Canadian risk leaders are bracing for a fraught year in which trade politics, stubborn inflation and shifting supply chains matter more than any single shock. For Zurich Canada chief risk officer Manuel Lewin (pictured right) and Marsh Advisory’s Daniel Kotwinski (pictured left), the 2026 horizon is defined, above all, by a make‑or‑break renegotiation of the Canada‑US‑Mexico Agreement (USMCA) – and by how businesses respond to that uncertainty in their risk decisions.
Lewin expects “that economic uncertainty is going to remain,” and points squarely at the coming USMCA renewal. As he put it, “the USMCA is going to be the make-or-break.”
For now, he argued, Canada has actually emerged from recent global changes in a relatively better position than some peers. Yes, average tax rates have risen, but in his view they have increased by less than in many European and Asian countries, leaving Canada “in a slightly stronger position relative to other exporters than before, in an unexpected kind of way.”
That advantage is fragile. Where the USMCA negotiations land could reshape Canada’s competitiveness again, especially if new tariffs mirror harsher regimes seen elsewhere.
Lewin suggested that “until at least the middle of the year… and potentially beyond that,” the fate of USMCA will be “a top priority” for Canadian leaders.
Kotwinski shares that concern from the client side. “I think a lot of our clients are going to continue to look with significant trepidation at that review, particularly in some of the areas most significantly impacted by it.”
Kotwinski also sees a powerful domestic policy lever pulling in the opposite direction: Canada’s Bill C‑5. While USMCA hangs over cross‑border trade, he believes the new legislation could help rebuild resilience at home.
“Canada's Bill C-5 is creating new opportunity,” he said. He described “the shift that the Carney government is expecting” as an effort “to strengthen the domestic supply chains and to create better national resilience.”
Looking at this year, he expects sentiment to bifurcate: anxiety about North American trade on one side, and cautious optimism about domestic growth on the other.
“I do hope and expect that there will be at least some growth of that excitement around how the Canadian economy can thrive in the new environment that Bill C-5 is looking to create for this year,” Kotwinski said.
“We expect that it's going to create new growth within Canada. And from that perspective, those two items [trade pressures and domestic growth] may not counterbalance each other, but they will, I think, create a little bit more optimism.”
Against that backdrop, he does not expect a wholesale reshuffle of the risk rankings in the near term. He believes concerns about downturn, inflation, misinformation, decline in health and well‑being, and lack of economic opportunity “will continue being key risks… over 2026, barring any significant changes or significant natural catastrophe events.”
If USMCA and Bill C‑5 set the macro stage, Kotwinski’s biggest worry for 2026 lies in how clients respond to that environment.
“As we look at the economic downturn and the inflation, we have two competing factors,” he said. Asset values, input costs and labour costs have all risen over the last few years. Now leaders are staring down the possibility of recession and asking: what happens to our revenues, and how should we reposition strategy and investment?
“With respect to the risk gap, I think one of the biggest concerns that I have is that our clients might forget to anticipate some of the expected unknowns that are coming their way,” Kotwinski said. He pointed to basics such as whether firms have properly looked at how their valuation has evolved, how their supply chains have evolved, and whether they understand what their business interruption values should look like in a downturn scenario.
The danger, he suggested, is a swing into a “cash is king mentality,” where organizations focus narrowly on protecting the bottom line at the expense of risk management. While understandable, that shift perhaps leaves the risk gap unmanaged. The result, he warned, is “larger losses and the potential of bigger impacts to an individual client or to an industry if a loss were to occur.”
Layered onto the macro picture is a fast‑evolving threat set around crime, AI and misinformation. Kotwinski links the survey’s high ranking for misinformation and disinformation directly to advances in artificial intelligence and the financial strain on employees.
He noted that AI has already “been used in order to trick or solicit individuals in order to give away funds or to misappropriate funds, based on what they thought was a senior leader's guidance.” As health and well‑being decline and workers feel more stressed and worried about their own finances, “they become more susceptible to different types of attacks, whether that be a phishing attack, or just simply being tricked by misinformation or disinformation campaign.”
In practice, that can expose employers to fiduciary risk and even physical property losses “because they're stressed and not concerned with how they're operating.”
For Lewin, the risk looking out to this year is not just what’s on the list, but what’s fallen off. He called it “human nature” to focus on the biggest challenge immediately ahead, but worries that climate and environmental risks dropping down the priority order could “create a bigger resilience gap” over the coming years as attention narrows on what happens “south of the border in the next three months.”
He is equally struck by the absence of demographic pressures and labour shortages from the rankings, even though demographic risk is apparent. “This is going to come,” and insurers “already struggle with that when it comes to managing talent.”
