Stephen Hazell
August 14 2026 Issue
The Glebe Report
Ottawa suffered perhaps its worst-ever overland floods on Canada Day. Two major storms dumped 140 mm of rain in some neighbourhoods (118 mm at Ottawa airport). The storms caused massive damage to homes and infrastructure, with the City receiving 5,423 reports of basement flooding as of July 10.
The Canada Day deluge far surpassed the extreme rain event of 77 mm in August of 2023, not to mention the severe riverine floods of 2017 and 2019 that forced evacuations and caused extensive property damage.
Ottawa’s mayors and councillors have known for at least a decade that extreme weather driven by climate change will only get worse. City council declared a climate emergency in April 2019 and released a Climate Vulnerability and Risk Assessment in 2022 making this very prediction. In the National Capital Region, total annual precipitation is expected to increase three to five per cent by the 2030s with rains falling in more intense storms. Overland flooding is just as serious as riverine flooding, generating a higher proportion of home insurance claims. Homeowner claims for property damage caused by the Canada Day floods must already be swamping insurance companies.
The City of Ottawa has made some effort to mitigate overland flood risk by constructing underground storage tanks and tunnels, stormwater ponds and catch basins, delivering a limited Rain Ready program and releasing an albeit underfunded strategy, Climate Ready Ottawa. Kudos to Shawn Menard, Capital Ward councillor and chair of the Environment Committee, who has been a champion for greater city efforts to adapt to climate-driven flooding and reduce carbon emissions.
Despite good work by Menard and staff, the city’s efforts are simply inadequate to prevent basement flooding and dumping of untreated sewage into the Ottawa River. Essential flood plain and overland flood maps essential to identifying vulnerable neighbourhoods are incomplete; meanwhile, new subdivisions and urban intensification developments are approved with limited regard to flood risk. Nature-based solutions (protected and restored wetlands, sponge parks, rain gardens, bioswales, green roofs, depaving and permeable pavements) remain largely unimplemented. Serious city action could directly benefit homeowners financially through reduced premiums for flood insurance.
Mayor Sutcliffe’s public suggestion that the Canada Day deluge may be a once-in-500-year event is unhelpful, even irresponsible, wishful-thinking that demonstrates a misunderstanding of climate science and Ottawa’s vulnerability to ever-worsening floods. In the absence of urgent city action, floods like those on Canada Day – or worse – may happen every few years.
The October 26 municipal election campaign is a key opportunity for mayoral and council candidates to commit to declaring flood management a strategic and budget priority, as Citizen Climate Counsel (C3) has repeatedly urged. A new paradigm that reimagines precipitation as a valued resource for communities and ecosystems rather than a waste product to be flushed away is essential. Montreal and Vancouver are already showing Ottawa how to do it.
Mayoral and council candidates need to explain to Ottawans more broadly what they will do to address the climate emergency. C3 wrote to all five mayoral candidates in June asking them to answer five questions concerning climate change in the context of emergency preparedness, housing affordability, transportation, best use of tax dollars and affordability. C3 proposes to publicly release candidate responses (or lack thereof!) in the autumn.
C3 urges Glebites to make use of these questions whenever candidates knock on their door or address all-candidates meetings.
Reducing and managing floods is a challenge for all of us and will demand bold thinking and investment by the City, especially as climate change generates even more extreme weather and floods in coming years. For Glebites, this means doing our part as a community and as individuals to reduce volume and slow flows of flood water that empty into our rivers.
Job one for Glebe residents in this autumn’s election campaign? Challenge mayoral and councillor candidates to make solid commitments to improve flood preparedness and tackle climate change. Then vote for candidates who are serious about addressing Ottawa’s climate emergency.
Stephen Hazell is a Glebe resident and member of Citizens Climate Counsel (C3), an Ottawa volunteer group established in 2019 that undertakes research to find municipal climate solutions and promote their implementation (www.c3ottawa.ca.)