Did the Canada Day storm wash away your long weekend plans? The intense rain storm and flooding that swept across Ottawa on Canada Day left thousands without power, damaged homes, and disrupted communities. Yet in the immediate aftermath, Hydro’s CEO described this event as a “surprise.” Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe told CBC, “I don’t think anybody was anticipating this amount of rain”.
Really?
The City of Ottawa’s published 2020 climate projections anticipate that our region will experience significantly more frequent and more intense rainfall. While many of us were unprepared for the scale of the damage these floods caused, the science wasn’t.
Events like this highlight important questions: is our city preparing quickly enough for the climate change reality we already know is coming? And is our city doing its part to prevent a worsening climate destabilization? Solutions abound.
It isn’t just floods. Across Canada, another climate emergency has been unfolding. Within the last couple weeks, wildfires have burned millions of hectares of land, forced entire communities to evacuate, and filled cities with hazardous smoke. Even hundreds of kilometers away, our community felt the effects of the wildfires through smokey skies and poor air quality – reminding us that climate impacts don’t stay where they begin. From flooded streets to smoke-filled skies, these events reveal the same crisis.
Canadians certainly recognize the urgency. In 2025, according to Stats Canada 53% of Canadians reported being very, or extremely concerned about climate change, while 30% reported feeling stressed about climate change at least once a month. People aren’t just worried, we are actively seeing the impacts unfold in our own communities.
If the recent floods and wildfires have taught us anything, it’s that extreme weather is no longer a distant possibility. It’s happening here, and it’s happening now. As CAFES’ Angela Keller-Herzog told the Ottawa Lookout, the reality of climate change means that Ottawa needs to prepare for more frequent and intense extreme weather events.
With respect to the Canada Day storms, Angela explained that when temperatures warm, we get more humidity and therefore rainfall will become more and more intense. Whether wildfires, pollution or floods, these climate induced natural disasters are leading to death, injury, financial hardships, displacement, loss of livelihoods and huge burdens on societies, economies and the environment.
The real surprise isn’t the storm. The surprise is that we are still treating these events as unexpected rather than preparing for the climate reality we know is already here. Every flood, every heat wave, and every major storm is another reminder. Climate action isn’t only about preventing dire far off future, it’s about protecting our communities today.