Quesnel Mayor Bob Simpson says former Liberal MLA George Abbott and First Nations leader Maureen Chapman attended the Cariboo Regional District meeting in Williams Lake and also paid a visit to Quesnel to meet with West Fraser and the City’s Emergency Management team on Friday…
“George is just doing a Preliminary finding, he’s scoping out the range of issues and challenges and opportunities and he’s certainly looking for practical solutions and options to put in front of government, so he’s getting a scoping of the work that needs to be done and then in February the public will be able to engage him with the public information sessions and public hearings.”
Simpson says Abbott says he wants to put things in front of government that will make sense to government and can then actually be acted upon.
He says that didn’t happen following the 2003 fires and as a result the report just collected dust and wasn’t acted upon.
Simpson says the way the system is set up now is based on the premise of a single short duration incident…
“When you get into these multi back to back, massive geography, multi agency and multi event situations, our system is not built for that, so there is a fundamental shift that has to occur in the thinking around that, and a big part of that shift is what steps can we take to prevent and mitigate the damage of these kind of new normal events where they go on for a long period of time over a large geographic area.”
Simpson says he feels that Abbott gets that and that he is really looking for ways to put that in front of government come April