Canadian Underwriter

Category: Claims

Adjusters preparing for flood Cat after Ontario’s spring thaw
With more rain — and snow — forecast for Ontario this weekend, adjusters are closely monitoring the potential for catastrophic flooding in the province.

“Right now, it’s more of a monitor-and-prepare situation, not a full Cat event just yet. That could change though,” Christine Segaric, director of Cat response at ClaimsPro, tells Canadian Underwriter Friday.

“At this point, we’re watching the northern and northeastern Ontario communities, places like Sudbury and Timmins. We are also paying attention to some of the more remote and lower lying communities like Kapuskasing.

“It still feels a bit early though. We’re not seeing a big spike in claims yet. But based on what’s happening on the ground, I wouldn’t be surprised to see things ramp up quickly over the next week or two as temperatures keep rising and the snowpack starts to melt.”

Parts of northern Ontario received more than 500 cm of snow this winter, The Weather Network reports. And the warm, spring-like temperatures over the past week have led to a rapid thaw, causing several waterways to flood. The Weather Network forecasts more rain in southern Ontario Saturday, and a mix of rain and snow in northern Ontario.

“The freeze-thaw cycle is a big part of it,” Segaric says of reports of serious flooding in several areas of the province. “We came out of a pretty deep freeze earlier this year, and now we’re shifting into warmer weather. That swing tends to create ice buildup, and with frozen grounds it makes it hard for water to drain properly once everything starts melting.”

Also in the news: What the P&C industry can do to keep home insurance affordable

That concern is exactly what Jim Mandeville, senior vice president at First Onsite and disaster recovery specialist, sees play out every spring on the ground.

“If we talk about Southern Ontario, we don’t have consistent very cold temperatures like we do in the West,” Mandeville told CU in mid-February. “So, when we go from hovering around freezing to minus 30, and back and forth, we end up with ice damming like crazy. If you talk about the total volume of [winter-related] claims, especially from an underwriting perspective, it’s ice damming [among the most].”

This week, Segaric says, “losses are a mix of flooding and snow-load related collapses.”

Insurance Bureau of Canada reports “we’re already seeing significant flooding in a number of communities, with many more facing elevated risk,” according to Amanda Dean, vice president of Ontario and Atlantic.

Drone footage shows several roadways in North Bay are washed out. Minden Hills, Ont., a small town in Haliburton County, has closed down roads and declared a state of emergency in response to flood conditions in the community, The Weather Network reports. And Central Manitoulin Island declared a state of emergency earlier in the week following major floods in multiple communities that shut down the Manitoulin Hospital.

“For residents impacted by flooding, IBC’s Consumer Information Centre has activated its Virtual Community Assistance Mobile Pavilion (V-CAMP) program to support home, car and business owners across the region,” says Dean.

Adjusters note that when floodwaters start rising, there is only so much homeowners can do. However, suggestions include:

making sure sump pumps are working (and ideally have a backup)

re-grading driveways to prevent water from pooling near the house

clearing eavestroughs and downspouts

ensuring downspouts direct water away from the house

clearing snow around the home’s foundation.
April 17, 2026
What the P&C industry can do to keep home insurance affordable
Canada’s P&C industry needs to lobby more for public investments in resilience, provide more incentives for Canadians who invest in protection for their homes, and stop re-building damaged homes to their pre-loss condition, according to a new emerging issues paper published by the Insurance Institute of Canada.

Home insurance is currently affordable, adequate, and available for most Canadians, says the report, Home Insurance Affordability: Implications for the Insurance Industry in Canada. But higher residential claims for flooding, wildfire, hail, and severe wind has driven up the price of home insurance significantly over the past 30 years.

“Strain is evident in some Canadian insurance markets,” says the report’s author, Paul Kovacs, the founder and executive director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction. “Experience in the United States shows that home insurance affordability will inevitably become an issue if Canadians fail to break the trend of rising severe weather-related home damage and continue to experience rising residential claims.”

Statistics Canada figures cited in the report show the median after-tax income in Canada was “stagnant” between 1996 and 2025, growing by an average of 0.8% per year after inflation. Over the same period, the cost of living in Canada increased by 2.3% a year, driven by increasing costs in housing, food, and energy.

Meanwhile, the price of home insurance in Canada increased by an average of 5.3% per year over this period. “This was more than twice the increase in the cost of living, sustained over three decades,” the report states. “Indeed, Statistics Canada found that home insurance prices increased by more than inflation in 28 of the last 29 years. In this same time period, natural catastrophe–related claims have increased 8.1%.”

Claims costs for insurers ballooned to a record $9.1 billion in 2024 and returned to the more familiar (but high) range of $2.4 billion in 2025. Escalating natural catastrophe claims expenses are the main culprit in the rise of home insurance costs.

Also in the news: Recovery | Why psychological recovery starts with adjusters

The report states every dollar invested in building resilience in homes reduces claims costs down the road by between $5 and $10.

To prevent a home insurance affordability crisis in 10 years’ time, four opportunities exist for building more damage-resistant homes, the report states:

Homes must be built in the right locations and in the right way during initial construction

Millions of existing homes lack essential protection that should be added through retrofits supported by government incentives

Governments and the insurance industry can partner to build back better after a loss, adding essential resilience measures that will reduce the future risk of damage

Communities must invest to protect homes and public infrastructure.

To this end, the “insurance industry must press with increased urgency for action by governments,” the report states. “Building codes need to include protection from flooding, wildfire, hail, and high wind. Governments should provide financial incentives to homeowners who invest in protection. Governments should invest in resilient community infrastructure.”

Second, the insurance industry “needs to become more effective in communicating present practices in a way that incentivizes homeowners to invest in seismic and climate resilience,” the report recommends. “The insurance industry must improve communications with homeowners about how resilience investments can have a favourable impact on home insurance pricing, terms, and availability.”

And finally, the industry and governments need to invest in “building back better,” meaning they rebuild in a way to prevent damage from happening in the future.

“Governments and the insurance industry need to stop restoring damaged homes to their pre-loss condition,” the report states. “This puts structures and their contents back at risk. Inevitably, homeowners will experience future loss and damage.

“Insurers and governments should commit to build back better by incorporating resilience protection into recovery efforts.”
April 16, 2026
Do beaver dams really make flooding worse?

Beavers (Castor canadensis) are widely recognized as ecosystem engineers, building dams that reshape water flow and alter the physical structure of rivers and streams.

There is a scientific consensus on the positive impact of beaver dams, for example, in creating landscape-scale wetlands, increasing biodiversity and generating heterogeneity that benefits many species. However, during extreme rainfall, beaver dams are quickly blamed for exacerbating downstream flooding whenever they break.

Together with my colleagues, I explored the topic of beavers at the international Wood in World Rivers 5 Gaspé Conference held in June 2024. That led to the publication of an article in the journal Earth Surface Processes and Landforms.

Real-world consequences

Beaver dams were heavily implicated in major flooding events in the Charlevoix-Est Regional County Municipality in Québec’s Charlevoix region in 2005 (Hurricane Katrina) and 2011 (Hurricane Irene). These events led to Québec Superior Court rulings in 2008 and 2017 that blamed beaver dam failures for downstream property damage.

Both parties had called experts with opposing views: the plaintiffs claimed that destroying the dam would have prevented the flooding, while the defence argued that the river would have burst its banks anyway.

The judge ruled in favour of the plaintiffs, finding that the municipality was aware of the potential danger posed by the dams and had a legal obligation to intervene to prevent the risk of flooding, in accordance with Section 105] of the act pertaining to municipal powers.

This section stipulates: “If informed of the presence in a watercourse of an obstacle that threatens the safety of persons or property, a regional county municipality must carry out the work required to restore normal water flow.”

Dead wood and beaver dams constitute an “obstacle” under these provisions.

In short, because beaver dams constitute a threat, they should be destroyed as a preventive measure. But what scientific evidence supports these claims?

Modelling tools exist that allow us to fully understand the downstream impacts of breaches in human-made dams, such as those belonging to Hydro-Québec, for example. It is precisely these hydraulic modelling tools that the engineer hired by the Québec municipality, Jean Gauthier, used in the report he submitted to the court in 2008. Gauthier was also present at the second trial in 2017.

A new simulation

Since the judge had questioned Gauthier’s estimate of the volume of water upstream of the dam, we decided to contact the engineer to ask him to carry out further numerical simulations using the most recent tools and data available.

To assess the impact of the beaver dam on the water level at a bridge in the municipality — Chemin Port-au-Persil — we used a model that simulated the flood resulting from the August 2011 rainfall.

We carried out simulations with and without a dam breach. To assess the worst-case scenario, we assumed that the dam would breach at the peak of the flood. We also assumed that the breach — the opening created in the dam — would form in just 10 minutes. That’s a very short time frame, comparable to that of a concrete dam, in order to measure the maximum possible impact downstream.

Since the judge had questioned the estimate of the volume of water behind the dam, this was deliberately increased to test an extreme scenario. It was quadrupled (10,000 cubic metres) compared to the volume initially estimated on site (2,500 cubic metres). Finally, a dam height one metre higher than that measured in the field (3.15 metres instead of 2.15 metres) was also tested.

Dams not to blame

The results of our modelling indicated that, even with a fourfold increase in water volume, the impact on the water level at the bridge was very low. That confirmed that the damage caused to the lodge could not be attributed to the beaver dam breaking.

The simulations also highlight that it is the height of the dam, rather than its retention volume, that controls the propagation of flood waves downstream.

In reality, other natural phenomena linked to the torrential floods that occurred are likely responsible for the damage in 2005 and 2011. These include landslides and the transport of sediment and timber resulting from the erosion of the riverbed and banks observed along the Port-au-Persil River in 2011.

Furthermore, the narrowness of the Port-au-Persil bridge may have contributed to the damage caused by the floods. The bridge was rebuilt in 2023.

The importance of rigorous assessments

Our findings challenge the negative perceptions of beaver dams and highlight the importance of rigorous scientific assessments in civil liability cases relating to flooding.

The legal implications of Section 105 of Québec’s Municipal Powers Act, as well as the case law relating to the flooding events in Quebec in 2005 and 2011 — which holds regional county municipalities are liable for damage caused by flooding due to “obstacles” in rivers — expose beaver dams to widespread and unnecessary demolition.

Instead, evidence-based management practices and public awareness campaigns should be promoted to recognize the ecological benefits of beavers while addressing concerns regarding the flood risks they pose.

Pascale Biron received funding from the NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada).
Maxime Boivin is a co-holder of the Research Chair in Exploited Aquatic Species (CREAE) and a member of the Boreal Research Centre (CREB). He has received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC).
Thomas Buffin-Bélanger has received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC).

This article was originally published on The Conversation, an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts. Disclosure information is available on the original site.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Disclosure information is available on the original site. Read the original article: https://theconversation.com/do-beaver-dams-really-make-flooding-worse-research-casts-doubt-on-beavers-as-flood-culprits-276848

Article courtesy of The Canadian Press

April 15, 2026
What higher energy prices mean for Canadian P&C insurers

Spikes in oil and natural gas prices will have knock-on effects on a variety of areas touching Canadian property and casualty insurers — including the prospect of economic recession, positive investment returns, escalating claims costs, and supply chain disruption, a reinsurance exec told Swiss Re’s 40th annual Canadian Insurance Outlook Breakfast Tuesday.

“The knock-on effects of energy issues for inflationary impact — not just on energy, but lots of other things [as well] — is substantial,” John Dacey, former group chief financial officer of Swiss Re, said in his keynote address to the Canadian P&C leaders attending the breakfast. “Worst-case scenarios are worth thinking about…

“If the Strait of Hormuz does not open, and if there’s more material damage done to the infrastructure in the Gulf region over the coming months, the spike of oil prices and natural gas prices is going to be far in excess of what people have seen today. And the likelihood of that triggering a global recession cannot be ignored.”

Dacey qualified that he was not predicting this. He believed the warring parties would “muddle along” and come to some sort of resolution to the conflict, claiming “victory on both sides,” sooner rather than later.

Although higher energy costs contribute to inflation, that may prove to be a boon for insurers’ investment returns.

“Interest rates, as a result of the inflation impacts, are going to remain higher than people thought at the beginning of this year,” Dacey said, noting that U.S. interest rates would likely be between 4.2% and 4.5% between now and 2027. “It could go higher, because inflation could go higher.”

Since Mar. 18, 2026, the Bank of Canada’s interest rate has been 2.25%, unchanged since October 2025.

Neither the US Federal Reserve nor the Bank of Canada seem likely to lower interest rates in the current environment, Dacey said. “As a result, on a worldwide basis, the inflation is already hitting Europe thanks to energy cost. You’re going to continue to see interest rates relatively high to what we’ve seen in the last decade, ever since 2008.

“That’s not bad news for insurance companies. Your fixed income portfolios should be just fine.”

Also in the news: BrokerLink acquires three brokerages in different provinces

However, the increase in oil and gas prices could disrupt supply chains, which were just recovering from the pandemic shock between 2020 and 2023. That happened during a hard market in Canada, when insurance premiums rose to account for higher claims costs.

Due to the higher energy costs, “if you have to worry about paying claims and replacement values,” Dacey said, “you need to start thinking yesterday about, ‘Are we going to have a similar situation to 2022, where the cost is going to outstrip any premiums that we were able to get on board?’”

Canada, a supplier of oil and natural gas, may not be as hard-hit by inflationary energy prices as other countries, Dacey noted.

However, even though North America may not be as affected by spiking energy costs as Europe, and Europe would feel the shock less than in Asia, the energy prices would have a downstream effect on key suppliers in the global supply chain, Dacey said.

“There are economies today in the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand, where the day-to-day activities are being constrained dramatically by the absence of natural gas and to a lesser degree oil,” Dacey said. “This is not going to fix itself in two weeks if the Strait of Hormuz were to open tomorrow. This is going to be longer-lasting.

“And these are exactly the countries which, thanks to…policies put in place a year ago, are more important for supply chains than they have been.”

April 15, 2026
Recovery | Why psychological recovery starts with adjusters

The evidence is clear: when injured claimants start to avoid driving, social situations, or physical activity in the days following a motor-vehicle accident (MVA), those patterns can calcify rapidly. And that increases treatment duration, legal involvement, and claims costs.

But the claims industry rarely asks one logical question: who has the best chance of interrupting avoidance before it takes hold?

Answer: It’s not the psychotherapist; it’s the insurance adjuster.

Adjusters are usually the first people claimants talk to after an MVA. That conversation happens within 72 hours of the event, which is precisely the window when a person’s nervous system is most flexible – threat appraisals are still forming, and behavioural patterns aren’t yet set.

Normally, psychologists and therapists don’t enter the picture until weeks or months later, if at all. By then, the window has largely closed.

But the adjuster is there when it matters most.

Importance of early contact

Research shows early social contact after a traumatic event isn’t just a nice to have. It’s one of the strongest predictors of whether a person’s distress will resolve or compound.

A meta-analysis of 68 studies finds post-trauma social support is one of the strongest predictors of whether psychological distress will, or won’t, become entrenched. Warm, normalizing responses from trusted figures immediately after a traumatic event are associated with reduced symptom severity and faster functional recovery. And cold, transactional, or bureaucratic interactions can heighten threat perception and reinforce a sense of helplessness – both of which are predictors of prolonged psychological distress.

Adjusters are not, and shouldn’t try to be, therapists. But their interactions with claimants are not psychologically neutral. Every word choice, every tone, every framing of what happens next either reduces or amplifies the claimant’s distress – and the insurance industry has largely failed to measure the cost implications.

Behavioural signals

When a claimant describes pain, fear about returning to driving, or worry about the future, the adjuster’s response can send a signal about what is normal, what is expected, and what will happen next.

Responses that acknowledge the emotional dimension, even briefly, tell the claimant their experience is expected and manageable. But responses that immediately get into documentation requirements unintentionally tell claimants their emotional experiences are outside the scope of what this process addresses.

The signals adjusters send matter.

Early avoidance stems from how a claimant reads their situation. Do they feel supported and that their situation is manageable? Or do they feel uncertain and threatened?

Research consistently shows people who receive early, normalizing contact after traumatic events are significantly more likely to maintain function, and less likely to avoid returning to their normal, daily tasks.

Related: Recovery | Why avoidance, not trauma severity, can delay motor vehicle accident recovery

Adjusters’ early access to claimants gives them a direct and largely unexplored influence over each of those variables. A one-minute, well-scripted normalizing statement from an adjuster, delivered early and authentically, can meaningfully shift outcomes.

While most adjusters want to help claimants they speak with, they often lack the right script.

This can prompt a default to the claims process’ transactional language, because adjusters’ training teaches them to ask about injuries, document facts, explain next steps, and move on.

This is a training gap.

Fortunately, the required skills are not complex. Adjusters don’t need to become counsellors. They need three things: language that normalizes the emotional response to a collision without dramatizing it, a brief and credible explanation of what early support looks like, and a clear referral pathway when the conversation warrants it. These things are learnable, measurable, and scalable.

Improving claims outcomes

From a claims management perspective, the case for investing in adjuster scripting around early psychological contact is straightforward.

Claims involving unaddressed psychological distress take longer to resolve and are more frequently litigated and expensive. Research measuring actual health and economic costs in MVA insurance claimants find those with untreated post-traumatic stress disorder incur significantly higher total costs than claimants without psychological morbidity.

The cost of not training adjusters in this area manifests in prolonged treatment authorizations that are rarely traced back to their origins.

The insurance industry makes significant investments in physical rehabilitation pathways but has been far slower in investing in the psychological options. But psychological recovery unfolds on its own timeline, and is shaped by the interactions claimants have in the hours and days after impact. Adjusters’ work happens during those early hours after an MVA, but they’re often not equipped to be fully effective.

Repositioning the adjuster’s role does not require an overhaul of claims operations. It requires targeted scripting, brief training, and a clearly defined referral structure for early emotional support. The infrastructure already exists in many organizations, but what’s often missing is the clinical framing to help adjusters understand why what they say during that first call is doing psychological work – whether they know it or not.

Kristin Graham is a Registered Psychotherapist and president of Graham Guidance Inc., which delivers structured early emotional recovery support within auto insurance claims environments.

April 15, 2026
Auto reform: Priority dispute rules about to get “very, very messy”

Priority disputes between auto insurers in Ontario could get “very, very messy” due to the upcoming auto reforms, an insurance defence lawyer said in her presentation to accident benefit adjusters March 26.

Starting July 1, 2026, Ontario’s reforms will convert several mandatory benefits in auto insurance policies to optional benefits, including income replacement, caregiver benefits, housekeeping, and death benefits, among others. Medical, rehabilitation, and attendant care benefits will remain mandatory coverages within the auto insurance product.

Optional accident benefits will only be available to named insureds on the policy, meaning drivers, their spouses, dependents, and other listed drivers in the policy. Claims experts say they expect to see more disputes at the Ontario Licence Appeal Tribunal (LAT) over who is entitled to the benefits.

But layered on top of that is the fact that the priority disputes between auto insurers have not changed, says Julianne Brimfield, a partner at SBA Lawyers.

Under Ontario’s existing priority of dispute regulations, the first auto insurer to receive a claim for accident benefits must pay. And if they aren’t the right insurer, they must work out the priority dispute with another insurer in a separate action later.

However, under Ontario’s proposed auto insurance reforms, it seems claimants can now submit accident benefits applications to more than one insurer, says Brimfield.

“On some policies, it’ll be obvious if someone has access to optionals, because they will be that named insured, that listed driver,” Brimfield said at the Ontario Insurance Adjusters Association (OIAA’s) annual conference in Toronto. “But when it’s not obvious, what do you do?

“They’ve already got an open claim [with another insurer], and now they’re coming to the optional benefits insurer, saying, ‘Actually, I want to submit my [optional benefits] claim to you, because I’m a dependent.’

“What does that insurer do? Do they deny the claim? Do they do more investigation? Do they accept it and start a priority dispute? That’s not clear based on the current rules and regulations.”

Continuing with the example, Brimfield asks what happens next if the optional benefits insurer denies the claim.

“Let’s say you are the second insurer, and you deny that claim,” Brimfield says. “What does that claimant then do? Do they just continue with their first claim? Do they then bring a dispute against the second insurer? And now they’ve got two AB claims open with different insurers?

“There’s really no clear direction on that.”

Brimfield questioned whether this is a first party dispute between a claimant and insurers to be resolved at the LAT. Or is it a priority dispute between insurers?

If it is a priority dispute, insurers first approached with a benefits claim must be ready to notify the optional insurer of a priority dispute within the required 90-day notification period. Brimfield offered a hypothetical scenario in which a claimant receives optional benefits from the first insurer notified under priority dispute regulations, but he or she then switches to the optional benefits insurer.

In this scenario, Brimfield says, the first insurer must make sure it puts the optional benefits insurer on a 90-day notice of a priority dispute. Otherwise, the first insurer won’t be able to recover the money they paid out under the dispute resolution rules.

“There are no changes [to the dispute resolution rules] coming up in July,” Brimfield said. “It still says you only send one application [for benefits]. It still says that the first insurer to receive that application has to pay benefits pending resolution of a dispute about priority.

“And it also says that if you do not send that priority notice within 90 days, you can’t pursue another insurer. So the priority regulation is the only way that insurers right now can recover benefits that they’ve paid to a claimant when priority actually lies elsewhere.

“So what does that mean for insurers? They’re still going to have to do that priority investigation on every single claim. They still have to send that 90-day notice once you see that another insurer is lower on priority than you but has optional benefits.

“Send that 90-day notice to them, because if the [claimant] then changes their mind and decides to go to this other [optional benefits] insurer, and you didn’t send that 90 day notice, you can’t get your money.”

April 13, 2026
Insurers urged to keep on their toes, despite muted 2026 hurricane forecast

Reinsurer Swiss Re is warning against complacency after Colorado State University (CSU) on Thursday forecasted a lower-than-average 2026 hurricane season.

CSU predicts 2026 will have 13 named storms, six hurricanes, and two major (Category 3-4-5) hurricanes, all below the 20-year historical average.

The probability of a hurricane making landfall along the U.S. east coast, including Florida, is 15%, CSU says, down from the 20-year average of 21%.

That’s significant for Canada, since hurricanes along the U.S. east coast often recurve through the western Atlantic, putting Atlantic Canada at risk. The remnants of these tropical storms often bring a risk for flooding rains, high winds, and tornadoes as they move north across the border.

Last year, no hurricane-related tropical storms hit Atlantic Canada despite the forecast for an ‘above-normal’ hurricane season, with four to seven major hurricanes projected in 2025.

However, despite the lower risk for a major hurricane this year, CSU forecasters caution: “Coastal residents are reminded that it only takes one hurricane making landfall to make it an active season for them. Thorough preparations should be made for every season, regardless of how much activity is predicted.”

Monica Ningen was previously Swiss Re’s representative in Canada. She is now CEO of property and casualty reinsurance for Swiss Re in the US. She noted Hurricane Andrew is a prime example of what can happen, despite the forecasts.

“Last season may have felt relatively quiet, and this forecast points in a similar direction, but we have to be very careful not to let that create complacency,” Ningen said in a statement following the CSU’s forecast. “It only takes one storm, in the wrong place at the wrong time, to define a season.

“Hurricane Andrew is a classic example, forming during what was otherwise a quiet year, yet ultimately becoming one of the most consequential loss events in our industry’s history. We’ve seen time and again that a single event can reshape both loss experience and market dynamics, regardless of how the season looks on paper.”

In 1992, the U.S. National Hurricane Center projected Hurricane Andrew was weakening as it approached southern Florida. Instead, it rapidly intensified into a Category 5 hurricane before it hit Florida as a Category 4 storm with 270 km/h winds.

At the time, it caused estimated insured damages of US$15.5 billion and was directly linked to the insolvency of nine US insurance companies, according to a paper published by National Academies.

And so, Ningen highlights CSU’s caution about the forecast.

“According to today’s Colorado State University forecast, which is calling for a below-average Atlantic hurricane season, it would be easy to interpret that as a signal to ease off,” Ningen says. “But in our business, averages can be misleading because they don’t capture impact….

“We can’t control how many storms form, but we can control how ready we are. That includes practical steps like strengthening roofs, improving building standards, and making smart investments that may cost more upfront but save significantly in the long run.”

CSU is forecasting a quieter hurricane season primarily because of a potentially strong El Nino event in the Atlantic ocean during the summer and through the end of 2026.

“El Nino” refers to a 12-18-month period during which anomalously warm sea surface temperatures occur in the eastern half of the equatorial Pacific. It’s often associated with a strong vertical wind shear, which is the measure of winds higher in the atmosphere.

“Tropical cyclones need relatively calm winds in order to develop and thrive,” as The Weather Network explains. “Increased wind shear can shred apart thunderstorms before they can take root, disrupting the development of a budding tropical system.”

April 10, 2026
Verdicts against Meta, Google in U.S. could boost Canadian big tech lawsuits

Recent U.S. court verdicts that found Meta and Google liable for harms to children are likely to benefit similar cases launched here in Canada, say experts and the lawyers behind the Canadian litigation.

They say the March verdicts in Los Angeles and New Mexico could affect a class action in B.C. and a case brought forward by a group of Ontario school boards.

“As a first step, this is a landmark moment for holding … social media accountable,” said Emily Laidlaw, a law professor at the University of Calgary.

“The cases in the U.S. bode well for the litigation in Canada. There’s so many cases underway across the world, and so I expect that this will have a ripple effect.”

A Los Angeles jury found both Meta and YouTube liable for harms to children using their services, while in New Mexico, a jury concluded that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

In New Mexico, state investigators built their case by posing as children on social media and documenting sexual solicitations they received, as well as Meta’s response. The jury was asked if Meta violated New Mexico’s consumer protection law.

The Los Angeles case had a single plaintiff — who goes by the initials KGM — against Meta, Google’s YouTube, TikTok and Snap. TikTok and Snap settled before trial.

The plaintiff argued the platform features of the two remaining defendants, Meta and YouTube, were designed to be addictive, especially for young users.

KGM is one of a handful of plaintiffs whose cases are testing how these arguments play out before juries, and whether they can lead to broader settlements.

A spokesperson for Meta said in a pair of online posts in March the company “respectfully” disagrees with the verdicts and will appeal. A spokesperson in Canada declined to comment on the Canadian cases.

Vivek Krishnamurthy, an associate member of the University of Ottawa’s Centre for Law, Technology and Society and an associate professor of law at the University of Colorado, said the verdicts suggest it’s “perhaps a bit more likely that the Canadian litigation against the platforms could reach a similar conclusion.”

While the U.S. decisions aren’t binding in Canada, Krishnamurthy said, they are “certainly persuasive.”

“I have no doubt that the parties in the Canadian litigation will be looking very closely at this and the plaintiffs will be seeking to use those verdicts to maximum advantage,” he said.

One of the lawyers involved in the Canadian cases is Duncan Embury, head of litigation at Neinstein LLP. He’s representing a group of 22 Ontario school boards that have brought claims against Meta, Snapchat and TikTok.

The boards are claiming the platforms’ algorithmic design has disrupted the public education system, leading to additional costs, Embury said. School boards report that students are paying less attention in class and schools are seeing a spike in bullying and mental health issues, he added.

Embury said the U.S. verdicts have “real significance both to this case, but also to all of us more broadly.”

He noted more cases in the U.S. are scheduled to proceed to trial and that “should give all of us pause to really think about what our children are being exposed to and what potential harms those things give rise to.”

In British Columbia, a class action against Meta alleges people have been injured by the platform. While similar cases were filed elsewhere in Canada, they are now on hold while the B.C. case proceeds, said Reidar Mogerman, a lawyer arguing the class action.

He said the platforms use tools to hold people’s attention, leading to “social comparison” and creating depression and anxiety that can manifest in physical injury through things like eating disorders and suicidal thoughts.

“Allegedly, the algorithms are ultimately designed to hold people’s attention. That’s what the platforms are selling to the advertisers. And in order to hold their attention, they’re giving them more and more damaging and radicalized information,” Mogerman said.

He said the U.S. cases offer a road map because juries in the U.S., examining similar sets of facts, concluded the companies did something wrong.

“So they are momentum, but they’re not a complete answer. We have to litigate ourselves our own case up here,” he said.

Taylor Owen, founding director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University, said that while the Canadian cases are building on the American ones, “they’re all sort of following similar underlying logic that there’s a sort of a negligence or liability around product design.”

He noted the U.S. cases had to get around Section 230. That’s a U.S. law that generally exempts internet companies from liability for the material users post on their services.

“So they didn’t touch content. It was all about the design of the product,” Owen said.

Owen said comparisons can be made between these social media lawsuits and the decades of litigation that led to tobacco companies being ordered to pay out tens of billions of dollars in compensation for the health effects of their products.

Those tobacco company lawsuits “revealed a host of things that were known internally to those companies, in a similar way as we now know a lot more about what was known internally in social media companies because of these cases,” Owen said.

“But I think the bigger lesson is that those litigations in the tobacco cases weren’t the things that got us all to stop smoking. It was the regulations that followed them.”

The Liberal government is planning to introduce an online harms bill and is currently consulting with an expert advisory group — which includes Owen, Krishnamurthy and Laidlaw — on that legislation.

Luke Stark, an assistant professor in the faculty of information and media studies at the University of Western Ontario, said regulation should take into account the design features that have been singled out in the lawsuits.

“If you understand social media platforms as just another consumer product, the design of which is … intentional by the companies involved, you could see, for instance, a set of prohibitions or a set of regulations about what kinds of interactive features are available,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 9, 2026.
— With files from The Associated Press

April 10, 2026
Where Middle East war creates risks for Canada

While the conflict following U.S. and Israeli military actions against Iran since late February won’t shut down Canada’s economy, risks are rising for certain business sectors.

“Certain activities [can] become un-economic or temporarily unfinanceable,” says Marcos Alvarez, managing director, global financial institution ratings at Morningstar DBRS.

He notes there are immediate risks for Canadian commercial clients with people, assets, contracts, cargo, or counterparties in or near the Middle East. Both political violence and all-out war in the region can mean customers aren’t able to take delivery of goods or make payments, and that exporters may suffer losses of inventory or equipment.

Alvarez adds Canada’s government is “facilitating departures from the region, underscoring the practical risk around staff mobility, evacuation, and business continuity.”

Related: What Month 2 of Mideast war means for Canada’s insureds

Sectors at risk are mainly tied to shipping in the Persian Gulf or Red Sea, airlines and companies that lease to them, airports, firms financing projects in the region, contractors working in infrastructure, and commodity traders.

There are also risks for exporters that rely on coverages for cargo, credit, or political risk related to instances where they’d need to satisfy their counterparties or lenders.

“In Canada itself, if capacity tightened sharply, the pinch would likely be felt by landmark commercial real estate, major event venues, ports [and] terminals, and community institutions that need specialty terrorism or political violence protection, but that is still a narrower problem rather than a general market shutdown,” Alvarez tells CU.

Domestic concerns

He adds exposures most relevant to Canada’s homefront include hotels, malls, sites linked to diplomatic activities, religious organizations, community centres and transit nodes.

“Canada has also seen rising antisemitism and hate incidents linked to the Middle East events, which increases concerns around smaller, high-visibility losses even if catastrophic attacks remain unlikely,” he says.

“The most likely spillovers are not blockbuster losses but smaller, harder-to-model events [like] cyber disruption, threats to symbolic or community targets, and supply-chain interruptions that hit several insurance lines at once.”

Related: Why your clients keep falling for the same old cyber fraud scams

In terms of which insurance covers Canadian commercial clients should be considering, Alvarez says from his perspective at a credit rating agency, there is a shift away from narrow terrorism policy wordings toward broader coverages for war, terrorism and political violence.

“For transport-linked clients, it is usually separate marine cargo war and strikes cover, voyage-specific war-risk cover, aviation war and allied perils…crisis-management products such as [kidnap and ransom], evacuation response, and active assailant [are] the most sought after covers in times of conflict,” Alvarez says.

April 7, 2026
Why insurers shouldn’t count on building codes to prevent quake damage

Seismologists, structural engineers, and developers aren’t always on the same page when it comes to earthquake-resistant building codes, a world-renowned seismologist tells the Insurance Bureau of Canada’s 2026 InSight Summit.

“Let’s imagine we have a building built to the current code,” said keynote speaker Dr. Lucy Jones, who spent 33 years with the U.S. Geological Survey, and who served as Los Angeles’ Science Advisor for Seismic Safety. “What if your ground shaking exceeds what the code [says]?

“We’ve got a problem that the engineers and seismologists look at things in different ways. As seismologists, we do theoretical wave equations and say, ‘Oh, look at the strong shaking.’ And the engineers say, ‘We’ve never recorded this. We need real data.’”

And then on Feb. 6, 2023, a Magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck southern and central Turkey and northern and western Syria. Estimated damage from the event was more than US157.8 billion, with death estimates ranging between 59,000 and 62,000.

Jones showed a slide with a black line indicating what kind of shaking the building codes anticipated. “And their building code is the same as ours [in California],” added Jones. Blue and red lines showed what kind of shaking was actually recorded at the epicentre of the quake in Syria and Turkey.

For small buildings, a few stories tall, the building codes were built for quake frequencies of less than one second, said Jones. But for the tall buildings, “we were really far off,” said Jones, with the codes underestimating the shaking by a factor of five to 10.

“And the seismologists tended to go, ‘Hey, that’s what we were talking about,’” Jones said. And “the engineers are now going, ‘Uh, okay.’

“So we’ve got an issue there. I will say, at least discussions are happening, but don’t believe that we’ve got it covered with the building code.”

Code coverage

Jones asked the audience of insurance professionals to consider what building codes actually offer, adding that building codes do not say the structures can’t collapse. Plus, large stocks of older buildings have been built to previous code standards.

She showed slides of damage caused by various earthquakes in Los Angeles. All of the damage happened to older structures, she noted. “We no longer allow them to be built, but that doesn’t make them disappear,” she said.

She noted one dozen cities in Southern California require quake-resistant retrofits, and three cities are addressing problems related to concrete building structures.

“We’re getting somewhere, but there are still a huge number of buildings out there [that can] be running into trouble,” she said.

Jones and other seismologists modelled a quake along California’s San Andres Fault to measure what kind of damage it could do downtown Los Angeles, assuming all structures were built to the current, highest building codes.

In the modelling, 1% (about two, three, or four) of the buildings would completely collapse. Another 10% would have to be torn down, accounting for dozens of structures, and another 40% would not be usable immediately after the event.

“So we will not be able to use most buildings in Southern California…and these are the modern buildings built to code,” she said.

Also in the news: Why embedded insurance keeps this lawyer up at night

Some developers in North America shy away from spending more on up-front costs required to build to more quake-resistant standards, Jones said. “Our codes are trying to minimize life loss while minimizing upfront costs. It is not minimizing long-term costs. It’s minimizing the cost for the developer and the building owner.”

She noted in California, “it adds about 1% to the cost of construction to build to what we call a recoverable standard that you can repair the building afterwards.”

But it’s not a requirement, she added.

In fact, in California, commercial lenders don’t even require earthquake insurance if developers can show their Probable Maximum Loss following an earthquake is less than 20% of the value of the building, Jones said.

“You’d be surprised at the industry that’s out there to give you ratings of 19.4% or 19.7%,” she said. “Essentially, nobody gets commercial earthquake insurance, so the banks are going to be sitting there [after an earthquake event] holding the bag.”

Why is it worth it for developers to invest more upfront to build to a higher earthquake standard?

Jones referenced March 2011 Magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck the east coast of Honshu, Japan. More than 20,000 people were killed, 140,000 people were displaced and more than 500,000 buildings and structures were damaged or destroyed by the earthquake and resulting tsunami.

Then, Jones showed a slide of a city that appeared untouched by the disaster.

“The city of Sendai is basically due west of the [Honshu quake’s] epicenter,” she said. “They received the strongest level of shaking, and this is what Sendai looked like after the earthquake.

“There’s essentially no damage. Because in Japan…earthquakes happen several times more often. So just overall, the code is going to be higher.

“But also, if you’re a Japanese structural engineering company, and your building fails in an earthquake, you will lose so much face you’ll never again get another job. It’s a cultural issue. They never go towards the lower level.”

April 7, 2026