Floods, uninsured homes among climate change impacts Vaughan residents told

Canada’s Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangements (DFAA) is spending over a $1 billion annually compared to $100 million a year in the 1990s

Yorkregion.com
April 2, 2019
Dina Al-Shibeeb

MP Deb Schulte (King-Vaughan) lamented how “expensive homes” in lucrative locations are not selling simply because floods intensified by climate change have made them uninsurable.

“We may have only 12 years before we can get into that zone, where the systems start feeding each other and there is nothing much you can do about it,” she told dozens of people attending a town hall in Vaughan Thursday.

She was joined by Craig Steward, vice-president of federal affairs at the Insurance Bureau of Canada and Mark Winfield, a professor of environmental studies, to give people a clear picture of how climate change is affecting different facets of their lives.

Schulte, who recently returned from a trip to northern Canada, said the Inuit are already seeing the change and shared an alarming statistics that in 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the sea.

“The cost of inaction is more than the cost of action. The National Round Table on the Environment (and the Economy) concluded that cost of climate change will likely represent $5 billion per year by 2020, and 2020 is not very far away,” she said.

So far, Canada has to reduce annual emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. The target was signed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2016 as part of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

To make this happen, the federal carbon tax is set to kick in April 1 in the four provinces that didn’t have their own carbon pricing system – Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and New Brunswick. Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and Yukon are co-operating with the federal government, which will also apply a carbon-pricing plan in those territories.

Putting a tax on carbon is the most “practical” method said Winfield, as setting new regulations will have a “limit” when it comes to enforcement.

“One of the ideas that came earlier was that instead of trying to write rules on everything that goes in the economy, which is virtually impossible, we wanted to instead figure out ways to send signals across the whole economy and then let people decide for themselves on how they want to respond,” the professor said.

“In this case, we want to encourage people to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels.”

Schulte also explained to the audience how the government of Canada has put a price on pollution while giving money directly back to Ontarians. For example, an average family of four can receive $307 through the Climate Action incentive when they file their taxes.

Also, there is a reason why Canada is so “progressive” when it comes to tackling climate change even though its emissions account for fewer than two per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

“The atmosphere above parts of Canada is warming at a rate of between two and three times the global average,” said Steward, That means, “climate change affects us more than it does than many places around the world,” he added.

“We are a northern country where the impact and costs are felt more than many other places.”

Steward said the Government of Canada's Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangements (DFAA) used to spend $100 million a year in the 1990s. Now it's spending over $1 billion annually, with most of the funding going to repairs for flood damage.

“Some areas in this country can actually be uninsured ...that’s not meant to be a threat,” he said urging for more action despite IBC sounding the alarm since the 1990s.

He said this rising cost of climate change is taxpayers’ money, making Canadians pay more.

The panel has spurred some discussion including some pondering by some of the attendees, when one woman asked people to think about their meat consumption since it’s a contributing factor to greenhouse gas emissions.

“What I liked about this session is that there was a scientist, the insurance industry. It tells you why the government is doing it, because if it won’t, you will end up paying it anyway,” said Bruna Pace. “It was very good to come to have a better idea on how it will affect me and everybody else.”