Now it’s job cuts and a big deficit
Email
Print
Letter to Editor
Share
Updated: July 15, 2009 6:54 PM
VICTORIA – The NDP lost the election, but their key policy has won. B.C. will run a billion-dollar-plus deficit this year.
The admission was dragged out of a reluctant Finance Minister Colin Hansen last week, when he presented the audited books for 2008-09 with a razor-thin surplus that will likely be the last black ink B.C. sees for years. It was a bad day for Hansen, who took the fall for Premier Gordon Campbell’s adamant claim during the election campaign.
“I can tell you this. The deficit will be $495 million, maximum,” Campbell said in May, in what NDP finance critic Bruce Ralston now calls his “George Bush read-my-lips moment.”
Hansen said it was a briefing from Canada Revenue Agency on June 25 that finally revealed the shocking truth: personal income tax revenues were not going to be up $300 million this year, they’re down! (Apparently people took some big investment losses, and others lost their jobs.) And “what really took my breath away” was that big companies took losses and extra charges that have caused B.C.’s corporate tax take to plummet even worse! Who knew?
“Given what I know today I am not optimistic at all that the $495 million [deficit] is anywhere near possible,” Hansen said.
He declined to be more specific until his new budget is tabled Sept. 1, but a nine-figure deficit as predicted by outside observers is virtually certain.
Also last week, the B.C. Government Employees’ Union revealed plans to cut as many as 230 full-time positions in the forests ministry, and 30 or more in the environment ministry.
Oddly, I couldn’t reach the normally chatty Environment Minister Barry Penner, but Forests Minister Pat Bell was quick to assure me this is strictly speculation by the union and no decision has been made yet.
Yes, the annual timber cut is expected to be down a third from normal levels this year, so there will be fewer sites to inspect. Yes, the same pre-election budget that proposed that dinky deficit allowed that about 180 positions were going from the forests ministry in the next three years. Yes, the treasury board is combing every ministry for further savings in preparation for September. But further job losses? Don’t be too hasty.
Ralston predicts that in the next few weeks there will be more bad news, rolled out during “barbecue season” so it all doesn’t land with a thud in September. Forests, environment, even attorney general operations are small potatoes after health care and education.
Health authorities, told to hold back their budgets until after the election, are now reporting the expected multi-million-dollar shortfalls. (Ralston bitterly notes that the B.C. Liberals won the Maple Ridge-Mission seat by 68 votes, and then set to work winding down Mission Hospital’s ER in favour of expanded facilities in Abbotsford and Maple Ridge.)
Voters who feel manipulated and misled may take some comfort, however. Campbell and his cabinet ministers are all but certain to take a pay cut of 10 per cent this year for failing to balance their budgets.
v2
