The deficit was how big?
Email
Print
Letter to Editor
Share
Updated: September 02, 2009 1:50 PM
By Tom Fletcher
Black Press
VICTORIA – Finance Minister Colin Hansen's sales job on the harmonized sales tax is being derailed by his admission that he was informed about B.C.'s ballooning deficit in the middle of the May election campaign.
Hansen's budget update Tuesday projected a deficit for this year of $2.8 billion, more than five times the amount of $495 million that Premier Gordon Campbell insisted during the election campaign would be the maximum.
The budget update projected three years of deficits, totaling $5.4 billion, a stark contrast to the two years of modest deficits presented to voters before the election. Asked in the budget lockup about the B.C. Liberal government's credibility, Hansen revealed he had received a brief update in mid-campaign from deputy finance minister Graham Whitmarsh.
In "an aside" at the end of a phone conversation, Whitmarsh told him new projections were showing B.C.'s resource and tax revenues were off $200-300 million, Hansen said.
NDP leader Carole James seized on the admission, reminding reporters that Campbell had been adamant on the day of the last leaders' debate about the province's financial situation.
"I was standing beside him when he looked into that camera and looked at British Columbians and said the deficit will be $495 million and not a penny more." James said. "And now we find out that the finance minister was actually warned that the revenue was dropping, and that there was a huge concern we might not be able to make that deficit. That just proves the point that this entire budget was a lie."
In a post-budget news conference Tuesday, Campbell and Hansen were on the defensive trying to explain what they knew about the deficit and when they knew it. (See video at www.bclocalnews.com)
Campbell acknowledged that he was also briefed about the deteriorating state of provincial revenues before the election.
"I had heard that revenues were coming off, yes, before the election, a week before the election, maybe the Thursday before the election," Campbell said. "We were talking about the H1N1 [influenza virus preparations], I heard that revenues were weakening. I also heard that we could manage them within the budget framework we set."
Asked what she would have done differently if she had been in the premier's position, James replied, "Tell the truth."
She said the service cuts and fee hikes in Tuesday's budget were concealed, and that's why voters are angry.
"It's that British Columbians are having to pay the price, with the HST, with an increase now in MSP premiums, James said. "It means middle class British Columbians who've done things right, who are tightening their own belts because they recognize these are difficult economic times, are having to pay the price for this government's incompetence and the government deceiving them."
v2
