Auto reforms “disappointing” to Ontario Trial Lawyers Association
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As a personal injury lawyer and partner at McLeish Orlando, Patrick Brown has represented countless accident victims and their families.
When the Ontario government first proposed its changes for the province’s auto insurance system, Patrick was serving as President of the Ontario Trial Lawyers Association. As such, he was able to offer the Financial Services Commission of Ontario a legal perspective on the reforms. ILSTV asked Patrick how much OTLA was involved.
Patrick Brown: With OTLA, we certainly have been involved knowing the five-year review is coming up, when the changes were going to be made that our organization was actively involved in meeting with the government at Queen’s Park and at the same time meeting with the IBC and a number of other stakeholders and FSCO as well just for the purpose of giving our input on what we see. We’re an organization of over one thousand personal injury lawyers so we have first-hand experience of what’s going on out there and how these things are going to impact various consumers in Ontario. There was very few consumers groups at the table during the course of the negotiations so from that standpoint OTLA has certainly been at the forefront in that regard.
Patrick says the final list of 41 changes to the auto insurance industry were not quite what the Association had hoped.
Patrick Brown: I must tell you, it’s a bit disappointing certainly for OTLA and I think for many consumers. We certainly were in favour of a process where they take the system and simplify it, take out some of the complexities, reduce the number of assessments and at that time, they’d save in a lot of transaction costs and perhaps give back to the industry. They were crying poor and they were talking about reduced profits and of course you need a profitable insurance industry in Ontario, it’s just a matter of degrees. We certainly felt that there were a number of implementations that could be made that would reduce transaction costs, reduce administration expenses and thus alleviate the problems that the industry was facing. What happened at the end of the day we think is that it went …we wanted more of a balanced approach and we really think it was an imbalanced approach when it came down to it.
Our position was always that if there was going to be any reduction in benefits – no-fault benefits – there had to be some restoration of tort rights to the consumer in order to maintain the balance. Without restoring those tort rights, it would just be an imbalanced system if they turned around and simply reduced the benefits which is what in fact happened. The only real tort change that they did was to get rid of the $15,000 deductible in fatality claims. But they really did very little with the other deductible in injury claims. They didn’t do anything in regards to the verbal threshold which again prevents people from suing for pain and suffering and health care costs unless they have a serious, permanent impairment. So we were hoping some alleviation in restoring some tort rights for the consumers and that really didn’t happen and certainly from our standpoint, it ought to have.
