Madam Speaker, I would like to begin by acknowledging that I am rising on the traditional unceded territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin people.
I would also like to thank the voters of Lac-Saint-Louis for sending me back to the nation’s capital to be their voice and represent them once again and also help them in their dealings with the federal government. I would like to acknowledge that my staff play a very important role in that regard. They do a magnificent job that reflects well on my office and me as a parliamentarian and a candidate in the election.
I am particularly pleased to be standing here today, January 31, on the Hill in person.
I remember that around 2002 or 2003 I was on the Hill not as an elected representative, but in another capacity. One of the central debates at the time was whether we should ratify the Kyoto protocol. At the time, there was concern about global warming, but there was an even greater debate on whether climate change existed. Fortunately, more and more voices acknowledged that climate change is real, but at the time we were focusing a lot on global warming and not so much on climate change and unstable climate. We were not focusing so much on the impacts of unstable climate, flood and drought. Dr. Jim Bruce, an expert in water policy in this country, who was already honing in on one of the truths about climate change, which has become a self-evident truth: the link between climate change and water, between climate change and drought and flooding.
To quote Dr. Jim Bruce, “If climate change is a shark, water is its teeth. Like a fish that doesn’t notice the shark until it feels its sharp bite, humans will first feel the effects of climate change through water.” In other words, a climate crisis is a water crisis. Dr. Jim Bruce was the first director of Environment Canada’s Centre for Inland Waters and he, along with a handful of other renowned Canadian water experts at Environment Canada at the time, were very much pioneers in this area. I speak of people like Frank Quinn and Ralph Pentland. Ralph Pentland was a director in water planning and management at Environment Canada for 13 years and helped negotiate many of the Canada-U.S. agreements and federal-provincial agreements around water. He was the primary author of the 1987 federal water policy.
If ever we need proof of a causal link between climate change and water security, recent history has obliged. In the last decade, Alberta has seen massive flooding in places like Calgary, while the Fort McMurray wildfires were themselves a manifestation of drought. In B.C. this past summer, a heat dome killed more than 600 people and caused mass evacuations. Excess heat melted mountain snow and ice, causing record flooding, the melting of permafrost and the collapsing of roads in the north. In the south, water evaporated too quickly as mountain glaciers melted, leading to insufficient water supplies and rising food prices as livestock herds were culled due to lack of water and feed, an example of non-money supply-related inflation.
Of course, we saw the disastrous results of excessive rain in British Columbia, which brings me to the topic of atmospheric rivers. An atmospheric river is a large narrow stream of water vapour that travels through the sky, can stretch 1,600 kilometres long and more than 640 kilometres wide and, on average, carries an amount of water equivalent to 25 Mississippi rivers. According to a 2013 report co-produced by B.C.’s environment ministry, atmospheric rivers typically form in eight oceanic regions around the world, some closer to continental coasts than others. One of those regions is just off North America’s western coast and can produce between one dozen to two dozen such rivers in the sky per year. As the rivers cross from ocean to land, particularly into mountainous regions like the B.C. coast, the water vapour condenses into precipitation, sometimes dumping a month’s worth of rain or snow in a matter of days.
This brings me to Dr. John Pomeroy from the University of Saskatchewan, a hydrologist, Canada research chair in water resources and climate change, and associate director of the Global Water Futures program, the largest university-led water research program in the world. It is right here in Canada, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Dr. Pomeroy has been dedicated to developing better flood forecasting computer models and bringing these models into disaster warning systems. He is convinced that we need to “build state-of-the art water prediction and management systems” and that doing so requires federal leadership. More specifically, we need a national system of flood prediction inspired by, but not necessarily identical to, what exists in the U.S. I say not identical to because we are a different kind of federation with different jurisdictional realities and considerations.
I agree with Dr. Pomeroy. We need to develop federally managed models in collaboration with the provinces and universities that focus on river basins for use by the provinces, cities, first nations and industrial users like hydroelectric utilities.
In 2013, according to Dr. Pomeroy, there were already test models in Europe able to suggest a large flood would hit Calgary on the precise day it did. This prediction was made two weeks before the flood happened. Much like in Alberta, B.C. was unable to correctly forecast that this year’s floods would be major ones until roads were already washed out and casualties had occurred. The Americans apparently did much better with their system. Global Water Futures will be working on improving the U.S. system in a major collaboration now being developed. Global Water Futures has the science and technical capability to build a national flood forecasting system here in Canada, with the help of the provinces, municipalities and indigenous communities.
This bring me to the throne speech. As I said at the very beginning, the climate crisis is a water crisis. We will need infrastructure to adapt to the impacts of climate change on water, infrastructure like dams and reservoirs that can hold water when it arrives too early in the spring until the agricultural season starts, when the water is actually needed for irrigation. The throne speech commits the government to creating Canada’s first-ever national climate adaptation strategy and to establishing the Canada water agency as a locus of freshwater expertise and policy coordination.
The throne speech needs to be seen in juxtaposition with water-related Liberal platform commitments. The platform committed that a re-elected Liberal government would “complete our work with provinces and territories to develop flood maps for higher-risk areas in the next three years.” It is vital that this work be done by governments rather than by private sector insurance companies, which obviously have a different interest. The platform also committed our re-elected Liberal government to create a “nation-wide flood ready portal so that Canadians have the information they need to make decisions on where and how to build their homes and communities, and how they can protect their homes and communities from flood risk.”
In the U.S., the Federal Emergency Management Agency and private companies like ClimateCheck have flood-risk maps, where a user plugs in an address and gets a flood-risk assessment. We will need flood and drought protection infrastructure, but also insurance. CBC’s Marketplace says, “six to 10 per cent of Canadian homes are currently uninsurable due to flooding and that estimate could go up as more insurance companies update their risk assessments to account for the rising threat of climate change.” That is why the Liberal platform committed a re-elected Liberal government to creating a “low-cost national flood insurance program to protect homeowners who are at high risk of flooding and don’t have adequate insurance protection.”
In conclusion, our government is committed not only to combatting climate change, but also to preparing for and protecting against the impacts of climate change, which, as Dr. Bruce said, are manifested in the water cycle.
