Thank you very much.
Eleven years ago, my ideas around what would become this bill began to jell when it rained for three and a half days over the mountains west of Calgary, Alberta in late June 2013. Two hundred and fifty millimetres fell on a late-lying snowpack, and the flood started. We had 15 people in the field from the University of Saskatchewan, including several professors who were colleagues. What we found was absolutely incredible. The generation of these floods was in the mountains, and they rushed down towards Canmore, High River and eventually Calgary. What we did not see in time, even after the evacuations were starting in Canmore.... Where was the flood warning for the province of Alberta that a massive flood was on the way? Four people died in that flood. Over $5 billion in damages occurred in the region. It was the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history at that time.
Almost a year and a month later, in Saskatchewan, which had had only snowmelt flooding since it incorporated as a province in 1905, the rain started. In eastern Saskatchewan, over 200 millimetres of rain caused rainfall-based flooding in basins that only had snowmelt flooding, at a time of year when the creeks are normally dry and farmers are looking after their growing crops and all that. Again, this overwhelmed the provincial capability, which is designed for snowmelt flooding—which you can plan for by watching the snowpack accumulate.
These were incredible lessons. We had to better understand flood forecasting in Canada.
The other lesson, as Mr. Scarpaleggia mentioned, was one from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. It was running an experimental product in 2013 that gave a reasonable estimate of the magnitude of the Calgary flood 10 days before it happened. They didn't communicate it to Canadians. It was just a test product, but it showed what was possible and gave us an aspiration for what Canadians could do if we brought our technologies together and worked together as a country on this exceedingly difficult problem.
Flood and drought damages have risen dramatically in Canada since then and are expected to rise further due to extreme weather and water events, thanks to climate change coupled with our growing communities and increasing agricultural and industrial production. Flood plains are growing, droughts are intensifying and many community farms and industries are impacted by this. In 2022, the “Aquanomics” report estimated that, up to 2050, GDP loss in Canada due to droughts, floods and storms will total $174 billion. In the Global Water Futures program, which I direct, we estimate that Canadian damages from these events since the year 2000 have exceeded $40 billion only up to last year. Things are getting worse.
How do we deal with this in Canada? Prediction in Canada follows a piecemeal governance approach. We have provincial and territorial systems developed bottom-up, which work to meet local needs, and a federal system developed top-down from the weather forecast system, as mentioned. Neither is interoperable and neither meets the full suite of current needs we have in the country. This fragmented approach has led to slow adoption of new technology and methods by the provinces and limited uptake of the more sophisticated federal system. There is a desire and need for common modelling frameworks, common approaches and coordinated forecast systems. This is what countries like the United States do. This is what Europe does. This is what other major countries do.
At Global Water Futures, we established, with the help of Environment Canada, a pilot forecast demonstration project for the Yukon territory. We developed a state-of-the-art prediction system for the Yukon River basin and transferred this to the Yukon government for its operational forecasts. Technical challenges in running such a complex hydrological computer system meant that we have been running the system for the Yukon government since 2018. Remember, the Yukon territory has 40,000 people. It doesn't have the technical expertise, so far, to run a system like this without assistance. A federal-provincial-territorial co-operative system could far better ensure that resources and technologies are available to support operational forecasting and prediction from these co-developed systems.
I have a few recommendations for how we might have a more coherent flood and drought forecasting and prediction framework in Canada.
One, the framework should be developed to coordinate local, regional, federal and international efforts—remember, we have shared river basins with the United States—and enable the authorization of state-of-the-art scientific and technological advances in forecasting and prediction.
The national framework should be co-developed with both a top-down and bottom-up approach to be mindful of local realities and to build credibility and trust between academics, users, and government policy and practice—