Juno News - August 28, 2025


Candice speaks with Alberta lawyer Ricky Bagga

Mentioned
Aaron Sutherland
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Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

200.39

Word count

477

Sentence count

14


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk about the proposed changes to Alberta's proposed new no-fault insurance system, CareFirst, and how this will affect our rights to sue and seek compensation for injuries sustained in an accident.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So let's start with the basics. Can you explain to me what the changes are,
00:00:03.580 what's happened in Alberta, and what is this proposed new insurance overhaul?
00:00:08.320 Yeah, so CareFirst is essentially a WCB NDP scheme of no-fault insurance,
00:00:14.380 which will be delivered by private insurance companies.
00:00:17.080 This essentially means that someone injured in an accident will lose their rights to sue
00:00:20.860 and seek compensation should they be injured by a bad driver.
00:00:24.160 There's going to be zero accountability for bad drivers causing us harm.
00:00:27.980 This plan also, because it's going to be ran by private insurance companies,
00:00:32.500 it's going to give a private insurance company, which has every reason to save money
00:00:35.880 and to cut costs, the power and control to do as they want with your claim and with your treatment.
00:00:41.760 And so one of the things that the government says is that this is about affordability
00:00:46.760 and they sort of say that premiums are getting high because of legal costs in law firms.
00:00:51.080 Is that accurate or is there something else at play here?
00:00:53.400 um well the best example i can give is um there is a little bit of a affordability crisis happening
00:01:01.340 in alberta we get that however the issue with insurance i believe and it's actually you know
00:01:07.680 there's a lot of articles on this as well is with property damage claims so hail is a big issue in
00:01:12.960 alberta especially in talgary um you know whoever it was some genius decided to make the airport
00:01:18.100 and a big computer in northeast in what they used to call hail valley so there's like a billion
00:01:22.720 dollars of hail damage happening a year and uh they're not doing anything to fight that or or
00:01:28.320 to give any you know rebates to someone who has you know hail coverage or special roofs or special
00:01:34.200 society that can that can um you know handle that hail they're choosing to pick the easy thing which
00:01:39.920 is bodily injury claims which are a very very small percentage of what insurance claim costs are
00:01:45.440 um and decided to obliterate people's rights so you know i think it's important to know that
00:01:50.940 like Aaron Sutherland, he's the vice president of the Insurance Bureau of Canada. He has come out
00:01:56.000 now publicly saying that this new reform of insurance or people losing their rights is now
00:02:01.460 not going to save any money now. So I guess the lie that we heard from government essentially was
00:02:06.060 everybody would lose their rights, but you would save $400 a year on premiums. So the average Joe
00:02:11.540 said, okay, well, I'm losing some rights, but I need to save money. So let's do that. But now we
00:02:16.160 know that we're losing rights. Now we're not going to save any money at all. So why are we doing
00:02:20.820 this in the first place.