The Costly Future of Claims

Oops, the industry did it again.

In 2017, Canada’s property and casualty insurance industry paid out a total of $1.33 billion in insured losses following catastrophic events primarily related to climate change. It’s the fifth time over the past seven years that the industry has paid out more than $1 billion annually in catastrophe claims.

This year, the industry did it without benefit of a single whopper claims event such as the Fort McMurray wildfires (which cost the industry about $3.8 billion).

“There are so many factors to relate to it,” said Laura Twidle, director of catastrophic loss analysis at Catastrophe Indices and Quantification Inc. (CatIQ).

“People have more [flood] coverage, and more events are occurring over populated centres. This summer, the cat season, we had a lot of hail events and thunderstorms throughout the Prairie provinces. It’s not that hard to hit the $25-million [cat] threshold when golf-ball-sized hail goes over a town like Red Deer [Alta.].”

Read the full article in the Digital Edition of the February 2018 Canadian Underwriter.

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