Floods remind us we haven’t learned lessons of the past

OTTAWA—In 1791, after a century of habitation in the flat plains along the Saint Lawrence River, an earthquake hit the parish of Kamouraska, Que., damaging the church and some of the town’s buildings. The priest at the time, Joseph-Amable Trutault, called it a “sign from God” the parish should move. However, he had an ulterior motive: he had experienced the annual flooding that hit the low-lying town each year when the Saint Lawrence and the nearby Kamouraska River overflowed their banks. When he built the next church on higher ground a few kilometres away, the town’s people followed. Today, there is a tourist stop by the road in the middle of farmland and a graveyard marking the “berceau” (cradle) of Kamouraska. The actual village of is a bustling hub above the river, with sea walls to protect from the spring tides, and dikes at either end of the village to protect reclaimed farmland. The story of Trutault has always struck me as instructive, and is pertinent this week, as floods hit riverside towns and cities in Quebec, Ontario, and New Brunswick. While volunteers and the military fill bags with sand, it seems as if the lessons of even recent history have been lost. In 2017, as the first rains began to fall, I was cycling beside the Ottawa River in Gatineau. On one side of the road were front lawns and houses, on the other side, the river lapped at the shore, with no berm or dike to stop it. In a day or two, the floods overwhelmed those homes. As they most likely have again this year. This past winter, when the conversation turned to the accumulation of snow, there was inevitably mention of how it would affect spring flooding. And, yet, when the rivers began to rise with the inevitable spring rains, the response among public officials and the media seemed to be astonishment. As he toured some of the flood-stricken areas in Gatineau and Montreal, Quebec Premier François Legault made it clear the Quebec government would pay up to $200,000 to buy the homes of people who had built on flood plains, and leave the areas vacant. This sounded reasonable, but when one is talking about a community of 100 or 200 or more homes, that is a bill in the tens of millions of dollars. Multiply that by the thousands, and the bill is in the billions. As well as the hit to budgets, it does not take the human cost of moving into account, nor does it look to effective solutions applied elsewhere. In the 1970s, the Brewer Park neighbourhood beside Carleton University in Ottawa was flooded regularly by the neighbouring Rideau River. For students at the time, the campus was almost cut off. With great foresight, a system of dikes and berms was built in the area, which has seen new construction and no further threat from the river. A few years ago, a berm was built in the Britannia area, which held off the rising river in 2017, and so far this year. And High River, Alta., was hit by devastating floods in 2013, but for $200-million has built seven kilometres of dikes to protect the town. In Winnipeg, a massive floodway was built in the 1960s for $62-million under the aegis of then-Manitoba premier Duff Roblin. At the time, people mocked the initiative as “Duff’s Ditch.” Today, it has paid its way dozens of times over and is credited with saving the Manitoba capital, notably in the “flood of the century” in 1997. There is also the example of the Netherlands, a country that has existed and thrived, despite many coastal areas being below sea level. Its dikes and flood control are legendary. Although dikes, berms, and floodways are sometimes not the answer (as the recent failure of the dike in Sainte-Marthe-sur-le-Lac, Que., has shown), they are a more sophisticated response than “leave your homes forever.” And they end up costing less in the long run. The problem of long-term infrastructure lies in its initial expense, detailed planning requirements, and buy-in from politicians and the public. The current federal $180-billion infrastructure fund seems ready-made for these initiatives. The probability is with global warming these annual floods are here to stay, so governments have to plan for them. In public administration courses at university, we were warned never to act incrementally in government, but rather to plan rationally or proactively to prevent or mitigate problems. Whenever I see volunteers, the military, and politicians filling and stacking sandbags to hold back an overflowing river, it reminds me how we ignore those lessons at our peril. Andrew Caddell is retired from Global Affairs Canada, where he was a senior policy adviser. He previously worked as an adviser to Liberal governments. He is a fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and a principal of QIT Canada. He can be reached at pipson52@hotmail.com. The Hill Times