Caught in the fuel gap

On a morning when you are already juggling a funeral in Jamaica, a family emergency in Trinidad, or a winter escape you booked months ago, the last thing you expect to hear is that your insurance may no longer protect you from a cancelled flight. Yet, that is exactly the shift Caribbean Canadians need to understand now, because Manulife has said worldwide jet fuel shortages are a known event for its travel insurance, which changes what gets paid and what does not.

If you live in Toronto and move back and forth across the Caribbean, this is a warning that the cost of being connected to home is getting more expensive, more fragile, and less predictable.

Manulife’s update, issued in early May, says that if a policy was bought on or after May 5^th, 2026, trip cancellation and interruption benefits related to the current jet fuel shortage generally will not apply, because the problem is now considered a known event. If the policy was bought before May 5^th, 2026, some protection may still exist under misconnection or disruption benefits if the shortage causes a delay or interruption.

So, what does that mean in plain language? It means that if your flight is cancelled because the airline cannot secure fuel or schedules collapse because the system is under pressure, the insurer may say the risk was already known when you bought the policy. In insurance language, once something becomes known, it often stops being insurable.

Caribbean families in Canada rely heavily on air travel that is often expensive, tight, and vulnerable to disruption. A missed connection is not always a nuisance; it can mean a missed funeral, a delayed hospital visit, a wedding left half-finished, or a child left waiting to see grandparents for another year. When you add a fuel shortage to already limited route options, the Caribbean traveller can be left paying more for less certainty.

Manulife says insurance is secondary to the airline’s own remedies, meaning refunds, rebooking, or travel credits from the carrier come first. That sounds reasonable until you remember how often passengers end up in the middle of a chain reaction: one delay, then a missed seat, then a hotel night, then a new fare, then a claim that gets reduced or denied because the event was already known.

This is bigger than one company. It tells you something about where travel risk is moving. Fuel shortages, flight cuts, and route instability are no longer abstract supply-chain problems. They are becoming part of the personal financial risk faced by ordinary travellers, especially those whose journeys are not optional but tied to family responsibility across borders.

There is also a political edge here. Caribbean Canadians are often told to keep supporting the region, keep visiting home, keep investing in the homeland economy, keep the cultural ties alive. When the insurance net narrows and airfare remains unstable, the burden quietly shifts back to the traveller. The message becomes: yes, keep going home, but carry more of the risk yourself.

I want to share this as a consumer alert and as a diaspora economics story. The Caribbean Canadian traveller is a remitter, a mourner, a wedding guest, a caregiver, and often the bridge between two households. If airlines can change schedules and insurers can label the shortage a known event, then the family link between Canada and the Caribbean becomes less secure, and more costly to maintain.

So, the questions now are simple but urgent: How many travellers bought policies after May 5^th, 2026, and do not know they may be uncovered? How many families will learn the hard way that a fuel shortage is now their problem, not their insurer’s? How much more can Caribbean Canadians absorb before travel home becomes a luxury instead of a duty?