This content is largely borrowed from MNA Sylvie D’Amours’ FB post from October 29, 2024: 2024: https://www.facebook.com/sdamoursmira/videos/1087416812794821

Last June, Benoit Charette, Minister of the Environment, announced the start of consultations on modernizing the rules governing flood-prone areas.

The flood mapping in Quebec is outdated and needs to be modernized. In some places, the maps are over 30 years old, while climate change is causing weather patterns to become more intense, more frequent and more unpredictable.

The last decade has been marked by successive flood disasters across the province. This trend is likely to accelerate over the coming years.

This has had major consequences, including social, health, material and economic impacts. For the floods of 2017 and 2019, 14,000 people were evacuated in more than 500 municipalities. The cost to the Government was more than a billion dollars. These are major impacts. The government needs to rethink the way it builds and thinks about its territory.

The Quebec government must take action to help people adapt to climate change. The aim is not to relocate residents living in flood-prone areas, but to increase their safety and protect their property while protecting the environment.

To ensure the safety and resilience of communities, the government needs to adopt a modernized, science-based regulatory framework, backed up by mapping that represents the real risks of flooding and enables citizens to be aware of that risk.

The maps circulated by the CMM have not been approved by the Minister and are not official. The final cartography is expected to reflect the protection provided by protective structures when municipalities take responsibility for them and demonstrate their effectiveness.

Meanwhile, insurance companies do their own mapping to assess flood risk. As a result, many homes are already deemed to be at risk by insurers and cannot be covered by a flood insurance policy, even though the government’s maps do not place them in a flood zone.

The government’s specialists are presently collating the information obtained during the consultation period, analyzing the recommendations and making the necessary adjustments. The Ministry plans and hopes to bring the modernization into force by the end of 2025.

The CMM has published an open letter signed by the mayors of the greater Montreal Area asking that better measures be set in place to take into consideration the real financial impact these new maps will have on property values, insurability and willingness of banks to lend or mortgage: https://cmm.qc.ca/nouvelles/lettre-ouverte-il-faut-soutenir-les-citoyens-en-zone-inondable/

Although the consultation is over, questions can still be sent to the ministry at the following e-mail address: consultation.DAMH@environnement.gouv.qc.ca