A BC tribunal ordered ICBC to reinstate a mother's caregiver benefits, rejecting the insurer's bid to swap them for a lesser payment.
The Civil Resolution Tribunal of British Columbia has ordered the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) to pay a mother thousands of dollars in retroactive caregiver benefits, after finding the insurer wrongly cut them off following a 2021 crash.
The applicant, a full-time mother of two young children, was injured in a motor vehicle accident in British Columbia in November 2021. She initially received full-time caregiver benefits of $634 per week, totalling $48,818 by April 2023, reflecting her pre-accident role providing full-time care for her children.
In April 2023, ICBC replaced the applicant's caregiver benefits with activities of daily living benefits, cutting her support from $2,536 every four weeks to a maximum of $959.22 a month, contingent on receipts. ICBC later argued that describing the change as a replacement in its notification email was casual language rather than a formal description of what happened. The tribunal disagreed, finding the email reflected exactly that: a substitution of one benefit for another.
Central to the ruling was the tribunal's interpretation of the caregiver benefit provision in the Insurance (Vehicle) Act, building on the same tribunal member's reasoning in an earlier decision. Applying that approach, the tribunal found the applicant needed only to show she could no longer provide the same relative level of care she gave before the accident, not that she was entirely unable to function as a parent. ICBC had argued the applicant's children, then aged 10 and 12, needed less care as they grew older. The tribunal rejected this, pointing to the legislature's choice of 16 as the age cutoff for caregiver benefits, and found that caregiving "is not simply doing the bare minimum."
The tribunal ordered ICBC to pay the applicant caregiver benefits from April 29, 2023 to September 18, 2025, the date of the most recent medical evidence before it, plus interest, and to reassess her ongoing entitlement from that point forward.
A separate bid for income replacement benefits fared less well for the applicant. She sought $452,500 based on a software consulting career in Ireland that she left in 2013 to raise her children, rather than the calculation ICBC used based on her part-time, self-employed artist income. The tribunal sided with ICBC, finding her nearly decade-long absence from the software industry and lack of recent training meant her earlier career could not form the basis for her benefit classification.
ICBC had already agreed to cover most of the applicant's physiotherapy and travel costs before the hearing. The tribunal ordered a further $48.69 in travel expenses after finding ICBC had applied an outdated mileage rate, and $959.22 in previously unpaid activities of daily living benefits for household assistance provided by her husband. It dismissed her claims for permanent impairment compensation, including an allegation of sexual dysfunction, finding neither was supported by medical evidence establishing a permanent condition.
The decision leaves ICBC responsible for retroactive caregiver payments, interest, and a fresh assessment of ongoing entitlement. The tribunal's scrutiny of the insurer's own wording in describing the benefit change was central to that outcome.
