A city staff report on climate change lead to a candid discussion in council chambers on Monday.
The report reflected on a year of flooding and fires, and says that while climate change isn't the exclusive cause, it's creating natural disasters to happen more frequently.
That report was presented after council heard results from the Citizen Survey, which showed that people still highly prioritize bigger roads.
Mayor Colin Basran says given the spring and summer we had, there needs to be a community-wide shift in thinking.
"25 days when air quality posed a health risk (this summer), I know that my kid couldn't go to soccer, I know Councillor (Brad) Sieben who coaches minor soccer had to cancel practices, because kids couldn't be outside. Yet, when you look at our survey, (the) highest priority for transportation by our residents? Improving traffic flow by adding more vehicle lanes. There is a huge disconnect there," he said.
"It's a problem everybody's dealing with, and I don't know how we get people to think differently. That's the perspective I'm taking is, we know it's a problem, but we have a survey that we just recieved that says that nobody's willing to change much to do anything about it, and there's the issue I'm having, and it makes me a little bit sad. But we can continue to do our part, and so where we can, let's be leaders and lets lead by example."
Basran says that as a high number of people ask the city for bigger and better roads, they're not connecting that issue with some of the recent extreme weather.
"I'm just as guilty, I still drive an automobile. I guess where I'm not sure it quite measures up yet is, what are our residents prepared to do? And so maybe we as a council need to have the conversation that, maybe we need to start adding more climate change questions into the survey," he said.
"Okay, you want to improve roads by adding more lanes to get more cars on the road, are you prepared then, to deal with more days when you can't send kids outside? More days when we're dealing with flooding, because all that is helping create the very problems we just had this report on."
In its report, the city lists key actions to take to adapt to climate change.
Those include supporting Mission Creek restoration, protecting farmland, and making infrastructure more environmentally friendly.