General liability is the policy everyone has. It is also the one people are most wrong about.
It answers harm you cause to other people and their property. It was never written to cover your advice, your own work, your staff, or the property you were looking after. Those are four separate policies, and most businesses hold one or two of them.
Start a quote file Read the short answer firstBad advice is errors and omissions.
Redoing your own job is on you.
Employee injury goes to WorkSafeBC.
What does a general liability policy not cover?
Four things surprise people most: advice you gave, the cost of putting your own faulty work right, injuries to your own employees, and damage to property that was in your care at the time. A general liability policy responds to bodily injury and property damage that you cause to somebody else. Every one of those four sits outside that sentence, and each is answered by a different policy.
This is not an insurer being narrow. It is what the product is. General liability is the cover a client or a landlord asks you to prove you have, which is exactly why so many businesses treat it as the policy that covers everything. The certificate proves you hold it. It does not tell you what it does.
Look at what the four have in common. Your advice, your workmanship, your employees and the goods in your care are all things you control. General liability covers the accidents you cause to people and property outside your control. The moment the loss is inside your own operation, the policy hands off to something else, and the question stops being whether you are insured and becomes which policy you bought. That is the whole map, and it takes ten minutes with a broker to find out which parts of it you actually hold.
Every one of these is a different policy.
Advice you gave
A drawing, a specification, a recommendation, a report. If the loss came from what you said rather than from something you knocked over, it is a professional liability claim. General liability wordings exclude professional services, and the exclusion is broader than most people expect – it reaches anyone whose product is judgement rather than labour.
Your own faulty work
If a joint you installed fails and floods the floor below, the damage to the floor is a general liability matter. The cost of taking out your joint and installing it properly is not. Redoing your own work is treated as the cost of doing business, and that is deliberate – insurance is not a warranty on your workmanship.
Your own employees
Injuries to your staff sit with WorkSafeBC in this province, not with your liability policy. The employer liability exclusion is in the wording precisely because the workers compensation system already answers it. What that system does not answer is a claim brought against you as an employer over how somebody was treated, which is employment practices cover.
Property in your care
A customer’s vehicle in your bay, a client’s equipment in your workshop, stock in your warehouse that belongs to someone else. Care, custody and control is one of the most common exclusions to bite, because the business genuinely believed it was insured for the thing sitting in front of it. Bailee or warehouse legal liability answers it.
Each business was insured. None of them was covered.
The specification that was wrong
A supplier recommended the wrong grade of material and the installation failed. The claim was framed as property damage, which sounded like general liability, but the cause was the recommendation. The professional services exclusion applied, and the business had no errors and omissions cover because nobody had ever called it a consultancy.
The customer car in the bay
A vehicle was damaged while on the hoist. The shop held a proper general liability policy and had shown the certificate to its landlord for years. Care, custody and control excluded the one thing the shop most needed insured, which was other people’s vehicles, the entire reason it exists.
The subtrade who was really staff
A long-standing contractor was treated as self-employed but worked only for this business, on its schedule, with its tools. After an injury the question of whether he was an employee was decided by the facts rather than by the invoice. Employer liability exclusions and WorkSafeBC coverage both turn on that answer, and it is worth settling before something happens.
The ones that come up when a certificate is requested.
My client asked for general liability. Is that enough?
It is enough to satisfy the clause. Whether it is enough to protect the business is a different question, and the two get confused constantly. Send us the clause and your policy and we will tell you in writing whether the cover matches the work you are actually doing.
Does it cover damage to the building I rent?
Usually yes, up to a stated limit, under tenants legal liability. That limit is often set once and never revisited, and it needs to reflect what it would cost to rebuild the space you occupy rather than what your contents are worth. It is a single figure on the declarations page and it is worth reading.
We only give advice. Do we still need general liability?
Most advisory firms carry both. General liability answers the visitor who trips in your office or the laptop you knock off a client’s desk. Professional liability answers the advice. They cover different accidents and one is not a substitute for the other.
What is the difference between an occurrence and a claims made policy?
General liability is usually written on an occurrence basis, meaning it responds to something that happened during the policy period even if the claim arrives years later. Professional liability is usually claims made, which is why the retroactive date matters so much on that side and barely at all on this one.
Our operations changed. Does the policy still fit?
This is the most useful question on the page. Liability is rated and worded around what you told the insurer you do. New services, new sites, a new province or a new class of customer can all move you outside what was described. Tell your broker when the business changes, not at renewal.
Two that follow directly from this one: what errors and omissions covers and what an umbrella actually sits over.
Not the question you had? Send your declarations page and the question with it through the quote file and you will get a written answer, not a sales call.
Find the gaps before somebody else does.
Four questions, one declarations page, and a written note on where your cover stops. It costs nothing and it is the same work whether you move to us or not.