Toronto Islands flooding should prompt real discussion on climate change
Whether the flooding is a product of climate change or not, the city needs to decide whether it's prepared to face our mounting environmental issues head-on.

thestar.com
By EDWARD KEENAN
June 5, 2017

This weekend, I wrote about the great treasure our city has in the Toronto Islands, and the sadness of losing them for part of the summer - they are closed due to flooding until at least the end of July, and if the rain keeps coming, it could be longer. The lost seasonal employment, the cancelled summer camps, the threatened small businesses, homes and buildings and most of all, the great escape we weekend beachgoers and picnickers will miss out on.

And considering it all makes me wonder about the prospect of losing the islands for good. What if the flooding of the islands this spring and summer is a preview of our near future rather than a one-time aberration? What if it is just a taste of the kind of slow city-altering transformation we can expect as the climate changes?

Are we prepared to do anything about it?

It’s not certain that this - or any other one-time weather event - is caused by global warming or is connected to some change in the climate. The seasonal levels of rainfall we’ve experienced this year have set a record, and could certainly just be a fluke.

But dramatically more rainfall - and much bigger storms - are also what we’ve been told to expect. The city’s own 2011 report on changes in projected weather and climate in Toronto in the coming decades specifically predicted higher levels of rainfall and precipitation and more frequent large storms.

And whether any of them is connected to climate change of some kind or not, we seem to have been getting wetter in the last while. When we had a major flood in 2005 (Ontario’s most expensive weather disaster to that time) we were told it was a “once-in-a-century storm.” Then we had a bigger storm (and flood) than that in 2013. Then we had massive flooding that shut down roads and GO Train lines in 2015. And more flooding in 2016. And now this year, not just flooded roads, but the islands closed and great swaths of our shoreline beaches submerged in water.

So you could look at this and think we’re like that proverbial frog in a pot of water on the stove, and we’re starting to realize the thing is getting uncomfortably warm. Are we prepared to jump out? The evidence doesn’t say we are.

On the same day last month that the city announced the Toronto Islands would remain closed, city council decided to punt on a fee aimed at funding actions to reduce the kind of stormwater runoff that contributes to the flooding of basements and streets and rising lake levels.

At the same meeting, city council deferred until later this month a decision on implementing and funding an ambitious climate change plan - one that would not just reduce emissions to contribute to a global long-term effort, but would take real measures to prepare the city for the irreversible effects that may be in our future no matter what we do (and no matter what is causing them).

And on so many topics, not just related to wet weather - social housing, poverty fighting, transit building - city council has a long history of talking about doing something, even making plans to do something, but failing to spend money to do something, even as the situation becomes critical. Why should things be different if the problem at hand is that parts of the city spend more time underwater?

We are like the homeowner who notices a drip-drip-drip coming from the roof, and not wanting to spend the time and money to deal with the leak, puts a bucket under it. It’s annoying, but after all, it’s just a little drip, and just this one time in a severe storm. Next time, just a couple buckets. We’ll take a look at fixing the leak eventually. A few years later, the home is full of overflowing buckets and the roof is ready to cave in, and much of the inside of the house is rotten from exposure to the elements. How did this happen when the plan was just to delay action a little longer, to save a little money and effort now?

This isn’t a problem unique to Toronto city council, obviously.

You could make the same argument about many other things, including virtually the whole world’s reaction to climate change. Told of the possibility of its coming, we decided to put off any expensive and possibly painful action until we saw more evidence. Seeing some evidence, we decided to wait a little longer to see if things would really get that bad - and make sure what we were looking at wasn’t some random fluke occurrences. And so on, until the time things become unbearable, and it is far too late to do anything about it. Then we wonder why we didn’t do something earlier.

Perhaps this is not all that. Perhaps the closure of the islands for part of the summer is just a one-time freak occurrence, and perhaps the city will fully prepare itself to fight off and prevent further floods and other climate and weather problems. Perhaps we shouldn’t get carried away.

But perhaps, too, the civic pain of the loss of a season with the islands, alongside washed-out beaches and frequently flooded roads - a drip-drip-drip that just starts to hurt our quality of life - is the time to consider the possibilities, and examine whether we’re ready to deal with them.