MANITOULIN—Canada has traditionally advised its communities, infrastructure and institutions around the promise of a relatively stable climate. Now, the climate is changing faster than the machinery of government was built to respond to it. A sweeping new federal scientific assessment released September 3 finds that some of the changes subliminally sensed by many are already underway in Canada’s climate and are effectively irreversible within the boundaries of human timescales.
The 2026 National Adaptation Strategy Report alongside the federal 2026 National Adaptation Strategy Progress Report released by the federal government on September 3, — ts second revision since 2019—elicited the following comment from Ryan Ness, Director of Adaptation at the Canadian Climate Institute
“Ottawa’s update on its National Adaptation Strategy documents a good deal of activity—but little sign that any of it is actually reducing the escalating climate and extreme weather risks that Canadians face. This summer’s catastrophic wildfires that have destroyed communities, forced thousands to evacuate, and shrouded cities in toxic smoke are the latest signal that Canada must accelerate climate adaptation.
The government documents reveal that Canada has warmed approximately 2°C since 1948, with the North warming 2.6°C. Since 1970, the country has warmed nearly twice as quickly as the global average, while the Canadian Arctic has warmed roughly three times faster.
Those numbers can look minuscule on paper but when we think of the planet’s temperature instead like a household bill: a small percentage increase may not look alarming on a single line, but compounded across everything that bill pays for, the cost quickly becomes impossible to ignore. The metaphor is not merely rhetorical; there is an actual bill arriving.
Climate Risk Institute president and Manitoulin resident Al Douglas has been warning about it for years. Speaking to The Expositor in 2023, Mr. Douglas said insurance companies were already pushing for greater resilience because increasingly extreme weather was driving claims upward.
“Insurance companies are right on top of this,” he said, warning that as losses grow, “certain places will become uninsurable.”
That is where the abstract language of climate adaptation reaches the kitchen table. A changing climate does not simply mean longer, warmer summers. It can also mean flooded basements, washed-out roads, roofs damaged by water or fire —and eventually higher premiums, larger deductibles, restricted coverage or insurance that becomes increasingly difficult to obtain.
If climate change were an insurance premium, Canada has already received the rate increase and now the question is ‘how much higher can the bill become when governments fail to invest in the adaptation that could reduce the claim?’ A harder yet question is whether the country—and Manitoulin Island—are rebuilding their assumptions about climate predictability quickly enough to follow through before already visibly longer fire season, earlier spring thaws, warming waters and declining snow and ice pack before our ecosystems and the economies that depend on them spin into a freefall.
Because there is more warming already baked into the system. Between 2021 and 2040, Canada is projected to warm another 0.9°C regardless of the emissions pathway the world follows. By then, the country is expected to be about 2.7°C warmer and receive approximately seven percent more precipitation than during the 1850-1900 period.
Islanders watched it arrive at the roadside this spring.
Heavy rain falling onto rapid snowmelt and ice-clogged drainage systems overwhelmed culverts, closed roads and contributed to states of emergency in several Island municipalities just this past April. Perhaps we should be asking of Canada’s new climate assessment a much larger question: what are goverments doing in real time to protect remote communities such as Manitoulin Island.
A climate moving faster than the map
Canada is already wetter than it was 75 years ago. Between 1949 and 2023, annual precipitation increased an estimated 9.7 percent nationally and 7.5 percent across southern Canada, including Manitoulin. In the far North, the increase approached 19 percent.
But averages tell only part of the water story. Increasingly, what matters is when the water comes, how quickly it arrives and where it goes.
A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, increasing the likelihood of heavier precipitation, while rising temperatures are also changing whether that water falls as rain or snow, how long snow stays on the ground and when rivers reach their spring peak.
More precipitation does not inevitably mean more flooding. Floods are shaped by everything from rainfall intensity and snowpack to frozen ground, drainage and the watershed itself. What warming does is change the conditions under which all of those things interact—and the assumptions communities have historically used to prepare for them because those forces don’t operate independently.
A watershed can endure drought, then receive enormous quantities of rain in a matter of hours while frozen, saturated or drought-hardened ground may struggle to absorb it. A winter thaw can turn snow storage into runoff while culverts and drainage systems designed around historical rainfall can suddenly find themselves carrying tomorrow’s water through yesterday’s pipe.
Wetlands are also of particular importance, as they hold water on the landscape and release it gradually, forests regulate runoff and groundwater quietly feeds streams, wetlands and wells.
They are not merely scenery, but climate infrastructure, itself.
“Fifty years down the road, it’s going to be a very different climate than the one we are currently operating in,” Mr. Douglas previously told The Expositor, “so we need to be thinking about these things now so that our infrastructure will last.”
The new federal science suggests that future is arriving considerably faster than 50 years.
When the past stops predicting the water
Floodplain maps are lines drawn from probabilities and the climate that directs those probabilities is moving fast. A so-called 100-year flood does not mean a flood that arrives obediently once every century. It describes an event carrying a one-percent probability of occurring in a given year under the conditions used to calculate that probability.
Change the conditions and the odds can change with them.
Canada’s assessment projects that droughts and flash floods will become more frequent and severe as the climate warms. Summer droughts are expected to grow longer and more intense across central and southern Canada, even as extreme rainfall becomes heavier and more frequent across the country. The largest increases are projected in the North, while conditions capable of producing intense storms are expected to become more common across central and eastern Canada, including Ontario.
It is one of climate change’s more uncomfortable water paradoxes: a place can become more vulnerable to drought and flooding at the same time; less reliable water does not necessarily mean less rain. It can mean longer dry periods punctuated by harder downpours.
That leaves a question for every community approving subdivisions, replacing culverts, rebuilding roads or locating critical infrastructure: when was the flood mapping done, what climate assumptions went into it, and do those assumptions still describe the watershed outside the window today?
Here on the Island, water complicates the picture further. We sit within one of Earth’s largest freshwater systems, but abundance is not the same thing as security. Only a small fraction of Great Lakes water is renewed annually through precipitation, runoff and groundwater. Changes in evaporation, precipitation, snow, ice and groundwater tug on different strands of the same hydrological web.
The Expositor reported in 2022 that approximately eight million people across the Great Lakes basin depend upon groundwater. Manitoulin Streams’ Seija Deschenes explained then that the Island’s fractured limestone creates extensive connections between groundwater and surface streams.
Those connections sustain life. Water security, in other words, is not simply a question of whether there is water. It is a question of where it is, when it arrives, how warm it is, how clean it remains and whether the landscape can still hold it. More water falling from the sky does not necessarily mean more water available when it is needed.
In that sense, the April floods offered a glimpse of the problem Canada is now attempting to describe nationally: water arriving at the wrong time, in the wrong form and faster than infrastructure can move it away.
Even the best case scenario trajectory is not a return ticket.
If global carbon dioxide emissions begin falling immediately and reach net-zero in the 2070s, Canada’s temperature is still projected to stabilize at roughly 3.5°C above the pre-industrial average by late century. Sea-level rise, glacier loss and permafrost thaw would continue even after surface temperatures stabilized. Adaptation is no longer preparation for hypothetical scenarios, it is preparation for what is already arriving.
Ottawa continues to emphasize the economics and acknowledges that preparation for climate disasters is less costly than repeated recovery from them. Since 2018, nearly $3.66 billion has been committed through the Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund for projects intended to reduce future losses but that funding envelope is now fully allocated. The newer Build Communities Strong Fund contains $6 billion over 10 years for a much broader collection of regional infrastructure, retrofits, community infrastructure and climate adaptation.
Meanwhile, Parliament continues to move in another direction as well.
Bill C-5, the One Canadian Economy Act, created an accelerated pathway for projects deemed to be in the national interest. Ottawa is simultaneously attempting to construct infrastructure capable of surviving tomorrow’s climate while accelerating decisions about some of the development that will shape it, “streamlining” environmental oversight along the way.
That contradiction becomes harder to ignore when much of the infrastructure already protecting us is quite literally alive: the aforementioned wetlands, forests and watersheds that regulate yesterday’s rain into tomorrow’s groundwaters. Destroying those systems and replacing their functions later with concrete is an expensive definition of adaptation.
The tension is also visible in Ottawa’s enthusiasm for artificial intelligence infrastructure. The federal government has committed billions toward sovereign AI computing capacity and is seeking enormous new data-centre projects at the same moment its own climate assessment identifies freshwater availability as an emerging concern.
For communities entering an era of increasing water instability, the questions write themselves: How much water will these facilities consume? Where will it come from? Who gets priority during drought? And who carries the cost if abundance proves less reliable than assumed?
Planning for Manitoulin
Work is being done here. The Expositor reported as early as 2020 on regional energy and emissions planning involving Manitoulin municipalities and First Nations. Central Manitoulin subsequently adopted a Community Energy and Emissions Plan. Other Island municipalities have incorporated climate considerations into asset, energy or emergency planning, while Assiginack has explored developing a dedicated adaptation plan.
What remains absent, after more than five years when organized climate planning began across the Island, is a comprehensive Island-wide adaptation strategy.
There is federally allocated money specifically intended to help close that gap: $530 million through the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ Local Leadership for Climate Adaptation initiative, including $130 million to help municipalities develop climate-ready plans and processes and another $227 million to move adaptation into implementation.
The Expositor made the case for greater Island-wide emergency coordination following April’s flooding and the new federal assessment pushes the question further: can our communities continue to respond when the water reaches the road or are we able to adapt before it gets there?
And are we planning for the Island as we remember her or as the Island that is coming?
