For a moment, 2025 almost looked like a reprieve. After years of escalating catastrophe losses, Canada’s insurers enjoyed what Zurich Canada CEO Paul Jackson (pictured) calls an “unusually benign” period for weather.
But if anyone is tempted to breathe easier, he has a blunt message: don’t.
“2025 was an unusually benign year, and the industry certainly benefited from that,” Jackson told Insurance Business. “But I would not take that as a signal for the future. 2024 was actually the most significant year for weather‑related cat events in the Canadian industry. I would personally prefer to use that as the signal for the go‑forward.”
That perspective reflects Zurich’s global view of climate risk – and the realities of insuring a country that stretches across three oceans and multiple climate zones, with exposure to wildfire, flood, severe convective storms and, hanging over everything, the prospect of a major British Columbia earthquake.
For Jackson, “resilience” is not a buzzword. It is the organising principle behind Zurich’s Canadian climate strategy.
“You hear the topic of resilience a lot from Zurich, particularly when it comes to technology and cyber, but also – and more importantly in the Canadian context – climate,” he says.
That work is happening on two fronts. First is product development: designing covers that give commercial customers more certainty about how their policies will respond to climate‑driven events.
“We’re putting investments in product development – how we can provide solutions that actually give our commercial customers more certainty,” Jackson said.
The second is structuring and pricing those products so they remain viable over the long term, even as events become more frequent and severe.
“It’s also about how we structure our products so that climate resilience is affordable over time,” he adds. “There’s a lot of work that we’re doing in that area, particularly in Western Canada, particularly related to wildfire and flood.”
Even if insurers get everything right on product design and risk selection, Jackson is clear there is a hard limit on what the sector can do by itself.
“We can’t get to the solutions, particularly around climate resilience, without a unified effort across government, regulators and the insurance industry, but also the industries that we insure,” he said. “Everybody needs to play a participating role.”
Zurich’s view, he argues, is that dollars are better spent before disasters strike than endlessly rebuilding afterwards.
“Our view on resilience is it’s better to invest the dollars in advance of an event than to continually put dollars into restoration,” he said.
The problem, of course, is that prevention and adaptation are a harder sell – whether to boards, taxpayers or policyholders.
“When you’re talking to a large corporate customer that has limited resources for investment in resilience, it’s always a challenge to say, ‘We think you should put millions of dollars over here for something that may or may not happen, but we think it will,’” Jackson explained. “It’s much easier to say, ‘Something’s happened, it needs to be repaired, so now we’re going to come in and repair it.’”
Changing that mindset – from reaction to long‑term resilience – may be one of the toughest tasks facing the industry.
“It’s a challenge about changing mindsets and changing the attitude towards long‑term resilience, which is not something that people naturally want to invest in,” he said.
Jackson sees an important part of his mandate as pushing that resilience conversation forward in public forums.
He notes that Zurich is “a key player” within the Insurance Bureau of Canada and has people on several committees.
“One of the things that makes Zurich special is that we have extensive expertise here across multiple dimensions – in resilience, but also technical expertise in risk management, claims and pricing,” he says. “There are people in the Zurich orbit who are able to have a much more proactive, participative role in some of the thought leadership around change.”
Jackson says he is encouraging his teams to be more visible through the IBC and in direct conversations with customers and brokers.
“I’m out a lot now in the market, talking with our customers and our brokers about what else we should be doing in this space,” he says. “I definitely see the opportunity to bring some of our global thinking into Canada in a much more meaningful way.”
For now, the temptation after a quieter catastrophe year is to hope that 2025 marks the beginning of a gentler era. Jackson doesn’t buy it – and wants the market to plan on the basis that 2024’s record losses are a more accurate preview of the climate decade ahead.
“In Canada, we have to assume that the kind of weather we saw in 2024 is the benchmark,” he suggests. “If we design our products, investments and partnerships around that reality, we’ll be in a much better place when the next big event hits.”
