The missing middle: Why Canada's family market is still the foundation

Canadian life insurance new premium hit a record C$2.3 billion in 2025, an 8% jump over the prior year. LIMRA forecasts continued growth in 2026. Yet buried inside those headline numbers is a quieter story: term insurance sales are expected to remain flat, and 30% of Canadian adults still live with a coverage gap. The industry is growing, but it is not growing where families need it most. 

There is a reason for this, and it is not a product problem. 

When I started as an advisor in my twenties, my natural market was people exactly like me. Young individuals & couples buying their first home, having their first child, taking on their first real debt. I did not need a sophisticated niche strategy. I simply showed up where my friends and peers already were. For the first time in my career, my personal life and my work life were the same thing. I was not just selling policies. I was making a real difference in the lives of people I actually knew. It felt purposeful. It felt fulfilling. 

That felt effortless because the industry then recruited hundreds of young advisors every year. A 25-year-old's Rolodex was naturally full of 25-to-30-year-olds. A 28-year-old's client base was starting families, signing mortgages, and buying their first term policies. The economics were modest upfront, but the practice was built on a simple truth: protect a household today, and you earn the right to serve them for decades. 

That pipeline has slowed to a trickle. 

The average financial advisor in North America is now roughly 53 years old, and nearly 40% of the current workforce is expected to retire within the next decade. In Canada, the picture is even more acute. As Kevin Press noted in Investment Executive, "so few young Canadians want to be a financial advisor." York University research shows that Gen-Z has grown up in an economy that treats do-it-yourself disintermediation as normal, and the traditional advisor career path has lost its shine. 

Firms have responded rationally, but perhaps not future-focused. Rather than carrying the expense of underperforming rookies through the difficult first few years, the industry has shifted toward specialization, larger case sizes, and MGA affiliation. Advisors sell to their own age cohort. A 55-year-old advisor is naturally in conversation with 50-to-60-year-olds about estate planning and retirement income. The 30-year-old with a new mortgage and a toddler is simply not in the room. 

The numbers are staggering. RGA estimates that 8.4 million Canadian households are exposed to the life insurance gap. Gen Z shows a 44% need gap, more than double that of Boomers. LIMRA reports that 68% of adults under 40 still see life insurance as essential, even as they delay marriage and parenthood. They are not disinterested. They are simply not being asked. When they do look for coverage, many under-30 consumers overestimate the cost of coverage by 10 to 12 times, which tells you they are not hearing from anyone who can correct the record. 

In my early career, I spent a lot of time recruiting and developing young advisors. I would take them out on joint fieldwork, and we would sit across from young families who were trying to figure out how to protect a mortgage, handle debt, and build a foundation. I was teaching the advisor, but the family was getting served in the process. Many of those advisors went on to build thriving practices, and they now serve a much more sophisticated market. I am proud of that. But here is what frustrates me: I do not see our industry doing enough of that work anymore. We have abandoned recruiting the 24-year-old. We are not putting them in front of the 29-year-old. And we are not building the foundation that everything else depends on. 

This is a structural problem disguised as a market problem. The family market is not less profitable because young families do not value protection. It is less profitable because the advisor who used to drive across town on a Tuesday night to explain a 20-year term policy to a 29-year-old teacher is now doing Zoom calls about indexed universal life for a 58-year-old business owner. Both are worthy conversations. Only one is building the next generation of the practice. 

So how do we fill the gap? 

The answer is not simply to complain that young people do not want to join the industry. It is to redesign the front door. Senior advisors need to embed one or two younger associates into their practice and give them the family market as their explicit mandate. The senior partner provides credibility, mentorship, and complex case overflow. The associate brings the time, the digital fluency, and the natural peer network that the senior partner no longer has. One brand, one process, one service standard – but two age cohorts being served. 

Carriers and MGAs need to look at compensation and persistency bonuses to make the family market economically viable again. A 20-year term policy with a 90% persistency rate is worth more to the industry than we treat it. And firms need to stop treating term insurance as the minor leagues. The advisor who protects a 32-year-old's mortgage today is the same advisor who will handle that client's estate planning in 2045. If we are not in that relationship at the beginning, someone else will be. 

I don't manage many personal clients anymore, but I stay close to those relationships through the advisors I have partnered with. Now I am watching term policies from my first few years convert to permanent insurance. I am watching clients exercise guaranteed insurability riders they never thought they would need. I am watching them discover the true value of critical illness coverage. The stories my senior advisors told me when I was new are no longer just stories. They are coming to life right in front of me. 

The next great wealth transfer is happening now, and will continue for the next 15 to 20 years. But the advisors who earn the right to manage it will be the ones who showed up 20 years earlier, when the client was young, indebted, and only needed term insurance. That used to be the industry's default strategy. It is time to remember why.