Mr. Speaker, I am resuming a question I that initially asked in question period on May 29 of the former minister for emergency preparedness. I have to say that I mentioned in my question at the time that I thought he was working very hard and doing quite an exceptional job. However, my plea tonight to the hon. parliamentary secretary, and through her, to our new Minister of Emergency Preparedness, is to please take steps to establish a national climate emergency task force.
What the former minister for emergency preparedness was doing, and what my question on May 29 pertained to, was the extraordinary wildfire situation across Canada. This situation was current, at that time, and it continued through the summer to this day. We were seeing wildfires across the country, and we continue to do so. The efforts really led a lot of us across party lines to call for a national force to fight forest fires force and a national water bomber fleet. In other words, they should not just be federal. However, in terms of preparedness for what we are going to see and what we see more all the time, we need federal government leadership. However, provinces, territories, local governments and especially first nations governments need to be at the table sharing lessons learned and moving forward together. There has never been an issue that demands of us a non-partisan, shared response of all hands on deck as the climate emergency does.
On June 18, 2019, as I mentioned in my question back in May, in this chamber, we passed a motion that we are in a climate emergency. However, the government has never acted as though we were in an emergency. We are literally in it every single day, with fires, floods, permafrost melt and extreme weather events of all kinds, from tornadoes to extreme windstorms to derechos. Nevertheless, we really do not have the response or the resilience to respond to these events when they occur to save lives.
Obviously, as Greens, we want the government to do those things that are required to avoid levels of climate crisis to which we cannot adapt, but that is another debate. We really need to take steps to reduce our emissions dramatically, but we also need to prepare for those levels of climate events that we can no longer avoid from what is baked in.
An example is the question of heat domes. We know that the federal government response in the national adaptation plan says that we will continue to have Canadians die in heat domes until 2040. Why is that? It is because the government has decided that, in a bureaucratic approach, the only way to save lives in a heat dome is to make sure that every Canadian has access to an air-conditioned space. That is about as far as it goes. However, 619 British Columbians died in four days in 2021. All those lives could have been saved with emergency measures that are easy and affordable.