Mr. Speaker, Canadians have been generally lucky that we have been relatively free of catastrophic events. I am 50 years old and very few events stand out like the Ottawa ice storm or the flood of the century in 1997 in Winnipeg.
I am concerned as well that perhaps we are not building a culture of preparedness and not preparing in anticipation of these events. We can be sure that as climate change becomes more and more a reality, radical climatic events are going to happen more frequently. The magnitude of the ice storm itself ground down a great city in a few short hours. We can be assured that there will be similar events all over the world on a more frequent basis. There is no way to ensure against that level of devastation, but we can prepare for the human effect, and that is workers on the ground, public health workers, people who are deputized to leap into action.
I am surprised we do not have the type of emergency measures preparation going on today like we did during the Cold War. Drills would be held now and then in classes and students would be told to dive under their desks. They were told what to do in the event of nuclear fallout.
We do not contemplate disaster and happily go along because we are a peaceful nation and blessed with very few natural catastrophic events in terms of earthquakes, floods, ice storms and hurricanes. Let us not kid ourselves, though. We are bringing this upon ourselves, and we will realize more of these events with a vengeance as climate change becomes more of a reality.