Fix ICBC, don’t just blame the B.C. Liberals

Iwant to address Attorney General David Eby’s announcement this week: ICBC rates are going up 6.4 per cent. As to be expected, he blamed the B.C. Liberals, saying the former government was using ICBC like an ATM machine.

Full disclosure: I am a B.C. Liberal. I served on the board of ICBC until a few weeks ago; then the NDP dumped me. No surprises there; I expected it, and Joy MacPhail, the new ICBC chairwoman, was gracious enough to warn me the night before, so I did not have to read about it in the paper the next day.

First, Eby, or at least his staff, should read the independent report by Ernst & Young, thoroughly. Former transportation minister Todd Stone commissioned the ICBC board to do an independent review.

We did that, and I stress independent. Even the many meetings we had were not held in government or ICBC offices, hence when the report came out it was truthful — warts and all.

I know the Liberal government was prepared to act on the report, even though there are some unpopular political moves suggested in it. Things at ICBC have to change and they knew that.

Eby’s comment about ATM machines is just silly. Dividends were paid annually to the government when ICBC made a profit. This money went to things important to us all, such as health care and education.

You might ask: “Why didn’t they just reduce the insurance rate if they made a profit?” A good question, but as with all large corporations, the profits show up at the year end, and rates have already been set before that.

So why let all that money sit there doing nothing? Surely it is better used on important services for the public. If you want the technical term, this was referred to as “excess optional capital transfer.”

When Ernst & Young released the independent report this summer, it said that between 2006 and 2016, ICBC had total profits of $3.1 billion, and paid government $1.2 billion (referred to as dividends), all this money going toward services such as health care and education.

The NDP has spent so much time prattling on about the “dividends” paid by ICBC to the Ministry of Finance, as if it were a bad thing. When did profits spent on good things for the public become bad? I understand the political motivation for such commentary, but dividends were paid only in years when ICBC was profitable.

ICBC has become unprofitable for unforeseen reasons, such as a 23 per cent increase in the number of crashes since 2013, a 15 per cent increase in claims people are making on damage to their vehicles, and a whopping 330 per cent increase in the cost of pain-and-suffering awards for minor injuries since 2000, about 10 times the rate of inflation.

Why is that? Are people just driving really badly now? Are there too many cars on the road and are people making claims when they should not be?

All I know is that as a former board member, I became increasing aware of this crisis and knew we had to face up to it and deal with it. We did. We commissioned a review, and when it came back it told us the truth. The crisis is not from profits previously sent to government. This crisis is about everything mentioned above.

Eby is very aware that no dividends were paid to government by ICBC last year, and yet the company still incurred a significant loss.

Jacking up insurance premiums, as the NDP just announced (after suggesting during the campaign that it would freeze ICBC rates) will not solve the problem of more crashes, more claims and rapidly rising court awards. What will help is to follow the report and do what the Liberals had planned on doing.

No more reviews are needed; it is all in the report. I agree it’s not the politically astute thing to do, and a whole bunch of people will not like it, but it is the right thing to do.

Attorney General Eby, read the report thoroughly and make the hard changes required, and stop whinging about it all being the Liberals’ fault.