[Inaudible—Editor] invent filibustering, Mr. Leslie? I don't know.
When you represent a coastal riding, as many of my colleagues know, even across the table, you're not able to treat climate change as a theoretical debate or a distant future problem. The environment drives our economy and shapes our culture, and it increasingly threatens rural, urban, coastal and central communities alike through extreme weather events.
In Nova Scotia, we're not waiting for climate change to arrive, because it is already here. We saw it in 2022, when hurricane Fiona tore through the Atlantic provinces. It destroyed homes, devastated our coastlines and left communities in the dark—literally. I saw it first-hand in my riding of Halifax in 2023, when the Upper Tantallon wildfires forced residents to abandon their homes and filled our skies with smoke. We see it in the historic flash flooding that washed away roads and infrastructure, and in the rising sea levels that threaten the very foundation of the Halifax peninsula.
Let me be super clear about this. The science is settled. The debates over whether climate change is real and over whether human activity is the primary driver have been over for decades. The work of this committee is to advance action on climate and the environment. The global scientific community is unequivocal. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is unequivocal. Our own Canadian scientists are unequivocal.
In Nova Scotia, our provincial climate risk assessments paint a very stark picture. By 2050, we're looking at significant temperature increases and a severe rise in extreme weather events. We're expecting an increase in relative sea level of up to a metre by the year 2100. That's going to devastate our coastal communities, which should concern many members of this committee.
Our oceans are warming, becoming more acidic and losing oxygen, which is a direct threat to our vital fisheries and marine ecosystems. We're even facing new and emerging threats to our fresh water quality because of heavier rainfall and warming lakes, which is also a problem for many members of this committee—in fact, all of them. We all depend on our freshwater resources for our very survival.
To stand in this committee or anywhere in this country and attempt to cast doubt on any of these facts is irresponsible. It's failing to fulfill our collective duty to the Canadians we were elected to protect. To try to interfere with the good progress this committee is trying to make across its approved studies and witnesses who have been invited is also irresponsible.
The science is settled, and it's past time that our political discourse reflected that reality, which brings me to the core of why I'm speaking to this now. If the science is settled and the impacts are devastatingly clear, why haven't we taken all of the necessary steps to address the climate crisis? Sadly, the answer lies with our political institutions. Too often, the fight for our planet is derailed by cheap political plays and hyperpartisanship. Climate change is the greatest existential threat of our time, yet it's routinely reduced to a wedge issue, or we just play little games that waste time in committee meetings that are intended to be very serious. It's seen as a tool to score cheap points in the polls, rather than as a crisis demanding a unified, national response.