25 Years Ago In The Actuarial Review

(From a column by Norman J. Bennett)

Maunderings

"Cet article doit être écrit en français entierement. J'éspère que mes coleagues Franco-Canadiens comprenderont et m'excuseront de ne pas le faire.

For our monolingual readers the above sentences mean that we are going to talk about Canada and its intrepid little band of casualty actuaries. This has only lately become a task for which I could work up any enthusiasm. Actuaries in Canada, until recent days, fell into two classifications: transplanted English life specialists with hyphenated names or two middle initials—and Carl Wilcken, who reportedly suffered the loneliness and anxieties of a Maytag repairman.

But suddenly and quite without any promotional buildup that I was aware of there have been appearing here and there in the Provinces typically fair-haired young Associates and Fellows flaunting their new halos and giving Canada a skilled if modest nucleus of casualty actuaries.

It has been my pleasure to work with most of these men in Toronto during the past year at the newly formed Insurer's Advisory Organization of Canada…The entire tactical reserve of Canadian casualty actuaries was called up to form the [actuarial] committee. Since the result was still rather spindle-shanked, three American actuaries of companies with substantial interests in the Canadian market were invited to expand the committee to ten members."

Editor's Note: Norman implied that there were only seven CAS members in Canada in 1975. This might understate the actual number, but probably not by much. The current CAS membership directory identifies 217 CAS members who have addresses in Canada; and they are not all men, as they evidently were in 1975.