Proposed insurance changes require a closer look

An excellent opinion by Sharon Polsky, president of the Privacy and Access Council of Canada, lays out a blinkand-you'll-miss-it section of Alberta's Bill 41.

“Albertans will be presumed to be high-risk drivers — and charged higher rates — unless and until they agree to `voluntarily' consent to participate in a usage-based insurance (UBI) program and prove their good driving behaviour.”

Introduced on Oct. 29, the bill seeks to allow Alberta's Automobile Insurance Rate Board (AIRB) new ways to “innovate” and “modernize” how that province provides auto insurance. Escalating rates are no mystery; when a Conservative government took office, one of the first things it did was remove the cap installed by the previous NDP.

“The average monthly cost of Alberta car insurance is up 24 per cent from the beginning of 2019 to the second quarter of 2020,” according to a CTV report, making it the third-highest behind British Columbia and Ontario.

It's not just Alberta, of course. Auto insurance rates — in fact, all insurance rates — have been spiking in recent years. It's a perfect horrible storm of, depending on who you ask, weather events, fraud, freakishly expensive repairs on technology-loaded cars, or greedy insurance companies. Lots of blame to go around.

Governments are, and should be, obligated to assist consumers in wrangling this essential product. It's a many-tentacled beast, and Ontario's decades-long multi-party failure to fix the auto insurance industry is a testament to how consumers are failed repeatedly.

The Alberta bill would allow companies to base all premiums on this protocol. Don't be fooled by the wording; “usage-based” sounds like how many kilometres you drive, but this is about advanced data collecting, and this should scare you.

UBI — the telematics part — isn't new. For years, you could agree to install a black box in exchange for possibly lower rates if you drove in a way deemed “good.” I call them squeal boxes.

When it was introduced, insurance companies like Allstate were fierce in their defence the information collected would only be used to reward good drivers with reduced rates, and never to punish bad ones. Hogwash. In an industry that is chasing every penny, do you really think the bucks used to reward some won't be paid out on the backs of others?

Look at that opening quote again: you will be considered a bad driver (and assigned higher rates) unless you allow the squeal box or app in your car. That's not voluntary, that's voluntold.