In a review of John Cherrington’s 1992 book “The Fraser Valley: A History” the reviewer comments: “The author follows the Valley's history from the eighteenth century when Stalo natives were constantly on guard against visits from raiding Yacultas, through the Victorian era, when waves of settlers fought harsh winters, floods and mosquitoes to build a new community in the Valley, to the twentieth century, when the depredations of two world wars and the impact of the automobile changed the Valley forever.” [emphasis added].
Simon Fraser was among the first Europeans to find the Fraser River in 1808, travelling along the river to the Pacific. Before the turn of the century, towns like Chilliwack and Abbotsford sprang up. I lived in Chilliwack and nearby Cultus Lake in 1951. The area is strikingly beautiful.
It is also an area of frequent flooding.
Over 200 years ago, in the 1920’s, Sumas Lake near Abbotsford was drained to create more farmland. That also created the risk of periodic flooding. The entire area is below sea level and flooding of the Nooksack river in Northern Washington forces water up into British Columbia and into the Sumas floodplain.
The recent flooding caused by extreme rainfall created a tragedy that was inescapable over enough time. But left wing media like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation took no time at all to blame the flooding on “climate change” as if the increase of 1 molecule of CO2 in 10,000 molecules of atmosphere over a century was all it took to spell climate disaster. The absurdity of that claim gets no coverage.
The parade of nonsense involved all the usual suspects. Elizabeth May, once leader of Green Party, immediately blamed the flooding on “climate change” and reiterated her incessant diatribe against fossil fuels. Former Liberal Minister of the Environment Catherine McKenna (often labeled “climate Barbie”) took no time to jump onto Twitter to post her immediate diatribe, expanding the “climate change” blame to include every bad weather day in B.C. for the past year.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made the usual pledges of federal support but stopped short of the usual Liberal rhetoric blaming every bad hair day on “climate change” but that didn’t stop New Democrat member of Parliament (and emergency planning critic) Richard Canning from claiming that “this is the direct result of the climate crisis and, without immediate action, will only get worse in the future”. Canning was not very forthcoming about what immediate action Canada could take to reverse nature or upend the laws of physics and was silent about what action was needed to make water run uphill.
It is time for our Liberal and NDP leaders to apply “Occam’s Razor” to these events. If you drain a lake and create a flood plain, it is only a matter of time before it will flood. Political ideology need not and certainly should not come into the equation.
The action that is required is civil engineering planning to mitigate the risks of the inevitable floods, not run around screaming “the sky is falling”.