The Parliamentary Budget Officer and the Auditor General have analyzed the pattern of increasing risk over the last number of years, and in taking climate change into account have tried to project into the future what we can expect in losses and damages, particularly from floods and wildfires. The projection is that we probably need to set aside about a billion dollars a year just for cleaning up the mess after the fact.
One of the premises in the emergency management strategy, recognizing that this is the big future risk going forward, is that we're going to either pay now or pay later. You either prevent the loss, or you clean up the mess after the fact. The latter is usually more expensive.
We have tried to identify opportunities in our infrastructure spending, for example, where, before the fact, you can build structures—some of them heavily engineered, concrete structures and some of them natural habitat—to better control water flows, so that you can try to protect yourself as much as possible from the storm that dumps a year's worth of precipitation on a community or an area in two or three days and then floods everything with huge losses.
We have a federal program called the DFAA, disaster financial assistance arrangements, which compensates for some of the losses. That program has, if my memory serves me correctly, paid out more to compensate for floods and wildfires in the last six years than it has paid out in total over the full history of the program, going back to 1970.
Obviously, the situation in recent years has been getting worse and the risk is higher. Therefore, investing in more climate-resilient infrastructure in advance will save you money after the fact.