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?

[Winsor_Pilates]

BC Budget 2026 Released:
13B debt, tax increase for lowest tax bracket, cuts to public sector jobs.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/briti...2026-9.7094451

https://vancouversun.com/news/bc-bud...ill-affect-you

[calgarygeologist]

Originally Posted by Winsor_Pilates

BC Budget 2026 Released:
13B debt, tax increase for lowest tax bracket, cuts to public sector jobs.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/briti...2026-9.7094451

https://vancouversun.com/news/bc-bud...ill-affect-you

The BC government is also making cuts to disability programs:

Three years after promising parents of autistic children that they could keep their individualized support funding, Premier David Eby’s government has yanked the rug back out from underneath them by scrapping the program entirely.

The changes, announced last week, replace annual individual payments of $6,000 for autistic children to use on therapy and equipment, with a new needs-based benefit and income-tested supplement.

While billed as providing more support for the highest-needs children, it also means more than one in three B.C. children with autism currently receiving support—roughly 36.5 per cent—will get less financial help. That’s around 10,256 children affected, according to government estimates.

Half of those kids, about 5,200, will get their yearly $6,000 eliminated entirely because they will not be designated to have high enough needs or a corresponding severe intellectual disability. They’ll be redirected to community programs that are often backlogged by long wait lists.

https://www.biv.com/news/commentary/...pport-11887243

[Winsor_Pilates]

Just not enough money to cover the programs needed, and I don't see an easy way out of it.

Lost revenue from reduced real estate sales have impacted property transfer tax collected, and now lack of development will reduce related tax revenues.
Adding additional soft costs to development in this budget will increase pricing to end users, so we're always stuck between "fixing" real estate prices and relying on a busy real estate cycle for revenues.

Amongst other things, but from the real estate side of things, the math never maths.

[chemgear]

Originally Posted by Winsor_Pilates

BC Budget 2026 Released:
13B debt, tax increase for lowest tax bracket, cuts to public sector jobs.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/briti...2026-9.7094451

https://vancouversun.com/news/bc-bud...ill-affect-you

The CBC charts of the non-stop growing deficit (& debt) under Eby is pretty consistent and damning. Nevermind his failed decriminalization experiment and now his DRIPA and land claim issues around threatening private property. Interesting times for BC.

[Regorium]

The whole revenue neutral carbon tax leading to a tax bracket drop is really the issue.

I thought BC did it super smart where it was out of sight and out of mind for everyone, while maintaining the climate benefits, but I guess on the other end it makes it a mess because everyone doesn't see that their low taxes are because of the carbon tax and it needs to come up.

We've also always said that real estate as a percentage of GDP is higher than O&G in Alberta. They were so reliant on a single industry, and now that it's a bit slower they can't manage their finances at all.

[opendoor]

The budget actually isn't that bad, and I think they're doing a poor job of communicating it. For one, it has a ton of padding, with $5B in contingency reserves for each year. Maybe they'll end up spending that, but those contingencies are about 10x the size of what they used to have pre-pandemic, so there's more room for error.

And they're also spending a lot on capital stuff; while that does rely on borrowed money, it's obviously more of an investment. A lot of that stuff was really neglected through the 2000s and 2010s, but eventually you need to build new hospitals and schools with a fast growing population.

But ultimately, tax rates are still too low for the level of services. If BC had Ontario's personal income tax rates, they'd be bringing in about $3-4B more in revenue. And if they brought in the same sales tax relative to GDP as Ontario does, that's another $3-4B in revenue. Just those 2 things, coupled with some public service cuts, and the budget would be a lot closer to being balanced.

Though I do like that they're reforming the property tax deferral. Until now, 55+ year olds could defer their taxes indefinitely at a non-compounding interest rate of prime - 2%. So for most of the last 15 years, they've been getting near interest-free loans from the provincial government. Now that's prime + 2% and it compounds, which will make things a lot fairer. Instead of the young subsidizing older property owners, people who take part in the program will be subsidizing everyone else, as the interest rate is well above what the province can borrow money at, so it creates a net source of revenue.