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An insurance industry association has called out Newfoundland and Labrador’s (NL) costly auto insurance for being more expensive than other provinces - but an investigation has discovered that it has been using outdated information.
The Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) has long criticized NL’s auto insurance system for setting rates that are too high, and has called for claims cost control measures to keep premiums from surging.
In its newest campaign against NL’s auto insurance rates, the IBC has claimed that drivers in the province pay a lot more for coverage than motorists in other provinces. A series of TV-spot ads discussed this difference, and invited viewers to visit the website “betterautoinsurance.ca” to compare NL’s rates with the rest of the country.
The website compares NL’s auto insurance rates against other provinces that have adopted minor injury caps – one of the recommended actions IBC is pushing for to keep NL’s rates down. But some of the information on the site is misleading, reporters have discovered.
In an investigative report, CBC News found that the website indicated that the average auto insurance premium in the province of New Brunswick (NB) is $789 – 29% less than the average in NL. The numbers, however, are from 2016; most insurers in NB have long since raised their rates, or applied to raise rates.
While auto insurance premiums are still cheaper in NB than in NL, the gap is reportedly not as large as IBC has claimed.
IBC Atlantic vice-president Amanda Dean told CBC News that the bureau does not know the current 2019 difference between average premiums in NB and NL. However, even she acknowledged that the 2016 numbers are stale.
“We’ve been using the newer [2017] numbers in some of our communications pieces in the Newfoundland market. Clearly we need to go back and update the numbers on that site,” she said.
Dean also explained that IBC started its campaign in NL last year – at that time, records from 2016 were the latest data they had.
