News and event information for Williams Lake, BC - as it happens.

Good Fiscal Management?

The Liberal’s pride themselves on being good fiscal managers. However, the fallacy of this claim was proven after the May election when the deficit was changed from the promised $495 million to over $3.5 billion and the government still had to make deep cuts to public services.

After 2001, Premier Campbell ran three successively larger deficits before posting a surplus. One of these deficits was the largest recorded in BC. While the government was running these deficits they were also giving away revenue through tax cuts and subsidies while making deep cuts to essential public services.

We’ve argued that the government’s finances only turned around in 2004 because commodity prices spiked and the housing boom took hold in the Lower Mainland thereby boosting government revenues. It was not prudent management that turned deficits into surpluses; it was simply the luck of the market.

Now that the boom has turned into a bust our argument has proven to be true: the Liberal government did not position BC well for the inevitable downturn in the economy because once again they are forced to deficit finance while still cutting public services.

Traditionally, government’s go into deficit in the tough times in order to maintain the public presence in the economy: keep public sector jobs, improve social programs to help those who lose their jobs in the private sector, maintain public services. The theory is that if the government also slashes jobs, cancels programs and reduces supports to those in need, it will only cause the recession to deepen. That’s exactly what the BC Liberals are now doing: deepening the pain in our communities and households.

Add to this bad fiscal management the Liberals shift of billions of dollars more of the tax burden onto households thru the HST, their failure to give resource dependent communities the resources they need to plan for their future, and their failure to support workers who have lost their jobs, and it is hard to understand how the Premier and Finance Minister can claim that BC is doing okay and will be one of the first provinces to rebound when the economy finally turns around.

Just like their claim that they are good fiscal managers, it’s simply not credible to say that BC is going to be okay if we stay on the course we’re on.

Bob Simpson
MLA Cariboo North

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