Madam Speaker, I will ask for some forgiveness from my colleagues, as my voice has been impacted by the smoke we are encountering in Quebec and Ontario and on this side of the country. I will remind colleagues that British Columbians in my riding of Cariboo—Prince George and I have been experiencing it for a long time. I am glad that in the last couple of days and the last week, if there is a positive that has come out of any of this, Quebec and Ontario have been waking up to what the rest of us have been dealing with for quite some time.
In today's debate, I wish I had more time to speak to this because it is something we have lived with in my riding in the eight years since I have been elected. In 2017 and 2018, we had some of the worst wildfire seasons we have had in the history of our province. Indeed, in 2017, we had the longest state of emergency, which was over three months. We also had the largest mass evacuation in our province's history.
Members will pardon me for my skepticism about the government ever doing anything, because it has been eight years since the Liberals have been in government and six years since our largest wildfire season and they have yet to do anything. They stand with hand on heart while a phony tear comes to their eye and say they truly, really care, yet two weeks ago, when I appeared at the natural resources committee, I heard the government cut funding to the wildfire resilience program. That allows communities to be fire smart and to look after themselves to make sure they are prepared for the next wildfire season. The government has cut that. That is shameful.
My concern is that, after six years, I still have communities in my riding waiting to be made whole. Our colleague from Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon has Lytton in his riding. It is totally devastated. The whole community is gone. The businesses there and that whole community have seen nothing from the government.
These debates get very partisan. Of course, everybody takes shots, but let us remember that there are real costs to this. Lives and livelihoods are lost. Everybody has taken shots at the Conservatives over this time, but I will remind colleagues that it was our former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney's government that brought climate change to the forefront of international discourse. The acid rain treaty that we signed with the U.S. in the late 1980s and early 1990s was groundbreaking. It was the first time this debate really took place.
Our friend from Kingston and the Islands railed on and on, for about the first 10 minutes of his 20-minute speech, about how our leader blocked and filibustered last night in his speech. He asked how we can sit as a party and be a party to this leader. How can the member sit in a party with a leader who has so many ethical challenges? I know our colleague from Kingston and the Islands to be a decent person, but over eight years we have sat and watched the Prime Minister face ethical challenge after ethical challenge, yet the member still sits there and is a good soldier for the Liberals. He cannot point fingers across the way.
Our argument is that a tax plan is not a plan to fight fires. We have real people in real communities who are losing their livelihoods and losing their way of life, yet the government, in eight years, has done nothing. As a matter of fact, as I said in this discussion earlier, the Liberals have cut resources to the very thing they say they are doing. They stand there when they think it means something or when they want to get voted in, but after they get voted in they do nothing.
In 2021, the Prime Minister, in the eleventh hour of that election, came to my home province, pledged millions upon millions of dollars and said that he was committed to finding a thousand forest firefighters. Two years later, the Liberals have done absolutely nothing, so pardon me if I am skeptical that, under the leadership of the Prime Minister, the government will ever do anything with respect to climate change, wildfires and flooding. It is important that whoever is in power takes this seriously. The government is not.