From a post at Facebook.. not everyone uses the platform so I publish Black's commentary here for the record, as follows:
The following is a link to the video of Mayor Kogon and I at the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications from this past Wednesday. We each had an opportunity to talk about the impacts on our communities and then answer questions for an hour before adjournment. Our segment starts at about 19:43:00
This is the written record of my opening:
"Mister Chair and members of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications, I want to thank you for this opportunity to be a witness before you today. My name is Andrew Black, and I am the Mayor of Tantramar, formerly the municipality of Sackville and Dorchester. I am also the President of the Union of Municipalities of New Brunswick and as such, have a seat on the board of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. I am here today to speak to you about the tenuous position that my community is in regarding the Chignecto Isthmus and the fear and concern that we live with day by day.
My beautiful community is situated on the banks of the Tantramar River which is connected to the mighty Bay of Fundy directly, home to the highest tides anywhere on Earth. We are also situated on the breathtaking Tantramar Marsh and countless salt and freshwater marsh areas. The people of Tantramar count themselves lucky for living where we live and the chocolatey mud flats, the stark flat beauty of the marsh and the teeming biodiversity of those areas have been ingrained and interwoven into our history, our art, music, culture, educational opportunities, tourism, and economy. But, Mister Chair, there is consistent dread that it will all be washed away in one perfect storm.
The Chignecto Isthmus is a narrow piece of land that connects New Brunswick to Nova Scotia stretching from the Bay of Fundy on one side and the Northumberland Strait on the other. Most of that land is well under sea level and it would take little effort to inundate it with flood water. The former Town of Sackville has had its fair share of floods in its past from many parts of the town being underwater in 1962 and then again more recently in 2015 and once more in 2016 from freshwater flooding, exasperated by high winds, high tides, and storm surges. In 2022 Hurricane Fiona blew through the Atlantic Provinces and my community saw damage and destruction from downed trees and flooding that was significant but Mister Chair, I am here today to say that we dodged a bullet. If the hurricane had followed a different path and the tides had been right, the dikes would have breached, the CN rail bed washed over, and my community would have been underwater and cut off from the vital connection to Nova Scotia. Last month we dodged a bullet again when hurricane Lee made landfall, this time having the storm track directly up the Bay of Fundy on the day/night of the highest tides and a full moon. Fortunately, it was starting to blow itself out and was not as bad as people had expected but the anxiety and fear on people’s minds in my community leading up to that storm was palpable. The reason for this Mister Chair is because we are all aware now, after floods of the past and a quickly changing climate, that it is not a matter of if but a matter of when the isthmus will be underwater.
The truth is, what the dikes and the CN rail line that parallels the TransCanada highway protects is difficult to quantify because the impact on such a devastating situation such as a breach is too complicated to list.....but I’ll do my best here today for my community. Let me start, Mister Chair, with an easy statistic and that is that $40,000,000,000 travels across the ONLY trade corridor between the two provinces, a year. To boil that down, that is just shy of $770,000,000 a week. Within some of that amount, is trade that is associated with my community either importing or exporting which means it would be a shutdown for that trade if there was a breach. Because of the proximity of the Town of Amherst, many citizens travel to work there.... this too would be shut down. There are even more people who access shopping and services in Amherst and beyond that would not be able to do that if the isthmus flooded. Our province, like others, is having a challenging time with health care service delivery to the point that our local hospital in Tantramar almost shut its doors in 2020. The Amherst Hospital, with its increased level of services, has been lifesaving to my community and once again being cutoff would put Tantramar residents in a terrible, potentially life-threatening situation. Tantramar has a strong backbone of agricultural economy, and many farms are located on the sweeping Tantramar Marsh. The ocean would move across this land efficiently and rapidly submitting arable and pastureland to salt water that would ruin it for years to come.
The last point I will make Mister Chair, is the impact on the municipality directly. Many people would lose their homes, their jobs, their businesses, and our schools to the ocean. The municipality would lose our property and infrastructure from parkland to community buildings, and roads to retention ponds. Our municipal asset loss would be catastrophic.
These are the fears that everyone in Tantramar lives with day to day and it is even worse at this time of year during hurricane season and as I spoke about in my opening, these fears are so present because we feel like we are on borrowed time.
Mister Chair and the members of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications, I thank you once more for this opportunity and I invite you to come to Tantramar and see firsthand the impacts of a changing climate and the situation that exists around the Chignecto Isthmus. Thank you again."
Commentary welcome here and please connect with Andrew Black at this Facebook link:
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