ICBC basic rate hike piles costs on families: Canadian Taxpayers Federation

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Narrator: The Insurance Corporation of British Columbia announced this week that due to increasing bodily injury claims and lower investment income, it will be seeking a basic insurance rate increase for the first time in four years. ICBC’s President and CEO Jon Schubert reassured drivers that for most, the increase will be less than $30 a year. Meanwhile, optional rates, the area of insurance ICBC competes on, are falling. ILSTV spoke to Jordan Bateman, BC’s Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation about what ICBC’s increase means to a province already dealing with crown corporation increases.

Jordan Bateman: We kind of have to put it in the context of what is happening in other Crown Corporations in BC. If you’re looking at ICBC in isolation and you said $30 a year – and that’s the average so I think for some drivers it’ll be far more and for others it will be slightly less – but you just can’t take that in isolation because hydro rates have gone up this year, medical services premium taxes have gone up, there’s been a carbon tax increase, there’s been 2 cents a litre more in gas tax. The cost for families continues to edge upwards. So ICBC now is basically piling on a group of people who I think are just broke. We just can’t afford to keep going on like this. It’s a very tone-deaf maneuver to bring this out now and certainly one that I think the provincial government is starting to feel some heat on. When you put everything together, sure ICBC comes out and says “Come on, it’s only $30 – that’s what? $2.50 a month? That’s no big deal” but in the context of everything else that’s going on … The other problem ICBC has is it’s not like we’re getting a really great deal with them now. Their premiums are already the second highest in the country. I know the Fraser Institute does the annual review and the news just never gets better for BC drivers. Only Ontario’s (auto insurance premiums) is higher and we pay almost twice as much as Quebec drivers.

Narrator:  The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is an advocacy group dedicated to “lower taxes, less waste and accountable government.” We asked Bateman what the Federation would like to see happen in BC’s auto insurance industry.

Jordan Bateman: We believe in competition, not necessarily privatization. Basically we want to see the government, and the irony is they promised us way back in the day but never brought it in, we want to see the government introduce legislative changes to allow competition in basic auto insurance. We also want ICBC to open their data files to their competitors, as the Competition Bureau asked them to do, to make sure that we are getting proper statistical analyses of insurance trends. They talked about how claims are up. That’s interesting but we keep hearing these anecdotal stories about ICBC over-litigating certain cases. We’d love to be able to get in there and make sure that they’re doing their job properly and effectively. Competition is the best way to streamline something and make something competitive.

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