This letter is written by Mark McCourt, and is further to his most recent guest columns this month in the Calgary Herald and Edmonton Journal (and the half dozen previous guest columns he wrote in those Alberta Postmedia papers since last year's provincial election, linked in his blog post last month, published worldwide on Danielle Smith's 2nd anniversary as Premier):
Honourable ladies and gentlemen of UCP Caucus,
Thank you for allowing me to be frank. I appreciate your stated efforts this fall session of the legislature to protect Albertans' rights, including the freedom of legal professionals like me to express ourselves in a manner consistent with dicta from the Supreme Courts of our country and our neighbour to the south:
"Debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide open, and may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials." -- NY Times v. Sullivan (SCOTUS, 1964)
"Lawyers should not be expected to behave like verbal eunuchs. They not only have a right to speak their minds freely, they arguably have a duty to do so." -- Doré v. Barreau du Québec (SCC, 2012)
This isn't my first rodeo on the subject of motor vehicle accident (MVA) tort deform. I've been practicing auto accident injury law exclusively for over three decades, after a stint in the '80s in the Constitutional Law Section of the Alberta Attorney General's Department. Twenty years ago, I was named one of Alberta's 50 Most Influential people for my leading role in advocating for vulnerable Albertans (accident victims and insurance policyholders) in the face of auto insurance lobby efforts to limit their rights and freedoms. Put bluntly, I know this file far better than the insurance policy bureaucrats in TBF who are trying to bamboozle you into making a potentially politically suicidal (oh, have I got your attention now?) error. As I stated in my Edmonton Journal column last week, there exist nuanced, conservative, "made-in-Alberta" solutions within the existing at-fault auto insurance system to bring rates for good Alberta motorists more in line with those paid by policyholders in the substandard, Soviet-style public auto insurance regimes of our three Western Canadian neighbour provinces. In fact, I enumerated them over nine months ago.
You will be aware that earlier this month, Premier's cabinet held chinwags behind closed doors on the TBF bureaucracy's ill-advised and unconservative proposal to turf MVA tort law in our province in favour of a disastrous no-fault scheme, a socialist concept most recently implemented by British Columbia's NDP government (much to the detriment of BC's citizenry, as the Insurance Bureau of Canada recently noted). Evidently, no-fault insurance is smoke and mirrors, swapping longstanding civil legal rights for "enhanced care" that is in fact illusory. Case in point: when Section B no-fault accident benefits were increased in Alberta (on paper) 20 years ago from $10,000 to $50,000, payouts actually decreased by 10%.
As for the asinine nonsense that no-fault brings down premiums, let me explain what that REALLY means: My wife and I, like 80% of Albertans, are good drivers. We are insured through The Personal Insurance Company, and our policies renewed last month. I drive a sweet Jag (I’m quite certain I’VE earned it) and she drives a Range Rover -- and including collision coverage, we each pay under $1000/yr ($1940 for the two vehicles combined).So by way of illustration, if 80% of Alberta motorists pay $970/yr for our auto insurance and the other 20% (the reckless drivers) quite deservedly pay an average of a whopping $4465/yr (Boo-effin'-hoo! Don't like it? Then drive better or do us all a favour and get a bus pass instead), the overall average Alberta auto insurance premium works out to $1669/yr ($970 x 80% + $4465 x 20%).
Under no-fault insurance, negligent motorists' insurers are no longer responsible to compensate the innocent victims those reckless drivers maim or kill. So let's say under no-fault, multinational multibillion dollar private auto insurance corporations bump up good drivers’ premiums to $1000/yr but (temporarily) slash the average reckless driver's rate down to $2720/yr. Even though 80% of Alberta policyholders see their rates rise, the bad drivers see rate reductions -- and just like that, Finance Minister Nate Horner's bevy of blatantly biased beancounter bureaucrats can brag that the UCP government has reduced the average Albertan's auto insurance premium down to $1344/yr. Holy moly, that's an average reduction of $325/yr, nearly a 20% drop! Well, good luck selling that sack of crap to Albertans three years from now, considering that most Albertans will suffer increased premiums and decreased rights, while careless drivers see their rates drop and their benefits rise.
And this just in: no-fault increases traffic accidents, injuries and fatalities, leading to higher premiums: you can read my November Postmedia columns linked above to see that this is so, or you can bury your heads in the sand and see in Election '27 that ignorance isn't bliss -- it has consequences (apart from the collateral damage of dead Albertans, it may well hurt the UCP government's re-election odds). Lower premiums are great for one news cycle before they rise again, but the broadcasts and articles about severely normal Albertans who no-fault fails will continue indefinitely. Rather than letting insurance policy bureaucrats drive you off a cliff with their "The first thing we do, let's get rid of all the lawyers" plan, listen to your excellent lawyer -- Justice Minister Amery!
Elected representatives (because they're actually accountable to the electorate) come and go, but frankly these Finance department bureaucrats never seem to change. I remember lawyer Brent Rathgeber KC (then a Conservative gov't MLA, now VP Legal of the Alberta Insurance Council) 20 years ago (during the Alberta government's initial auto insurance reforms) stating, “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.” Honourable members, be like Brent.
Alright? OK.
Kind regards,
Mark McCourt
Victims' Rights Advocate
Alberta Civil Trial Lawyer