Thank you for the question.
Certainly the federal government has a role to play in ensuring the resilience of our telecommunications systems. We haven't researched the specific mechanisms that are available to do so, but certainly its role in regulating those systems and the providers of those systems is to ensure that they are constructing and maintaining infrastructure that is designed to face the future climate.
With respect to the second question, there are always challenges when dealing with a large complex democracy and moving major issues like adaptation forward. Certainly adaptation has taken second place to mitigation, which is obviously still important. Reducing our greenhouse gas emissions is the number one form of adaptation we can take. However, it has taken up most of the air in the room, and there hasn't been as much attention on adaptation.
As well, the benefits of adaptation are realized over quite a long term, and certainly well beyond individual electoral cycles in many cases. Therefore, it's often difficult, with more pressing priorities, to justify expenditures that may not pay off—many won't ever pay off in very dramatic and showy ways—until decades down the line.