Confederation Life Insurance Company, also known as Confederation Life, was a major

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

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company and

financial services Financial services are the Service (economics), economic services provided by the finance industry, which encompasses a broad range of businesses that manage money, including credit unions, banks, credit-card companies, insurance companies, acco ...

provider. Its global head office was located in

Toronto Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the ancho ...

in what is now the Rogers Building. The company had operations in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Bermuda, and an inactive office in Cuba.

History

The company was founded in 1871 by John Kay Macdonald (1837–1928) in

, then established operations in the UK in 1906 (with a head office at

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) and later into the

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with offices in

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. Macdonald retired in 1920 and was succeeded by Charles Strange Macdonald from 1921 to 1946 and then John Kenneth Macdonald from 1946 to 1969. John Kenneth MacDonald's daughters, Peggy Latimer and Ann Macintosh, never were operationally involved in the firm, but they did inherit ownership from their father. In 1969, J. Craig Davidson became president and for the first time, the firm was no longer led by a member of the Macdonald family.

Demise

Confederation Life was forced into liquidation in 1994. The process began on August 11 of that year. The international operations of the company made the liquidation process somewhat complex. The company had financial obligations to 260,000 individual policyholders in Canada and another 1.5 million people were members of a group insurance plan through the company. During the liquidation process, CompCorp, by then called

Assuris Assuris is a nonprofit organization under Canadian federal regulation to protect policyholders of life insurance instruments if a life insurance company becomes insolvent. It is designed to allow a block of policies to be transferred to a solven ...

, was able to guarantee the assets of all policyholders, and the process cost the compensation fund only CA$5 million. The various blocks of business held by the company were taken over by several different Canadian and American insurance companies. The liquidator was

KPMG KPMG International Limited (or simply KPMG) is a multinational professional services network, and one of the Big Four accounting organizations. Headquartered in Amstelveen, Netherlands, although incorporated in London, England, KPMG is a net ...

. As of 2010, the process was still ongoing. It was the third liquidation of an insurance company in Canada in consecutive years, Les Coopérants (1992) and Sovereign Life (1993) and was followed in 2012 by Union of Canada Life.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Confederation Life Insurance Company, In Liquidation
Defunct financial services companies of Canada

History

Demise

See also

References

External links