Madam Speaker, Bill C-241 raises the major issue of flood and drought prevention. These phenomena are no longer isolated incidents. They have become recurring realities that disrupt our communities, weaken our infrastructure, and threaten our economy.
The numbers cannot be denied. Over the past 10 years, the average cost of insured disasters in Canada has been $2.5 billion a year. Last year, we reached an all-time high of $8.5 billion in insurable weather-related losses. That is the cost of climate change.
In Quebec, an average of $428 million a year is spent on compensation for climate disasters. These amounts are not abstract. They are very real. They represent destroyed homes, closed businesses, displaced families. They represent lives turned upside down.
That is not all. Prolonged droughts are affecting our agricultural producers. According to the Association des producteurs maraîchers du Québec, half of all vegetable growers have no insurance against drought-related losses because they cannot afford it. Meanwhile, municipalities are imposing water restrictions, and some even have to import drinking water.
We have seen forest fires ravage our forests. We have seen catastrophic floods force 6,000 people to leave their homes; that is what happened with the Lac des Deux Montagnes in 2019. In the riding of La Pointe-de-l'Île, we are also feeling the effects. We have to spend millions of dollars to combat riverbank erosion, and power outages are becoming more and more frequent.
These phenomena are all amplified by climate change, which the Liberal government has decided to ignore, pretending that it does not exist or making it even worse by investing in oil.
The Bloc Québécois recognizes the importance of improving forecasting and coordination, but why create a new federal structure when the Meteorological Service of Canada already exists and Quebec's environment ministry has recognized expertise, with 230 hydrometric stations that collect, analyze and disseminate data on water levels, flows and flood zones?
Bill C-241 is a distraction. It does not amend any provisions of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. It does not explain at all why these services cannot be provided by the Department of Environment's current meteorological services. I am actually a little surprised that my Conservative colleagues seem to want to support this bill at second reading, because, more than anything, I see it as another layer of bureaucracy.
Why would it be useful or necessary to create a new government organization in parallel to the Meteorological Service of Canada? There is no new funding. There are no concrete measures to support the provinces and municipalities. All the bill does is announce a strategy and schedule a report in two years' time. Meanwhile, disasters continue and costs soar.
Is the bill a response to the crisis or is it a communications exercise? Is it a tool for action or a smokescreen to create the appearance of action? The answer is obvious. It is all smoke and mirrors.
The Bloc Québécois is clear: We want concrete action. We want immediate investments to strengthen infrastructure resilience, support farmers, protect citizens and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
What do we see? We see some concerning setbacks: the elimination of consumer carbon pricing proposed by the Conservatives and supported by the Liberals; the suspension of electric vehicle incentives; and the scrapping of the zero-emission vehicle strategy. The government talks about adaptation, but is turning its back on addressing the underlying causes of the problem. It makes no sense.
We are proposing clear, costed demands: increase the disaster mitigation and adaptation fund by $875 million; create a co-insurance program for flood-prone areas to protect vulnerable households; invest $500 million to combat shoreline erosion; and transfer funds to municipalities, which are best positioned to manage the consequences of climate change.
These are tangible measures. They respond to the real needs of communities. They would have an immediate impact. If we want to improve flood and drought forecasting, we need to focus on smart co-ordination, not the bureaucratic centralization that the Liberals are once again trying to impose.
The Quebec government already provides the public with weather, hydrological and flood forecasts. For example, the Vigilance web application provides 48-hour flood forecasts for many rivers in southern Quebec. To prevent flooding, Quebec uses numerical environmental forecasting, which is based on the collection of recent meteorological and hydrological data, including temperature, precipitation and snow accumulation on the ground, as well as numerical models. These numerical models simulate environmental processes, meaning the interactions between different components of the environment, such as the atmosphere, water, soil, vegetation and ecosystems, in order to predict how they will change over time.
The federal government's role should be to facilitate the exchange of information, to fund advanced research and modelling and to support provinces and municipalities in their adaptation efforts.
Quebeckers do not want a federal website that tells them it is raining. They want roads that do not collapse, houses that do not flood and farms that survive droughts. They want a government that takes action, not piles of reports.
That is our position. I think it is shameful to see the Liberal government abandon climate action. Indeed, an environmentalist, the former head of Equiterre, resigned from his position as minister. That is very symbolic. We will see what happens next, but if we do not get our act together, we are heading in a direction where we will see more and more environmental disasters, and bureaucracy is not going to solve the problem.