In an emergency debate in the House of Commons on the disastrous flooding in British Columbia, veteran Green Party MP Elizabeth May reflected on the situation in her home province in the context of the global climate crisis.

Elizabeth May

November 24, 2021

Mr. Speaker, I am truly honoured to be the first member to rise this evening to speak to such a crucial issue.

I first want to acknowledge that we are gathering today on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.

To me, it is clear that we are in the midst of a climate emergency. I just participated in the 26th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Glasgow. This was my 12th time participating, and the situation is graver now than it was the first time.

I am desperately concerned that the climate emergency is outpacing any government’s actions to take control of the situation, and I want to address this issue while cognizant of the time. I take to heart the remarks from earlier today by my friend and colleague the Hon. Member for Abbotsford, who also wanted an emergency debate. We want to focus on what has just happened in our home province of British Columbia. However, there is a context here, and any action we take now that ignores the root causes of what just happened invites worse to come. We need to take account of root causes and we need to take appropriate actions.

With the Speaker’s indulgence, my intention is to start with the global, move to the national and then focus most of my remarks on the provincial and the local and what we do now. I hope we can approach this issue tonight, all of us members of Parliament from five different parties, in a way that reflects the best of us in recognizing that we have more in common than in difference.

I am looking across the way right now to my friend from Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, who referenced earlier today that it was in his riding that Lytton burned to the ground in 15 minutes earlier this summer. I do not think we can only look at the floods that just happened. A lot of events have taken place and hit the same communities, particularly the same first nations communities, over and over again within the period of time during which the House was adjourned, from the end of June until reconvening on Monday.

We have to recognize that we are in a climate emergency, as the House did on June 17, 2019. Some of us were in our seats then. Through a motion from the former minister of environment, Catherine McKenna, the House voted that we were indeed in a climate emergency and had to take account of that. However, nothing has changed. We do not act as though we are in an emergency.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the large scientific body also known as IPCC, has released unequivocal research. It presented a report on 1.5°C in October 2018. The news was so terrible that the IPCC called for immediate action. Three years have now passed, and the situation is even worse than it was in October 2018.

We were told by the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change in their emergency report on 1.5°C, which is the target of the Paris Agreement, that we are at desperate risk of missing it. It is not a political target. The reason the IPCC was asked to produce the report they produced was to inform policy-makers, politicians and government leaders around the world about the difference between a 2°C global average temperature increase and 1.5°C. I will not go through all the details of the report. I cannot in the time available. However, as one of the government leaders, the Prime Minister of Barbados, just said a few days ago in Glasgow: “2°C is a death sentence for us; only at 1.5°C do we survive.”

What the IPCC sketched out was not that 1.5°C makes us live in a safe world, but that it is one we can survive in. It would allow coral reefs to survive, mostly. It would protect our Arctic, mostly but not entirely. We would experience permafrost thaw, but it would not be a fatal level of permafrost thaw. Over and over again, that report, which is seminal, pointed out that 1.5°C was essential.

Then we had, this summer, the report of the first working group, the sixth assessment report of the IPCC, which was labelled by the Secretary-General of the United Nations as code red for humanity. It said that everything they had warned about in 2018 is happening faster and with greater severity than they had anticipated.

We know globally that we are now on track to shooting well past 2°C, well past the danger zone. This is not about bad weather. This is about whether human civilization can survive. That is what we are talking about. No issue could be more riveting and the stakes could not be higher. Still, on a day-to-day basis we have this ability to function as though there is still time.

Sadly and tragically, the Government of Canada chose to use only part of the IPCC advice, the part saying that if we hold to 1.5°C, by mid-century, 2050, we should be at net zero. I need to enforce this and I need to say it slowly, particularly for my Liberal colleagues, because I am not sure that the government understands the way this information is being manipulated by someone, somewhere.

The IPCC has never said the goal is net zero by 2050 and then we will get through all this and human civilization will survive. They have said very clearly that there is only one pathway to hold to 1.5°C, and it starts with at least 45% reductions globally, which is a lot, against 2010 levels by 2030. If we do not do that, net zero by 2050 is meaningless. It will be too late. We will have taken a very significant step toward the unbearable risks of unstoppable self-accelerating global warming triggered by what some people call points of no return or tipping points. The important thing to say is that we still have time.

Time is running out, but it is not too late. We must act immediately to reduce greenhouse gases and make changes to protect nature, and forests in particular.

We have just barely enough time, and in COP26 we did not do what needed to be done, not Canada, not anyone. As the UN Secretary-General António Guterres said, COP26 was not a failure in that 1.5°C, as a possible end point for the global warming nightmare, is possible but it is on life support. That is where we are, so by 2022, and preferably before then, this country needs to do more.

I know I risk being heckled, but at the national level, if we are serious about the climate emergency, this must be said: We cannot be serious about the climate emergency while building the Trans Mountain pipeline. We cannot be serious about the climate emergency while subsidizing fracking and LNG and all of the fossil fuels. We must bring in a just transition act. We must take care of workers. We must make this transition.

Moving from global to national, we know we have a lot of work to do, and I support many of the measures that have been put forward by the government. However, in their totality they are insufficient to ensure that my children alive today will be in a livable world when they are my age. That is something that affects all of us deeply and personally, and I am grateful that we have a chance to talk about it.

As I am talking about the personal side, let me shift to British Columbia. This climate emergency hit really close to home this summer. In British Columbia, the heat dome, as it was called, was more than a heat wave: It killed nearly 600 people in four days. One of those who were affected and did not die is my stepdaughter. She is in her thirties and happened to be at my husband’s family farm in Ashcroft, British Columbia, not far from Lytton, where the temperature at the farm hit 50°C.

I do not think any of us here can really imagine what that is like. She said it was like having a hair dryer blowing on her face all the time, outdoors. It hurt one’s skin. She nearly died and had brain edema. Another family member was a first responder, pulling people out of shacks and trailers and putting them in ambulances and knowing they would not live.

We have to do a much better job, when we talk about what do we do now and what have we learned. We need health care protocols that are radically revamped, that look at the question of what they do when they find someone whose organs are already cooking. It is not the protocol they were using in the summer in B.C.

We had wildfires from early April until the end of September. That wildfire season in British Columbia saw 1,600 wildfires destroy over 868,000 hectares. That also contributed to how bad the flooding damage was, because the ground had become hydrophobic, meaning it expelled the water that fell on the ground. The ground could not absorb water; the ground repelled it. The flooding was worse because of the fires.

Of course, the flooding was described as an atmospheric river. We learn new terms as we go through this. During the fire season, we learned that there were things called pyrocumulonimbus clouds. Those are clouds that shoot sparks. They create more fires.

We are not in a normal climate situation. We have entered the world of a climate emergency. I should say more, of course. As people know, the flooding destroyed highways. When will Coquihalla Highway ever get repaired? There are massive amounts of damage: 18 highways and five bridges significantly impacted by the flooding; the loss of life; the terrifying experience for people caught in mudslides; the horror of losing farms. I mentioned my husband’s farm in Ashcroft. We have, for the second time, taken in climate refugees. In the summer, we took in people who were on wildfire alerts. Now there are people who have lost everything in the floods.

This is unbearable, but there are things we can do. We must be serious about doing them and it is a national effort. We know, from the Speech from the Throne, that there is finally a commitment. I have heard it before, actually. I remember the previous Conservative government promised a national adaptation plan. The goal here is to act to reduce the damage of the climate emergency to the greatest extent possible by reducing our dependence on fossil fuels as quickly as possible, making transitions to renewable energy and so on.

There is an impact that is baked into our atmosphere. There are levels of climate damage that we will not be able to avoid, so we have to avoid those levels of climate impact to which we cannot adapt, such as, as I mentioned, runaway global warming that would mean that we could not really survive on this planet as a species. We have to adapt to those levels that we can no longer avoid.

Adaptation involves a lot of elements. Yes, the ministers for public safety, public security and infrastructure must be seized of this. This is a whole-of-government approach. I rarely urge the Government of Canada to consider something that a US administration is doing, but the US President has appointed John Kerry, who used to be secretary of state in the Obama administration, not as the head of his environment department but as a key member of the National Security Council inside the White House.

That is because the President of the United States fully understands that climate change is not and will never be an environmental issue. Rather, it is a threat to national security, kind of like a military enemy from a bygone era.

We are faced with a national security threat that requires a whole-of-government approach. It is particularly important, as I look at the member for Nunavut, that we have to think about what is happening in our Arctic. We have to think like a circumpolar country. We have to know that we have to keep the permafrost cold enough so that it does not thaw. The permafrost contains methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas, and if we lost the permafrost of the world we would be releasing four times more carbon than humanity has burned since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

We know that we have to keep our Arctic cold enough, as Sheila Watt-Cloutier told us years ago. To protect the human rights of the Inuit peoples, we must keep the Arctic cold, and to protect traditional hunting and culture. Also, for the sake of all species on this planet, we need to keep the Arctic cold to keep that methane in the permafrost and keep it from thawing.

There are some really significant drivers here. Let us think about what we do creatively.

In the immediate short term, we need more resources for British Columbia. We need to help rebuild key roads and railroads so that supply chains are protected and the economy recovers. We need to help individual farmers and homeowners who did not have insurance. We need to find a way to help families rebuild their lives on a very personal level. We have to think about rebuilding, retooling and adapting to the climate emergency that we now experience.

We have to think creatively about things that we do not often think about. In this emergency, we needed volunteers jumping into their boats and rescuing people. It is not comfortable for governments to think, “Well, those are uninsured people. Is that really a good idea?” If the people of Abbotsford and Merritt had not shown up and sandbagged key infrastructure, the situation would have been much worse. How do we think creatively about climate adaptation corps to respond to emergencies and create resilient communities where people are deputized to go out and save lives?

A major event happened in my community over Christmas two years ago. There was off-the-charts, climate-induced crazy weather. Large trees were blown down across the roads. It was Christmas, and everybody lost electricity. This happens in major weather events. We lose our land line and cell coverage and we cannot move around, and in this case it was because trees were across the road. People in my community are smart people and know that, when the power is out because trees are down, it is illegal to go out with chainsaws to cut up the trees and help their neighbours, but everybody did it. They took care of each other through Christmas. They are not going to leave someone in their 90s who is living on their own because it is illegal to cut trees to move them off the road.

We need to figure this out. How do we empower people who know how to react in an emergency and create trained, legal, appropriate responses that engage our volunteers? I know the Hon. Member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola will agree with me that there were great acts of bravery throughout the communities with individuals acting, and we need to harness that.

The bottom line is that we are looking at climate emergencies that have killed hundreds of people in the last number of months in British Columbia, with nearly 600 in the heat dome and more now through the floods. What we need to think about is that the global average temperature is now 1.1°C above what it was before the Industrial Revolution. We are trying to see if we can hang on to 1.5°C, which is not a safe zone and will be worse than what it is like right now at 1.1°C.

There is nothing more important than protecting young people, our children and grandchildren, against the major threat of climate change.

We are not doing everything we need to do yet. We still do not act on a day-to-day basis as though we understand that we are in a climate emergency. I would urge the government, since we have already bought Trans Mountain and we have all those workers and all that equipment, to just change the mandate of that Crown corporation and put those people and that equipment to work to rebuild, to repair our highways, and to help protect against the next major climate event.

We know that in the last 24 hours on Cape Breton Island, where I am from, we see roads washed out, and we see roads washed out near Corner Brook, Newfoundland, Labrador. There is no one part of this country that is safe and secure any more than there is one place on this planet safe and secure in the climate emergency.

We have to all pull together, and as the Speech from the Throne said:

“Now, we must go further, faster.”

I am sad to say that I do not see in the Speech from the Throne the things we must do, but we know what they are. Tonight is a good opportunity to put forward those good ideas and together say, “We work for our communities, we work for Canada and we will save the planet.”