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In 1943 there were 37,800 motor vehicle crashes in Canada. Across that decade two-thirds of the country's vehicles carried no car insurance. None at all. Almost every version of what Saskatchewan did about that in 1946 gets it wrong. So who was carrying the cost?

The answer is that most people were never paid. You could sue the driver who hurt you, win, and hold a judgment worth whatever that stranger owned, which was usually nothing. Underneath that sat two rules almost nobody remembers. By 1939 every province except Quebec had made it close to impossible to sue a driver who gave you a lift, and Ontario made it absolute from 1935 until 1966, so a passenger hurt in a friend's car had no claim at all. In Saskatchewan roughly one vehicle in ten carried cover of any kind, while residents paid over $50 million in premiums between 1935 and 1944 and got about $19 million back. What Saskatchewan did with those numbers is why what you can claim after a crash keeps shrinking.

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#CanadianHistory #EconomicHistory #SaskatchewanHistory