Niagara flood victims denied Ontario disaster aid

Ontario’s municipal affairs minister says residents of north Niagara whose homes flooded with sewage-tainted water this summer don’t qualify for provincial disaster aid, leaving them to fight for settlements with private insurers.

Rob Flack told the legislature on Tuesday the Disaster Recovery Assistance for Ontarians program was not activated because the damage did not come from overland water. “It was sewer backup,” he said, adding that people with flooded basements need to go through private insurance, CBC News reported.

St. Catharines MPP Jennie Stevens had demanded the province activate the program. It pays up to $250,000 to individuals, farmers, small businesses and not-for-profits for emergency expenses and repairs after disasters such as floods and tornadoes.

Back-to-back storms on July 27 and 28 and again on Aug. 2 each dropped a month’s worth of rain in a few hours and overwhelmed sanitary sewers in St. Catharines, Lincoln and parts of Niagara-on-the-Lake and Niagara Falls, CBC reported. Thousands of homes were flooded.

The province’s website says the program generally does not cover sewer backups, apart from a provision for low-income households. Stevens wrote to Flack that an Environment and Climate Change Canada meteorologist confirmed the July storm caused flash flooding. The City of St. Catharines said in the summer the flooding was caused by a storm, not an infrastructure problem.

Catastrophe Indices and Quantification Inc. estimated the Niagara flooding caused $360 million in insured damage. That is part of about $3.7 billion in insured losses across Canada this summer, the third costliest on record, the Insurance Bureau of Canada said on Oct. 22.

A survey of nearly 450 homeowners by the online group Northend Neighbours found only 36.6 per cent of respondents had their insurance claim fully approved, organizer Daya Lye said. Of those flooded, 70 per cent described the damage as severe or catastrophic, and more than 60 per cent said they were still in limbo with their insurers, according to Stevens.

The insurance bureau says insured losses from extreme weather have averaged more than $3.7 billion a year over the past decade, up from $1.4 billion in the decade before. It has urged governments to restrict development in high-risk flood areas, offer homeowners incentives for protective measures and invest in resilient infrastructure.

Ontario has recently announced other flood-protection spending, including $540,000 to protect communities against flooding.

Source: CBC News; Insurance Business.

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