At the last Supper Club meeting, the neighbours compared notes on the latest insurance increases turning up in the mailbox. We all shared spring renewal dates and the same puzzled frown because no one at the table has made a claim on property or vehicles in the past 30 years. But we all faced a 15 per cent increase give or take.
Vehicle theft has not reached startling levels here, unlike the city. The last time a vehicle was stolen on this sideroad was 1997. Oscar had his farm truck taken for a joyride and it was abandoned up in the village.
Everyone knew who had stolen Oscar’s truck except the police and they weren’t interested. Car theft is simply property theft which has ranked at the bottom of police concerns for a generation now. The insurance companies aren’t that interested either because they just raise the rates anytime their losses go up. The mock concern they show on the news has reached the level of performance art. Even Oscar saw no need to be vengeful about the incident because he recalled his own joyride one Hallowe’en night back in 1957.
We made a rough calculation of the premiums paid by the eight people at the table over the last 25 years and it came to well over a million dollars. Clearly, we would be much better off to form a new, small-farm cooperative and self-insure.
We are still exposed to risk though I have been plundered twice in the last 45 years. The first raid happened the year I bought the property and was renovating. I had one power tool, an anemic Black and Decker circular saw that whined if it was asked to cut anything thicker than quarter inch plywood. I left it on the veranda one Sunday night when I went back to the city and someone swiped it. I never had a chance to thank the burglar properly because I went out and bought a decent saw the next week and still have it today.
The second raid happened when my wife and I had moved up here full time and had stocked the place with sheep and poultry. Late one night I saw lights at the barn and went out to investigate. A truck roared away leaving the dogs barking, the guinea hens and geese shrieking and me fearing the worst. I had a look around to see what was missing but needed daylight to do a proper inventory. The next morning, I looked carefully through both barns and found the thieves had taken…nothing. Not a thing. I should have been relieved but the experience rattled me. People I didn’t know had looked over my possessions and found them worthless. I felt violated.
But this, of course, is the secret to living unmolested in the country or anywhere else. Don’t make it look like you have anything worth taking. Envy is the seed which should never be watered. Prevention is the key and we have placed our faith in a burglar alarm system that is completely solar-powered. We have guinea hens, geese, donkeys and a lot of dogs. They do turn in a lot of false alarms but when they all get going you couldn’t hear a fire truck pass. Noise is a reliable deterrent for burglars. They prefer to work in peaceful surroundings, and they don’t like heavy lifting. If you give them a choice between a Rolex watch and a 1935 vintage 500-pound root pulper, they generally go for the watch. And if they have to listen to a guinea hen, they won’t even take the watch.
We also drive ancient vehicles; those that won’t make the list of top ten vehicles stolen in Canada. You can’t swipe a 15-year-old Ford and ship it to Montreal for export. They already have enough old trucks in Africa. But none of these measures give us any leverage with the insurance company. They just shrug and tell you to shop around. So, I raised the deductibles once again, removed the coverage on the oldest barn and got the bill back down to where it was last year.
A hundred years ago, when I worked for an insurance company myself, we called this exercise ‘the lateral arabesque’. It is a term taken from ballet to describe an elaborate and complicated leap into the air, a maneuver which lands the performer in precisely the same place.