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Establishing detailed and up to date flood maps nationwide has been the key theme of flood prevention advocates for years - but that would mean property values on flood zones would likely drop.
Furthermore, the publication of flood zones could place political pressure on municipalities to prevent construction in these areas, hitting property developers’ profitability on another front.
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So what can be done? The issue came up at the 2017 Flood Risk Summit when a panel was asked about how far the insurance industry has come with overland flood.
“I’ll share with you a real life story and believe me I didn't make this up,” Bob Tisdale, president and CEO of Pembridge Insurance Company said. “We were at a similar event to this with some government officials and we were talking about water and the difficulty with water and we were talking about putting out information about where sewer back-up claims were occurring because we have that information.
“The one government official, a municipal alderman, basically pleaded with us that we would not release that information.”
The federal government used to make and distribute flood maps up until 1996. Recently, Trudeau’s Liberal government released national standards to harmonize flood maps in Canada - but there are still no publicly available and up to date flood maps for Montreal, among other major cities.
Tisdale explained that some municipal officials feel it’s in their best interest to keep those flood maps secret.
“So when we pushed back and said: ‘why wouldn't we put that out there?’ his comment was ‘if you do that, the price of those houses is going to go down and so is our municipal tax base’,” Tisdale explained. “So I thought that’s incredible. You’ve developed an infrastructure where flooding occurs in these people’s basements and you want the new purchaser not to know about that.”
Tisdale said he believes the insurance industry is making important strides in overland flood but can’t go it alone.
“I certainly think we’ve made progress as an industry for sure - I look at the amount of companies that are offering coverage and the fact that I think we’re doing it well and we’re looking after our consumer needs as best we can,” he explained.
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