Thank you for the question.
I would be crazy not to say that we and Princeton should be first.
We still have close to 200 families who are out of their homes here. We have no diking. We have a bridge that is half-built and hangs there as a reminder every single day of what has happened in our community. We have people whose lives have been completely uprooted. We have ghost houses that are boarded up, and we have houses that need to come down. The list goes on and on. Basically, all of our low-cost housing was washed away, and our rental availability in Merritt is 0.00. You cannot rent here.
This, again, is going to start to affect our investment in our community. People will not want to invest in a community that is so highly damaged. I am hoping that the Prime Minister's words will ring true and we will see some funding, because not only does it affect my community to live in; it affects my community to invest in. I don't want to lose investment dollars, because we all fight for the same thing, but I do agree that the damaged areas need to be repaired first. Then mitigate the other areas so this doesn't have to happen to another community.
Thank you.