Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I would like to thank the witnesses. They have mostly left, but I would like to thank the ones who are still online, as well as anybody else who's testified to this committee on this very important topic over the last couple of weeks, for their work.
For those who were on the front lines, whether they were printing pamphlets to ensure that everybody was aware of the evacuation plan, putting out fires, leading groups and making decisions or just helping out their neighbours, I want to thank them. I'm glad that this committee, collectively, is willing to provide sympathy and gratitude to those first responders and the people who are making those decisions.
I also want to take this opportunity to express sympathy and gratitude to the family of 24-year-old Morgan Kitchen, who lost his life fighting fires in the Jasper wildfire incident of 2024. That was a true tragedy.
We heard from a lot of really important experts, frontline responders and various levels and jurisdictions of government. I think we can all accept that it's tough to talk about this stuff when Canadians' lives and livelihoods are so dramatically impacted.
However, Mr. Chair, there were also a few lines crossed throughout these meetings. I referenced one earlier regarding an email chain that was shared in one Conservative member's tweets. Thankfully, that tweet has now been deleted, but tweeting out a professional public servant's name out of context and implying that the person was responsible for some wrongdoing resulted in death threats. That can be avoided by being responsible, diligent and honest, and by just doing our jobs the way people elected us to—with integrity and without trying to overly politicize natural disasters and these types of tragedies for points.
I seek to be accountable to Canadians for every tax dollar, decision and choice made by this government, but that doesn't involve tweeting out the names of particular people, including email addresses and personal information, on social media to score political points. As I said before, that is disgusting and it is beneath any member of Parliament to do that.
It's also beneath members of Parliament to invite people to this committee who have a public and demonstrated lack of integrity. Unfortunately, I received an email—to my personal email—regarding the conduct of a witness who came to this committee, and that is the conduct of Mr. Kris Liivam. This is disgusting, but I'm going to read the tweet that was sent to me today, because I think it's important that everybody hears it so that we understand the kind of conduct this witness undertakes on their social media. In response to a tweet from somebody regarding something on a football chat, Mr. Kris Liivam posted—trigger warning, this is bad—“All women are whores. Some take the cash up front, as in this case. Others wait a few years and take your house, half your savings, and you're stuck paying alimony for years.” On Twitter, he identifies as “Albertan but not Canadian”. In the email, the person who wrote to me today indicated that they also witnessed anti-vaccine, anti-residential schools repetitive far-right tropes, conspiracy theories, and anti-diversity, equity and inclusion rants, so it doesn't stop at the offensive characterization of women. They have also demonstrated a willingness to delete tweets because they're often flagged, even by Twitter, in this one case, as “Visibility limited: This post may violate X's rules against hateful content.”
This is an honourable place. It is an honourable place to work, and I think we need to demonstrate a diligence in making sure that the people we invite to this committee don't express those types of hateful and misogynistic viewpoints on their social media so willingly.
It goes beyond just that, Mr. Chair. A lot of MPs on the Conservative side who have come to this committee have continually suggested that the federal government did nothing to prepare. They lead their questions by saying that Parks Canada was not prepared and that they did nothing to prepare, despite the evidence that both ministers presented—the Minister of Public Safety and the Minister of Environment—with respect to the massive incremental funding that was dedicated to fireproofing and fire-safing the town of Jasper and Jasper National Park over the past five years.
In front of me, the content of my question, which I was going to ask one of the witnesses before we had to end that session, is the fact that funding for the overall fire program for Parks Canada in Jasper between 2011 and 2015 averaged between $13 million and $14 million. Since then, under our government, it's been $20 million, then upwards of $35 million, then $25 million, and then, last year, $79 million. That was to fireproof Jasper and to save lives, livelihoods and structures.
As we heard from Parks Canada officials, certainly more could have been done. More will be done in the future, but I also looked at a map of Jasper National Park. It's over one million hectares. The fire-affected area was about 39,000 hectares, and 39,000 divided by a million is a small amount. This fire was started by lightning, not by anything else. There are lots of causes of wildfires.
Our government has invested heavily in Jasper in forest management, in undercutting, in removal and in studies. It has spent millions of dollars, Mr. Chair, as I just said—four, five, even six times more than the Conservatives did in the past.
Do you know what it is, Mr. Chair? It's an outright rejection and an unwillingness by the Conservatives to acknowledge the role that climate change plays in the proliferation of these wildfires and the enhancement of the severity and frequency of these wildfires. They won't say “climate change”. They won't acknowledge the scientists who come here to say that the reason these are getting so much worse is climate change, and the reason climate change is getting so much worse is our emissions, primarily driven by the oil sands in Alberta. They won't acknowledge any of that, so they want to blame park management.
Mr. Chair, it's disgusting. It's disgusting to try to score political points off a tragedy like this, a natural disaster like this. It's unfortunate that we can't all agree that when these non-partisan officials are doing their jobs, when they're creating these plans and evacuation routes, and when their work results in zero fatalities of civilians, that's a success. Thirty per cent of Jasper burning is an absolute tragedy, but we also know that it could have been a heck of a lot worse, and we know that if we had been investing at the Conservative level of 10 years ago, it would have been a lot worse.
Mr. Chair, to say that I'm disappointed in the Conservative side and their tactics over the last couple of weeks is an understatement. I regret that they have gotten to the point where they're inviting people of such disrepute to this committee to provide testimony. I'm disgusted that they've used the names of non-partisan officials, who were just doing their jobs—from emails that they received in confidence due to their parliamentary privilege—in social media posts. This has resulted in death threats to those public officials.
Mr. Chair, I was eager to undertake this study, because it's important. Canadians and Jasperites deserve answers. They deserve accountability. I spoke this week to a Jasperite who was involved in the unified command. They expressed gratitude for shedding light on some of these issues. They also, as a Jasperite, expressed deep disgust with the politicization of this and these meetings.
