Manufacturing insurance built for the Surrey operation that ships product today and gets sued about it two years from now.

CGL is a broad policy that covers third-party injury and property damage arising from your operations. Inside the CGL, there are different sections. "Ongoing operations" covers what happens while you're actively doing the work — someone injured on your shop floor, damage during delivery or installation. "Products & Completed Operations" covers what happens after the work is done — a product you manufactured fails months or years later and causes damage or injury somewhere else. For manufacturers, the second section is usually where the real exposure sits.

Depends on your product, your customers, and your export exposure. $2M is a baseline for smaller domestic manufacturers. $5M is common for mid-size operations or manufacturers with larger-customer contracts. Higher limits may be available depending on the product, market, and insurer appetite. A product with a safety profile (something that could injure an end user), or sold into the US, or into industrial customers, should be sized higher than a simple consumer product with limited exposure. We walk through the sizing question on a 15-minute review.

A few ways. First, the territory language on your CGL needs to include the US, not just Canada. Second, limits often need to be higher because US product liability claims tend to be larger. Third, you may want extended reporting and defence-in-the-US coverage. Fourth, your customers may require specific CGL confirmations as part of their purchase orders. We work with exporters regularly. The policy needs to be built for the distribution footprint, not just the manufacturing location.

Product recall covers the costs of notifying customers, retrieving product, replacing it, and administering the recall when a defect is discovered in a batch, lot, or serial range. It's separate from CGL — CGL pays for damage the defective product caused, product recall pays for the costs of pulling product back before more damage happens. Food manufacturers, consumer goods with safety profiles, anything with regulatory oversight, and exporters almost always need it. Industrial components and custom one-offs sometimes don't.

First, don't admit fault or make commitments over the phone — the investigation comes before the response. Second, get us involved immediately. Notify your advisor, preserve the relevant production records, inspection reports, and shipping documents. Do not throw anything out. Our claims team — one of our advisors, preferably the advisor who placed your coverage, or a senior commercial advisor — stays on the phone with the adjuster through the investigation. The investigation determines whether the product actually failed, whether the failure is covered, and what the policy response looks like.

Several sections pull at once. Property covers the building, equipment, and inventory destroyed or damaged. Equipment breakdown covers certain machinery losses. Business interruption covers lost income plus ongoing expenses while you're down. If contract penalties apply for late delivery to customers, those can be part of the BI claim. The indemnity period matters most — 12 months is standard, 18 months is often more realistic for manufacturers with custom production equipment.

For existing Prime commercial clients with active policies: within 2 business hours, during commercial desk hours (Monday to Friday, 8:30am–6pm). For new clients: same business day once we have complete information. Manufacturing COIs are among the most complex — they often list multiple customer entities as additional insureds, reference specific policy sections, and require confirmation of coverage territory and limits. Two hours gives us time to build it right. If we miss the window for an existing client, we send you a $50 gift card.

"Fully covered" is a sentence, not a coverage. The 15-minute Coverage Review answers the specific questions: what's your Products & Completed Operations sub-limit, what's your territory language, is product recall endorsed, what's your business interruption indemnity period, are your contents limits sized against peak inventory? You get the answers in writing. You keep the document. If "fully covered" was accurate, we'll tell you. If it wasn't, you'll see exactly where.

Yes. People on our Fleetwood team speak English, Punjabi, and Hindi every day. Coverage reviews, claims, Certificate of Insurance requests, or walking through the policy line by line — all of it can happen in your preferred language. Ask for Kul, Kuljeet, or Seema by name when you call.

Only in that we know these industrial parks well. Our office is in Fleetwood, but we've written policies for manufacturers across Surrey's industrial corridors for 30 years. The address is where we sit — the service reaches wherever your facility is. We're also happy to meet on-site if walking the floor helps us scope the coverage properly.

Yes. Manufacturing policies go stale faster than most commercial policies, because revenue, inventory, production volume, and customer base change quickly. A policy written two years ago when you were doing $2M in revenue doesn't fit a business doing $5M with larger customers and broader distribution. If anything significant has changed — new customers, new territory, new product lines, new equipment — we should talk before renewal, not after a claim.

Over the past decade, a lot of BC family brokers have been bought up by national consolidators and insurance-company-owned networks. Prime hasn't. Same Shergill family. Same Fleetwood address. Same voices on the phone when a customer's plant manager calls with a failed-product complaint. For a manufacturer, continuity of the advisor relationship matters — because product liability claims can land years after the policy was written, and the person who wrote it needs to still be there.