Insurance Blogs hosted by Canadian Underwriter
Insurance Blogs hosted by Canadian Underwriter
The July 11 announcement that Farmers Insurance is stepping back from writing some business in Florida lead to another round of panicky comments in the press and on social media that climate change was leaving yet one more permanent scar.…
For the vast majority of the existence of Canada’s property and casualty insurance industry, overland flood was deemed to be uninsurable for Canadian homeowners. While commercial entities have been able to purchase flood insurance for decades, it was only eight…
Large storms like the kind we saw in 2022 can present unique challenges to Canadian insurers Preliminary numbers for 2022 Canadian insured disaster losses are in (or out), and they’re not pretty. According to Catastrophe Indices and Quantification Inc.…
The main purpose of insurance is to aid in personal, corporate and societal recovery by providing indemnification for losses that might otherwise cause financial failure. However, insurance has several secondary functions, including acting as a mechanism to incentivize good risk…
From time to time, the global re/insurance industry experiences a loss or series of losses that forces market participants to re-evaluate what they thought they knew about a given hazard. Three examples of such shock losses are Hurricane Andrew (1992),…
Right from the get go, it is instilled in us that fire has very few redeeming qualities if any at all. Essentially nothing good ever comes from fire, or so we’re told. It’s an evil force that must be quelled,…
Stephen Dishart served as Managing Director of Corporate Communication and HR for Swiss Re’s Americas Division at the time of the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001. He led the strategic communication team that worked very closely with senior management…
In this piece, industry veteran Phil Cook makes a number of good points about the current state of the p&c market in Canada. Cook makes the distinction between a hard market and a difficult market, sharing that he is not…
There is an old joke that has a young Senate intern at a fairly high-level Washington, D.C. cocktail party. The intern approaches a four-star general standing alone and engages in small talk. “Wow, that’s a lot of medals you have…
After a string of costly and disruptive floods in Canada in recent years, beginning with the $1.5 billion insured loss event in Southern Alberta in June 2013 and the $1 billion insured event in Toronto just a few weeks later,…
Some claims made by climate science deniers would be downright hilarious if they weren’t so dangerous. I mean, I really don’t know where people come up with some of the things they maintain are fact. And I really don’t get…
Nine provinces and one territory in the country have formal disaster assistance programs designed to help homeowners, renters, small business owners, not-for-profits and local governments recover after a loss event. Prince Edward Island, Yukon and Nunavut do not currently have…
In some years, it’s water. In others, it’s wildfire or hail. This year, it was extreme wind that stood out as a major driver of insured catastrophic loss in Canada. Indeed, just two events – the May 4 Southern Ontario/Quebec…
It is somewhat understandable why most Canadians seem to know virtually nothing about how building codes work in this country. After all, a person might only really be exposed to code-related issues if they were having a new home built…