayor of the town of Ashcroft, British Columbia, who also plays a role as regional chair. She is discovering that if we want to use school buses to get people out of seniors residences, we better make sure over the course of the summer that the school district is insuring the school buses so they are available for emergencies. There are multiple layers to this. We will do better if we create a standing committee that works collaboratively across all jurisdictions and all party lines and remembers we are in an emergency.

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