After a year filled with wildfires and storms, many Canadians are attempting to recover and rebuild. However, their attempts to access provincial or federal aid are often being limited by confusion over their eligibility, and how to work through the frequently complicated and confusing application processes, according to an article in the CBC. A recently released watchdog report in British Columbia highlighted many of the issues, noting the disaster aid programs within the province suffered from a lack of flexibility, unreasonable delays, and were generally outdated, inaccessible, and poorly communicated, with the end result being additional burdens on residents trying to recover. The report particularly highlighted the issues in access for those where were Indigenous, elderly, or disabled.
Says Blair Feltmate, head of the University of Waterloo’s Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation, of the report’s findings, “That’s not just a B.C. problem. You could take out B.C. and put pretty much any province’s name in that report and it would work.”
Says Feltmate, who has previously run analyses comparing the readiness of different provinces, “It’s monumentally frustrating.… It does not seem to be that difficult to figure out, to develop a system that can increase efficiency, but we’re simply not doing it. For reasons that are beyond me, we don’t seem to learn from one incident to the next.”
Source:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/disaster-relief-financial-aid-programs-canada-1.6988067
