What They Wrought on this Fine Province

 

The Liberal Party of British Columbia left a disastrous legacy that reverberates today even after they've been run out of office.

Among other things, during the reign of Gordon Campbell and his successor, Christie Clark, the provincial Libs offloaded responsibility for disaster management onto municipalities.

In 2003 (the Campbell years), the government transferred responsibility for flood management to municipalities.

The offloading has resulted in a hodgepodge of regimes across the province. In Metro Vancouver alone, for example, there are 21 municipal authorities with varying capacity to deal with the growing threats of extreme weather.

During Christie Clark's tenure as premier, the provincial Libs sloughed off responsibility for managing sea level rise, again onto municipalities. I discussed the situation with our town's engineer. It was a bit shocking to learn that each municipality was responsible for hiring its own consultants to estimate sea level rise in the decades ahead, storm surges and the impact of early spring snowcap melting. There was no central planning. Victoria washed its hands of the whole business. Some smaller municipalities, I was told, couldn't afford to hire experts and were winging it. I guess that's what you get for electing rightwing, "free enterprise" governments with a fondness for shady dealing.

We finally sent the BC Liberals packing and brought the New Dems to power in 2017.  They would sort out these problems, right? Wrong. From his energy policy to the Site C dam, to 'old growth' forestry, Horgan sometimes deals from the bottom of the deck. Oh, but they've got sometime in the works.

Aimee Harper, the Emergency Management B.C. spokesperson, said the province’s new flood strategy is anticipated in mid-2022. She also said the province aims to introduce new legislation next fall that will modernize the Emergency Program Act. “This will ensure there’s adequate time to develop the legislation, considering the pause we had to take in July and August during peak wildfire activity and response,” she said.

That the government had to halt its work on emergency-management legislation because of a weather-related emergency is telling. And the situation in B.C., as elsewhere, is only going to get worse.

Now we're being warned of heavy rains returning this week arriving at Haida Gwaii before reaching the mainland and heading south to what we might consider renaming "Disaster Central."


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Navigating the Minefield of Short-Termism

Image
Its disappearance went largely unnoticed. There was no post mortem, no eulogy, no deep sighs for what had been lost. Posterity slipped from our consciousness as we ushered in the neoliberal era 40 years ago. Populations would now be administered, not led. Grand vision was a quaint artifact of generations past. Besides, the invisible hand of the marketplace would see to all our needs today, tomorrow, forever. Politicians grew smaller and smaller until they shrunk to fit the mold of technocracy.  Like sheep being dipped we were plunged into a world of supply-side economics in which lower taxation and deregulation would deliver manna from heaven. We focused on skinning the economy, and society, right to the bone. Everything would be maximized, nothing would be wasted, not even the offal.  We were surrendered to a world of short-termism. We elected governments of technocrats - grey suits stuffed with wet cardboard - whose horizons were measured in electoral cycles. They would do what they
Read more

The Gun We Point at Our Own Heads

Image
  If you're sitting at a table and there's a loaded pistol in front of you, do you pick it up and point it at your own head?  Probably not, unless something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. How would you feel if someone else was holding that pistol to your head? But there is a pistol pointed at our heads and, unless we do something about it, we're goners. It's not a Glock. It's fossil fuels and the industry is slowly squeezing the trigger. Proven fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to generate 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas emissions .  Russia and the United States each have massive reserves of fossil energy sufficient to push humanity through the 1.5C heating limit, sometimes called the "carbon budget."  I have it on reliable authority that Washington and the Kremlin aren't getting along very well these days. After all, if you won't hold the line on nuclear proliferation, you might not be inclined to voluntarily give up a major source of na
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr
Read more