The NDP thinks there’s more the province can do for dealing with higher insurance costs.
Shannon Phillips, the opposition’s Finance Critic, says the main reason for those higher costs was the UCP removing the cap on insurance rate increases.
“Companies were free to jack up rates however much they wanted. We have since learned that the Premier’s friend and former campaign manager was a lobbyist for the insurance companies. That’s when the cap disappeared, that rates shot up, and insurance companies we just learned took in a billion dollars more than they paid out in claims in 2020.”
Phillips says they’ve been calling on the UCP government to bring in “common sense solutions.”
“What they can do is do things like regulate insurance and some of the aspects of our utility bills and they’ve just simply refused. We are in a situation where we’ve got $100 a barrel oil, those benefits aren’t trickling out to ordinary communities. Particularly in rural Alberta where utility costs have really hurt people and some of those municipalities have had to raise their property taxes because of the cuts to municipalities.”
We talked to Phillips on the Trending 55 Hot Seat, you can hear that full discussion below.
– Kyle Moore, Trending 55 Newsroom
