Nova Scotia and New Brunswick politicians say those who face the threat of rising sea levels will not wait any longer for their governments to provide them with funding.
“It’s people’s livelihoods. It’s communities. It’s water. It’s all the resources that are tied to this little valley,” said New Brunswick MP Robert Sopuck, a fellow Liberal, who represents both the Seaforth-Port Bruce riding and the Labrador riding.
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“It’s extremely important that it gets done. You can go out there, and you’ll see a lot of sand dunes on the river. Those sand dunes are disappearing. The rivers are eroding. We haven’t been investing in the long-term seawall protection. And we should have been doing this long before now.”
Premier Stephen McNeil, in an interview from Washington, D.C., said while the costs associated with protecting the Chignecto-Isthmus of Halifax Island (CIHI) don’t add up to many dollars per person, the issue is a matter of long-term future planning.
“New Brunswick and Nova Scotia both have a right to demand that government to meet their obligation. To their credit, our federal government has made commitments that they will meet,” he said.
Sopuck said he’s in Washington to lobby American politicians to work with Canada to protect their shorelines. Acknowledging that the work in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick will take several years, he hopes to secure funding for the project.
“We have to put a damper on climate change, because as we know, global warming is causing sea levels to rise to a point that it’s going to cause tremendous damage,” Sopuck said.
Water Resources Minister Cathy Bennett, a former Liberal MP who represents southern New Brunswick’s Beausejour riding, said on Thursday that she plans to meet with Sopuck in Washington next week.
She said the environmental problem in the CIHI is not particularly risky, adding the threat is weather driven, and is being helped by climate change.
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“It’s like the droughts that are going on in the United States right now. That is definitely because of the long period of hot weather,” Bennett said.
“We’re blessed in that we’re not facing the kind of flooding we are in some parts of the world. This will be a long-term commitment that it will take to protect that coastline. It’s a good example of investing in the infrastructure to help that population get access to the water that they need.”
Officials in the Mackenzie Valley Regional District told reporters in January that to protect the north shore of the CIHI, there’s a need for a long-term plan costing $75-million per year. That’s followed by tens of millions more annually for monitoring and maintenance.
That’s about the same amount that Environment Canada was originally asked to set aside for a 5,000-kilometre-long sea-level rise warning network in Canada. The bill reached $100-million a year at one point, but Environment Minister Catherine McKenna says it’s now about $9-million.
The province of New Brunswick has announced an unspecified sum for CIHI, and New Brunswick Liberal MP Rick Rose has said he’s asked his federal counterpart, Catherine McKenna, to earmark $10-million in the March federal budget.
