Insurance Bureau of Canada's newly released InsurEconomy 2026 report puts the P&C insurance industry's 2025 contribution to Canada's GDP at nearly $32 billion, with a total economic impact, including indirect and induced effects, exceeding $53 billion.
The industry supported an estimated 361,000 jobs and contributed more than $17 billion in federal and provincial taxes and levies. Insurers held more than $35 billion in federal, provincial, municipal, public authority and school bonds.
"Fortunately, the P&C insurance industry continues to be a stabilizing factor for the Canadian economy, helping Canadians recover from disaster, and protecting households and businesses from economic shocks," said Liam McGuinty, IBC's vice-president of federal affairs.
The report also found women accounted for 67% of employees at P&C brokerages and 61% at insurance companies in 2025, against 47% across all industries nationally.
Meanwhile, government bond holdings fell from almost $39 billion in the 2022 data to more than $35 billion in this year's report, a smaller but still notable decline given how prominently IBC frames this figure as evidence of the industry's role supporting public infrastructure financing.
IBC's report repeats three now-familiar policy priorities: a national solution on earthquake risk, stronger resilience measures against severe weather, and "more efficient, coordinated and growth-oriented" P&C regulation.
That last point is the same core argument IBC and the C.D. Howe Institute have made repeatedly through 2026, citing an 81% rise in P&C regulatory compliance costs to $753 million in two years and a finding that Canadian insurers spend roughly 17% of operating costs on compliance against 6.5% for European insurers, a campaign Insurance Business has now tracked across multiple releases citing the same underlying figures.
The earthquake risk ask also connects to work Insurance Business covered earlier this year on the federal housing advocate's call for a First Nations insurance captive and CMHC's own documented barriers to earthquake and disaster insurance access, underscoring that IBC's "national solution" language spans both general catastrophe resilience and specific underinsured populations.
For brokers, this report is best read as an advocacy document supporting IBC's ongoing regulatory and resilience campaigns rather than a neutral economic snapshot.
The employment and gender-diversity figures appear genuinely strong and consistent with the industry's broader trajectory, but the GDP contribution figure's unexplained decline is worth understanding before citing it in client-facing or public communications, since it doesn't align with the report's own framing of an industry demonstrating uninterrupted economic strength.
