Manitoba’s NDP government has already applied to the Public Utilities Board (PUB) for a 3.4% rate increase for Autopac this year. The proposed vehicle insurance rate increase comes at a time when Manitobans are already paying more for virtually everything as a result of the expansion of the PST to new products and its increase from 7% to 8% by the NDP.
When the Autopac rate increase was announced the NDP told Manitobans that it was because of the difficult winter that we just experienced and an increase in claims. What they didn’t tell Manitobans was that during the first few months of this year, Manitoba Public Insurance (MPI) actually made a profit of $14.2 million. While accident claims did go up this winter compared to last year, the number of bodily injury claims went down, resulting in the healthy profit.
As well, there was no indication in the MPI financial report released earlier this week that there have been reductions in administrative and executive costs. Recent reports have shown that MPI has paid retiring executives hundreds of thousands of dollars and then turned around and hired them to consulting contracts at the rate of $180 per hour. Despite these costs and the millions of dollars of profits at MPI, the NDP have insisted that Manitobans need to pay more for their auto insurance. It simply doesn’t make sense and it makes Manitobans rightly suspicious about what the NDP are doing with the money.
It was just last year that the NDP tried to get MPI into the business of fixing and building roads. Public backlash resulted in that idea being shelved for now by the NDP. A similar thing happened not long after the NDP were first elected when they tried to take hundreds of thousands of dollars out of MPI to fund universities. Universities and colleagues are great assets to Manitobans and our roads and highways are in need of repairs, but those are not the things Manitobans expect their Autopac premiums to be funding. Autopac premiums are supposed to be used to pay for the cost of insuring our vehicles.
Unfortunately, there is a pattern of the NDP using Crown Corporations as a piggy bank. Manitoba Hydro has been raided by the government many times as has Lotteries and the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission.
So why is the NDP insisting that Manitobans pay more for their insurance rates despite the fact that MPI is making millions in profit and has the money to pay for expensive consultants and executive perks? Given their past history, Manitobans are right to be suspicious that the NDP are taking more of their money to spend on something else that has nothing to do with auto insurance.
