Burned vehicles at a property destroyed by the Bush Creek East wildfire, in Scotch Creek, B.C., on Sept. 6.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
As the worst wildfire season recorded in British Columbia ebbs, municipal politicians from across the province will gather this week to try to send a warning to the provincial government that responding to such climate emergencies is beyond their capacity.
Towns and cities have only their local property and business taxes to pay for municipal services, and those funds can’t address the huge expenses of the devastation caused by natural disasters or the massive challenge of preparing for them, they say.
“Probably the most terrifying and not-yet-talked about is the issue of housing and the fires,” said the president of the Union of B.C. Municipalities, Whistler Councillor Jen Ford.
“We’ve seen hundreds damaged or permanently destroyed by wildfire. How do we replace them? When you’re trying to build 115,000 new units” – the 10-year goal the NDP government set five years ago – “and then a couple thousand burn down, not good.”
The convention, which will bring a record 2,000 people to the Vancouver Convention Centre for all of next week, has scheduled two separate workshops on wildfires, one looking at health effects, another at preparing for future fires, along with multiple sessions on the topic of housing.
“Everybody wants to talk about fire, floods and drought – earth, wind and fire,” said Clearwater Mayor Merlin Blackwell, after a fire season that included out-of-control fires in Chase and the Shuswap, a couple of hours away, along with several in the Okanagan that resulted in almost 200 homes destroyed there.
“And the question will be, how can communities, with something this extreme, how do we get fire smart?”
Abbotsford Councillor Patricia Ross said she has four main issues that she’s going to the convention with, and the top one is emergency management for disasters. Abbotsford experienced devastating floods in November, 2021.
“For municipal governments, we need access to resources to recover from an emergency. Mitigation and recovery – these are far beyond our capacity.”
Besides a big focus on those issues, the convention has significant time dedicated to housing, mental health and addictions, and homelessness.
The union’s resolutions book, which functions as a kind of early-warning sensor for current issues in cities and towns across British Columbia, has more than three dozen resolutions involving housing that range from “encampment management,” put forward by politicians in B.C.’s north-central region that includes Prince George, to requests for housing with supports (Kamloops and Kelowna), to requests for the province to speed up its own needed approvals for local developments (Cranbrook).
There are also at least a dozen more related to mental health and drug treatment from cities as different as Smithers, Maple Ridge, Victoria, Vancouver and Terrace.
Those resolutions are likely to prompt significant disagreements among mayors and councillors. Some cities have called for bans on public drug use, for example – or, in some cases, enacting local bylaws to do that – and mandatory treatment as they grapple with rising problems of public disorder in their communities. Others are looking for more support and services for people with those problems.
Those differences have been heightened since the province moved to decriminalize small amounts of drugs in May, 2022, a move that some local government politicians believe has led to an increase of public drug use and disorder beyond what the pandemic sparked.
About half of B.C. mayors and councillors are new to the job this year after a big changeover in the October, 2022, civic elections, some elected because of their campaigns on those issues.
“There are just as many arguments on one side as the other,” said Ms. Ford. “I don’t think anyone has the solution that everyone agrees on.”
She said the municipal association has been asking for more health and housing supports for people if decriminalization is going to work for everyone. “We want the pilot of decriminalization to be successful but it will only work with supports.”
But it is an urgent issue that she hears about constantly. “The angst and sheer terror I have heard is really upsetting,” she said.
The convention will also feature a session on fostering more women in municipal politics and two sessions on calls for a provincial ethics commissioner.
The province required cities to come up with a code of conduct for its councillors in 2021, but it has led to many unpleasant situations because the people judging whether the code has been violated are other councillors.
“The ones to decide are your peers, so we’re essentially being asked to police ourselves,” said Ms. Ross of Abbotsford.
But there have been several messy cases where councillors felt they were being judged as guilty of violation by a group on the other side of the political fence, rather than truly neutral judges.