Opinion: We’re sending B.C.’s extreme weather bills to the wrong people

Another devastating flood event has hit B.C. These disasters are no longer rare emergencies for the province. They are recurring events with recurring bills. And with each flood, fire or storm, we make a default choice about who pays.

After disasters, public discussion turns quickly to resilience: better dikes, updated flood maps, stronger emergency response. All of that matters. But it sidesteps the key question that determines whether we can properly face this intensifying cycle of damage: how the costs are distributed. Right now, it’s B.C. homeowners and taxpayers, and they are paying three times over.

First, through rising insurance premiums. Across Canada, average home-insurance premiums have risen roughly 45 per cent over the past six years. In Kamloops, average premiums have jumped 98 per cent in just two years, and more than 50 per cent in Kelowna.

Second, households pay through coverage gaps. Homeowners are facing higher deductibles, narrower coverage, and exclusions for certain perils. When a disaster hits, a growing share of losses lands outside what insurance will cover.

Third, we pay through taxes. Roads, bridges, dikes, and other emergency response costs are largely borne by governments. In 2023 alone, B.C. blew past its wildfire suppression budget by $762 million, pushing total firefighting costs above $1 billion — the highest on record.

The province now carries a permanent base wildfire budget of $233 million, before additional spending on prevention and aircraft. In 2021, extreme weather cost B.C.’s economy $17 billion, with insured losses from the atmospheric river flooding making up $675 million of these costs.

Historically, public disaster assistance programs acted as an insurer of last resort, absorbing shocks the private market could not. But those programs are also beginning to restrict the level of support provided to impacted communities.

In 2021, the federal government provided $5 billion for its share of recovery costs associated with recent extreme-weather events in B.C. Many repairs remain incomplete. Meanwhile, new disasters are already unfolding.

Households are being squeezed from both sides: the private market tightens, and the public backstop becomes less generous and more conditional. This is how systems fail: not a single moment of collapse, but a series of “adjustments” that shift risk and cost onto people increasingly unable to carry it.

Regulators are beginning to discuss this. B.C.’s financial services regulator has flagged that natural catastrophes and climate-related risks pose material and systemic challenges for the province’s financial services sector. Or, as Alberta’s deputy superintendent of insurance has said, “There’s no cheap solution. … Any real path to resilience, to addressing the underlying risks, is going to be expensive.”

That’s correct. But it raises an obvious question: expensive for whom?

Under our current default model, these costs are steadily shifted onto residents and taxpayers, while the companies most responsible for driving more frequent and severe disasters pocket their profits. This is the recurring failure across the financial system: companies, whether polluters or insurers, are content as long as climate damages sit on someone else’s balance sheet.

It’s time to challenge this failure in B.C. and across Canada.

As attribution science matures, the costs of climate damage can increasingly be tied specifically to those responsible for causing it. Twenty five U.S. states and municipalities are pursuing cost-recovery actions against major fossil-fuel companies. A German court has affirmed that corporate actors can be held liable for climate harms. New York and Vermont have enacted climate-damage funding legislation requiring high-emitting companies to help pay for disaster costs.

Canada has the legal tools to do the same. Provinces have successfully used litigation and legislation to recover tobacco and opioid costs, lowering evidentiary barriers in cases where widespread public harm is well documented. B.C. is particularly well positioned to act as it has already been a first mover on cost recovery in tobacco and opioids. It can do so again, this time to recover climate damages.

The floods of 2025 will not be the last. British Columbians are resilient, but resilience is not infinite. We cannot indefinitely socialize climate damages while privatizing climate profits.

As B.C. recovers from the latest disastrous flood, this question should sit at the centre of the province’s response: Why are B.C. families and taxpayers paying the climate bill instead of the companies most responsible for driving the damages?

Kiera Taylor is senior policy analyst at Investors for Paris Compliance, a shareholder advocacy organization holding Canadian companies accountable to their net zero commitments.