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The NDP government was already feeling heat from motorists unhappy their premiums kept rising despite reforms at ICBC. A rate redesign in September 2018 meant the bill for inexperienced drivers jumped and in some cases exceeded the cost of university tuition.

The prospect of complex reforms, unpopular rate increases and facing more years of “chasing down additional savings” just to barely keep ICBC’s finances in the black was, Eby says, simply untenable.

Photo by Gerry Kahrmann / PNG

As well, it became apparent that legal challenges by personal injury lawyers to ICBC reforms, and an advertising campaign that targeted Eby specifically, were shaping up to be protracted battles.

“It was a street fight with many former colleagues in law, and some people I would even say friends in law, that fought every reform tooth and nail as hard as they could,” said Eby. “And I realized that it would be three- to five-year process to get to where we needed.”

Around the same time, a Vancouver woman wrote Eby a letter saying her car insurance bill had risen to $1,900 a year and she was struggling to afford to keep her home.

“I have nowhere else to go for insurance,” she wrote. “How is someone like me who lives in B.C. supposed to live?”

Eby wrote back that her insurance, while pricey, was still a pretty good deal. But he said it began to gnaw at him that his claim was wrong, because even her high rate was not buying her enough insurance to adequately cover her for a crash.

“I kept the letter on my desk,” Eby said. “It was a reminder I needed to do better.”