What a Novel Idea

"Infrastructure/resilience/climate change" 

Every cloud does have a silver lining.

The natural disaster that is today's southwestern British Columbia has got officials speaking the words they kept to themselves for decades.

“Recovering from this natural disaster will take time and a significant amount of collaboration and co-operation among all orders of government,” said Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair at a press conference in Ottawa on Thursday with other federal ministers.

“Highway and rail line damage is significant, and how we move forward in terms of a response will not only guide our emergency response efforts locally but can cascade nationally,” he said.

Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said the climate crisis is here, and the country will have to adapt to this reality.

“Climate change mitigation, and certainly adaptation, will have to be front and centre in the decisions that we make going forward at every level,” he said.

Wilkinson said the short-term focus is on protecting people in danger, helping those affected, and restoring transportation routes. But as the immediate crisis subsides, he said better decisions must be made.

What have these guys been doing for the last six years? Oh yeah, they were busy building a new pipeline to make the global climate crisis just that much worse.

“In the medium term, though, we will have to think about how we can build back smarter, with more resiliency in the infrastructure that we have,” he said.

A "risk assessment." Be still my beating heart.

Experts Canada’s National Observer spoke with said a priority should be making climate risk assessments standard practice across the country. That’s in part because infrastructure is designed to withstand weather impacts based on historic climate data –– a design standard that has little relevance in the emerging era of climate breakdown.

“Infrastructure continues to be built in that way, making it in many ways obsolete as soon as it gets built (because) it will be there for decades or even a century,” explains Canadian Institute for Climate Choices adaptation research director Ryan Ness.

Better late than never, I suppose. 

Canada lacks climate risk information, which is leading to poor decision-making. For example, available flood maps are 20 years old on average, with “virtually none” of them taking into account how climate change may impact the risk of flooding. At least 500,000 buildings are at risk of flooding and not identified by available government flood maps, the report estimates. Information on other climate risks, like wildfires, is also largely missing.

“In the absence of this information, few infrastructure owners or investors are able to assess and manage existing climate risks, let alone future risks associated with climate change.”

It was to be expected that the Conservatives, especially under Harper, would ignore these obvious, imminent perils, but the Trudeau Liberals have held sway for six damned years and what is their excuse?  They've been wantonly derelict in their duties but isn't that Justin Trudeau's way? He's still building that damned pipeline and forking out billions of dollars in subsidies and perks to the fossil fuel giants every year. That's rank hypocrisy.