Aah, good to know. Up here PAI and PEI are combined into PPP, the Protection Plus Package. It also includes up to $300 for legal defence of moving violations and it'll pay your own insurance deductible if you have a claim and are using your own coverage. That alone made it a pretty easy sell in my day. Someone shows up "Don't need insurance, I have coverage on mine". "Well then you don't need to go spending $25/day on ours then! However you would have to pay your own policy's deductible if you had a claim before your policy would kick in, same as your own insurance. But, for only $7.99/day we offer a deductible waiver that would knock that right out." And that was my easy cruise to sales leader for the month at my counter.

However, it's interesting that legal defence is only offered up here since I've never heard of hiring a lawyer to defend a speeding ticket. I think the effects of being convicted aren't as drastic here, and if you do contest it's just you vs. the officer in traffic court several months later. In most provinces your insurance rates can go up if you have a couple of speeding fines, but I don't think it's by much. Depends on the infraction and how quickly you get them.

In B.C. we have government-mandated auto insurance, run by a crown corporation (business owned wholly by gov't) known as the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC). The minimum is $200,000 third-party liability. I think that would be the equivalent to having CSL liability coverage in the US. For extended liability and coverage for collision and fire/theft/vandalism, you can get it through ICBC OR a private company, but you still must carry the basic amount from the ICBC.

Your rates do not increase if you have a moving violation, however it works different since ICBC also administers all the DMVs in the province and moving violations. Rather than losing points on your license like most other jurisdictions, in BC every driver starts with no points on their license. Let's say you get a ticket for going 97 km/h in an 80 zone. You'd pay the fine (around $115 iirc) and have 3 points ADDED to your license. Points accumulated are wiped off on a set anniversary date every year, which I believe is set as 5 months before your birthday.

Here's where it gets complicated. Everybody is allowed to carry no more than 3 demerit points on their license without further financial penalty. If you go over that, you pay an additional fine known as the Driver Penalty Point Premium. So let's say I got another ticket going 97 in an 80. I'd pay the $115 fine on the second ticket, and now my license would have 6 points on it. At the end of the "license year", I'd get a bill for $300, which is the penalty for having 6 points. I have to pay this (and the 2 speeding ticket fines) before I can renew my insurance or registration (both are done at the same time since ICBC handles both).

I dodged this narrowly going into 2006. My first ticket happened after I was pulled over for an illegal U-turn at 2 in the morning. I had come back from Ontario a few months prior and hadn't bothered changing my license over (which you're supposed to do within 90 days). Since this was day 105 of being in the province (as evidenced by auto registration), I got fined for not having a proper license and my Ontario one was taken away. I got my BC license re-issued the next day, and then not long after I got a speeding ticket for going around a corner to fast in front of a cop (I was in a work Camry and LOVED the old corner coming out of YYJ ). There was only a mere 54 days separating these two incidents, but because they straddled my anniversary date, I only had to pay the two fines, no $300 penalty.

So there, everything you probably never wanted to know about auto insurance and moving violations in the great Olympic Province of B.C. I'm going to bed...