Attorney General David Eby said if the previous Liberal government hadn’t hidden the full report into the shambolic financial situation at ICBC, he might have been able to soften the government’s response to the $1.3-billion loss that the provincial insurer faces.
Eby said that’s one reason why he’s calling on BC Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson to force former finance minister Mike de Jong to pull the complete version out of cabinet privilege, and release it to the public.
“I suspect strongly that the pages, as media reports suggested, that this outlines that ICBC was on the road to crisis, that government needed to take bold steps to get it back on track, and that the Liberals had a full three-year warning that ICBC was heading into trouble that we could have avoided,” Eby said.
“I think we could’ve done a lot more to respond to and prevent this crisis had government been open at the beginning, but that’s something that we’ll only know if these pages are released.”
The report was commissioned in 2014, but Wilkinson said he’s never seen it.
“David Eby is raising this issue with the 2014 report that I’ve never seen and in fact what’s going on is that the legislative assembly is trying to investigate how this got out in the first place and how it was leaked,” Wilkinson said.
When asked who has seen the report, besides former transportation minister Todd Stone, Wilkinson said, “I don’t know,” and when asked if, as the BC Liberal leader, he has the power to hand it over to the BC NDP, he said, “I don’t think so.”
The attorney general has claimed that the former BC Liberal government fiddled with the original document before releasing the final copy.
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