THE NDP on Monday said that while B.C. Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson sat at the cabinet table, he and his cabinet colleagues made a series of bad decisions that left the public insurer losing more than $1 billion annually, resulting in higher premiums for motorists.
The NDP pointed out what they said were the top bad choices made when he was in government:
* At a time when ICBC’s fiscal future was in question, the BC Liberals raided $1.2 billion from the company.
* When Liberal MLA Todd Stone served on the board of ICBC, he signed off on $1 million in bonuses to six executives in just two years, a practice that was stopped by the BC NDP government.
* When the BC Liberals received a report in 2014 saying the company was headed for trouble, they deleted seven pages of recommendations that identified and would have fixed the problem before releasing it to the public.
* The BC Liberals concealed the financial issues ICBC faced before the last election using accounting tricks to hide hundreds of millions of losses, leaving British Columbians in the dark as they went to the polls. For example, they cooked the books by recording trumped up values for the company’s URL and the sale of ICBC headquarters even though it hadn’t even been listed for sale.
“When they were seeking the leadership of the BC Liberal Party, Andrew Wilkinson blamed Todd Stone for the problem, while Stone blamed Wilkinson. The fact is, they are both right,” said Attorney General David Eby
Watch the video here.