The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Is Canada Becoming Uninsurable?

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

As extreme weather drives parts of the U.S. toward becoming effectively uninsurable, what signals are emerging in Canada as fires, floods, and droughts intensify and reshape risk? Craig Stewart, co-founder and CEO of the climate risk company Mycinity, examines whether Canada is on a similar path and what that could mean for homeowners and insurers. Then, in part two of a wide-ranging conversation, Suzanne Simard, author of When the Forest Breathes, takes a closer look at Canada's forestry practices, questioning how human intervention has altered natural systems and why she argues it has effectively detonated a carbon bomb.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We have seen catastrophic wildfires, devastating flooding, and more. They have caused loss of life and widespread property damage, which comes with a pretty hefty price tag. According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, losses added up to more than $2.4 billion last year. As climate change makes those events more common and more intense, is there a chance that whole areas of Canada could just become uninsurable? We look at whether we're headed for an insurability crisis and what we could do to stop it. Then we talked to scientists and author Suzanne Samar about the rising risk of

wildfires and how we could transform our forests from carbon sources to carbon sink. This is the rundown. Thanks to the rising number of extreme weather events, some areas in the U.S. have become virtually uninsurable. As climate change heightens the risk of fires, droughts, and floods here in Canada, are we headed in the same direction? Craig Stewart is co-founder and CEO of the Climate Risk Company, Mycinity, and he joins us from Mahon Bay, Nova Scotia. Great to have you on the show. How are you doing? Great, great to be here at J.N. Thank you very much for having me on the rundown. Of course. Now, Craig, you were the VP of Climate Change and Federal Issues at the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

Federally, how has the focus on climate issues changed since you left last year? Well, you know, it's no surprise. I think we're dealing with climate fatigue after hearing about it so much in the last decade. you know, maybe not a surprise, like given current geopolitical events, especially what's going on south of the border here, that climate's taking a back seat both federally and across the country. Federal government has stepped quite a bit back, canceled a number of climate commitments from the previous government, and it's focused more on growth and making sure that, you know,

Canada is stable as we're facing, you know, shortages of oil and gas, you know, around the world. there's a demand for our resources, and I guess that's now the attention rather than climate change. Moving away from government, are we saying a similar shift when it comes to financial institutions, major corporations in regards to climate initiatives? Yes, we are. Similar fatigue. Given that we've got a number of financial institutions that operate both in Canada and in the United States, You know, there are a number of institutions that are afraid of sticking their head above the parapet.

Work is quietly going on behind the scenes in Canada, and much as it was during the first Trump administration. But I think you're just seeing companies being less vocal about it. You know, a number of companies. The first signal of it was there was a net zero banking alliance, you know, that in fact, Prime Minister Carney had launched. And despite Carney being the prime minister, you saw a number of banks. In fact, the whole thing collapsed in the past year. Just a sign of the times, unfortunately.

We've also seen organizations like Zillow, Royal Lepage as well, changed tune a little bit as well. Yeah, I mean, there was, you know, great demand in the U.S. for climate resilience scores on your home. So that if you're buying a new home in the U.S., you know, and let's say you're using Zillow, Zillow actually had a climate risk score that they were putting up so that people would know whether the home they were looking to buy was, you know, at risk of floods or wildfires and how safe that home was given those risks. But Zillow dropped that.

And Royal LePage, similar situation here in Canada. Royal LePage dropped out in January. People don't want to hear about climate risk. They'd rather be unaware of it. And frankly, it was just people were worried about home valuation. that was going to affect the valuation of homes during real estate transactions. So there was pressure from agents and from sellers to remove that data from real estate listings. And that's what's happened, unfortunately.

Well, let's talk about insurance. You mentioned the U.S. In the U.S., we are seeing what are called, quote unquote, insurance deserts, where insurance companies have pulled out of high-risk regions. Is that something that we will see here in Canada? Not in the same way. in the U.S., what has happened is that, you know, insurance companies just simply can't make money. There's price regulation in the United States, so there's a limit to what they can charge for property insurance.

And as a result, when companies are facing huge losses, as we've seen in California from wildfire or Louisiana and Florida from hurricanes and flooding, companies have just backed out. And in fact, there's 18 jurisdictions across the U.S. as reported by the New York Times, 18 jurisdictions. where insurance availability is a problem. In Canada, a very different situation. Property insurance is not regulated, unlike auto insurance in this country. Therefore, pricing isn't regulated. And insurers can pay,

can basically charge whatever premiums they need to to ensure that they make a profit. And that is why, you know, even though we've had, you know, incredible losses, insured losses across this country over the past decade, insurance is still widely available, albeit more expensive in Canada.

For a Canadian who is looking to, you know, renew their insurance policy, perhaps they just bought a new property and they're looking at insurance, they might be surprised at sort of what's being offered on the table. Help me understand the shift in sort of the packages the insurance companies are now offering. So what we're seeing now is not only our prices going up,

but you're getting less for what you pay. So there's an erosion insurance coverage as insurers try to adjust to regional risks across the country. Hale is the greatest example. So, we've, you know, insurers have paid out over $6 billion in hail claims over the past five years, $3 billion in the summer of 2024 alone from one storm. And as a result, a number of insurers just lost the risk appetite for ensuring hail in Calgary. Some stopped.

And others decide to move it out of the core coverage and say, well, you're going to have to pay for hail separately. We've seen deductibles go up for perils in high risk areas. So you're paying more and your deductible is higher. You're also what we're seeing is roofs being pro-rated. So if it used to be that, you know, you had an insurance claim. Your roof was damaged from a wildfire or a hail storm. You get the full amount, you know, full replacement value of that roof. Now what we're seeing is insurers are taking a look at how old your roof is and your claim is being prorated based on the age of the roof. And so rather than wholesale, you know, companies fleeing parts of the country, we're actually seeing as an erosion and coverage while prices go up. So it's a,

it's a slow boil in Canada rather than you just, you know, companies fleeing. You mentioned Hale in Calgary, of course, but what other parts of Canada are being hit hard when it comes to rising insurance costs? So for Quebec, it's flooding. We're seeing that insurance basically isn't available or if it is available, you know, there's very low coverage limit for flood. It's a separate endorsement. In BC, of course, wildfires of great concern. We're looking at mounting wildfire activity probably as we head into July. It could be another bad season.

Last year was I think the worst on record. And for areas like Kelowna, the interior of BC, that's an area of concern. And so it really varies depending where you are in the country. Here in Atlantic, Canada, we're always watching for hurricanes. Last year was a quiet year. Hopefully this year will be a quiet one too. What's not on your list is Ontario. And I am curious, should I be holding my breath here or, you know, or should I knock on wood?

Should we be all right? Ontario has been relatively safe. If there's one place in the country that has, you know, escaped unscathed. Now, you've definitely had flooding across southern Ontario, sporadic flooding. And we've got windstorms in Ontario. You're seeing wind storms, you know, if you live north of Toronto, even in the Ottawa area in the last few years, we've seen tornadoes, much stronger tornadoes, tornado activity, wind activity.

But relative to what we're seeing in the rest of the country, Ontario is relatively safe. Help me understand how do we regulate insurance prices without making certain areas basically ininsurable. You know, there's a spine balance that I feel like needs to happen. How do we walk that? Right. So we have insurance availability widespread across the Canada because we don't regulate the pricing. However, there are places like Alberta where, you know, there are concerns.

The Premier actually went down to a conference in Colorado, an insurance conference in Colorado, because she was so concerned about the Premier of Alberta was so concerned about prices rising in her province. There have been protests in Calgary related to the cost of insurance rising, particularly around Hale Insurance. And so, you know, at some point it will likely become a political issue. We're not there yet. And there hasn't been regulatory activity around regulating pricing in this country because I think regulators here realize the mistakes that have been made south of the border and the U.S. and don't want to replicate them.

The challenges lay elsewhere. They lay more in making sure Canadians, consumers, businesses, they know the risks they face. With that example of Alberta, I am curious. Do you think we'll see costs continuing to rise until consumers get angry, enough that it forces some government intervention. So prices have risen across the country between 5 and 15% on an annualized basis, you know, over the last few years, according to stats can. But Alberta has seen the greatest rise.

I think it's been around 10%. It's a, you know, it is on the radar there. It is an issue that they're looking at carefully. You know, a lot of it has been driven by, by those hailstorms. But Alberta is also prone to wildfire, Jasper Wildfire, for example, prone to flooding, Calgary flooding. We're watching the Bow River right now, in fact, a Bow and Elbow River are running quite high at this moment.

And so, you know, it's an insurer's price risk. Risk is relatively high in Alberta. So prices are relatively high. Whether to be public pressure to cap that pricing, you know, wouldn't be surprised if that happens. Greg, I want to thank you so much. This was fantastic. Learned a lot on this. I really appreciate your time. Thanks, Jan. Great to be here. In her new book, When the Forest Breeds Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World,

Suzanne Samard looks at the effects humans have had on our natural spaces and what it would take to support and protect them. In part two of their discussion, Rundown producer Eric Bombachino gets insight on Canada's forestry practices and why she says they have detonated a carbon bomb. So when we look at forest practices in Canada now, how would you describe them currently? We could do so much better. Okay. You know, if you're looking back to the 50s and how we managed forest then,

how much has changed in that period of time? It's changed immensely. Okay. So let me give an example from my own family. So I come from a family of horse loggers. You know, we came from Quebec across to the interior, the inland rainforest of BC, and we were like family horse loggers, selective loggers. And by the 1960s, basically had lost all of our permissions to do that.

We lost our livelihoods. And that happened all across British Columbia, and I would say across Canada, as the corporatization of forestry took its grip. It was no longer people living on the land with the forest and ensuring that their livelihoods were supported by the forest. It became more about people distant from the forest, shareholders who expected dividends, and if they didn't get their dividends, then they would leave, right?

And they would take their mills with them. And so it just changed from us doing it to something else doing it. And we see the consequences now on our landscapes. We've seen extensive clear-cutting. We've seen forests that are not nearly as productive and healthy as the old forests that they've replaced. We've seen more wildfire. Actually, there's a term I learned from this book.

You quoted a, I think a member of the EU from Portugal. So Portugal had a brutal wildfire in 2017. It killed 66 people. And the quote from him is, we have to recognize we've created a killer forest. What did he mean by that? forest. Yeah, so eucalyptus is a species that's been planted worldwide because it's one of the fastest growing species that originates from South Africa. And it, you know, it became the, you know,

the go-to tree to grow fast trees to provide wood products and pulp especially. And so it's proliferated around the world. There are certain species that have become so popular. And that one is especially the fastest growing. And so you see it in South America. You see it across Europe. You see it through the U.S. Not so much in Canada. But the reason it's a killer forest is because, for one, it requires a lot of water in order to grow these trees. And so it sucks the water.

It draws down the hydrologic system, dries out this ecosystem. And then the tree itself is full of oils that are very flammable. And it sheds bark. And so those trees are kind of like Molotov cocktail. in a way. Once they burn, they're just like, you know, like he said, they're killer forests. They burn really fast. So we've created these all around the world and, you know, and it's really, it's changed whole townships, whole livelihoods. People can't even grow food in some places because the soils are dried out and then they've got these really flammable forests, these killer

forests. In Canada, have we created something similar? Well, we have in a way. It's not eucalyptus. No, but we've, at least where I'm from, you know, in British Columbia, we planted a lot of lodgepole pine. And a lot of Douglas fir and a lot of spruce. Conifers. We've been focused on conifers. Why?

It's because when, you know, when we started logging the old growth forest, it was the conifers that brought such great market value across the world. And so we thought, oh, so the foresters thought, well, we'll just replace those conifers with more conifers. without the understanding or appreciation that a forest has goes through a successional period where there's all kinds of species, right? There's deciduous trees. There's understory plants and they grow together in a community. So they focus so much on these coniferous trees and then spraying herbicides and weeding out these other plants that really increase the flammability of the forest. And these three species also have lots of resin in them. And so they're not as flammable as eucalyptus, but they're very, they are flammable.

And they, you know, and they're packed tightly together because we planted them at fairly close spacing. And so they're like matchsticks rolling across the landscape. Okay. So if we change some of our forest management practices in Canada, would we see fewer wildfires every year? Yes, we would. Because it feels like an inevitability now, and that there's stuff we can learn to do in terms of

putting them out. Yeah. But there's prevention well beforehand. There is. So there's something called a fire risk triangle, and that means that if you have, you know, ignition, fuel, and the right climatic conditions, that you have a higher risk of wildfire. So all three of those things have changed. So we have more heat in our atmosphere. So that creates more lightning. And we have more fuel on the landscape because we we banned indigenous burning, which kept fuel loads down for millennia.

We banned indigenous burning in the late 1880s with the Indian Act. That's created havoc across the ecosystems. So we have this fuel buildup, and combined with that with this very narrowly focused forest management objective of growing conifers, without deciduous trees, like we got rid of the aspens and the cottonwoods and the birches to create these pure coniferous forests, We've created these high fuel loads and these tight, dense, flammable plantations. So what can we do? Well, obviously, we need to deal with climate. Thank you for asking the questions here, so I can just sit and hang out.

Keep going. No, no, no, no, I love it. No, no, no, keep going. Yeah. So obviously we need to deal with climate change. We need to reduce the heat in the atmosphere. That's a whole thing unto itself. But we can also work in forests.

So we need to thin them out, reduce the fuel loads, and then, you know, re-encouraged deciduous trees and plants so that'll reduce the flammability of the forest. And then once we've done that, we can start reintroducing fire into the landscape. So I can't believe I'm going to say this, and I apologize beforehand. But was Donald Trump right when he said they need to clean up the forest floors a little bit more? Okay. He was not right. Okay, okay.

Donald Trump doesn't know about forest systems. What he was thinking is it needs to look like a golf course. Okay. So, no, actually, we need to do some thinning, but we need to encourage other species to grow back. Right. And he was also, you know, advocating for, you know, less forest stewardship. Right. We need more forest stewardship.

And it needs to be done carefully so that we, you know, that we're encouraging diversity in the forest and encouraging more abundant trees and plants that are bringing water up from below so that we reduce the flammability of the forest. Let's talk about the Mother Tree Project. What is it? So it's a really large experiment and it's a really long-lived experiment. Still ongoing. It's still ongoing.

Yeah, it started in 2015. So now it's 10 years older, just over 10 years. It's a climate gradient experiment. It's 1,000 kilometers long. It runs from near the border with the U.S. in dry, hot, arid Douglas fir forests. And it includes nine research forests

all the way up to just north of Prince George and Fort St. James, where it's cold and snowy, Douglas fir. And so at each of these nine locations, we're harvesting trees in different ways to figure out a better way to do forestry than clear-cutting,

which is what we do by and large in Canada. So we're trying different ways of leaving mother trees behind in different densities and configurations to protect, hopefully to protect the carbon pools and the biodiversity of the forest and to increase the regenerative capacity of the forest. So what's the spectrum of that? It's like leave 10% of trees, leave in, yeah. So zero, leave nothing, leave 10% as seed trees scattered around the forest,

leave 30% in clusters, and then leave 60% just by thinning out a few large trees and thinning out from below and then comparing that to uncut forests. In terms of the one of the big takeaways of this, is it to keep those old trees? Is that the biggest takeaway of the mother tree project? Yes, that leaving the old tree project. Yes. Yes, it is the, you know, that we need to leave these old trees behind. You know, we can still log some, but it needs to be selective logging.

And then how much you leave behind depends on the climatic conditions of the forest. Right. So the more stressed a forest is under, so if it's getting more arid, or if it's stressed from a lot of frost, for example, as you go north, there's a lot of frost in forests. Those ones especially benefit from a higher cover of these old trees. And in the more conducive environments, the more humid ones, like coastal climates, you can take a few more trees out because everything just responds and recovers that much faster. Yeah. So it really, I always say place matters, right? We can't do the same thing everywhere.

It all depends on the place. In one coastal area in BC, I'm going to try to pronounce it, Haida Gai. Yeah. Yeah. They were cutting down cedars and replacing them with spruce and pine. Why is that a problem? We've been on this mission since for the last century to liquidate the old growth forests.

Okay. The primary forests. And when Europeans came to Canada and set up the forestry industry, they said, we're going to convert these old forests to what they called normal forests, these European forests, like tree farms, so that they're all like the same species, same size, more efficient for, you know, growing and then harvesting in the future. Got to get rid of the old forest. And so on Haida Gwai, that's been happening, as has been across Canada. And so these old, you know, cedar forests are being cut down and then replaced with these normal,

forests. And they put spruce and pine back, or pine especially, which grows quickly at first, and it can reach what foresters call free to grow really quickly. So within about 10 years, a tree has to be above the neighboring plants and then growing at a certain rate and then it's declared free to grow. And then the company can walk away and say, we're done. Okay. Yeah. We're all done with this weekend. We'll come back when there's a forester in the future. And what does that do to the connections in the forest? Well, it changes everything. Okay.

Right, because the pine for one don't belong in those ecosystems. Yeah, they don't connect into those networks. Right. The cedars are formed this other kind of, remember we talk about clicks at the beginning. Yeah. Cedar regenerates not by planting trees in these, you know, actually they put them, when they do plant them, they plant them as nursery plugs and then they put these white cones around them. Right.

Because sitca deer were introduced to Haidaquai, you know, decades ago. and has been chewing the understory and changing the whole plant community for that entire time. And so they protect these cedar trees with these plastic tubes. So when you walk in these plantations, it looks kind of like a graveyard. And they're growing pine and some of these cedars. But cedar actually establishes sometimes by seed,

but also by this process called layering. Okay. And so in an old forest, you'll see a cedar tree with its big candelabra-like branches that swoop down, and they touch the ground and then they root. And then eventually that roots and the branch separates and it becomes an individual tree. And so that's how cedar likes to regenerate, not growing in a plastic tube. Right.

So it's changing the forest and the pine trees never connect because they're, you know, they'll never be able to connect to the underground network that those old trees had. You wrote in the book that Canada's forestry practices are detonating a carbon bomb. Yeah. How so? So in 2001, Canada's forest shifted from being a carbon sink overall to a carbon source. And that's not a good thing. You know, we're counting on forests to be a carbon sink to help us mitigate our CO2 emissions from fossil fuel production and burning fossil fuels.

So it's going in the opposite direction right now. And why have they become a source? It's because the forests are stressed. Right. They're stressed from climate change. We're also disturbing them at a high rate through the clear-cut logging and development of oil and gas itself, urbanization, agriculture, and so on. And also, with this clear-cut logging, if you think about it, when you clear-cut a forest, you're losing all that above-ground carbon pool, the trees and the plants and the herbs and the mosses and lichens are gone, right? Some of it gets turned into long-term wood products, but most of it does not.

Right. And then the forest floor itself gets highly disturbed by the machine. that are doing the logging. Right. So, you know, we send in these great big machines, and they've moved gradually towards something called whole tree logging, which means that they drag an entire tree out of the forest and then de-limit on a landing.

And when they pull a whole tree out of the forest, they drag with it a lot of forest floor. And then all that material ends up in these big piles. These piles can be as big as an apartment building, and then they're burned. And so that burning then emits all that seal of, to the atmosphere. So in that, there's some forest floor. Yeah. Some of the forest floor that's remaining on the site ends up, you know,

ending up in little rivulets that move into streams, that ends up in estuaries and out to the ocean. Our experiments show that we're losing 61% of the forest floor carbon due to these practices. And it took a long time to get that forest floor, you know. We estimate 10,000 years because that's when the last ice age was. Can we get back to being a carbon sink? What does that roadmap look like? Yes, we can. That's what I, you know, I believe we can. We really need to work hard so that forests are sinks again. So how do we do that?

Well, one, we've got to mitigate wildfire because, you know, wildfire emits a lot of CO2 and we're having increasing wildfire risk, extent, severity, intensity over time. So we really need to be tending our forests, you know, by reducing the fuel loads and encouraging these less flammable plants to come back. We need to reintroduce indigenous burning so that we really need to be sending our forests. We can make the forests less risky, more healthy. And we can do this, right? We found in our studies that if you do really careful management like that,

you can actually maintain all the carbon pools and not disturb them, but you actually increase the resistance of that forest to fire. So we know that we can do this. So preventing wildfire is really important, reinvigorating the forest, so they're less flammable. We also have to deal with climate change. That's the big elephant in the room. And we need to be getting off of fossil fuels.

We need to be going to renewable energy. Because until we address that, you know, fixing the forest at the same time, it's going to be continually under stress due to the warming of the planet. So we can't just pretend that that doesn't exist. So we need to make these hard decisions. Well, thank you so much for spending all this time with me today. It was just a real joy to be able to speak with you. Thank you.

Thank you so much. I'm Jay-Anne. Thanks for watching The Run Down. I want to know, has extreme weather impacted your home or community? Let us know. Email rundown at tb0.org or as always, drop us a comment on our YouTube page. Until then, I will see you tomorrow. If you're enjoying this series, please consider supporting TVO with a donation to make more insightful and thought-provoking podcast possible. TVO is a registered charity and you will receive a tax receipt for your gift. Visit TVO.org slash giveTVO to make your donation today.