As consolidation among brokers and insurers continues – and key players signal there’s more to come – one Canadian carrier executive says the story looks distinctly different in Ontario and Quebec.
Navacord’s acquisition of Acera and other recent deals have underscored how fast Canada’s brokerage landscape is changing. For Unica Insurance and L'Unique COO Guy Lecours (pictured), the result is a “barbell” market that is unfolding at a somewhat different pace on each side of the Ottawa River, and forcing carriers to rethink how they work with distributors.
“Brokers are evolving, that’s for sure… the landscape is evolving,” Lecours said. “There’s fewer brokerages today than there were a few years ago.”
In Ontario, that evolution has been most visible at the top end. Large national broker groups have rapidly increased their presence and market share over the past few years, driven by steady acquisition activity.
“Their market share is a lot larger than it was even probably five years ago,” he said.
At the same time, there is still a long tail of smaller firms.
“There are… even new brokers,” Lecours noted, pointing to “family‑oriented, community‑oriented” shops and very niche players. What’s disappearing, he argues, is the mid‑sized regional broker.
“To me, it looks like the market is… polarizing a little bit,” he said. “We get very large brokers. But at the other end of the spectrum, we still have small… or very niche [brokers]. It looks like it’s the middle that tends to disappear or [is] being bought by larger firms.”
For carriers, that barbell structure isn’t just a curiosity; it also changes distribution strategy.
Quebec is not immune to consolidation, but it has evolved differently. The total number of brokerages is also shrinking and acquisitions are common, Lecours said, yet national giants have historically been less dominant there than in English Canada.
“That’s less true in Quebec,” he said of nationals’ market share, noting that “a lot of these big national firms are probably more Anglophones” and the Quebec market “might be harder to get into.”
Language and culture have long given local and regional firms more room. That buffer is starting to erode.
“We see some national brokers [who] have made acquisitions in Quebec, or they’re looking for acquisitions in Quebec as a way to enter the market,” he said. At the same time, Quebec brokers are expanding into Ontario, and Ontario brokers are pushing into Quebec.
“For us, that offers interesting opportunities as well,” Lecours added, but it also means insurers that operate in both provinces must navigate different maturity levels in the consolidation cycle and different broker profiles.
L'Unique itself “grew up” with smaller Quebec brokers, which still shapes how it thinks about distribution.
For many years, Lecours said, L'Unique largely treated its broker partners the same.
“A few years ago, especially with L'Unique, it was a one‑size‑fits‑all approach,” he said. “We would do… business with the vast, vast majority of brokers, and [we] would treat them in a very similar fashion.”
In a polarized market, that no longer makes sense.
“Now we’re adapting our approaches and our offers,” he said. The goal is to recognise very different broker business models and operating styles – from national consolidators with multiple executive layers and provinces, to three‑generation family firms in small communities.
When asked which end of the barbell is more challenging – national giants or small boutiques – Lecours resisted framing it as a choice.
“There’s no right or wrong model, obviously,” he said. “I believe… there’s room for everybody in the marketplace. The large ones, the small ones, the specialized ones… there’s a place for everybody.”
Unica’s history means it is “probably more used to” working with smaller brokers, he acknowledged, but the real friction with nationals is practical rather than philosophical.
“One of the difficulties of working with large national brokers is to find the proper way to make our connections in these brokerages,” he said. “There’s many people, there’s multiple executives, there’s multiple lines of business, people responsible for different provinces and all that. So sometimes it’s harder… to get the connections established.”
Once the relationships are built, he said, the partnerships “work very well.” But getting there often requires more resources and capabilities, particularly around technology.
Large brokers “may have different expectations… in terms of technology or different things,” he added. Unica’s “large parent company… gives it the means that it needs to be able to work with these brokers as well.”
Lecours believes the winners – among both carriers and the largest brokers – will be the ones that blend that national strength with true regional presence.
“I think the model that works well for an insurer, and probably for a large broker as well, is to be able to combine a national presence and the national strength with regional [teams] – it’s think globally and act locally,” he said. Unica keeps “people on the ground that really know their market,” supported by a national team that can “build things to scale” and tackle what is common across provinces. He sees big brokers moving in the same direction: “a large national brand,” but local operations “well and alive.”
