How do I start? If you can’t make a monopoly succeed then get the heck out of the business. In fact maybe you should find a new job as you are unable to represent, work for or have the best interests of the people that pay your wages at heart. In an open market, free enterprise job you actually would be without work rather than getting raises and big pensions.
ICBC is a great communist corporate model and in no way works well for the people it is intended to help. How can you expect every claim or portion of to go through one company and have that corporation succeed without wiping out your constituents with excessive premiums?
Are you paying your claims on a timely basis? Are you waiting for hurting people to give in? Are you putting gag orders on claim lengths and settlements? Is this a people’s company with the people’s interest at heart or a money generator for politicians?
How ICBC was ever created and how it has lasted this long is beyond common belief. And perhaps it actually failed years ago and should now go away.
This corporation should never have been founded and if it was it should never have been a “for profit corporation.”
The best interests of the people it was intended to serve would have determined it to be a “not for profit corporation” with all and any profits going to reduce the user premiums rather than line the pockets of politicians and their bad decisions.
Solution(s):
• Use your bragged about $2.7 billion surplus to leave our already excessive premiums alone.
• Politicians stand up and be transparent and accountable – whatever percentage you raise my ICBC Premiums all and any of you holding seats during ICBC will take a pay and pension cut of the equal percentage amount until all is paid back and ICBC is operationally sustainable.
• Disband and disassemble ICBC and open the insurance business to free enterprise and open market democracy to which it should have been all along.
• Change ICBC to a not for profit corporation.
What Can’t Happen:
• Raise the public ICBC premium rates without reducing your wages and pensions.
• Hide the true story – be transparent, accountable and don’t point fingers as you have all had your hands in the pot over the years.
• Expect the people to pay for hidden and bad political decisions while you all sit back and collect premium wages and pensions.
• Expect the people to pay your wages and pay bonuses to ICBC management.
People don’t seem to care that we are almost $70 billion in debt as a province so add $1, $2, $5, or $10 billion to that debt and leave our ICBC premiums alone as they are already the second highest in the nation.
Perhaps a responsible government might start saying what we the common people have to say to ourselves and families – “If we can’t afford it we won’t buy it, fix it, replace it…..”
Since I have moved here over 15 years ago, I have paid my ICBC premiums and said to my wife that they are high, I have read people state that ICBC is no more money than Alberta etc. – so this year I called and found that the open market free enterprise model was $400 less expensive than my 40 per cent discounted ICBC premium for the same coverage.
That money could be spent in our open market free enterprise economy rather than refitting Vancouver stadiums, subsidizing $1 billion of non-accountable MLA expenses etc.
Donald Craig
Vernon