Who regulates insurance where I live?

How it works

underwriting is the part nobody controls

How long each stage takes

1. 01The discovery meetingThirty minutes. Online, with no products.
2. 02The suitability recordOne sitting. A licence requires it before advice.
3. 03The design meetingOne hour. More than one route, guarantees shown apart.
4. 04Underwriting2 to 6 weeks. Decided by the insurer, sometimes longer.
5. 05First conversation to a contract in force6 to 10 weeks. When nothing waits on a medical.

Insurance is supervised federally for solvency and provincially for everything a consumer meets. Licensing, conduct rules, complaints and title protection sit with the province, which is why the register to search is the one for your own address. Each register is free and needs only a name.

The federal role and the provincial role are carried out by different offices entirely, and neither substitutes for the other. The federal regulator examines whether an insurer holds enough capital to meet its promises across the whole country, while the provincial body examines whether a specific representative is licensed to sell in that province, whether the sale followed the province's own conduct rules and whether a title such as Financial Security Advisor is being used correctly. A representative can be fully licensed under federal solvency rules being satisfied and still be unlicensed in a province where they have never applied, and neither office corrects for the other, since the two systems answer different questions entirely. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions carries out the federal side for insurers incorporated federally, and its published supervisory work is aimed at the industry as a whole and not at any individual household's own transaction, so it is not the office a consumer calls about a single representative.

The cost or the catch

no legal limit, a practical one

How many contracts you may own

1. 01There is no legal limit on the number in Canada
2. 02Financial underwriting sets the practical limit
3. 03Total coverage in force is assessed against income
4. 04Insurers share this information with one another

Now here's the key. A name on a website is not a licence. Title protection also varies: Quebec and Ontario have it in force, New Brunswick's came into force in 2026 with its transition still running, and Alberta, Manitoba and British Columbia have none, so the title may be used there while the licence is still needed. Verify the record, and not the description.

The plainer bad news is that a licence check only confirms that a person is permitted to sell, not that a specific transaction was suitable or that a specific illustration was accurate. Fraud involving an unlicensed individual claiming to represent a real insurer does happen, sometimes using a genuine insurer's own name and branding without any relationship to that company at all, and a household that skips the registry check because a name, a logo and a phone number all looked legitimate has skipped the one step that would have caught it before money changed hands and not after, and a payment sent to an unlicensed party is rarely recoverable once it has left the household's own account.

What varies by province, by insurer and by year

Six provinces are where this practice places business, and each one runs its own separate register under its own separate regulator, each with its own online search tool, its own hours of update and its own way of listing a suspended or revoked licence: the Autorité des marchés financiers in Quebec, the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario, the Alberta Insurance Council, the Insurance Council of Manitoba, the Financial and Consumer Services Commission in New Brunswick, and the Insurance Council of British Columbia. None of these six registers is searchable from another province's website, so a consumer moving between provinces has to know which register now applies rather than assuming the old one still does. A representative licensed in Quebec who also serves clients in Ontario, for example, needs a separate licence from the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario in addition to the Quebec one, and each licence can be verified only through that province's own system, never through the other one.

Title protection itself has also changed over time rather than being fixed since some distant date. New Brunswick's protection came into force only in 2026, meaning a document written even one year earlier could describe the rule differently and still have been accurate when it was written, which is exactly why the date on a source, and the province it names, matter as much as its content. A document that does not state when it was written, or which province it describes, should be treated as unreliable on this specific point until confirmed against the current register.

What to ask, and of whom

a leveraged strategy, described as one

What an insured retirement plan depends on

1. 01A participating contract funded heavily from the start
2. 02The contract assigned to a lender as collateral
3. 03A line of credit drawn during retirement
4. 04The death benefit repays the lender at the end
5. 05Everything depends on the lender continuing to lend

Ask the provincial regulator directly, using its own free public register, for the exact licence status of both the individual and the company involved, searched by the full legal name and not a nickname or a business name that might not match the licensed name precisely, since registers are built to match a legal name exactly and a near miss can return no result at all even where the person is properly licensed. This is the one question a regulator is actually equipped to answer with certainty from its own records.

A different question, whether a specific product or a specific illustration is appropriate for a household's own circumstances, does not belong to the regulator at all. That question belongs to the household's own Financial Security Advisor in the first instance and, where tax consequences are involved, to an accountant, since a regulator's register confirms a licence and nothing about suitability. A third, narrower question, whether the insurer itself remains solvent, is answered by the federal supervisor's published reports rather than by any provincial register at all, and Assuris adds a further layer, describing what happens to a contract if an insurer were ever to fail regardless of how solvent it appeared beforehand. Confusing the two is one of the more common and more costly misunderstandings a consumer can make, because a fully licensed representative can still recommend a product poorly matched to a household's own circumstances, and a licence record will never reveal that on its own.

Who this matters to most, and least

an irreversible trade, described plainly

What a life annuity exchanges

1. Capital is handed to an insurer
2. The insurer pays a fixed amount until you die
3. It removes the risk of outliving your money
4. The capital is generally gone
5. The decision cannot be undone

This matters most to anyone about to sign an application or hand over a first payment, since that is the moment a licence check is cheapest to do and most valuable if something is wrong. It matters least to an existing client of a long established, clearly licensed practice with years of prior statements and correspondence on file, though even there a periodic recheck costs a few minutes and confirms nothing has lapsed, particularly after any move to a new province, since a licence held in one province does not automatically transfer to another without a fresh application, and a representative who moved provinces recently may hold an application still pending and not an active licence.

What this page does not tell you

This page describes which register to search and why the answer differs by province. It does not tell a reader whether a particular representative's advice was appropriate, since a licence record says nothing about the quality of a specific recommendation, and confirming a licence should never be mistaken for confirming that the advice itself was sound. Where a household suspects it dealt with an unlicensed person or an outright fraud, the provincial regulator's own enforcement branch, not this page, is the body that investigates and acts on that complaint, and where money has already been lost, a lawyer is a further resource this page cannot replace. Understand that much and you will not be misled.