January 23, 2008

Premier Gordon Campbell
Check Against Delivery

Adapting to Climate Change: Business Planning, Risk Management, Emergency Preparedness

Anne Golden: He was first elected to Vancouver city council in 1984. Almost 7 years ago he and his government were elected to lead the province, the largest majority in B.C. history, and he was re-elected to office in 2005.

Since first being elected, Premier Campbell and his government have distinguished themselves with whole policy agendas.

I said to him when he came in today that I just love everything the government, your government, is doing.

Their first move, starting in 2001, was to turn around the ailing provincial economy. Their success in establishing a strong economic and fiscal foundation has given the province room to make some truly cutting-edge investments in other policy areas. These include: support for primary education, advanced education, training and skills development, improving literacy, encouraging healthy lifestyles, affordable housing, and building the Pacific Gateway for trade with Asia.

Under Premier Campbell, British Columbia is also leading the way in building new relationships with aboriginal people, according to the principles of mutual respect, reconciliation, and recognition of aboriginal rights and title. In recognition of these efforts, the Ahousaht First Nation recently bestowed on our Premier the name Chamatook which means one who is able to do the right thing in harmony. And I know, Premier, that you take personal pride.

Of course, Premier Campbell’s government has also distinguished itself for its achievements on the environmental front. I don’t want to steal his thunder on this topic, but I imagine he’s looking forward to telling you about his achievements himself.

Let me just say that he is doing an impressive range of things to advance B.C.’s vowed goal of making that province a world leader in sustainable environmental management. In fact, last year British Columbia became the first jurisdiction in North America to put greenhouse gas emission reduction targets into law. Both, the environmental goals that British Columbia has set for itself and the range of partnerships that it has cultivated with other jurisdictions in Canada and U.S. attest to the seriousness of his efforts on this front.

Just last week Premier Campbell’s government made national headlines by announcing a new $14-billion transit and transportation strategy, billed as a key measure in the province’s plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This plan includes four new rapid transit lines in Metro Vancouver and a new energy-efficient bus service along routes in Kelowna, Victoria, and Vancouver.

Now, to say that residents of Ontario might be jealous of this announcement is an understatement. In proportion to your economy, that $14-billion investment would be equivalent to a $46-billion investment in Ontario. I think that’s the kind of visionary leadership many of us would like to see spread across the country.

Now, one other thing that you should know about our speaker, that I found interesting, is he’s a remarkably avid reader and pursues that in his political life by working on behalf of literacy and libraries. More unusual, he has set up his own personal website, www.readonbc.ca to encourage reading among youths and adults. Another thing: this site features short book reviews on [inaudible] his MLAs are reading.

Actually, I’m an avid reader myself. But I find this kind of leadership important too.

I actually went on it yesterday. Now, you had your MLAs, but you didn’t have your own latest book. But that’s… I was too…. Yes.

Without further ado please help me welcome Premier Gordon Campbell.

Gordon Campbell: Thank you, Anne. I was thinking as you went through that, first of all, I want you to move to British Columbia.

It is a great pleasure to be here today to talk with you about a subject that I think has grabbed much of the attention and the imagination of people across the country. I think it’s important for us to recognize as we look to the future, we have some significant challenges to do with adaptation, initiation of what is clearly the impacts of climate change on all of our lives and, in fact, on global lives.

It’s important I think for us to note that there may be people that say they don’t like some of the edges of the debate or some of the edges of the question. But we are confronted with one of the most significant challenges of our generation.

As I talk about an adaptation to climate change, what I think is fundamental, the underlying principle of dealing with the issues is we have to be able to think. We have to be able to be thoughtful and to rethink some of the things we’ve done in the past, to rethink about how we can move to the future and not be frightened by what’s taking place, confront what’s taking place, and grab the opportunities of what’s taking place to make our lives and the lives of the people that we serve — that we serve in government, that we serve in business, in Canada and in the world — better.

I think that sometimes we can get paralyzed and think, well, we can’t get it perfect. Sometimes we say we can’t get it perfect, and we don’t even try to get it right. I think one of the things we have to do is be willing to try and make progress, step by step by step, moving to a destination that works for all of us.

We are often paralyzed by the status quo.

Our worlds are really shaped by what happened before. And often we’ll say—I don’t think you’ve ever gone to a futurist conference but often what happens if you go to a futurist conference is that the people that are called futurists are actually telling you what’s actually happening today and it’s comfortable as you sort of recognize what’s happened today you say, “That’s actually smart. He just told me what happened today!”

The issue for us is not so much what is happening today but what are we confronted with today and what do we want our country and my province and our cities and the world to be like in 20 and 25 years.

The first three things we have to do…. Certainly, those people that are involved in my line of work — in elected offices trying to provide a strong and a vital public place in Canada. We have to find, we have to discover a way we can get people to think long term. This is not a short-term problem.

There are problems that are in front of us right today, and I will go through a couple of those, in British Columbia, and how we’re responding to them.

Many of the actions, though, that we take when we talk about mitigation are actions that are going to be beneficial to people that haven’t been born yet. They’re going to be beneficial in ten, 20, or probably 30 or 40 years out from today.

If I go to a group and I say to them how many of you want me to think long-term, everybody’s hand shoots up. I say how many think that we should really have a public life where we’re focusing on the short term, the day after tomorrow or maybe next week? Everyone sits there. Then I say okay, great, we’re going to go long term. The next thing I have is a bunch of people coming to say: ‘That’s great. What are you going to do for me tomorrow?’

So that is a shift for us. As we look at the world we live in, I think we have to be willing to make that shift. It’s one of the challenges that we face.

Mitigation really deals with the causes of planet change. It deals with how we can reduce those causes, arrest the growth of greenhouse gases, thinking about the future and the long term, and make some investments now. It’s investments in our grandkids, and it’s actually our time to think about them.

My generation, the baby boom generation, are pretty used to thinking about ourselves driving the marketplace, driving the world to meet our goals and objectives. I think we actually now have to stand still and say to ourselves, “what are we going to do for our grandkids?” Make it simple for everyone: we’re just talking about our grandkids because the changes, that we know and that we can see and that we can confront, are going to impact on them if we don’t act now in terms of a mitigation strategy.

Adaptation deals with the consequences of climate change. It’s important for us to recognize that there are consequences that we live with even today.

I’m wondering if you’ve ever thought of something and said, you know, “If only I’d been there, I could have taken advantage of that and look where I’d be today. If I’d only acted back then, look where I’d be.”

So, I think today we are living in a time that’s just as significant as the Industrial Revolution was to the nineteenth century. Our actions have to be just as fast and just as innovative and just as driven as what we experienced at the end of the twentieth century, with the added visual media, with the Internet, with all of those things that have totally changed our world.

You know, it’s hard to believe that 20 years ago we didn’t talk about Microsoft all the time. How many people here have Amazon? The verb “Google” had not been invented. How many of you are Googling now? How many have ever heard of Google?

The fact is that innovation, investments, and job creation are all here for us to take advantage of if we’re willing to look at the world that we live in today with different eyes, not the eyes of 1980 or 1990 but the eyes of 2008. And with those eyes we have to look out to a future in 2020, 2030, 2050. Now, I think that’s a significant challenge, but it is a huge opportunity. It’s an opportunity for us to take the world as it is and to make our world that we’re going to leave for the next generation a better place for all of us to live.

There is no question in my mind that climate action is not only an ecological curve. It can also be a global catalyst for positive change. I want to underline that: a global catalyst for positive change.

So we should think to ourselves what is it that we have to do? Adaptation is a critical part of developing and building on that opportunity.

Where mitigation might be about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, minimizing the extent of global warming in the future, adaptation is about anticipating and reacting to the unavoidable consequences of global warming now and next year and a decade from now. It’s about making the most of the cards that we’ve been dealt. This is not about finding blame; it’s not about saying someone’s done something they shouldn’t have. It’s all of us, and I think that’s an important thing.

If we’re going to be successful in confronting this and taking full advantage of the opportunities, we have to stop thinking first about what somebody else should do. We should think first about what we should do, what we should do as individuals, what we should do in our communities, what we should do in our province, what we should do in our country, and what we should do in our continent, and what we should do in the world. But we have to be willing to think differently about those things as we look ahead.

For Canada this is especially important. It’s especially important because we are going to feel the impacts of global warming much more than any other jurisdiction and they’re going to be much more immediate. We’re seeing that already in the Arctic. We’re seeing that already with the melting of our snow caps and our glaciers. And, you know, they seem far away. The Rocky Mountains seem far away from Saskatchewan, don’t they? Have you driven across Saskatchewan? The Rocky Mountains seem far away from Saskatchewan. But what’s happening in the Rocky Mountains make a big difference to what’s taking place in Saskatchewan.

When we talk about the country that we live in and the wealth that we have, not just the natural wealth but the human wealth that we have in this country, I think it’s important for us to recognize we have to tap into that creativity, that innovation, that expertise.

Global warming’s going to have a big impact on Arctic ice fields, on glaciers, on snowpacks. Our water tables are going to be affected. That’s going to mean our soils, our plants, our trees, our food supplies, the biodiversity that we’ve all celebrated in our country, all of those things potentially could be affected.

The strategies that we adopt as a result of understanding the potential to improve the health and productivity of our forests and our agricultural lands and our community is the critically important way, I believe, in looking at the challenges that are in front of us. They offer the potential to minimize the threat and the damage that we face, like insect infestation, like the mountain pine beetle that we’re living through in British Columbia and Alberta. Right now, that pine beetle has destroyed 40 per cent of our pine forests in British Columbia, 40 per cent.

I’m just going to take a little moment here just for those of you who aren’t from British Columbia to just show you how the world has actually changed. The pine beetle was first discovered in the early 1990s. The response was—and this is not a criticism of anybody. The response was: Let the winter take care of it. All we needed was a cold winter to take care of the pine beetle. People think we get lots of cold winters in our times. In 1993 and 1994, it didn’t come along. It didn’t come along in ’94 and ’95. The pine beetle spread.

I visited a northern community. The mayor said to me, “You’d better focus on what’s going on with that pine beetle; it’s reaching our parks.” He said, “If you don’t get that under control it’s going to be damaging.” I was in the Opposition at the time. The government of the day said we’re waiting for a cold winter. We’re still waiting for that cold winter.

We have now, the government, invested $620 million in trying to deal with the mitigation in trying to stop the expansion of the pine beetle. We’re fighting, frankly, a losing battle. We expect by 2015 that 70 per cent of our pine forests will be gone.

That’s happened. You can’t go back and take it back. You can’t get those forest stands back. That happened.

What are we going to do about it? We’re going to adapt to it. What we’re going to do is we’re going to look at that forest product, and we’re going to say how do we build forest products out of that pine, that “beetle-enhanced” pine? It’s a different mindset: Beetle-enhanced pine.

Right now when you go to the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, you can go to the speed-skating oval and you will see beetle-enhanced wood in the roof. That’s one million cubic metres of beetle-enhanced wood. It’s the first time in the world we have that building construction in place. Fifteen Douglas fir columns will go across and cover a space the size of a football field. It’s called product development. It’s telling people what you’ve got and making sure you put it to their use.

The most environmentally sustainable building product in the world is wood, and we’ve got it, and we’re going to use it. We’re going to use it to help us build an alternative energy strategy in our province based on bio-energy. That’s going to drive the future, that we can provide many of the needs—not all of them—many of the needs of other jurisdictions.

Private mutual energy is a very positive thing in the world. We can develop that when we look at the time and say what are we going to do. That is an adaptation strategy. What do we do? How can we take advantage of the people that are living here and the economy that we live in?

I could sit there and be very upset. I am upset, but that’s not going to get me anywhere. So we have to look to where we’re going to go and what we’re going to do and our Minister of Forests, I think, is doing a very good job of that.

That’s just one example.

As we look to the future it seems to me we’ve talked about what we can do in terms of adaptation. Indeed we can protect people and private property from the threat of wildfires, plight, drought, and severe storms if we think about it beforehand and we act. We can improve our forest’s health, biodiversities, species protection, water security, energy self-sufficiency. We can better plan for the developments of our communities and investments in public infrastructure. All of those are part of thinking about our adaptation strategies, our mitigation strategies and changing our mindset to make this work for the people that live here.

It’s an entrepreneurial mindset. There is no question about that. We see opportunities. We have to find the opportunities in adversity, and we have to take those potential solutions to our manmade problems and put them to work for us in our jurisdictions.

The good news about the bad news of global warming is that it’s not too late to mitigate and to adapt to its impact. This is a message that’s conveyed by the intergovernmental panel on climate change, by the Stern Report, and by the overwhelming body of scientific evidence that’s at our disposal.

In any case, the alternative to adaptation and mitigation, for me at least, is unimaginable. I think there are times in this world where we have to sit there and stand there as humans and say to ourselves: We don’t know how all this works. We don’t understand how all of it works in the end. That shouldn’t paralyze us in inaction; it should prompt us to action.

There are things that we will know and that we can develop and that we can build on. And this is one thing that we know for certain, business as usual won’t work. The extent and the effects of climate change are going to get worse if we follow that business-as-usual path. We have to find a new model, a model that’s based on sustainability, a model that is conscious about the decisions that we’re making, is conscious about the resources that we’re using, and it is saying to all of us: Let’s be smarter about how we do this. As we build that model and those adaptation strategies, I think we’re in a position where we can make a difference.

But for me at least and for us in British Columbia it started with mitigation. Anne mentioned that we passed legislation to require our greenhouse gas emission reductions of 33 per cent by 2020, 80 per cent by 2050.

Now, people have described those targets as unrealistic. I can tell you this: As we move ahead, I believe we will not just meet those targets, I believe we will exceed them. But we have to change the way we think.

When I was first elected Premier I thought we were facing a deficit in British Columbia of about a billion. I set a goal. I said we were going to balance our budget by the third complete budget. I was elected; I looked at the books. We had a structural deficit of four billion. That didn’t change the goal. Then, we had to change what we were doing to get to the goal, and the goal was right.

This is the right thing to do. It’s a start. It will build momentum. We believe by placing it in legislation we are clear to our business community, to our public, to the will of what we’re trying to accomplish. People will describe those goals however they want. I believe we’ll achieve them. And I believe this: If you don’t set them, you won’t get there. So we’ve set a goal, and we’ve said we’re going to get there, and I believe that we can.

We’ve appointed a climate action team, supported by several of the co-authors of the international government panel on climate change. Its job is very straightforward. We will be laying out our government-driven climate action plan this spring, and they will be asked to look at the most credible, aggressive, and economically viable emission reduction targets possible for 2012 and 2016 that will be legally mandated, and they will drive us to our goals in 2020.

Here's what's important about that, and it's a different way of looking at this. We will not claim when we present our climate change strategy in the spring that we've solved the problem. We will say: "Here's how far we think we've gone. Tell us what you think we can do that will be economically viable and will get us to our goal." And let's take measures. Let's look in 2012 and see whether or not we're making the kind of progress we expected. Let's look again in 2016, because that will change the kinds of action that we take.

We are not looking for a headline solution. We are looking for a long-term plan that will be executed relentlessly and will be pursued until we succeed. And I [believe] that we can do that, and I think the climate action team will be an important part of it.

We've also recognized that climate change is not about…. It doesn't fit into our convenient and traditional [categories]. In fact, it doesn't pay any attention to either provincial boundaries or national boundaries. It’s global. So we've tried to take [manageable steps] as we've gone forward to say how do we build alliances with people who have like minds and want to move forward to help us create the momentum we need to drive changes that are so critical? So we're working with California, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Montana and Manitoba to develop a cap-and-trade system. The architecture of that system will be in place by August of this year.

We are working with New York, New Jersey, with countries across Europe and the European Union to make sure that our cap-and-trade system can comfortably migrate to the European system, so that we build more and more diversity, more and more economic opportunity that comes out of that system. And a critical component is if it actually says…. In the past, where in fact the benefits of not paying attention to this accrued to the private sector and the consequences to the public sector, what we're saying is: let's try and make sure that we reduce those…the negative component of [carbon], and let's try and make sure that we can trade it so that there is an economic reason to actually reduce your carbon impact to the globe. And I believe that's going to make the big difference, and it's going to change.

Last August the Premiers met, and all of the Premiers from all the provinces and territories agreed to get going with the climate registry, an important component and foundation document in terms of how we move and how we progress, because it will state that we're going to make sure we know how we're measuring things together, we'll make sure we can measure our progress together, and it will effectively, I think, by the time we're finished, be continental. The North American continent will have some standards that we can all meet, that we can all pursue, that our businesses can see, that our governments can see and that our citizens can see about how we're doing.

[Inaudible] it's going to make us successful because it helps us drive the changes that we have to make. There's no question about that. And to have the climate change, the climate registry, in place is a critical component of that as we move forward.

We're pursuing new strategies. We're going to become electricity self-sufficient by 2016. And this is important: 50 percent of all incremental power demand will be offset through conservation by 2020. You know, it requires us again to think about what we've got and whether we're using it in a way that — "thoughtful" one of the better terms — is thoughtful.

I was mentioning to Anne we've got…. How many of you have, you know, sort of chargers? How many of you have chargers for your cell phone? How any of you have a cell phone? How many of you have a Blackberry? How many of you use a charger to charge your cell phone or your Blackberries, and how many of you take your cell phone or Blackberry off and just leave it plugged in [inaudible]? A lot of people do that. It's called vampire power. It sucks a lot of power out of the grid with nothing [to show for it].

We and in Ontario…. We're going to have a special new meter that's going to be put into British Columbia households so that people can see the energy they're consuming when they're not there. I think they'll be surprised when we put that in place, and ours will be in place by 2012 — about a $400 million capital investment. When people look at what their power is, they'll start reducing their power, and the evidence is it goes down between 20 and 30 percent power consumption.

So those are the tools that we have to put in people's place so that they can make important what I call autonomous decisions. Business, individuals will make autonomous decisions. They don't need government always to make them. They will make them voluntarily if you give them the tools they need to make them, the information they need to make them.

So think about climate change right now, and we think about a farmer today. Now, farmers may decide on their own that they're going to plant a different crop because of climate change. They may not even [inaudible]. They plant different crops.

If you're in the forest industry, in British Columbia we're expecting that we will see the climate regions change. I mentioned to you to the pine beetle. Well, we're not just going to necessarily want to just go back and plant more pine where the pine beetle is. What are the species that we should plant there? What are the most economically viable? What are the ones that we can use the best? What places will we put the trees?

It is a critical component of our decisions. It's the fact that people are saying that the interior of the province may be a place, you know, with our temperatures having gone up in western Canada and Alaska up about three or four degrees in the last century…. That may be a place that actually cedar starts to grow. I don't know that yet, but I can tell you we're going to need to get the information required so that when we do plant whatever we plant in our forests, it's not just a question of carbon, but it's generating some economic potential for the future for the generations that are going to follow.

In British Columbia, in Ontario, and from Okanagan to Niagara, [we have] some of the best wines and some of the best wine-growing country in the world today. What grapes will they plant twenty years from now if it's one-half a degree higher average temperature? They're going to be thinking about that now.

Adaptation means we go out and we do the work, we do the studies…. If we do the science that's necessary, we will be in a position where in fact people can make the right choices for their future, and whether it's the wine industry, which may move a little bit to the north in British Columbia…. I'm not sure whether it'll be north or where it will move in Ontario, but it could move to the north. It could add additional opportunities if you want to plant the right grapes. You want to make sure that the soil is the right kind of soil for the grape that you're growing. You know, if you don't have good grapes and you don't have good grape-growing country, you don't have good wine.

There's no question that one or two degrees [inaudible] will shift, and we can see some of our climate regions in British Columbia are moving north today. What are we going to do to adapt to it? How do we make sure that people get the information they know so that they can make those choices?

That's one of the things that I think we all have to embrace as one of our responsibilities as government. Next week we'll be meeting in British Columbia. The Premiers are coming together. We announced in August we'd have an adaptation conference in British Columbia at the end of January. We're doing that next week. One of the things that we have to talk about is: how are we going to work together? You know, again, the boundaries…. Anyone that thinks that boundaries matter should ask the province of Alberta how much the pine beetle paid attention to that border between B.C. and Alberta: no attention whatsoever. You know, I've found that pine beetles particularly…. They don't even read government licence plates. I don't understand it.

You know, so we have to find ways that we are actually providing new ways, new tools for us to actually respond to this in a way that's constructive. Every province is doing some science. Every province is doing some adaptation strategies. What are the things that we can do that we could bring together so that provinces can work together? British Columbia and Alberta are working very well together on a number of these initiatives. We'll work together on a water initiative.

We think we have to look at more of that, and we have to provide the tools for the provinces to take advantage of what's in front of us. So British Columbia will be establishing in this spring a new Pacific carbon trust, and it's important for that carbon trust to be there, because it allows people to apply their offsets as we go through this [inaudible] period of time that they know that they can depend on and that they know will make a difference.

Our goal is [stimulating] investments in home-grown projects that will reduce, sequester and avoid greenhouse gas emissions that otherwise wouldn't have happened. And if we want people, businesses to be able to invest in the Pacific carbon trust or to get offsets from that — governments can; businesses can — we'll want people to know that this is a top-quality project, and we're going to make it available and make it available up and down the coast with the Western Climate Initiative, and we may reach beyond that as well. We think that's an important mitigation strategy, because it will make a difference over the long term and, again, it make us think in different terms as we move forward.

We as a province will be adopting California tailpipe emission standards. [We put them] in legislation this year. Now, when I say that, I want you to know that obviously we're not [going to act] alone. Until California and the other states of the United States are able to move forward with those standards, it would be not very smart or bright for British Columbia to act on them. We have four million people in our jurisdiction, and when you think of 20 American states and 12 Canadian jurisdictions that have all said they expressed support for those standards, that represents a population of 176 million people; 47 percent of the North American marketplace. Of course, the market will respond to that market.

California standards are pretty sensible. They go out over time. They were going to start in 2009 and go to 2016. They now have the federal government in court in the United States to allow them to do that. I met with the Governor of New York and New Jersey [in the spring]. They're very interested in moving towards California emission standards as well.

And this is what really happens when you do this. They'll reduce the average vehicle emissions by some 30 per cent by 2016 compared to the 2005 ones, and at least as [California's modelled it], they see a net benefit, the difference between moving to their standards and the standards that have been set by the federal government of the United States, is 315 million cumulative tons of CO2 by 2020.

We have to act quickly. We have to act directly. The more we do now, the better off we'll have and the less impact and the less challenges we'll face in the future. I believe we should be adopting those standards. I think that it's important for us not to search for the lowest common denominators but for us to reach…. We should be reaching high to drive to a new place for us all in the marketplace in North America.

In British Columbia we'll also be adopting California's low carbon fuel [inaudible] standards. We'll be initiating several new strategies to reduce B.C.'s reliance on fossil fuels. All that is critically important.

As Stern said in his report, without strong and growing mitigation, the physical limits to and the costs of adaptation will grown rapidly. Adaptation will in most cases provide local benefits realized without long lag times in contrast to mitigation. Adaptation responds to the effects of climate change, and in many ways, as I mentioned, it would be autonomous decisions that are made by individuals, by companies as they look to how they can make sure that they are moving forward and building the kind of future they want.

But we in government will also play a critical role. There’s a little bit of a tendency when governments say let’s go and develop this information management, and people say it’s just airy-fairy stuff and it’s not going to make any difference. It makes a difference to have the science in place and to get the facts so that you can act.

Getting the facts does not stop you from acting today. We should take the first steps today and the first actions now, and we will build on those actions in the future as we build more science, as we work together. It is a critical part of adaptation and mitigation that allows us to maximize our investments. When we know what we’re doing and we know why we are doing it, we will get far more benefit from the investments that we know we have to make.

I just wanted to use this as an example, two examples from British Columbia. The first was last spring. Last spring we faced one of the most hazardous flood situations we’d ever faced. Now, what typically happens when the federal and the provincial government work together? I’d say there’s a problem; they say there could be a problem. I say no, there’s really a problem; they say, well, there might be a problem. I say, well, could you share some money? They say no, we can’t do that yet. I say, could you please do it now? They say, well, could you talk later because we’ve got a budget next year. No, we’re having a parliamentary committee.

This is what happened last year. We said we have a problem. We said we have to move now; we have to move between January and April of 2007; we have to act on this problem now. We cannot take the chance it’s not going to work. We can’t take the chance this flood is not going to take place. So we took $33 million and said we’ve got a $33-million program; we’ll be working with local communities. Get the information in. Where can you be diking? Where can do the best with the most money? Make sure that we’re investing the money wisely; $33 million was really restricted by what we could do in the time that was available for us to act.

We got some information, and we said we’re going to go and ask the federal government to support us with 50 per cent. If they’re not there, we’re going to do it. The federal government was there, not because they went through processes but because they thought of what we needed to do together. So our $17.5 million was matched by their $17.5 million. We had a partnership that worked for people throughout the province.

I can tell you that without that partnership, we could have had the worst flood in the lower mainland that we’ve had.

That partnership works. And that’s going to require a new way of thinking in government as well. What do we need to do together?

I believe that one of the things that we should be looking at as we look at climate change is we should be saying to ourselves what are we going to do about flooding. How do we build that partnership now? Now that we know that works, how it can work, let’s get a partnership in place that will work.

I actually take my hat off to Scott [Inaudible] for the work that he’s doing with this on that.

We now in British Columbia have $100-million flood protection program that we put in place last September. We’ve been working with municipalities. We’ve been working with the federal government, and we hope that the federal government will match it.

The reason is you save a lot of money when you don’t have billions of dollars in damages. I would rather invest a few million upfront and save billions of dollars of cost down the road. And the federal government saw the reason behind that argument, as well.

So I think those are things that we have to know and we have to do. We have to monitor ourselves in our own jurisdictions, with hydrometric monitoring networks. So [inaudible] we’ll be doing that in British Columbia. We’ve got to understand and predict what’s taking place.

Today in British Columbia, in Prince George they are facing a pretty significant ice jam. Now, where did that ice jam come from? Why did it suddenly happen? It was that pine beetle. Remember that pine beetle I told you about? There’s a couple [inaudible] trees. Dead trees don’t drink as much water as living trees. A living tree takes about 40 gallons a day of water into its system.

So we’re watching a substantial increase in runoff. So the former 200-year limits that we set for our dikes are not high enough. That’s going to require us to change. It may require us to change where we put things, how we do things. But we know [inaudible] about that. We can act on that information now, and we’re attempting to adapt to that information as we move ahead.

As you look at climate change we know, for example, working with other jurisdictions, that by working together and learning one another, we can help improve our ocean health, air and water, exact measures to prevent wildfires. All those things are possible — and certainly to protect the significant damage that we can get from those things.

I think as we look to the future it’s important for us to say the world is as it is. How do we apply our expertise, our knowledge to make sure that we can make it a better place in the future. I think that one of the things that’s critical to that is the science, is the information.

We take our water for granted in Canada. You know there’s an awful lot of water in places that it’s not needed and not enough water in places where it is needed. We’ve all watched as the flood-drought syndrome that’s starting to take place, certainly in western Canada. It’s important for us to look at how we deal with that, with those issues.

And it’s important for us to deal with it in concert. So next week as the Premiers come to Vancouver, I’m going to be encouraging them to work at least an inter-provincial and, hopefully, a national water conservation strategy. I believe we should have a national water security strategy, a national flood mitigation strategy. I think we should be looking at our forests across our country and saying how do we make sure that we know the kind of forests we should be replanting, how can we stop the level of deforestation we’ve had and move closer and closer to net deforestation across the country. All of those things are going to require all of us, all of us. It requires the forest industry, the federal government, the provincial governments of New Brunswick and British Columbia. It requires all of us. We can all learn from one another.

When the caucus coordinator said they wanted to bring together this assembly on adapting and mitigation for energy, I was pleased to accept the invitation. I basically accepted because we’ve all got to [inaudible]. We have to have the businesses of Canada take a lead. We have to have governments and premiers. We have to tap into our entrepreneurial spirit, into our ability, the imaginative and creative; imagine the future we want; and drive all of our [inaudible] towards that future.

We’re not going to make all the right choices. We won’t necessarily make all the right decisions.

But I know this: if we’re motivated by the right concerns and by the right principles, we will have an opportunity to lead not just in Canada but to lead the world. We are in an exceptional position because of the people that live here, because of the resources we have, because of our ability to openly communicate with one another. We can be leaders. And if you lead in the development of [inaudible], if you lead in water management, if you lead in forestry, if we become as well known for planting trees as we are for cutting trees, we have an opportunity to expand our economy and the opportunities that people have and experience in this country.

It’s going to take long-term strategies. It might be tough for some politicians, for all of us to figure those out. It’s going to require citizens and communities, cities and provinces, and the federal government all working together.

If we keep our eyes on the big picture, if we keep focused on the things that we value and we want to get into better shape for the next generation [inaudible] to our grandchildren, I think we can take these seismic shifts that are taking place, that are shaping our world and that are shaping our country, and we can put them to use for those who will follow us.

You being here today have said that you want to be part of the solution, and you are all part of the solution. I know there’s no place in the world that will do a better job, that will be a greater leader in this initiative than Canada.

Thank you very much.