Canada's national flood insurance program, which was pledged with $450 million in funding and an April 2026 target, still has no timeline for delivery, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada.
Rachel Barry, IBC's director of federal affairs, said the program is still being actively designed by the federal government.
"There's no timeline that I can share right now from government," Barry said.
She said the program is complex and that IBC's discussions with the federal government have focused on making sure it is scoped correctly – including how a federal backstop would function alongside flood coverage already offered by Canada's private home insurance market. She said it needs to be "designed in a way that doesn't encourage increased harms in the long term."
A February 2025 report from the Canadian Climate Institute found that unless precautions are taken, more than 540,000 homes could be built in flood-prone areas by 2030, adding up to $2 billion in extra damages annually.
Barry said Canada has not reached the point where affordability pressures have turned into an insurability crisis — but that the window to prevent it from getting there is now.
"We're not there," she said. "And what we're trying to make sure is that we're making those right choices now to ensure we don't have that problem."
She said the industry and governments still have the ability to act before the situation deteriorates further.
"Right now we are still able to make choices and have some of those upfront investments now that will maintain insurability and affordability," Barry said.
The Canadian Climate Institute estimated in 2026 that $4 billion in annual proactive infrastructure adaptation could yield $5 to $10 billion in avoided costs – a return that IBC has cited repeatedly in its discussions with federal and provincial governments.
Barry said there is no single measure that will resolve the problem, but she identified land use planning as the most important piece – making sure new homes are not built in areas where the flood or wildfire risk is already too high.
"Land-use planning and where we're building new homes is really critical," she said.
She said the second priority is existing housing stock. Building codes at both the federal and provincial level need to be upgraded to reflect current climate conditions, and homeowners need support to retrofit properties that were built before those risks were understood.
"We can't just be talking about new homes, but how are we retrofitting existing homes to make them more resilient," she said.
She framed the challenge as two-sided: reducing the risk that already exists while making sure new development does not add to it.
"It's about reducing our already existing risk and it's about not increasing our risk," Barry said.
A Statistics Canada report released in mid-June found that catastrophic weather-related claims have risen fivefold since the early 2000s.
Since 2009, Canadian insurers have paid nearly $2 billion per year on average in catastrophic weather-related claims, up from approximately $400 million annually between 1983 and 2008. Annual insured losses reached $3.4 billion in 2022 and $9.4 billion in 2024, the highest figure ever recorded. Four of the last five years now rank among the 10 costliest on record.
Insurance premiums have increased faster than inflation in recent years, reflecting both the growing cost of rebuilding homes and the escalating frequency of catastrophic events.
Liam McGuinty, IBC's vice president of federal affairs, said at the time that the data confirmed what the industry has been observing on the ground.
"Reducing cost pressures in the home insurance market means confronting the root cause: rising risk," McGuinty said. "That requires a decisive shift to adaptation – investing in resilience, building in safer ways and locations, and taking action now to curb the growing damage from extreme weather."
