 We welcome you to tonight's mini law session. It's a pleasure to see so many familiar faces in the audience. If this is your first time here, we just wish you that the coffee and cookies will stay for the duration. So please make sure you get yourself something to eat and drink if you haven't yet. This is a series that we've taken on the law school for the last couple of years with the object of having some of the people who are connected to the law school talk about interesting current legal issues for a broad audience. It's really a pleasure to have you in our building. And I hope that this is your first time you all find time to come to one of the next topics in the series. Tonight, I'm delighted to introduce to you the professor to you. He is a wide-ranging finger. He does all kinds of things from property law to land use, thinking about land use, municipal law to thinking about access to justice, to law and economics. He teaches property law here to our first-year students. And one of the things that I enjoy the most about him is he strikes me as someone every time we get in a conversation who's just interested in everything, has an idea about everything, and is incredibly actively engaged in all manner of topics here at the law school and has sort of enriched the intellectual life and diversity of the intellectual life here at our faculty. So I'm sure you will enjoy him. We have a more alternate to Jane. Thanks. Thanks, Tim. Hi, good evening. Thank you all for coming out this evening. Tonight's lecture topic is going to be on, as the title reads, Catastrophe and the Law, Community Recovery after a Disaster. So we're going to talk about how communities recover over the long term after the aftermath of a major natural or human-induced or technological disaster, such as a flood or a hurricane or an explosion or an industrial accident. And we'll examine some aspects of how the law shapes people's decisions and choices, both individually and collectively as they rebuild. So I want to start tonight with the aftermath of a very familiar disaster that struck this city almost a century ago in December of 1917, when a French munitions ship loaded with nearly 3,000 pounds of explosive powder collided with a Norwegian relief vessel here in the Halifax Harbor and causing an explosion and an ensuing fire that flattened most of the city and especially impacted neighborhoods in the north end, killing and severely injuring thousands and destroying many, many buildings rendering more than I think about 10,000 people homeless. So the Halifax explosion is well known in the city, but it's also, I think, a quite a unique moment in the history of Canadian disaster recovery. It's remarkable for its response by residents and by governments at all levels and to the challenge of rebuilding and reshaping damaged neighborhoods. So I say remarkable not because I mean to imply that it was a particularly successful reconstruction effort. Maybe it was, but it clearly had its problems in its shortcomings. But I think that what it does is it captures the sort of contested values and conflicting impulses that take hold of people and communities in the aftermath of a disaster. And I think ultimately it's these sort of contested values that really shape how the law responds to disaster in these circumstances. So I wanted to start with this picture, which is a picture of Halifax around 1879. So here we're looking west across the peninsula. And you might notice that the main feature of this picture is that it sort of trails off here past North Street. This line here represents North Street. And there's not much. The picture itself cuts off. And it looks like it's getting pretty sparsely populated out beyond that. And indeed, at this time, the north end, what we now think of the north end of Halifax is very much on the urban periphery. And indeed, throughout much of the 1800s, this was farmland settled by mostly immigrants of, I think, German origin. So if you jump ahead to the early 1900s, here a picture of the northeast end of the peninsula. And what's now become a populated working class area during a period of moderately rapid industrialization. The north end now hosts important city features like the Halifax sugar refinery, which you can see in the distance there, the Nova Scotia Cotton Company, as well as a prison and an infectious disease hospital. Further north of this still is Africaville, a small African Nova Scotian community of about 400 at the time of the explosion. Not visible in this picture, but farther to the north of this neighborhood. So with economic change at the time, north end comes some pretty substantial social ills. And particularly for poor residents, low income residents in the form of poor housing. And I'll just note this excerpt from a Humick Lenin's famous novel on the Halifax disaster of Bromiter rising. And so he describes the north end, a north end where houses look like crackerjack boxes standing in rows on a shelf, and whose interior made him a shutter with plastered walls, sticks of furniture that look like rubbish, everything greasy, hand-touched, and sour smells issuing into the streets. So it doesn't sound like, in some aspects of this neighborhood, very nice surrounding. So in part because of its location, in part because of maybe some of the poor housing construction, this neighborhood, at the time called the Richmond neighborhood, north of Russell Street, is all but destroyed in the Halifax explosion. While wealthier areas to the south, especially south of the Citadel, which protected some of the blasts, were less impacted. And as well, Africaville to the north was somewhat protected by the topography, although it also sustained some damage. So the question for tonight is, if we look at these pictures in the aftermath of the explosion, the question is, how does a community get from looking something like this in the immediate aftermath of a major disaster to looking something like this maybe just two or three years later? So this is a photo of the north end, and in particular, this dense development here is what's now called the HydroStone District in Halifax. And this is a picture from 1921 after much of the reconstruction effort, at least in this central portion of the neighborhood, has been completed. So what we're interested in then is what law's role is going to be in this transition from severely impacted or destroyed community to one that has been substantially reconstructed. Here you can see a close-up of not one of the HydroStone houses, not in the development, but further to the west. OK, so to start us off, well actually, so to start us up, I just wanted to say a few intro notes about the presentation. So just to lay my cards on the table here, this is a fairly new area of research for me. So they tell you not to say that, but I'm going to say it anyways. And I hope that, and I expect that maybe there's some people here that know a lot more about the Halifax explosion than I do, or maybe some of the other topics I'm going to talk about. I encourage you to please interject, speak up, even correct me if you think I'm going astray. I will, I will. We have 3,000 tons, not the powers. Yes, great, sorry. OK, good. So we're off to a good start already. My role here really is then just to sort of open up the topic. Not a conventional topic, maybe so much for lawyers, but one I think that actually from a legal perspective, there might be some interesting sort of things to say. So just as an outline of the evening, I'm going to start by giving you a bit of the global context of sort of disasters, because I think the events of this past summer in Calgary, and in Alberta, in Quebec, with the train realm right there, and in particular with the recent happenings in the Philippines, it might be good to have some global context to start out. Then I'm going to talk about two major sort of themes that these sort of tensions that I see is really informing the development of law in this area, and talk a little bit about how that I think informs the law of disaster recovery. And then I'm going to canvas a sort of hodgepodge of legal issues that I hope might be of interest to you and that I think are sort of informed by these tensions or conflicts, and then we'll maybe have some time hopefully for discussion and questions. OK, so the global context. I'm going to be focusing mostly tonight on reconstruction scenarios. So not so much on the immediate response to a disaster or emergency relief, things of that nature, going to be really focusing as the title indicates on the sort of the reconstruction of neighborhoods. And I'm going to be focusing mainly on urban areas because I think it's something that's most alive in the media and because often that's where the most people are impacted and also poses some particular problems for some of the issues that we're going to talk about. So to start us off then looking at the global scenario, this is a sort of map of the kinds of disasters in 2012 that were recorded by something called the International Disaster Database. And so these are disasters, there's sort of various criteria, but 10 people are more, 100 are killed or 100 are more affected, or a declaration of emergency. So the idea is that these are fairly major disasters by one definition or another. And so what you can see is that the incidences of floods in particular are on the rise. This accounts for the largest proportion of events, windstorms and other extreme temperatures. And the trends in general seem to indicate that these are indisputably obviously on the rise with the particular effects of global warming, climate change, and the world is likely to only run up against these more and more frequently. Other kinds of disasters such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, these seem to have been pretty stable over at least the past half century. And technological disasters, in particular transportation, transport incidents and industrial accidents are a account for a major proportion of what happens on an international scale. So because I'm going to be talking about reconstruction, just a few statistics about the kind of costs of these disasters. Obviously, there's an enormous toll in terms of human lives. But in terms of reconstruction of neighborhoods, we might also want to look at the sort of numbers in terms of economic damage. So it seems like these events are not only getting more frequent and more severe. They're also costing substantially more. So the disasters cost the world in particular in 2011. At the time of the Japanese earthquake, $374 billion. The numbers for last year were less than that, $157 billion, although with the effects of hurricane sanding in the states, accounting for a major proportion of that. And then in 2005, Katrina, you can see a bump there when the hurricane hit the southern United States. So in terms of here, the floods in Alberta, the most recent estimates are that they will cost around $6 billion to recover from the damages there, and also substantial damages in Quebec. So the idea here is that the costs of these disasters are rising to such an extent that local governments and provinces are struggling to bear the burden of the costs. And as we're going to talk about a little more tonight, the federal government is becoming more and more involved in trying to make a response to these disasters. So now I want to talk about these competing values or competing impulses that seem to lie at the heart of a lot of disaster scenarios. It's hard to imagine events that are more disruptive to the social order than disasters such as a major explosion, like the one in Halifax, the floods in Calgary, or the train derailment in Quebec. People are forced out of their homes in neighborhoods. They often leave, and many don't come back. And this compounds itself as others stay away. People don't want to return to their neighborhoods. Neighborhood blight starts to take hold. Economic activity slows often to a near halt, and it becomes quite difficult to do even the most day-to-day activities, in addition to public infrastructure and public institutions struggling to function effectively at all. So the first of these core tensions I want to talk about are what I call the tension between going it alone versus everybody pitches in. So the idea here is that on the one side, people really want to take charge and have control over the rebuilding process after a disaster. And in particular, they want to move to reassert control over their own lives. Against that, people also seem to be drawn to work with others as part of collective efforts to rebuild and re-establish their lives and to help each other out in sometimes surprisingly altruistic ways. So the idea on the one side with going it alone is that the experience of a disaster sort of takes away or restricts one's personal autonomy to act in the world and one's freedom to shape his or her own life. So often this is a result of a lack of access just to basic necessities. People are driven from their homes, neighborhoods, the most kind of intimate and private aspects of their lives. It's also, I think, a product of this idea, which is kind of the overwhelming power of nature or technological phenomenon in the face of a disaster in which people feel ultimately pretty helpless. And as a response, are desperate to reassert some kind of control over their lives. And in fact, when we look at cross-national studies of this and rebuilding, we see that people report that they are more satisfied and they're much happier with the reconstruction efforts that happen once they have control over decisions about where to rebuild, how quickly and where they want to locate. The darker side to think of this tension is that people tend to act pretty selfishly in some situations. They are inward-looking. They're concerned about their own welfare, their own safety and privacy. And they're mainly seeking to get back and restructure their own lives, sometimes blinded to the larger aspects of community. So this, I think, this idea is connected intimately with the idea of private insurance and the role of private insurance in disaster scenarios. So the idea here is that people want to reassert control over their lives is directly related to their individual responsibility for doing just that. So in Canada, we rely very heavily on private insurance markets to pay for individuals to rebuild their homes in businesses or cover damages from lost property. And this is unlike car insurance, for example, in Canada in which people aren't legally required to carry insurance on their home to protect against damages and catastrophic events. It might be required by your mortgager, for example, but it's not a legal requirement, at least in Canada. And we might ask then why that is the case. Why is it not required by law and or why doesn't government simply guarantee compensation in the aftermath of a disaster? And I think the economists will tell us that there is effectively two rationales for why it is that we rely so heavily on private insurance to fund the majority, at least, of private redevelopment in a disaster. So one is based on this idea of changes in behavior or what economists call moral hazard problems. So if people have some choice about the amount of insurance they want to buy, about how much risk they want to take on, then they're going to take steps to act in less risky ways, maybe find ways to make their houses stronger, for example, to raise their basements, to mitigate against future risks. And conversely, if people know that someone else will pay, then they're going to engage in unnecessarily risky behavior, such as knowingly building their house on a floodplain is an example that's come up pretty recently in light of recent events. OK, so one rationale here of why we have this kind of private insurance orientation is because changes in behavior. The other idea is that there's some kind of amount of expertise that's involved. So expertise from private insurers that are better able to create cost-effective insurance, segregate risks. I won't go into the details, but there's something that private insurers can do well, and maybe governments can't do so well. So as it stands, the idea is that we mostly rely on private insurance in order to fund people to reconstruct, in particular, their homes and businesses. OK, public funding, donations, and the like, largely then fill in around the edges, at least for middle and upper class home and business owners. And they also fund, to some extent, the rebuilding of public infrastructure. So as I said, I think there's probably a close connection here between the sort of go it alone type of value and the it's up to you kind of attitude that we take when we use private insurance markets to act as a sort of baseline for funding disaster recovery. So you've already probably identified some of the important gaps or problems with this kind of an idea. One is that as many Albertans found out to their great surprise this summer, their homes were not insured for what we call overland flood damage. And I think probably in light of that, there's a lot of Canadians going into their drawers and looking at their home insurance policies and trying to make sense of what it is they're covered for and not. The idea, though, is that at least in Canada, overland flood insurance isn't normally part of what you call an insured peril. So the idea is that it's something that is supposedly predictable. If you live in a flood plan, you know you're going to be susceptible to kind of damage in a way that you wouldn't be for wind events or fire that are spread more evenly across the population. And in other words, this kind of covers a smaller slice so that it's less economical for private insurers to get into the game, although there's increasing pressure, I think, for that to happen. Another issue is would if private insurance simply is enough to cover the damage when things get really bad? Hard to know how bad these events are going to be. And sometimes private insurance just isn't going to cover it. And so that's another kind of gap. The other thing we might ask is what about renters, for example? Their homes get destroyed too in a disaster. And the sort of doing yourself outlook seems to imply that people might be pretty concerned with their own ends. And isn't this going to leave renters in the lurch some of the time? In particular, these renters are likely to be potentially some of them more marginalized people in society. And we ought maybe to be thinking fairly careful about how that plays into this focus on private insurance markets. So the second idea here, as against the do-it-yourself or go at it alone kind of value, is everybody gets together. So this is the other side in which disasters not only drive people to want to kind of reassert control over their own lives, but also push people together to act collectively, to act cooperatively, in ways that are actually sometimes pretty difficult even under normal conditions of day-to-day life. This is often not the picture we get from media coverage of disasters, which tend to be much more interested in images of fevery violence and the breakdown of social order. What makes the news stories is about people often looking after themselves, or worse, hurting others, than about people acting altruistically or cooperatively. This seems much more like a story about the dark side of go at it alone, rather than everyone getting together. It turns out, though, that that may not be the case. So Rebecca Solnit, who's an American author and journalist, has written a pretty remarkable book called A Paradise Built in Hell in which she traces a number of disaster events through history, touches a bit on the Halifax disaster. And it really challenges what she called disaster myths that post-disaster situations are ripe with looters and thieves and that there is a disintegration of the social order most of the time. She argues that people actually tend to realize huge benefits from coordinating their actions after a disaster. And they respond to the isolating or intimidating effects, often by strengthening social bonds. So one example she gives is in Mexico City after the 1985 earthquake. An earthquake that had killed, I think, more than about 10,000 people in that city. That was actually the groundswell for a rebirth of civil society in that country, in that region, as residents responded to a vacuum created by government action and a long history of government corruption by self-organizing and promoting, then going forward to establish things like labor movements that were crucially involved in the rebuilding. Later, we'll touch on another example in New Orleans when we talk a little bit about neighborhood associations and how people self-organize on that level. So if we apply this to the Halifax situation, getting back to the Halifax disaster, this impulse to coordinate and cooperate manifested itself in a different kind of way. So within hours after the explosion in Halifax, an informal group of local politicians, lawyers, philanthropists, and other citizens met together to form what was at that time called the Halifax Relief Committee. So this was a group of people from the community who had no real experience in disaster relief or emergency measures, but they took on some crucial roles in organizing emergency shelter provisions and this sort of thing. This community of people then was rapidly sort of moving to a legal lens, was rapidly institutionalized in the form of the Halifax Relief Commission, which was appointed by the federal government within about a month or so, I think sometime in January of 1918, by a federal ordering council. And so this was three folks, two judges and a former mayor of Oshawa, that were appointed to carry out the sort of duties that were then subsequently bestowed on the committee. So after they were appointed, provincial legislation stepped in and granted this small committee of people what were, in retrospect, remarkably broad powers to not only manage the monies that were coming in for relief efforts and for reconstruction, but also to the power to actually make plans for implementing reconstruction in the damaged neighborhoods, the power to expropriate any lands that they needed, the power then also to control and disperse all the monies that were required for all of this, which I think ultimately amounted to about $25 million that they're about to send relief funds from various sources. So in a world of 1917, and like today, private insurance was likely not as widely available. And so this small committee of people would play a crucial role in coordinating reconstruction efforts in the damaged neighborhoods. But we also, as part and parcel of this, see some important countercurrents. One is that a small commission of legal and civic leaders, although they might be fairly effective at organizing relief and reconstruction, were also seen as relatively elitist and disconnected from people's concerns and problems on the ground. And so we see this idea that they're going ahead with their plans and in some of the newspaper coverage of the time that people aren't particularly engaged or aware of what's happening. One example, just a small example of this is that there's reports of when people were offered the choice between effectively getting a payout of reconstruction funds or having the HRC build them a house and sometimes become a mortgager for their new home, they opted out of the collective effort and for individual control over their own rebuilding efforts. And so some important countercurrents here we see getting back to the idea of people wanting to do it on their own. OK, so the second conflict of value is that I wanted to touch on was this idea back to the future or return to the status quo versus don't miss out on this chance or the agony of opportunity that comes along with disasters at certain points. So starting on the one side with this idea back to the future, the idea here is that people in post-disaster situations will want security, comfort, and return to the familiar. There's a real craving to get back to what people know and people are hesitant or suspicious of things that are transformative or new. What they really want to do is preserve as much of their former lives as possible and they're anxious to restore the status quo quickly and without delay. So Bob Ellickson, who's an American legal scholar and an urban historian, has studied this phenomenon by looking at the changes in street layouts following a disaster. And what he finds is that even where streets are badly laid out or confusing, it's rarely, if ever, the case that they get redesigned in the wake of an urban disaster, even though this would seem like an ideal time in which to actually go ahead and do that, particularly in instances something like Hiroshima in which the city was almost entirely or neighborhoods were almost entirely wiped out, you would think that this would be an ideal or opportune time to get in and redesign streets. So Ellickson says this doesn't happen most of the time in his findings and this is just one example taken from his paper recently released on the topic in which he shows Hiroshima pre-disaster in 1945 and in 2008, in which other than the Peace Park, the sort of epicenter of the explosion, there really was very little change in the street layouts as they existed. And he has sort of two reasons why, which I think are important for us in thinking more generally about post-disaster reconstruction. The first is that pre-existing layouts provide a sort of focal point around which residents can coordinate their expectations and their reconstruction efforts. So residents, when they come back to a community after a disaster, already have a map in their mind and that's the map of the pre-existing layout in which they had been living. The second idea is, draws on an insight from cognitive psychology, which is that residents will often value the restoration of their neighborhoods pre-existing layout more than they'll value any gains associated with an alternative or equally meritorious layout. So the basic notion here is that people will often place higher value on what they know, on what they've already got, rather than something that maybe by some objective measure can be shown to be equally or more valuable. So based on these kind of two explanations, Ellison argues that there's a very strong pull back toward the status quo. For his example of street layouts, but we could think more generally about the reconstruction of neighborhoods after a disaster. Okay, so on the other side of this idea back to the future or return to the status quo is the notion that we don't wanna miss out on this opportunity for making new plans and engaging in urban or community innovations after a disaster. So the idea that after the destruction of a physical environment, people are operating with a relatively clean slate and with appropriate planning and deliberation, you could address some longstanding social inequalities or perhaps path mistakes that you've made. So this I think is a pretty illustrative quote that was made by Michael Sorkin, who's an architectural critic in the US following Katrina. And he said, well, it would be callous to talk about 9-11 or Katrina as having silver linings both have wiped this late clean to reflexively reproduce the status quo ante without vigorously questioning both its values and its defects would slight the disaster and obscure the urgency of opportunity. Okay, so sort of strong statement of this idea that there's often good opportunities for sort of urban innovation and planning. So this kind of tension often ends up setting up or pitting experts in a community in particular urban planners, lawyers, other kinds of experts against local residents and non-experts who may more strongly feel this pull back toward the status quo. So this was a main feature of New Orleans after the rebuilding in that city after Katrina in 2005 where there was some extensive city planning processes that were taking place and a number of city-wide plans over a number of years in fact were drafted and some rejected creating a lot of conversation but also some substantial delay and frustration. This map has now become quite famous, I think at least in people thinking about post-cautic reconstruction after Katrina. This is called the controversial green dot plan in which urban planners came up with this idea that there's gonna be a lot of urban blight following the disaster of not a lot of people are gonna be returning and so they need to do something with this space. These green dots represented spots they thought would be good places to build city parks. They often tended to be in the poor neighborhoods, often the black neighborhoods of the city and this caused understandably quite a backlash. You can see it became a symbol almost for sort of the struggle between what local residents saw as a struggle between local control or autonomy versus expertise and social engineering at the city level. Okay, this was also an important theme in Halifax if we go back to 1917. The Halifax explosion coincided with a pretty interesting time in urban planning generally and shortly after the HRC, the Relief Commission got together, they recruited a famous British planner in the name of Thomas Adams who had been kind of instrumental in the city beautiful movement in Europe who got together with a Montreal architect named George Ross to embark on some very ambitious planning around the reconstruction and the replanting of the devastated neighborhood. And this is really how the hydro stone development and the surrounding neighborhood came to be developed. So you can see here, this is a comparison of the original street plan of the North and Richmond neighborhood before the explosion and then a representation of Thomas Adams' reconstruction plan thinking about planning after the disaster. And so just a quick look at this seems to push back against this thesis that for example, it's not a good time to redo street layouts after a disaster. It seems that Thomas Adams was anxious to do just that following the disaster. His idea was that he wanted to effectively create a plan in three parts. This dense area you see in the middle here is the hydro stone development that was planned to be at the beginning at least rental housing for mainly for former residents of the neighborhood to the west, sorry, to the east was on the hill and down toward the water was set aside for wealthier residents who were planned to come back and build what Adams called better quality homes at the time to the west of the hydro stone then was the poorer neighborhood in which they ultimately ended up constructing some more ramshackle housing. And so the idea here was in effect, the hydro stone was act as a sort of social screen or curtain between the richer areas and the poorer area of the neighborhood reflecting ideas about social planning at the time. Against these sort of extensive planning ambitions then we also saw some considerable backlash from residents who not only wanted to give back to their old neighborhoods but also resented a lack of voice in the IRC process and contemporary reports at the time talk sort of represent some of this backlash. An Ottawa reporter actually I think has a very illustrative quote in talking about the struggle between sort of city planners and local elites and local residents and the quotation is that the North end will prefer democracy but it's a question of whether democracy included the right to build up another shack town for children of Halifax industrial workers to grow up in. So the idea here that people wanted a voice or say or some control in the reconstruction of their neighborhoods but elites at the time were questioning whether or not this was going to sort of reproduce some of the social levels that had existed prior to the explosion. As a side note, as it turns out Adam's plans were substantially unrealized at least in this area more to the north of these developments although hydrostone development did go ahead it seems that some of his really ambitious planning was curbed to some extent by the pragmatics of reconstruction and maybe to some extent by the backlash. Okay, so those are the sort of two as I said major complex of values that I think maybe sit at the heart of what a lot of law and policy deals with in Canada when we confront post disaster scenarios. So now I want to turn this to some more sort of specific issues in the law of post disaster reconstruction where some of these tensions arise. So the first question that I want to deal with is effectively who's responsible for public disaster recovery funding in Canada. We've already looked a little bit at private insurance and how that seems to play into funding people's recovery efforts. But as we mentioned before, there's going to be lots of instances in which this is going to be inadequate and which is going to be gaps and clearly government plays an important role here. So starting with the province, the province of Nova Scotia for example sort of sits as a main player in responding to disasters that occur here. So as a starting point, they're responsible for declaring an emergency situation when it exists under the emergency management act and the provincial emergency management act. And once they've declared a disaster exists, then they designate a disaster affected area. Okay, within which residents, small businesses and nonprofits may be eligible for relief funding for disaster related damages. So this is the critical first step in which the provincial government designates people as being eligible for disaster assistance funding. So once that's happened, then the disaster, the actual assistance is administered by the Nova Scotia Emergency Management Act in the form of a provincial program for funding. And so I won't get into all the details of the requirements of the eligibility under that program, but as it stands right now, there's a maximum payout of about $80,000 for individuals and small businesses, about 200,000 for nonprofits, organizations who qualify. And funds can be designated to restore property effectively to pre-disaster conditions. There's also, as I mentioned at the end, some of that that allows for mitigation measures to reduce future vulnerabilities for everybody. Actually, it doesn't have to be declared. You just need a disaster that happens to over 1% of the capita. So it's 940,000 here. Then we get into disaster has been shown that no longer has to be declared. You know why it has to be declared? It's sort of kicks in on the matter. Because it's only had one declared, I think it's quite one. It's the only one that has been declared disaster in the last number of years. How do they define the boundaries then of the different period? That's it. If there's a amount of damage is over $940,000, 1%, then the form of the kicks in, the feds will pay so much on the over 940,000. And then there's a form right after that. But it doesn't have to be declared. Okay, great. Okay, so after this sort of first initial steps kicked in then, then we sort of get to the step in which the province coordinates with the federal level in these sort of cost sharing agreements. The federal provincial disaster financial assistance agreements that provide for some federal kind of backstop funding or share funding with the province. So this is probably, at least in my understanding of the sort of landscaping Canada right now, the most important kind of role that the feds play in terms of disaster recovery. For the most part, they don't get much involved in other aspects of disaster reconstruction. Something by comparison to the Halifax disaster in which they seem to be taking a much more active role, although from my reading, there's some criticisms that they should be, that they should be more involved. So the idea here with these disaster financial assistance agreements is that the province can then initiate a request to the federal government. And once the governor and council has declared that a disaster is within a matter of creating concern under the federal legislation, then the federal government will provide some proportional funding for disaster relief. So the idea here is that there's a sort of cost schedule that applies for how much the feds will pay. So on a per capita basis for every one dollar, the provinces are responsible for that. The feds don't pay anything for the next $2. They pay 50%. For the next $2 after that, they pay 70%. This is the federal government and they'll pay the remainder at 90% over that. So this sort of escalating cost schedule that the federal government is participating in. Once disasters get too expensive, the idea I think is for local governments and local authorities to bear. So there's been a pretty rapid expansion of this program within the last number of years. So the stats I've got are that from 1970 to 1996, the program paid out on average about $10 million annually. But then since 1996, this average has been about $100 million annually. So about a 10-fold increase in the amount of funding that is being channeled through these disaster financial assistance agreement programs. The feds do have some other additional ways to think of helping people out through, for example, types of loan programs for homeowners through CMHC. I won't go into the details of those sorts of things. The province may also, I think, offer some small business funding, loan funding for businesses. But the bulk of the financial relief assistance comes through the channels that I just discussed. Okay, so I think just to give you an example of this then in the Alberta situation on this past summer, I mentioned before that private insurance doesn't cover overland floods. And so the governments are now having to step in to provide in that province a lot of reconstruction funding because most people are finding out that they're not covered under their insurers. This, of course, leads back to the moral hazard problem that I was talking about before, is really what's to stop people then from going and rebuilding their homes in the floodway and collecting compensation next time. And I think this is an issue that the provincial government there is struggling with. It seems that what they've said right now is, the Alberta government has said you can collect this time if your house exists in a vulnerable area or in a floodway. But we're not gonna be there next time if you choose to rebuild. And there's also some incentives built in to relocate, although you can imagine people are facing some pretty dramatic choices because if they happen to move out of these floodplains, then their houses aren't going to be worth much money if they need to sell it on the housing market. So I think this is a conundrum that people are, the governments and the communities are confronting across Canada. And it seems that there is a lot of noises about the insurance companies getting involved, the infunding flood insurance, but no one seems quite sure at this point anyways about exactly how to do that. Just a brief comparison with the US. So the US, we've heard quite a lot about it in the aftermath of Katrina has a substantially more, I think complex federal regulatory scheme to do with disaster recovery in the form of what's called the Stafford Act. And several individualized programs to fund individuals and businesses across a menu of options. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency that's designated under the Stafford Act in the States, was heavily criticized in the wake of the hurricane in Katrina for its slow and inefficient handling of the disaster, it's a botchering of delivering reconstruction funds and some sense poor leadership. And there's been, I think, a substantial backlash in the States against decisions being made at this higher level and people clamoring to assert more local control. Whether or not those are valid criticisms or valid movements I think maybe still remain to be seen. Although it seems that there's been some reforms in the wake of those criticisms. The other thing to notice about the American situation that I thought was quite interesting was that outside of the programs that are provided for under the Stafford Act are that Congress has sort of substantial powers to authorize appropriations of additional funds for disaster assistance. And they do so quite regularly and quite substantially. So in the hurricanes after Katrina and Rita, the Congress appropriated about 19.7 billion dollars for relief in those instances. The interesting thing about these appropriations is that Congress has the authority to tie conditions to the funding. Which is something that seems to be more or less absent from the Canadian situation in which funding is sort of just channeled through and any conditions or decisions are made more at the local level. In the US, Congress through these appropriations sort of has wider scope to tie funding to special provisions that may for example impact lower income people, make provision for them, set things particular to environmental review standards or labor standards. It gives the federal government substantially I think more control over how reconstruction happens. One other sort of point of note here that I thought was really interesting is what Ontario does in terms of kind of organizing some of this relief funding. They do something that's called, well there's called a disaster relief assistance program. But once an area is declared a disaster area, the local municipal councils are required to appoint a disaster relief committee. And this sort of recalls I think some of the history of what happened in Halifax in terms of creating a sort of on the ground council or committee of local individuals who in this instance have a couple of responsibilities. So their primary responsibility is to raise funds to benefit disaster victims, to raise funds from sources outside of the government. And so the idea here is that to the extent that the committee can raise funds and allocate those to reconstruction, that's going to take priority and then the government will fill in with public funding in around that. And then the committee also has authority or responsibility for settling eligible claims for individuals. And I think this kind of channels the idea of collective or cooperative action that we talked about a little bit earlier in a couple of different ways. I think the idea is that a local committee is more embedded in the immediate community and that can both help them to locate funding sources more effectively and oversee claims in a way that's maybe regarded as more legitimate by the local community. And also sort of draws on the altruism and fellow feeling that comes along with the idea of capturing fundraising as opposed to delegating public funds. So I said I would return a little bit to talking about the idea of how sort of local neighborhoods in New Orleans were involved in the reconstruction there. And for all the studies and kind of things I've read and seen about what comes out of New Orleans, I think this is probably one of the most interesting. And so as I said before, there was a real struggle between people who were planning at the sort of city-wide level around trying to create plans for the future of the city as a whole and kind of local residences and neighborhoods who were trying to sort of map their own course. So Carl Seidman, who's a urban studies guy at MIT has recently written this book called Coming Home to New Orleans in which he sort of picks apart these planning and reconstruction processes in New Orleans and he really drills down to the neighborhood level and looks at what's happening with sort of really localized organizations and institutions and their sort of role in rebuilding communities. So he focuses on, in particular on this one community called the Broadmoor community in Halifax, which is a sort of central community right close to the downtown in the city. And it's fairly typical of the poor neighborhoods in the city. It has a poverty rate of about 30%. It's about 48% owner-occupied homes, pre-Katrina, so relatively poor inner city sort of neighborhood, typical of the neighborhood that would be surrounding in this area. Others that you hear about like the Lower Ninth Ward. So what's interesting about this neighborhood is that they had what was called the Broadmoor Improvement Association, which was a pre-existing neighborhood association that mainly looked after minor beautification in the neighborhood, did some activities around neighborhood advocacy, this sort of thing. But after the hurricane, this local improvement organization sort of really took off and started to engage in some pretty sophisticated local planning processes, started to gather a lot of data about who was coming back to the community and who wasn't so that they could track efforts at reconstruction so that they could advocate to people who weren't returning to show people that there were others who were, so that they would sort of follow suit. And just a lot of activities sort of at this micro scale in the community. And what struck me when I was reading about this was that from the legal sort of perspective, there's sort of two aspects of this that I think could be maybe lessons for where law has a role to play. And one is that the neighborhood association went on to use a community development corporation to give their sort of reconstruction efforts a sort of formal structure through which they could both raise money and attract investment funding and also reach out to other institutions. And so they had partnerships with Harvard, with MIT to draw on some of their expertise, to use some of their students to come in the summer, help them out with reconstruction efforts and this sort of thing. And this community development corporation drew on what was a pretty well established network and sort of series of legislative supports for these types of CDCs in the area. And Seisman's analysis is that it was successful, particularly because it was kind of embedded in this supportive institutional environment. The second thing that was interesting was the Broadmoor community's use of these residential improvement districts to strengthen their neighborhood association. So what was largely a voluntary association to start with was transformed into one of these residential improvement districts in the US. And in Louisiana anyways, there is state legislation to allow neighborhood associations to apply for one of these residential improvement districts. And the idea here is that once you become sort of certified you can levy a fee on property within your neighborhood to raise money effectively to run your neighborhood association. So Broadmoor created theirs in 2010 and they now levy about $100 a year parcel fee for each owner in the community, which allows them to have some operational funding to sort of go forward and be engaged in further planning and advocacy efforts around reconstruction in their neighborhood. I noted that in Halifax there's a bit of a precedent for something like this because my understanding is that the city has recently passed a bylaw to regulate business improvement districts in the city. And so this is a similar idea in which businesses get together and if they're approved under the bylaw can levy a fee on local business owners in order to garner funds and then engage in activities like marketing or beautification or economic development. So it seems to me that something like this stands as an interesting kind of legal legislative precedent for creating the kind of institutional environment that might support something like a residential improvement district which might be quite instrumental in going forward in rebuilding after a disaster. Okay, I'm getting toward the end here but I wanted to touch quickly on this question of what about renters? So I noted earlier that people who rent often can get left out in the cold after a disaster because in particular there is often a chronic shortage in rental housing following a disaster event. For a couple of reasons I think people tend to delay rebuilding if it's not their primary residents. So this kind of going back to the theme of doing it yourself, the idea is that people are kind of going to be primarily concerned at least in the immediate phase of getting back into their homes and going to be worried about reconstructing their primary residences. This is going to leave rental buildings or rental properties at least somewhat down the road if they ever get there. The other idea is that public relief assistance may not be available for things beyond primary residents and this may also affect people's ability to rebuild income properties. And so the result of all this is that there's often I think a shortage of supply, a long-term shortage of supply in rental housing following a disaster and it becomes very difficult for people to find affordable accommodations. The other worry here is that the sort of skepticism about unscrupulous landlords who might be looking to take advantage of a post-disaster situation and charge exorbitant rents. So interestingly this was a problem that was also confronting lawmakers in Nova Scotia after the Halifax explosion. As I mentioned before the hydro zone development was intended to be rent controlled housing but wasn't ready until at least the sort of early 1920s for people to move in. And in the meantime there was a real concern about the supply of affordable housing for people. And the response to this was for the province to pass. I think what's in my understanding was a pretty early on landlord tenant legislation in order to regulate some of this activity. So there was some initial legislation passed when the HRC was given its powers in 1918. And then in the next year in 1919 the provincial legislature passed the Fair Rent Act which required a couple of things that tried to get around this problem or tried to meet this problem of affordable housing supply. One was that it required rents to be fair and reasonable in the province or in Halifax I should say. And avoided any leases where rents exceeded this standard. And so it applied what was a fairly discretionary standard in order to require, excuse me, that our rents remained at a reasonable rate. It also banned fees or fines that were applied in the event of a renewal of the tenancy to I think prevent people from extorting or taking advantage of people in that way of charging them key money or something to that effect. And finally it barred judgments for ejectment of tenants unless they failed to pay their rent or they were creating a nuisance or something to that extent. So some pretty important protection for tenants at the time. They were sort of meant to address this problem. As I said, the hydro stone itself was sort of a longer term solution to this by providing at least in the initial phase of that development rental housing for people the development remained owned by the Halifax Relief Commission and was rented out to 10s, at least I think until the mid 50s or early 60s after which those properties were sold off to private individuals. But I thought this was interesting because it also illustrates some of the real challenges in trying to address problems in housing markets after a disaster. And you see in some of the contemporary accounts complaints about huge vacancy rates in the hydro stone as of this article in 1923. People complaining that rents were too high and that there were huge vacancy rates in the buildings at the time. I'm not sure what the explanation for this might actually be, but I think it just sort of stands as an example or representation of how difficult it may be to sort of confront these problems by getting into the rental markets. Okay, so I'm kind of coming to an end here. I just wanted to make a final mention and I haven't talked much at all about what I think is actually a really, really important issue which is how disaster mitigation gets sort of rolled in or might be regulated in reconstruction efforts. The idea here is that when you're rebuilding after a disaster, this is obviously a really important time to be thinking ahead to the future about making homes and communities more resilient for potential future risks. And my understanding is that in Canada right now there's a lot of discussions going around, excuse me, on around a national disaster mitigation strategy that's meant to coordinate efforts at the federal and provincial levels to require people to come up with mitigation plans and plan on sort of larger scale and focus on broader public investment projects, things like the Red River floodway in Manitoba after the floods there in the 1950s. There's some positive developments. I think Nova Scotia has a climate change adaptation fund to fund particular projects here in the province but it looks like we've yet to see something emerge as sort of coordinated effort on a national scale. As far as sort of smaller scale efforts and in particular in terms of inducing people in the private realm to take into account mitigation when they're reconstructing their homes and businesses, it seems that it may be important to think about things like a part of Nova Scotia's program where there's allowances for relief mitigation measures in the funding that's allocated for relief. A stronger approach I think would be to tie conditions to relief funding that required mitigation measures and we may I think start to see some of that as well going forward. So I think I'll stop there and open it up to any questions and answer any as best that I can or we can have a conversation for those who have things to add to the conversation. But yeah, so does anybody have anything they would like to, yeah. Thanks, I want to be very interesting to hear about this and I'm wondering if you have any comment about when a party gets at fault, like in the train derailment or Swiss air, it must end up in court for years and the need of being able to get caught into and it's not gonna go bankrupt. How does that work? Of course, they probably start from a point that they're not liable and then it goes from there. They're gonna. Yeah, that falls a bit outside of my ability to have expertise. I mean, you can imagine, I mean in the Halifax explosion, for example, there was years of litigation where I was saying following who was at fault there for the cause of the explosion and someone found at fault might be then liable to pay some of the costs. All right, I don't actually know, you know, what extent, how far those damages might run in kind of a civil emergency backline, but I'm sure that's something that we're watching closely and as you say, in combat, well, that seems to be a certain issue. I think in Halifax, the extended legislation or a court case that ran out with just two ships fighting with each other. Yes. None of that money went there. But actually, we're fine equally to blame. There was no money went into the right reconstruction from suing those two companies. Yes. I think I think we'll be much more interested from a legal point of view because there, we have a very small railway that is now bankrupt, part of a much bigger railway. How much will actually come into the provincial coffers? But in the meantime, my government's setting into, I think essentially see that the reconstruction is done and they'll fight it in the courts for hours and years. That's so, yeah. We didn't know that the federal government and British government had divided and offered funding, relief funding now for the town, I was going to say that they're saying that they're asking for the damage probably to be part of the excess of what's being offered right now. So it seems like there's still more going on. The reference to automobiles are always seductive in these things and I'm just reflecting in the comments of the automobile insurance. And I think the public law leaves us in exactly the same situation with automobiles as it does with how is there anything else in the sense that you buy a car and the degrees at which the owner assumes the risk of loss of the asset is up to the owner. So we do have to carry public liability and public damage insurance. But the car itself can be left uninsured. It's simply up to the owner. And I guess the idea there is that because car accidents, presumably affect other parties that we want to protect. People drove their homes in the same way that they drove their cars. We have to have PLPD insurance for prices too. And the other item is reflecting on your comments on the neighborhood associations in New Orleans. And we have in the past had pretty much the same sort of legislation in Nova Scotia. I don't know if there are any of these things left in terms of rate pairs associations. One of which was the Bedford Rate Pairs Association. In the late 1970s, in the context of landfill, it was the reason why there was never a dump in Jack Lake because it actually contested that with the provincial and the child tax service regional authority and made a decision at a public meeting to self fund the contest that Supreme Court of Canada beat down and down. And it worked out really well because when they approved the funding at that town hall meeting, it was just added onto the county rate was very, very effective. Right, and it's a shame that that's not really available much anymore. I didn't think it'd be a great piece of public legislation that a rate pairs association could be formed to do that. Yes. It's quite interesting. You know, partly, I think a sort of a legal question and partly a sort of social cultural question in the sense that, you know, if people see themselves as really wanting to actively participate in those kinds of, in those kinds of community, it's gonna be something that's on those radar. The usual obstruction is a high cost litigation and this was a solution to that. Yes, yes, yeah, interesting. I mean, I think it illustrates a kind of broader point about these kinds of institutions in the sort of instruction context is that ones that we often don't think about is we be playing an important role in these sort of more catastrophic scenarios. It actually turned out to be pretty important. They were sort of sleepers in some sense. They kind of come alive as some kind of problem or example. And I expected that probably if you go looking at other examples of that, it's sort of what we're looking at. In the case of Banshee, it wasn't a natural disaster, but it was a crisis that was precipitated in another way and the organization responded to that. I'll give you a citation for the Sprinkler County case. Yes. I'll give you a citation for the Sprinkler County case. Is there any other questions? Any thoughts on mitigation prior to initial construction? We have all kinds of buildings on blood lanes and short lines, Nova Scotia and Brunswick. They should be dealing with this before they build initially to get approval for some of these locations. Well, I mean, it seems to me that this is kind of part of the sort of broader context of creating a sort of mitigation strategy. So either in a provincial scale or coordinated on a national scale. That the best time to do that is obviously before some do the best. What are you doing? That's what you're doing. And I think that there's a bit of a, people are kind of, it's not heard of, it's currently stuck now because obviously people that have already built there are very concerned about how they're basically going to get themselves out of that situation. But I know that there's, you know, for the scene of the situation, they don't know anything about these kinds of, there's some kind of adaptation questions then than I have. But that certainly seems like a huge concern. Where do you see Canada's greatest concern when it comes to future national disasters? In terms of types of disasters or in terms of? Where do you think we should be paying attention to those coming here? Maybe this is not something you thought of or you're just going to mitigate? Yeah, no, I mean, I, in the kind of course of kind of doing some of this research, it seems to me that on a sort of broader level, I think we need to think more deeply about what levels of government, for example, want participating in particular ways. So this idea, I think that the federal government should be more involved, that there can be things that they can be doing to be sort of guiding the course is a really important piece of that picture. But in line with this kind of tension and seeing, I think we also kind of tend to ignore the very local level stuff that's going on. So I'd like to see more thinking about how a plan for these kinds of local institutions. And so not in the broad worse example where things just kind of happen up spontaneously, but maybe that we have some forward-looking things in place in order to create conditions to make that possible. I wonder if that's the hardest to do so with the sort of course disasters. So like the pull towards the status quo that you've seen often, that's really depressing because I always thought that disaster, I've said in lines that the silver lining that people will necessarily make the big changes that they need to make until they have to make them. I always sort of assumed that disaster would be that sort of opportunity to make those changes. So I was wondering if you saw in the cases where changes were made, like are there any rules or to sort of push for those kind of important changes that need to happen? I mean, it seems to me that in principle that people are on this experience was one in which it was really crucial to sort of get a buy-in on one hand. So they didn't try to do that. So I said there was sort of a number of these kind of planning processes. They were really directed towards this kind of taking advantage of the design moment. And part of the early problem is because that was too expert driven and I think they learned their lesson a little bit and started to take into account sort of more voices. And so what they did, for example, is they went out to places like Houston where there was large populations of displaced residents and they held big meetings or a conference call with other residents who were in fact in New Orleans and they sort of tried to coordinate these sort of participatory acts of the process. But the flip side of that was that they also, it seems once they came up with their plans they really neglected to set priorities. So that's the kind of side of these really open participatory processes is that you get a lot of feedback but then if you fail to really set priorities under conditions of limited funding then that can also be just another manner in which the sort of design won't even fail and you really don't have those from there. So it does seem like there are some important lessons to be made in there. I actually think it'd be quite up to the state factor I think I did know that people are learning more from this and I didn't think, I think that this sort of idea of returning to the status quo is a bit cynical or is a bit disheartening but I think it's also one that is important to take into account and not just sort of dismiss because people do have these kind of values at stake in which they want to feel secure and sort of control over. I'd make a few suggestions where we should be concerned with Canada. It seems to me that subduction is on Earth quick off the Vancouver Island as a certain being within 100 years. I was, I did mention to history that something like under 50% of people in BC are in those zones and they have higher risk insurance than most. So we have the shaking of a very large earthquake plus the tsunami that would result. I think it's called Mount Baker but it's the equivalent of Mount St. Helens that could and will eventually erupt with huge amounts of ash. When they put away, well it's done a good job. It, we know that in the past there's been far more meltwater than the flood that we've ever handled. So you have a city of thousands of people having to be evacuated. And wildfires, we've seen what they can do and there's plenty and there will be more. And in the big earthquake, Fraser Delta, nutritionists sits on well, they go by and it's part of the slide. And then locally through it's a hurricane storm that's coming over the legs. I'm just saying is you're, thank you for the, for identifying those issues. And I think, you know it's funny like, thinking about this stuff can be pretty depressing. But I actually think, you know there's a bottom, there's a bottom really unique stuff. It goes on and also just like, in my opinion, but I think it's actually, and this is part of this idea of these kind of conflicting tensions. You do get to see these, you know, kind of really pretty incredible moments of, you know, kind of spontaneous organization, sort of cooperation. And I don't know, I don't know how to turn off this, but something that kind of gives me some kind of hope. But it's, it's an interesting topic. So, maybe you can talk about that. Just kind of related to that, I was wondering, on a municipal level, thinking of the Richmond disaster. So they're just sitting there, you know, and that's just a huge liability just popping up all over the place. At a municipal level, can they, or do they, or are they required to, carry any kind of insurance, or can they ensure against that, where they know it's sort of an entity itself? Yeah, I actually, I started to try and dig into exactly how that works for Pokemon. I don't actually know very much, but my understanding is that a lot of, at least the public side is uninsured, and so they just kind of deal with that after the fact. But there is actually some kind of interesting proposals that are, the booking requiring municipalities or localities to effectively ensure areas. So not even really buildings, but ensure kind of whole areas as a way to, so get them in the door of trying to take advantage of some of these misrisk management strategies. So, I don't want to learn about that, but I think that's kind of interesting. So kind of moving away and sort of like building by building or site by site, recently an idea, an idea that's sort of more area, but because as you said, you think sometimes sort of stick out when it's sort of comes into play. And you've done a tremendous amount of urgent preparedness and exercises and you know, really big on that for a long time. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. The problem is it's actually self-insured too, which is kind of scary. The figure is more, it's cheaper to pay a lawsuit out of the coffers instead of the insurance that would come. Yes. Okay, well listen, I'll end it there. Thank you for all coming and thank you for those who offer their sort of thoughts and expertise. I really appreciate hearing that. Folks who want to talk further I'm always interested in this stuff. So, thanks a lot. Have a safe trip home.