THE BILL to amend the Motor Vehicles Insurance Act which Arthur Williams initiated in the Senate from the Opposition benches and which was the subject of our commentary last Friday is facing a roadblock in the Lower House.
The bill was tabled in the House on Tuesday by Audley Shaw, the Opposition spokesman on finance and the public service, but debate was suspended to allow the Government and the Opposition to confer on a motion by Government member K.D. Knight to make the provisions of the bill retroactive. The Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Senator A.J. Nicholson, who had heartily endorsed the bill when it was discussed and passed in the Senate on September 16, is to confer with Senator Arthur Williams before a resumption of debate in the Lower House set for next Tuesday.
Under the current Motor Vehicles (Third Party Risks) Act insurance companies pay to third parties in motor vehicle accidents only the minimum coverage required. The bill tabled in the Senate by Arthur Williams, who is an attorney-at-law, has proposed an amendment to ensure that nothing in the law would prevent a third party from recovering an award that was more than the minimum set out in the insurance policy.
Mr. Knight, himself an attorney-at-law, is proposing that the law be given retroactive status "because it would be no injustice to the [insurance] company because the company collects premium". We find this legal reasoning less than adequate. The fact of the matter is that before any new legislation comes into force for the amendment of the law, the actions of the insurance companies were fully within the existing law. A retroactive provision to force insurance companies to make higher than the minimum payment to third parties who have been already compensated under the law is, in effect, to make the past actions of the companies illegal.
The parliamentary Opposition through its leader, Bruce Golding, has registered its 'principled and consistent' objection to retroactive legislation.
We share the apprehension of the Opposition on this issue. In 'very extreme circumstances', particularly where the state itself is the liable party, retroactive legislation may be necessary to correct an earlier injustice. But it seems to us a dangerous procedure to saddle individual citizens and the enterprises which they may form with retroactive liabilities.
Two cardinal principles of the rule of law, with which Mr. Knight, the Prime Minister and the several other lawyers in Parliament would be familiar, is consistency and fairness. Retroactive legislation challenges both, and, in this particular case, the status of private contracts under the law. Indeed, Mr. Knight, explicitly aware of these difficulties, was pleading for an exemption to the usual practice.
We urge the Lower House to remove the roadblock of retroactivity and to bring closure quickly to the enactment of the law to Amend the Motor Vehicles Insurance (Third Party Risks) Act which the Senate has already strongly endorsed in its present form.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
