Nearly a year after wildfire tore through Kingston in Conception Bay North, Atlantic Canada's costliest insured loss event of 2025 is offering an early test of how the region's insurers, and the broader industry's catastrophe response model, hold up as wildfire risk spreads beyond its traditional strongholds in British Columbia and Alberta.
The fire ignited on August 3, 2025, and burned approximately 10,708 hectares, forcing roughly 3,000 residents to evacuate across at least nine communities in the Conception Bay North region. Catastrophe Indices and Quantification Inc. (CatIQ) estimated insured losses at more than $70 million, according to figures compiled for the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC), making it the most damaging insured property loss event in Atlantic Canada for the year.
It came during a wildfire season that Public Safety Canada has described as the second-worst on record in Canada by area burned, with more than 6,000 fires reported nationwide, even as overall insured catastrophe losses across the country eased to $2.4 billion for 2025, down from $9.1 billion in 2024, according to CatIQ.
Atlantic Canada's wildfire exposure had, until recently, been considered comparatively low relative to British Columbia and Alberta, where most of the country's historical insured wildfire losses have occurred. The Kingston fire, alongside other 2025 blazes in provinces with no prior industry wildfire catastrophe on record, has prompted insurers and catastrophe modellers to reassess exposure assumptions in regions not traditionally viewed as high-risk.
One data point on how that recovery is progressing comes from Intact Financial Corporation, Canada's largest property and casualty insurer, which says 75% of the roughly 400 personal property claims it received from the fire have now been closed, with more than 60 customer homes reported as fully destroyed.
Intact activated its national claims network as evacuation orders were issued, drawing on adjusters, appraisers and project managers from across the country, and says it had teams on the ground in Kingston within 48 hours of evacuation orders lifting. Its wholly owned restoration arm, On Side Restoration, has been involved in rebuilding more than 60 homes.
Tracy Laughlin, senior vice president, Claims, Canada at Intact, said: "Kingston is a tight-knit community, and what happened there touched a lot of lives. Our teams have built real relationships with the people we've been supporting, and that matters to us."
That claims picture, however, is only part of the recovery. Local estimates cited by community members in the months after the fire put uninsured or underinsured households in the affected communities as high as 60% to 70%, with residents pointing to a lack of fire hydrants and correspondingly higher premiums as a longstanding barrier to coverage — a gap that persists regardless of how efficiently insured claims are processed.
Amanda Dean, IBC's vice-president for Ontario and Atlantic, has used the anniversary to renew calls for governments to invest in wildfire-resilient building codes, FireSmart programs and more coordinated emergency planning, arguing that a national approach would reduce the need for communities to build a response plan from scratch after every new disaster.
Intact's use of an in-house restoration arm reflects a broader pattern across Canadian P&C insurers, several of which, including Aviva and Definity, have acquired restoration firms, brokerages and other distribution and repair capabilities in recent years to bring more of the claims process in-house rather than relying solely on third-party contractors.
For an industry facing a growing frequency of catastrophic events in regions with limited local repair capacity, that vertical integration is increasingly framed as an operational necessity rather than a competitive extra, particularly in smaller, more remote communities like Kingston where contractor and materials shortages can otherwise slow recovery.
For Kingston itself, that shift may matter less than the coverage gap still facing many of its residents. As the next Atlantic wildfire season approaches, how insurers and governments close that gap — not just how quickly claims are closed — will likely shape whether the region's next fire produces a similar recovery story or a harder one.
