Wildrose rains criticism on Tories over flooding
Too soon? Did the Wildrose party get too partisan too quickly by releasing a 14-page, highly critical report looking into southern Alberta’s massive flood?
Highly critical? Make that hyper-critical.
That’s not how the Wildrose would characterize the document titled 2013 Preliminary Flood Report: Rebuilding and Preparing for Future Floods, which comes with 22 recommendations on “what should have been done to better prepare for Flood 2013, how relief and recovery efforts must be improved, what should be done to help victims recover and how the province can mitigate the damage caused by future flooding.”
It’s a benign description, almost friendly. You expect a level-headed, perhaps even-handed, exploration of the flood, especially when the Wildrose begins by saying the government is only “partially responsible” for the damage incurred.
But the report then goes on to eviscerate the government for its behaviour before, during and after the flood.
There is nary a pinky of blame pointed toward municipalities that zoned flood-prone areas for development or homeowners who bought houses in risky spots.
The Wildrose crosshairs are focused pretty much exclusively on the government of Alison Redford. Just about the only thing the Wildrose doesn’t blame the government for is the torrential rainfalls that created the flood.
“The government permitted extensive development on known floodplains and floodways without building appropriate flood mitigation infrastructure,” says the report. “It profited from these developments through collection of taxes and fees; it was in possession of multiple flood mitigation reports, including a recent 2006 report, which it hid from the public for six years; and it failed to even begin to implement the vast majority of the report’s recommendations.”
It is a highly partisan attack on the government dressed up as a helpful report. In that light, it is less than helpful and you have to wonder if Albertans, still recovering from the most devastating flood in the province’s history, will appreciate a return to the nastiness that seems to be an ever increasing facet of Alberta politics.
I had fully expected the quasi-truce that had existed the past month between the Opposition and government to dry up, but this is happening so suddenly, it is sublimation, not mere evaporation.
However, that’s not to say the Wildrose report doesn’t raise some points that need to be addressed, sooner or later.
One of the most common criticisms the government will have to deal with is why it ignored or dragged its feet on recommendations in the 2006 flood mitigation report from former MLA George Groeneveld that urged the government to provide accurate flood maps, prevent new construction on floodplains and deny financial assistance for “inappropriate development in flood risk areas.”
The government has tried to argue that even adopting all the recommendations wouldn’t have prevented the flooding. Yes, but doing so would have at least prevented a portion of this year’s devastation.
The Wildrose report includes a quote from a highly respected expert on Prairie rain storms, Prof. John Pomeroy from the University of Saskatchewan, saying, “You want a flood warning to come before the flood ... and we didn’t have that. We had our learning experience in 2005, but we didn’t learn from it.”
The Wildrose is urging the government to implement a flood-mitigation plan for the province and to start saving once again so it will have money in the bank for future disaster response. These are perfectly reasonable ideas and they perhaps hint that the Wildrose party accepts the warnings from climatechange experts to expect more severe weather events in the future.
But that would be too much to expect.
The Wildrose report in fact downplays the warnings of more severe weather events caused by climate change by saying “although the size of the flood was rare, it was neither unprecedented nor unpredictable.” And the report points to previous floods from the last century.
However, the reality is that the amount of rain that fell in Flood 2013 is unprecedented. We are seeing more severe weather events, and to suggest this is simply a natural pattern no better or worse than events from 100 years ago, might not be an aggressive form of climate change denial, but it is a passiveaggressive form of denial, and that’s a troubling stand to take for a party that wants to form government.
If the Wildrose wants to quote climate experts such as Pomeroy, it might want to include this quote from the professor: “We have seen increasing trends for long and spatial extensive rainfall events in the Prairie provinces that can be attributed to global change.”
And this one: “We’ve got different atmospheric dynamics and we’re getting events like this that were improbable or even literally impossible before. And we should expect more of them.”
Wildrose is right to criticize the government for not doing enough on flood mitigation in the past and to demand the government do more in the future — but I’d feel better about the party’s stance if it was based more on the science of climate change and less on the politics of a partisan attack on the government.