Severe storms that swept across Manitoba and Saskatchewan on June 9 and 10 caused more than $728 million in insured damage, according to initial estimates from CatIQ, with tornadoes, hail, damaging winds, torrential rain and flash flooding affecting communities across both provinces. Separately, flooding in Montreal and surrounding areas on June 20 and 21 caused more than $409 million in insured damage. The losses land as Canada still has no functioning national flood insurance backstop - despite the federal government committing $450 million toward an April 2026 launch during the 2025 election campaign. As of mid-2026, IBC says there is no confirmed delivery timeline, with the federal government still designing the program and working through how a backstop would function alongside private market flood coverage. The roughly 1.5 million Canadian households at highest flood risk - many of them in the same Prairie and flood-prone regions absorbing this year's losses - remain without access to affordable overland flood coverage in the interim.
Liam McGuinty, vice-president of Federal Affairs at IBC, said flood risk is no longer a future challenge. "These recent and past catastrophes are a reminder that flood risk is no longer a future challenge, it is a current reality affecting Canadians from coast to coast," he said.
The Manitoba and Saskatchewan event fits a documented and worsening trend. Over the past 20 years, flood and water-related insured losses have increased more than 300% compared with the previous two decades per CatIQ, with flood and water events accounting for 39% of insured catastrophic losses in recent years. Since 2009, insurers have paid an average of more than $2 billion annually in catastrophic weather-related claims, including record losses of $9.4 billion in 2024 and $2.4 billion in 2025. The current losses sit just ahead of the second anniversary of the July 2024 Toronto flash flooding, now estimated at more than $909 million in insured damage per updated CatIQ figures, which was one of several events contributing to the record $8 billion 2024 summer of catastrophe - the costliest severe weather season in Canadian insurance history.
The Prairies specifically carry an escalating loss profile. Alberta alone has absorbed more than $5.5 billion in insured hail losses over the past five years, including a 2024 Calgary hailstorm generating more than 130,000 claims. Canada experiences an estimated 230 tornadoes annually, ranking second globally by frequency, concentrated across southern Ontario, the southern Prairies and southern Quebec, with some research suggesting tornado and wind hotspots are shifting eastward toward more densely populated parts of the country.
Federal disaster assistance payments, which cover public infrastructure costs from these events, averaged $881 million annually between 2010 and 2024 and are projected to climb to $1.8 billion annually between 2025 and 2034 per Statistics Canada.
Allstate Insurance Company of Canada reported in February 2026 that home insurance claims from external water sources rose 94% in 2025 compared with the prior year, with external water damage accounting for nearly a quarter of all home insurance claims. Home insurance premiums have risen as much as 45% over the past six years per rates.ca. Reinsurance costs for Canadian property portfolios climbed 25-30% during the 2023 renewal cycle and up to 50-70% for portfolios with recent losses per TD Economics.
IBC has proposed a federal reinsurance entity structured through a CMHC subsidiary to extend affordable overland flood coverage to the 1.5 million highest-risk Canadian households. It is also calling on governments to accelerate land-use planning reform, infrastructure investment and building code modernisation to reduce the underlying exposure. McGuinty said insurance alone cannot solve Canada's flood problem. "We need all orders of government to accelerate investments in adaptation and flood-risk reduction to better protect Canadians and build more resilient communities," he said.
Until the federal backstop moves from design to delivery, the pattern this week's storms represent - rising losses concentrated in regions the private market already knows are high-risk - is likely to keep repeating each severe weather season.
