Honourable senators, as we gather here in our Senate Chamber, welcoming our remarkable new colleagues and greeting each other joyfully after our COVID-imposed separation and, at the same time, overcome by great sadness as we grieve our beloved colleagues Judith and Josée, I rise to make my first statement in this, Canada’s Forty-fourth Parliament.

Colleagues, like all Canadians, today I have water on my mind — the current crises and the hope.

Colleagues, today we are witnessing water-related destruction from coast-to-coast-to-coast. On the West Coast, we see the devastating flooding, mudslides, loss of human lives, loss of animal lives, loss of homes, loss of farmland, loss of vital infrastructure and Indigenous communities hard hit. Our Arctic coast neighbours have been plagued with melting ice, sea level rising and domestic water infrastructure breakdowns long before the recent issues with Iqaluit’s toxic drinking water supply.

Now our East Coast communities are being ravaged by severe wind and rainstorms. I need to get home to attend to the tree in my yard that knocked out the power to my street. You may have read in today’s Globe of the residents of a trailer park in Antigonish having to be rescued from the windows of their homes and ferried to safety in boats — again, the vulnerable being the hardest hit.

Colleagues, the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices reported last year the number of catastrophic weather events in Canada was three times higher this past decade than in the 1980s. And the average cost of each disaster jumped by 1,250% since the 1970s.

While these climate-related water crises are severe and on the increase, I wanted to turn to an important source of water-related climate hope: our oceans.

Last week, while visiting Dr. Anya Waite, CEO of the Ocean Frontier Institute, who recently returned from COP26, Senator Kutcher and I learned that the ocean is the most important global storage depot of carbon on earth. It holds 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere, soaking up more emissions than all the world’s rainforests combined, and that the North Atlantic is the most intense carbon sink on the planet.

We also learned that we need to invest in understanding our changing oceans better. Colleagues, in closing, it would serve us all well to defy the words of Jacques-Yves Cousteau who said, “We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.”

Thank you, Wela’lioq.