Billion-dollar natural disasters used to be rare in Canada. Now they arrive annually, as climate change intensifies floods, wildfires and extreme storms.
In 2024, uninsured disaster losses reached an estimated $24 billion, roughly three-quarters of total disaster costs. Households absorbed roughly $18 billion of those uninsured losses, costs that rarely appear in government spending tracking. Meanwhile, federal disaster spending totalled $2.4 billion between 2020 and 2024, more than 20 times higher than historical norms, with provincial, territorial and municipal spending rising in parallel. These trends reveal a structural failure quietly compounding the housing and cost-of-living crisis: Canada is shifting disaster costs onto households that can neither see the risks nor afford the protection.
Canada’s main challenge is not a lack of programs or expertise. Programs exist but do not reach households when their decisions determine how much risk they carry. Too often, Canadians:
- choose housing without seeing hazard risk.
- buy insurance without understanding what is and is not covered.
- protect homes without knowing which preparedness measures matter most.
- navigate disaster recovery alone across 8 to 10 disconnected systems.
This failure stems from fragmented authority and accountability. The federal government bears growing costs for risks it cannot see and land-use decisions it does not control. Provinces and territories regulate disclosure and insurance markets without access to standardized federal risk information at the point of sale or lease. Municipalities deliver services directly to households but cannot coordinate across insurers, provincial assistance and federal funding. Responsibility falls, by default, on households at the moment they are least able to manage it.
This report proposes a National Household Resilience Strategy that aligns existing authorities around the household decisions that shape disaster-related financial exposure. Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada (HICC) is well positioned to lead this work, convening federal-provincial-territorial partners in 2026 across four key moments: choosing housing, buying insurance, protecting homes and recovering from disaster.
Three recommendations anchor the strategy:
1- Enable households to act at four decision moments.
2- Align delivery through a Household Resilience Table. HICC and Public Safety Canada would convene a time-limited coordination body in 2026, in partnership with provinces and territories. This Table would coordinate federal, provincial and territorial delivery around household needs rather than institutional mandates.
3- Link federal cost-sharing to measurable household outcomes. Building on the 2025 modernization of the Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangements (DFAA), the federal program that reimburses provinces and territories for disaster recovery costs, the Strategy would tie funding more closely to results that reduce long-term government liability: higher insurance coverage, earlier hazard risk disclosure, and completion of priority home retrofits.
