Halton Hills mayor says rising insurance rates creating ‘unfair burden on taxpayers’
Published October 8, 2021 at 4:53 pm
Halton Hills Mayor Rick Bonnette recently described rising insurance rates as ‘an unfair burden on taxpayers’ and has prompted Town Council to pass a resolution calling on Ontario Premier Doug Ford to take action as a result.
According to a recent report, the municipality is now at a point where rising insurance premiums can no longer be funded through annual taxpayer increases.
The Town of Halton Hills anticipates that over a five-year period, the municipality’s total annual cost of liability insurance premiums has grown by a total of $1 million. This represents an increase of approximately 258 per cent over that same time frame.
“These increases are unsustainable and have created an unfair tax burden on our residents,” said the Mayor.
“In what other industry have we seen such a crazy increase? That’s why Halton Hills’ Council passed a resolution supporting the recommendations put forward from the Association of Municipalities (AMO) and calling on the Province to take action.”
An organization called AMO, which works to represent the common interests of the Province’s 444 municipalities, outlined several recommendations as a result.
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They include calling on the Ontario government to implement enhancements to existing limitation periods, implementing a cap for economic loss awards and increasing the catastrophic impairment default benefit limit to $2 million.
They also recommended increasing the third-party liability coverage to $2 million in government-regulated automobile insurance plans and more.
Additionally, the resolution called upon the Province to provide municipalities with grant funding until reforms within the insurance industry has been implemented.
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