Disaster survivors bring pleas for climate change action to Parliament Hill

OTTAWA – Meghan Fandrich’s voice shook as she recalled grabbing her five-year-old daughter and fleeing their home as flames descended on the village of Lytton, B.C., in 2021.

Darryl Tedjuk was quiet as he related the reality that his hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk in Northwest Territories was slowly being washed away by the Beaufort Sea.

The two are among a growing class of Canadians for whom climate change is not an abstract concept but a lived reality.

They brought their stories to Parliament Hill on Thursday, hoping to convince parliamentarians of the need to take greenhouse-gas emissions more seriously.

Their pleas came the day after scientists at Copernicus, the European Union’s earth monitoring arm, reported that last month was the warmest May ever on record globally, and the 12th straight month in which average temperatures broke previous records.

The 2015 Paris climate accord, which almost every country in the world agreed to, commited signatories to reduce emissions in an effort to slow global warming and keep average temperatures from increasing more than 1.5 C above pre-industrial temperatures.

In May, the average global temperature was already there, exceeding pre-industrial averages by 1.52 C.

Global warming is contributing to an increase in the frequency and severity of bad weather.

Recurring disasters

That includes heat waves, droughts, hurricanes, and thunderstorms, which in turn have led to more damaging and recurring wildfires and floods.

Alex Cool-Fergus, the national policy manager at Climate Action Network Canada, helped co-ordinate a visit to Ottawa by people across the country who have lived the reality of climate change.

Fandrich said before her village burned, she saw disaster stories in the news and thought people would be fine, because “they’ll rebuild.”

Having lived through it herself, she said she now understands that surviving a disaster is not remotely that simple.

She wants politicians to try to understand what it is really like.

“I don’t expect that the policy-makers have thought about it, except they need to,” said Fandrich.

“Except that it’s their job to connect with Canadians. It’s their job to represent us.”

Fandrich is a single mom who recalled in detail how she and her daughter had to flee on June 30, 2021, as a wildfire descended on Lytton, a tiny village of about 250 people that is 250 km northeast of Vancouver.

She said most people can picture the fire itself, and people running.

“You can imagine watching your town turn into a pillar of smoke that’s big enough to be seen from space,” she said.

“You can imagine seeing that pillar and the black punctuations of smoke that come up as another car explodes, another propane tank, another house.”

But what most people don’t imagine is what happens after the fire, she said.

“We went back to a burned-up town.”

The town, just seven blocks long, was 90 per cent destroyed. Fandrich was among the few who did not lose her home.

Nearly three years later, she said only two or three homes are now in the midst of being rebuilt. The two grocery stores that existed are no more. She has to drive nearly an hour to buy food.

Recovery challenges

Since the fire, Lytton has been hit with flooding and major snowstorms that added to the anxiety and made recovery even harder.

For his part, Tedjuk has been working on a documentary about the impact climate change is having on Tuktoyaktuk, an Inuvialuit hamlet of about 900 people 1,400 km north of Whitehorse.