Quebec National Assembly member Sylvie D’Amours bears no ill will toward the person who fired a pellet gun at her constituency office windows in October 2024, peppering them with small dents. She wasn’t there when the incident occurred, and she doesn’t think the person responsible meant to harm anyone.
“It seemed like it was just an act of mischief — a way of saying, ‘I’m shocked and I’m showing you my anger.’ It wasn’t personal,” the elected official for the riding of Mirabel told The Narwhal in French.
D’Amours suspects the incident had something to do with early versions of the province’s new flood maps, which had just been released by the Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal, a regional planning organization for the Greater Montreal Area. The maps were in a preliminary report that announced 15,508 buildings in Greater Montreal — including nearly 20,000 homes, representing close to $10 billion in property value — would now fall within the province’s newly drawn flood zones. Across the province, The Canadian Press reported, as many as 77,000 homes could be included within the new flood zones.
The weeks following lent themselves to her theory of what prompted the pellets. D’Amours, whose riding encompasses multiple suburbs along Montreal’s North Shore, said she began facing a flurry of hostility over the flood maps: threats on social media, angry phone calls, even a confrontation at the grocery store. Many were angry at how the government was going about modernizing the maps and upset at how the maps might affect their home values. The situation was serious enough that she closed her office out of concern for her safety and that of her employees.
Several Montreal neighbourhoods have experienced major flood events in recent years, including Île Bizard, seen here. Updated flood maps for Quebec are in the works, and they are expected to show an increased number of homes in floodplains. Photo: Paul Chiasson / The Canadian Press
What should have been a technical exercise in Quebec quickly became a political flashpoint, one playing out across the country.
As provinces and municipalities amend decades-old flood maps and strengthen flood preparedness measures in the face of inclement climate change, a vocal minority of homeowners are pushing back. Some argue governments have failed to properly consult local communities and overlooked personal, on-the-ground mitigation measures. Others say their elected officials are focusing too much on penalizing property owners instead of initiatives that would reduce flood risk. But most express concern about their home values and insurance costs: last year, insurance company Desjardins announced it would no longer offer mortgages in Quebec’s high-risk flood zones.
The result has been a country-wide string of reversals and delays in flood-risk planning. On Nov. 17, 2025, the town of Summerside, P.E.I., rejected a bylaw that would have designated more of the city as a floodplain after residents warned it could hurt property values. Last year, Nova Scotia’s government scrapped robust flooding-related legislation that had already secured all-party support following consultations with concerned homeowners. In Calgary, a neighbourhood association argued in November that government-funded infrastructure upgrades, not development restrictions, should be the city’s first line of protection. And as B.C.’s Fraser Valley coped with another atmospheric river in December, dairy farmers, Indigenous leaders and the Insurance Bureau of Canada all criticized the province’s failure to fulfil flood mitigation promises made after similar catastrophic floods in 2021.
Kate Sherren, director of Dalhousie University’s School for Resource and Environmental Studies, said the task of updating flood maps is technically complicated, given the uncertainties of climate change, as well as politically fraught.
“I’m not an engineer, but I certainly wouldn’t like to have to come up with a really reliable flood-risk map,” she said. “It’s very difficult, but we kind of have to try, right?”
Canada is ‘20 years behind’ on flood planning
Daniel Henstra, co-lead of the University of Waterloo’s Climate Risk Research Group, said flooding remains the dominant climate risk across Canada.
According to Public Safety Canada, 80 per cent of Canadian cities are located on floodplains — including major cities like Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa and Fredericton. In 2020, the federal agency estimated that 1.5 million households, or 10 per cent of all households in Canada, were highly exposed to flooding.
And yet, Henstra said, “We’re probably 20 years behind other countries on this.”
Canada was the last G7 country to introduce residential insurance coverage for overland flooding because existing flood maps were so outdated. It remains the only G7 country without national, publicly available flood maps — a problem the federal government is trying to fix. A 2020 University of Waterloo survey of 2,500 people in Canada living in designated flood-risk areas found only six per cent knew they were at risk.
That lack of experience with flood maps — combined with the lack of action from governments — contributes to homeowners being upset when maps are updated, Henstra said.
“[Homeowners] are not used to it, and therefore they don’t necessarily trust the process,” Henstra said. “They already have very low awareness of their own flood risk when new maps suddenly appear and declare that their neighborhood is at high risk. It stands to reason that they would worry about their property value when they go to sell their house.”
He emphasized that flood maps are important to public safety, but also economic stability: when risk is disclosed upfront, he said research shows property values typically dip by two to six per cent, often temporarily. But after a major flood, values can collapse, insurers pull out and governments face pressure to rebuild homes in the same high-risk locations.
“That doesn’t preserve wealth. It just transfers the cost of inaction onto future homeowners and taxpayers,” Henstra said. By contrast, risk disclosure allows buyers, sellers, lenders, realtors and insurers, “to plan appropriately” and invest in protection and resilience at both the property and community level.
Opposition to new flood maps in Quebec cites lack of government education and care
D’Amours thinks many Montreal residents panicked because they assumed the draft maps the Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal published were final and about to be adopted by the Quebec government. In fact, the maps were only preliminary, with final maps expected to be published progressively as they are approved, starting in March 2026.
But Marie-Claude Nolin understood the maps weren’t final. Yet the recently retired education worker from the Montreal suburb of Vaudreuil-Dorion became a co-founder of the advocacy group Regroupement des citoyens riverains du Québec, or the Quebec Shoreline Residents’ Association. The group launched a petition urging the provincial government to pause the rollout of new flood-risk maps until residents better understand how the changes will affect them and what they perceive to be errors are addressed.
Nolin said too many residents have yet to even see the preliminary maps. She said residents have told her they initially dismissed invitations from the municipalities to attend public consultations: “Several people … thought, ‘I live so far from the water, this must be a mistake.’ ”
A resident of Laval, Que., keeps his eyes on the floodwaters around his home in spring 2019. Later that year, a fall storm across Eastern Canada caused an estimated $189 million in insured damages in Quebec alone. Photo: Ryan Remiorz / The Canadian Press
Fellow organizer Pier-Luc Cauchon, a construction project manager in Île Bizard — just off the coast of the Island of Montreal — said he doesn’t understand the methodology behind the new zones. At a public meeting in 2024, Cauchon said the Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal’s chief engineer had told him the province had added extra “risk coefficients” on top of the usual international standards for flood recurrence, using the worst-case scenario for projected high-water levels. When Cauchon asked for the calculations, none were provided, he said.
Another of Nolin and Cauchon’s objections is that the current system has no specific point of contact for airing concerns, which makes contesting the maps difficult. Cauchon says he’s heard cases of people being able to get modifications after persistent lobbying but “The average citizen who doesn’t have the time can’t get it changed. There’s injustice in that.”
Nolin and Cauchon eventually received a total of 2,395 signatures on their petition. They say they haven’t heard back from the province.
Both the Communauté métropolitaine and Quebec’s Environment Ministry defended their consultation process in emails to The Narwhal.
Jennifer Guthrie, a communications consultant for the Communauté métropolitaine, said the additional “risk coefficients” account for “climate-change uncertainty” across all rivers and waterways, as well as the risk of “compromised management of dams and reservoirs” that help mitigate flooding on rivers such as the Ottawa and St. Lawrence.
Louis Potvin, a spokesperson for Quebec’s Environment Ministry, said the flood mapping is based on internationally recognized scientific principles developed through consultations with academic, municipal, governmental and private-sector experts. Potvin said the methodology was set out in a new provincial guide published in June 2025, which is nearly a year after the Communauté métropolitaine’s initial consultations.
Potvin did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions about why the province has not formally replied to the petition or whether the government plans to engage directly with its signatories. He acknowledged the preliminary maps have raised concerns and said residents can submit questions through an online form that the ministry responds to systematically. He added that a mechanism to request revisions will be clarified once the final maps are officially released.
In the meantime, Nolin says people they know are already being affected. “We’ve had new homeowners say they’ve seen insurance costs double,” she said in French.
This, too, is a problem Canada could have anticipated. A federal promise to offer insurance support in highest-risk flood areas has been languishing for years.
The problem with exemptions
Nolin insists her group’s goal is not to deny the increased flood risks brought on by climate change, but simply to be better consulted on determining who is at risk.
Alain Bourque, executive director of Ouranos, a climate-focused research consortium that collaborated with the Quebec government on the new flood maps, doesn’t deny governments can stumble in consultations and fail to show empathy for those affected.
However, he said, exemptions can help set the stage for costly disasters. He highlights as examples the 2017 and 2019 floods in Montreal. Catastrophe Indices and Quantification, a firm that tracks and tallies insured losses from natural disasters, estimated that the Halloween storm that hit Eastern Canada in 2019 caused $189 million in insured damages in Quebec alone. More recently, the firm estimated Hurricane Debby in 2024 caused close to $2.5 billion in insured flooding-related damages in Quebec.
Bourque said impacts were so severe “because [the government] was too relaxed on regulation — you pile up value here, you develop the economy there and then it gets seriously damaged and wiped out. And everyone expects the government to pay the bill at the end of the day.”
And one homeowner’s actions, including attempts to get exempted, inevitably affects neighbours. Take Cauchon’s argument that Montreal’s maps should take into account individual flood-proofing measures — such as elevated foundations — when assigning a risk level. Sherren, from Dalhousie, said a rush to lift single homes could increase flooding risk for next door neighbours that now live at the bottom of a slope.
That’s why in Truro, N.S., she said, development is still allowed in some high-risk areas, but with a key condition: builders can’t truck in new soil to raise homes and must instead use what’s already on the property. The logic is that any ground they raise is offset by a lower area elsewhere on the lot—leaving floodwaters somewhere to go, rather than pushing the risk onto neighbouring properties.
Neighbourliness is the same reason why Toronto has stopped allowing most homeowners to pave over their yards for parking: if hard surfaces prevent water from soaking into the ground, it diverts to the gutter and eventually a storm drain, which increases flood risks elsewhere.
A vocal minority can delay or prevent public education about true flood risk
Sherren has studied public attitudes toward flood mapping in Nova Scotia. She has found most respondents favour the idea, viewing flood-risk information as useful whether they’re buying or renting a home. But opinions shifted when people were asked to consider potential impact on property values: a minority of respondents argued flood-risk maps should be private and accessible only to the property owner, not the broader public.
“But even a very small minority of unhappy people — particularly if they have money, if they have power — can come in and cause entire mapping programs to be kind of withdrawn, because the political will isn’t strong enough to hold when these people get angry,” she said.
In February 2024, the Conservative government of Nova Scotia announced it was scrapping the Coastal Protection Act, despite it undergoing three rounds of public consultation and passing in 2019 with all-party support.
Intense thunderstorms dumped record amounts of rain across a wide swath of Nova Scotia in 2023, causing flash flooding, power outages and washouts, such as at this rail line near Truro. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Canadian Press
Documents obtained by CBC through access-to-information laws show that, in the years when the act had stalled, most public submissions to Environment Minister Tim Halman supported the legislation. Only a small number of property owners and real-estate interests warned of lower land values or limited redevelopment. Yet Halman pointed to those concerns when announcing another round of “targeted” consultations.
Had it taken effect, the act would have “outlined exactly how and where people can build in a way that protects them from rising seas,” CBC reported. Instead, the government released an online mapping tool that shows the “worst-case scenario for coastal properties in the year 2100 based on current sea-level projections,” letting citizens make an “informed decision” about their property.
But Sherren said the tool’s narrow focus on the coastline doesn’t account for storm surges, coastal topography or even the buffering effects of tidal wetlands. It also omits the potential for rain-driven flooding.
She believes the decision to scrap the act blindsided more than a few municipalities, which might have held off developing their own rules, assuming the province’s framework was imminent. “It put them five or 10 years behind,” Sherren said.
Concerns that Quebec’s new flooding regulations will affect home prices have drawn serious political support: two provincial politicians have publicly endorsed Nolin and Cauchon’s petition. A coalition of 26 Quebec mayors have also released an open letter arguing for the need to accommodate homeowners’ concerns.
“We believe that the government proposal submitted for consultation can be improved by modifications that will minimize the impact on property values and reduce the uncertainty that citizens have to deal with,” the coalition wrote in French.
The letter did not specify how the province should achieve that balance. The Canadian Climate Institute said the mayors’ statement amounted to “political pressure” to weaken the proposed framework, arguing that updated and accessible flood-risk maps do not significantly affect access to insurance or mortgages.
Eight months after announcing its first preliminary maps, Quebec officials downgraded the number of homes that would fall in the newly-designated flood zones from 77,000 to 35,000. Officials also emphasized no one would be forced to leave their homes under the new management plan. But the rules would bar new construction in the highest-risk areas and prohibit rebuilding if houses in those zones are destroyed by flooding.
Henstra said flood mapping is more effective when framed as “shared problem solving,” rather than something being done to people. Flood risk in Canada, he adds, is also highly concentrated: roughly 10 per cent of homes account for more than 90 per cent of losses.
“If we know where those areas are, and that is all transparent,” he said, “we can stop spraying money around the country on disaster mitigation and focus our scarce resources.”
