The Insurance Bureau of Canada’s decades-long campaign to raise alarms about the ravages of floods continued last week with an appearance by Blair Feltmate, a favourite star climate-change witness for the biggest insurers, at the Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority’s annual meeting. Feltmate heads the industry-funded Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at Waterloo University, which claims climate change has triggered a surge in flood events in recent years. As Feltmate put it during his comments at the meeting: “The elephant in the room, from a climate-change perspective, is… too much water in the wrong places.”
Not quite. The real elephant sharing the room with Feltmate turned out to be a detailed report from Guy Gendron, a CBC/Radio Canada International ombudsman, outlining how such distorted flood claims led the news network to publish stories last fall that contained “inaccurate and irrelevant” information.
At the time, last September, Feltmate was interviewed by the CBC’s English-language Radio Canada International arm, promoting the insurance industry’s sensational new report that claimed bad weather and flood events are soaring due to climate change. Weather that used to happen every 40 to 100 years is now occurring every six years, the industry has said, and the only way counter the threat is to introduce a national “green infrastructure” program.
