Vaughn Palmer: Despite legislature rhetoric, Lytton no closer to knowing ‘when’
Vaughn Palmer
The Vancouver Sun
Opinion: All parties professed support for Lytton, but opposition parties unable to get commitment on when rebuild starts
Damaged structures in Lytton on Friday, July 9, 2021, after a wildfire destroyed most of the village on June 30. Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
VICTORIA — While the legislature readily supported an $8.36 million bailout for Lytton this week, the opposition parties challenged the New Democrats as to why it has taken so long to get to this point.
“We’re now at 225 days,” Green house leader Adam Olsen said Thursday, citing time lapsed since the village was destroyed by wildfire on June 30.
“I have to ask why a bill of this nature did not come forward in the fall session. We spent six weeks in this house debating legislation. This would have been a welcome bill at that time.”
The bill before the legislature this week provides three years worth of funding to sustain village operations, restore records, plan recovery and replace the loss of tax revenue from properties destroyed by wildfire.
The funding bill was approved in principle before the house adjourned Thursday. It is expected to clear the final stage of debate early next week and then receive royal assent.
But as the B.C. Liberals noted during debate, the money will go to restoring government operations, not homes, businesses and the rest of the community.
B.C. Liberal MLA Peter Milobar: “If this is the key to restoring Lytton — something as simple, frankly, when it comes to government, as record management, record storage bylaws which everyone would have known by July 1 had been wiped out by the fire — and it took us 7½ months to see it in front of this chamber, Lord help us with all the other things that need to happen to rebuild that community.
“Absolutely, the local government side of the equation needs help. It needs resources. It needs help with bylaws. That’s a given,” continued Milobar, leaving no doubt that the Liberals would vote for the bill.
“But the residents, the people that live in the homes that municipality serves, need help as well.
“Seven and a half months in already and not one building permit has been issued for a residential structure to be rebuilt. People can’t even get people in there to start looking at how to get plans drawn to start moving through the process.”
Time was running out, particularly for insurance claims.
“Most insurance claims have a two-year clock on them,” said the MLA. “Two years is what you get for most of them to rebuild.”
Several New Democrats touted the legislation as evidence that in the case of Lytton the premier and the government “has your back.”
Heaping scorn on that notion in light of all the delays was B.C. Liberal MLA Jordan Sturdy.
“It certainly doesn’t build confidence that this government has people’s backs,” he told the house.
“People who lived in Lytton are dispersed, displaced, evacuated and with no real plan or path on how they’re to return.
They continue to live on couches, in hotels, with friends. Will it never be their home again? Really no idea.”
The delays were driving up the cost of rebuilding, Sturdy noted.
The insurance industry has already boosted the estimated cost of recovery to $102 million from $78 million “because of all the delays.
“That’s to date. Where are we at in another six months or another year?”
The delays could also affect the fate of the community said Sturdy, drawing what he learned in a briefing with the Insurance Bureau of Canada.
“They fear that the community will actually dissipate and really never recover, because people move on. They find jobs in different places. Their kids get ensconced in other schools, and they just never return.
“The insurance bureau’s experience is that after a while — and we are getting to more than awhile — people take insurance payouts and they never return.
Several Liberals contrasted the delays in Lytton to what happened with Fort McMurray, the Alberta city ravaged by wildfire in May 2016.
Some 88,000 residents were evacuated and more than 2,500 residences destroyed.
But when Alberta’s then NDP premier Rachel Notley visited Fort McMurray six months later, the municipality had already issued 229 rebuilding permits and another 1,700 for demolition.
By the first anniversary of the fires, 652 rebuilding permits were proceeding and three dozen families had already moved into new homes.
There are differences between the two cases of course. Fort Murray’s municipal government, its records, and operations survived. Lytton was all but obliterated.
There were also significant holdups because of hazardous materials on the Lytton village site.
B.C.’s heritage legislation treats every building site as a potential archeological dig, needing separate permitting.
Stung by the attacks, NDP house leader Mike Farnworth defended the government’s record on Lytton.
The government put up emergency money last fall for residents driven from their homes.
The medical services building will be replaced. Ditto the RCMP detachment.
Farnworth, who is also solicitor general, blamed the fall floods that cut off Highway 1 for the slow progress on debris removal at Lytton.
“ We’ve made it clear that once that highway was cleared, that debris then would be able to be removed faster.”
“Recovery takes a long time,” conceded Farnworth.
“But to say that this bill is the only thing that has taken place in terms of recovery, that government has forgotten about Lytton, is absolutely wrong.
“We know the importance of the community of Lytton. We want it rebuilt, and it is going to be rebuilt.”
But when? Excuses aside, that remained the outstanding question as the week ended.
[email protected]
© 2022 Vancouver Sun
