Canadian Insurers Publicly Pressure Carney to Prioritize Climate Resilience as Wildfire Season Begins

The industry has been raising climate resilience with Ottawa for years — McGuinty's team at the IBC formally presented a three-point policy ask to Parliament last year, and Climate Proof Canada (which McGuinty also chairs) has been publishing on the housing-exposure problem since 2024. What's new is that the asks are now being delivered on the front page of a Reuters wire piece with CEO quotes attached.

Saunders' framing of the situation at Definity is the clearest signal. Here's a sitting CEO of the country's fourth-largest P&C carrier characterizing federal climate posture as "deprioritized" — and telling a global news agency the industry is going to keep the issue on the table whether Ottawa wants it there or not. Leibl's quote at Wawanesa is the structural version of the same point. The insurance industry is reporting that the frequency and severity curve has already bent — and that the pace of federal investment hasn't bent with it.

The intended audience for all of this is the Prime Minister's Office, not homeowners. But the signal homeowners should read from it is that the carriers already pricing Canadian risk think the country is underinvested in preventing the next set of losses — and underinvested carriers raise prices, raise deductibles, or pull back.

The IBC's policy proposal, laid out in submissions to Parliament and restated in yesterday's Reuters piece, compresses to three interventions:

The third ask is the one that has the most direct downstream effect on existing policyholders. Insurance premiums don't price a single house in isolation. They price the pool. When a carrier underwrites 500,000 new homes in high flood-exposure areas, the losses from that pool land across the entire book — which means existing homeowners in lower-risk neighbourhoods are partially subsidizing the decision to keep building in floodplains.

That's the mechanism McGuinty keeps pointing at. It isn't a moral argument. It's an actuarial one.

The carriers picked April 14 for a reason. Wildfire season in Canada is effectively opening, and the backdrop of numbers makes the urgency legible even before any 2026 fire has been named.

Start with losses. Insured catastrophe damages in 2024 hit a record C$9.4 billion, per the data cited in the Reuters piece — driven by the Jasper wildfire (which destroyed nearly a third of the town's structures), the Calgary hailstorm, and flooding in Toronto. The IBC's own summer-2024 summary documents a single five-week window that produced four catastrophic events, more than C$7 billion in losses, and roughly 228,000 claims — 406% above the 20-year average. Previous annual records sat around C$6 billion. Those have now been "shattered," in the IBC's own word.

Then the trajectory. Home-insurance premiums rose about 6% in 2025 alone, and a Global News analysis citing IBC and My Choice Financial reports weather-related claim payouts reached C$8.5 billion in 2024 — triple the 2023 number and roughly twelve times the 2001-2010 annual average.

The federal statistical lens tells the same story from a different angle. Statistics Canada's October 2025 CPI release puts homeowners' home and mortgage insurance 38.9% higher than five years earlier.

That's the curve Leibl was pointing at when he said public investment hasn't kept pace with the new reality — and it's the curve Homeowner.ca has been tracking across pieces like Canada's Decade of Climate Catastrophe. The insurance industry's frustration is that the curve is now visible in every corner of the data — government CPI, IBC catastrophe models, carrier claim books, StatCan inflation prints — and federal prioritization still lags behind it.

Add the forest. Roughly 32 million hectares of Canadian land have burned in the last three years. And this is what the insurers are telling Ottawa to catch up to while opening wildfire season on the calendar.

The single number the Carney government has staked its housing plan on is 3.9 million new homes. It's a figure rooted in affordability, demographic demand, and political necessity. The IBC's reading of that number — and the part Ottawa hasn't answered — is where those homes end up sitting.

McGuinty's estimate, as reported in Reuters: about 500,000 of the 3.9 million would fall in high-risk flood areas, and more than 200,000 in high-risk wildfire areas. The Canadian Climate Institute's 2025 Close to Home analysis lands on similar orders of magnitude — 540,000 new homes in high flood-hazard zones and 220,000 in high wildfire-hazard zones by 2030, with a projected system cost of up to C$3 billion per year in additional rebuilding and disaster-relief spending. The Institute's counterfactual is the policy kicker: redirecting just 3% of new homes away from the highest-risk flood zones would avoid nearly 80% of projected losses.

That's an unusually asymmetric risk-reward ratio — which is why it keeps showing up in every industry and think-tank submission to the federal government. The policy intervention required is small. The cost of not making it is very large.

For existing homeowners, the siting question is where the argument gets practical. The housing plan will be built somewhere. The question is whether that "somewhere" gets chosen with flood maps and wildfire models in hand, or whether it gets chosen on the shortest path to shovel-ready permits. The first choice stabilizes the premium pool over time. The second is what the insurance industry is now publicly warning against.

The dispute is federal. The consequences are local.

The most immediate thing most homeowners will encounter is the discount layer insurers have been quietly building into the Canadian market. Per the Reuters piece, carriers are "rewarding consumers for weatherproofing their homes" — offering premium discounts for completing formal risk assessments or for installing fire-resistant roofing and siding. Natural Resources Canada's own resiliency guidance — part of the Canada Greener Homes Initiative — tells homeowners directly to contact their insurer about potential savings when they complete hardening measures like non-combustible cladding, metal mesh on vents, or backwater valve installation.

Three things follow:

1. The discounts are real but unevenly advertised. Most of them live in program details rather than front-of-brochure marketing. Homeowners typically have to ask. Ahead of renewal is when that conversation carries the most leverage.
2. Documentation is the gating factor. Carriers discount what they can verify. That means before-and-after photos, contractor invoices, inspection reports, product specs. Receipts you've thrown away are discounts you probably can't claim.
3. Home hardening now pays twice. Once through the discount at renewal, once through reduced claim exposure when the next catastrophe hits. The carriers have also folded resilience upgrades into claim settlements — meaning when a home does have to be rebuilt, the rebuild can sometimes be specified up, not back.

Homeowner.ca has covered the structural pieces of this in detail, including why rates are rising and the ten levers most homeowners can actually pull. The point for this moment: the next renewal conversation in most Canadian households is going to look different from the last one, and the homeowners who come in with documentation and a hardening story will have more room to negotiate than the homeowners who don't.

Parallel to the political pressure, the technical end of the industry has been building the reference framework that federal code updates would eventually hook into. Last week, the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction and the Canadian Home Builders' Association released the first version of tiered resilience guidelines for Canadian residential construction — a "Good, Better, Best" framework covering basement flooding, hail, high wind, and wildfire. Each tier includes checklists, technical sheets, cost-and-difficulty indicators, and notes on potential insurance incentives.

What that framework does is turn resilience from a spectrum of optional retrofits into a structured, auditable specification. "Better" and "Best" become things a builder can quote, a building inspector can verify, and an insurer can discount against. It's the connective tissue between the industry's Ottawa-facing ask (update the codes) and the homeowner-facing reality (document what you've done). Homeowners building new, renovating, or budgeting for major envelope work this year have a clearer target to aim at than they did a month ago.

Yesterday's Reuters piece isn't a prediction. It's a status report from the balance-sheet side of Canadian housing. Four major insurers have coordinated publicly because the private channel isn't producing the policy response the underlying numbers require. Premiums are up. Catastrophe losses are at record levels. The housing plan, as currently mapped, would put more than 700,000 new homes in areas statistically exposed to floods and wildfires. And wildfire season is opening.

For Ottawa, the policy choices are structural — codes, siting, natural infrastructure, federal investment.

For existing homeowners, the choices are smaller and more immediate: know your flood and wildfire exposure, keep the receipts on any hardening work, and ask about discounts before the renewal notice arrives rather than after.