A St. Thomas, Ont., woman whose home insurance was cancelled after two claims in three years found there was no regulator to turn to for help, a gap that leaves Ontario homeowners with far weaker protections than the province gives drivers under the same insurance system.
Christine Buechler’s insurer sent a cancellation letter in August citing “frequency of claims,” after she filed for a lost hearing aid worth about $4,000 three years earlier and an $18,000 basement flood caused by a sewer backup and tree root damage, CTV News reported Sept. 24, 2026. She said an agent had told her filing the first claim would not affect her rates. “I specifically asked him, ‘Will my insurance go up?’ And he said, ‘No, you should be fine,'” Buechler said, according to CP24, which reported her story alongside CTV.
Deemed high risk, Buechler had to call between 10 and 15 companies before she found a new insurer, CP24 reported. Insurance expert Fleur Dsouza told the outlet that more than two claims within five years “does pose a threat” to a homeowner’s ability to get favourable rates, and data from Lowestrates.ca show one claim over five years typically raises premiums 20 to 22 per cent, while two claims can push rates up by roughly 30 per cent.
What neither outlet’s coverage explored is why Buechler had no way to challenge the decision. Ontario’s Financial Services Regulatory Authority, the provincial insurance watchdog, says plainly on its website that when it comes to property coverage, it “cannot make an insurance company sell you a policy or mediate disputed or denied claims.” That is a markedly different standard than the one FSRA applies to auto insurance, where insurers must file their underwriting rules with the regulator and disclose which specific rule triggered a decline or non-renewal. No equivalent disclosure requirement exists for home insurance, leaving cancellation and non-renewal decisions almost entirely to insurers’ discretion.
The gap is not new, but it is becoming more consequential. FSRA’s own Home Insurance Thematic Review, published in June 2024 after examining the 20 largest property insurers in the province, found that 45 per cent of claim denials were logged only under the vague category of “other,” and that some insurers could not produce denial data at all because of system limitations. The regulator said it expects insurers to document their procedures more clearly, but stopped short of proposing new rules on non-renewal itself.
Buechler’s claims were not weather-related, but her case lands amid a broader shift in how Canadian insurers treat frequency of any kind. The Insurance Bureau of Canada says catastrophic weather claims have climbed from an average of about $400 million a year between 1983 and 2008 to roughly $2 billion a year since 2009, hitting a record $9.4 billion in insured losses in 2024. Four of the last five years now rank among the 10 costliest on record for the industry, IBC vice-president Liam McGuinty has said. As insurers tighten underwriting to manage that exposure, ordinary claims like a lost hearing aid or a backed-up sewer line are increasingly being swept into the same risk calculus, even though they have nothing to do with climate.
For Buechler and homeowners like her, that leaves a widening question unanswered: as insurers grow more cautious across the board, should Ontario extend the same disclosure protections drivers already have to the roughly two-thirds of the province’s households that carry home insurance, or will the industry continue to police itself. FSRA has not indicated it is reviewing that question, and no legislation currently before the province addresses it.
Via CTV News and CP24, with additional reporting from FSRA’s public filings and the Insurance Bureau of Canada. Read the original reporting at CTV News and CP24.
