Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members, for the invitation and opportunity to speak to you at the standing committee today on the subject of disaster mitigation and insurance. I'm Craig Stewart, vice-president of federal affairs at the Insurance Bureau of Canada, or IBC. We

Environment committee  In the United States, FEMA runs what's called the national flood insurance program, which is a very sophisticated program that's responsible not just for insurance but also for funding flood mapping—they invest hundreds of millions a year in flood mapping across the country—as we

Environment committee  The government backstops it to a degree, but that particular model is funded through levies applied to insurance policyholders across the country. There's a bit of cross-subsidization from insurance policyholders, but not really from the taxpayers in Great Britain.

Environment committee  It's the model that ministers have asked us to take the closest look at.

Environment committee  Yes. In that case, you do have properties that, as we've seen unfortunately in this region, are going to repeatedly flood. They would drain any insurance pool that you set up, and other policy holders would essentially be subsidizing them for living there, which isn't right. Tho

Environment committee  Federal, provincial or municipal. That's a discussion that has to happen. This is called strategic retreat. You carefully select those communities that should either be moved or elevated. You can elevate these homes as well, either by putting them on stilts or on berms, but they

Environment committee  To date, with the disaster mitigation and adaptation fund run by Infrastructure Canada, natural infrastructure is eligible in that program. Unfortunately, the threshold for the program is such that it's quite high. The minimum threshold is $20 million, so you can't apply only for

Environment committee  They were self-selected. British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec are all represented. That said, the Province of Alberta has been very engaged, as have the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Those four provinces are officially on it, but it's not limited; it's ope

Environment committee  We should be collaborating closely; that's the number one thing. That's the municipalities, as well as the provinces and federal departments, with the private sector insurance industry, realtors and banks. It gets to that whole-of-society piece that we talked about. We need to b

Environment committee  Absolutely. We have, just in the last year, funded a workshop and reports on how to incorporate natural infrastructure more effectively into mitigation planning. We've done that in partnership with the Intact Centre at the University of Waterloo and the International Institute f

Environment committee  Three years ago our CEO went coast to coast in this country with the message that climate change is a clear and present danger, and that whereas there is a national conversation around mitigating future risk, most Canadians are not connecting the dots and realizing that it's cost

Environment committee  From the work we are seeing, Canadians are beginning to connect the dots, that there is a link between the events they are experiencing and climate change; these aren't just fluke events. Canadians are not aware enough of what's contained in their insurance policies, and we hav

Environment committee  The onus is on both of us.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the invitation and the opportunity to speak to the standing committee today. I'm Craig Stewart, vice-president of federal affairs, and I'm joined by Nadja Dreff, our chief economist at Insurance Bureau of Canada or IBC. We are the national trade associa

Finance committee  Yes, we do. Basically, through a third party, we aggregate every catastrophic event—which would be an event that surpasses $25 million in losses—that can be attributed to severe weather. That would be anything from hail to flooding, ice storms, wildfire, or generally any severe w