As Canada’s largest property and casualty (P&C) insurer, Intact has a unique opportunity and obligation to advance net zero. After all, the P&C sector is where climate damages first hit home, quite literally.
As with many large Canadian companies, Intact is doing a pretty good job with its own operational emissions, but this isn’t where the company can have the most impact. Rather, we need to look at its financing and its underwriting.
Financing
Intact is a major investor, with a $42.6 billion investment portfolio. And, those investments can either make climate change worse or better.
Perhaps the best news in Intact’s 2025 climate report is that its absolute financed emissions continue to go down, this year by ~14%, and the year prior 5.7%. For this, Intact deserves credit.
Our past critiques of Intact have focused on its lack of specificity in policies to keep reducing financed emissions. This year there are some improvements and some ongoing gaps.
The most substantive improvement comes in Intact’s reporting on portfolio engagement. The company has met its 2025 target to engage with its top 20 carbon-emitting investees, representing 7% of holdings and over 60% of weighted average carbon intensity.
Intact discloses it tracks each company individually through an engagement scorecard and has provided some detail on how the firms, on aggregate, are performing against their engagement criteria. They were also categorized by the level of follow-up deemed necessary. The company has set its next milestone, aiming to repeat this exercise with an updated list of top emitters by 2027, expected to cover roughly 70% of portfolio emissions.
This level of detail is good progress. But engagement frameworks ultimately succeed or fail based on what happens when companies don’t perform, and here, the disclosure thins.
In 2024, Intact stepped back from previously disclosed commitments around divestment and exclusion. In earlier reporting, the company drew relatively clear lines: coal companies without a credible 2035 exit plan would be removed, and oil and gas firms would face exclusion by 2024 if they failed to demonstrate meaningful transition progress. Those commitments are no longer public.
On the climate solutions side, Intact has also expanded its sustainable finance reporting, disclosing that $1.2 billion of its portfolio aligns with the Climate Bonds Initiative Taxonomy. The breakdown spans government bonds, corporate bonds, common stock, and private debt, with concentrations in government securities, real estate, financials, and utilities. This new granularity is welcome, but the absence of an overall climate solutions financing target weakens the impact of the disclosure.
Underwriting
On the insurance side, progress remains stalled. Intact has reported insurance-associated emissions to regulators but has yet to publish the data or set reduction targets, citing data quality issues. There is no net-zero commitment for underwriting, no formal engagement framework for insured companies, and no underwriting renewables target or exclusion policy for new fossil fuel expansion; an area where several global peers have already stated clear policies.
The Biggest Gap
While Intact makes progress towards reducing its own emissions, its largest gap is the refusal of the company to talk about overall societal emissions reductions. Check out any of CEO Charles Brindamour’s statements, and you’ll find lots of language about adaptation, but none about emissions reductions.
The reason this is such a huge gap is Intact refuses to take a position on what state it is trying to adapt to, which undermines the whole strategy. It won’t hit a target it won’t define. And, beyond a certain point, climate chaos renders the world uninsurable.
In past engagements with the company, it has characterized this as “staying in its lane,” which makes little sense because the mitigation lane is crashing into the adaptation one, rendering it impassable. There aren’t really two lanes.
This is a huge blind spot for Intact, and indeed for the Canadian P&C industry in general. Until we see more rigour in assessing a safe climate future, and courage in advocating for one, the medium to long-term prospects for the insurance industry look bleak.
