For losers in bids for federal cash to protect against climate disaster, fears remain

HALL’S HARBOUR, N.S. — For communities where roads and homes are damaged in climate disasters, losing out on bids for federal help to protect against coming storms are one more blow from which to recover.

Standing beside a wharf that is slowly being dismantled by Bay of Fundy tides, Dave Davies said it was hard to hear in June that Ottawa’s Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund had rejected his community’s $4.8-million request for aid.

The funding was to go toward strengthening seawalls and building a breakwater in Hall’s Harbour, N.S., while replacing and extending the dilapidated wharf. Now, Davies and other volunteers in the small town are left wondering where to turn for help.

“I’m rejected, dismayed, angry, all of the above,” said Davies, 89, who is the vice-president of the Hall’s Harbour Community Development Association. “The federal government has passed the buck to someone else down the road, and we don’t know who that is.”

Volunteers with his association spent two years fundraising and then commissioning a conceptual design to protect the picturesque town from climate change.

He said the community’s anxiety about forecasts for higher sea levels and stronger storms only intensified after a July 11 downpour of about 110 millimetres caused a tidal river to swell and smash the causeway that connects the two sides of the village, home to about 300 people.

Rodger Cameron, owner of the town’s lobster exporting facility — whose 30 employees ship about two million pounds annually — said in a recent interview that since he set up the operation in 1995, his parking lot, “has been almost completely obliterated five times” by waves bursting over the existing seawall.

A spokesman for federal Infrastructure Minister Sean Fraser says Ottawa makes choices based on the best applications for the $3.8 billion put into the adaptation fund since 2018. But communities losing out argue there’s not enough money to go around for projects needed to protect essential infrastructure.

“Given the high volume of applications we have received…since its inception, we had to prioritize the strongest eligible applications,” said Micaal Ahmed, a spokesman for the minister’s office.

He said Ottawa can’t yet release how many of the 287 applications in the latest round were rejected as the list of successful bids is still being finalized. In the previous round of applications in 2021, 45 of 214 applications were accepted.

The frustration of unsuccessful applicants has been emerging in public.

On June 3, three mayors from the British Columbia communities of Abbotsford, Merritt and Princeton held a joint news conference to denounce the rejections of their adaptation fund applications, saying their communities have suffered and continue to face inland flooding risks.

In an interview, Princeton Mayor Spencer Coyne said his interior B.C. community saw a large part of its downtown damaged when the Tulameen River overflowed its banks in November 2021.

The community of roughly 3,000 people sought about $21 million from the adaptation fund to go toward a $54.4-million improvement of the town’s dike system and other flood protection measures.

Coyne said he finds it “ridiculous” that Ottawa has created a system where municipal governments are pitted against one another for the funding, rather than federal assessors helping identify areas where flooding and other risks are greatest.

“We can’t all be competing against each other,” he said. “For those of us who have already faced these disasters, why are we on the same playing field as communities that have never seen a natural disaster?”

Joanna Eyquem, a geoscientist who works with the University of Waterloo’s Intact centre on climate adaptation, reviewed the Hall’s Harbour applications and said in an interview that — as with some other applications she has seen from small communities — it didn’t present a “shovel ready” construction project, with engineering feasibility studies completed.

“It’s a much earlier phase than you would typically have in an application to the Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund program,” she said.

However, Eyquem said the federal refusal highlights a problem for smaller communities that can’t afford upfront design and feasibility studies.

She echoed Coyne’s position that the money should be allocated based on risk, not solely on the quality of an application.

“If we have specific hot spots where we know we have a significant area of risk, we should be looking at that on a national level,” she said.

Daniel Houghton, the engineer who completed the Hall’s Harbour conceptual design, said he previously applied to the province twice without success for about $1 million to carry out engineering work. The lack of provincial funding hurt his ability to provide feasibility studies needed for the federal application by its final deadline, he said.

A spokesperson for the provincial environment department said a specialist from the department has been in touch with the Hall’s Harbour bidders “and will continue to support them in addressing concerns and finding solutions.”

Houghton said it has been “heartbreaking” to see the community’s main road severed in two by a storm, when work could have been undertaken years ago to upgrade and protect it from heavy rainfalls.

“I hate the fact that I get to say, ‘I told you so,'” the engineer said.

Davies said he and his committee will keep casting around for government programs that might help them find ways to preserve their harbour.

“We can’t let (the residents) down…We’re going to make sure this place gets what it needs,” he said.