Canada's insurers launch apocalyptic ad blitz as premiums soar

National Observer

a day ago

A felled tree rests on a house in New Glasgow, N.S. on Sept. 28, 2022, following significant damage brought by post tropical storm Fiona. Photo by: Darren Calabrese / The Canadian Press
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A terrified family huddles in their car. Lightning cracks. Hail batters the windshield.
'This is severe weather,' warns an ad from the Insurance Bureau of Canada. 'It's getting worse in Canada – and we're all paying the price.'
That price is only climbing. In the summer of 2024, natural disasters, including the catastrophic wildfires in Jasper, AB, extreme hailstorms in Calgary and historic floods across Quebec resulted in a record $7.1 billion in insurance claims.
'It was the most devastating quarter in our country's history for insured losses,' said Jason Clark, chair of Climate Proof Canada and director of climate change advocacy at the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC).
The consequences of these disasters impacted homeowners.
Aman Nakra from Aurora, Ont., got an unwelcome surprise when he checked his credit card statement last month: his property premium had increased by 57 per cent from $1,400 to $2,200 per year.
'I thought it was an error... I don't live in one of the high risk areas,' said Nakra, speaking with Canada's National Observer. His insurance company informed him that they had 'tweaked their equation' because of hailstorms and floods across Canada.
As insurance providers roll out new advertising that emphasizes the rising threat of increasingly common natural disasters without mentioning climate change, Canadians are noticing that their premiums are also increasing at alarming rates.
Nakra's experience reflects a growing trend. Property insurance premiums have leapt 78 per cent for new homeowners since January 2015, according to Statistics Canada. This means that Canadians now pay double the average for G7 countries for premiums, relative to GDP.
Remarkably, despite enormous climate change-fuelled damages, these high premiums drove a combined profit of $4.13 billion for Canadian property and casualty insurers in 2024.
But as climate risks multiply and premiums skyrocket, the current situation is becoming unsustainable. Some insurance firms have started quietly retreating from the riskiest regions, leaving homeowners exposed. All eyes are now on Mark Carney's Liberal government as it races to create Canada's first national flood insurance program.
'They are going to lose their minds'
Since May 2025, the IBC has spent over $150,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads raising the alarm about the risks of the climate crisis — without mentioning it by name.
Most of the marketing budget has gone to Ontario, Quebec and Alberta. The town of Jasper, which lost about a third of its buildings to wildfires last summer, was excluded from the ads, according to Canada's National Observer' s analysis of Meta's Ad Library.
Clicking on the ads redirects you to a webpage called Protecting Your Tomorrow, which provides practical steps for homeowners to 'protect yourself and your property' and advocates for federal adaptation investment.
While the campaign appears educational in tone, it may have ulterior motives, said Jason Thistlethwaite, one of Canada's leading researchers into climate risk and insurance at the University of Waterloo. 'This is an effort to deflect responsibility from the sector towards government and individuals.'
Thistlethwaite expects 'at minimum, double-digit increases' in home insurance premiums across the country. When people see their latest renewals, ''they are going to lose their minds,' he said. He predicts that insurers will face a public backlash if they continue to increase premiums without providing mitigation credits for homeowners who spend money reducing their risk of damage.
Nakra has already started mobilising his friends, who are 'picking up the phones and calling their brokers' to find out how much their premiums will increase.
What concerns him most is that insurers are offsetting predictable losses in some parts of the country by implementing a blanket increase. 'It's not fair to Canadians,' he said.
IBC, in response to questions from Canada's National Observer, said in a written statement that 'insurance rates follow risk and across the country, we are seeing an increase in… severe weather events.'
IBC could not provide estimates for premiums increases in 2025 but explained that its Protecting Your Tomorrow campaign aims to reassure Canadians that 'when disaster strikes, insurers step up and step in to ensure their policyholders are looked after.'
Intact Insurance, Canada's largest property and casualty insurance firm, told Canada's National Observer that transfer of the financial costs of climate risks to consumers is part of an evolving dialogue on the subject.
'Our policies and prices create important conversations about what risks exist and the actions required to prevent and reduce their impact,' the company replied via email, directing us to Keep It Intact, its latest campaign, which instructs homeowners to 'keep your home well maintained year-round.'
'It's like death by a thousand cuts'
The best way to reassure Canadian that the onus of fast-rising insurance premiums is not being placed solely on consumers, is to release detailed information on how their risk scores are calculated, said Thistlethwaite.
Currently, high resolution risk maps are proprietary, accessible only to private companies and federal and provincial governments. Another concern is that publishing them would cause property values to plummet. As a result, only 6 per cent of Canadians living in a designated flood zone know about it, which Thistlethwaite described as 'unconscionable.'
This transparency chasm will be partly bridged by the Flood Hazard Identification and Mapping Program, an upcoming $164 million federal initiative to make high quality maps, which will feed into an online portal. Risk calculators co-developed with the insurance industry will also be published.
For now, the sparse data that does exist paints a stark picture. Last year, researchers collaborated with Public Safety Canada to analyze proprietary risk data and discovered that Canada's riskiest 100,000 homes account for 40 per cent of flood losses nationwide.
This extreme concentration of risk is both an opportunity and an obstacle, according to Thistlethwaite. Reducing risk becomes more tractable, but it creates a 'protection gap' by prompting insurers to withdraw from the riskiest areas.
In California, the insurer State Farm made a dramatic exit from wildfire prone regions in 2023 and 2024, leaving tens of thousands without private coverage. Globally, there is growing apprehension about an 'uninsurability crisis.'
In Canada, the same phenomenon is more insidious. Canada's insurance industry is less regulated, allowing insurers to reduce coverage by introducing exclusions, raising deductibles and lowering coverage caps. 'It's like death by a thousand cuts,' said Thistlethwaite.
Without insurance, homeowners cannot get mortgages, risk losing their homes and are left unprotected from natural disasters. The crowdfunding platform GoFundMe estimates that Canadians launched 10,000 natural disaster relief campaigns between 2019 and 2023, raising $24 million.
Climate 'haves and have nots'
Thistlethwaite is concerned that without a federal insurance plan for the highest risk areas, insurance will soon be a luxury item for the rich. 'People will hire private firefighters and flood risk managers,' he said.
In the US, climate gentrification is already in full-swing.
According to Jatin Sharma, Managing Partner at insurance broker NARDAC, who lives in Newport Beach, Calif., insurers have started providing luxury protection for high-net worth clients.
He told Canada's National Observer that in Northern California during wildfire season, wealthy homeowners paid for an express service where 'carriers came and dumped chemicals to avoid the fire coming anywhere near their properties.'
'They were high net worths — they own homes in the 10s, 15s, 20 millions — not the sort of people that go out and necessarily need to get a mortgage from the bank.'
Nearby homeowners could not afford this and had to watch their homes go up in flames. 'We're getting into this kind of haves and have nots situation,' said Sharma.
Despite this mounting crisis, the bar remains relatively low for Carney's government on climate adaptation action.
In 2023, Canada became one of the last countries in the OECD to launch a national adaptation strategy. The release was widely publicized and took place during wildfire season.
A recent audit of that strategy found that its core plan was "neither systematic nor comprehensive," lacks a ranked list of the country's gravest climate threats and offers only one progress report before 2030.
Canada's National Observer has found evidence that the Trudeau government ignored identical warnings about these problems from the Canadian Climate Institute, its independent thinktank that was established to advise on climate policy. The wording of the audit is almost identical to the institute's 2022 report, released during the consultation phase.
Prime Minister Carney, who was sworn in this spring, inherits this emerging crisis.
He has a history with the insurance industry. In 2015, when he was Governor of the Bank of England, Carney gave a speech called 'Breaking the tragedy of the horizon', about the short-sightedness of political and financial cycles towards future climate damages.
While Canadian insurers are calling for a massive public insurance scheme, Carney has in the past praised lighter weight private-public solutions such as the UK's Flood Re.
Budget 2025 will reveal how much funding will be allocated to Canada's long-awaited National Flood Insurance Plan, which is expected to provide financial protection for the highest risk households and establish a federal re-insurance backstop.
Only $15 million was awarded for the plan's launch in Budget 2024. IBC is calling for much more in the next budget, alongside a $2 billion surge for the Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund and a reversal of the current 10:1 spending ratio favouring climate mitigation over adaptation.
However, not everyone agrees about who should pay. The shareholder advocacy group Investors for Paris Compliance recently submitted a complaint to the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario about insurance companies passing the burden of climate risk onto taxpayers.
Profiting from the 'damages loop'
Kiera Taylor, a senior analyst at the group, told Canada's National Observer that insurers are profiting from a 'damages loop' by underwriting and investing in the fossil fuel projects that necessitate a public insurance bailout. In 2024, the group released a report which revealed that Canadian insurers have $19.5 billion invested in fossil fuel projects and that Toronto-based Fairfax is the fifth largest underwriter of fossil fuel projects globally.
The question of the irreconcilability of the insurance industry's calls for federal climate adaptation funding to prevent its losses with continued fossil fuel investments is a big one. The IBC said only that 'individual insurers are afforded the opportunity to make their own strategic investing and underwriting decisions.'
Recently, some in the higher echelons of the global insurance industry have started to break rank. In March, Günther Thallinger, a board member of the multinational insurance company Allianz wrote that the uninsurability crisis can only be solved by 'keeping emissions out of the atmosphere.'
Perversely, after a year of record-breaking climate catastrophes, record-breaking payouts and record-breaking premiums, the riskiest activity for Canada's insurers may not be investing in fossil fuel projects, but using the words 'climate change' in public.
'This is not about saving the planet,' Thallinger said, it's about 'saving the conditions under which markets, finance and civilization itself can continue to operate.'
July 29th 2025
Rory White
Technology & Democracy Reporter
Darius Snieckus
Business Correspondent
@dariussnieckus.bsky.social
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