Mr. Speaker, I believe that a key role of a legislator, especially when society is faced with a growing multiplicity of challenges, many of which require recourse to science to solve, is to act as a conduit, in essence a conduit for bringing the science that resides in our universities and other research entities, including government departments, into the realm of actionable public policy. This is what Bill C-317 seeks to do.

Before I delve into the bill, I would like to acknowledge and thank Dr. John Pomeroy, director of the global water futures programme at the University of Saskatchewan, and Dr. Alain Pietroniro, Schulich chair in sustainable water systems in a changing climate at the University of Calgary, both of whom have patiently provided me with a basic understanding of flood and drought forecasting to allow me to argue today, hopefully convincingly, for the creation of a national flood and drought forecasting strategy.

Fresh water is one of those complex policy issues that call for urgent political and policy attention. First, let me be clear, Bill C-317 is not about encroaching on provincial jurisdiction. It is not a Trojan horse, no more than the Canada Water Agency, which will be a platform for co-operation in better managing our water resources, would be a Trojan horse.

It would be a political conceit, not to mention just plain foolish, to think the federal government could govern fresh water, a provincial resource, in a top-down centralized fashion. That said, we need all hands on deck if we are to properly manage and protect this vital resource, which Canada has been blessed to possess in such great abundance in its rivers and lakes, in its ice coverage and beneath our feet in groundwater.

I implore members not to oppose this bill for reasons of politics or ideology. Water, especially when we speak of flooding, is a far too important of a non-partisan policy issue. Bill C-317, if adopted, would help better protect communities across Canada, including in Quebec, from the devastating impacts and costs of flooding. My own riding of Lac-Saint-Louis in Quebec, as well as ridings adjacent to it and further upstream, have been impacted by costly flood events as recently as 2017 and 2019. I have seen first-hand the damage and heartbreak that flooding can cause.

My bill calls for the creation of a national flood and drought forecasting strategy. I want to emphasize the word “national” here, as opposed to “federal”, which is a crucial distinction.

Water is far too vast and complex an issue for the federal government to be able to take on alone and take sole responsibility for. This would be true even if, by some miracle, the Constitution gave the federal government complete jurisdiction over water, which is obviously not the case. Centralization is simply not the way to go here.

The federal government readily acknowledges this fact in its words and actions. The federal government’s equivalency agreement with Quebec on the regulation of waste water effluent is a good example of this desire to collaborate, even when it comes to a powers under the Fisheries Act, which falls squarely under federal jurisdiction.

That being said, when we talk about water or other environmental issues, gaining knowledge, advancing research and sharing best practices to reach better solutions are international undertakings that require a kind of collaboration that transcends borders. Nothing in this bill challenges respect for jurisdictions, including provincial jurisdiction over water. If the European Union countries can collaborate on a common water policy, the European water policy, the regions of Canada should be able to do the same.

The condition of our water resources is increasingly linked to climate change. In fact, water is the canary in the coal mine, an early warning system. I would like to quote one of the most respected experts on water policy, Jim Bruce.

He said, “Like a fish that does not notice the shark until it feels its sharp bite, humans will first feel the effects of climate change through water.” Put another way, to quote water policy guru Bob Sandford from his book Flood Forecast: Climate Risk and Resiliency in Canada, water is a child of climate. He writes, “If we follow what is happening to our water, it will tell us what is happening to our climate.” In other words, we experience climate change through water.

At this time, I would like to say that, while Bill C-317 deals with both drought and flood forecasting, I will be concentrating on flooding in this debate.

According to the United Nations, flooding is the most common natural hazard globally. Due to damage associated with floods, it has been known as the deadliest natural disaster after earthquake and tsunami.

To quote Zahmatkesh et al. from an article entitled “An overview of river flood forecasting procedures in Canadian watersheds”, published in the Canadian Water Resources Journal, “In Canada, floods are known as the most common, widely distributed, and the most costly natural disasters which threaten lives, properties, the economy, infrastructure, and environment.”

Needless to say, flood disasters hurt the economy. According to the Library of Parliament, an Insurance Bureau of Canada paper states that large natural disasters have a negative impact on economic conditions. A typical disaster lowers economic growth by about one percentage point and GDP by about 2%.

The damage from flooding is not only physical, it is emotional and psychological as well. To quote the report of the 1998 symposium on the Saguenay flood:

Some authors have observed an increase in depressive and somatic symptoms [and] emotional distress and anxiety [pursuant to flood disasters]. Some flood victims...[have even] exhibited psychological disorders 14 years after the event, including phobias, panic disorders and agoraphobia.

I have seen the damage. I have toured flooded areas of my riding with Jim Beis, the mayor of the Montreal city borough Pierrefonds-Roxboro, who has been tackling local flood risk head-on for years, through robust annual springtime flood preparations. He has worked tirelessly to buttress the community’s resilience to floods, often not waiting on the city administration downtown to act to protect his constituents, many of whom are also my constituents.

Allow me to give a brief overview of major flooding events in recent Canadian history. In 1996, according to the report from the 1998 symposium on the Saguenay flood:

More than 16,000 were evacuated and 7,000 families witnessed...damage to their homes or neighbourhoods [in the flood].

Twenty percent of the disaster victims suffered post-traumatic stress and the flood “generated psychological after-effects that were measurable three months later.”

Apparently, these floods drove home the reality of climate change for Quebec’s Premier at the time, Lucien Bouchard, and its destructive potential.

In 2017, the Ottawa-Montreal region experienced extreme flooding and then again in 2019. According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, the 2019 spring flood in Quebec cost $127 million in insured damages.

This brings me to 2013 in Alberta where, to again quote Robert Sandford in his book Flood Forecast: Climate Risk and Resiliency in Canada:

Three storm cells combined and then lingered for three days in the same region and unleashed 250 to 270 millimetres of rain in the upper regions, producing some nine million cubic metres of rainfall, suddenly turning mountain creeks into raging torrents. The spring snow melt was late that year and the snowpack was above normal for late June, something that was not recognized in the province’s flood prediction system or model. The province’s flood prediction system utterly failed and flood warnings were not issued in many places until after evacuation orders were issued. However, the inadequacy and failure of Alberta Environment’s flood forecasting system should not be attributed to the skill or knowledge of individual forecasters but to systemic problems related to staffing cuts, reliance on outdated forecasting tools and inadequate field monitoring.

The flood caused $5 billion in damages.

In British Columbia, in 2021, parts of the southern region of the province recorded between an estimated 1-in-50 and 1-in-100-year rainfall events, triggered by an atmospheric river, delivering about one month’s precipitation in a matter of hours. The total flood damages totalled $9 billion.

Needless to say, damages from flooding are expected to grow exponentially with climate change. According to a report by GHD consultants entitled “Aquanomics: the economics of water risk and future resiliency”, “droughts, floods and storms could wipe $5.6 trillion USD from the GDP of key economies, with some more affected than others.”

In Canada, “droughts, floods and storms could result in a total loss of $108 billion to Canadian GDP between 2022 and 2050, an average of 0.2% of GDP per annum.” Output losses in Canada in manufacturing and distribution alone between 2022 and 2050 could reach a total of $50 billion. One can only imagine the impact on inflation of increasing, widening flooding events.

Flood forecasting is a complex endeavour with two key components: meteorological forecasts and hydrological modelling to translate weather forecasts into stream flow and water level predictions. Accurate flood forecasts also require knowledge of watershed characteristics, which influence water flows. It is easy to see that accurate flood forecasting relies on large quantities of data from multiple sources and the ability to create models that are both broad and granular, into which to feed the data. As flood forecasts cover wider and wider areas and take account of more and more factors in an uncertain climate context, greater and greater processing power is required to crunch the data and produce a range of probabilistic scenarios, which means an increasing reliance on supercomputers.

According to scientists, “Canada is the only G7 country, and perhaps the only developed country, without a national flood forecasting system”. Flood forecasting in Canada is largely considered a provincial responsibility, carried out by many of the 13 provincial and territorial governments, various municipalities across the country and some 99 of the Ontario conservation authorities. However, there are disadvantages with this approach. The main one is the lack of integration with weather forecasts as well as inconsistent forecasting capacity across provinces. This fragmented approach can lead to the slow adoption of new technology and advanced methods, and to an absence of technical coordination with agencies like the Meteorological Service of Canada.

Most jurisdictions in Canada have no modern flood forecast modelling capability. Even the most sophisticated systems use dated software and are limited to major river forecasting. Fragmentation can also be problematic in dealing with transboundary basins when individual systems in each province and territory, and between provinces and territories and the U.S., are not necessarily compatible. Several provinces and territories are still struggling with their forecasting needs because of limited human resources or skills. However, there are advantages in the Canadian decentralized system. It allows provinces to be laboratories to test unique and innovative approaches that, once demonstrated to be successful, can be adopted by other provinces. The benefit of this fragmented approach in flood forecasting is that it allows for developing bespoke flood forecasting systems that are specifically tailored to work at regional scales and to tackle unique local hydrological challenges.

I have much more to say on the technical level about what the bill would accomplish, and I expect to be able to touch on those aspects in future speeches in the House and also in committee, if the bill gets there.

I would like to end by saying that the benefit of a national forecasting system is that its models are of higher quality, producing more accurate large-scale forecasts with longer timelines than is possible with local forecast models only. The ability to connect national models with local forecasting efforts is crucial for accurate flood forecasting and also for long-term capacity building. National modellers gain experience on a regular basis from floods in different parts of the country. A national modeller could very well predict a flood almost every year. Local modellers, on the other hand, might not predict a flood in their whole career. Working with national modellers facilitates knowledge transfer that strengthens the overall system.

The bill is trying to accomplish a formal structure of collaboration among the stakeholders in this area, with the scientists and the forecasters, which is something I believe they all want. At the moment, they do meet informally to share best practices, but there is a need for a more permanent structure that could bring them together to better predict floods for the benefit of all Canadians.