Transport committee  We are in the same position as far as the diking goes. The diking, as Mayor Coyne has said, needs to be a long-term, variable dike system that is able to cope with a possible Q200, and possibly higher. When we had our flood here, we saw 2.6 times more cubic metres of flow than we'd ever seen before.

Transport committee  First of all, thank you for the question. I'm going to have to preface this with the fact that I became mayor this past November. I was not involved with the flood reconstruction. I was just an ordinary citizen at the time. When we do talk about the situation we have with the diking, in two of our areas we still are using temporary military dikes.

Transport committee  I would have to go with Mayor Coyne's position. I understand that we should be looking at the areas that are flood affected and at risk, and the areas that aren't we should be not looking at those.

Transport committee  That's correct. There is only one Merritt, B.C. There may be hundreds of communities that in the future might be facing what we've faced, but they're not Merritt. They're not Princeton. They're not Abbotsford. Merritt is Merritt.

Transport committee  Sure, I can. We have a family. There's a woman named Jennifer Biddlecome, and her husband Everett is in a fight for his life. He has liver cancer. Their home on Pine Street was severely damaged. They cannot sell it. They cannot fix it. They cannot do anything with it. The whole idea was to sell the property to cover the costs for his liver transplant.

Transport committee  That is correct. These houses have to be taken care of in order for new diking to go ahead. We also have to relocate the river. We have a temporary dike protecting Pine Street, but eventually the river has to go back to its original flow, and these houses would then become unattainable—you couldn't get to them—so yes.

Transport committee  I would have to say that, at this time, that is a conversation that has not happened. It is a conversation that probably will happen. The insurance that I am talking about is the fact that some people were under-insured, and some had no insurance at all. What I'm hoping for is an ability for some form of insurance to cover everyone, whether it's provincially funded or federally funded.

Transport committee  That is something we will continue to work on. We have implemented a transitional housing situation right now, one of the first that's happened, probably, in the country. We brought in 31 trailers to house people who were in hotels as they work on their homes and return them to a livable situation.

Transport committee  We have the mobile homes that were damaged. They now have a different way of being set up. They are higher and are anchored down. There is the five-step program that is coming in from the provincial-federal government, so we'll be following those five steps. I think we'll be able, as a community that's prone to floods, as is Princeton, to possibly give our ideas, like we are doing here today, to help with the codes being changed.

Transport committee  Thank you for the question. Again, a simple answer for us is no as well. We are looking at the diking system, and the protection of our community is exactly as it was on November 16, 2021. When I say today's date is May 4, 2023, it's kind of shocking to know that we are still going into a second freshet with absolutely no dikes in certain areas.

Transport committee  Thank you for the question. I would be crazy not to say that we and Princeton should be first. We still have close to 200 families who are out of their homes here. We have no diking. We have a bridge that is half-built and hangs there as a reminder every single day of what has happened in our community.

Transport committee  Thank you very much. Thank you for the invitation to appear before the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities to testify regarding your study on adapting infrastructure to face climate change in Canada. I am pleased to address you from the city of Merritt and also from the traditional, ancestral and unceded lands of Nlaka'pamux and Syilx people.