Hello,

My cousin has been trying to get a cheap car insurance in Calgary but the quotes are eye watering. She has a UK license since 2015 and has just moved to Calgary this month. The cheapest quote so far is $2500 from Kanetix.

She doesn't have NCD from UK as she was named a second driver and her husband the main driver whilst in UK. The insurance company refused to give her a UK NCD when she asked because NCD is for the main driver only.

Is there a way to get cheaper insurance in Alberta. Any tips will be great.

Tell her to contact a brokerage. Unlike the UK, there is not much competition for anything in Canada and, once a single brokerage has contacted all of the various insurers, she will have obtained the best quotes possible as the insurers are then not permitted to deal with other brokerages.

If it's $2500 for a year then that sounds very reasonable, I'd be surprised if shopping around would help very much with that.

The idea of insurers not being able to deal with multiple brokers over a single risk is news to me. It may be a legal requirement but I don't think that can happen in practice as, in the systems I've seen, quotes are not saved in a retrievable fashion. The same person can call for the same quote repeatedly either directly (if the company writes that way) or through the same or different agents. That'd only be worth the bother, of course, if the potential policyholder pitched the risk differently each time.

I know from what you have stated on this board that you have written the programs so I will defer to your greater knowledge but two, completely different, brokers in Alberta have told me that that is how it works here.

On a different, but similar, note. I have just had to deal with Federal bureaucracy this morning. I was attempting to renew all the other member of my family's Canadian passports this morning. My wife's and my two daughters'. I had renewed mine a couple of weeks ago.

An issue came up with my youngest daughter's passport application and they needed to contact my wife. We are married and not divorcing and each of us named the other as emergency contact of the other, our addresses match, as do our home contact numbers.

In any event they tried to call my wife on the number given (home number) and, when they called she wasn't there. I offered them her cell number and they said that, as only one number was given on the form, they couldn't call her on that. Fortunately, when I called her on her cell, she was on the tractor and agreed to go back inside so that they could call her at home. Bureaucracy at its finest and, no doubt, a poster such as BristolUK will be able to explain how the world was saved by such bullshit.

I dread to think who is named as the contact person for any of our family members or what use we could be to each other, all being in different countries. Passports last for ten years, my domestic arrangements do not.

Apologies for the thread drift.

Ask her to call Brokerlink in Calgary. They will likely be able to take into account any claims free period when she was a named driver on a policy in the UK. I have always found them to be helpful.

Thanks

Thanks

That does sound a tad on the spendy side, My daughter was paying less than that as a brand new driver. However Ontario saw her insurance go up 3x the amount, she sold her car it was so expensive.

Insurance is quite expensive here in Alberta, but not eye watering like Onterio. $2600 was the premium for two quite powerful cars in our household, certainly not as cheap as UK, but I'm on ice and snow for 6 months of the year. Oh yes, the drivers here are also really shit, so the premium is understandable, it is as if the rule of give way on roundabouts doesnt exist, the indicator fuse must be removed and when merging, it is compulsory to do so only on solid white lines. Oh yes...mirrors for makeup, hands for texting and timmies in one hand is compulsary. On a local media site, someone asked if anyone could help with their steering as the wheel wouldn't turn, some said it was the power steering pump, I replied that they should put the phone and timmies down and hold the wheel!

I even had one girl say the back lights and dash wasn't working, she asked for help for the reason.....she hadn't turned the lights on! Day time running lights are compulsary!

A stupid idea because it overestimates the awareness of drivers. There's a lot of fog here and most vehicles are greige. When there's not fog there's snow. Because the front lights are automated, it's usual not to activate the back ones, so there's a constant danger of running into the back of a ditherer.