Editorial | How soon they forget

How soon they forget.

Remember last year, when climate adaptation and resilience was still a thing?

All it took is one lucky, relatively benign year of natural catastrophe losses in 2025, and Canada’s property and casualty insurance industry has turned its attention away from climate issues.

Earlier this year, Insurance Bureau of Canada, which represents 90% of Canadian home, auto and business insurers, listed its Top 3 priorities for 2026. They were, in order: auto reforms in Ontario and Alberta, lobbying for a federal earthquake backstop, and reducing regulatory red tape.

All worthy issues, to be sure. No one is denying their importance. But it’s interesting to see the NatCat/climate change focus narrowly defined as an earthquake backstop. Again, an existential threat to the P&C insurance industry to be sure.

But somehow severe weather damage caused by floods and wildfires seems to have slid onto the backburner for the nation’s P&C insurers.      

Likewise for brokers, as Canadian Underwriter’s 2026 National Broker Survey suggests.

Let’s hop into the Wayback Machine for a moment. Remember 2024? Canada suffered the worst year for natural catastrophe claims in the nation’s history. That year, insurance companies paid out more than 274,000 Cat claims, totalling about $9.1 billion. That was roughly 47% higher than the previous worst-ever Cat year in Canada, in 2016, when a wildfire swept through Fort McMurray in Alberta, contributing to roughly half of the $6.2 billion in claims payouts that year.

Cat losses in 2024 captured brokers’ attention.

After that year, NatCats and climate change ranked third as a challenge to the broker channel, topped only by the economy and the talent crunch. Anecdotally, broker executives across the country were talking about how to protect their clients from the ravages of climate change.

Previous to that, it’s safe to say, NatCats and climate resilience were not top of mind.

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In fact, brokers rated natural catastrophes and climate change eighth on their list of top challenges to the broker channel in 2023. Only 38% of 161 brokers surveyed in that year’s National Broker Survey named NatCats and climate change as a top challenge to the broker channel.

That number moved up to 47% in the 2024 National Broker Survey, motivated in part, perhaps, by the spike in reinsurance rates following a year in which Canada saw $3.6 billion in losses caused by NatCats. Even then, NatCats ranked only sixth place on a list of broker channel challenges, topped by concerns about the hard market, economic issues, M&A, and the growth of the direct distribution channel.

And now? After the P&C industry had a relatively benign Cat year, with “only” $2.4 billion in claims in 2025?

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Crickets. Back to seventh place for NatCats and climate change.

Most of the worst NatCat seasons in Canada on record have happened in the past decade. And a recent survey by Gore Mutual shows customers want to hear more from their insurance providers about how to protect themselves against damage caused by severe weather. Anything to tamp down their escalating insurance rates.

And so, it seems the P&C industry is missing a golden opportunity to connect with Canadians on an existential issue facing all of us.

Climate change is not going away. Neither should the industry’s efforts to encourage climate resilience.     

David Gambrill

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