Mark McCourt is an injury lawyer at McCourt Law Offices in Edmonton.The Islamic jihadist attacks 25 years ago (sadly, not the last barbaric mass murders perpetrated by bloodthirsty Muslim terrorists) killed nearly 3,000 men, women, and children in the United States. The events of 9/11 also had negative repercussions for the insurance industry, triggering depressed investment revenues and markedly increased reinsurance costs. In Canada, auto insurers promptly sought to recoup profit margins dampened in the wake of 9/11 by embarking on a “Blame the Victim” campaign which resulted in the implementation of caps on compensation for innocent victims of reckless drivers in provinces ruled by Conservative governments in 2003 and 2004. Here in Alberta, an attempt by Conservative Finance Minister Patricia Nelson and her unelected bureaucrats to cap compensation for injuries just short of catastrophic was successfully opposed by the Accident Victims/Insurance Policyholders Advocate (AVIPA), leading to the defeat of Nelson's plot in government caucus in October 2003. The deciding vote in caucus was cast by MLA Brent Rathgeber (who later became Chief Operating Officer and VP Legal of the Alberta Insurance Council), who persuasively stated, "I appreciate that the bureaucrats at the Department of Finance have limited interest in an unbiased and objective analysis; however we as politicians MUST insist on objectivity and fairness both in process and result." Thanks to Mr. Rathgeber's courage to speak truth to power, Mrs. Nelson was forced to settle for a minor injury cap on fast-healing sprains, strains, and whiplash a year later before doing Albertans the favour of leaving public office for good in November 2004. Over the 20 years that followed, the insatiable auto insurance lobby was a regular visitor to the offices of Alberta Finance department bureaucrats, always seeking more corporate welfare at the expense of innocent Albertans injured by careless drivers. .Perhaps tiring of these incessant visits, in November 2024 then-finance minister Nate Horner (now thankfully riding the backbenches) announced plans (ridiculously dubbed "Care-First") to raise auto insurance rates and rip away the rights of Albertans to seek injury compensation from negligent drivers' insurers. After all, if Nanny State Nate's Finance department were to force under penalty of law Alberta motorists to purchase from private, profit-driven corporations no-fault policies that forbid them from filing liabilty claims against at-fault drivers' insurance companies, what more could the avaricious auto insurance industry possibly want?However, Alberta Finance is under new management, led by Finance Minister Jason Nixon, his new Chief of Staff, a new Deputy Minister, and a new Superintendent of Insurance, all appointed to these posts this year, after Nate's no-fault nonsense (which slashes compensation for innocent victims to increase benefits for reckless drivers) was overwhelmingly rejected by UCP members at the party's AGM late last year. These new bosses (hopefully not the same as the old bosses) have asked victims' rights advocates to help the Finance department carve out (of Horner’s odious "Care-First" scheme) tort rights for Albertans with motor vehicle accident (MVA) injuries more serious than those currently capped under the Minor Injury Regulation. Last month, both the Alberta Civil Trial Lawyers Association and the Canadian Bar Association submitted proposals to Alberta's Treasury Board and Finance (TBF) department, recommending that if the government is hell-bent on implementing its unjust, unnecessary, unconservative, unAlbertan no-fault scheme next year, it should at least preserve the fundamental tort rights of innocent Albertans permanently injured by reckless drivers. ACTLA advises that eliminating the traditional civil legal rights of innocent Alberta auto accident victims with non-permanent injuries (about 90% of claims) would reduce the average Albertan's auto insurance rates by about $200 per year, a figure confirmed by the Insurance Bureau of Canada in the proposal IBC made back when Nate Horner was finance minister.While obliterating 90% of auto accident injury claims would be a drastic haircut for injury lawyers such as myself, insurers, and brokers could use a little off the top as well. Replacing the 6% insurer underwriting profit provision with a 75% auto loss ratio target, and moving Alberta's bloated brokerage commissions ($265 per policy) closer to the levels of those in Manitoba ($66 per policy) and Saskatchewan ($67 per policy) — see page 3 of this Oliver Wyman actuarial report — would significantly reduce rates for policyholders without revictimizing innocent injured Albertans (mostly women and children) already victimized by at-fault motorists..But the government itself should not escape the barber’s chair: as this column a year ago in the Edmonton Journal pointed out, eliminating the insurance premium tax and reducing the health-cost recovery levy would lower premiums for policyholders by about $90 per year while barely making a dent in the provincial government's annual revenues haul (which last fiscal year was a gaudy $82.5 billion).To sum up, if the four horsemen of auto insurance (lawyers, insurers, brokers, and government) are each prepared to take a little water with their wine, and if the new and improved TBF administration is prepared to pause for sober second thought, good Alberta motorists should be able to benefit next year from auto insurance reforms done the right way, reducing rates while preserving the rights of permanently injured victims of careless drivers. So that these reforms roll out at the same time, I suggest that July 1, 2027 is a reasonable implementation date. While the so-called Care-First legislation had a January 1, 2027 target implementation date when that legislation was passed last year, the law was amended earlier this year to remove that target date. Neither the legislation, nor the regulations (announced in a classic "take out the trash" news item posted on the government’s website the Friday before August long weekend) mandate a New Year's Day implementation, and so there is no reason whatsoever that the UCP government can't park this putrid plan to make the needed repairs, no matter how badly no-fault fans at the Auto Insurance Rate Board want to ram through this unpopular, socialist-style “Care-First” scheme on that date.Mark McCourt is an injury lawyer at McCourt Law Offices in Edmonton.
