Focus on prevention, experts say
Some argue response needs improvement
Approximately 1,650 troops have been deployed to help with severe flooding in Quebec, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan confirmed Monday afternoon.
The federal government has also supplied 250,000 additional sandbags from the Canadian Armed Forces stockpile to fight flooding in Ontario after the provincial government ran out.
Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said his department is contacting private- sector suppliers for additional sandbags, should they become necessary.
As of Monday, 1 , 520 people had been evacuated from their homes in Quebec, Goodale said.
Though southern Quebec has been hit hardest, there has been flooding in many parts of the country in recent days, including the St. John River in New Brunswick, the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec, parts of eastern Ontario and interior British Columbia.
Ottawa agreed to send military personnel to Quebec as soon as the provincial government made the request on Friday.
Asked on Monday whether Ottawa s hould have stepped in earlier, without waiting for the invitation, Goodale said it’s important to work together.
“The first line of responsibility, authority and jurisdiction clearly rests with municipalities and provinces. And the f ederal government’s role is to respond and respond quickly whenever requests are made.”
But he said he’ll be meeting with his provincial and territorial counterparts later this month to review the disaster response protocol.
Still, some say the real issue isn’t how governments respond after regions flood.
“We’re doing a good job responding to an event on the ground right at the moment,” said Blair Feltmate, head of the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo.
“What we’re not so good at is having the event not happen in the first place.”
Glenn McGillivray, managing director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, agrees. “We don’t seem to learn our lessons,” he said.
“We have built and continue to build on floodplains, for one thing.”
Even after the devastating flood in southern Alberta in 2013, McGillivray said, only 94 of 254 homeowners accepted buyouts offered by the provincial government.
Feltmate said a major problem is t hat Canada doesn’t have up-to-date flood maps that show which areas are at high risk. There used to be a federal flood damage reduction program that worked on flood mapping, but it was wound down in the 1990s.
The issue now, Feltmate said, is that new flood maps would be “politically toxic.”
Homeowners could see their property value crash if they were found to be in a high- risk area. Developers would “go apoplectic,” he said.
“It’s almost news that people don’t want to hear.”
McGillivray said municipalities can also be part of the problem, as they don’t have much incentive to prevent development on floodplains.
“When the flood comes and disaster assistance kicks in, it’s the province that’s paying them,” he said. “It’s not costing them anything to do this.”
New flood maps wouldn’t force governments to ban all new development in highrisk areas, according to Feltmate. He said there are many other steps municipalities and homeowners can take to reduce the risk, like building diversion channels and cisterns to hold excess water, or buying a battery backup for a sump pump in case the electricity goes out.
But right now, many Canadians simply don’t know they’re at risk.
Feltmate’s c ol l eagues recently released new research showing that only six per cent of Canadians know they’re living in a designated flood risk area.
After the 2013 flood in Alberta, several Canadian insurance companies began offering overland flood insurance, which was previously not available.
But to date, just 10 to 15 per cent of homeowners have bought it, said Craig Stewart, vice- president of the Insurance Bureau of Canada.
And now that overland flood insurance exists, many Canadians may find themselves out of luck if they don’t buy it and their homes later flood.
“Most jurisdictions in Canada will not provide government assistance if you could have bought insurance instead,” Stewart said, though that does not apply in Quebec and Ontario.
“In some ways, there’s more confusion than there was in 2013.”
Stewart and McGillivray both said the federal government needs to do more to educate homeowners about flood insurance and how to protect their property.
Budget 2017 announced a $ 2- billion federal fund for disaster mitigation and adaptation, but there are few details about how or when that money will be spent.
Stewart said he expects most of the funds will go toward flood- related infrastructure.