Thousands more drivers are crashing into each other, claim costs are rocketing up, the government is monkeying around with the Insurance Corp. of B.C.’s books to ease the damage, and the cabinet is taking desperate measures to avoid slamming voters with high-visibility premium increases before the May election.
So who does Transportation Minister Todd Stone finger as the main culprits for all this fiscal grief, and deliberately rear-end?
The Ferrari owners. The Aston Martin set. The Lamborghini crowd.
His announcement Wednesday was an amusing bit of misdirection that probably will go over beautifully. It will win him the gratitude of beater drivers the length and breadth of B.C. But it will do next to nothing to solve all the financial dilemmas swirling around the Crown-owned insurance company.
I instinctively resent Lamborghini drivers as much as the next wage slave. Stone’s move to cancel their ICBC insurance because their carbon-fibre, 300-km/h beauties cost too much to fix brought a surge of warmth to my heart.
Take that, one per centers! Have fun paying double from now on!
But the joy at others’ misfortune doesn’t have much of anything to do with the lurking menace of rate hikes next year.
The hit-and-run on the rich that was announced Wednesday was staged for the TV cameras, with a bruised Aston Martin and Ferrari on display, complete with the ludicrous repair bills that ICBC was obliged to pay out.
The government’s response is to double the ICBC premiums of anyone driving a private car worth more than $150,000. Then they’re going to start turning them away from Autoplan offices, as soon as the law can be changed to allow ICBC to refuse their business.
The trouble is, there aren’t enough of them around to make much difference. There are only 3,000 private cars over that price limit in B.C. Even though the number has grown 30 per cent in three years, even though the average repair cost for that segment is six times higher than the rest of the market, the savings are going to be a tiny fraction of the sum ICBC needs to find soon.
Stone’s pitch was that it’s fundamentally unfair for luxury-car owners to pay about the same basic premium as a regular-car owner, when it costs so much more to fix them after crashes. ICBC already has slightly different rates for different types of cars.
But doubling them for the over-$150,000 bracket, en route to cutting them off completely, is a national first.
ICBC spent $38,000 fixing a 2015 Bentley Flying Spur last year, which is more than the sticker price of a brand-new car (for normal people).
“If owners of high-end luxury cars can afford a high-priced car, they certainly can afford to pay higher premiums to cover the real cost for their repairs,” said Stone. “This policy needs to be fair for all British Columbian ratepayers, and we want to ensure that the regular everyday driver is not paying for the additional repair costs of these cars through their insurance rate.”
Only moments before the cameras rolled on the offending vehicles, more details were released on the real problem. One of them was a “hypothetical scenario” from the utilities commission, which purportedly regulates ICBC’s premiums. It forecast five years of rate increases starting with this year’s 4.9 per cent hike that total a compounded 42 per cent increase by 2020.
That’s the political equivalent of a bus crash when it comes to calamities, and it’s what the government is trying to avoid.
The government has capped hikes at 1.5 percentage points for the past few years, but despite a host of mitigation measures, claim costs are still rising. Funds have been shuffled around with ICBC to cover the shortfalls. It’s gotten so bad that for the next three years, the government is forgoing the dividend it used to extract from the corporation.
But still the crunch, outlined by independent observer Richard McCandless on these pages Wednesday, persists.
ICBC has its own hypothetical scenarios as well, and it looks like the best drivers can hope for is a 16 per cent hike over the next five years.
The only comfort is that the Rolls-Royce crowd will be paying far more.
