Canada’s insurers stay well positioned to soak up wildfire losses, a rating agency says
Canada’s insured catastrophe losses reached $8.5bn in 2024, the most expensive year on record, Insurance Business reported, while the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, which forced more than 80,000 people to evacuate and destroyed over 2,400 properties, is now valued at more than $4.8bn in insured damage in 2025 dollars.
Those losses pushed home insurance rates up 5.28 percent nationally in 2025 and by as much as 9.07 percent in Alberta.
Across the wider commercial market, pricing keeps easing.
Global commercial insurance rates fell an average of 6 percent in the second quarter of 2026, an eighth straight quarterly decline and a steeper drop than the 5 percent recorded in the first quarter, Insurance Business reported, drawing on Marsh’s Global Insurance Market Index.
Canadian composite rates fell 7 percent and Canadian property rates 8 percent, per the index, while casualty pricing rose globally, driven by the United States, the only region to buck the trend, where it climbed 7 percent.
