Flood-prone communities want more help from province, feds

Mayors of flood-prone communities say all levels of government need to do more to help them better prepare for increasingly common extreme weather.

Municipalities, Ontario and Ottawa all have "siloed" programs for flood mitigation and recovery programs, leaving cities and towns to shoulder too much of the burden, three mayors said.

"Communities like mine may be among the first threatened by shoreline erosion, flooding, extreme weather or algal blooms," said Pelee Island Mayor Cathy Miller, "but it is simply a matter of time before those effects meet more populated mainland communities. We need more help and we need it quicker."

Tecumseh Mayor Gary McNamara said Canada should be following the U.S.'s example. 

The Army Corps of Engineers is currently creating a plan for eight states along the Great Lakes to predict what the shoreline will look like in the future, and how best to protect the cities and towns along the water. 

The Corps has promised to share some of their findings, but Canada should do its own work, McNamara said.

"We're fragmented, because there's different studies and different consulting groups at different times, and it's not contiguous," he said. 

"To my knowledge, there is not one fund that ties municipalities into the province and also the feds to cost share the extensive infrastructure required to meet the challenge of climate change over the next 10, 20, 50 years," Miller said.

At the Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference last month, McNamara stood in front of thousands of civic leaders and asked if Environment Minister David Piccini would call on the federal government to do a resiliency study like the one in the U.S.

"Short answer: yes," Piccini said.

He added that he's stressed the need for federal infrastructure funding to include carve-outs for climate adaptation and resiliency and that federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault agrees.

"We recognize that this must be a three-level-of-government approach," he said.

Then, the minister said there will be an announcement on this front soon.

"I was heartened to hear that the federal government — looks like they'll be announcing this in the fall," he said after promising to keep pushing them on resiliency programs. "And with or without them, I know we'll come out with a program ourselves here in Ontario."

Piccini spokesperson Daniel Strauss refused to elaborate on what announcement the minister was talking about, saying repeatedly that he was referring to "shared priorities" between Ontario and the feds. Strauss said Piccini was not referring to the new round of the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program.

The PC government has spent $62.7 million on 550 projects to safeguard the Great Lakes since it was elected, he added. 

“It is difficult to ascertain what announcement Minister Piccini is referring to in the dialogue with the Mayor of Tecumseh," Guilbeault's press secretary, Kaitlin Power, said in an email.

Power said her minister has no planned announcements and no upcoming resiliency studies on Great Lakes shoreline communities. He could have been referring to an announcement through the National Adaptation Strategy, Power said, but added that she hadn't heard of anything like that.

McNamara said he also wasn't sure what Piccini was talking about. He said he was “very pleased” with the minister's answer overall, but that governments of all levels need to get serious about the problem.

Parts of his region are "losing land almost on a daily basis," he said. "We lost part of Highway 3. We look at Pelee Island, for example, they've lost like 10, or 12, or 15 meters of coastal (land)."

Southwest Middlesex Mayor Allan Mayhew said in a statement that his community's extensive flooding this year came at the same time as neighbouring municipalities', and "is further evidence that action plans and analysis are required."

Ontario has worked "hand-in-hand" with him so far, but "we hope this highlights an ongoing need for collaboration and future planning," he said.

Six municipalities in Essex flooded late last month during rainstorms and then Tecumseh got hit with an F1 tornado, McNamara noted. He said he recently had to dip into reserves and spend $800,000 on emergency repairs after water came over breakwalls and flooded homes. 

"We're trying to do everything that we can to really build resiliency in the system," he said. "Mother Nature's telling us, 'You better."