Who Killed Confederation Life?: The Inside Story

by Rod McQueen

When Confederation Life Insurance Co. was seized by regulators on August 11, 1994, it ranked as the fourth largest insurance company in Canada, and was among the top 30 in North America. With $19 billion (Cdn.) in assets, the company’s collapse wiped out 4,400 jobs, threw into disarray owners of 250,000 policies and contracts in Canada, plus another 800,000 outside the country. It also severely damaged confidence in Canada’s substantial insurance industry.

In a no-holds-barred account of the debâcle, financial journalist Rod McQueen documents how it all happened, and shows how Confederation Life’s failure was due to the combined failure of the company and the larger public sector. Directors did not hold management sufficiently accountable, officers let things get out of hand, regulators were tardy, then threatened with too small a stick, auditors missed the big picture, politicians showed neither courage nor conviction, and, rather than help, industry representatives dithered. Any one individual among those six constituencies could have affected the course of the corporation’s history sufficiently to prevent its collapse.

In 1994 McQueen wrote a detailed three-part article in the Financial Post about the Confederation Life scandal. Now, having extensively researched the history of the company, and having conducted over a hundred interviews, he has written a “whodunit” tale of Canada’s biggest business story of the decade.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

As a journalist for thirty years I've been lucky enough to live and work professionally in London, England, Washington, D.C., Florence, Italy, and Toronto, Canada, where I now live. During that time I've written for numerous magazines and newspapers, and have also done broadcast work. My major focus has been business, the economy, and international trade, but I've also written about politics and entertainment. As the author of more than a dozen books I won the National Business Book Award for Who Killed Confederation Life? and the Canadian Authors Association award in history for the #1 best-seller, The Eatons: The Rise and Fall of Canada's Royal Family.

(source: http://www.rodmcqueen.com/about)

Reviews

[Melon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great review of the Confed Life debacle. Some parts are slow, but it's very thorough.