A large majority of Canadians believe they are insured against floods like the ones we've witnessed in recent years in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. They are wrong. And that error will prove increasingly costly.
Most are not insured for the simple reason that insurance against overland flood damages simply did not exist in Canada as recently as 2015, the year that two insurers -- Aviva Canada and The Co-operators -- introduced products for the Canadian market. Previously, according to Flood Insurance in Canada, a research paper published by the Insurance Institute of Canada in 2016, Canada was the only G8 country which did not have overland flood insurance for homeowners.
Many have "water damage" coverage, insurance and health writer Indrani Nadarajah noted in the paper she authored. But that emphatically doesn't include floods originating from rivers or lakes that overflow or from heavy rainfall, something most homeowners discovered only after the fact in recent catastrophes.
