The federal government released its 2026 National Adaptation Strategy Progress Report this week, three years after the strategy's 2023 launch. The Insurance Bureau of Canada responded by renewing its call for governments to address what it describes as a more than $65 billion stormwater and wastewater infrastructure deficit across the country.
"Canada can no longer afford to treat extreme weather as a series of emergencies to respond to after the fact," said Liam McGuinty, IBC's vice-president of federal affairs. He pointed to this summer's flooding in Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec - alongside significant wildfire activity in BC and Ontario - as evidence of a long-term pattern of increasingly severe and costly disasters, not isolated anomalies.
IBC says insured losses from extreme weather in Canada have averaged more than $3.7 billion annually over the past decade, up from $1.4 billion the decade before that and $883 million in the decade before that - an increase of roughly 320% in real terms since the late 1990s. The organization cited 2024 as Canada's costliest year on record for insured weather losses. CatIQ's January 2025 release put the initial figure at $8.5 billion; updated estimates have since revised the 2024 total above $9.2 billion as late-arriving claims data was incorporated.
The June 2026 Saskatchewan and Manitoba prairie storms - a single event that CatIQ has now revised to an estimated $850 million in insured losses at its six-week estimate - illustrate the scale of individual events IBC is citing in its renewed push.
"Investing in resilience protects Canadians, reduces disaster costs and helps keep insurance affordable and available," McGuinty said. "Every dollar spent today helps avoid greater recovery costs tomorrow."
IBC's statement was one of several reactions to the federal report, and not the most critical. Ryan Ness, director of adaptation at the Canadian Climate Institute, said the report "paints an overly optimistic picture of success." While Ottawa has launched a wide range of programs and funding mechanisms since 2023, Ness argued there is little evidence any of it is actually reducing climate risk - because the government is not tracking the outcome data needed to show whether Canadians are measurably safer, only that activity is happening.
Ness also pointed to a specific figure buried in the government's own progress report: up to 1.5 million Canadian households still face flood risk severe enough to be considered effectively uninsurable. That figure - drawn from the government's own assessment rather than from an outside critic - sits awkwardly against the report's broadly upbeat tone.
The federal government's own framing is more optimistic. Officials said nine of the strategy's targets had been met or exceeded by the end of 2025, citing progress on public awareness of climate risks and the integration of resilience into infrastructure decision-making. But even by the government's own numbers, household-level adoption of protective measures is lagging: only about a third of Canadians have taken concrete steps to prepare for climate risks, short of a 50% target the strategy had set for 2025.
Climate Proof Canada, a coalition of climate advocacy groups, welcomed the report as a "strong road map" while echoing IBC's message that implementation, not further planning, is now the central challenge.
For brokers and insurers, the disagreement over whether the strategy is "working" is less consequential than the specific, quantifiable gap both IBC and independent critics agree on: stormwater and wastewater systems built for a different climate are failing more often and more expensively, and addressing the deficit requires capital governments have not yet committed at scale.
The federal government itself has estimated that every dollar spent on proactive adaptation saves between $13 and $15 in avoided future costs, according to infrastructure resilience analysis cited in government infrastructure planning documents. If accurate, that return makes the current funding gap harder to justify on cost grounds alone, whatever the disagreement over how much progress the adaptation strategy has delivered.
This is not a new IBC position. The organization made nearly identical calls after June's Manitoba and Saskatchewan storms and after the Quebec storms in June and July, both of which IBC's own regional leadership tied directly to aging stormwater infrastructure overwhelmed by heavier rainfall. Neither set of advocacy communications has yet produced an announced federal or provincial infrastructure commitment.
For brokers advising municipal or commercial clients on flood exposure, that pattern is itself the signal: the advocacy case for infrastructure investment is being made consistently and with credible data, but the funding response has not followed. Until capital commitments are announced and construction timelines are established, the underlying stormwater and drainage infrastructure in most Canadian municipalities is not materially changing. Flood risk assessments for clients in affected communities should not be discounted on the expectation that this report will accelerate infrastructure spending. The history of similar calls this summer suggests it will not, at least not quickly.
