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“There’s no point in presenting it as an option in any kind of final recommendations because government can tell you now we are not prepared to go to a no-fault regime.”

Stone was at a loss to explain how a 2014 report that his ministry commissioned could end up being completed without him seeing it, and then changed without his knowledge. He instead pointed the finger at the ICBC board.

“I think the board of the day, and Paul Taylor was the chair, you’d have to ask him that question,” he said.

Taylor resigned as board chair in December 2013, before the report was commissioned. He said in an interview Thursday that Stone’s version of events on the report “just doesn’t ring true to me,” and added he disliked Stone’s leadership style as minister and felt he was not a good manager of ICBC.

“Frankly, I quit as chair because of him,” said Taylor, who was also former premier Gordon Campbell’s chief of staff and has endorsed Andrew Wilkinson in the Liberal leadership race.

“I just found him a hard guy to work with. This whole stuff about him trying to point the blame for problems at the corporation for a report that his own department commissioned and, knowing him, would have been on his desk and he wouldn’t have liked some of the stuff in that and asked that it be changed — that’s exactly the kind of stuff I saw when I decided to resign. I found him that kind of guy.”

ICBC has said in a statement it did not commission the report and received only the edited final March version from the Liberal government.

rshaw@postmedia.com

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