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The route to Charles Brindamour’s family cabin snakes north from his hometown of Quebec City. Once or twice a year, he says goodbye to his wife, Josée, and their daughters, Emmanuelle and Juliette, and embarks on the familiar trip from Toronto for some solitude in the forest. His only company is a stack of books—but not the le Carré spy thrillers and geopolitical non-fiction he likes to read in what little spare time he has.
It’s a strategy that’s been 15 years in the making—ever since Brindamour took over the reins as CEO of Intact’s predecessor, ING Canada. Since then, he has overhauled the way the company sells policies, launched a dedicated natural-disaster claims team, and purchased a home restoration company in 2019 to speed up wait times for policyholders—all while steering Intact through a series of acquisitions to bulk up its share of the Canadian market and establish a beachhead in Europe.
In 2010, Feltmate notes, Brindamour funded the first major national conference on climate adaptation, which led to one of the first published papers on the subject. “He supported the foundational work behind the scenes,” says Feltmate, “often pulling the levers to have meetings with industry associations and ministers at the federal level.”
The place looked like an apocalyptic movie set, with burnt-out cars abandoned alongside charred remnants of once-healthy neighborhoods. Blue safety fencing blocked access to areas that were still deemed unsafe. Brindamour was awestruck by how quickly the fire spread, even jumping across rivers as it consumed 32,700 hectares over the course of a month.
“We changed our view of natural disasters,” Brindamour says. “Normally, you price insurance looking at the past. But in the case of climate change, you have to take the view that it’s trending upward prospectively, and the past is only a partial indication of the future.” “Charles will always say we don’t have a climate strategy, because climate is embedded in our business, and we bear it on our balance sheet,” says Intact’s CFO, Louis Marcotte. “I think that is a defining differentiator between us and everybody else.”
After graduating from Université Laval in 1992, Brindamour was hired by a small Quebec-based insurer, Commerce Group, that would later be acquired by ING Group. After stints in both Toronto and Europe, Brindamour returned to Canada and was named chief operating officer of ING Canada in 2007. A year later, at 38, he became CEO.
But he had much bigger aspirations. “We had to keep an eye on the size of the people we were competing with on a global level,” he says. “We started to look at potential targets that could help strengthen our position abroad and here in Canada.” Today, Brindamour spends a quarter of his time in London, where he continues integrating RSA into the Intact culture. Within the first five months, he changed a portion of the U.K. leadership and invested heavily in tech, on which it now spends $500 million a year.
Feltmate first met Brindamour in 2009 over lunch. The professor was looking for a partner to support research around severe weather events, and to say he was impressed with Brindamour—who’d just been promoted—is an understatement. In his words, Brindamour is a “pragmatic, benevolent visionary.” The CEO agreed to invest, and in 2016, Feltmate opened the Intact Centre for Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo.
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