Insurance advocates show their cards in new political campaign

A Canadian insurance group’s unconventional lobbying effort is helping to draw widespread attention to pressing industry concerns

Risk Management News

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An insurance advocacy group may have taken a gamble with its latest campaign, but the efforts have yielded a winning hand.
 
The Insurance Bureau of Canada has brought climate change to the forefront of Albertan politics by creating a set of playing cards featuring each of the province’s Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) on the front, and information about extreme weather on the back, according to the Calgary Herald.
 
The card belonging to Premier Rachel Notley, for example, educates the card holder that Edmonton’s biggest weather-related disaster occurred in the 1987 Black Friday tornado that caused 27 fatalities and $271 million in insured damages.
 
Although the cards act as a lighthearted way to ignite discussion, IBC hopes that it results in a thoughtful examination of changing weather patterns and the need for risk mitigation efforts.
 
“We wanted to do something different, something that people would have fun with,” said Heather Mack, an Edmonton-based spokeswoman for the bureau. “It’s a really serious issue. … The insurance industry is big in Alberta, but not in comparison to others, so we have to think of a creative way to stand out.”
 
Mack recently engaged the province in a public presentation around these issues, pointing out that Alberta averaged $100 million a year in catastrophic losses between 1983 and 2008, which skyrocketed to an average $673 million a year between 2009 and 2013.”
 
“From 2009 through 2012, when Canada was hit by more than a billion dollars a year in insured losses, Alberta suffered the most,” she said. Since that time, Alberta has faced $1.8 in damages from the 2013 floods and a recent Airdrie hailstorm that caused $568 in insured losses.
 
The cards are part of a larger IBC campaign to lobby government officials to help offset extreme weather losses through such interventions as promoting the use of hurricane nails and forbidding construction in flood-prone areas.

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