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Quebec presented its new plan to deal with persistent flooding Tuesday that will see the number of residences considered to be in flood zones increase from 22,000 to 77,000 under new mapping guidelines.
The proposed new flood-management plan, which is expected to come into effect in 2025, will also see increased rules for municipalities to follow to avoid flooding and tightened security surrounding the maintenance and surveillance of the roughly 30 dikes in the province to protect shoreline communities from the type of catastrophic rupture that inundated the town of Ste-Marthe-sur-le-Lac in 2019, forcing 6,000 residents to flee.
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The new regulations come in the wake of two seasons of devastating floods in 2017 and 2019 that hit more than 240 municipalities in the province and caused more than $1 billion in damages. Following the disasters, Quebec was criticized for lacking a central organization to oversee flood management, unlike European countries and even other Canadian provinces.
“In certain places in Quebec, the flood zone mapping has not been updated in 30 years,” Environment Minister Benoit Charette said Tuesday at a news conference in Montreal. With the growing influence of climate change that is exacerbating weather events worldwide, “we have to update our way of doing things based on the science, and that is what we are proposing today.”
Under the proposed regulations, which will be the subject of public consultations with residents and municipalities this summer before going to the government for final approval, the criteria for flood zone mapping has been widened. Whereas before zones were identified as being “0-20-year” flood zones — where there is a five-per-cent chance of flooding in any given year — or “0-100-year” zones, the new regulations will take into account both the estimated chance of flooding and also how severe the flooding is expected to be in terms of depth of water.
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Government officials said the new flood zone maps will not necessarily affect insurance rates, as insurance companies typically have their own mapping guidelines for flood risk.
There are four levels of flood zones, ranging from “very high” for areas where it’s considered there is a 70-per-cent risk of flooding over 25 years and where more than 60 centimetres of water is expected, to “weak” in areas where the risk of flooding is between seven and 20 per cent over 25 years and less than 30 centimetres of water is expected.
Citizens who are in flood zones will be allowed to remain there and to repair and renovate their homes and will not be displaced — the regulations seek to improve the resilience of homes and not their displacement, the proposed regulations stipulate. But those in high risk zones will not be allowed to reconstruct if their buildings are destroyed in floods, and limitations will be placed on any work.
Desjardins Group announced that as of Feb. 1, it would no longer offer new mortgages for properties in “0-20-year” flood zones — where there is a five-per-cent chance of flooding in any given year — because of what it called the rising impact of climate change.
But the company’s decision has left mayors of low-lying towns worried that homeowners will be left with properties that no one will buy or that are massively devalued.
Traditionally, it has fallen on the Quebec government to step in to help homeowners cope with the costs of flooding.
But after 2019, the government signalled its unwillingness to pay for repeated flood damage at the same address, imposing a new lifetime cap on compensation per home and offering financial incentives for people to relocate from homes in high-risk zones.
More details to come.
Canadian Press contributed to this report
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