Canada is rethinking how it deals with flooding. It’s about time
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This week, Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair announced that Ottawa will finally create a national public-private insurance program for overland flooding.
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Ottawa will also finally create comprehensive flood mapping of the entire country, and make it available to the public so property buyers know exactly what they’re getting.
And the government will look at ways to tie funding for reconstruction to the condition that homes and buildings are moved away from areas of acute risk.
If the government lives up to these promises, it could mark a critical shift away from a flood-management philosophy in Canada that has been antiquated by climate change.
The old model, called “hazard-based” by experts, was built around the probability of a disastrous event occurring, such as a one-in-a-hundred-year flood, and doing the minimum required to prevent its worst consequences. Those measures are accompanied by public disaster relief programs, which includes Ottawa’s Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangements, that compensate provinces and flood victims for their losses.
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