Northern BC Dipper

The BC New Democrats held an blogger-exclusive scrum with budget critic Bruce Ralston in regards to the BC 2010 budget, therefore continuing an event established for the BC 2009 budget update. This scrum was bigger than last time, involving blogs such as Northern Insights, TheLeftCoast.ca, Politics, Re-Spun, and B.C. Policy Perspectives.

Ralston opened by stating that what he found was the most striking thing about this budget was the BC Liberal attempt to try to re-brand the HST as a measure that would be used to exclusively fund health care. He predicted that this re-branding would fail and only serve to further galvanize opposition to the HST in BC.

After that short statement, the bloggers were allowed to ask questions.

In particular, I was interested in the BC New Democrats’ opinion on the rather particular property tax deferral program for parents with children under 18. Ralston didn’t think much of the program. It would not result in new funding or jobs that could help these families, only provide a line of credit at no cost to the government. Furthermore, Ralston thought it was rather ironic that the BC Liberals were introducing measures to reduce the tax burdens of large banks while enabling families to accumulate more debt.

In regards to the questions asked by other bloggers: I’m sure that they will be posting more details on their respective blogs, so I’ll just go over some of the highlights.

There was a lot of discussion about the HST, and how it would be a tax shift that would take the burden off of business and onto the middle class. Also mentioned was the fact that the BC Liberal Government choose to only receive $250 million of the $1.6 billion federal inducement for adopting the HST instead of receiving the originally agreed to $750 million for this year. Ralston agreed that it was rather particular that the BC Liberals choose to defer $500 million instead of using it to avoid borrowing $500 million and therefore having to pay interest on it.

Another question asked was: were the BC New Democrats still committed to better, independent reporting of government budget reporting? Ralston reaffirmed this commitment, and discussed how there was further work to be done in making the government budget process less archaic, less politicized, and developing more ways to allow better comparisons of numbers between the various budget documents.

Close to the end, somebody asked one of the big questions: if the BC New Democrats were in government, would the deficit be bigger? Ralston admitted that yes it would be, as the BC New Democrats made a commitment during the 2009 election to have a bigger stimulus package focused on green infrastructure and work to preserve services that would be harmed by short-term, short-sighted panicked cuts.

After a damning report stating that women’s rights in Canada have been in decline since 2004 in February, the Harper government has lain out a response in today’s Throne Speech.

The response being you might ask? Let’s use the Throne Speech’s own words:

Our Government will also ask Parliament to examine the original gender-neutral English wording of the national anthem.

What exactly does that mean? Well, let’s look at the words:

So basically, as far as I can tell, the Harper government is going to ask Parliament to replace the words “True patriot love in all thy sons command” with “True patriot love thou dost in us command.”

From a gender-neutrality point of view, this change is a step forward. But does it do anything substantive to address the wage gap between men and women, or a lack of affordable, accessible, professional child care?

I don’t think so.

The 2010 BC Budget has been released today, and if anybody was expecting a post-Olympic economic vision from the BC Liberals, they’d be disappointed.

The 2010 Budget basically continues the path set by the 2009 Budget Update in September 2009: aiming to have a surplus budget by 2013/2014, continuing the reformation of the tax system from a progressive system to a middle-class harming regressive system, and finding more government services to cut.

Spending Cuts

Probably the big news story of this budget is the cuts to most government ministries with the exceptions of Health and Education, and the reduction of staff to BC’s already lean Civil Service. The Civil Service is set to have 4,142 fewer people working for it by 2013, which is a reduction of 13% of the civil service by 2008 staffing levels. The government hopes to achieve most of these reductions by not replacing those that leave the Civil Service, but some layoffs are expected. The budget of the Ministry of Forest is also to be reduced by 35%, on top of previous cuts.

One really has to wonder if these cuts are an example of the BC Liberal government being penny-wise and dollar-foolish, saving money today but reducing economic opportunities for the citizens of BC in the long term.

An Olympic Legacy?

One of the good news stories of the budget, according to the BC Liberals, is the creation of a $60 million “2010 Sports and Arts Legacy” fund, designed to help fund arts and sports programs. Of course, what isn’t mentioned is that last year’s budget made a huge cut to discretionary grant money that helped fund, you guessed it, arts and sports programs.

A Little Boost in Education Spending

Education spending has been boosted a tiny amount in this budget. However, over the last couple of years, the BC Liberal government has downloaded greater responsibilities and costs to Boards of Education. Therefore, the question is, will this boost be able to both pay for increased costs and inflation?

Property Tax Deferral For Parents With Children Under 18

By far the weirdest announcement of the budget, the BC Liberal government is allowing parents of children under 18 who have 15% equity of their homes to defer their property taxes for the 2010 tax year, supposedly for the purpose of helping working families. Of course, those who opt to defer will have to pay the tax back plus prime rate interest for the 2011 tax year.

I fail to see how this is going help people with families. First of all, this problem isn’t going to help those families that rent, not own, their houses. Secondly, this is a good way to encourage BC Families to have a higher debt load, which is ironically counter to the “live within our needs rhetoric” we keep hearing from this government. Finally, I’d suspect that increasing resources to such things as combating child poverty and housing would have been way more useful in helping working families than this program.

Conclusion

If anybody is looking for any indication that the BC Liberals have basically run out of ideas in regards to the governing of this province, this budget would be it. This budget seems to stumble to-and-fro. It makes penny-wise, dollar-foolish cuts to the civil service that will hurt the quality of BC Government services in the long run. It makes a big deal of a few spending increases that really make up from downloaded costs or previously cut programs. Finally, it contains just plain weird programs that seem to be based more on a ideological, warped view of market economics and less on actually helping families that have been hurt from the economic downturn.

During the 2009 British Columbia Election campaign, the BC Liberals repeatedly said that despite the hard economic times, they would protect education while in Government.

After getting out of yesterday’s School District #57 (Prince George) special meeting, there is only one thing I can say:

The BC Liberals lied.

At the special meeting, School District #57 administrators presented a “District Sustainably Committee” report, which recommended that the district:

1. Close down 12 of 47 schools and re-purpose 2 schools to teach different groups of students. To top it off, some of these schools slated to close down are rural elementary schools; therefore elementary students will have to be bused into Prince George;
2. Increase class sizes;
3. “Cut district infrastructure” (a.k.a., for the most part, laying off staff).

None of these steps are very conducive to protecting education; however all this is to save $7 million in order to be able to deliver a balanced budget in the 2010-11 school year.

Why does the school district all of a sudden have to save $7 million? Because the BC Liberal government choose to pile more obligations to school boards, such as all-day kindergarten, carbon reduction requirements, and higher MSP Premiums without giving school boards the extra money to pay for them. Because the BC Liberal government choose to take away the Annual Facility Grant used to maintain school buildings. Well, I suppose at least the BC Liberals choose to give school boards a rebate on the HST.

Remember too that this is coming from a school board that had to shut down 14 schools in 2002, during the early Campbell BC Liberal government. Oh, and to make things even worse, the report suggests that School District #57 will have to cut a further $4 million in the future.

So what does this have to do with somebody that is not living in School District #57? Simple. A lot of other BC school boards are facing the same fiscal pressures as School District #57, and might have to take similar action. Heck, it’s already happening in Vancouver.

Of course, the BC Liberals still have time to protect education. They still have time to amend this year’s budget take responsibility for the extra costs that they have added to school boards. They still have time to prove that they didn’t lie during the election.

It seems that the BC Liberals have finally decided to give Board of Educations, Post-Secondary Institutions and Hospitals a HST rebate so that these organizations are not spending more money on taxes and less money on their purposes.

One really has to ask the question: why wasn’t the HST designed and announced with these rebates in the first place? There is simply no excuse for this oversight. After all, the BC Liberals have been down this road before; they neglected to give rebates to boards of education and municipalities when the carbon tax was implemented, and then later organized a rebate for the tax.

Of course, there is a cynical answer: the announcement for the HST tax rebate was held back until now, just before the affected organizations will be announcing service cutbacks because of reductions to funding, to try to soften the blow for the BC Liberal government.