What a New CTV News Report Means for Insurability, Mortgages, and Resale
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A CTV News report has put a hard number on a problem most homeowners never see coming. Roughly 850,000 homes across Canada — about six per cent of the housing market — cannot buy insurance against flood risk. In the same breath, the report lays out how fast the cost of coverage is moving for everyone else, with Alberta standing out as the sharpest case in the country.
Read quickly, it looks like an insurance story. It isn't only that. The line most owners will skim past is the one that should stop them: a major lender has already begun declining mortgages in defined high-risk flood zones. That single fact changes the stakes. A house that no buyer can finance is a house with a much smaller buyer pool, whatever the comparables on the street say.
This is an explainer, not an alarm. Here is what "uninsurable for flood" actually means, why Alberta sits at the front of the line, and why the mortgage angle is the part worth reading twice.
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Start with the headline figure. Approximately six per cent of the Canadian housing market — about 850,000 homes — is uninsurable for flood risk, according to Kathryn Bakos of the University of Waterloo's Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation, as reported by CTV News. "Uninsurable" is a market status, not a legal label. It means insurers will not offer flood coverage on that address at any price they consider viable.
How does a home get there? The mechanism is granular and quiet. When a property sits in a very high-risk flood area, insurers may decline flood coverage outright, and where they do offer it, they can attach a higher premium and a higher deductible — often a percentage of the claim rather than a flat dollar figure, the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada explains. The 850,000 figure is simply the point where that pricing logic reaches "no." It is the macro number for hundreds of thousands of individual renewal letters.
That is the first thing to hold onto. Insurability is priced address by address, not province by province. Two homes on the same street can land on opposite sides of the line.
If insurability is the ceiling, premiums are the slope beneath it — and no province has climbed faster than Alberta. Homeowners' insurance premiums in the province rose 391.6 per cent over the 20 years from December 2005 to December 2025, the largest cumulative increase of any province, according to Statistics Canada. Nationally, homeowners' premiums rose 45 per cent between December 2019 and December 2025 — more than double the 21 per cent rise in the overall Consumer Price Index over the same stretch.
The gap is not a rounding artifact. The most recent five-year period tells the same story in miniature: Alberta led again at 55.8 per cent, well ahead of the 38.6 per cent national figure. What drives it is exposure, not bad luck. Statistics Canada ties Alberta's disproportionate risk to hailstorms, wildfires, and convective storms concentrated in and around the Calgary region — a mix that keeps loss ratios elevated and gives insurers a reason to price hard.
For a sense of how local this gets, Homeowner.ca has tracked the same pressure at the city scale in Edmonton.
Wildfires make the front pages. Water empties the reserves. Even as deadly fires dominate the news cycle, dangerous downpours — the overland and urban flooding that follows heavy rain — are now the leading source of insured losses in Canada. The CTV report puts flood losses above $1 billion in 2025 and above $4 billion in 2024, a scale that reshapes how insurers think about every policy in a mapped zone.
The government data points the same direction. Flooding remains the primary source of insured losses in Canada, with roughly $9 billion paid out over the past decade and nearly half of that falling in 2024 alone — the costliest catastrophe year on record at $8.6 billion, Statistics Canada reports. That single year stacked four major events inside one 30-day window, including Quebec and Ontario floods that together topped $3.6 billion. When losses concentrate like that, insurer appetite contracts fast — and the map of where coverage is available redraws itself.
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Here is the pivot that turns an insurance story into a property-market story. Mortgage providers, including Desjardins Financial, have stopped offering mortgages in certain high-risk flood zones — parts of Quebec where the annual flood risk exceeds five per cent, Bakos told CTV News. Follow that logic to its end. If a lender won't finance a home, the pool of buyers shrinks to those who can pay cash. A smaller buyer pool means weaker liquidity, and weaker liquidity eventually shows up in price — no matter what the recent comparables suggest.
Most buyers can't see this risk coming, which is what makes it dangerous. Only about six per cent of Canadians living in designated flood-risk areas know they live in one, and there is no Canada-wide requirement for sellers or agents to disclose future flood risk, a CBC Marketplace investigation found. So the first signal that a property is exposed often arrives late and from an unexpected desk: an insurer's non-renewal, or a lender's declined application. By then, the buyer is already at the table.
If you already own, the practical question is narrower than the headlines suggest. It is not whether your policy renewed. It is whether you actually hold flood coverage — or only assume you do. Standard Canadian home policies do not cover overland flooding or sewer backup by default; each is a separate optional endorsement, alongside add-ons such as sump-pump failure and storm surge, per Public Safety Canada. The two phrases to look for on your declarations page are "overland water" and "sewer backup," as distinct line items. Neither is included automatically.
The distinction matters because the water can arrive in ways your policy treats very differently:
This is a newer market than most people realize. Overland flood insurance only became available in Canada in 2015, after the 2013 southern Alberta floods exposed the gap, as CBC Marketplace has documented. A decade on, the product is common — but "common" is not "automatic," and the difference is a line item you have to buy.
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The 850,000 figure deserves one piece of context that rarely travels with it. That number is falling, not rising. Overland flood insurance is now available to about 94 per cent of Canadian homes, and the count of homes unable to access it has dropped nearly 45 per cent over seven years — from roughly 1.5 million to about 850,000 — the Insurance Bureau of Canada reports. Better mapping and sharper risk modelling have pulled hundreds of thousands of homes back inside the insurable line.
What remains is concentrated. Roughly two per cent of residential properties now account for more than half of the country's potential flood losses, which reframes the problem as one of risk reduction rather than access. For the large majority of homeowners, coverage exists and is affordable — most overland flood policies cost $300 or less a year. The report's own expert makes the same point: Canada remains a very insurable country, and the path forward is proactive, getting risk out of the system before the water arrives rather than reacting after it does.
For the homes still outside the line, that is cold comfort. But for everyone else, the takeaway is not panic — it is a five-minute read of a declarations page, and a clear eye on whether an address sits inside a mapped high-risk zone before the mortgage desk, or the next storm, makes the decision for you.
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About the Author
Angela Nightingale is the Senior Editor at Homeowner.ca with two decades of experience in digital publishing and content strategy. She has owned two homes, taken on her share of DIY projects, and learned what most guides fail to mention. She writes from the belief that the best home guidance comes from people who have lived through the decisions — and her goal is always to leave readers feeling confident, not overwhelmed.
