TORONTO

OK, hands up all of you who actually believed Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals when they promised NDP Leader Andrea Horwath last year that they’d roll back car insurance rates 15% by August of this year.

I see a forest of hands. You lucky people. I have a bridge in Brooklyn for you and some very attractive swamp in Florida.

The insurance pledge was an easy one to make. After all, the government doesn’t own insurance companies. It just regulates them through the Financial Services Commission of Ontario (FSCO).

So promising to tell a private company to roll back its rates is easy for government to do during an election. When the company doesn’t follow through, they can throw their hands in the air and blame it on the insurance industry.

An FSCO report released Wednesday says rates for 26 companies — 52% of the market — increased an average of 0.6% in the second quarter.

It should come as no big surprise that they weren’t able to deliver as promised. Much of the profits generated by the insurance industry are from interest on investments. And interest rates are extraordinarily low right now — and getting lower.

But empty promises win elections — and like pie crusts, are made to be broken.

Just as these rates are going up, the government is changing the way insurance benefits are delivered.

In its spring budget, the government proposed to slash the maximum amount a person can claim for a catastrophic injury from $2 million to $1 million.

And $2 million may sound like a lot of money, but when you’re paying for round-the-clock care, it gets eaten up quickly.

Patrick Brown is a critical injury lawyer and former president of the Ontario Trial Lawyers Association who came to Queen’s Park in May with a group of gravely injured accident victims. In an interview Thursday, he said that traditionally, the province always ensures people with serious injuries such as quadriplegia and severe traumatic brain injuries are looked after.

“The government has always indicated previously that if change has to be made it ought not be done on the backs of these people with severe traumatic injuries, but rather on the backs of the people with minor whiplash and soft tissue injuries,” he said.

“If the government is moving forward to make more changes because of the call for premium reductions, I think everyone would agree that should be done with the people with much more minor injuries and not touch those people with quadriplegia and severe traumatic brain injuries,” he said.

New Democrat critic Jagmeet Singh said the government failed to make good on a promised 8% reduction on insurance rates for 2014.

“Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals promised to bring auto insurance rates down by 15% by August 2015. That’s a little over two weeks away. Instead, rates have gone up on average by 0.6% and some insurance companies are raising their premiums by as much as 16% — that’s quite the U-turn,” he said in an e-mail.

Tory critic Vic Fedeli says it’s no big surprise the Liberals can’t keep their promise.

“They never had a plan of how to reduce insurance and it’s obvious now that they still don’t have a plan.

“This was a promise made back in 2013 to get approval of the budget.

“There was no thought put into it and no plan of how they were going to reduce it. There was no plan back then and there’s no plan now,” Fedeli said.

Finance Minister Charles Sousa was too busy to comment, but said in a statement: “Auto insurance rates are lower today than they were a year ago. In fact, our reforms have sent rates 6.46% lower on average since August 2013.”

Higher insurance premiums? Cheaper benefits?

Did you really vote for that?