Severe storms that swept across Quebec on June 20 and 21 caused more than $409 million in insured damage, according to initial estimates from Catastrophe Indices and Quantification Inc. (CatIQ).
Montreal's West Island and areas south of the city were particularly affected by a series of severe thunderstorms that caused flooding in hundreds of homes.
The June losses fit a pattern of escalating flood costs in the province. Over the past 20 years, flood and water-related insured losses across Canada have increased more than 300% compared with the previous two decades, according to CatIQ. IBC has recorded an average of roughly 25,000 flood-related claims a year in Quebec over the past five years, underscoring how frequently, not just how severely, the peril is affecting the province.
Laurent Fafard, vice president, Quebec at IBC, said thousands of Quebecers are seeing their daily lives disrupted beyond the raw numbers. He said the organization's priority remains supporting homeowners while working to reduce risks and better prepare communities for the future, specifically through investment in mitigation measures such as modernized stormwater and wastewater infrastructure, flood protection mechanisms and residential renovation programs.
The losses also land as Quebec overhauls how it identifies and regulates flood risk. A new provincial regulatory framework took effect on March 1, 2026, introducing a four-level flood risk classification, ranging from low to very high, to replace a system based purely on flood recurrence probability.
New generation flood zone maps are being published progressively starting this spring, and provincial officials have said the updated mapping could increase the number of homes identified as being in flood zones by roughly 30%, from about 25,000 to 35,000, with some estimates suggesting the number of affected properties could climb toward 77,000.
Properties newly classified as flood zones face restrictions on major renovations, reconstruction and expansions, with knock-on effects for home insurance availability and mortgage financing.
Against that backdrop, IBC is calling on governments to accelerate action across several areas to meaningfully reduce flood losses and help keep insurance affordable. Some of what IBC wants is already underway in Quebec specifically, including the rollout of updated, more accurate flood zone maps and a four-tier risk classification system, both of which the province began implementing this year.
Other asks remain largely aspirational at a national level - stronger land-use planning, modernized stormwater and wastewater infrastructure, scaled-up home retrofit incentives, and stricter building codes for flood-resilient construction, none of which currently have a confirmed implementation timeline. That national picture, including the status of Canada's long-delayed federal flood reinsurance backstop, is covered in full in IBC's companion report on flood insurance access, published the same week.
IBC has also called for clearer, more accessible consumer information to help homeowners, renters and businesses understand their risk and take practical mitigation steps.
Fafard said extreme weather events are becoming increasingly costly, and that Quebec is no exception. He said the province must learn from these floods and accelerate investment in prevention, adaptation and resilience aimed at strengthening Quebec's economic resilience, adding that every disaster is a reminder that prevention costs less than reconstruction.
Quebec's flood challenge is now unfolding on two parallel tracks: insurers absorbing recurring, multi-hundred-million-dollar loss events in the near term, and a provincial government redrawing the underlying risk map in ways that will reshape where and how homes can be built and insured for years to come.
With new flood zone classifications already rolling out but national-level solutions still pending, how quickly Quebec can align insurance markets, municipal planning and household-level mitigation may determine whether the province's flood losses continue rising at the pace seen over the past two decades.
