Intact Insurance

We’ve been insured with Intact for over 5 years. Homeowner’s coverage has included a city home, a vacation home, and a small home-​based business. Both homes were covered under identical, comprehensive policies.
In December 2010 we had a burglary at our vacation property and the claim of $ 3000 was paid out without any hassle. We were then promised that we would not be penalized with higher rates because of this single claim.
However, consider the following table that shows our total premium each year over the past 5:
2010 — $ 1349
2011 — $ 1790
2012 — $ 2162
2013 — $ 2201
2014 — $ 2742
You can see that in 5 years the total premium doubled. Two insurance agents told us that Intact had huge claims losses over the Calgary flooding in 2013 and had raised premiums for all customers in Canada as a result. That alone seems unfair; yet it doesn’t explain the huge increases, far above the inflation rate, between spring 2010 and spring 2013.
We were prepared to pay the exorbitant premium of $ 2742 this year because it is very difficult to find companies that would include liability on our home-​based business in the regular homeowner’s policy. However, the Intact underwriter was obviously intent on getting rid of us because he told our insurance agent that the company would only insure us if we could prove that we were living in our vacation home 2 days out of every week in the year. That was an absolutely ridiculous request so we switched to another insurance company.
The moral of this story: Beware if you are offered homeowner’s insurance with Intact. They do a lot of TV advertising and everything sounds rosy. However, we have never been treated so unfairly by an insurance company in 45 years of owing a home.