How Canada’s latest resilience centre wound up in Toronto’s financial district

Sometime after becoming a senior executive advisor at Accenture in Canada, Phil Gibson was chatting about resilience in Accenture’s downtown Toronto office with Paul Kovacs, the executive director at the property and casualty industry’s natural hazard research arm, the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR).

Gibson was previously the chair of the ICLR board and so he had a special interest in helping Canadians weather increasingly severe natural catastrophe losses. At the time, ICLR had resilience centres located in London, Ont., and a new one in Winnipeg, Manitoba. And it was looking for more places to spread the word about its research to protect policyholders against storms.   

“When I transitioned to Accenture, Paul and I continued our conversations, saying, ‘Resilience is where it’s at. This is the future for Canada. We need to become a more resilient country. How can I help?’” Gibson recalls of the conversation with Kovacs. “We need to collaborate more. We need to get our message out.”

The two were having coffee in Accenture’s office, and Kovacs dropped a not-so-subtle hint about where he envisioned another potential climate resilience centre location.

“A place like this would be wonderful,” Kovacs said of the Accenture office, located in the Scotia Plaza in Toronto’s financial district.

As they talked, Gibson said he and Kovacs saw bankers walk past, as well as insurance people and government officials. “This would be ideal,” Kovacs said to Gibson. “This is the intersection of all things finance — banking, insurance, government. I mean, it’s all happening right here, pretty much in orbit of this office.”

And so it came to pass that ICLR opened up a new resilience display centre at Accenture’s downtown office in May 2025. The centre includes a gallery of models demonstrating the Dos and Don’ts of building structures resistant to floods, wildfires and earthquakes.

Tours are available showing, for example, how backwater valves and sump pumps work. Visitors to the centre can see what wind-resistant roof shingles look and feel like. They can witness for themselves what hurricane straps look like — and it’s all costed out for them on display.

Moira Gill, the director of strategy at ICLR, has been taking many different P&C industry groups on tours of the facility, using the displays as a jumping-off point to talk about how to build more resilient homes.

She says guided tour groups include insurance company executives, brokers, claims professionals, underwriters and actuaries. Outside of the P&C industry’s orbit, tour groups include mortgage lenders and home restoration and construction groups.

And perhaps, sometime in the future, the centre might see visits from politicians, many of whom are intent on building up the nation’s housing stock over the next decade.

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“There’s a range of people coming through,” Gill says, after taking CU through an abbreviated tour of the displays. “And because there are rooms here [onsite], all of those groups have an opportunity to have conversations about what they saw here. They can do that with Accenture, ICLR, or by themselves.

“For example, I mentioned [building resilience through] insurance products. People who may say, ‘It would be good to have essential water [flood protection]. How can we make that happen through advice, or through making it part of our product?

“Many companies will replace [damaged homes or property] with more resilient approaches after a claim. But it’s even more powerful if you could include that as a feature of the product before the claim. So those sorts of strategic conversations can happen on the spot after they’ve taken the tour, and it can be assisted or facilitated by both of our groups at the same time.”

Industry Collaboration

For Puneet Chattree, insurance industry lead at Accenture in Canada, the resilience centre is a focal point for sharing this knowledge.

“I think collaboration should lead to…a real opportunity for the industry to become smarter around what resiliency really means and allow the industry to discuss how we make [resilience measures] more affordable for Canadians,” Chattree says. “How do we better protect Canadians? And how do we prevent a lot of the losses that we have seen?

“This is one sliver of a bigger challenge we are facing as an industry. [The centre is] really [prompting] that collaboration to fuel that outcome.”

In addition to showcasing ICLR’s research, Gibson says, the centre also serves as a platform for Accenture to share its leading genAI capabilities, such as using AI to mine unstructured claims data.

“As a small example, we [in the P&C insurance industry] pay losses, and so we have adjuster notes on tons of properties,” Gibson said of Accenture’s role and interest in the centre. “That’s what we call unstructured data, because it’s not in a file format.

“Prior to gen AI, it was very hard to consume all that [data] and say, ‘Okay, let’s get an idea of what’s going on out there in mass.’ Now [with gen AI], Accenture is perfectly positioned. We have the power to do that. We can help insurers better understand the loss patterns.”

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Based on these loss patterns, insurers can try to find climate resilient solutions for policyholders, several of which are on display in the centre.

“It ranges from very simple, practical solutions — you could do this right now — to very cutting-edge,” says Gibson. “It’s going to take technology. It’s going to take collaboration, it’s going to take gen AI — maybe even agentic AI [in which AI systems reason, adapt and act like human team members] — to figure this out, to figure out what’s next.”

The centre’s information is now underpinning various modes of communication about resilience.

For example, Accenture and ICLR have put together a panel of industry innovators to speak about how companies in the P&C industry can make the business case for resilience. It’s a means to showcase lessons reinforced by the centre.

The July 22 discussion, moderated by Gibson, features Jolee Crosby, CEO of Reinsurance at Swiss Re Canada, Paul Gilbody, president of ClaimsPro, Lisa Guglietti, executive vice president and chief operating officer of P&C at Co-operators, and Dr. Keith Porter, chief engineer at ICLR.   

David Gambrill

David has twice served as Canadian Underwriter’s senior editor, both from 2005 to 2012, and again from 2017 to the present.