As wildfires burn, natural disasters key focus for Canada’s premiers

As Canada’s premiers reckoned with housing, health care and their contentious relationship with Ottawa during meetings last week in Halifax, many of them remained consumed by climate change-related natural disasters that have only escalated since they returned home.

“It’s not lost on us that emergency preparedness for natural disasters is more important than ever,” Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston said in his closing remarks on the final day of the Council of the Federation conference.

Canada’s provincial and territorial premiers gathered for three days of meetings, and discussion of ongoing natural disasters was consistently on the agenda, Houston said. This summer has so far included multiple flash floods, including one this month in Nova Scotia that killed a 13-year-old boy, and wildfires across the country that have resulted in destruction of property and the evacuation of thousands of residents.

“There’s a number of premiers around the table today battling forest fires back home. Of course here in this province we had the tragic flash flooding death just last week,” the premier said on the second day of meetings. On July 11, Eli Young was swept into a ditch in a Wolfville, N.S., park during a flash flood that caused extensive damage across the western part of the province.

“So, of course, emergency preparedness discussions certainly take on additional meaning and importance at a time like this,” he said.

Blair Feltmate, director of the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo, says discussion is not enough. He said in an interview Wednesday that all levels of government need to treat escalating climate change-related natural disasters as the crisis they are and quickly enact mitigation strategies