The owner of the house that was swept away by a major landslide in Sainte-Monique, in Quebec’s Centre-du-Québec region, will not be able to claim compensation from an insurance company. Insurers do not cover this type of risk. A few hours after the landslide that swallowed Fernand Therrien’s house on Wednesday, his niece, Audrey-Anne Gervais, launched a fundraising campaign on the GoFundMe site. “I’ve lost everything, my house, my garage, the river has even taken over my land! My family wants to help me, thanks to you, to rehouse, clothe and feed my surviving dogs,” reads a message attributed to Therrien online. The goal of the campaign is to raise $50,000 for Therrien, who suffered a loss not covered by home insurance in Canada. “When an insurer is going to cover a risk or include it, for example, in a basic home insurance policy, it has to be able to assess that risk, to evaluate the probability of it occurring,” said Pierre Babinsky, director of communications and public affairs at the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC). “In the absence of a method to assess this risk, to measure its probability, it makes it impossible to offer insurance for a hazard like this.” Retired professor Jacques Joncat, co-founder of the Laboratoire d’études sur les risques naturels (LERN), associated with Université Laval, pointed out that “we can predict the conditions conducive to the triggering of a landslide, but we cannot predict when these conditions will be met for it to occur.” Government provides financial assistance In the absence of home insurance policies, disaster victims can turn to the Quebec government, which assumes part of the losses incurred as a result of damage caused by ground movement. Landslide victims can sign up for the Programme général d’assistance financière lors de sinistres (PGAF), which is, according to the website of the Ministry of Public Safety, “last-resort assistance for homeowners and tenants.” Under this program, a disaster victim can receive up to $385,000 for “damage to the residence and access road.” No ministry spokesperson was available Thursday to explain in detail the financial assistance that may be granted to landslide victims. However, in an email exchange, a public relations officer told The Canadian Press that, in addition to damage to the main residence, the PGAF can cover “accommodation costs,” “eligible movable property” and “moving and storage costs.” Hundreds of investigations per year It is virtually impossible to know how often landslides occur in Quebec, because “you’d really have to monitor thousands of kilometres of shoreline,” said Joncat. “But at the Ministry of Public Safety, in the landslide section, I think they must do between 150 and 300 investigations into landslides a year.” Most of these phenomena occur in clay soils, on the banks of watercourses. In Quebec, clay soils are found in the most densely populated parts of the province, such as the St. Lawrence Valley, the Ottawa Valley and the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region. The retired professor added that “major landslides, like the one that occurred in Sainte-Monique, happen once a year.” The cause of Wednesday’s landslide has not yet been confirmed, but Public Safety said heavy rainfall over the past week may have contributed. Number of landslides expected to increase Climate change, which is leading to more intense rainfall, may increase the number of landslides. Studies predict that, in the Saint Lawrence Valley, there could be perhaps 15 per cent more precipitation and heavy rainfall will have a real impact on superficial landslides, which are characterized by a depth of less than 1.5 metres below the natural ground. The Sainte-Monique landslide created a crater estimated to be 25 metres deep in some places. “This is a deep landslide that is directly associated with erosion,” which “is also associated with climate change,” said Joncat. On Thursday afternoon, Sylvain Gallant, Regional Director of Civil Protection, said that “expert assessments are continuing” in Sainte-Monique and that the authorities were “awaiting a preliminary report.” This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French May 22, 2025.
