The small community of Sackville’s precarious place on the edge of the Chignecto Isthmus is a source of anxiety for some as the area is increasingly threatened by the possibility of coastal flooding.
The thin strip of land that connects Nova Scotia and New Brunswick is protected by a series of dikes and aboiteaus first constructed by Acadian settlers who turned the natural salt marshes into agricultural land in the 17th century.
But hundreds of years later those aging dikes are under threat from rising sea levels and experts say it would only take one well-placed storm for water to inundate large parts of Sackville.
“It’s really just a crapshoot right now, it’s like playing Russian roulette,” said Shoshanna Wingate, who works on Lorne Street, one of the lowest-lying areas of the community.
A proposal to raise or replace the dikes is being discussed by the federal and provincial governments in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Though it’s mostly geared towards protecting the rail line and TransCanada Highway that run through the isthmus, raising the dikes would also protect the communities of Sackville, N.B., and Amherst, N.S.
The project would cost up to up $300 million and take about a decade to complete, leaving Wingate frustrated over the time it’s taking for the three governments to reach a funding agreement.
“It’s not a matter of if or when. Those storms are coming and the longer they delay on funding the restoration of the dikes, the greater risk we all are at,” she said.
The federal government has offered to foot half the bill for the project, but New Brunswick’s infrastructure minister Jeff Carr has said that Ottawa’s contribution should be larger.
“We believe that the federal government needs to be the major funder in this project, it is a piece of national infrastructure and it’s a critical one and we’ll continue as a government to make a priority on getting that done,” Carr told the legislature’s estimates committee in April.
However, some in Sackville are already recognizing that raising the dikes won’t secure the community indefinitely.
“It will alleviate a lot of problems for our community and the community of Amherst, but the fact is there’s going to have to be further conversations about what it takes to address climate change problems like storm surge,” said Tantramar mayor Andrew Black. “Do we move people away from floodplains? Do we review our municipal plans as municipalities to address climate change problems? There’s a further conversation there.”
“(Upgrading the dikes is) not a silver bullet but it would sure help the community for the foreseeable future.”
Some researchers have suggested that resettlement will have to be part of the long-term solution in the community, which will require government buyouts of home and business owners. It’s a difficult conversation but one that needs to happen sooner rather than later, according to former town councillor Bill Evans.
“It’s hard to get people to support intrusive measures when they’re not really, I don’t want to say aware, but they’re not really thinking about the problem,” he said.
“Most of the time people don’t think about the fact that where you and I are standing would be way below sea level twice a day.”
Evans lives in the home where his grandmother was born and says he has to confront the fact that it would be at risk should the dikes fail. He says governments need to be preparing people for the possibility that some areas just won’t be safe to inhabit.
“We have to start a conversation, that this is a priority, that it would be cheaper and better to avoid the disaster than to be compensated afterward,” he said.
Ensuring that conversation begins to take place, and that governments are ready to step up and support the community when the time comes, is a key way to ensure that people still have agency as the area adapts to the risks posed by storms and sea level rise, says Sackville resident Julia Feltham.
“What I worry is going to happen is that it’s going to be decided for us and that will be the pain point. Whether it’s decided for us by the provincial and federal government or if it’s decided for us by catastrophe,” she said.
“No one is emotionally prepared to do a resettlement and I think we need to think innovatively and compassionately about those next steps because I think it will be, like I said, a catastrophe or a higher level of government saying, ‘nope, you guys have to get out of there.'”
But when it comes to protecting the community in the short term, Wingate says it’s time for action.
“We’re one of the most vulnerable locations in Canada, it’s very frustrating,” she said.
“We’re confused here about what the hold-up is.”