For years, Canadian insurers could build their year around a rough rhythm of catastrophe losses. Summer meant hail and thunderstorms; late summer and early fall brought hurricanes. The idea of a defined “CAT season” gave at least some structure to staffing, planning, and capital decisions.
That calendar is gone.
Colin Asselstine (pictured right), Deloitte Canada’s insurance claims leader, says volatility is now the baseline – and climate is only the starting point.
“We’re seeing volatility driven by CAT events,” he told Insurance Business.
“We’re seeing a constant string across the country, events that run into each other. So you’re constantly trying to get ahead of that and react to CAT events that are happening throughout the year.”
That shift is reshaping everything from claims operations to how insurers think about vendor capacity.
Asselstine stresses that climate is still the biggest financial driver, but it’s not acting alone.
“You start to compound other things on top of that,” he says. “COVID, then supply chain demands, and now we’re seeing a lot of geopolitical tension, tariffs, etc. Volatility is continuously compounding, and insurers have to get used to making sure that they can react and plan.”
Chris Duvinage (pictured left), Deloitte Canada’s national property & casualty insurance segment leader, notes that even what the industry now calls a “quiet” year is anything but.
“As far as climate is concerned, two years ago we had almost $9 billion in losses,” he says. “Last year, we arguably had a quiet year, but it was just a normal year. If you look at historic averages, it wasn’t really much lower.”
From a client perspective, that persistent volume has obvious consequences.
“It creates capacity issues,” Duvinage says. “It’s really, really tough to do for operations that have been sort of legacy for most of their lives.
The most tangible sign of that new reality is the disappearance of any predictable catastrophe window.
“We used to have this notion of a CAT season,” Asselstine says. “We used to have summer months – you’d start with hail, you’d end with hurricanes. Now that kind of notion is gone.”
In recent years, insurers have seen windstorms in December in British Columbia, “atmospheric rivers” that dump vast amounts of rain, and other events that defy old seasonal patterns. That makes it much harder to simply “staff up for summer” and then scale back.
“Now, a CAT can happen in December,” he says. “When you’re planning, it’s not like ‘I’m going to staff up for CAT season’, because now volatility is normal – it can happen at any time of the year. That changes how you have to get ready for these surge events, and how you plan and prepare.”
The good news, both leaders argue, is that the industry has not stood still. Asked whether insurers are better prepared for another brutal CAT year, Asselstine says the last five years have brought a “big step improvement”.
“There’s been significant investment by individual insurance companies and by the industry as a whole to beef up their CAT playbooks,” he says. “A CAT can happen at any time, so there’s been a lot more investment in not being as reactive as in the past – being a bit more planful, making sure you’re lining up staffing, how you’re going to resource‑augment, how you’re going to share resources across different geographies with scale.”
Larger carriers, he notes, have become much better at shifting staff from one region of the country to another, and vendors have also improved their ability to move resources quickly. Technology is now starting to accelerate that shift.
“One example we’re seeing is insurers holding off some of their assignments as they come in, to make sure they can plan and send them to a vendor and line them up all on one street so a vendor can go house to house, versus running across the city as assignments come in,” Asselstine says. “That makes things a lot more effective from both the insurer’s perspective and the frontline vendor perspective.”
