We insure across Canada, but we have many rural members. The challenges in rural communities are quite pronounced, and often more pronounced than those in urban centres.
In urban centres, we saw with the hail in Calgary and the flooding in southern Ontario and Quebec last year that there was very catastrophic, enormous damage. For context, with that rain last year in southern Ontario and Montreal, the volume of insured losses from just those 48 hours of rain was roughly equivalent to the average insured losses that we used to see in an entire year just a generation ago. This is the reality we're in right now. That's the concentration.
In rural areas, you don't have that same concentration, but you also don't have the same level of infrastructure. Again, with local leaders, we have full partners at the table, and we invest as part of our philanthropic giving and community giving in organizations supporting rural communities—farmers in particular—in mitigation and awareness efforts.
We've heard from local leaders that they absolutely need the support. In some of these communities, you may have mayors and reeves who are in a part-time role, for example. The infrastructure is simply not there. These are the communities that are often demonstrating exceptional leadership. Rural communities are tough, and they know how to respond to challenges—that's not new—but when the face of the threat is evolving as quickly as it is, we need to be there to support them.
When we hear, as we did this summer, for example, that one rural community is lending fire trucks to another, that's wonderful, but is there a coordinated federal response to help these same local leaders, so that we can be there in their time of need?