Madam Speaker, before I begin, I want to acknowledge that we are gathered on the traditional unceded territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin nation.
We have debated Bill C-241 on the national strategy for flood and drought prevention. I think it is essential to speak to the House about the fact that this bill deals with an issue that directly affects the safety, well-being and resilience of our communities. Extreme weather events are now part of everyday life in many regions. Every year, municipalities across the country see their infrastructure weakened, their roads submerged, their soil dried out and their homes flooded.
I am thinking of my own riding of Terrebonne, where I have seen first-hand the very real effects of heavy rains. Sudden rainfall events, unexpected flooding, and erosion risks are not simply meteorological phenomena. They are part of our daily lives. When the Mascouche River or the Mille Îles River threaten to overflow, it is about more than just hydrological data. These are families who fear losing their homes, business owners who risk losing everything, and infrastructure that is being put to the test. That is precisely why Bill C-241 is essential. It proposes establishing a national strategy for flood and drought forecasting based on coordination and transparency.
If this strategy is to be truly effective, we need high-quality, consistent data. Today, each province, territory and indigenous government collects its own hydrological information using different instruments, observation networks that vary from region to region, and analytical methods that are not always compatible. These differences create silos that limit our collective ability to effectively anticipate floods and droughts. To move forward together, we need to narrow these gaps and strengthen interoperability. Bill C-241 does not seek to centralize or remove these powers, but rather to bring together this knowledge and these tools around a shared objective, namely, to strengthen our capacity to anticipate and prevent hydrological disasters.
Experts from across Canada, including UQAM, the University of Saskatchewan and across Quebec, are telling us how important good data coordination is. In this context, data sovereignty is essential if we are to have full control over our forecasting capabilities. Today, our country still relies on data provided by foreign agencies, such as NASA in the United States. While useful, this data has sometimes proven to be inaccurate or ill-suited to Canada's unique realities. Bill C-241 aims precisely to correct that dependence by strengthening our autonomy and ensuring that our decisions are based on data produced here for our own needs.
It proposes a co-operative model where information collected by different jurisdictions can be interconnected and analyzed jointly. That will allow us to offer all municipalities, from coast to coast to coast, the means to respond faster, to plan smarter and to protect their residents. The costs of doing nothing are already immense. In 2024 alone, insured losses related to climate events in Canada reached $8.5 billion. Tropical storm Debby caused $2.7 billion in insured damages in Quebec, and thousands of residents had to be temporarily relocated.
Bill C-241 provides a national framework for planning infrastructure, improving access to data, coordinating responses and, ultimately, saving lives. We need to choose prevention over reaction, coordination over isolation and resilience over vulnerability because so much more than property damage is at stake. At stake are people with faces, names and addresses, members of our communities. I invite my colleagues to support this bill so that we can work together on building a Canada that is better prepared to meet climate challenges.