LILLEY: Flooded roads and subways but we have bike lanes!

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We can’t let Toronto’s municipal leaders use climate change as a get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to Tuesday’s flooding. In some ways, they are already trying to do that to deflect blame from their lack of action to ensure our infrastructure is up to the job.

“Climate change is real,” Mayor Olivia Chow said to reporters while reacting to the storm.

“We really seriously have to deal with climate change.”

Chow said the city is expecting the number of severe rainstorms to double in the next 15 years.

See how she’s doing that.

It’s not her fault the city’s infrastructure couldn’t handle the rain that was coming down. It’s not council’s fault that the infrastructure isn’t up to snuff, and it’s not the city manager’s fault.

It’s the fault of climate change.

The city has been through storms like this before, specifically July 8, 2013, when close to 140 millimetres — or 5.5 inches — of rain fell in a few hours. That storm caused the city, its agencies and the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority a combined $10.1 million in damages and some $850 million in insurance claims were filed, according to a city report.

That report said the 2013 storm “highlighted the need for accelerated investment in infrastructure improvements required to prevent and/or mitigate risks from future storm events.”

Given the severity of the flooding witnessed on Tuesday, that work was not done.

In the middle of Tuesday’s storm, which saw City Hall leaking all over the place and the basement of the building flooded, the response from city officials was less than stellar.

Lakeshore Blvd. and the DVP should have been closed by the city’s Emergency Operations Centre sooner than they did. There were major intersections in downtown that were impassable, once again, just like in 2013 underpasses became lakes.

The just renovated Union Station was flooded, the subway couldn’t operate at several flooded-out stations.

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It’s not like the city wasn’t warned; there was an alert from Environment Canada that more than 125 millimetres — or five inches — of rain was going to fall. That’s close to the same level as the storm in 2013 and the rain would be coming after a few soggy days.

The city has been getting rain for days, including 25 millimetres on Monday, prompting Environment Canada to declare the ground was unable to absorb any more rainfall. That should have been enough for the Emergency Operations Centre to be on alert and ready to shut down roads.

Instead, lives were put at risk as people drove into unknown situations and more than a dozen people had to be rescued from flooded out cars on the DVP.

Chow couldn’t even answer why the DVP wasn’t closed earlier, or answer which other roads needed to be closed. It was an embarrassing display for the mayor, who should show up prepared to answer basic questions when dealing with an emergency.

Saying climate change won’t solve this, bringing in the city’s proposed rain tax won’t solve this, fixing our infrastructure, including sewers, is what we need to do. Maybe we can call these fixes “climate change mitigation measures” to get Chow and her NDP council friends interested.

“We are $26 billion short, over 10 years to fix the old infrastructure,” Chow said Tuesday.

She said the $2 billion in savings the city is realizing from uploading the Gardiner and the DVP is good, but doesn’t go far enough.

Here’s an idea then — a serious one.

Instead of spending millions adding more than 100 kilometres of new bike lanes in every part of the city, spend that money on fixing the sewers and preventing floods. You could do the same with the money you are going to spend on renaming Yonge-Dundas Square to Sankofa and any number of other pet projects at City Hall.

When the basics don’t work, and on Tuesday, they clearly didn’t, everything else becomes a nice to have — not a must-have.