Insurance Bureau of Canada is again calling on governments to invest in flood infrastructure, shift toward prevention and expand access to flood-risk information.
In an op-ed published this month, the IBC argued that "catastrophic flooding is no longer a surprise." The piece leaned on Canada's Changing Climate Report 2026, released by Environment and Climate Change Canada on September 4, the federal government's second-ever comprehensive climate assessment following its inaugural 2019 edition, compiled by more than 100 scientists over three years.
The report stated plainly that "the warming and associated changes in climate in Canada are effectively irreversible," and projects "high confidence" increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall and flash flooding, including in urban areas.
The op-ed cited the September 2 GTA storm as a direct illustration: more than 100 millimetres of rain, large hail and damaging winds overwhelmed the Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway and left more than 150,000 Ontario customers without power. It also repeats a now-familiar statistic from this campaign: flood and water-related insured losses have grown more than 300% over the past 20 years compared with the two decades before, according to CatIQ.
One striking finding from the same federal climate report doesn't appear in this op-ed but reinforces its argument directly: Environment Canada's own summary projects that the annual cost of flood damage to homes and buildings across Canada could increase three to five times over the coming decades.
That's a considerably more specific and alarming forward-looking figure than anything in IBC's own messaging on this issue to date, and it's worth brokers and clients knowing it exists even though IBC didn't cite it directly.
This op-ed's recommendations, investing in stormwater and wastewater infrastructure to close what it now describes as a $65 billion deficit, shifting government spending from disaster recovery toward prevention measures like backwater valves and land-use planning, and expanding public access to Canada's Flood Risk Finder, are functionally identical to IBC's positioning across a string of prior statements this year.
Insurance Business has tracked this same three-point ask following June's Prairie storm outbreak, ahead of Quebec's provincial election, and following Ontario's Niagara Region flooding in late July and early August, that piece citing a $60 billion figure for the same infrastructure deficit rather than $65 billion, a discrepancy this desk has flagged previously without IBC explaining the difference.
The consistency of the ask across a full storm season shows IBC treating this as a sustained policy campaign rather than a reaction to any single event, this September 2 storm included.
One detail worth noting for context: unlike the 2019 edition of this same climate report, which received ministerial press conferences and technical briefings, this year's release drew comparatively little federal promotion, with Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin unavailable for comment at launch, according to independent commentary on the report's release.
That's a separate, notable contrast to how forcefully IBC and the insurance industry have amplified the report's findings in service of their own infrastructure argument.
For brokers, the practical value in tracking this recurring campaign isn't in any single op-ed's novelty, it's in recognizing that IBC is building a sustained public record ahead of infrastructure and building-code policy conversations that could eventually affect flood coverage design, mitigation-linked discounts, and municipal-level risk assessment tools like the Flood Risk Finder.
Brokers with clients in flood-prone or previously flooded areas should treat the federal climate report's 3x-to-5x damage cost projection as a concrete, citable figure for conversations about overland flood and sewer backup coverage, since it's a stronger data point than anything in IBC's own messaging so far.
