Madam Speaker, I am returning to a question I put forward in the House during question period back on November 22. It deals with something compelling, which is Canada's preparedness for extreme weather events, particularly fires, floods and storms of all kinds, and how the government could better prepare for them.
Certainly, the Minister of Emergency Preparedness and I have talked about this, and I would get the sense no one is against it. My argument then and now is that we are not prepared for extreme weather events of all kinds. I come from a province where 619 people died in four days in the heat dome. They were all preventable deaths. We have lost billions of dollars of infrastructure in the atmospheric rivers.
We have had extreme weather events and storms that have cost lives. We talk about human lives a lot. Many in this chamber may not know that, in the heat dome in the summer of 2021, three billion sea creatures died. Residents in my community who were dealing with unbearable heat went to the ocean to cool off, only to retreat because of the stink, and they wondered why it smelt so bad. It was because three billion sea creatures died.
If we are going to be prepared, we have to talk to each other. I have talked to people such as Barbara Roden, who is the mayor of Ashcroft, B.C. She told me that, for emergency preparedness, she realized that they were going to have to evacuate the seniors long-term care homes, so she said to get the school buses organized. However, in her regional district, some school boards decided not to keep insuring the school buses when the schools were not in session and kids were not going to school.
That is the kind of information we need to share with each other because some school districts keep insuring their school buses. The federal government could set up an emergency preparedness fund that canvassed every province, territory and indigenous community to see if the school buses were insured year-round because we may need them. We may need to use them when there are extreme fire warnings or extreme flood warnings.
My argument here in this place is not partisan. We need to pull together a standing committee on emergency preparedness that would do things such as exchange stories of best practices and figure out how to better prepare. We need to be talking to people, such as those from places like the First Nations' Emergency Services Society in Kamloops and former chief of the Kanaka Bar first nation Patrick Mitchell. There are communities that figured out how to take care of themselves early and how to rebuild faster. There are communities that know where the vulnerable people are and to rescue those people.
Severe wind storms, hurricanes, floods, fires and heat domes are now inevitable. We need to understand climate better. We need to understand that we need carbon pricing, policy and to reduce greenhouse emissions. We are at a point now where we cannot turn back the clock, and we cannot get back the hospitable climate we once had. We have to make sure we do not get into such a bad situation that we are in a climate in which we cannot survive, one that has become acutely lethal. We need to plan ahead for things. What happens if the power goes out at the same time that we have a heat dome? As Professor Blair Feltmate from the University of Waterloo has said, if the power had gone down during the 2021 heat dome in British Columbia, thousands would have died, not hundreds.
We are almost out of time, all of us, but there is still time to act. We need to pull together and act like this is the emergency that it really is.