B.C. election call crushed victims’ hopes of being heard by committee reviewing ICBC’s no-fault policy

NDP Leader David Eby’s snap election call this week pulled the plug on a legislative review of ICBC’s no-fault insurance plan, leaving some accident victims feeling their and the committee’s work may be wasted.

The election call meant the committee of MLAs reviewing ICBC’s “enhanced care,” or no-fault model, ceased to exist on the second day of a week of scheduled hearings.

A crash victim who has lived with a brain injury since being hit by a fishtailing car on an icy, hilly road in Kelowna almost five years ago learned the committee was dissolved hours before he was scheduled to make his oral presentation on Tuesday.

Dean Ferrer, 54, a sheet-metal worker, was working toward his retirement when the accident happened.

He was forced to transfer all his efforts to recovery and to fighting ICBC, despite its no-fault insurance being touted on B.C. government websites as a faster, easier way to getting insurance to pay for medical expenses and income losses.

“What was printed there is not the reality I’m facing,” he said.

His ICBC adjuster once cut him off his migraine medication and twice suspended him from benefits, he said. He’s appealed to ICBC’s “fairness officer” and the B.C. ombudsperson, neither of which helped, he said.

He was hoping he would finally have his claim experiences heard by the committee.

The committee had been appointed to fulfil the government’s mandate to review no-fault after the program’s first five years and was to have filed a report by February.

Ferrer wanted others to know what it was like to go up against a giant insurance corporation when “you have no influence,” which for him has been “nothing but harassment for years.”

“People don’t understand what ‘enhanced care’ is and that the people that are in it are suffering,” he said. “This was going to be the first meaningful opportunity to give me a little bit of help to effect change for others and for myself.”

The committee chairperson was NDP MLA Stephanie Higginson (Ladysmith-Oceanside); the deputy chairperson was Conservative MLA Brennan Day (Courtenay-Comox); and the other five members were three NDP, one Tory and one Green party MLAs.

Ferrer was among 144 individuals, mostly victims, who sent submissions to the committee before the deadline in June. Thirty organizations representing victim advocacy, health provider and lawyer associations also made submissions. A small number, including Ferrer, were asked to make oral presentations.

The submissions are posted to the committee’s website and Ferrer has read them all.

“Every submission has the same tone and the same experience, and none of us had talked beforehand,” he said.