By Bill Bennett

MLA East Kootenays

Summer is normally when I spend a little more time with my family, doing the things we all love to do in the Kootenays – camping, fishing, hiking and enjoying our beautiful mountains and valley. But this year is different for your MLA because of the provincial election in May.

Now I have a new, larger cabinet position that I must learn and all MLA’s are heading back into the Legislative Session on August 25 for a Throne Speech and Budget.

It’s the budget that I want to touch on today.

In 2001, when our government first took power, there was a structural deficit in place after 10 years of NDP mismanagement and undisciplined spending.

A “structural” deficit means that there are more spending promises in place than there is expected revenue to cover the cost of them.

It took our government a few years to get the costs under control and to lower taxes and get investment and job creation flowing back into the province.

Yet with hard work we accomplished this, all the while still increasing health-care and education funding every single one of our eight years as government.

But due to the global economic recession, we are now facing the threat of going back into a structural deficit if we don’t make some tough changes to our spending.

The challenge is that the provincial budget is made up mostly of health-care, education and social services.

If you completely scrapped the budget for the Ministry of Environment, it would only pay for provincial health-care for about four days.

If we got rid of my Ministry of Community and Rural Development completely, it would pay for health-care for only about one week.

When you add up health-care, education and social services and interest on the debt, you are left with 18 per cent of the provincial budget – from which we have to find savings to keep from creating a structural deficit that would be passed on to our kids and grandchildren.

Our government is just not willing to burden the next generation with an insurmountable debt.

So we are working very hard right now to find ways to deliver health-care as effectively and efficiently as possible but to do so in a way that is not by living beyond our means.

B.C. has come a long way since 2001.

We have the lowest taxes in the country, a positive investment-job creation climate and the best credit rating in Canada.

We need to maintain these advantages for when the global recession ends and the economy picks up again.

When the new budget is announced this September, it will be a deficit but it will not be structural in nature.

We will show how that deficit will be reduced over the next few years and then we’ll be back in the black where B.C. should be.

Our deficit here in BC this year will still be a fraction of Ontario’s and will even be significantly smaller than Alberta’s. B.C. will still lead Canada on the management of government and the management of the economy.