Thank you.
My name is Patrick Michell. I'm a resident of Lytton, British Columbia. In 29 days, it will be the two-year anniversary of the Lytton fire.
The Lytton fire wiped out an entire town, destroyed roads, destroyed electricity, destroyed communications and basically paralyzed the region for months. What happened on June 30 of 2021 wasn't unexpected. It was just unprecedented.
My community of Kanaka Bar became aware of climate change as early as 1990, when we got back on the land and saw something different. It was changing. By 1992, the word “anthropogenic” for climate change was indicated, and we came to realize as an indigenous community that the world's earth, lands and water were heating up at an unprecedented rate. This was creating these extreme weather events, which we call “heat, wind, rain and cold”.
By 2010, we'd written a document called “Memory, Loss and Sorrow....”, which basically summarized contact colonization and where my community was up until 2010. Building on the work that we had done, in 2015 we created a land use plan that assessed all the impacts on our traditional territory.
I believe it was in 2018—I don't have my document in front of me, but I've shared it with the clerk so the committee can reference it—that we created a climate change assessment and transition plan. We embarked on protecting our homes, our people, our property and our infrastructure from those extreme weather events of heat, wind, rain and cold and the ground impacts they trigger, be it drought, wind, fire, flooding or landslides.
We completed the climate change transition report and basically set about protecting ourselves by upgrading, renovating and retrofitting our infrastructure as best we could, but also by designing and building new infrastructure that could withstand this new extreme weather. We wanted to do this not because we were concerned about the economy. We were concerned about our future generations. Our future generations are entitled to have the same access—if not more—to the life and the quality of life that we enjoy today.
My community sits down and takes the resources that we have—people, time, technology and money—and we invest it in our future generations. What we've done to protect our roads, our wastewater treatment systems, our water, our electricity and our communications is not a cost. It's an investment.
In 2021, Kanaka Bar replaced its climate change transition plan with something called the “community resilience plan”. It sets out projects and programs that we'll be implementing over the next five years to once again re-establish these foundations—foundations that are resilient to extreme weather. We've now said that to be resilient means to be able to shelter in place during extreme weather events and then repair the systems that give us quality of life.
We've been warning the people who come to our region, the north end of the Fraser Canyon, for years that the infrastructure they built was built quickly and needs to be upgraded. The atmospheric river that hit the region in November of 2021 wiped out the roads—roads that are still not rebuilt—because nobody expected that much rain. We did. We warned people: Change the culvert sizes. Spend $60,000 today to save $6 million tomorrow. Do not go into our future in response mode. Change the conversation from cost to investment. Keep our roads open: To do that, replace the culverts from 1957.
The railroad was built in 1884, the CPR, and the CNR was built in 1913. They have not changed out their culverts. These rights-of-way that bisect my region, they maintain their land in a very poor way. I've said that in effect they've become dynamite fuses to our community.
I just wanted to share with the committee that I am optimistic for our collective future. The fact that this committee is looking at adapting our infrastructure for climate change gives me hope. Our children and grandchildren are worth it.
Thank you.