Thank you for the question.
In those kinds of examples, when the dikes for flood protection that have been so much the subject of conversation lately are allowed to degrade and are not maintained to the level of service and the level of protection that they were originally designed to provide, we see the consequences during a major flood event. The cost of upgrading and maintaining those dikes would almost certainly have been a fraction of the cost of the damage that resulted. We see this over and over again in all kinds of disasters.
We could have foreseen where the impact would be, as the Insurance Bureau of Canada mentioned in earlier testimony. Most of the flood risk in this country is concentrated in the top few per cent of homes that are at flood risk, so a relatively small investment to protect or perhaps relocate those homes would deliver major benefits in terms of reducing the flood damage that those homeowners, and then the Canadian economy as a whole, have to bear.