Summit discusses a new national office on auto theft

Property and casualty insurance industry professionals and a car manufacturing industry representative are endorsing the idea of establishing a national auto theft office, an idea floated at Ottawa’s National Summit on Combatting Auto Theft earlier this month. 

“Criminals have really capitalized on the lack of coordination [between various governments, police, and industries],” Karin Ots, senior vice president of regulatory and government relations at Aviva Canada, said during a Canadian Underwriter webinar Wednesday. 

“They know that police forces, perhaps historically, haven’t talked to each other; that they haven’t talked to [Canada Border Services Agency]; that we don’t share information; that we don’t track cars and license plates and VIN numbers the way we should.” 

All of this requires a more centralized approach, panellists agreed during CU’s webinar, How to stop auto theft. And one such approach would include a national office dedicated to the task of stopping auto theft.

“There’s a real opportunity to better join up information-sharing,” said Ots, and “make sure that when cars are stolen, or when cars are exported, that it’s recorded as such in the VIN database so that we don’t keep insuring the cars that have already left the country.” 

According to Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC), more than 105,000 vehicles were stolen across Canada in 2022. That’s about one vehicle every five minutes. Auto theft cost the insurers $1.2 billion, the costliest year on record, according to Équité Association’s latest tally (2022). 

This is resulting in a substantial hike in drivers’ auto insured’s auto premiums, said webinar panellist Amanda Dean, Insurance Bureau of Canada’s vice president of Ontario and Atlantic Canada. 

“Auto theft alone added an average of $130 to auto insurance premium in Ontario, at $105 to auto insurance premium in Quebec,” Dean said. “So, this is certainly…a crisis, perhaps even an epidemic at this point.” 

Auto theft is nothing new, added Stephen Beatty, vice president of corporate at Toyota Canada Inc. “What’s different is the way in which vehicles are being stolen; the sheer volume of auto thefts.” 

Essentially, auto thieves have learned that organized auto crime is “a very lucrative space,” Beatty said.  

And as government begins to address the problem, the P&C insurance and car manufacturing industries can expect organized crime to switch its attack vectors, Beatty warned. He gave the example of thieves launching a barrage of new technologies to crack a vehicle’s tech security.

“[We’re] going to be trying to deal with some of the consequences of what happens when organized crime, faced with new barriers, starts to squirt through our fingers and attack the problem in a different way,” Beatty said. “[It’s] going to be extremely important for that national office on auto theft [to] be watching in real-time and understanding what’s happening so that we can respond quickly as the nature and scope of the problem changes.” 

Bryan Gast, vice president of investigative services at Equite Association, compared this moment to when auto theft saw a notable boom in the early 2000s. “Many actions were taken to correct that,” Gast said. “And then everybody seemed to take their foot off the off the gas for a little bit. Now we’re playing catch-up.” 

Feature image by iStock.com/ssuni