Chris Lowrey
MUNICIPALITY OF PONTIAC May 9, 2018
It’s been a full year since the Pontiac was hit with the 100-year flood.
Several municipalities around the region are still recovering from last year’s devastation, with more flooding predicted for this year.
The Municipality of Pontiac was especially hard hit by last year’s flooding, with more than 30 homes scheduled for demolition.
It’s been a tough slog for those who were affected by last year’s record floods.
Those 30 demolished homes only make up about 50 per cent of the more than 60 houses slated for destruction. Many of the residents are in a form of limbo while they wait to find out the fate of their homes.
“Here we are in the middle of another flood season and still approximately 50 per cent of the files from last year are still ongoing,” said Municipality of Pontiac Mayor Joanne Labadie.

Labadie also said that the coordination with Quebec’s Ministry of Public Safety (MSP) has been slow going.
One of the main issues revolves around confidentiality.
“As far as who has received compensation because of damages but were allowed to keep their homes, we unfortunately don’t have those statistics,” Labadie said. “As soon as one of our residents opens a file with [the MSP], it’s confidential. We as a municipality have no means to communicate with them.”
Labadie added that the only reason the municipality is aware of the demolition of a residence is because the land is transferred to the municipality once the home is demolished.
“We know the numbers, but we don’t know the people until we sign it,” Labadie said. “The confidentiality really impedes us being able to help our ratepayers.”
Understandably, this makes the job of assisting residents much more difficult for the municipality.
To make matters worse, several residents haven’t even been able to get assistance from the government, which has left them with limited options.
Labadie also said that many people received inadequate compensation for their homes.
She said that some residents who bought a modest cottage they renovated and turned into a year-round home, didn’t get enough compensation to discharge their mortgage.
As a result, these people had to either declare bankruptcy or continue paying a mortgage for a property they no longer owned.
“I looked at a property [recently] where the man just walked away,” Labadie said. “He just handed the key back to the mortgage company and said ‘Goodbye.’”
Once the file on a property is completed and the structure is torn down, the property reverts back to the municipality’s ownership.
As a result, the municipality is determining what to do with the land – but there’s not much that can be done.
“Well they’re in a 0-20-year floodplain so no one will ever be able to build on it,” Labadie said.
Labadie said the municipality will form a committee to look at what options the municipality has when it comes to finding a use for the property.
Adding to the complication is that many of the hardest-hit communities are serviced by private roads, which limits the ability of the municipality to help out. Labadie said that some residents have asked to have the roads municipalized but even that idea isn’t so simple.
Labadie said that in order to do that, there would need to be a set of norms adopted so that smaller roads that would be tough for a snowplow to pass, for example, wouldn’t be municipalized.
When it comes to the municipality’s newly-acquired lands, Labadie said that those properties could be divided between the two neighbouring properties, or they could be used to widen roads.
However, the work to widen these roads and get the land surveyed will cost money, something the municipality has less of thanks to the floods.
“We lost 30 homes last year,” Labadie said. “That means we lost 30 ratepayers. There was no growth in our community.”
The municipality has revamped its emergency response plan and a post mortem has been undertaken by Jean Perras, the investigator who did the post mortem analysis after the train derailment that devastated the town of Lac Mégantic in 2013.
The floods last year saw a massive response effort – the Canadian Armed Forces were even called in to help.
The municipal staff pulled their weight as well.
Labadie said six employees at the Municipality of Pontiac worked more than 520 hours of unpaid overtime during last year’s flooding.
The mayor also said that the lessons learned by staff will be invaluable going forward.
“If nothing else, after the 2017 floods, the team here at the Municipality of Pontiac have learned so much,” Labadie said.
She pointed to the fact that municipal staff have formed relationships with MSP staff and that the lines of communication that were formed last year have remained open all year.
The municipality is part of the City of Gatineau’s $2 million plan to re-evaluate the region’s floodplains. The plan was to examine the flood plains for the Gatineau River, the Ottawa River and the Livre River, but Labadie and the municipality pushed to include the Quyon River, which will be included in the study.