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Editorial: Car insurance joy ride slams to a halt

We have had it good for a long time. The bad times are due. Our auto insurance rates in B.C. have for years papered over particular disparities among drivers.
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We have had it good for a long time. The bad times are due.

Our auto insurance rates in B.C. have for years papered over particular disparities among drivers. Under the previous government we had a system of relative kumbaya on rates for political purposes, and the insurer has been pillaged to fortify the province’s balance sheet.

The BC NDP government inherited the unsustainable financials and is making an effort to bring a more rational system to the Insurance Corp. of British Columbia (ICBC). But the surgical fix is more radical than micro, as was evident in the filing last week to the BC Utilities Commission (BCUC) for rate revamping. The joy ride is over.

While pockets of the province will find some near-term relief – parts of the North, for instance – sticker shock is headed to the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island.

Any relief, indeed, is only a temporary licence. What is evident in the BCUC filing is that almost everyone will face higher rates in the decade ahead, even if there is some short-term easing on some drivers.

The province’s attorney general, David Eby, has the unenviable task of selling these rate changes to the public, and he earned some demerit points last week by trying to put lipstick on the pig. He would have done far better to level with us on the true task at hand than to claim there will be winners among the losers.

No, it’s time to realize that we will be paying the piper. And paying and paying. Problem is, for the populous Lower Mainland, there are inadequate transit alternatives that might mitigate the gradual exposure to increased expenses to insure what remains in many instances a necessary vehicle. Like the ICBC do-over, we have waited far too long to get the necessary infrastructure to entice us to leave our cars behind. And the bills will come due before the improvements.

To wit: couple that infrastructure inertia with inevitable (that is, post-election) mobility pricing and the current and permanent onerous tax on gas and we will soon have the most expensive driving in North America.

ICBC rates were an accident waiting to happen. Call the first responders