Six Montreal and three Toronto life companies no longer take new business.

As against the one small branch office of the Phœnix in 1804, in 1911 Montreal could boast of possessing 141 offices devoted exclusively to the handling of insurance in one form or another, and eighty-three agents. No reliable and exact estimate of the actual number of people who are employed here by insurance firms and companies is obtainable, but it is safe to put it up in the thousands.

In fire insurance Montreal has been made the headquarters of many of those great British corporations who occupy an impregnable position in the world in fire underwriting, a number of American companies also handling their Canadian connection from this point. Several enterprises with a Canadian backing also operate from here, while every fire insurance concern in the Dominion of any importance is represented in Montreal by agents of influence or by special managers and staffs.

Canada has very largely assumed control of its own life insurance business, and Montreal financiers have always been to the front in developing this phase of underwriting. Those British and American corporations which have selected this city as a starting point for their Canadian ventures are among the most powerful in the world, and have materially assisted in placing Montreal in the first place among Canadian cities in the business done in life insurance.

Montreal can also show that it has always lead in that section of insurance enterprise covered by the term “miscellaneous” and which includes the writing of policies on automobiles, accidents, employer’s liability, plate glass, steam boilers, burglary, sickness, inland transit, sprinkler leakage, titles, live stock, hail, weather and tornado, etc.

To-day the bulked insurance business of Montreal institutions is probably the greatest of any one city in the world by reason of the fact that most of those influential enterprises which are split up and divided among a number of cities in Great Britain and the United States have concentrated their head offices for Canada in this city.

It is safe to say that next to the great banking and railway business done by local institutions more money is handled by the insurance companies than by any other group of enterprises.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] An article by H.M.P. Eckhardt has been mainly used in this chapter.—Ed.