Juno News - Candice speaks with Alberta lawyer Ricky Bagga

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.

Juno News - August 28, 2025