Insurance Brokers: directory of firms

A broker is retained by you. Because a brokerage holds contracts with several insurers, it can take one set of facts about your house, your vehicle or your business and put it in front of more than one underwriter, then explain the differences in what comes back. That is the practical value of a brokerage: not a lower number, which nobody can promise before an insurer has looked at the risk, but a comparison of wordings and conditions that you would otherwise have to assemble yourself, one phone call at a time.

An agent represents the insurer. A captive or exclusive agent sells one company's contracts, knows them thoroughly, and can often answer a question about an endorsement without going away to check. What an agent cannot do is tell you how a competitor would treat the same risk. Neither role removes your own obligations, which is why the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada's guidance on applying for coverage is to answer every question on the application completely and honestly, whoever is filling in the form with you.

Titles are used loosely in the market, including by people who are not licensed at all. Ask directly which insurers the person can place business with, and then confirm the name and the licence class on the register kept by the regulator for your province before you hand over identification, banking details or a credit card number.

There is no national insurance licence in Canada. In British Columbia the Insurance Council of British Columbia regulates and licenses life and general insurance agents, salespersons and adjusters, and its online Insurance Licensee Directory publishes licence information for current licensed agents, agencies, adjusters and firms in the province, including licence status, licence class, and the agencies or firms a licensee is authorised to represent. The Alberta Insurance Council is the industry-funded regulator that licenses and oversees insurance agents, brokers and independent adjusters in that province, and it runs a public lookup for confirming that someone is licensed.

Ontario splits the work between two bodies. The Registered Insurance Brokers of Ontario describes itself as Ontario's regulator of general insurance brokers and publishes a broker search and a brokerage search, which it recommends using to avoid unqualified or fraudulent operators, while the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario licenses life and accident and sickness agents. In Quebec the Autorité des marchés financiers maintains registers of the firms and individuals authorised to carry on activities such as insurance in the province.

Standards are coordinated but not merged. The Canadian Insurance Services Regulatory Organizations, a forum of Canadian regulatory authorities dedicated to consistent qualification and conduct-of-business standards for insurance intermediaries, produces harmonised material used across jurisdictions, including the Life Licence Qualification Program and common forms. Coordination does not make a licence portable: someone moving provinces, or selling into a province where the client lives, needs the authorisation that applies there.

A policy is a snapshot of facts that stop being true. Renewal is the moment to tell the brokerage what has changed since last year: work done on the building, a vehicle added or sold, a business started at the kitchen table, a child now driving, a basement finished, a long absence planned. The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada points out that using your home for purposes your insurer is unaware of may cancel your policy, and the same logic runs through every line of business.

Ask for the policy wording, not only the summary page, and read the definitions and exclusions once. Keep the declarations page, the endorsements, any inspection report and your correspondence together in one place, because those documents are what a claim is measured against later. If you change brokerages, the new one needs the expiry date, the claims history and the current wording to do anything useful with your file.

Complaints about the conduct of a licensee go to the licensing regulator for the province, which is the same body whose register you used to check the licence. Complaints about an insurance company's decision follow the company's own complaint process first. The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada does not resolve individual complaints but publishes the steps for complaining to an insurance company and explains how to work through the process.

Put the complaint in writing, keep a copy of everything, and note names and dates as you go. An insurance file is built out of paper, and the person who kept theirs is in a far stronger position months later than the person relying on a recollection of a phone call.