For decades it was called capital spending and maintaining public infrastructure in a state of good repair.
Now it’s called adapting to climate change in the frenzy by politicians to re-label what should be a given — spending public money efficiently on public infrastructure to better protect Canadians from the impacts of severe weather.
Hence the Trudeau government’s announcement last week of $1.6 billion to help Canadian municipalities better adapt to climate change in addition to more than $8 billion already spent.
While that may sound like a lot of money, in reality it’s a drop in the bucket.
Long before climate change became a buzzword, federal, provincial and municipal governments failed to ensure that publicly-financed projects such as roads, highways, bridges, public transit, dikes, water and sewer mains, hospitals and other public infrastructure were properly maintained after they were built.
Two years ago, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities estimated the cost of protecting municipal infrastructure from the worst impacts of climate change — that is, severe weather — will be $5.3 billion annually going forward.
Last fall, the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario said that province alone has a repair backlog of almost $70 billion when it comes to improving the weather resiliency of municipal and provincial infrastructure.
You wouldn’t think such a basic responsibility of governments as properly maintaining what they build to withstand severe weather would be controversial.
But as Robert Henson in his book, The Rough Guide to Climate Change: The Symptoms, The Science, The Solutions, explains:
“What might seem like a straightforward response to climate change — adapting to it — is actually fraught with politics. There’s nothing especially novel about being prepared for what the atmosphere may bring …
“Yet there’s a tension between adaption and mitigation: to some, the former implies a disregard of the latter, as if society were giving up on trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
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Increasing the resilience of public infrastructure also means implementing such planning measures as disallowing any further development close to ocean coastlines and other major bodies of water, on flood plains and in forested areas historically susceptible to wildfires.
Climate change will always result in severe weather and we will always need to be better prepared for it than we have been for decades.
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