2026 Executive Outlook | Jamie Lyons, Westland Insurance

The greatest new challenge in 2026 will be catastrophe volatility in a softening market. 

Regarding NatCats, if 2024 was the wake-up call, 2025 felt like a breather. After record insured losses from severe weather in 2024, the past year is tracking materially lower. That respite has supported continued healthy industry results, even as commercial lines softened and personal lines showed easing price momentum.

But in 2026, the industry will face something it did not have to contend with in 2025: a likely return of elevated weather-driven losses colliding with a softening market.

Despite where we sit in the market cycle, the forward trend in loss costs is clear. For property especially, secondary perils such as hail, convective storms and floods remain highly unpredictable in Canada. We learned in 2024 how just a few weeks of events can drive the entire year’s outcome and create incredible hardship for communities across the country.

The risk hasn’t gone away; only the timing did. If 2026 brings even an average season by recent standards, the industry will feel the impact just as competition puts downward pressure on rates and terms. That creates a very different equation than what we observed in 2025.

For brokers, this is an opportune moment to deepen risk-based conversations with clients. Many will welcome rate relief, but they also expect and deserve skillful advice on where and why volatility persists, and how to better protect their businesses and communities (without materially increasing spend) in a world that is getting riskier.

As domestic and international re/insurance capacity becomes more eager, brokers can play a critical role alongside the broader industry in helping address coverage gaps — both those that widened during the hard market and those emerging in new areas of risk.

The economic backdrop should also provide more support. In 2025, Canada’s economy was essentially flat, with trade frictions weighing heavily on many industries and dampening consumer and business confidence. Looking forward, fiscal stimulus and the natural adaptation of Canadian businesses to the new realities of global trade should help strengthen growth. If sentiment improves, so should the willingness of insureds to invest in both coverage and mitigation — a healthier foundation than the uncertainty we experienced last year.