Public Safety Canada partnered with Kūwiingu-néewul Engagement Services (KES) to speak with Indigenous communities and individuals living off-reserve in areas at high risk of flooding to discuss flood insurance and cooperative relocation strategies. As this project was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, all conversations for this engagement were conducted virtually.
Our engagement strategy made use of a two-phase approach to the project:
the first phase included research and education and involved speaking with academics, researchers, and insurance providers to understand the current barriers and challenges to accessing flooding insurance for Indigenous people and the current issues surrounding cooperative relocation efforts.
The second phase of our engagement focused on speaking with community members, crisis response teams and disaster management experts, and provincial and territorial representatives about the perspectives and needs of Indigenous people living in high-risk flooding areas. In particular, our engagement focused on rural, Northern, and isolated communities where aid can be challenging to access and insurance, in some cases, can be impossible to get.
