Flood tests Ontario’s overhauled disaster relief

As the floodwaters start to recede along the Ottawa River, one of the assessment teams hitting the ground is from the provincial government. It has a hugely important job: documenting the damage in order to activate and start processing Ontario’s new disaster relief program.

It’s an issue that’s getting more important with each passing year, as the pace of disaster events has seen a huge spike over the last decade. From 2005 to 2010, the province had 17 declared disasters that required $8 million in total assistance; from 2010 to 2015, there were 43 declared disasters that needed $36 million in total assistance.

Starting last year, Ontario launched a completely overhauled disaster relief program with the goal of making it more flexible, better targeted and faster at getting money to recipients. The government was trying to address multiple problems, but there were two in particular. The old program was designed primarily to help small municipalities, often leaving cities scrambling. The old program also required that financial assistance going to private individuals and businesses be matched by local fundraising. This meant that depending on the capacity for fundraising in an area, some communities qualified for much more provincial money than others.

So the province split its disasterrelief program in two. One of them, called Municipal Disaster Recovery Assistance, is meant for governments, and aims to make the eligibility criteria more transparent and predictable, while also giving municipalities more time to assess the damage before applying for assistance.

The second stream, Disaster Recovery Assistance for Ontarians, is designed for individuals and businesses to recover some basic costs following a disaster. Crucially, it drops the requirement for matched fundraising.

The changes the province made — after lengthy consultation with municipalities — seem sensible in their design, but you never really know how well a program’s going to function until it’s in practice. The Ottawa flood will be one of the first big tests. There have been numerous small disaster events since it launched, but the only other event on this scale was a flash flood in Windsor last fall, and the jury’s still out on that one as the claims make their way through the system.

Disaster relief is almost always a troublesome issue for governments. Yes, politicians get photo opportunities showing them “on the ground” and promising firm action, as Premier Kathleen Wynne did on Monday in Ottawa. But in the following weeks and months, there are inevitably stories of people saying they haven’t gotten enough help, or the help hasn’t arrived in time, or it’s too difficult to access.

It’s pretty much impossible to design a relief program that can function perfectly for everyone. The program needs to be generous enough to help those who need it, but not so generous that people neglect to buy the insurance they need for their property. (This is especially true now that overland flooding insurance is available in Ontario, a very recent development.) You also need to be able to weed out the frivolous and fraudulent claims that always arise, while still getting the money quickly to those who legitimately need it.

But we need to keep our expectations high. There are few government responsibilities as important as protecting vulnerable citizens following a disaster. As I write this, the city and the province are carefully sorting through the flood’s aftermath to prepare to activate the program. Those of us who don’t need the relief should watch closely and keep the pressure on to make sure those who do are getting it.