Toronto · Ontario

Basement flooding in Toronto: what the City pays, and what it asks for first

Toronto runs the most generous per-device basement flooding subsidy of the four cities on this site, and the amounts changed recently enough that a lot of pages describing it are describing a programme that no longer exists.

It also has the oldest sewer problem. approximately 23 per cent of the City’s older areas are served by combined sewers — a single pipe carrying both sewage and stormwater, in places built as much as a century ago.

What is actually under the street

Toronto publishes the numbers, which is more than most municipalities do.

The City maintains nearly 3,800 kilometres of sanitary sewers and more than 523,000 City-owned sewer service line connections. And approximately 23 per cent of its older areas are on combined sewers.

That last figure is the one that matters to a homeowner, because in a combined system a heavy rainfall event and a sewage event are not two things that might happen on the same night. They are one thing. A basement in a combined-sewer neighbourhood has a different risk profile from a basement four kilometres away on separated pipes, and neither homeowner is usually told which they are in.

It also explains why the City’s subsidy programme is shaped the way it is: it pays for devices that keep the reversal out of your house, rather than for anything that would fix the pipe under the road.

The catch most applications trip on

Toronto’s conditions are stricter than the other three cities here, and two of them are done before you start rather than after.

Your downspouts must be disconnected from the sewer. Not planned to be — already done. In a combined-sewer city this is the whole logic of the programme: every downspout still discharging into the sewer is adding rainwater to the pipe that is about to back up into somebody’s basement.

Any paved front-yard area must comply with the City’s zoning requirements. The same logic. Impermeable front yards send water to the same place.

Your contractor must have held a valid City of Toronto business licence at the time of the work. Checked afterwards, against the date.

A building permit is required for a backwater valve. Not optional and not retroactive.

You apply within two years of installation, and you cannot have outstanding taxes or debts to the City.

The practical order, then, is: downspouts and front yard first, permit second, work third, application fourth. Doing it in any other order is how the money gets left behind.

What the money actually buys

The programme is per device rather than a single pot, which is why the headline maximum is reachable only by doing several things.

The line worth noticing is the battery backup. A sump pump keeps a basement dry by running; the storm that overwhelms the system is frequently the storm that takes the power out. Toronto funding the backup as its own item is the City saying so in budget form.

The second is that the backwater valve allowance covers two devices. A house with separate storm and sanitary laterals may need both, and a single-valve assumption is how that gets under-scoped.

How Toronto compares with the other three

Toronto’s maximum of $6,650 puts it second of the four Ontario municipalities on this site. The highest of the other three is Mississauga at $7,500; the lowest is Hamilton at $2,000.

What the headline hides is that Toronto is the only one of the four that funds a sump pump battery backup as its own line item, and the only one that will pay for two backwater valves on one property. On a house with separate storm and sanitary laterals that is a materially different programme from Mississauga’s larger-sounding one, which makes you choose between a sump pump route and a valve route.

What none of this does for you

Every dollar on this page buys a device that reduces the chance of water arriving. None of it pays for the damage if it arrives anyway, and in Canada that is a separate purchase that a standard policy does not include.

So the complete answer for a Toronto homeowner is both: the device, part-funded by the City, and the sewer backup endorsement, bought from your insurer. Doing one and not the other is a half-measure in either direction.

And if water is in the building now, the clock is Health Canada’s rather than your insurer’s: mould begins to grow in an area with excessive moisture within 48 hours. Your policy separately “requires you to act to limit any further damage”. What that means in practice is on our duty to mitigate page.

Questions people actually ask

Where to read next

• What a sewer backup actually is
• The endorsement the devices do not replace
• What restoration work costs, and whose figures those are
• Mississauga’s programme
• Ottawa’s programme
• Hamilton’s programme