On paper, 2025 has been “OK‑ish” for Canada’s property insurers after a record‑breaking 2024. Reinsurers haven’t been hammered by a Fort McMurray‑scale event, and the industry hasn’t seen a repeat of last year’s multi‑billion‑dollar flood and wildfire bill.
But for the companies that actually clean up the damage, that headline read can be misleading.
“There used to be trends in our business, and there used to be cycles of sorts,” said Jim Mandeville (pictured), senior vice president, large loss – North America, at First Onsite Property Restoration. “You'd have three or four really good years, and then you'd have one where it was really slow. That's all gone out the window in the last five or six years.”
Instead of predictable peaks and troughs, Mandeville said restorers are now dealing with clusters of extreme claim volume in a specific geography for two or three years in a row, followed by deceptively quiet stretches that don’t necessarily mean risk has gone away.
From a restoration perspective, 2025 has actually been tough.
“2025 has been a really challenging year for the restoration industry as a whole in Canada,” Mandeville said. “It’s been great for the underwriters, the best year in many, many years. But when the underwriters have great years, it's… difficult for the restoration industry.”
The headline cat numbers that matter for reinsurers – aggregate losses, return periods, impacts on capital – don’t map cleanly to the work volume on the ground. What matters to companies like First Onsite isn’t just the size of events, but the type.
“We can have multi‑billion-dollar hailstorms that result in billions of dollars in claim dollars, but a lot of that goes to auto,” Mandeville explained. “The rest is primarily roofing and exterior driven.”
By contrast, a big water event or a major wildfire can be transformational for restorers.
If there is a multi‑billion-dollar water event or a wildfire event, that is a tremendous amount of work for the restoration industry as a whole, he said.
The mismatch between what makes the news and what drives restoration demand is stark. Hail and tornadoes generate dramatic footage; widespread water damage often does not.
“Hail is definitely the best one” as an example of a news‑worthy event that doesn’t necessarily translate into restoration work, he said. Tornadoes are another.
“Tornadoes happen almost every week, somewhere in the spring and summer across Canada,” Mandeville noted. “The vast, vast majority of them hit nothing… It makes the news because there's a cell phone everywhere now, and everybody wants to see this on the news, but it doesn't actually do any damage.”
Meanwhile, a mid‑week downpour can quietly generate tens of thousands of claims.
“If we get 60 millimeters of rain in the Greater Toronto Area on a Wednesday, that could be tens of thousands of water loss claims,” he said. “But on the news, it's just, ‘It rained hard and there's traffic on the 401’,” he added.
For those outside the sector, “cat year” has become shorthand for industry pain. Mandeville argues the reality for restorers is more complicated. There is a correlation between large‑loss years and restoration volumes, he said, “but it's not a direct correlation. There's some nuance in it.”
If 2025 has been unusually calm for restorers in some regions, Mandeville doesn’t expect that to last, especially in Western Canada.
“British Columbia has been unseasonably calm, weather wise, for the last probably 16-18 months,” he said. “I have a hard time believing that trend continues. I think we could definitely be in for a pretty busy at least spring, if not winter.”
He also believes, more broadly, that “we're going to see a return to some more extreme weather.”
The increase in severe weather brings forward a need for a stronger footprint in vulnerable areas. That mindset is part of the backdrop to First Onsite’s latest deal, the acquisition of Kelowna‑based RBT Restoration By Trades, announced this fall. While the company has been active in the Okanagan for years, Mandeville said it lacked the kind of embedded presence it wants in key markets.
“Kelowna is an area of the country where we've been working actively for many, many years, but never really had that solid footprint and that level of community involvement that we wanted to have,” he said. “We’re picky about the partners that we take on, and we found a really good fit in RBT.”
He said that the local presence goes beyond marketing.
“When we open in a community, it's really important that the people we employ there are a part of that community, not just in a business sense, but socially,” Mandeville said. “Their kids play soccer with their customers, and they go to the same functions, and they donate to the same charities. It's really important for us to be a part of that fabric, and that's what this really allows us to do.”
He stressed that First Onsite runs as a single national brand – “one name, First Onsite, across the country” – and that consistency is “a large part of our value proposition,” especially for large accounts that want “the same product, coast to coast to coast.” The strategy, he said, is to blend that national standard with local delivery.
After a difficult year for restorers but a benign one for underwriters, that combination of nuance and scale may matter more than ever. If 2026 does bring the “return to extreme weather” Mandeville expects, companies that can read beyond the cat headlines – and build the right local footprints ahead of time – will be better placed to respond.
