Thank you very much to all the witnesses for coming. I'm really excited for day one of this study. It's a study that I proposed. I've been involved in this issue for many years, since my time working for the City of Halifax on climate change.
In 2023 we had a wildfire in Tantallon that destroyed many, many houses in a suburban area near the wildland-urban interface. We had a hurricane, and we had a flash flood that took four lives just outside the boundary of the HRM. Thinking back to that Tantallon wildfire, we were scrambling, obviously, because Halifax and Nova Scotia weren't used to this situation. We were trying to figure out how the insurance sector played in something like the rebuild after a wildfire, when insurance has typically been “like for like”, in the exact same place.
This is maybe a question for Ms. Penwarden and others. Is the insurance sector thinking about flexibility in its coverage, so that we can build back better and reduce risk on a go-forward basis?