mBolden

Canadian Insurance Industry Deep Dive
(2025–2026)

This page provides a current, evidence-based view of the structural forces reshaping Canadian insurance. It consolidates 2025–2026 data, supervisory guidance, and industry signals to support informed executive decision-making.

Climate Risk Has Become an Operating Reality

Insured losses from severe weather exceeded $2.4 billion in 2025, following $8.5 billion in catastrophic losses in 2024. These outcomes confirm that catastrophe volatility is no longer episodic.

Supervisory expectations now reflect this shift. Climate risk measurement has moved from qualitative assessment to structured reporting. Early climate risk returns identified material data gaps, reliance on proxies, and inconsistent methodologies. Broader filing requirements expand in 2026, increasing delivery complexity.

For insurers, climate risk is now a capital, pricing, underwriting, claims, and operating-model issue simultaneously.

Affordability and Claims Inflation Are Structural

Statistics Canada analysis shows that rising repair costs, vehicle complexity, medical inflation, coverage choices, and regional regulatory factors are driving sustained claims pressure, particularly in auto and health lines.

This elevates affordability from a pricing discussion to a system-level concern. Product design, claims operations, fraud management, and public policy are now tightly coupled.

Operational Resilience Has Hard Deadlines​

Operational resilience expectations are now explicit. Supervisory guidance requires staged adherence through September 2026, expanding requirements across business continuity, crisis management, data risk, change management, and third-party dependencies.

Resilience cannot be delivered as a parallel control layer. It must be embedded into how transformation and day-to-day operations are executed.

Life and Health Scale Increases Scrutiny

Life and health insurers paid $143.3 billion in benefits in 2024, covering 27 million Canadians. This scale drives heightened expectations around affordability, integrity, privacy, and fraud detection.

Industry-wide use of advanced analytics and data sharing reflects a shift toward system-level integrity management, which introduces new governance and explainability requirements.

The Execution Agenda for the Next 24 Months

High-performing insurers are prioritizing fewer initiatives, sequenced deliberately, with explicit decision rights and integrated risk management.

The focus is not acceleration at all costs. It is sustainable execution under sustained volatility.

Sources and References

Severe weather insured losses, 2025

Canadian catastrophe loss estimates

Climate risk returns, E-21 operational resilience guidance

Auto insurance cost drivers study (2025)

2024–2025 industry facts and claims data

2026 Executive Outlook series

2025 Insurance CEO Outlook