Thank you, Sophie.
We're rushing a bit, trying to respect your time.
I'm going to close with three recommendations.
First, the Government of Canada should establish national building codes by 2030 to protect Canadian homes from flooding, wildfire, hail and severe wind. Again, we know what to do; we just need to codify it by putting it in the codes.
Second, Public Safety Canada should partner with the provincial and territorial governments and the insurance industry, with the focus always being on building back better with resilience after a loss. After you experience a loss to your home or your community, the expectation always should be to build back better. The federal government took an important first step earlier this year with the modification of the disaster financial assistance arrangements. The need now is to coordinate the federal opportunity with provincial follow-through and to collaborate with the insurance industry.
Our third and final recommendation today, which Susan started on and we strongly agree with, is that we need a coordinated approach to proactively encourage homeowners to implement the advice and changes that are needed. At the moment, the municipal governments and insurance companies have been bringing in a number of incentives in different communities, in different ways. We do not yet have a national collaboration whereby the federal government and provincial governments work with the others who benefit when a home is prepared, when a community is prepared. There are big savings that can be made. We think a dollar can save five to 10 dollars more. At the moment, you have municipal governments stepping up to some extent, and you have insurance companies stepping up. We are looking for the federal and provincial governments to have this collaboration, this overall pre-event, “Let's get homes ready, and let's do all these things that our science shows can be done.”
To conclude, thank you for the opportunity. We want to share with you that there is a crisis going on in the United States, where they have failed to deal with the same issue that's confronting us. In my opinion, we are not in crisis, but we're going the wrong way very fast. The losses are going up, and we know what to do about it. The fact that the Americans didn't do it is not a good excuse. We need to get on with doing the right things. We need to proactively invest in risk reduction. We need to take advantage after a loss. We need to put in building codes, so that we do this before any risk comes along. We think this does not need to become a crisis, but unfortunately we're going the wrong way fast.
Thank you.