The Icy Beastie

My son, a student at UNBC, was recently in a vehicular accident. Fortunately, he walked away physically unscathed and, like the responsible young man that he is, immediately contacted ICBC—the Icy Beastie—to initiate his claim.
As an undergrad university student, he has always retained his permanent address in his hometown, Nelson. This is where he comes to roost, where he votes, where any government documentation is sent, etc. Prince George is where he attends school. Most students, until they are established and working in the world, follow this practice to keep their home address consistent throughout their nomadic years.
My son purchased his car insurance in Prince George and, of course, provided his Nelson address as his permanent address.
The insurance agent obligingly sold him coverage—we thought—and happily took his money.
Now that my son has filed a claim we discover, all of a sudden, that he should have paid a higher premium because his vehicle spends most of its time in a territory outside Nelson where, apparently, coverage is more expensive. The insurance adjuster who interviewed him after his accident, told him he should step up and accept the responsibility of his error, i.e. purchasing inadequate insurance coverage.
I hardly think it was, in fact, my son’s error. However, he is willing to pay the difference.
Unfortunately, the adjuster chose not to let him off that easily. He applied a penalty that allowed him to multiply the shortfall by ten. In other words, if one inadvertently underpaid by six hundred dollars, for example, it would immediately become a six thousand dollar punitive payment!
Outrageous, unreasonable corporate bullying—that’s how I see it.
Surely the happy little agent who sold my son his policy is culpable. Surely he would have noticed the Nelson address and asked my son why he had come all the way to Prince George—a two-day drive from Nelson—to renew his auto insurance. But he didn’t and, in my opinion, failed to perform his due diligence by informing his client of the geographical ramifications of permanent and temporary addresses. And my son, who is not studying insurance agency law, was obviously unaware of this potential problem—as are most other laypeople I have spoken with since.
It’s another David ‘n Goliath story. I hate them. I really hate being in them. But, most of all, I can’t stand seeing my child struggling through a quagmire of rude and smug adults, corporate secrets and sanctioned extortion. Pedantic bureaucracy in action … and ‘they’ (the bureaucrats) do it for no other reason than because they can.
Eventually, after several phone calls made by both my son and his father (on occasions such as these, mothers are better off staying out of the way), the initial underpayment was revisited and considerably reduced so that the penalty was easier to bear—financially, at least. I still think, however, that the agent who sold the policy to my son should have acknowledged his oversight, apologized and made up the shortfall.
You’ll pay top price for insurance for the rest of your life, but don’t think for a moment that you are getting assurance in the package!