Canada needs a ‘climate czar,’ says P&C industry advocate for adaptation

Canada needs a ‘climate czar’ to coordinate its adaptation efforts across federal government departments, one of the property and casualty insurance industry’s foremost climate adaptation advocates told a claims conference Tuesday.

“Personally, I think Canada needs someone who’s charged with the task of keeping an eye on [climate] as a sole job,” Blair Feltmate head of Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo, told delegates attending CatIQ Connect in Toronto Tuesday.

“I do believe Canada needs a climate czar, someone who is a direct report to the Prime Minister, someone the Prime Minister trusts…That would help…to mobilize adaptation.

“Because any particular ministry you look at — and there are a lot of good people doing good work, and with substantial degrees of commitment to adaptation across ministries — but it’s almost too much for any particular ministry to keep track of. And one doesn’t have control over the other.

“But if you had a climate czar with dotted line responsibility or linkage to the different ministries and then feeding input into the Prime Minister, I think that would help a lot.”

The issue, as Feltmate elaborated, is that there are many climate perils, and many ideas and initiatives to mitigate the impact of all of them. For example, he listed 10 major climate perils: flood, drought, fire, hail, wind, snow load, permafrost loss, sea level rise, contraction of Arctic sea ice and extreme heat.

All of these are impacting the country at once, Feltmate said, and the various federal government departments have developed various public education materials and actions for each.

But Canada tends to be “policy rich and operations poor,” he added.

“We’ve got a lot of excitement at the time we’re creating these things. And when they come out, it draws a fair bit of media attention and people are hyped up. But then, that’s it. For some reason, it kind of falls off the radar screen. And I don’t mean it disappears. But the enthusiasm for the operationalization of the material in these guidelines dies.”

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For similar reasons, Feltmate’s fellow CatIQ Connect panellist, Mike Pedersen, a corporate director and former bank CEO, called for some kind of “nation-building program to protect Canadians from climate change.”

Pedersen said individual climate adaptation initiatives all benefit Canada. “But if they were implemented, they would likely be resident in different ministries and departments across government, maybe at different levels of government,” he said. “They would be subject to distraction if, as [Feltmate] said earlier, big things happened.

“And that’s why both of us believe that if you could gather these things together, whether under a czar, or as a nation-building project, you’d have a much better chance of really having impact over the next decade.”

Feltmate’s and Pedersen’s ideas did not go unanswered. In an afternoon session following their remarks, Jeffery Hutchinson, Canada’s associate deputy minister (emergency management) of Public Safety Canada, expressed some alignment with the notion of a coordinated approach.

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Although he wouldn’t use the term ‘czar’ because of its loaded political connotations, Hutchinson agreed the federal government would benefit from a more coordinated approach to climate issues.

“The way we put it is, we need to find the right space to drive policy coherence,” Hutchinson said. “We can’t, on the one hand, go to cabinet and to the government and say, ‘We need to do this on risk, we need to do this on response, we need to do this on recovery.’ But at the same time, we have other major policy initiatives that are moving forward without some alignment.

“So, because that’s a conversation that’s partially happening in the boardroom when I’m with the minister, and…in other closed-door rooms, I can’t believe I can go further than that. But I just want to underscore that the idea of policy coherence is for exactly this….

“The idea that these [government and climate resilience] initiatives need more than just alignment, they actually need a shared understanding. We’ve heard the minister be very public about the importance of resilience, and that’s been very warmly received by the industry.”

David Gambrill

David has twice served as Canadian Underwriter’s senior editor, both from 2005 to 2012, and again from 2017 to the present.