Other provinces avoid B.C.-style manipulations

Re: “Other provinces take money from hydro,” letter, March 21.

Perhaps the letter-writer should do some research before so ardently defending the B.C. Liberal government’s financial manipulation of ICBC and B.C. Hydro.

Had he done so, he might have learned that the public auto-insurance rates in Saskatchewan and Manitoba are significantly lower than ICBC’s rates, mainly because they have a no-fault system. The rates in the two provinces are the lowest in the country, and — unlike ICBC — they have not needed to cannibalize their assets to do it.

With some research, he would have discovered that, unlike B.C. Hydro, the two public electricity utilities do not create non-existent revenue to inflate their profits, nor pay their government shareholder annual dividends completely funded with borrowed money. They actually follow generally accepted accounting practices.

He might also have found that the two governments refrain from interfering with decisions of their independent third-party rate-review boards, unlike the cabinet directives regularly issued by the B.C. Liberal government to the nominally independent B.C. Utilities Commission.

For those of your readers who would like to be better informed on these matters, I recommend the B.C. Policy Perspectives website. Richard McCandless Saanich