A former NDP premier and ex-B.C. Liberal finance minister agreed that the growth in spending leaves the province unprepared for tariffs
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Premier David Eby said Wednesday that money is required to build the infrastructure that the province needs, but economists and two former finance ministers from both sides of the aisle say the government’s fiscal situation is unsustainable.
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Speaking at the site of Simon Fraser University’s new medical school in Surrey, the premier argued that his NDP government is doing what is necessary to provide British Columbians with the services they need and alleged that the B.C. Conservatives would make large scale cuts to supports if elected.
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“Do you think that the Conservative government or whatever constellation of right-wing parties forms in British Columbia will actually build the new medical school, will actually train the doctors? Because the history is that they announced balanced budgets, but they were not balanced because they starved British Columbians of the services they needed,” said Eby.
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Those comments come at a time when the province is projected to run a $13.8-billion operating deficit this fiscal year and at least one former NDP premier and finance minister feels the government has strayed from any sense of responsible economic management.
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Ujjal Dosanjh, who served as premier from 2000 until the party was wiped out by the B.C. Liberals in the 2001 election, says the NDP risk being swept out of power if it doesn’t engage in a fundamental shift of its spending.
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He said he’s especially concerned about the growth in the size of the public sector under Eby, with much of the growth in operational spending coming from wages for workers. When Eby took over as premier in November 2022, the late John Horgan had left him a projected operating surplus of $5.7 billion.
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“The engine of growth can’t be the public sector jobs, because it seems to me that in the last few years, the public sector has grown disproportionately, and of course the deficit has just ballooned after Horgan,” said Dosanjh. “You can’t continue piling deficit upon deficit, and this has been done after Horgan, and it’s in a very short span of time, and Horgan took us through COVID essentially, and so you can’t blame it on COVID.”
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Former B.C. Liberal finance minister Mike de Jong, who served in the role under Premier Christy Clark from 2012 to 2017, said that the whole point of surpluses is to pay down the debt and put the province in a strong position to weather storms like COVID-19 or U.S. tariffs.
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Instead, the province has gone through five straight credit downgrades and is on pace to more than double the provincial debt in under four years from $89.4 billion to $180.886 billion. Of that debt, over $45.4 billion of it is from operating expenses such as salaries and the day-to-day operations of government. All of that debt has been added under Eby.
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“The government went into COVID having inherited the strongest set of books in the country. B.C. was better positioned than any other jurisdiction, arguably in North America, to assist people and provide the supports necessary during those very difficult days of COVID, the problem was in the aftermath,” said de Jong.
