Thank you.
I think Margaret covered most of it, but for sure science is very important when it comes to what's happening with climate change. We are adapting in our province, as I said previously. We've gone into more flood-risk mapping.
In terms of our municipal infrastructure, when we build any municipal infrastructure now, we take into account the one in 100-year storms that are more common than ever before. We develop berms around certain buildings for protection. We install bigger culverts. Our engineers are always thinking, “We have to go bigger; we have to go bigger.” As Minister Fox said, when you look at the infrastructure of wharves, they need to be three feet higher. Well, when we look at our culverts, they need to be at least 30% larger.
Then we do a lot of work in anticipation. Thankfully, we have good, good people who monitor the weather systems we have. I guess we do have some knowledge ahead of time that there's a storm heading our way, but we never know exactly what the effect of it will be. Fiona was the latest example of that. You would have heard interviews with people in Port aux Basques the day before Fiona, when they said, “We're used to wind. We've seen wind. We've seen wind 130, 140 kilometres before. It's no big deal.” No one knew what the ocean was going to throw at them this time. It has frightened people. They're afraid to go back to live where they once were. We are moving people out of these areas because of the risks for the future.
In all of our coastal communities we have to encourage municipalities to consider these larger storms with respect to any building along the coastline now. We need good, scientific knowledge to bring to the municipal world as well.