The Way Forward

I remember the day everything changed.

It was two days after the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus to be a global pandemic. On that Friday, Canadian Underwriter prepared for what has turned out to be a three-month stint of working remotely from home.

Now, like every other industry around us, we find ourselves caught in the grip of a deadly pandemic. And the cure has resulted in the side effect of a seriously ailing economy; solvency and employement are top of mind.

We are fortunate indeed to be covering the P&C insurance industry, which is built to withstand the worst that can happen around us, and is therefore an essential service. But it would be silly to say the economic conditions around us have had no impact on our operations. Like everyone else in Canada, we have had to change to stay the same.

Take this issue, for example. We have doubled up on our news in June and July, bringing you the results of our inaugural Trusted Advisor Survey and our much-anticipated Stats Guide. You will see double issues of our print product for the rest of the calendar year, including our Specialty Markets Guide, our National Brokers Survey, and our 2021 Market Outlook edition. The semi-monthly distribution of our print issues is a temporary measure designed to give you everything you are accustomed to reading in our print editions, as we shift our resources and priorities to accommodate what we hope will be a short and finite period of economic uncertainty.

Another shift we are making is the same one all of you are making – an emphasis on digital services.

The pandemic highlighted the value of our online news. From the get-go, we attempted to get your questions answered about the impact of the pandemic on Canada’s P&C insurance industry. We developed a COVID-19 Hub on our website and invited industry executives to discuss pandemic-related issues on special webinars.

We are also enhancing our website to make it easy for you to find our content, identify key issues of the day, and increase the number of industry voices in our daily online news.

So all in all, it’s “business as usual” at Canadian Underwriter — only differently.