Canada’s disaster tracker has logged a string of new catastrophes this spring and summer — Prairie hailstorms, Alberta flooding, and, most recently, flash flooding in the Montreal region. The insured losses are still being counted.
But according to Glenn McGillivray, managing director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR), Canada’s biggest catastrophe problem isn’t understanding disaster risk.
It’s acting on what it already knows.
“We know exactly what to do,” McGillivray says. “We’re just not doing it.”
Rebuilding the same risk
Researchers already know which upgrades dramatically reduce future losses for nearly any peril Canada faces, McGillivray says.
“We know the features — the best three, four or five features to put in a rebuild per hazard — that will help prevent a repeat of a loss.”
Instead, homes and businesses are frequently rebuilt exactly as they were.
“You look at a hailstorm in Calgary, we’re putting things back with vinyl siding and non-impact-resistant shingles,” he says. “When the industry rebuilt Fort McMurray after the 2016 fire, we put it back with vinyl siding. We just continued to put risks back exactly the way it was.”
Part of the problem, he argues, is that homes are built to be cheap upfront rather than cheap to maintain.
“We’ve got our priorities backwards,” he says. “We’re trying to save money up front. And then when the builder walks away, it costs the homeowner a lot of money to fix or replace. We know how to build where we won’t have to fix much and won’t have to replace much. We just don’t do it.”
Free money, left on the table
One of the more surprising barriers, McGillivray says, is the homeowners themselves.
Many clients treat risk management as an annual renewal exercise. Effective, year-round risk engineering helps them build resilience.
More than 40 Canadian municipalities offer basement flood subsidy programs to help residents pay for devices like backwater valves and sump pumps. Similar FireSmart subsidies exist to help homeowners in wildfire-prone areas assess and reduce their risk.
Yet even when governments offer to pay for resilience upgrades, many homeowners don’t participate.
“Most of those programs are not doing well. The take-up is very, very poor,” he says. “Programs where people are, in fact, given free money to make their homes more resilient — they’re not accepting that money.”
He’s blunt about where responsibility sits. “I don’t think the insurance industry is pushing hard enough for resilience,” he adds. “Nothing’s been going on on the building-code side. Very little happening on the land-use planning side. We’re just not taking this seriously.”
Municipalities with “no skin in the game”
McGillivray also points to how development approvals get made. When disaster strikes, the bill typically lands on private insurers and provincial disaster assistance — not on the municipality that approved the building in the first place.
“They have no skin in the game. They have no risk,” he says. “They can approve a subdivision that’s carved out of a conifer forest that would go up like jet fuel if it ever ignited, or put a subdivision on a floodplain, on flood fringe, or in a soup bowl — a low point of a city that floods a lot in heavy rainfall.”
Montreal is a case in point, he says: “Montreal is almost completely a combined sewer system. It’s almost all decades old. And not a lot is being done about it.”
Insurers are moving — slowly
Some insurers are starting to abandon the old approach of rebuilding with identical materials.
“They used to rely on the old contract wording that says they had to put things back using the same materials as before,” McGillivray says. “They’re starting to understand that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
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He compares it to seatbelt-era safety features that eventually became standard. “I compare it to when they put airbags in cars — eventually every car had them. Or anti-lock brakes — eventually every car had them, and they weren’t unique anymore.”
He cites a Calgary insurer contributing toward impact-resistant roofing after hail claims, and a carrier that added hurricane straps to roofs when rebuilding after the Barrie tornado — both still reluctant to publicize the programs. Financial incentives remain the exception rather than the rule.
“There’s only a couple of companies that’ll give you a discount if you do a FireSmart assessment of your house, but hopefully there’ll be more one day,” he says. “We can give you examples of small wins. We just can’t give you an example of big, earth-changing things that have happened.”
A federal reform that hasn’t moved the needle yet
Ottawa overhauled its Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangements last year, adding funding specifically for building back better when reimbursing provinces after a disaster.
“That was exciting when it happened,” McGillivray says. “I don’t think a whole lot is occurring because of it yet, but it’s significant reform and we were excited to see it.” He notes it’s still early: the changes only took effect in April. “We’ll have to see where it goes.”
The conversation Canada hasn’t had
Sometimes, McGillivray says, resilience isn’t about better materials at all — it’s about not rebuilding in the same spot.
“Sometimes not building back is building back better,” he says. “Not putting somebody back on the coastline, or in the floodplain.” That leads directly to buyouts — permanently relocating homeowners out of high-risk zones — a policy tool McGillivray says Canada has largely avoided.
“We haven’t really had that discussion in Canada,” he says.
The affordability clock is running
Statistics Canada recently found Alberta homeowners’ insurance premiums have climbed nearly 400% over the past two decades, a trend StatsCan links directly to extreme weather.
“We continue to get whacked by the same old perils,” McGillivray says. In his own field, he adds, “I cannot point to one single thing where a big, widespread action has been taken that will move the dial.”
Asked why the country continues to repeat the cycle despite years of research and repeated warnings, his answer is surprisingly simple.
“Because humans are funny creatures,” McGillivray says. “That’s about all I can tell you.”
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Sonia is an award-winning multimedia journalist, producer TV personality and content strategist with more than a decade of experience across television, radio, digital media, and communications.