Foundation
Who We Are
Aeternus partners with Canada’s most successful families, business leaders, and advisors. Our mandate is simple: provide clarity in complexity and deliver solutions that stand the test of time.
We integrate seamlessly within a client’s existing circle of advisors, to ensure every decision aligns, supports, and elevates the broader plan. Every recommendation we make is shaped by foresight, trust, and a commitment to long-term protection and growth.
Advantages
Why Choose Aeternus
Unified Strategy
Integrated solutions across planning, insurance, and financing that brings your vision to life.
Collaboration
We work in concert with your trusted advisors, aligning decisions to advance your wealth and estate strategy with care and purpose.
Tailored Guidance
Every detail is designed around you – to build, protect, and grow your wealth with precision, foresight, and care.
Leadership
The People Behind It
Experience and dedication across every division.
Our History
Founder’s Story
Aeternus begins with the story of its founding partner, John Durland. In 2018, after a 30-year career as a practicing CPA focused on tax, estate planning, and international taxation for high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth families, John chose to focus exclusively on the life insurance industry. Over three decades, he built a reputation as a senior tax leader and trusted advisor, known for his ability to navigate complex cross-border, succession, and estate issues with clarity and discipline.
Before moving into life insurance full time, John held senior national leadership roles in public practice for a major Canadian professional CPA firm. Leading multidisciplinary teams across the country, he advised on complex corporate and private-client structures and helped shape tax strategies for many of Canada’s most successful families and privately held businesses.
When John transitioned into the life insurance space, he did so with a clear objective: bring institutional-level tax and estate rigor to an industry where product often leads planning. He immersed himself in work with families that required not just insurance, but thoughtfully engineered solutions that enhanced liquidity, supported estate plans, and improved tax efficiency. Over time, John acquired interests in existing brokerages and consolidated them under his leadership. Rather than simply continuing legacy structures, he used this process to clear the way for a new, unified platform and team with a bolder vision. That consolidation of ownership and operations became the foundation for Aeternus: a purpose-built firm designed from the ground up around advanced planning, disciplined execution, and long-term client stewardship.
By 2025, this consolidation journey was complete, and the focus shifted fully to transformation. As Founding Partner of Aeternus, John set out to build a firm that would serve complex client families directly while also creating room for like-minded advisors to join him as equity partners in the Aeternus Partnership—advisors who want ownership, influence over strategy and culture, and alignment with a deeply technical, planning-led model.
At the same time, John recognized that the support structure he was building—advanced case design, underwriting coordination, actuarial support, insurance modelling and financing expertise—could benefit a broader circle of high-performing insurance advisors who did not need or want to be equity partners. To meet that need, he developed an Managing General Agent (MGA) style support platform within Aeternus, providing support for those agents who want to leverage the expertise and resources of the platform, and of the partnership.Within this MGA structure, the Aeternus Partnership brings together the collective expertise of equity partners, and the Aeternus MGA support platform provides deep technical and operational capabilities to both partners and agents for their most complex client work and ensures high quality solutions tailored to each client. The philosophy is consistent across the firm: insurance works best when it is deeply informed by succession, estate and financial planning and executed through a platform built to operate at the highest level.
Today, John continues to lead Aeternus with the same focus that has defined his career: technical excellence, thoughtful collaboration with professional advisors, and a commitment to helping successful families and entrepreneurs—and the advisors who serve them—steward wealth across generations.
Let’s Get Started Together.
Connect with our team to explore how Aeternus can enhance, protect, and sustain your wealth.