Eby pulls no-fault concept out of his Halloween bag of ICBC horrors
Credit to Author: Stephen Snelgrove| Date: Sat, 02 Nov 2019 01:15:22 +0000
VICTORIA — Attorney General David Eby tried to throw a fright into the Trial Lawyers Association this week over opposition to his effort to rein in ICBC’s legal and court costs.
“I told the trial lawyers very clearly that in going after these reforms, they need to be careful what they wish for because there won’t be many options left for government after that,” the cabinet minister for ICBC told reporters during a media scrum on Halloween.
“There are a number of different measures that we think we can bring in that would reduce rates and reduce costs — especially legal costs, which is what no-fault systems tend to address.”
No-fault auto insurance being the system where claims are settled without recourse to blame-placing in the courts.
The New Democrats tried to go that route the last time they were in power, but backed off after losing a public relations battle with the trial lawyers and the disabled.
Would no-fault really be back in play if the government loses those cases? Eby was asked Thursday. He just smiled and exited the scrum.
He’d hinted about no fault earlier in the year when his ICBC reforms first ran into opposition from the legal profession. But then, the prospect was hypothetical.
Now, the implied threat comes against the backdrop of a courtroom defeat for his effort to rein in use of medical and other experts in auto insurance cases.
ICBC will book a one-time hit of $400 million on the year’s financial statements over the loss on the medical experts case, according to Eby.
But he’s also facing challenges over his efforts to divert smaller claims to a civil tribunal for resolution and to limit awards for pain and suffering for so-called “minor injuries.”
“If those were to fail in court, it would be catastrophic and we would have to look at absolutely everything in terms of going forward from that position,” he told reporters.
Defeat on the latter two reforms would mean a further $1 billion hit to the books, reckons Eby. But he believes both have a better chance of surviving a court challenge than did the limitation on medical experts.
Earlier this week, the attorney general linked the trial lawyers to a $2 billion line item in the ICBC financial statements: “This is the first year we’ve reported these numbers, so they definitely were eye-opening for me.”
Granted, a large part of the $2 billion was payments to accident victim clients via their legal representatives. But as Eby noted, many of those lawyers would be working on commission and taking a hefty percentage of the settlement.
“When you look at 30 per cent of the amount paid to law firms — if that’s what they’re taking in contingency fees — you’re looking at more than half a billion dollars,” he said.
His face, I’m thinking, must be on a few dartboards in law offices around town, perhaps with a caption that says “traitor to his profession.”
The week also saw a challenge to Eby from B.C. Liberal MLA Todd Stone, the cabinet minister in charge of ICBC in the last government.
Stone sat silent in the legislature on Oct. 24 while Eby taunted him over Liberal mismanagement on the ICBC file.
But this week he met with several members of the press gallery, me included, to acknowledge that he needed to take a proactive role in defending his record.
He described spending years shooting down “goofy” proposals from ICBC for saving money.
One he strongly opposed was ICBC’s preference for basing rates on risk assessments rather than just actual driving records.
The driver risk model means you pay more based on age, experience, and where you live, even if you’ve never had an accident, Stone explained.
“I’m sure David Eby is finding the same thing I did, that you’ve got to be right on top of the corporation because they are coming up with crafty schemes all the time, like the driver risk model,” Stone told Rob Shaw of The Vancouver Sun.
“And, you know, that’s why we have ministers responsible. Unfortunately, in the case of the driver risk model, David Eby he was a sucker and he fell for it hook, line and sinker.”
Hence the now soaring hikes in insurance rates for young and inexperienced drivers, as well as those with clean driving records who happen to live in higher-risk locations, says Stone.
He also denied Eby’s charge that he’d presided over efforts by ICBC to sell its headquarters building in North Vancouver and to market its web domain to a Chinese overseas bank.
“Was it an option presented to us by ICBC? Absolutely. We opted not to do it,” said Stone.
But his tormentor, Eby, wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily.
“Well there’s two possibilities,” Eby told reporter Shaw.
“One is that essentially he was wearing those glasses with eyes painted on them to look like he was awake during meetings and he literally had no idea what was happening in the corporation — he didn’t know that they booked the sale of the URL, he didn’t know that they booked the sale of the headquarters. The alternative is that he knew exactly what was happening.”
Eby is not a soft target, as a colleague remarked this week. But his rhetorical skills won’t be much help if he loses that billion-dollar battle in court.
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