Alister Campbell to lead PACICC in February 2019

Alister Campbell, a 30-year industry veteran, has been appointed president and CEO of the Property and Casualty Insurance Compensation Corporation (PACICC), effective Feb. 4, 2019.

Campbell’s appointment marks the retirement date of PACICC’s long-time president and CEO, Paul Kovacs, who will continue to serve as executive director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR). “Paul has served PACICC with distinction for 15 years and finding the right successor was certainly a challenge,” Lawrie Savage, chair of the corporation’s board of directors, said in a news release.

PACICC is an industry-funded, non-profit resolution authority for Canada’s property and casualty insurance industry. The corporation’s mission is to protect eligible policyholders from undue financial loss in the event that a member insurer becomes insolvent.

Campbell said in a public statement that he always hoped he would be able to complete his career with some form of public service. “The opportunity to lead PACICC gives me the chance to play a central role in the engagement between our industry and our regulators, to ensure we continue to protect consumers in a continuously changing marketplace,” he said. “I am excited to take up that challenge.”

Campbell has held CEO-level positions with several major insurers in the last decade, including the Guarantee Company of North America and Zurich Canada. He is also a senior fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute, a member of the board of directors of CRU Catastrophe Response Unit and chair of the advisory board of Boxx Insurance.

He holds an MBA from the Wharton Graduate School of Business, an MsC in Economic History from the London School of Economics and an Honours BA in Economics and History from the University of Toronto.

Since 1996, Kovacs has been a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a forum for the study of climate issues which won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Kovacs has written more than 200 publications and articles and has been a popular commentator on insurance, disaster safety and economic policy for more than 35 years.