Good afternoon, colleagues.
Good afternoon, Ms. Auguste.
Thank you for being here today.
Thank you for bringing forward this private member's bill, which speaks to a topic of the utmost importance to many of our communities. As the member of Parliament for Victoria my community, unfortunately, is periodically afflicted by both drought and flooding, so these are experiences with which we are intimately familiar.
In fact, in 2021, our province of British Columbia was afflicted by a series of extreme weather events that had devastating impacts right across BC. The extreme flooding in that year not only cut off my region of greater Victoria from the rest of Vancouver Island, but it was actually severe enough that it cut off the city of Metro Vancouver and the port of Vancouver from the rest of Canada. The economic and social impacts as well as the physical damage of these kinds of events are difficult to overstate, so planning appropriately really does seem to be an item of the greatest urgency for this country and this government.
That being said, could you elaborate on how a national strategy, as outlined in your private member's bill, would help governments, the provinces and other agencies to proactively protect infrastructure in the face of extreme weather events such as flooding?