Bill 68 Poses Serious Flood,…

Bill 68 Poses Serious Flood, Climate, and Insurance Risks

I urge the Ontario government to immediately halt implementation of Bill 68, which would dismantle Ontario’s watershed-based Conservation Authority system, consolidate 36 authorities into 7 mega-authorities, and centralize control through a new provincial agency.

This restructuring significantly increases flood risk, financial liability, and insurance exposure for Ontarians.

• Increased flood risk and disaster losses: Conservation Authorities are Ontario’s primary flood-risk management bodies. Disrupting their operations through forced consolidation will divert staff from floodplain mapping, hazard assessments, infrastructure monitoring, and emergency planning—precisely as climate-driven extreme rainfall events are becoming more frequent and severe. Any weakening of these functions increases the likelihood of catastrophic flooding, loss of life, and property damage.

• Escalating insurance and municipal liability: Flooding is already the leading cause of insured losses in Canada. Weakening watershed-based oversight and permitting increases the probability of development in flood-prone and hazard lands, exposing homeowners, municipalities, and ultimately the Province to higher insurance claims, rising premiums, uninsurable properties, and legal liability.

• Politicization of flood-risk decisions: Bill 68 allows ministerial override of Conservation Authority decisions grounded in technical flood and hazard analysis. Replacing evidence-based risk management with political discretion undermines public safety, creates uncertainty for insurers and lenders, and shifts long-term financial risk onto taxpayers.

• Loss of locally grounded flood intelligence: Existing Conservation Authorities are structured around individual watersheds and supported by decades of local hydrological data, flood history, and climate modelling. Consolidation across vast and hydrologically distinct regions will dilute this critical expertise, slow response times, and impair effective flood forecasting and mitigation.

• Higher public costs and reduced resilience: Creating a new provincial agency adds administrative overhead while siphoning municipal funds away from flood mitigation projects such as wetland restoration, natural infrastructure, erosion control, and storm-water management. This directly reduces community resilience and increases future disaster recovery costs.

• False premise on development delays: There is no evidence that Conservation Authorities are significantly restricting development on non-hazardous lands. In contrast, weakening flood safeguards to accelerate approvals creates long-term economic risk by placing people, infrastructure, and insurance systems in harm’s way.

Bottom line:

Bill 68 shifts flood risk and climate risk away from developers and the Province and onto homeowners, municipalities, insurers, and future governments. At a time when insurers are warning about escalating flood losses and municipalities are struggling with disaster recovery costs, Ontario cannot afford to weaken its first line of defence against flooding and natural hazards.

I urgently call on the Province to stop implementation of Bill 68 and work collaboratively with existing Conservation Authorities to strengthen flood-risk management, climate resilience, and public safety—without dismantling the very system that protects Ontario communities from escalating disaster and insurance costs.