Narrator: Del Dyck, Executive Director of Alberta's Auto Insurance Rate Board, and the Insurance Bureau of Canada’s Jim Rivait are both in favour of moving from an industry-wide rate setting to a file and approve process. ILSTV spoke with both men about the concerns shared by the industry.

Del Dyck, Executive Director, Alberta Auto Insurance Rate Board: One of the big concerns they have is with regards to certainty of rate setting. When the Board can, on an annual basis, adjust rates on an average basis, they have concerns with regards to certainty. So what they’re saying is if, for example, the market’s of such a nature that they’re able to reduce their rates, they may not reduce them because they don’t know what the Board’s going to do five or six months later.

Jim Rivait, VP: Alberta, Northern BC, Insurance Bureau of Canada: We have 66 or 67 companies selling auto insurance in Alberta. When you move premiums in the form of the industry-wide adjustment, you treat those companies as if they are one company- and that’s clearly not the case. We have companies of different cost structures, distribution methods, services that they provide to their consumers and so on. They’re all different. When you try and move them in the same way, that just can’t be good. What we find is that we don’t want a system that forces everyone to be the same in order to have the appropriate move in premium. I think that it’s understood. The premium group served a great purpose. Not everyone liked it at the beginning but it solved some issues that we were facing as an industry. But we learned a lot over the last few years and if we can refine the process of how premiums are set then we’ll all be better off.

Del Dyck: The Board really has no control over the regulations. We can make recommendations to the minister and that’s what we’ve done so there’s nothing we can do to change those regulations. For this year we’ll go ahead with the industry-wide adjustment process and our hope would be that the new regs. are in for next year, but if not, we’ll go through the process again until they’re changed.