Desjardins Insurance review

Desjardins sells directly — online, by phone, or through its agents (many inherited from State Farm Canada, which it bought in 2015). For car insurance it’s concentrated in Ontario, Quebec and Alberta.

Yes — Desjardins Insurance sells home insurance as well as car (plus other lines like life and travel), so you can put both on one account and take the multi-policy discount. Bundling home and auto is usually one of the biggest savings a Canadian insurer offers, so it’s worth asking for a combined quote.

Desjardins Insurance offers Ajusto (10% intro, then up to 10–25% off). It uses an app or device to measure how you actually drive. If you’re a calm, mostly-daytime driver it can meaningfully cut your premium; if you brake hard, drive late at night or rack up long distances, the savings shrink. Turn it on if your driving genuinely reflects low risk.

It depends which policy you're buying — and that distinction matters. Desjardins Insurance's lines are underwritten by separate legal entities that carry their own ratings: car insurance — AA (group) from DBRS; home insurance — AA (group) from DBRS; life insurance — A (Excellent) from AM Best; health insurance — A (Excellent) from AM Best; travel insurance — A (Excellent) from AM Best. We show each line's own rating rather than applying one arm's grade to the whole group, because a strong rating on one entity says nothing about another.

Desjardins Insurance stands out for bundling & telematics (Ajusto). Backed by Desjardins Group’s DBRS AA, and roughly Canada’s #2 P&C insurer after acquiring State Farm Canada (2015). If those things matter most to you, it’s worth a close look; if your priority is something else, compare it against the insurers that rate highest on that pillar.

The watch-outs we found: auto availability concentrated in ON/QC/AB; no standalone P&C-entity financial rating published (group rating only). We spell these out so you can weigh them before buying — every insurer has trade-offs, and knowing them upfront is the point of a real review.

Desjardins Insurance ranks #4 of the 10 insurers we scored, at 80.8/100. It’s strongest on financial strength and has the most room to improve on customer satisfaction. The highest-scoring insurer in our ratings is Intact Insurance (86.2/100).

No, and that is the main reason to consider it. Desjardins states coverage starts right away with no waiting period and no graded benefit, so the full face amount is payable from day one — including in the first two policy years. That is genuinely uncommon: most Canadian simplified-issue and guaranteed-acceptance plans refund only your premiums, sometimes with interest, if you die of non-accidental causes within the first two years. You answer four health questions, there is no medical exam, ages 50 to 75 qualify, and coverage comes in fixed bands of $5,000, $7,500, $10,000, $15,000 or $20,000. Accidental death before age 85 pays five times the face amount.

No. Desjardins runs online quote and price-estimate tools, but you cannot complete a purchase through them — the application has to go through a person. You have several routes: a caisse branch, a captive Desjardins Agent, a financial security advisor, or an independent MGA broker, a channel Desjardins has been expanding. The 50+ product is different again and is phone-only, at 1-877-838-7617, Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern. Be aware that Desjardins Agents are captive and sell only Desjardins products, so they will not comparison-shop the market for you.

Yes, it is available nationally, but the practical experience differs by province. Desjardins is a Quebec-rooted cooperative headquartered in Lévis, and its in-person footprint — caisse branches and captive agents — is concentrated in Quebec and Ontario. Its presence elsewhere largely stems from taking over the State Farm Canada agent network, a transition completed at the end of 2019. Analysts consistently flag fewer in-person options outside Quebec and Ontario as a drawback. If you live in Western Canada or Atlantic Canada, expect to deal with Desjardins by phone or through an independent broker rather than walking into a branch.

Because those sites are out of date. AM Best assigned Desjardins Financial Security Life Assurance Company a Financial Strength Rating of A (Excellent) and a Long-Term Issuer Credit Rating of a+ (Excellent), both with a stable outlook, in May 2026. Several major Canadian comparison sites still describe Desjardins as 'not rated by AM Best', which was true until then. Be careful about a related confusion: Morningstar DBRS rates Desjardins Group at AA, but that is the whole cooperative including the bank, not the life insurance subsidiary. Published asset figures also vary wildly between sources for exactly this reason.

It is a fair thing to weigh, though it was a group-wide incident rather than a life-insurance one. An employee exfiltrated customer data over roughly two years; it was detected in December 2018 and disclosed in June 2019. Exposed information included names, dates of birth, addresses and social insurance numbers. The affected count was revised upward from 2.9 million to around 4.2 million, and the class-action settlement — reported at up to roughly CA$201 million — ultimately covered close to 9.7 million people, with payments for those affected, larger amounts where identity theft occurred, and five years of free credit monitoring. Desjardins has since rebuilt its security programme.

Sixty days from the date your group health coverage ends. Apply inside that window and Desjardins will issue individual health coverage without evidence of insurability, regardless of your age — no medical questionnaire, no exam, pre-existing conditions included. Miss it and you're a standard applicant: you must be 18 to 64 and pass medical underwriting, and anything you're already being treated for may be excluded. Note the deadlines differ by product. Life and critical illness conversions must be done within 31 days and only if you're 65 or younger.

Because major restorative work and orthodontics carry a 24-month waiting period, and only the Enhanced dental module covers them at all. The Basic dental module covers preventive and basic restorative care at 80% and excludes major care permanently. On Enhanced, preventive and basic care start at 100% immediately, but crowns, bridges, dentures and braces only become claimable two years after your policy starts. This is deliberate anti-selection design — it stops people buying a policy the week their dentist quotes them for a crown.

It ends. SOLO Healthcare is a one-year contract that renews automatically each year up to your 70th birthday, then stops. Your spouse's coverage ends at their 70th birthday or yours, whichever comes first, and children's coverage ends at their 26th birthday or your 70th. When your contract terminates, your spouse and children can continue in their own name on a new contract without providing new proof of good health. If you want coverage past 70, plan the switch to another insurer's retiree product well before that birthday.

Outside Quebec, the Basic drug module pays 70% of your first $7,142 in eligible drug costs, capped at $5,000 per person per year. The Enhanced module pays 90% of the first $11,111, capped at $10,000 per person per year, and includes oral contraceptives, patches, injections and the Mirena IUD. Both reimburse based on the least expensive generic equivalent, so if you insist on a brand name where a generic exists, you pay the difference. In Quebec the module works differently — it tops up RAMQ at 100% to $10,000.

For short trips, probably. Both plans include up to $5,000,000 per trip in emergency travel medical, but only for the first 30 days of any given trip, with a total of 90 travel days per year. That covers most vacations and business travel. It does not cover snowbirds: if you spend three months in Florida, days 31 onward are uninsured under this benefit and you need a separate policy. It also doesn't include trip cancellation or interruption, which is a distinct product.

Unusually, it publishes the actual test. Over the applicable window — 90 days if you are under 55 or bought the Stable for 3 months option, 182 days if you are 55 or older without it — you must be able to answer no to all of these: did you have new symptoms or were existing symptoms more frequent or intense; did you see or were you waiting to see a doctor other than for a routine check-up, or were you referred to another doctor; did you have surgery or was surgery recommended; and did you undergo or were you told to undergo an examination or test, including ones where results are still outstanding. A single yes makes the condition not stable.

If you are 55 or older it is often the highest-value line on the quote. Without it, Desjardins tests your conditions over the 182 days before departure. With it, the window shrinks to 90 days. That difference decides whether a medication adjustment or a specialist referral six months ago sits inside or outside the lookback — and a pre-existing condition exclusion is what turns a $150,000 hospital bill into a personal debt. Price the policy both ways. If any of your conditions changed between three and six months before departure, the option is not optional in practice.

Yes, and it is stated as a condition rather than a suggestion. The policy says you have to call the Assistance Service before going to a hospital or a medical clinic and follow their instructions, and that otherwise you may have to pay a portion of the expenses yourself. Desjardins does not publish a fixed penalty percentage the way Manulife CoverMe (20%) and RBC's Travel HealthProtector (30%) do, which cuts both ways — there is no stated cap on what a portion means. Call from Canada or the US on 1-855-368-6924, or collect worldwide on 1-418-647-5140.

For single trips, yes — Desjardins does not publish an upper age limit on single-trip coverage, and the policyholder minimum is 18. The multi-trip annual plan is the one with a hard ceiling: you must be under 81 to hold one. That makes 81 the practical pivot for snowbirds, who need to move from an annual plan to single-trip policies bought each season. Ages 61 to 80 should also ask about the Quattra Advantage discount on multi-trip plans. Expect a medical questionnaire, and expect the 182-day stability rule unless you buy the Stable for 3 months option.

It is an overall maximum of $5,000,000 per insured person per trip, and everything sits inside it — hospitalisation, physician fees, air ambulance and repatriation, plus sub-limited items like living expenses at $200 per day to a $2,000 total. Repatriation by air ambulance from the southern US can run well into six figures on its own, so the limit is not as generous as it sounds once a serious event involves both extended ICU care and a medical flight home. It is half of Manulife CoverMe's $10 million and RBC's unlimited medical, though for the overwhelming majority of claims $5 million is untouched.