Returning to the core business of identifying risk is a top priority for the Canadian Council of Insurance Regulators (CCIR), stated Patrick Déry, Chair of the organization.
Déry, who is also the superintendent of financial institutions for Quebec’s Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), sat down with the Insurance Portal to discuss the CCIR’s ambitions, including those that may not be immediately apparent in its 2026-2029 Strategic Plan, published May 12.
This plan alludes to Canada’s rapidly evolving regulatory landscape and the national regulatory collaboration undertaken by the organization and its members. It also briefly discusses emerging risks, the alignment of regulatory expectations from one jurisdiction to the next and governance priorities.
First, the strategic plan indicates that its contents reflect a refinement of the CCIR’s focus. Déry says the past 10 years have included a notable amount of policy work for the organization as it worked to bring about market conduct changes. Going forward, it intends to refocus on its core supervisory activities.
Following the financial crisis which came to a head in 2008 and 2009, many regulatory changes occurred across a number of sectors, including banking and insurance, namely in matters of market conduct that were first introduced by international standards-setters, the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
“Some of those international standards are about market conduct. One of the main responsibilities of the CCIR is to implement that in Canada in a way that is consistent with international requirements,” Déry explains, adding that there was also a robust work program to harmonize, as much as relevant and possible, the rules governing products that are similar in both the securities and insurance sectors, segregated funds in particular. “There was no good reason to have different rules applying to similar products, particularly when it comes to the consumer at the point of sale.”
Today, however, he says the organization recognizes it is operating in a volatile environment as geopolitics, technological innovation and climate-related risks are all identified as real concerns. “We are going back to the core business of identifying risk, monitoring risk and being ready to act, if necessary. Market conduct is a core responsibility,” he adds, but says policy work going forward will likely be taking a back seat to supervision.
Core activities
Coordination with other regulatory entities, namely the Joint Forum of Financial Market Regulators, the Canadian Association of Pension Supervisory Authorities (CAPSA) and the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA), remains a core pursuit for the organization, the goal being to identify opportunities to work better together and share best practices.
At the most recent spring meeting, the CCIR also invited the United States’ National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) to present to those gathered. “They have a business model that is really based on coordination and exchange of information,” he says. “It’s very interesting to look at and see if we can take some of those ideas into our own thinking in the next few years.
CCIR also continues to work with Canadian Insurance Services Regulatory Organizations (CISRO), which focuses on distribution while the CCIR focuses on insurers, to ensure both move forward in a cohesive manner.
More and more as well, Déry says the CCIR’s members are conducting cooperative supervision of market conduct. This can sometimes take the form of teams made up of multiple provincial supervisors working together with the insurance companies in question. “By doing that, we improve, again, the alignment of our expectations. It avoids having Quebec saying we would expect this while Ontario says we expect that,” he says. Although guidance continues to be issued at the national level, he adds that when the work is conducted locally, members try to be as aligned and consistent as possible. “We want to do better at this in the coming years.”
Crisis management
The IMF, every five years will review and assess the country’s financial sector, the role of regulators and how well regulation is aligned and compliant with international standards. The most recent review was published in 2025. In the most recent edition, Déry says a lot of recommendations were concerned with crisis preparedness and crisis management.
“If there were a big company to fail, are we ready? How can we prepare for such an event? Canada has a reputation of having a very small rate of failures or bankruptcies in the financial sector. You can count on one hand, which is not typical of what we see in other jurisdictions,” he says. “But does that mean it can not happen? If it were to happen, how can we better prepare ourselves in advance to manage the situation? A lot of the recommendations that were made last year are around that.”
Notably, he says the CCIR’s focus on this could change how the organization shows up in the Canadian insurance landscape: “This part of the strategic plan, although it seems like a few words in the high-level document, to me, this is something that could change, really fundamentally, the way CCIR works in the insurance ecosystem in Canada,” he says.
He adds that the CCIR wants to get to the same level it is at regarding market conduct supervision, such that if a crisis event were to occur, the public would be reassured that provincial regulators and the industry are working together to deal with the situation in an orderly manner. Although a crisis situation could be dealt with today, it would be more complex for both companies and regulators. The organization’s vision is to make this piece work better.
“We all have the responsibility locally,” he says of the provincial regulators. “Instead of leaving each of us alone in our jurisdictions to try and do our best when a big crisis happens like that, we thought it would be very good to use the CCIR as a lever, as a tool to coordinate ourselves and exchange information. Then when we act locally, we coordinate our decisions at that level so we can act in a consistent manner, a synchronized manner and we can communicate (that) to the public,” he says. “This is in the spirit of the IMF recommendations as well. Canada is a federation. How do we put all the moving pieces together so that we can perform well if we have to deal with such a situation?”
To approach this, Déry says the organization will use much of the same apparatus, including committees, structure and having the right people from various organizations gathered to discuss the challenge and agree in advance about the processes to be used if a crisis were to occur.
Appearing at the intersection between crisis readiness and process harmonization ambitions, the CCIR’s paper, Harmonization of Incident Reporting Frameworks, is perhaps an example of this work in action. (Déry says regulators will look at this information as being important in their supervision work.) The paper aims to encourage the harmonization of reporting frameworks across the country for information security and cyber incidents.
“If a cyber incident happens somewhere, we want to know fast and we want to get some basic information,” he says, but adds that the current process is currently not harmonized – the requirements do not even exist in some jurisdictions.
A “single window” approach
He says a “single window” approach involves the CCIR in its expanded capacity, providing information exchange among regulators to create a streamlined approach that will allow companies to report just once, instead of to every regulator in every province they operate.
“The idea seems simple, but the execution of it is a bit tricky,” he says, referring to the need for systems that are also secure enough that information remains confidential. “Hopefully in the next year or two we will have some very practical improvements to announce about this.”
The nature of the conversations between the CCIR and Assuris and the Property and Casualty Insurance Compensation Corporation (PACICC) could also be changing going forward as the organization becomes more engrained in its crisis preparedness work.
In the past, Déry says discussions were focused on the bylaws and rules of the two compensation protection schemes. The quarterly meetings were not difficult or contentious discussions. Going forward, the CCIR wants those relationships to also be oriented around crisis preparedness and management – and integration with the CCIR’s envisioned single-window approach to collecting information.
“We would use the CCIR to exchange the information among us, so there’s not 14 calls going on at the same time at the same company level to get the same information,” he says. “We’ll see where we can go in that direction, but that’s the vision at a high level.”
Engaging with ombud services
Also in the strategic plan, the CCIR indicates that it has plans to engage with the OmbudService for Life & Health Insurance (OLHI) and the General Insurance OmbudService (GIO). Both bodies are supervised by the CCIR. Déry says the CCIR’s approach to the ombud services is today very similar to the approach the CSA uses with the Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments (OBSI).
“We harmonized the frameworks; the three ombud services that we have in the financial sector in Canada are (now) supervised by regulators using similar approaches and expectations,” he says.
