A Stroke Of Good Fortune

Before starting his 30-year career in the insurance industry, Brian Wilcox, the incoming president of the Toronto Insurance Conference (TIC), had already played through one round of Life’s Grand Tour.

It started with a golf tour: Wilcox left Canada in the early 1960s to go to school in the United States, at the New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on a golf scholarship. “I fully intended to play golf as a means of living, but I got waylaid at school and decided studying was a better idea,” Wilcox says. He notes that getting paid every two weeks seemed like a better bet than basing one’s earnings on the unpredictable speed and lie of the golf greens. “In those days, we’re talking back in the early ’60s now, we didn’t make money on the tour [in the same way elite, professional golfers do now].

“I can actually thank my accounting professor who was the head of the accounting department for changing my life around.”

Wilcox graduated with his B. A. in Accounting. He said the night after his graduation, he got married and he and his wife moved to Toronto. The Canadian insurance industry can thank the U. S. government for Wilcox’s re-location to Canada. It was 1967 and the American government had started drafting recruits to fight in the Vietnam War.

“I had already received [a draft notice] from the [U. S.] government, advising me that my visa was up July 1 and if I decided to stay in the United States, I was to report,” Wilcox said, noting that he was Canadian and his wife was American. “We left and came to Canada.”

The next leg of the tour was accounting, Wilcox decided. In Canada, he interviewed with an accounting firm that insisted he do some more schooling, despite his good transcript and four university years in the United States. Instead, Wilcox walked out of the meeting and called up a manager at Mercer’s, where he had been working in the accounting department cranking out pension evaluations.

“We had lunch and I started working that afternoon at Mercer’s,” Wilcox recalls. “My career started in 1967 in the benefits [department].”

He shuffled around in different portfolios; a year and a half later, he came to rest at Marsh Mac International, part of the Mercer chain, and spent about three months travelling back and forth from New York.

“They were training me and then…all of us were moved to Peru, to Lima,” Wilcox said.

“We had to work with one of their companies down there, a correspondent company, just to do a specific thing relative to a worker’s compensation situation that has existed in Peru. They saw the opportunity to make a killing and that’s exactly what happened. I only lasted a year.”

That’s because his first-born son was on the way. And so Wilcox and his wife returned to Canada once again and had that big discussion of where they should stay. After the decision was made to raise the family in Canada, Wilcox began doing some consulting work in 1976 at what is now known as Aon.

He started in the general insurance side. But after the passing of his father, he shuffled responsibilities yet again. “Dad was a former risk manager for Maple Leaf Mills. He had a heart attack and … although I was in general insurance, it was deemed that I was the most likely person to come in and do it because I knew everybody I needed to know at Maple Leaf.”

Since joining the world of insurance, Wilcox has never been disappointed.

“Probably the thing that kept me in the business was that I was given the opportunity with the account base that I had, during the core of my career with Aon, that I found to be so interesting,” Wilcox said. “The opportunity to travel was one [interesting facet about the insurance side]; to meet people worldwide was another; and the most satisfying thing is to see how these industries actually work.

“For young people coming along, it’s one of the reasons they can get hooked on this, at least on the commercial side. There’s a wealth of information available. [Insurance and risk management is interesting] if you want to learn how to make bread, how uranium actually becomes uranium — all the rest of this good stuff. It’s fascinating to me and I think it would be fascinating to other people also.”

Not only wanting to learn, but reform, Wilcox was persuaded by a colleague to join the executive of the TIC. Wilcox was reluctant at first, not having a good feel for what the organization did outside of its annual golf tournament (of course) and black tie event.

He joined after learning TIC was making some bolder political moves to improve the position of commercial insurance brokers generally. This entailed working more closely with the Insurance Brokers Association of Canada.

With help from IBAC’s political clout in some instances, TIC has managed to push commercial brokers’ concerns on the national agenda.

In particular, the TIC has three files open that Wilcox will be working to close.

The first, changes to Part XIII of Canada’s Insurance Corporations Act, may be the toughest of the files to resolve.

TIC members are concerned the costs required to make the changes contained in Part XIII will have to be borne by somebody, and there are fears that [re]insurers will have no choice but to pass those costs along to their policyholders.

Also, Wilcox noted, TIC members don’t agree with the government’s proposal to license business according to where the business of insurance takes place, the test of which is currently a source of confusion in the industry.

Second, the TIC is working with IBAC and the Canada Revenue Agency to create an Export List. It is hoped the list will expedite the process for determining eligibility for excise tax exemptions on commercial insurance. To be eligible for an excise tax exemption, TIC clients must prove they were required to purchase unlicensed insurance because no licensed insurance was available. The Export List itemizes insurance coverages that are not available from insurers licensed in Canada.

The third file is thought to be the easiest file to close. TIC has created a pandemic endorsement. “What happens if something like [a pandemic happens] and everything shuts down and you’ve got all of the policies out there, both personal and commercial, renewing when there’s nobody around to renew them?” Wilcox says. “Does it just go into a deep hole and there’s no cover there on business?

“It was [former TIC president] Brenda Rose who said: ‘Well, why don’t we have a pandemic endorsement?'”

TIC is working with the Insurance Bureau of Canada to bring about the endorsement.

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For young people coming along, [the chance to know about so many different kinds of businesses is] one of the reasons they can get hooked on this, at least on the commercial side.