Madam Speaker, I appreciate my two minutes to speak to this emergency debate on the wildfires, and I appreciate all of my colleagues here tonight.
We are taking up a debate that operates at two levels. We have spent most of this debate on the first level, and that is appropriate. That first level is the immediate, the now. It is what we have just gone through, which is not over yet. As my hon. colleague from South Shore—St. Margarets pointed out, the idea of forest fires raging in areas of Nova Scotia, my home province, where the month of May is not known to be hot and dry but rather cold, miserable and very rainy, is so unknown to a Nova Scotian that it is rather chilling.
As my hon. colleague from South Shore—St. Margarets said earlier tonight, the fire is deep, several feet underground still. That is the immediate. That is the now. That is knowing that over the last 10 years in this country, the month of May has had an average area burnt of 150,000 hectares. The last 10 years have already been affected by global warming, so if we were to go back 100 years, it would have been less. This month, May 2023, saw in excess of two million hectares burnt. That is the immediate. That is the now. That is the courage of the firefighters we salute. That is the patience and forbearance of people who leave their homes without question, get to safety and do it in an orderly fashion.
However, I think we also know that right now we are at the very edge of being too late on the larger question of the climate emergency. This place voted that we were in a climate emergency on June 18, 2019. That same year, Greta Thunberg used fire as the analogy that should have caused our generation and our leaders to do what was required to avoid getting to this point. As she said, “Our house is on fire.... I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”