VICTORIA — B.C. motorists who get in a car crash on Monday will find themselves test-driving the province’s radically changed auto-insurance system.
The new cap won’t change how you report a crash to ICBC or how much money you get to have your vehicle repaired. If ICBC and the driver can’t negotiate a settlement under the $5,500 cap, the two sides must first go to the Civil Resolution Tribunal — an independent dispute resolution process already used for strata and small claims disputes.
Combined, ICBC estimates 80 per cent of all claims after April 1 will go to civil resolution instead of court — which it says will help avoid costly legal battles. Eby has also demanded that for the remaining 20 per cent of ICBC cases that do go to court, there be only one expert medical report on each side allowed for claims valued less than $100,000, and up to three experts and three reports each for all other claims. That is expected save ICBC millions of dollars.
“These changes do mean the value of basic insurance coverage has increased. Drivers will have more treatment and support if injured in a crash, regardless of who causes the crash.” But the new cap-and-benefits regime has received strong criticism from the Trial Lawyers Association of B.C., which represents personal injury lawyers. The association is preparing a constitutional court challenge to the legislation and has said it will be gathering the “horror stories” of how people are mistreated under the regime.
However, even private insurers realize the caps on minor injuries make sense, said Aaron Sutherland, the bureau’s vice-president. But the savings from capping minor injury claims have been less impressive than that government had hoped. That may be because court challenges have set far more types of injuries outside the cap than the Alberta legislature first intended, said Barbara Billingsley, a law professor at the University of Alberta who researches that province’s insurance model.
“It saves one kind of litigation but it generates others,” she said. “It becomes kind of a rolling industry unto itself.” The sheer scope of the changes to auto insurance will likely ruffle the feathers of drivers who get into a crash after April 1 or renew their insurance under the new rate regime after September.
NDP generational shi*.
The only thing that will fix icbc is the removal of all the pigs at the trough. Heavy insurance for repeated bad offenders and its total collapse. When ur that far in debt throwing my good money at it will not fix it. Period.