With major weather events becoming ubiquitous in recent years, insurance premiums have been going up for cars, homes, and even festivals. Before the pandemic, Taste of Edmonton would spend about $5,000 on insurance a year. Now they’re paying $15,000. “It’s the best insurance rate we can get across Canada for our style of event,” said the festival’s executive director Donovan Vienneau. “Weather is a very big thing, especially when we’ve produced an outdoor event for the last 42 years.” The Edmonton International Fringe Festival has also seen the cost of operations go up across the board. “Our funding has remained stagnant for the better part of a decade while our costs continue to go up,” said the Fringe’s executive director Megan Dart. “We have intentionally held the size of the festival for the last couple of years because the costs continue to go up. We can’t look at growth until we sustain what’s good.” The festival started a campaign to acquire more donors with just 34 monthly contributors. As of Thursday, they have 840 monthly donors with a goal of reaching 1,000 by Sunday. Luckily for the Fringe, the weather has held up and there are many places to seek shelter and see a show if things get ugly. But Edmonton isn’t the only place seeing a rise in insurance premiums due to major weather events. Anne Marie Thomas, director of consumer and industry relations with the Insurance Bureau of Canada, said they are seeing average claims of $2 billion due to extreme weather with claims most recently topped at $3 billion. “We see that with our home insurance premiums, our car insurance premiums, and it is not really much different for festivals, with perhaps the exception of municipalities requesting that festivals increase the amount of insurance they purchase,” explained Thomas. She said water, which Edmonton has seen an incredible amount of, is the main cost factor driving up claims. While costs to put on a festival are consistently going up year after year, organizers are trying not to burden consumers with higher ticket prices. A Taste of Edmonton hasn’t increased their prices since 2018. “Any way that I can pass the savings along to my consumer, I will always do that,” said Vienneau. “We are so fortunate that we’ve got the relationships with the partners that we do to be able to offset and offer our consumer the same pricing they experienced eight years ago.” With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Miriam Valdes-Carletti
