Good afternoon. Thank you, Mr. Chair and distinguished committee members, for the opportunity to speak to you about your present study on protecting Canadian residents from extreme weather events.
For the past decade, I have worked closely with many of your other panellists, leading advocacy work for the property and casualty insurance industry on disaster resilience. In that capacity, I founded a national advocacy coalition called Climate Proof Canada, co-chaired the disaster resilience and advisory committee for Canada's first national adaptation strategy, and co-chaired the national advisory committee on flood insurance. I have now left IBC and speak only as an individual expert. My opinions are my own.
Seventy-one years ago, on October 15, 1954, Canada experienced its worst natural disaster in modern times, when hurricane Hazel swept through southern Ontario, claiming 81 lives. The regional government of Metropolitan Toronto had been formed that very year and, together with the provincial government of Leslie Frost and the federal government of Louis St. Laurent, collaborated on swift action to ensure Ontarians and Canadians would be better prepared for hurricanes in the future.
St. Laurent and Frost—one a Liberal and the other a PC—collaborated in appointing a royal commission. As a result of that commission's findings, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority was formed, within three years, to oversee management and flood control across nine watersheds; the dominion weather bureau was resourced to provide better flood forecasting and alerts during severe weather events; and, most importantly, the Conservation Authorities Act in Ontario was modified to allow authorities to procure land and regulate development in flood plains, paving the way for the establishment of the greenbelt. Today, Toronto residents are safer, and flood losses in Ontario are fewer because of the focused collaboration between the Frost and St. Laurent governments in the lee of hurricane Hazel—all this from one event.
Now to look at the present, in our work preparing the national adaptation strategy, Canadian experts identified three risk factors related to extreme weather events: hazard, exposure and vulnerability.
The first factor is the hazard itself—flood, wind, hail, wildfire—and is usually determined by geography. For example, if you live in a dry, coniferous forest, you may face wildfire risk, or if you live in a valley bottom next to a river, you may face flood risk. However, that does not determine your outcome.
The second factor involves exposure to that hazard. If your home is built with fire-resistant materials in a fire-smart community, your exposure to wildfire can be decreased. The massive investment in the Red River floodway in the 1960s reduced flood exposure for most of the city of Winnipeg.
The third factor involves personal vulnerability. Two neighbours facing the same hazard with the same degree of exposure may face very different outcomes, based on either their financial or health-related situations. If one person, for instance, has chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, they are more vulnerable, and their health may be impacted much more severely by extreme heat or wildfire smoke than a neighbour's. If one is better protected by their insurance policy or has ample savings, they may be less financially vulnerable and better able to recover financially from extreme weather losses than one who does not. Therefore, a financially sustainable path forward to protect Canadian residents from extreme weather should include measures to reduce both household exposure and personal vulnerability.
Household exposure can be reduced by some of the measures you've heard already: retrofitting homes to make them more climate-resilient, building new homes to higher resilience standards, implementing defensive infrastructure and ensuring communities are fire-smart. Personal vulnerability can be reduced by ensuring that we identify vulnerable populations in advance of extreme heat and wildfire smoke events and provide necessary supports to them. Financial vulnerability can be addressed by ensuring that public insurance programming is in place when private insurance is no longer available, starting with high-risk flood.
Finally, there has been too little collaboration, beyond the programmatic level, among orders of government. The development of the national adaptation strategy did not engage other orders of government in a meaningful way. Ongoing disaster preparedness discussions do occur at federal-provincial-territorial tables, such as among the senior officials responsible for emergency management, but we need to strengthen this base. Politicians have collaborated, with urgency, across orders of government and political parties in the past. All that is needed now is sufficient political will.