By Cheryl Jahn

ICBC CEO visits PG BIG

Jun 11, 2025 | 3:47 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – They are hot commodities this time of year, but motorcycles can be risky business if you’re not sure what you’re doing.

And riders will tell you it takes time for the motoring public to get used to seeing them on the road once again. It’s one of the reasons the interim CEO of the Insurance Corporation of BC met with members of the Prince George Brain Injured Group (PG BIG).

“MVC is actually the highest rate of brain injury in the north for us,” says Sarah McCrea, Executive Director for the Prince George Brain Injured Group, or PG BIG. “So it is when we look at the last calendar year, it was almost 40 per cent of the members that came through our doors. It was because their injury was from a motor vehicle crash.”

And that is precisely why the interim CEO of ICBC is in the north, because every circumstance and every region is different.

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“One of the reasons it’s really important that we have people in those regions that are supporting, that are from those communities and know those differences,” explains Jason McDaniel. “And so we have a dedicated team here in Prince George that is very familiar with those things and different challenges, different availability to other support and services, very different from the Lower Mainland and here in Prince George. And I think it’s important we understand those things.”

As of March of this year, there were 202,420 crashes in the Lower Mainland. That’s up from just over 140,000 in 2020. In the North Central region, there were 14,889 crashes in 2020, which increased to 16,425 last year.

“Some is often a form of brain injury, there are thousands every year of our customers who have been in a motor vehicle collision of some sort and suffer some form of brain injury,” explains McDaniel. “So it is a really important one for us to be paying attention to and thinking, especially in our current model, how do we help people get back to the lives they had before the crash?”

“There are currently a number of clients supported by ICBC over the past year. We do about an average of 10 to 11 programs a week on a five-day kind of calendar span,” says McCrea. “And so it encompasses anything from connection, social, physical, rehab and recovery, education, obviously coping strategies and sometimes just good fun.”

June is Brain Injury Awareness Month, and given the rate of brain injuries attributed to motor crashes, if Sarah McCrae had something on her wish list, what would it be?

“Specialized funding for brain injury services, especially on our case management side, when we’re looking at how much a brain injury really affects the entirety of the person’s life, they’re being their family, their employment, and even their community, it is devastating. And so having those specialized services, especially for those who experience an injury because of a motor vehicle crash and navigating those systems of recovery as well.”

In the past ten years, there have been 535 intakes to PG BIG, and 32 per cent of those clients suffered a brain injury due to a motor vehicle crash.