BC Lags Behind Other Provinces in Life Satisfaction

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by afc wimbledon

which ironically makes the land value worthless and so makes claiming it pointless, I suspect that will be the get out of jail free card, value will have to be assessed as if the land was never colonized

Market price != value, land has the potential to produce value irrespective of the sales market evaporating under this legal сock-up. Unless it is practically unusable land, if all you have to do to effectively claim ownership of the land is say "mine!", you do it.

[blankall]

Originally Posted by combustiblefuel

You think that's ####ed up? Don't look up what a guy did in Qualicum Beach. That story will mess you up.

Made the mistake of reading it....goes into detail of the aftermath that is just totally unnecessary to the report in any way.

[calgarygeologist]

BC is not going to create a law to hold corporations accountable for environmental cleanup at industrial sites.

Port Alice is a “symptom of a wider problem,” provincial officials admitted internally in a 2021 briefing note. The province has no powers to compel companies to close and clean up their industrial sites or to collect funds to compensate taxpayers if they go bankrupt.

The Public Interest Bonding Strategy was designed to fix that, then-environment minister George Heyman said in 2023.

“We’re long overdue to reduce unnecessary environmental cleanup liability to the government, also known as the taxpayers of British Columbia,” Heyman told the legislature as he introduced the strategy’s first legal amendments in the legislature. The amendments would allow the government to require cleanup and collect bonding insurance from industrial sites for the first time.

The new laws required regulations to take effect, but those regulations never arrived.

Last week, the province told official interveners that it had indefinitely paused the strategy. The government has not announced the pause publicly, but in an email to The Tyee, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Environment and Parks confirmed that work had been halted.

“We are not in a position to move this work forward,” the spokesperson wrote. “The decision reflects the need to balance multiple priorities and ensure the best use of public resources at this time.”

With work on the strategy halted, the problems it set out to address remain.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2026/02/03/B...s-Pay-Cleanup/

[calgarygeologist]

Members of the BC NDP government are coming out against the budget and calling their deficit level unsustainable. Premier Eby is trying in part to combat their record deficit by cutting 2,000+ public service jobs.

British Columbia has an “unsustainable provincial budget deficit.” Those aren’t the words of the Opposition. They’re the words of Premier David Eby’s deputy minister, Shannon Salter, in an email to the public service last week.

If that phrase sounds unfamiliar, it’s probably because nobody from the Eby administration or the New Democrat government has ever really called their own budget “unsustainable”—despite the record levels of deficit and debt.

In fact, for the last four years, the language around the NDP’s management of the public purse has been pretty much the opposite: prudent, necessary, responsible.

When Eby first took office in late 2022, he inherited an almost $6-billion surplus from the John Horgan administration. Provincial debt sat near $92 billion. Should he use some of that surplus to pay down debt? No way, said the new premier.

“Our focus will be on delivering services and supports for British Columbians in this really challenging time that they face,” Eby told me at the end of 2022. “Not on debt repayment.”

Instead, the Eby government accelerated program and staffing growth to “put this year’s surplus to work for people—to support them now and for the long term,” according to the first throne speech.

The rapid expansion of programs, services and public service employees was followed immediately by a return to deficit. The next budget, in 2023-24 ended $5 billion in the red.

“It’s not the right time right now to make cuts to services in this province,” then-finance minister Katrine Conroy said in 2023. “We can’t afford a deficit of services.”

Conroy waived away a 20 per cent increase to total provincial debt that year, followed by another 24 per cent the next.

“Our interest rate is 3.2 cents on the dollar,” she said in 2023, as she increased it from 2.5 cents. “It’s one of the lowest in the country. So we feel very secure in moving forward with our budget.”

Two years later, those numbers seem quaint.

The government’s interest bite now sits at five cents on every dollar of revenue. Interest payment costs have doubled from the Horgan era. The annual cost of servicing the debt is now equivalent to the fourth-largest ministry in spending, at $6 billion.

“We are on a declining deficit for the next three years,” she said in 2024. “Our goal is a balanced budget.”

Eby repeated those pledges during the 2024 election campaign. “We'll have declining deficits,” he said.

Except they didn’t. The opposite happened, as the deficit jumped from $5 billion (2023-24) to $7.3 billion (2024-25) to a projected $11.6 billion currently in 2025-26.

https://www.biv.com/news/commentary/...risis-11854668

[opendoor]

It's mostly a revenue problem, as taxes are too low for the level of services. BC has basically the lowest income taxes in the country for anyone earning less than $150K a year and that was done when the carbon tax was introduced in order to make it revenue neutral. But then they got rid of the carbon tax without bumping up tax rates, and unsurprisingly, there's a big hole in the budget.

If BC was getting the same revenue relative to GDP as they were even 3 years ago, the deficit would be more like $3B, which is a lot more manageable to close with some spending cuts. But the carbon tax (which was introduced by a right wing government in BC, mind you) became a hot button partisan issue thanks to federal politics so there was no way to keep it and win the last election. But I'm sure we're all enjoying the huge drops in food prices that resulted from its removal, right?