The recently released Report to the CIA’s Project Oversight Group on Mortality Improvements Research (the “report”) represents the CIA’s first comprehensive review of mortality improvements (MI) in Canada since 2017. It explores different models for projecting mortality improvements into the future and different approaches for using historical calibration data. Accompanying the research paper, is a calibrated improvements model known as CanMI-2024. While the report does not make any explicit recommendations for the use of the model, the CIA’s stated desire of harmonizing MI assumptions across pension and insurance disciplines means that we expect the CanMI-2024 scale will soon be incorporated into accepted actuarial practice. We note that the current model raises some technical concerns, most notably a lack of smoothing that introduces some strange edge effects, that we assume will be addressed in time. The research also raises some questions around the level of adjustments and discretion allowed for in implementation that we will explore in more detail.
