British Columbia's Premier David Eby meets with Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Feb. 1. On Tuesday in Victoria, B.C., the premier announced additional investment in disaster preparedness, including the planning of evacuation routes as well as in flood mitigation infrastructure, like dikes.BLAIR GABLE/Reuters
B.C.’s government is dipping into its record $5.7-billion surplus to nearly double a fund that prepares First Nations and municipal governments for future natural disasters and mitigates the risks these calamitous events pose to their communities.
Premier David Eby and Bowinn Ma, whose Emergency Management and Climate Readiness Ministry was created in December, announced Tuesday that the province was adding $180-million to a community emergency preparedness fund, which now has had $369-million invested in it over the past six years.
These funds will look ahead to try to avert worse outcomes from disasters made more frequent and severe by climate change, they said, and do not go toward the reconstruction in municipalities such as Merritt, Princeton and Abbotsford, which still face billions of dollars in costs following catastrophic floods in November, 2021.
“These funds will assist in the planning of evacuation routes as well as in flood mitigation infrastructure, like dikes, it will aid emergency operation centres and provide equipment and training for volunteer fire departments,” Mr. Eby told reporters at the legislature in Victoria.
“This is part of our work to pay off deficits in critical infrastructure using this year’s significant surplus.”
The Emergency Management and Climate Readiness Ministry says the province’s fund has previously supported more than 1,300 projects that include a dike in Merritt, public cooling infrastructure in Victoria, and tsunami evacuation planning in Tofino. The program also includes supports for communities to prepare for the effects of extreme cold and heat.
Leah Stump, Chief of the Nazko First Nation, said in a news release that her remote community welcomes the new funding after being battered in recent years by wildfires, flooding, heat waves and droughts.
“The program will help us plan for these events and help us get ready for future climate emergencies by adapting our structures and enhancing our response capacity,” Ms. Stump said.
The province also announced Tuesday it would now provide a one-stop online platform for communities and First Nations to review flood, wildfire, weather and other hazardous events data that had previously been spread over various government websites.
Ms. Ma, who was appointed in December, said the province has successfully processed almost every application for disaster assistance related to the 2021 floods. But, she said, for now, the process is still far too slow as people must mail or fax in paper applications, which are then entered into a digital system by staff in her ministry.
“I would not be satisfied to have the speed at which we process those applications be repeated in the future,” she said. “It speaks to the importance of modernizing that program, and that is work that we’re going to be doing.”
Princeton Mayor Spencer Coyne praised the province for $11-million in funding to help refurbish the town’s drinking water network. He said more than a year after the flooding, Princeton is still awaiting final approvals from the local health authority before taps can flow again and a boil-water advisory can end.
However, he said, none of the $5-billion in disaster financial assistance Ottawa promised British Columbia in the wake of the floods has come yet, and Princeton still doesn’t know how much it will cost to complete its plan to better protect itself from the Similkameen and Tulameen rivers that surround the community in B.C.’s Thompson Okanagan region.
Mr. Coyne said engineers are still studying how best to do that, but if dikes across the entire river system need raising that could cost $50-million and better adapting the entire town will likely cost more than $100-million if residents need to be relocated permanently.
He said climate change is bringing unprecedented threats to communities across the province, noting the Tulameen was just a trickle a day before floods unleashed 900,000 litres a second of frigid water in November, 2021.
“It’s pretty mindboggling … and we, collectively, need to discuss what the future of our province is going to look like and how we work together to deal with that,” he said.
With a report from The Canadian Press