The COVID-19 pandemic caused a surge in mortality among policyholders of individual life insurance policies in Canada in 2020. This surge then gave way to a lull in 2021. However, mortality increased in 2023, reveals the report, Canadian Individual Life Experience Updated to Policy Year 2022-23, published in June 2025 by the Canadian Institute of Actuaries (CIA).
It examines the mortality statistics for individual life insurance policyholders (what actuaries call "mortality experience"). The 2022-2023 period also shows a second consecutive increase in the mortality rate.
Published in 2024, the CIA's previous report also revealed an increase in mortality, based on the previous segment of experience covering the years 2021 to 2022, as reported in the October 2024 edition of the Insurance Journal.
The 2025 report on the 2022 to 2023 experience segment is the 74th in a series from the Canadian Institute of Actuaries. Nine insurers contributed data. "Approximately 70% of Canadian individual life insurance is covered by this study," reveals the report's summary.
The CIA specifies in the summary that the data provided by insurers covers the one-year period beginning with the policy anniversary in 2022 on an age-nearest-birthday basis.
A broken trend...
The study behind the report examines the ratio of actual mortality to expected mortality, which it calls the actual-to-expected (A/E) ratio. "The overall actual-to-expected (A/E) ratio by amount for the most recent policy year is again well off the downward trend that had been expected prior to the pandemic," it reads. According to the CIA, this is the study's most significant observation.
"It is likely that the excess mortality due to COVID-19 is the main contributor to the increase in A/E, but there may be other factors as well," the report underlines.
"Mortality has gone down steadily year over year during all the time that I've watched it," said R.C.W. (Bob) Howard, an independent actuarial consultant and the CIA member who prepared the report, in an interview with the Insurance Portal. " Occasionally, one year mortality is a little higher, then it's lower. It has followed the trend fairly steadily for many years, but it seems as if that trend has been arrested," he adds.
Howard regularly contributes to the CIA's work on mortality, including the work that led to the new CIA2014 mortality table, published in 2022. He has been a practicing actuary for more than 40 years. Howard served as CIA President from 2009 to 2010. He has also practiced his profession for insurers, including Sun Life.
In the following chart, the curves represent the evolution of the ratio of actual to expected mortality. The dotted lines represent the trend that prevailed before the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Bob Howard, this is the “most significant” chart in the report. " This is the main chart that causes us to believe that there has been an interruption in the downward trend. Now, it looks like the lines might be turning downward again. Will we see it's sort of returning to the downward trend but at a higher level, or will it go back to where it would have been if we hadn't had the pandemic? That's what we don't know yet."
...and questions
We wondered if there might be some effect from the medical assistance in dying
– Bob Howard
Returning to the chart, Bob Howard describes the gap of more than 10% observed in 2023 between the solid curves for actual mortality and the dotted curves for expected mortality as very wide. He hesitates to speculate on the causes of the surge in such a short period. He believes the COVID-19 pandemic accounts for about half of it. But the illness has since subsided, thanks to the effectiveness of vaccines.
"Even if people stop dying of COVID-19 completely, you can't close that gap of over 10% between the actual mortality and the trend," says Howard. Over the past year, COVID-19 claims amounted to only a little over 2% of claims, he says, referring to the following table, which analyzes the cause of death.
For comparison, the proportion of policies studied with COVID-19 as the cause of death is twice as high in the CIA report's analysis that includes the worst years of COVID-19. It reaches 4.1% for the 2019-2023 analysis.
"Age would be part of it, but that's not the whole story. Just before the report was published, we wondered if there might be some effect from the medical assistance in dying because that has the effect of death occurring sooner. That's something we’ll study next year but I don't think either of those are sufficient. There's probably something else as well and it will take a while for us to be able to understand just what is going on,” he says.
