NDP Says Wilkinson ‘Nonsense’ Claim Proves True On Liberals Giving Away $3 Million ICBC Building

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VICTORIA – NDP said new video shows BC Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson was making stuff up when he denied his MLA once tried to give away a $3 million ICBC building and land to lobbyists.

Before the video came out, Wilkinson called the claim “nonsense.”

But the video shows former Transportation Minister Todd Stone at an event for the Automotive Retailers Association (ARA).

Stone says: “I am pleased to announce I have directed ICBC to transfer their training facility from their ownership and control to the ownership and control of the ARA.”

“When ICBC was in trouble, the BC Liberals chose industry lobbyists and made everybody else pay for it. Now Andrew Wilkinson has been caught making stuff up to cover his tracks again. If Andrew Wilkinson and the BC Liberals had spent less time misleading people on ICBC and more time fixing it, British Columbians wouldn’t still be paying the price today,” said BC NDP MLA Ravi Kahlon.

NDP further attacked Wilkinson for refusing to look into the rear view mirror as their government works to pull ICBC out of the ditch

“When BC Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson is looking to cast blame for the challenges at ICBC he should look in the rear view mirror,” NDP said.

While he sat at the cabinet table, Wilkinson and his cabinet colleagues made a series of bad decisions that left the public insurer losing more than $1 billion annually, resulting in higher premiums for motorists.

To help refresh the BC Liberal leader’s fading memory, here are the top bad choices made when he was in government:

  • At a time when ICBC’s fiscal future was in question, the BC Liberals raided $1.2 billion from the company.
  • When Liberal MLA Todd Stone served on the board of ICBC, he signed off on $1 million in bonuses to six executives in just two years, a practice that was stopped by the BC NDP government.
  • When the BC Liberals received a report in 2014 saying the company was headed for trouble, they deleted seven pages of recommendations that identified and would have fixed the problem before releasing it to the public.
  • The BC Liberals concealed the financial issues ICBC faced before the last election using accounting tricks to hide hundreds of millions of losses, leaving British Columbians in the dark as they went to the polls.
  • For example, they cooked the books by recording trumped up values for the company’s URL and the sale of ICBC headquarters even though it hadn’t even been listed for sale.

“When they were seeking the leadership of the BC Liberal Party, Andrew Wilkinson blamed Todd Stone for the problem, while Stone blamed Wilkinson. The fact is, they are both right,” said Attorney General David Eby.