Canada's Building and Insurance Industries Publish a First-of-Its-Kind Framework That Turns Technical Standards Into a Practical Upgrade Path for Homeowners
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Most Canadian homeowners know their home faces climate risks. Very few know what to do about it — or where to start. That gap between awareness and action is exactly what a new set of national guidelines is designed to close.
On April 8, 2026, the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction and the Canadian Home Builders' Association released Version 1 of tiered residential resilience guidelines, funded by the Standards Council of Canada and the National Research Council. The guidelines cover four hazards that collectively account for the majority of severe weather damage to Canadian homes: basement flooding, hail, high wind, and wildfire. Rather than offering a single prescriptive standard, the framework uses a Good, Better, Best tiered structure — giving homeowners, builders, and insurers a common language for measuring and improving a home's resilience.
What makes this release different from existing technical standards is who it's for. Canada already has strong building codes and guidance documents addressing each of these hazards. The problem, as ICLR's Resilient Homes Task Force identified when it launched in January 2024, is that uptake has remained limited. Builders cite cost and consumer demand as barriers. Insurers struggle to track and recognize resilience features in their underwriting systems. The guidelines are an attempt to solve both problems at once.
Each hazard-specific guideline is structured as a practical toolkit. According to the SCC announcement, every guideline includes standalone checklists, detailed technical sheets with installation guidance, high-level cost and difficulty indicators, and information on potential insurance incentives.
That last point matters. The inclusion of insurance incentive information signals a deliberate bridge between the construction and insurance sectors — something that has been missing from previous technical guidance. Homeowners have long been told that resilience upgrades "may" help with premiums, but there has been no standardized way to understand which measures insurers actually recognize.
The guidelines don't promise specific premium reductions. What they do is organize measures into tiers that both builders and insurers helped design. National surveys of builders and insurers conducted during 2024 and 2025 were analyzed using an impact matrix to identify measures that were both practical to build and meaningful for reducing insurance losses.
The tiered structure is the core innovation. Rather than presenting resilience as a binary state — protected or not — the framework acknowledges that most homes already have some level of protection and creates a clear pathway for incremental improvement.
At the Good tier, measures tend to be familiar and relatively accessible. At Better and Best, the upgrades become more specialized. In an interview with Canadian Underwriter, ICLR's senior director of resilience programs Dan Sandink offered concrete examples: a Best-tier hail measure for new construction would include fibre-cement, brick, stone, steel siding, or products warrantied for resistance to damaging hail size. A Better-tier wildfire measure ensures there are no openings or gaps larger than 3 mm in exterior walls.
Some of the guidance challenges common assumptions. Sandink noted that introducing a sump pump unnecessarily may actually increase basement flood risk — a home designed to drain passively through a storm sewer connection is better protected than one relying on a mechanical pump. For homeowners already dealing with water entry, the first step is identifying where the water is actually coming from before investing in any upgrade. That kind of counterintuitive insight is what distinguishes these guidelines from generic resilience advice.
For homeowners, the practical takeaway is this: the Good tier is a self-assessment baseline. If your home meets most Good-tier measures for a given hazard, you have a foundation. The Better and Best tiers map out what upgrading looks like, roughly how difficult each step is, and what it might mean for your insurance position.
The timing is not incidental. Between 2016 and 2025, insured losses from catastrophic weather events and wildfires in Canada totalled $37 billion — nearly triple the $14 billion recorded in the decade before, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada. In 2024 alone, insured damage hit a record $8.5 billion, driven by the Calgary hailstorm, the Jasper wildfire, and Greater Toronto Area floods.
Those are insured losses. They don't include the damage that homeowners absorbed out of pocket. Public Safety Canada estimates total residential flood risk at roughly $2.9 billion per year, with residential property owners bearing approximately 75% of uninsured losses annually.
The financial trajectory is stark. As Homeowner.ca has reported, insured losses nearly tripled to $37 billion over the past decade, reshaping the insurance landscape for every Canadian homeowner.
The scale of these losses created alignment between industries that historically operated in parallel. ICLR — an independent, not-for-profit research institute established by Canada's property and casualty insurance industry and affiliated with Western University — brings the insurance sector's perspective on what reduces claims. CHBA, representing roughly 8,500 member companies across the residential construction industry, brings the builder's perspective on what's actually constructible. The Resilient Homes Task Force brought both sides into the same room, along with the federal standards and research bodies that funded the work.
As ICLR Executive Director Paul Kovacs put it in the release: "For years, we have known what works to reduce losses from flood, hail, wind, and wildfire — but knowledge alone doesn't build safer homes."
The guidelines address hazards that collectively represent the most damaging weather perils for Canadian residential property.
The guidelines were designed for Part 9 residential buildings (houses and small buildings). They apply to new construction, renovation, and post-disaster rebuilding — not just new homes.
The insurance angle is where homeowner interest will be sharpest, and where the guidelines are most carefully worded. The framework includes information on potential insurance incentives at each tier, but it does not guarantee premium reductions. That distinction matters.
What the guidelines do create is a structured vocabulary that insurers can use to recognize and price resilience features. The Pembina Institute reports that the ICLR estimates every dollar invested in climate-resilient buildings yields $11 in avoided damages and insurance savings. The economic case is strong. The operational challenge is that most insurers' underwriting systems are not yet built to track individual resilience measures at the household level.
The ICLR has already published insurance incentive fact sheets tied to the guidelines, noting that some insurers offer rebates or reduced premiums for homes with wildfire protection measures — particularly in Western Canada. The Task Force has committed to developing tools that allow insurers to recognize and price resilience features more effectively over time.
For homeowners already concerned about rising premiums, the practical step right now is direct: contact your insurer or broker and ask whether any of the measures in the Good, Better, Best framework are currently recognized in your policy. The guidelines give you a specific list to reference, which is more than homeowners have had before.
One of the strongest credibility signals in this release is the field-trial component. The guidelines weren't developed in a lab. Pilot projects launched in Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia tested the measures in live construction projects using an Integrated Design Process that brought resilience experts together with builder teams to review plans, assess cost implications, and address constructability challenges on site.
That process surfaced practical findings that would not have emerged from desk research alone. Builders evaluated their likelihood of implementing specific measures over the next five years. Insurers assessed expected effectiveness in reducing claims frequency and severity. The overlap — measures that builders would actually adopt and that insurers believed would actually reduce losses — became the core of the guidelines.
The geographic spread of the pilots also matters. Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia represent distinct climate risk profiles: flood-prone urban centres (where spring flood warnings are already active), hail-exposed Prairie housing, and wildfire-threatened interface communities. The fact that the same tiered framework was validated across all three regions gives it national applicability that single-province guidance cannot match.
The explicit "Version 1" label is intentional. ICLR and CHBA have committed to expanding field trials, updating guidance as new evidence emerges, enhancing builder and insurer education, and engaging manufacturers — particularly in areas where the guidelines identified supply-chain gaps. The Canadian Underwriter interview highlighted one such gap: hail impact-resistant solar panels that meet Class 4 resistance standards are manufactured internationally but remain extremely difficult to source in the Canadian residential market.
The iterative approach means homeowners who engage with the framework now are not adopting a static standard. They're entering a system that will evolve as the data improves, as insurer recognition expands, and as builders develop more cost-effective ways to deliver Better and Best tier measures.
For Homeowner.ca readers navigating rising home insurance costs and a tightening market, these guidelines offer something that has not existed until now: a shared framework that both your builder and your insurer helped create, organized into steps you can evaluate on your own terms. Whether that starts with checking your basement's drainage design or asking your insurer what resilience features they currently recognize, the path forward is now mapped.
The full guidelines and checklists are available through the ICLR Resilient Homes Task Force page. Start with the hazard most relevant to your region — basement flooding for most of Ontario and Quebec, wildfire for interior B.C. and northern communities, hail for the Prairies — and use the Good tier as a self-assessment baseline.