Vaughn Palmer: BC auditor general delves into failure of Lytton rebuild

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VICTORIA – Auditor General Michael Pickup is investigating why it has taken so long to rebuild Lytton, a question the New Democrats have been avoiding since a bushfire devastated the town three years ago.

“We are examining the province of British Columbia’s role in Lytton’s ongoing recovery from the Lytton Creek wildfire that began on June 30, 2021 and destroyed most of the village,” Pickup announced last week.

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“More than 100 properties were lost and 80,000 hectares of land were burned. “Surrounding communities were also affected.”

The fire claimed two lives.

The independent watchdog will focus on the province’s responsibility for disaster recovery, funding and other support provided to Lytton, challenges in rebuilding Lytton and opportunities for improvement.

A primary target will be the Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Preparedness, tasked with coordinating the response of the government and its agencies to disasters like the one that destroyed Lytton.

Emergency Management Minister Bowinn Ma pledged to support the auditor general’s review and welcomed any recommendations Pickup and his team could put forward.

“There are certainly lessons to be learned” from the Lytton case, he told Alec Lazenby of the BC Today online newsletter.

Despite Ma’s welcoming tone, the New Democrats were slow to call the auditor general.

BC United MLA Jackie Tegart, whose Fraser-Nicola team includes Lytton, tried last year to get the legislature’s public accounts committee to call Pickup to review why it was taking so long to rebuild.

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The government majority on the committee rejected his motion, while professing sympathy for the residents of Lytton.

“My voice is shaking right now,” said NDP MLA Jennifer Rice, the NDP MLA for the North Shore. “I’m not his MLA, but I also have an attachment to Lytton, so I completely empathize.”

Completely empathetic? Not to the point of supporting an independent review of Lytton’s problems.

Then there was Spencer Chandra-Herbert, New Democrat for Vancouver-West End. He wanted to move things forward, or so he said, but he doubted that calling the auditors would “speed things up.”

“It can’t go any slower,” Tegart responded as the New Democrats rallied to crush his motion.

Still, Pickup took notice (he had previously met with Tegart) and began discussing the scope of an overhaul. Hence his announcement last week.

Tegart, who has kept this issue alive for three long years, welcomed the news.

“It has been a long road for my people. We are about to complete three years and now we have five permits to build houses,” she told reporters.

“I think this announcement today will give people hope, and I know it won’t be quick enough, but it will certainly give us guidelines as we look to the future of climate change disasters and how not to carry out the recovery process.” “.

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She hopes the review will explain how the New Democrats managed to spend so much money with so little results.

“What I’ve heard is that we have about $40 million, if not more, in expenses and we still don’t have a finished house in Lytton,” he told Jill Bennett during an interview on CKNW radio last week. “How can it be that we’ve spent $40 million and we don’t have a functioning community?”

Tegart and other opposition members have asked the question many times in the legislature.

The New Democrats have responded with excuses: toxic soil, destruction of records, the need to do extensive archaeological work at the site of an indigenous village.

They have also participated in creative transfers of responsibilities between federal, provincial and local agencies.

Tegart says the problem is competing jurisdictions.

When the Coquihalla Highway flooded in 2021, it was reopened and rebuilt by the expressway. He asked someone in the government how that was done.

“They said we had one person who made the decisions. At Lytton we do not have any government decision makers. It didn’t matter who you talked to. It was a different ministry. And that has been the frustration from day one.”

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An explanation, yes, but no excuse, says Tegart. He described flying over Lytton just after the fire with then Prime Minister John Horgan.

He asked what the government should do.

“I pointed out to him that a small community cannot be expected to (absorb) this type of devastation. Many of the people who were part of the council lost their homes. They were traumatized. It cannot be expected that there will be the capacity to rebuild an entire community.

The government needed to appoint a single supervisor and move on.

Instead, “I can’t tell you how many staff, how many turnaround managers, how many different consultants have gone through Lytton.

“The environment did one thing, emergency management did another, and municipal affairs did another. Who was the coordinating person? “That was the difficulty.”

Still, it will be a few months before the auditor general can give a definitive answer about what went wrong.

Pickup says he won’t expect his report until early next year, meaning after this year’s provincial election. Thus, the delaying action served the NDP’s short-term political purpose.

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