Will CCIR require insurers to oversee their brokers’ market conduct?

Canadas insurance regulators are contemplating market conduct surveys in the spring of 2007 that may ask insurance companies what they are doing to oversee the market behaviour of the brokers and sales intermediaries acting on their behalf.
This is a development of which brokers should be aware, Dominion of Canada General Insurance Company president and CEO George Cooke told an Insurance Brokers of Toronto & Region luncheon in February.
Cooke noted brokers already have a self-regulatory model in Ontario, the Registered Insurance Brokers of Ontario (RIBO), and the model is second to none.
But draft survey questions currently contemplated by the Canadian Council of Insurance Regulators (CCIR) raise a concern that the regulators might rely on insurance companies as opposed to the broker self-regulation model to hold sales intermediaries such as brokers accountable for their market practices.
Concern about the regulators direction in this area is particularly applicable to provinces that do not have the same broker self-regulation model that exists in Ontario, Cooke suggested.
Whatever else I might like to do on a go-forward basis, becoming your regulator is not one of them, Cooke told more than 100 brokers who attended the IBTR luncheon.
The problem is that in many other provinces of Canada, there is no RIBO, he added. And what I dont want to see happen is companies getting forced into a RIBO-like role with the intermediaries with which they do business in those other provinces.
Or, perish the thought, that there would be any other thought to establishing that kind of regime here [in Ontario].
Cooke said he didnt want to be accused of fear-mongering, but the upcoming survey could be an issue brokers should pay attention to and watch very closely as an issue in the next year or so.