Mr. Speaker, it is disappointing that we are back here despite the fact that Jasperites have actually pleaded now with Conservative politicians to tone down the political rhetoric on the disaster that claimed 30% of Jasper and the life of 24-year-old firefighter Morgan Kitchen.

In committee and here in the House of Commons, the Conservatives have persisted in making this a political issue. I hate to join them, but the fact is that between 2010 and 2015, the Conservatives completely ignored Jasper altogether. The Stephen Harper deficit action reduction plan cut more than $30 million a year from Jasper's wildfire prevention budget. This meant that, from 2010 to 2015, there was almost no mechanical thinning and there were very few prescribed burns.

That $30-million annual cut had an impact on 1,600 jobs and left the park worse off. In 2016, when we took power, we provided $42 million to Parks Canada. Since 2019, we have invested over $800 million. This is all incremental money, because the Harper Conservatives did nothing, to improve wildfire management, support provinces and territories and train over 1,000 firefighters. Our support did not stop there.

In budget 2021, our government committed $100 million over five years in Parks Canada wildland fire funding to allow critical firefighters conducting risk reduction, preparedness and response.

Our ability to control the weather or extreme weather in the face of unprecedented climate change and drying from the effects of burning fossil fuels is not absolute. We can work with various other jurisdictions, and we can do the mechanical thinning and prescribed burns. We can work with indigenous communities, such as the Indigenous Leadership Initiative and the Indigenous Guardians, to conduct some of those prescribed burns. This has a really positive impact, but that has not stopped the Conservatives from amping this up and implying that this was some kind of human error.

That is not what the witnesses at committee have said or what Jasperites have asked for. I will read a little of what Jasperites wrote recently in the Jasper Local, a newspaper native to Jasper. This is called “Recipe for disaster: Misinformation and wildfire”.

It reads:

Record dryness, extreme heat, high winds, and a lightning storm. This summer in Jasper National Park, all of the ingredients of a recipe for disaster were in place.

Now, two and a half months after that disaster came to pass, another set of circumstances— misinformation, toxic politics and facts-starved social media blowhards, desperately looking to pin blame—have lined up to wreak havoc.

I am sorry. I digress, but that is referring to the member opposite. It continues:

Jasper has taken some big punches. But if we’re going to get up from the mat, we first need to know we’re in each others’ corner.

We’ll need to trust each other. We’ll need to band together.

And we’ll need to ignore the bad actors trying to make political hay from our crisis.

July 22 had all the ingredients for an unprecedented disaster.

But if we can put politics aside and filter out good information from bad, Jasper—the town and the park [and all the people]—has all the right ingredients to make its rebuild unprecedented, too.

That is what our government is focused on. We are focused on fighting climate change and rebuilding Jasper.

Adam van Koeverden

$531,774.00