Hansard — Wednesday, February 20, 2008 p.m.

The following electronic version is for informational purposes only.
The printed version remains the official version.

Official Report of

DEBATES OF THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY


CONTENTS

	Routine Proceedings
		Page


Introductions by Members		9805

Statements (Standing Order 25B)		9805
	Roderick Haig-Brown
	C. Trevena
	Cell phone use by drivers
	J. Rustad
	100th anniversary of Britannia Secondary School
	S. Simpson
	Nanaimo Sports Achievement Awards
	R. Cantelon
	Sidney and Spencer Needham
	J. Horgan
	Scouts Canada
	H. Bloy

Oral Questions		9807
	Status of seniors care facilities
	C. James
	Hon. G. Abbott
	G. Gentner
	A. Dix
	Child poverty in B.C.
	B. Ralston
	Hon. C. Richmond
	N. Simons
	J. Kwan

Budget Debate (continued)		9812
	B. Ralston
	J. Yap
	N. Simons
	Hon. R. Coleman
	R. Fleming
	Hon. C. Hansen
	B. Simpson
	J. Rustad

Hon. M. de Jong: Last week we had a general introduction of the group of interns, and we welcomed them to the precincts. Their duties have now been assigned, and I'm pleased to introduce to the House the corps of interns who will be working with the government caucus. They are Gordon Hunter, Rhea Laube, Grace Lore, Madeleine Lyons and Danica Wong. I hope the House will make them, specifically, feel welcome as they take up their new duties with the government caucus.

Also joining the House in the gallery today is an individual who has demonstrated tremendous leadership on behalf of the Haisla First Nation. He has brought vision and courage to his duties as the elected Chief. Chief Steve Wilson of the Haisla First Nation is in the gallery, and I hope all members will make him feel particularly welcome.

D. Routley: I'd like to inform the members of a great experience that I've had over the last couple of days in having a young high school student do a job shadow with me. I maintain the pretence that I'm actually working fairly well so far, I think.

With the help of other people in the House, including yourself, Mr. Speaker, it was very informative for Pedro and me to meet with you and hear about your impressions of this place. Also, Mr. MacMinn took time to meet with us.

Pedro has learned a lot about the way democracy works in theory and also now in practice. I'd like all the members to help me welcome Pedro Banman, who is my job shadow. I'd like to encourage all the members to do the same, because I think it's very good for young people in this province to see how this great system does work.

R. Sultan: C'est avec grand plaisir que je vous présente Mme. Nathalie Lleres et 55 grade 11 students from the French immersion program at École secondaire Sentinel in West Vancouver. École secondaire Sentinel currently enrols over 1,090 students in grades 8 through 12. Peut la Maison les faire accueillir.

N. Simons: It gives me pleasure to introduce two friends in the House today. Would the House please make welcome Dan Bouman of the Sunshine Coast Conservation Association and Alison Leduc.

Hon. W. Oppal: Watching from her hospital bed is the Deputy Speaker and member for Kelowna-Mission. She tells me she misses us. Let's give her a great round of applause.

B. Bennett: I want to call the House's attention to an accomplishment by four men from the East Kootenay last weekend. They won the senior men's curling championship for British Columbia. They beat the great curler from Kelowna; Rick Folk, I think his name is. He has won several championships.

Ralph Will was the skip. He curls in Sparwood. There were curlers from Fernie on the team and my buddy Gerry Kent from Cranbrook. Congratulations to them. Now they're going to the nationals in Saskatchewan.

J. McIntyre: I just wanted to add a word of welcome to the Sentinel students, although I cannot do it as eloquently as my colleague from West Vancouver–Capilano. My son was a graduate from Sentinel in 2004. Welcome to all the Sentinel students and staff.

B. Lekstrom: It's my privilege today to rise and introduce a good friend of mine in the Legislative Assembly, a former member of this House from the northwest part of our province. Would the House please welcome Mr. Roger Harris.

C. Trevena: The Campbell River is a beautiful stretch of water. It rips along its wide bed, and it's a hope for the symbol of B.C. — salmon — and a home for an ecosystem.

This was recognized by Roderick Haig-Brown, Campbell River's and perhaps B.C.'s most famous flyfisher, a staunch environmentalist and a writer. From his home on the river's edge he could watch the river move as he wrote. It was in his mind's eye that he fought his environmental battles.

His legacy has lived on through his writings, and he has influenced many people, including, among others, biologists, psychologists and many who were just interested in the relationship between people and nature.

This year seems to be a time of legacy. For Campbell River it is a time to acknowledge the Haig-Brown legacies. Tomorrow marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Roderick, a day which will be noted with celebration both here in Victoria and in Campbell River.

The city of Campbell River is holding a special ceremony at the museum, which itself is marking its 50th anniversary, at which February 21 will be proclaimed Roderick Haig-Brown Day.

The province has also recommended this extraordinary man with a proclamation celebrating his lifetime achievements. It's the start of six months of events organized in conjunction with the Haig-Brown Institute to mark the centenary of his and his wife Ann's birth.

The institute's mission statement is to promote the links between ecology and economy through watershed management and to inspire a conservation ethic through education and literature, a noble cause which

will be highlighted through the coming months. Events include a symposium this summer on how communities can act to sustain wild salmon populations. The celebrations will culminate in the annual Haig-Brown festival, held in September at Roderick and Ann's former home on the banks of the Campbell River.

I hope the House will join me and the people of Campbell River in recognizing the influence of Roderick Haig-Brown and will use this year to help raise awareness of his values and his vision.

J. Rustad: Drivers everywhere in B.C. have a lot on their minds. They're worried about making it to their destination on time. They're thinking about what happened last night. They may even be thinking about the Canucks winning the Stanley Cup. Okay, maybe that's a bit of a stretch.

The point is that drivers don't always have their minds on the road. Distractions for drivers account for almost 80 percent of crashes and 65 percent of near-crashes, according to a recent study.

Statistically, young drivers have the greatest problem with distractions. Focus groups suggest that teen participants do not always see the relationship between the numerous distractions in their cars and the high rate of crashes. They do not seem to connect the many close calls that they've had to using their cell phones while driving. This is not just a problem for young drivers, but it's a safety issue for everyone on the road.

According to a recent poll, 89 percent of motorists are very concerned about other distracted drivers on the road. Speaking from personal experience, there's no question that using a cell phone while driving is a significant distraction. I'm fortunate in that I've learned that lesson without being in an accident.

It's difficult to encourage everyone to have the same level of awareness regarding the distraction caused by cell phones, but perhaps there's something we can do for our young drivers. As new drivers go through the graduated licence program, our hope is to try to instil the best driving habits possible. I believe the dangers of distractions due to cell phones while driving should be highlighted.

I applaud the Solicitor General's review that is being initiated regarding cell phone use while driving, and I look forward to hearing the results. Together we need to find ways to raise the level of awareness and to help our new drivers form the best driving habits possible.

S. Simpson: I'm very pleased to speak today about my old high school, Britannia Secondary in East Vancouver, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. On February 6, I had the opportunity — along with the member for Burnaby North, who was also a Britannia student — to participate in the ribbon-cutting commencing the 100-day countdown to the May 16 weekend when 4,000 to 5,000 past students, teachers, administrators and friends will converge on the Agrodome in Vancouver to celebrate this remarkable school.

Britannia was the second high school built in Vancouver and is the oldest still standing. It has played an integral role in East Vancouver, successfully blending a very diverse multicultural student population of working-class British Columbians.

Britannia has turned out many outstanding citizens: Barbara Howard, who competed in the 1938 British Empire Games and was one of Canada's first black athletes; well-known entertainer and comedian Bill Reiter; Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci; and of course past Premier Dave Barrett, just to name a few.

Britannia has long been known for its commitment to the community. This was highlighted in 1972 when an elementary school and the comprehensive community services centre were added to the high school in an integrated approach to meeting the needs of the people of East Vancouver.

The Britannia Community Services Centre is arguably the most successful initiative of its kind anywhere and has drawn people from around the world to come and learn about how it was done and the success it has had. Most importantly, talk to the thousands of people who use it every year, and you will be left with no doubt about the importance of its role to the community.

I'm very proud of my days at Britannia, and I credit the school for giving me the foundation to be successful in my life. I'm honoured today to represent many of the children of Britannia and their families. I know I'm joined by the member for Vancouver–Mount Pleasant, whose constituency the school is actually located in, in congratulating everyone at Britannia and all the people working on the 100th anniversary celebration. It's a great school and deserves a fabulous 100th birthday. Go, Bruins, go.

Mr. Speaker: Could I remind members to keep the chatter down just a little bit because it's hard to hear.

R. Cantelon: Today I want to recount a very special happening at the Pacific sports achievement awards that occurred recently in Nanaimo. Among the highlights were recognition of the Nanaimo Clippers as British Columbia champions in junior B hockey and of course the Dover Bay boys basketball team winning the B.C. championship — a triple-A basketball team. Also, Michelle Stillwell as athlete of the year, a Paralympian who has won gold medals and plans to do it again, and Jim Rayhear, a Dover Bay athlete who excels in badminton and in basketball.

The special moment came when they came to award the partnership team. Megan Yim and Kylee Abrahamsom were nominated for their bronze medal win in badminton, but also nominated was team

Plasteras. Jim Plasteras had pushed his 19-year-old daughter Carly to a finish in the Vancouver marathon. That was in May, and then he decided in October to repeat it with Carly's twin sister Angela, who is also a cerebral palsy victim. But because he tore a muscle, he didn't manage to finish the race without the help of Angela and Carly's brother and sister, who finished the race in over four hours. It was a really heroic moment.

It was a hushed audience when it came time to present the award. The award was presented to Megan Yim. It was a quiet, hushed moment, and then a very, very special thing happened. Yim walked up, received the award, turned to the crowd and said: "I don't really deserve this." She walked over and handed it to the Plasteras family. We were all just stunned for a moment. It was a moment of pure and simple graciousness that captured us all in one magic moment.

I salute all these champions and particularly Megan Yim for her graciousness, and I invite all the House to join me in that.

J. Horgan: Last year I had the pleasure to rise in this House and talk about the athletic achievements of members of my community. But the West Shore is not just about hockey; it's also about the arts. Today I want to take the opportunity to advise the Legislature about a special musical family in my constituency.

The story of Sidney and Spencer Needham starts with the awesome ensemble, the District of Soul. You don't have to go to Memphis or Motown to get a blast of the blues. Just roll into the Luxton Fall Fair or visit Jazz in the Park, and listen to the sweet sounds of soul right here in Malahat–Juan de Fuca.

The brainchild of Dunsmuir Middle School teacher Glenn Whitney, the District of Soul was formed in 2004 with 18 very talented students from Dunsmuir and Belmont Secondary. Glen saw the talent of these kids and turned to his teaching colleagues at Belmont, Glynis Dawson and the legendary Joyce Kopan, and he kept the melodies moving.

A wicked horn section and a rhythm duo to set the tempo, the District of Soul has gained a following across the region and is a show not to be missed. As awesome as the trumpets and the saxophones are, it's the power and clarity of the main vocalists that steal the show. That is where my longtime neighbours the Needhams take the troupe to another level.

Sidney, 18, and Spencer, 16, are accomplished soloists and recently put their talents up against 14 other contestants in the third annual PEERS charity fundraising performance of Victoria Idol. The packed house heard some incredible performances, but it was Spencer, the scrawny little brother, that won the day, and Sidney placed second runner-up. The scholarships are piling up, the studio time is being put to good use, and the recording contracts are sure to follow.

It is success stories like the Needhams' that highlight the importance of the arts in our public school system. It reinforces the enormous value of music educators in our schools and the need to support the arts whenever and wherever we can.

Will the Legislature please join me in celebrating the contribution of our music teachers and two wonderful kids with a mountain of Metchosin talent, a brother-and-sister combo that are going places — Sidney and Spencer Needham.

H. Bloy: It's my pleasure to rise and speak to a global movement of 28 million young people around the world, which started over a hundred years ago. The movement I'm talking about is scouting.

I am proud to wear this uniform, just like the 24,000 other adult volunteers across Canada and hundreds of thousands of volunteers all over the world. They volunteer their time and effort to lead young people through a variety of activities, from camping and earning badges to meeting new friends and completing good turns in the community.

Generations of children have benefited from scouting and its leaders. These children are taught positive values that help them become better individuals who can play a constructive role in society.

Two leading individuals who have benefited from scouting in my community are Warren Gill, vice-president of Simon Fraser University, and David Podmore, president of Concert Properties — and other active volunteers like John Chow, Dick Earthy, Celinda Williams, Lynn Holden and Mark Robertson, who continue today to make a difference in the lives of children.

February 22 is Thinking Day. This is a day where scouting and its sister organization Guides recognize the life and importance of Lord and Lady Baden-Powell, who were the founders of scouting and guiding. As we are three days away from Thinking Day, I urge all members of scouting and guiding and members of this House to think and to thank their leaders who volunteer in their community.

C. James: Yesterday the B.C. Liberals delivered a budget that completely ignored seniors and their health care challenges. On the same day, the opposition received an FOI package that once again highlighted this government's absolute failure to protect seniors. This package contains assessment reports for seniors homes and community living homes across Vancouver Island.

The reports are damning. As suspected, Beacon Hill Villa was just the tip of the iceberg. Dozens of homes across this region have been deemed high-risk. These reports are from 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007.

My question is to the Minister of Health. Why is he standing by doing absolutely nothing, allowing these

high-risk facilities to continue to operate and not telling seniors and their families that they're at risk?

Hon. G. Abbott: First of all, the Leader of the Opposition is dead wrong in relation to yesterday's budget. It contained great news for seniors in this province.

We are a government that has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in new facilities, residential care and assisted living for seniors across this province — now close to 4,000 incremental units across this province. We have moved away from the substandard facilities, even places like James Bay Care Centre. We've moved away from those multi-bed wards. We've moved away from those narrow hallways, those washrooms that were inaccessible to wheelchairs. We have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in improving the lives of seniors in this province.

We have, through the health authorities, an excellent system of ensuring that quality of care is there for all seniors in the province. The licensing officials at Vancouver Island and elsewhere work tirelessly to ensure that seniors get that kind of quality care.

C. James: There's only one part that the Health Minister said that was accurate. That is that licensing officers work hard. We have lists of dozens and dozens of facilities deemed high-risk, and I'd like the minister to tell those families that everything is fine for seniors in British Columbia.

It was the NDP who actually blew the whistle on the deplorable conditions at Beacon Hill Villa, a facility that is right behind the Legislature. It was the NDP who actually forced this government to take action. The minister tried to keep those reports in the dark.

The Premier actually said that everything was all right for seniors in British Columbia. Well, we know from these reports through FOI that Beacon Hill Villa is not the only one. Eagle Rock Heights: high risk, 2007. Shelmarie Rest Home: high risk, 2005 and 2007. Sunset Lodge: high risk, 2005 and 2007. Sunrise of Victoria: high risk, 2005, 2006 and 2007. The list is too long to read.

Again, I say to the Minister of Health: why does it take the opposition actually getting an FOI and blowing the whistle to protect seniors from abuse from this government?

Hon. G. Abbott: What I saw last fall were the licensing officials at Vancouver Island Health Authority working tirelessly to ensure that every one of the patients, every one of the residents in residential care facilities, got the best quality that they could. What I saw last fall was a desperate opposition attempting to capitalize on what was good and appropriate work being done.

Before this opposition leader gets too carried away with her talk about high risk, she should understand that high risk is a designation that is put on new facilities before they have the experience base to assign a permanent rating. So it may be entirely unreflective of the quality of care that is being provided in a facility.

She should watch her rhetoric, Mr. Speaker. We saw too many examples last fall of this opposition getting carried away with their rhetoric in this area.

C. James: I can tell the Minister of Health that what he saw last fall was the opposition standing up for seniors, and we're going to continue to do that, because the government sure isn't doing it.

Excuse after excuse from this government. All we've seen is the government trying to bury the information, trying to keep these reports hidden from seniors and their families. Well, residents and their families deserve better. They deserve to know the information about facilities that they're in.

So will the Minister of Health say today a simple yes or no? Will he adopt the opposition's proposal and make these assessment reports public so that seniors and their families can truly know the state of care under his government?

Hon. G. Abbott: I believe we have excellent residential care facilities in this province. I believe we have licensing officials at all the health authorities who work tirelessly to ensure that residents get the quality of care that they deserve.

I want to again advise the Leader of the Opposition that risk assessments are based on low, medium and high risk. High risk can often be a default for a facility that has not yet opened or has been opened very briefly and has not yet established a basis on which to make that assessment.

Hon. G. Abbott: …of the opposition leader's question that I can agree with, it is that we need to have a better system of understanding risk in residential care facilities, particularly when you have high risk associated with a facility that's not yet opened or has very brief risk experience. I think we can improve on that.

G. Gentner: The minister talks about the rhetoric. He doesn't quite understand the meaning of high risk versus moderate risk. He makes lots of accolades and applauds relative — and we agree with that — to the

licensing officials and the inspectors. But the minister has a propensity here to always shoot the messenger.

The opposition has assessment reports from VIHA from 2004 to 2007. Almost all of them say the same thing. Management lacks skills, chronic understaffing, no training. Patients are being put at risk. Even facilities that got the worst possible score were allowed to continue to operate. These are the worst of the worst. These are the repeat offenders. The minister only intervened at Beacon Hill Villa after the opposition blew the whistle.

Can the Minister of Health explain why he did not step in every other time, especially when facilities got the worst score possible, putting seniors at the highest risk?

Hon. G. Abbott: I think it's an interesting commentary, hearing these questions from the opposition the day after a budget speech in the province of British Columbia, given that this information has been publicly available since October. It was published in newspapers in southern Vancouver Island in October. It's very interesting….

Hon. G. Abbott: I think that maybe what they don't want to discuss is the fact that unlike the $8.2 billion health care budget that we inherited in 2001, that budget today, after the budget speech yesterday by the Finance Minister, is $15.4 billion for health care. There are hundreds of millions of dollars more for residential care and assisted living, hundreds of millions of dollars for home care — right across the continuum.

This is a government that's very proud of its record. We are improving on the sorry state of affairs that we inherited from that former government.

G. Gentner: The minister likes to do his Liberal math and throw out the numbers.

G. Gentner: …between 2004 and 2007, the high-hazard ratings were measured from 11 facilities in 2004 to 18 facilities in 2007. That is a 64 percent increase in high-hazard ratings in the Greater Victoria area.

Again, a question that wasn't answered. Will he commit today to let seniors and their families know when they are in a high-risk facility and one that doesn't even have its licensing in order?

Hon. G. Abbott: There is one charge the member made that I'm going to plead guilty to, and that's to using Liberal math, because the last thing in the world I'd ever want to use is NDP math.

Hon. G. Abbott: In NDP math these things just never added up, nor could people ever figure it out. It used to be well into the year before anybody understood anything of what was being done by that former NDP government.

Hon. G. Abbott: The risk rating is routine information. It is readily available to members of the public on request. The risk rating is based on licensing officers' assessments, number of reportable incidents, inspection history, management issues, staff qualifications and supervision, self-monitoring and physical nature of the building facility itself.

The licensing officers undertake these reviews regularly. They're available in the case of the reviews that the members are raising. It's been available since October. The licensing officers do a great job, and we have a great residential care system in this province.

A. Dix: Well, hon. Speaker, the government did have a message for seniors in this budget. It was: "Fend for yourselves."

The minister brags that his long-term care promise is still unkept. They got cuts to Pharmacare. They got no improvements in care standards — a big fat nothing except maybe, just maybe, George W. Bush–style medical savings accounts and the continuing assertion that seniors are to blame for his government's health care failures.

My question is pretty simple to him. Since he's not going to do anything about the seniors health crisis in this province — since he's not going to do anything — why shouldn't seniors who live in a care home have the

same access to information about risks in their care home that he has access to every single day?

Hon. G. Abbott: The real crisis in this province is the crisis of credibility which that NDP opposition suffers.

We've heard the Leader of the Opposition, the opposition Health critic and other members throw around charges about high-risk ratings and what that means. Let me quote here: "Ayr Bethel Centre, Sunrise of Saanich, Eagle Rock Terrace and Island View at Marty Lane, Selkirk and Sluggett have applied for a licence but have not been issued a licence."

The risk categorization of facilities that have applied for a licence is a default rating assigned by the computer program. This is an opposition that never hesitates to make charges which undermine public confidence in what is a wonderful residential care system in the province of British Columbia.

A. Dix: Well, you know, the minister talks loudly and often and incessantly, but it's pretty clear he carries no stick at all. He can't even tell us today the budget for VIHA. He can't even tell us today the budget for the Fraser Health Authority. It's half the budget of his ministry. He can't even tell us.

Why doesn't he table that information in the House today? Or is that too much for us to be able to understand?

A. Dix: Dozens of care homes at risk, and the minister shrugs and laughs. Not enough staff, not enough training — a proud Bill 29 legacy. Oh yeah, $220 million for the banks, no problem. How many more seniors are going to be put at risk until this government takes action to protect seniors who need the care in long-term care centres?

Hon. G. Abbott: I'm glad the minister — or the member — raised the point….

Hon. G. Abbott: He won't be a future minister. That's guaranteed; I agree. I'd have to agree with the opposition on that point.

Hon. G. Abbott: I know they don't like to hear this. I know they hate hearing about this, but too bad.

In the 1990s health authorities, all 52 of them, used to hear about their budgets in August. Four months into the fiscal year, the 52 NDP health authorities would start to hear about their budgets. So I'm not going to listen to a lecture from the former chief adviser to the NDP government around that point. It's a whole lot of nonsense.

Similarly, we've built almost 4,000. They didn't build a thousand in ten years of residential care and assisted living in this province.

B. Ralston: I want to talk about a record that I'm sure the government is less proud of. For the fourth year in a row, British Columbia has the worst child poverty record in the country. Other Premiers — Premier Danny Williams of Newfoundland, Premier Jean Charest of Quebec — have developed long-term poverty reduction strategies. B.C. refuses to take a leadership role. Yesterday's budget offers nothing to combat child poverty.

My question is to the Deputy Premier. Why, after four years of the worst child poverty record in the country, has her government failed to take leadership on this vital file?

Hon. C. Richmond: …to quote statistics from advocacy groups. Advocacy groups are well meaning, and they're sincere people, but they take a very narrow view of child poverty, of welfare and of the things that a government is doing.

First of all, their data is from 2005. Secondly, they don't take into account what has happened in the last two or three years. For example, last year we increased the welfare rates for the first time in ten years so that we are now amongst the two or three highest provinces in Canada. We have no income tax for anyone earning under $15,000. The rent supplement was for anyone earning $28,000 or less. Yesterday in the budget it went to $35,000. The day care subsidy is for anyone earning under $38,000 a year.

B. Ralston: Well, the minister likes to disparage advocacy groups. Let's try the Premier's own Progress Board, where they have said that there's a persistent failure in improving the social condition of the people that live at the economic margins of our society. That's the Premier's own Progress Board.

How about the Premier of Ontario? Here's what he had to say, not an advocacy group: "It's no longer just a moral imperative to ensure that the poor find opportunity and grow strong. It's become an economic necessity." That's the Premier of Ontario taking a leadership position.

My question is to the Deputy Premier. In the face of soaring child poverty in British Columbia, when is her government going to take a leadership position and serve and help the children of this province properly?

Hon. C. Richmond: For the member's information, the rate of child poverty has gone steadily downward in the last three years.

We have taken 112,000 people off the welfare rolls and put them back to work, and they're now averaging $13 an hour. Just a few short years ago in 2001, one in seven children was in families on income assistance. It's now one in 30.

Let me just give you one final quote from the C.D. Howe Institute, which says….

N. Simons: Today we received a report. The Pivot Legal Society has once again pointed to a terrible problem of child poverty in the province. It's entitled Broken Promises. Yesterday we saw that promise broken again, and that was to look after the children of this province. One in four in this province lives in poverty, and that's just shameful.

I'd like to know what this minister is going to do to address what we know to be the underlying causes of children and families coming into contact with the child welfare system, and that is poverty. What is this government going to do to address that important issue, which most British Columbians recognize is a problem, but somehow 46 people on the other side of the House don't?

Hon. C. Richmond: We take any report on child poverty very seriously, and we certainly don't dismiss it lightly.

Since 2005 the children living in low-income situations…. It's falling rapidly. It fell by 15 percent since 2005. It's gone down 15 percent. That is 24,000 children who are now better off, and we expect new data to confirm the trend to fewer families in lower-income situations.

Another fact is that the poverty rate for single moms has fallen from 52.7 percent to 29 percent in the last five years. The median income for single moms has risen from $21,900 to $30,400, and the increase has been almost entirely from higher market earnings rather than social payments.

N. Simons: What is shameful about that response is the fact that he is not denying the fact that we lead the country in child poverty, and he continues to quote statistics to maybe try and shape it to meet his particular needs. The fact remains that we lead the country in child poverty. That's a record that the other side of the House — the government — needs to take into account.

My question: when will this government fulfil the promise it made to children, which it has broken repeatedly, to look after families who are living in poverty? When will it have a strategy?

Hon. C. Richmond: Well, I don't think the member has been paying much attention over the last few years to the policies we've introduced for people at the low end of the income scale. Back just ten years ago there were 375,000 British Columbians on welfare in this province — 375,000.

Hon. C. Richmond: One family in ten was on welfare ten years ago. I do believe that the statistics quoted are not only out of date but that they are suspect, because the poverty rate has dropped tremendously in just the last two years. We think that any child living in poverty….

Even one is one too many, but we are working diligently with our programs to bring that number down.

J. Kwan: Maybe the minister should read the government's own Progress Board report. Clearly, he doesn't know what the heck he's talking about. B.C. has the worst child poverty rate since this government took office in 2002. And let's be clear. The rate of child poverty has remained the highest in the country since 2002, and the majority of the poor children in B.C. actually live with families who are working — from a government who refuses to increase minimum wages.

The Pivot Legal Society report states: "The government's lack of commitment to providing publicly funded services has severely undermined the ability of the Ministry of Children and Family Development to take a preventative approach to child protection issues." The report lists poverty as one of the examples of the government's lack of commitment. Yesterday the Minister of Finance tabled a budget that gave banks $220 million in tax breaks and $327 million to oil and gas companies in subsidies.

My question is to the Minister of Children and Family Development. Is the minister satisfied that one in four children in the province of British Columbia lives in poverty, or will he stand up and call on his government to redirect those dollars to people in greatest need — children living in poverty?

Hon. C. Richmond: The opposition doesn't seem to want to pay attention to statistics like this. The employment growth for single parents has increased dramatically over the last seven years. The employment rate for single parents with young children increased from 37 percent in 2000…

Hon. C. Richmond: …to 60 percent in 2006. We expect that this strong employment growth since 2002, which has led to the lowest unemployment rates in over 30 years, will further reduce low-income rates and improve B.C.'s ranking with other provinces.

C. Trevena: I'd like to introduce 23 students from Zeballos Elementary-Secondary School, from grades 8 to 12, who are in the gallery today. I've spoken to the House about the Zeballos Elementary-Secondary School in the past, and I'm very pleased that the students are here today. I hope the House can make them very welcome.

B. Ralston: I rise to continue my response to the budget speech that the Finance Minister gave yesterday. I want to begin by talking a little bit about global economic conditions as they pertain to the British Columbia economy. I think what we've seen, certainly since the new year, is a shift in mood and thinking about the economy not only in the United States but here in Canada as well.

The gathering effects of the credit crisis and related housing crisis, the sub-prime mortgage problems in the United States have led many economists to begin rethinking their growth estimates for the United States and, by implication, for Canada in the year to come.

At the Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum that was held in January just several weeks ago, which is a gathering place for economic and political leaders from around the world, that was the subject of some keen discussion. A panel of economists at the World Economic Forum was of the view that the U.S. economy might be — it's certainly one view — set for a long recession. The U.S. mortgage crisis has pushed consumer and company loans, and will spread to those.

It's clear that the monoline insurers are now experiencing some difficulty because of their very close relationship to numerous banking products. There's an expectation that that will push up defaults sharply.

Mr. Roubini, who is a New York University economist, was one of the few economists to correctly predict a slump in the U.S. housing market and subsequent crunch in the credit markets a year ago. He's of the view that after five years of strong global economic growth, of which obviously British Columbia has been the beneficiary, it's now only a question of how hard the landing of the U.S. economy would be — said Mr. Roubini, chair of Roubini Global Economics.

He expects that the Federal Reserve — and I think that's widely speculated upon — will continue to reduce interest rates. But that may not be enough to provide the necessary stimulus to restart the economy.

Mr. Roubini was also backed by Stephen Roach, who's the chair of Morgan Stanley Asia and well known for his economic opinions in the public arena. He criticized the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government for trying to solve the current crisis by reaching back into the same playbook that created the mess in the first place. Instead of tackling asset bubbles like inflated housing and stock markets head on, they waited until the bubble had burst and then cleaned up afterwards.

So when we set our economy here in British Columbia — our relatively small, subnational economy in the global context — it does appear that economic growth revisions are prudently revised downwards. Indeed, that was the view of some of the well-known British Columbia commentators on the economy. I'm thinking in particular of Jock Finlayson, employed by the employers council of British Columbia, who has offered his views in several recent lectures — one on November 20 here in Victoria and another one just recently in Vancouver in February.

What's noticeable — and what he says — is that there is a shift in emphasis towards a slightly more pessimistic tone, even between November and February. I don't propose to review everything that he said, but I think it is significant to have a look at what a well-respected commentator on the British Columbia economy has to say, as we contemplate the conditions that the budget seeks to address and how British Columbians can expect to respond over the year and into the future.

What one would expect during a period of economic growth is that the government would lay the basis for future prosperity using the financial resources made available to it during good times. As Mr. Roubini has said, it's been global growth pretty well around the world over the last five years. So when British Columbia is the beneficiary of that and has participated in that global growth….

But as things shift downwards, the degree to which the government will be tested is the degree to which the government has prepared for the inevitable downturn and built upon the natural and human assets of

What Mr. Finlayson says is that of the top ten B.C. growth industries in 2003 to 2006, seven of those ten industries are construction or construction-related. I don't think anyone will be surprised by that.

Certainly, there is a construction boom. It's related to the Olympics. But construction booms, as anyone in the construction business will tell you, ebb and flow. There will certainly be a downturn in the construction industry at some point, and that point is probably coming sooner rather than later.

He looks to what are other medium- and long-term constraints on economic growth, and we have to look at some of those. I don't think, again, that this is the chronic condition of British Columbia. A small, heavily resource-dependent export sector with a large and growing trade deficit will limit future gains in prosperity. He speaks of the impact of the pine beetle and a poor productivity record. Productivity is not simply labour productivity or inviting people to work longer hours but the complex quotient of productivity that involves the contributions of capital, labour, natural resources and regulatory reform.

He also describes as a medium- and long-term constraint on economic growth "the winding down of the construction boom and post-Olympics 'hangover.'" He has "hangover" in quotation marks. So there is an expectation out there, given by a very informed commentator on the B.C. economy, that there will be a winding down of the construction boom, and there will be a post-Olympic hangover.

He also stresses that the traditional export industries of the province are weakening. I think that's certainly very evident in the forest sector, which both on the coast and in the interior can only be described as being in crisis. It's notable and very remarkably disappointing that in the budget address all that the Minister of Finance offered up on behalf of the government was another reference to the Premier's round table on forestry. There was some reference to federal assistance and to a will to find common solutions, although those solutions are not described.

This is a government that has made big legislative changes in the structure of the forest industry in 2003 and has had it all its own way since then. The results are there to see as mill after mill throughout the province closes.

To return to the issue of the weaknesses in the economy that the government ought to turn its attention to, the next one that Mr. Finlayson talks about is that B.C. has a low export intensity. In total exports as a share of GDP in 2006, British Columbia is at the bottom of the Canadian provinces. It's last.

This is Mr. Finlayson. This is not some conspiratorial reference to an advocacy group, as some of the ministers opposite would have it. This is based on Statistics Canada and the provincial economic accounts. His calculation is of total exports as a share of GDP in 2006, the smallest percentage of any province in the country. That includes all the obvious ones. We're behind even Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia.

That weakness of the traditional export sector in British Columbia, as reflected particularly in the forest industry, and the beginning of the waning of the construction boom pose some obvious economic challenges for us here, for the economy here in British Columbia and for the kind of government leadership that one would expect to see in constructing a budget.

As I said, Mr. Finlayson in February of 2008 addressed the higher learning symposium and again offered his opinion on the direction of the economy. As I said, his view of the B.C. economy had grown a little bit more pessimistic just based on the changes.

I think there has been a real shift in the view of commentators coming out of January and early February and of the public in general. There's a growing concern about the economy. He says in his report that the United States is downshifting, led by the housing sector. The credit market difficulties aggravate the housing downturn. Slumping home values, high energy costs and weaker job growth threaten consumption in the United States.

Consumption is valued by many experts as being as much as 72 percent of gross domestic product in the United States, so when U.S. consumers stop buying, their economy begins to lose momentum very, very rapidly. Other modest growth is also ahead for the European Union, Japan and Canada.

I want to turn to what he has to say about the British Columbia economy and to focus on a couple of challenges for anyone looking at the economy and its future here. He once again notes that exports are structurally weak and recently falling. They've continued to fall, although there's a slight — particularly to the United States…. That obviously reflects lumber sales.

Most export categories — this is the change in value of B.C. international merchandise exports 2006-2007 — are negative. So not only is it not growing, but it's shrinking in most categories of exports.

That's very troubling for a small subnational jurisdiction of just over four million people, essentially export- and trade-oriented. We really have a very small domestic market, certainly not enough to sustain us.

Later in his lecture he makes comments on some of the obvious things. "The pine beetle disaster, a forest health issue of unprecedented scope." That's what he calls it — the pine beetle disaster. He speaks of the challenges in addressing regional impacts and dislocation, developing "replacement" economic activity in the infected regions and nurturing non-forestry export sectors for British Columbia.

In the budget speech the government, faced with this calamity in forests that for…. Any of those members who represent constituents outside the lower mainland, lower Vancouver Island and perhaps the Okanagan Valley will immediately recognize the obvious statements that he has made here.

It's very disturbing and very lacking in leadership in the budget for the government on this important file to have nothing other than: "There's going to be a

round table. We're hoping the federal government will bring some money, and we have the will to find some solutions." That really, I think, for most people throughout the province, other than in the metropolitan areas I've listed just moments ago, is very cold comfort.

Given the regulatory and business tools that the government has and has had at its disposal since 2003 and the major changes in the forestry legislation, I think that really is an indictment of their failed policies on this file.

Now, sometimes what the government likes to point to in this jurisdiction in British Columbia is that while so-called traditional industries may be declining, the high-technology industries are going to replace forestry. There's a new growth of new industry, and that will replace those industries. He, given his audience there perhaps, did address that sector.

What's striking about B.C. high-tech as a percentage of the provincial gross domestic product is that essentially, despite some modest improvements in the late '90s, I think, it has been flat from 2000 to 2006 — 5.2 percent in 2000, 5.1 percent in 2002, 5.3 in 2003, climbing to 5.5 in 2004, declining to 5.2 and 5.1. Now, the most recent year, it's 5.2 percent.

In an area of the economy that's often touted as the future of the economy, providing new growth, new jobs and creating the kind of economic dynamism that will replace some of the so-called — and I don't agree with this categorization — traditional industries of the province…. It's essentially been flat.

That really is, again, disturbing, and I think this view was captured by Vancouver city councillor Peter Ladner. He is a member of a political grouping that's certainly not the same as the members on this side of the House, although he's a well-respected city councillor and owner of a newspaper that comments regularly on business matters.

In an article in B.C. Business in August 2007, talking about the regional economy in the lower mainland — but I think this applies even more so now to the broader economy across the province — he warns: "But all booms end, and when you look beyond real estate speculations and one-time Olympics construction, our productivity is declining, our research-driven high-growth 'new' industries are lagging behind their competitors, and head office employment is declining." To continue with the quotation: "The foundations of all this growing wealth — they're shaky at best."

So there's someone who I don't think is politically aligned with the opposition, who understands, though, the economy not only in the lower mainland but throughout the province. His professional life is involved in commenting on newspaper and other economic matters. And that's his view of where the economy is at.

He echoes the same concern that Mr. Finlayson expresses about the absence of real growth in the new industries — the so-called high-tech sector. There are some measures in the budget that certainly look at the film sector, which was the subject of targeted tax relief by the previous NDP governments. That tradition has continued.

Certainly, giving credit for the labour component was particularly innovative, but that's been modelled elsewhere, and it's very competitive between jurisdictions to attract the film business to this province. That competition continues, but we have established an industry here in the 1990s. It hasn't been driven away. It hasn't grown to the extent that it now supplants other more traditional industries of the province.

There was a discussion by some thinkers in the city of Vancouver and the region about how to make the lower mainland a more effective and dynamic area economically.

Professor Muzyka, who's the dean of commerce at the faculty of commerce at the University of British Columbia and was at that point the chair of the board of trade in Vancouver, endeavoured, beginning in 2005, to create a regional development mechanism in order to, as many other jurisdictions do very effectively, begin to think seriously about how we face the competitive challenges of a global economy. He met with a lack of interest on the part of the business community, no support from the Minister of Economic Development, and the project has simply fallen away.

That's notwithstanding that, for example, the B.C. Progress Board says the following in one of its recent reports. I'm going to quote: "Competitive economies of the next few decades will be underpinned to a considerable extent by city states in many instances. This implies that the lower mainland will need to cooperate much more closely to increase regional competitiveness, especially with respect to the critical factors and activities that underpin economic development activities."

The Premier's own economic Progress Board has given this advice. The dean of commerce at the faculty of commerce at UBC has given this advice. Has the Minister of Economic Development, has the Finance Minister…? Is that reflected anywhere in the budget? The kinds of regional economic groupings that are necessary, the serious thinking, the inventory, the opportunity to build the economic clusters that Michael Porter of Harvard University talks about…. Is there any serious interest in that in the budget? There's none whatsoever.

That's particularly disturbing at a time when the economic ground is shifting under our feet, and those kinds of initiatives are going to become more important, not less important. Every informed observer in these matters takes that seriously, but apparently, the message hasn't gotten through to the government.

I guess that if we are to create a competitive, innovative, dynamic and egalitarian economy here…. Egalitarian economies are generally considered to be more efficient because when you don't have the same great disparities of income between people, you have greater social harmony and there's less social dislocation. The Premier's Progress Board confirms that.

If you look at jurisdictions like Finland or Taiwan, those are very effective by any economic measure.

Finland is a country, granted culturally homogenous for the most part, except perhaps in the north, where there are some aboriginal people…. It is regarded by most measures of economic effectiveness and competitiveness as being one of the leading economies in the world. It has a population of slightly over four million, and it offers examples that we might do well to consider.

The forest sector in Finland has four of the leading ten international companies in forestry. The research component of what those companies do dwarfs anything that takes place here, and certainly, the opportunity to build a globally leading forest sector here in British Columbia has been completely missed. Indeed, we're heading in the other direction.

What little manufacturing we had in terms of even rudimentary milling is disappearing with the end of appurtenancy. Remanufacturing operations are experiencing a shortage of log supply and cost pressures. They're experiencing difficulty, and increasingly, the forest sector in this province is reduced to export of raw, unprocessed logs. That's a long way from the achievements of the highly competitive world-leading forestry companies that are based in Finland, a population of about the same size as British Columbia.

There are other voices that speak of this direction and other advice that's been offered and not acted upon by the government in this budget — for example, research investment. The Premier's own technology council in its recent report speaks of research investment, and they have something to offer. I'm going to quote from their report. "Research investment is the most important direct contributor to innovation and commercialization. Currently B.C.'s investment in research accounts for only 1.5 percent of the province's GDP, compared to Ontario 2.4 percent, Quebec 2.7, California 4.1 and Massachusetts 5.3 percent."

The PTC, the Premier's Technology Council, believes that British Columbia should establish a long-term strategic target of raising R-and-D investment to 4.5 percent of GDP, with 65 percent of this coming from the private sector.

So it's not necessarily a government-led initiative, but it's a question of setting a strategic direction, having some leadership from the Premier, from the Minister of Finance and from the Minister of Economic Development about the economic challenges that this province faces and setting some targets in this area, rather than….

This obviously would require some spending. This can't be achieved simply through tax cuts. There is a role for state leadership in this endeavour. This is very clear from the Finnish example, from the Taiwanese example and from other examples of small, competitive, innovative, vigorous economies throughout the world.

That goal of choosing one of B.C.'s universities and setting a target for it of being one of the top 20 universities in British Columbia has not gone unremarked.

Prof. Stephen Toope at the University of British Columbia…. I express no bias here, but I happen to be a graduate of UBC. I think that in one of the e-mails that they send out regularly to graduates, he has already addressed this issue. He's prepared to take up the challenge. No doubt, the professors, the leadership and the president of Simon Fraser are similarly prepared to do that, as would be the professors or the presidents of University of Victoria and University of Northern British Columbia.

Certainly, it's a question of setting those kinds of economic goals — 4.5 percent of GDP devoted to research and development, to create a world-leading university. I'm not disparaging any of the universities in this province, but they can do more and are willing to do more.

We haven't seen that kind of leadership from the government. This budget, as we head into an economic downturn, doesn't have much to offer.

B. Ralston: I'm just reflecting the opinion of expert economists rather than the untutored opinions of those members opposite. I'm speaking of one member in particular, whose name I won't dignify by placing it on the Hansard record.

I want to continue, though, with this report of the Premier's Technology Council, because again, this is advice that the government has set up to take and provide. They apparently aren't prepared to act on this advice.

They have some suggestions on how to attract what they call the best and the brightest talent. They say that "high-tech firms often have difficulties in attracting high-quality personnel as well as senior executives. Through its extensive consultations, the Premier's Technology Council has learned that housing costs, taxation levels and immigrant approval processes are barriers to the inflow of talent."

They have some suggestions about how the government might tackle that. None of those are forthcoming in the Speech from the Throne, none of those are forthcoming in the budget, and I await some action by the government on that account.

I think that's particularly important when we look at the general economic landscape here in the province, as the temperature cools somewhat in the United States and we look for solutions to keep this economy going in a way that it won't as world commodity prices decline.

On the other side of the social equation, another area where the government and the throne speech and the budget in particular were notably deficient was in

the area of poverty reduction. What has become very evident is that this issue has become virtually a post-partisan issue. Governments across the country of different political views have taken leadership on this issue.

Premier Danny Williams, who's a Conservative Premier of Newfoundland, has taken personal ownership of the target of reducing long-term poverty in Newfoundland. When you look at his home page on his website, that's one of the things that pops up. That's something he is personally committed to. That's a leadership position. We've heard nothing like that from this government at all. It simply doesn't appear to be a priority.

Jean Charest, a Liberal Premier of Quebec, has a strategy to reduce poverty — social exclusion is how it's described there — similarly placed high up on the political agenda, a target for leadership at the provincial level in Quebec.

Premier Dalton McGuinty, the newly re-elected Liberal Premier of Ontario, has signalled his intention by November 2008 to have a detailed poverty reduction program in place with targets and a strategy.

This approach of targeting those on the margins of society, the poor in our society, is something that a number of governments across the country have taken on, but there doesn't seem to be, judging from the complete absence of mentioning it in the throne speech or in the budget, a priority in any way for this government.

It's significant, I think, that Judith Maxwell — who's a former senior policy person in Ottawa and who chaired the Economic Council of Canada at one point, I believe — has said that given some of the measures that the federal government has taken, coordination between the federal government and the provincial government programs would be advantageous in order to make that kind of a strategy effective. That's what she's advocating, and she speaks of these three provincial governments positively as a goal that should be achieved.

I'm optimistic that the government of British Columbia, the Minister of Finance and the Premier, in particular, will accept the challenge that's been, I suppose, indirectly raised by other Premiers across the country and take this on as a strategic priority.

If I might respond to some of the comments that were made by the minister earlier in question period today on this topic, since I'm on this topic. Judith Maxwell says:

That's a senior economic policy person advocating that provincial governments across the country take some leadership of this issue, but there's nothing in this budget to address that at all in any way. That's rather disappointing, to say the least. This view of the social condition is not something that is generated on this side of the House. Indeed, I've been guided in my thinking about this by the B.C. Progress Board, the Premier's own Progress Board, in its report of December 15, 2006.

The Progress Board was so struck by the long-term persistence of the proportion of British Columbians living below the Statistics Canada low-income threshold…. They were so struck that they commissioned a special report — a senior economist and sociologist, I believe, from Ontario — to look at this and find out what might be the reasons for this persistence and how the government might address it. So far, no action has been taken.

This is something that is known to the government. It makes it a little bit harder to ignore, I would think, given that it's the very board that's struck to advise the Premier and the cabinet on economic directions for the province. I think it's relatively hard to ignore when you have this body populated by those who the government presumably has sufficient confidence to appoint to the board making these statements.

That's the Premier's own Progress Board report on the social conditions in British Columbia. Are there any programs in the throne speech to address that? Is there a strategy in the budget? Are there any long-term goals on poverty reduction? Absolutely not. It's not because the cabinet and the government don't know about this.

The Premier's own Progress Board has very carefully, in a detailed report that's about 50 pages, set out all the statistics. It's overwhelmingly convincing. The evidence is there. The consequences, particularly to children, are there. This is not just some advocacy group — although they do great work; I often take much advice from advocacy groups — that the government can simply brush aside. This is the Premier's own B.C. progress report on the social conditions in British Columbia.

I look forward to a budget and a throne speech which begin to address that pressing problem in our society. This throne speech and this budget — this

budget in particular, since that's the one we're debating — does not address that. That's one of the reasons — that policy failure, that failure of political leadership — that I won't be supporting the budget when it comes to a vote in this House.

I want to move on now to other topics that are raised by the tabling of the documents associated with the budget. One of those documents that were tabled at the time of the budget was the service plan and the prospective budget for B.C. Hydro. What is clear is that for British Columbia ratepayers, British Columbia consumers — those of us who pay our hydro bills every month or two — rates are going up very dramatically. The budget shows in some of the ancillary documents to it that Hydro customers in B.C. will see a rate hike of 24 percent compounded over the next three years.

What is clear from the budgetary documents is that the artificial constraints that have been placed upon B.C. Hydro the definition of self-sufficiency that has been torqued beyond economic rationality in order to create a market for independent power producer power — are now resulting in rate hikes to consumers.

B. Ralston: I detect some grumbling on the other side. I suppose they can't take the truth. But it's very clear that that's what's happened to the great, the proud — the crown jewel of British Columbia — B.C. Hydro. These artificial limits that have been placed upon it to cover the costs of uneconomic, inefficient and environmentally destructive private power projects are now coming home to roost. These rate increases, I dare say, are the first of many that will come about.

Private power or hydro power in British Columbia has been part of the successful economic strategy set in place by W.A.C. Bennett. W.A.C. Bennett created B.C. Hydro by expropriation — not that I suppose members opposite would have supported it at that time. Maybe they did. I don't know. But that was a taking by the state of B.C. Electric — formerly a private company — expropriating it and turning it to public purposes.

What is clear is that that legacy is being eroded in order to create artificial limits — directives to the B.C. Utilities Commission to create artificially inflated prices for power that ratepayers here in British Columbia will have to pay over the long term.

At a time when our economy is going to be tested, at a time when we're facing the prospect of cooling growth in the United States and its consequences here, that economic advantage for businesses, for ratepayers here in British Columbia, is being systematically and deliberately lost. That is a policy failure. That's the wrong direction that this government is taking on this issue. The B.C. budget and the ancillary documents that are tabled with it confirm that those power rates are going to increase over the next three years and will continue to increase.

The other topic that I want to address — part of the general economic and social climate here in the province, which is again not addressed in the budget — is any initiatives for public safety in the province. One of the things that attract people to continue to live and work in big cities in our province and indeed throughout the world is a sense of personal security and safety as they go about their daily business.

What has happened recently — and I think the Attorney General can confirm this and will confirm this — is that the unprecedented spate of gang shootings, notwithstanding the best efforts of the police, is leading people to become increasingly concerned about safety in our cities.

I recently hosted an event in my constituency with Eileen Mohan, whose son Chris Mohan, and with Steve Brown, whose brother-in-law Ed Schellenberg…. Both were innocent bystanders in a gang shooting and were slain along with four other young men in an apartment building in Surrey. The consequences and the ripple effect and the kind of impact that has on our communities are difficult to describe.

In talking with Eileen Mohan, certainly no one expects to bring up their son or daughter to encounter that fate at such a young age. It's obviously and simply a tragedy, but I think it speaks of a larger public concern that people have, and there's nothing in the budget to address that.

The throne speech talks about creating a sentencing commission, a slight shift in policy on regional policing perhaps and a prospect of some further studies down the road, sometime in the autumn of this year. That doesn't address what citizens, certainly in the lower mainland, are experiencing and wondering about.

It doesn't address, I think, the growing problem that we may be building in terms of our reputation nationally and that may spill out over, unfortunately — I hope not — into our reputation internationally. Those are not things that we want to be known for, obviously. Citizens don't want to have that kind of fear, that kind of anxiety, that kind of worry when they go about their daily lives in the cities and towns of our province. The government hasn't taken a leadership position on this issue. There are things that could be done. Certainly, the police forces have some strong suggestions.

One suggestion was that in Quebec, when gang warfare became very open and there were a number of public shootings and tragic killings of innocent bystanders, the state…. The province of Quebec devoted more resources to policing and to prosecution and made a very determined fight against criminal gangs in Quebec. I think it has, by all measures, succeeded in eliminating most of the gang warfare with a series of high-profile trials and convictions of those responsible for much of the violence in Quebec.

Again, it's something that's missing from the budget and that's missing from the throne speech for the most part. It's something that people really want to hear about and are looking for leadership on. There's nothing in the budget speech from the Finance Minister that even begins to address those concerns.

With those comments on the budget, I will conclude my remarks and give the floor over to the next member of the Legislature who rises to speak.

J. Yap: It's my honour to rise and speak on this budget. But first of all, I want to acknowledge a number of key people who help me in the work that I do here as a member of this House: my constituency assistants Paige Robertson and PoWah Ng in Richmond, and in Victoria my executive assistant Nicole Hamilton and communication officer and research officer Sarah Morris and Justin Molander.

These are the people who work hard to help me here, and I thank them for their diligence and support. They help make me look good, and I appreciate their support.

Madam Speaker, we continue to make great progress in British Columbia, in spite of the fairly subdued and gloomy presentation by the speaker before me, the member for Surrey-Whalley. I believe this is a visionary budget that supports a visionary agenda for our province. This is a fitting position for the people of B.C. as we celebrate this year our 150th anniversary of being a province. On behalf of my constituents from the great riding of Richmond-Steveston, I am proud to endorse and support this budget, which I believe will continue to move B.C. forward.

We've come a long way with our economy, now one of the strongest, if not the strongest, in Canada. After a dismal decade of the 1990s, when the NDP were in power and B.C. went from first to worst…. When the rest of the world was doing well, B.C. went from first to worst. But thanks to the hard work of British Columbians and our B.C. Liberal government's policies, B.C. is now back, and we are truly in the midst of a golden decade in British Columbia.

We are blessed to live in a truly special part of the world — I believe the best place on earth. However, with this blessing comes a responsibility, which we all share, to deal with the effects of global warming. Climate change is the challenge of our times. It is a priority for British Columbians and a priority for our government.

I support the proposed revenue-neutral carbon tax, which will be a first step to reduce the carbon footprints we leave on this earth. This carbon tax will be implemented, as laid out in the budget, in a fiscally responsible manner phased in over the next four years.

The budget calls for the carbon tax to be offset fully by reductions in personal and corporate income taxes. I applaud the Minister of Finance for balancing the priority to deal with climate change with the priority to ensure that our economy remains strong. The Minister of Finance said it perfectly. A strong economy is fundamental to everything we do.

Our economy is on a roll. I realize that the member for Surrey-Whalley was trying to paint a gloomy picture, but actually things are going well for the province of British Columbia. British Columbians today are confident and optimistic about their economic future. Business confidence is high. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business continuously surveys its members, and for five years in a row, B.C. firms are the most optimistic in the country by a wide margin.

The Conference Board of Canada, in their fall 2007 Provincial Outlook, forecasts continued strong economic growth for B.C. This was in the fall of 2007 when we all were aware of the situation in the United States, which the member for Surrey-Whalley referred to. Unemployment at 4 percent in British Columbia is a historic low — among the best in Canada, the national average being almost 6 percent. Conversely, employment is at record highs, a far cry from the 1990s when we had high unemployment and we were losing people seeking work to other jurisdictions. That was the case in the 1990s — the dismal '90s.

We have a record high of 64 percent employment of our population. In December 2007 alone, B.C. added 12,000 full-time jobs. This past month, January 2008, our economy continued to grow.

J. Yap: The employment rate grew by 2.4 percent, implying that 53,000 more people were employed, compared to January one year ago. Since December 2001…

Hon. R. Thorpe: I want to hear the debate. I cannot hear the debate when….

Hon. R. Thorpe: I apologize unequivocally, but I would like to hear the debate.

J. Yap: We're now in the fortunate position of, instead of people looking for jobs, jobs looking for people. We have the challenge of meeting increasing needs for skilled labour in many sectors, thanks to the strong economy. Business creation and investment in B.C. continue to increase.

The member for Surrey-Whalley lamented that high-tech was really not doing as well as we believe it is. Well, I have something to say. Microsoft will be investing in our province, in my community in Richmond, and will create 700 jobs — that little company, Microsoft. Whether it's Microsoft investing in Richmond and British Columbia or the record number of small businesses that start in our province, investors are showing their confidence in B.C. and choosing to do business here.

Indeed, the small business sector, the backbone of our economy, has been thriving. Between 2001 and 2006 small business growth was 11 percent. That's growth of 11 percent, more than triple the national average of 3.6 percent. The number of new business incorporations in my community of Richmond has increased every year under our government with an all-time record reported in 2006.

The member for Surrey-Whalley talked about experts around the world suggesting that British Columbia could have some issues. I would like to refer to a release by the MasterCard Worldwide Centres of Commerce Index. MasterCard Worldwide listed Metro Vancouver among its top 50 worldwide centres of commerce — cities that drive global commerce. Vancouver was ranked number one in Canada ahead of Toronto and Montreal. It's another endorsement of the great progress that we're making here in British Columbia.

Evidence of this progress is everywhere. Walk along No. 3 Road, the main road in Richmond, and you see our community being transformed by the new Canada line, new developments, highrises and construction of new facilities, both residential and commercial.

Take a drive through the expanding commercial and industrial parks throughout Metro Vancouver, and you see signs of expansion and growth everywhere. Let your fingers do the walking, and you see the career pages of the newspapers with pages and pages of unfilled job vacancies.

Our mining exploration sector, so much a part of our history, recorded its best year ever in 2007 — $416 million in annual economic activity, an increase of 57 percent over 2006 and 1,300 percent over 2001.

The oil and gas industry also had a record year in 2007, surpassing $1 billion in rights sales, shattering the previous record of $647 million in 2003.

The high-tech sector, which I mentioned, continues to thrive. This is what the president of Microsoft Canada, Phil Sorgen, had to say about Microsoft's reasons for investing in B.C. "We have burgeoning high-tech and software industries and a globally envied quality of life, and our cities represent exactly the kind of environment that leading information workers want to live in. This centre will help Microsoft remain globally competitive while providing strong economic benefits to B.C. and Canada."

The retail sector is strong — in fact, so strong that it's the rare retail shop that is not seeking more employees to meet with the record level of business volumes. To quote Mark Startup, Retail B.C. president, in the The Vancouver Sun recently: "We're firing on all cylinders, and almost every category is strong right now. We haven't seen as many communities reporting positive growth during my whole time here at Retail B.C., which is over a quarter of a century."

British Columbia is a trading province. We always have been, and we always will be. Our future prosperity as a people depends on expanding our trade opportunities. As this millennium continues to unfold, B.C. is well positioned as Canada's only Pacific province — that's right; we're Canada's only Pacific province — to benefit from the great economic transformation that is happening in the Asia-Pacific, including China and India and the other Asia-Pacific countries.

The budget earmarks $30 million in funding to further promote our business, trade and cultural links with the Asia-Pacific region. I know this will make a major difference in ensuring that we continue to make gains in Asia-Pacific trade.

The growth is impressive. The member for Surrey-Whalley was trying to minimize the extent of this. But let me share with you, Madam Speaker, that the export trade with the Asia-Pacific region has grown steadily from $6.9 billion in 2001 to almost $10 billion in 2006. Through the Asia-Pacific Initiative our government has made trade development with the economies of the region a priority, and this budget affirms this priority.

My community, Richmond, is uniquely positioned to contribute to this growth in the Asia-Pacific trade. We have in Richmond a sizeable immigrant population, many of whom have ongoing family and business links with their countries of origin. The budget refers to strengthening the International Financial Centre program further, and I applaud this because this will enhance B.C.'s position as a business centre in the global economy, which is so important in this day and age.

The budget reflects continued sound management of public finances. Through effective leadership and management we have moved our province away from the reckless deficit spending of the 1990s to consecutive fiscal surpluses, with this year's being the fifth surplus budget delivered by our government. Public debt is being carefully managed, with the ratio of taxpayer-supported debt to GDP steadily decreasing.

B.C.'s strong economic performance has gained international recognition. In 2007 Standard and Poor's, the debt-rating agency, upgraded our province's debt rating to triple-A, the best possible rating. This is what they said. Standard and Poor's cited strong

budgetary performance, strong management culture and improved transparency as reasons for the upgrade.

This is what the Institute of Chartered Accountants of B.C. had to say. This is from their CEO, Richard Rees, about B.C.'s improved economy. He said this recently: "B.C.'s chartered accountants believe that government policy has influenced the province's strong economic performance. In particular, lower business and personal tax rates and a reduction of red tape have played an important role in encouraging both people and investment to the province."

The power of a strong economy is in the jobs that it creates. The power of a strong economy is in the opportunities for building on our shared progress as a province. The power of a strong economy is in the revenues to government that allow us to invest in the priorities important to British Columbians. This budget, all $37.7 billion of it, earmarks investments in the priority areas of British Columbians — priority areas like health care.

Our strong economy has allowed us to continue to make historic high levels of investments in health care. We have a great health care system that is there for those who need it. I am pleased to see the government's commitment to ensuring that our public health care system remains well funded, with two-thirds of all new spending to be allocated to our public health care system. The budget provides for investments in vital research areas such as Genome B.C., brain research, cancer research, and hip health and osteoporosis research.

The budget increases, as well, the funding in that other important area, K-to-12 education and advanced education. We're investing more than ever in our public, elementary and secondary school system, even though student enrolment is declining. I am pleased to see the increased funding for expansion of the number of preschool StrongStart programs to 400, which will help build literacy in the early childhood years, which is so important.

I have had the opportunity to visit schools in my community with these early literacy programs in action, and they are invaluable. We're investing significantly in advanced education, in keeping with our commitment to add 25,000 new post-secondary spaces throughout the province.

This budget provides the unprecedented increase in training that is underway in our province. We are training more doctors, more nurses and more trades apprentices today than we ever have in our history.

Of course, the budget puts our province at the forefront in the battle against climate change, with major initiatives to encourage British Columbians to transition to a lower-carbon-emissions way of life.

British Columbians care deeply about the environment, about the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on our climate. With this budget our government takes specific, targeted action to lead the change, to lead the transformation which people expect and want. This budget includes initiatives to reduce carbon emissions, to invest in green technologies and to encourage energy conservation.

Our strong economy allows us to expand public transportation. Our government has committed to the largest-ever investment in public transit in Metro Vancouver, the Okanagan, Greater Victoria and other areas of the province — $14 billion over the next 12 years. This is a visionary transit plan that will help improve the movement of people and goods to further spur the economy and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The link is obvious. If we can encourage more urban commuters to use public transit, there will be fewer cars on the road, and carbon emissions will be reduced. This is what is envisioned for Richmond with the arrival of the Canada line.

The Canada line is progressing well. In fact, just yesterday the last concrete block was put into place on the southernmost end of the No. 3 Road guideway of the Canada line. It is on schedule and on budget. Even though the Canada line is not scheduled to be completed until 2009, already there are a multitude of residential developments that have been built, are underway or are planned to be built in the next while, transforming the downtown skyline of my community, Richmond.

This budget makes significant provisions for supporting the arts and culture in B.C., so important to the vitality of communities throughout our province. I know that British Columbians will be very creative and innovative as we celebrate our 150th anniversary this year.

The new BC150 cultural trust fund will go a long way to providing funding for the arts and culture this special year and into the future. Along with my constituents, I am personally looking forward to the BC150 celebration called Rivermania, which will happen on September 28 at Garry Point Park in Steveston in my community, which I've previously talked about in this House. As well, the $105 million for arts and culture projects will truly help honour and celebrate our shared heritage and history.

B.C. is the destination of choice for business and investment. This budget will help maintain this for the benefit of all British Columbians. This budget will ensure continued confidence in our economic prospects. This budget will meet the needs, the hopes, the aspirations and the dreams of British Columbians.

This budget will ensure that B.C. remains competitive. In a global economy — and this is one point where I agree with the previous speaker; we are in a global economy — it's essential that we keep B.C. competitive.

Since 2001 our government has reduced personal income tax rates, and with the further income tax rates with this budget, we will have in B.C. the lowest marginal rates anywhere in Canada for those earning up to $111,000. Individuals earning up to $16,000 per annum will pay zero income tax, and 250,000 British Columbians benefit from this.

While income tax rates have been reduced, we have seen overall personal incomes rise thanks to the strong economy. Personal incomes have been rising steadily since 2001, with the 7.4 percent increase in 2006 the highest ever. What a turnaround from the 1990s, when average take-home pay per person dropped by $1,738 under the NDP, when B.C. had some of the highest personal income tax rates in the country.

As I said, B.C. is back. This budget will ensure that our future as a people and as a province under this government will continue to be bright. I agree with the Minister of Finance when she says we should not have to choose between a strong economy and dealing with climate change. This is a budget which achieves both objectives in a thoughtful, balanced way.

In closing, I am proud to support this budget. This budget will set British Columbia on a transformative path to a better place — to take action as a people; to deal with the challenge of our times; to make our lives better, healthier and enlightened — for a world that will be better for our children and our children's children. This is a budget for the times, and I thank the Minister of Finance for her vision, her wisdom and her contributions to the province.

N. Simons: It's my honour and privilege to stand here and respond to the budget that was presented in the House yesterday. I'd like to take this opportunity to warn the sensitive members on the government side that it might not all be positive. So in case it catches them off guard, in case they think that maybe I'm going to be pointing out like the advertorial we just heard, that is not going to be the case. I might actually even point to certain issues that seem to be completely forgotten in the government's mind and in their actions.

There's a disconnect between their advertisement in the throne speech and the actual delivery in the budget speech. Some of the most startling contradictions are the ones that I'd like to point out to the people of the province. They are already, I believe, starting to question whether all the gloss and shine is not actually covering up something more deep and concerning to the people of British Columbia — and sinister, in fact, with the level of poverty that exists in this province.

Are we actually seeing an increase in the disparate earnings of the rich and the poor? Are we actually seeing that gap expanding, and what is the consequence of that? That's the larger issue.

The specific issues brought to the House's attention by previous speakers are quotes from corporations that are pleased with certain aspects of the budget. What I'd like to do is represent the community that I have been elected by, and that is the community of Powell River–Sunshine Coast.

It's a community that has, like many other communities in rural British Columbia, been absolutely left out of this budget for a number of reasons. Some of them are obvious, and some of them need to be pointed out. I don't know if the…. We'll see.

The first one I'd like to bring up is that the disconnection between the throne speech and the budget was the issue of Jordan's principle. For those of you who don't know about Jordan's principle, Jordan was a little first nations child in Manitoba who was born with severe health problems which caused him to have to live in a major urban city, near a hospital — in a hospital, in fact.

He was approximately two when he was able to return home, but due to government infighting — provincial and federal governments trying to argue on who was responsible for the payments for that child's care…. Because of that dispute, Jordan remained in hospital, where he died two years later. The principle says that as a consequence of the attention brought to that particular case, we are to look after the children first and worry about the funding for that child's care later.

It was probably a hastily added section of the throne speech, because it doesn't show any reflection in the budget. I don't know if this is something that was deliberate or not. It certainly was a recent decision of this government to support Jordan's principle, but unfortunately, I believe they support the principle in principle. That doesn't get first nations children anywhere closer to the level of care that is offered off reserve.

I think that Jordan's principle, which requires that the federal and provincial government not argue over the funding for a child's care, should be implemented. Unfortunately, there's no indication in the budget that adequate resources will be put in place to achieve that particular goal.

Right now there are 25 delegated first nations child welfare agencies in the province that are operating on federal funding. The federal funding is specifically for services on reserve. Unfortunately, many of the services on reserve aren't able to meet the service levels that are provided off reserve, and that disparity is what's supposed to be addressed by the implementation and the endorsement of Jordan's principle.

The federal government and, unanimously, the federal parliament supported Jordan's principle. British Columbia should be the first province to do so, and I encourage the province to actually put that into effect. But it will require more than words. It will require more than a simple "we agree with the principle."

It will require resources, it will require energy, and it will require a commitment, in fact, to try to level the disparities that exist now. I am afraid that I have not seen any evidence that the commitment is there beyond the words.

Jordan's principle, which will actually allow children in British Columbia to receive care wherever they live, should be endorsed by this government. They've said that they would, but there is no indication in the budget that they are prepared to do so.

I believe it's partly because they don't really know what it meant. I believe that it was added on at such a late date in the process that they actually did not do due diligence and figure out that it would require serious consideration. In fact, what we heard the government say is that they want to start negotiating with the federal government about Jordan's principle.

That is exactly what the principle is attempting to get rid of — that negotiation first. We don't need to negotiate whether a child should receive medical care or social services that will allow them to live a healthy life. We need that service provided first.

The discussions between the federal and the provincial government should happen after. Right after

this government said that they would endorse Jordan's principle, they said that they would also start negotiating with the federal government. Their first test — and they failed. I would just point out that despite the words, we as British Columbians expect some action behind those words.

A number of issues specifically affecting the Powell River–Sunshine Coast area…. It's a beautiful area, and it has remarkable people who are very involved in the community and very active in the issues that we face. If I could just bring up a few issues specific to the government's apparent commitment to communities that are carbon-smart.

If I may read from the throne speech. This is the part where I'm actually reading government writing, so the members from the government side might want to hear that. "Carbon-smart communities are energy-smart, water-smart, health-smart and resource-smart."

Yet this is the same government that on the Sunshine Coast allowed massive clearcuts under the Private Managed Forest Land Act, which this government essentially set up, to denude the landscape to such an extent that the impacts on our water supply are unknown. This is a government that allows a regulatory regime to exist in this province that potentially threatens water supply. The contradictions between the words and the actions are apparent. That is a simple example. The watershed on the Sunshine Coast, the Chapman-Gray watershed, provides 85 percent of our community with their drinking water.

This is a historical dispute between various levels of government. The first nations in Sechelt consider it part of their traditional territory — and should. I know that the first nations government is concerned about protecting water source.

I think that's a good sign, because right now there's very little in government legislation that allows communities to have control over their water. They are required under various pieces of legislation to protect the quality of water leaving the water treatment plant, yet they have absolutely no control whatsoever on what happens to the water before it goes into the treatment plant.

While the liability rests with local government, the provincial government puts them in a position to not have any control whatsoever on various impacts of that water before it reaches the water treatment plant.

Yes, I agree with the government that carbon-smart communities are water-smart communities. But you can't say that and then undercut the ability of those communities to be water-smart. There's a distinct break in logic here between what the government says in their flowery words and what they actually produce in terms of legislation.

There are a number of other issues that specifically concern residents of the Sunshine Coast and Powell River and rural communities across the province. May I bring up the issue of meat regulations, the new regulations requiring all livestock to be processed in a government-approved abattoir?

In my constituency there is nobody who is against protecting our food sources or the quality of our food. We, in fact, are all encouraging of government to make sure that it reflects the needs of our communities, however. That hasn't been reflected in the meat regulations as brought forward by the Minister of Health and the Minister of Agriculture and Lands.

When a government says to a community that they need to be carbon-smart, one shouldn't, on the other hand, also require everyone who is raising chickens, sheep or beef to take those animals, put them on the ferry, bring them over to Vancouver Island — emitting who knows how much carbon emissions — and bring them back for sale.

This is a complete contradiction. We are, on the one hand, encouraging less driving — or making it expensive — at the same time as reducing the ability of communities to adapt to the changes that they are putting forth.

Let me just read from a letter from the Powell River Farmers Institute, in part to the government but also to other people hoping to raise attention to this particular issue. "While the cost of fossil fuels needed to transport animals and animal product rises, the idea of a mobile abattoir may be interesting. But this solution's problematic to the actual needs of the smallhold farmer."

This brings up the fact that solutions have been sought by the community; solutions have not been found by the community. Now the government is backing away, and there's no funding to allow them to find a solution. The problems of disposal of offal and other by-products of the slaughter process have not been fully discussed or acknowledged.

Finding a solution to meet the needs of local farmers or smallhold farmers is an important one. We were talking about…. This is the 150th anniversary of British Columbia's history since contact, and it's a celebration of everything that British Columbians have done for 150 years. At the core of that, I would submit, is the raising and the production of animals for our sustenance and our nourishment.

Here we have what is potentially the end of the family farm in British Columbia with the banning of farm-gate sales. There have not been examples good enough to explain why this new regulatory regime, this increase in regulation, is going to meet the needs of farmers or the people who buy products from farmers. While it's a local issue and an issue for farmers, it's also an issue that we have to consider in terms of climate change.

We, as a society, are more and more aware of the need to produce food locally so that we don't have to rely on massive transportation infrastructure to transport our day-to-day food products. That's just another contradiction. On the one hand, you have a government extolling the virtues of carbon-friendly communities while, on the other hand, implementing or allowing legislation to continue to exist that makes it difficult for communities to do so.

Transit is another issue that I believe residents in my constituency are concerned about. Many people have called the budget a lower mainland budget. I would like to see the issue of transportation in rural

communities be addressed, because what we have now is people relying a lot on cars. Nobody's arguing about the need to reduce our reliance on cars, but in the rural communities, where there may be four or five buses coming every hour or two, the options are not good.

When the roads are built in such a way as to be primarily, if not solely, for the automobile and truck, we have options of bicycling and walking that are not there. Transit — if that's not there as well, then it almost becomes…. The budget becomes a guilt trip, saying: "You have to do this. If you don't do it, you're not getting our help."

If the province could actually invest in rural transportation infrastructure so that people in rural parts of our province can get around safely and efficiently, that would be a good start towards reducing their reliance on the automobile.

I was particularly intrigued by the discovery of the ability of people to walk to school. That ties directly into that whole issue of transportation. Yes, we should encourage children to walk to school. Yes, we should encourage physical activity. But I would submit that parents of children who are walking to school would like to know that the roads on which they are walking are safe. If the infrastructure does not exist for safe travel to school, then that needs to be designed. That needs to be encouraged, and that is not something I've seen in this government's commitment.

There was a reference in the throne speech to being generationally selfish. A number of things. If we didn't do this or if we didn't do that, then we could be accused of being generationally selfish.

The issue of independent power production, the issue of run of the river — it's not a simple issue. However, what is simple is the fact that these power production sources are using the common wealth of British Columbians, and what I don't see is how those investments will give British Columbians long-term security in cost and in supply.

I'm not suggesting in any way that I disagree with the government's long-term plan, because they don't have one. What I'm suggesting is that if we don't look at the cumulative impacts, then we are being generationally selfish. If we are not looking at the long-term impact of government policy, then we are failing as government. We are failing the people of British Columbia. So being generationally selfish is not something that government can tell people about; it's what we can assess in terms of what government's policies are doing.

I don't suppose that government will recognize our position that the wealth of British Columbia and British Columbians, our common wealth, shouldn't be sold to, necessarily, the highest bidder. We're talking about what they're calling a gold rush. It's a gold rush…. We have first nations who are dealing with referrals in high numbers.

N. Simons: The "minister of energy and mines and heckling" seems to think that I'm not going to get to the point, because he hasn't been here the whole time. I'm not allowed to say that. I withdraw.

Deputy Speaker: Member, withdraw, please. Withdraw the unparliamentary language.

The Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources, were he able to listen to me, would know that I would come to the point where I would say that the first nations communities in this province need to have the resources at their disposal where they can actually do the studies and the necessary groundwork so that they can assess the appropriateness of independent power production in their traditional territory.

When you have first nations that have at least 50 on the table in front of them…. I think this government knows about the power differential, and I think that needs to be addressed.

Thank you to whoever it was on the other side of the House that brought up that issue. Whether they were here or not, I heard something.

N. Simons: I've just been asked if I want to play a game. I'm sure I have a bit more time before I'm allowed to go out for recess.

Deputy Speaker: Member, take your seat, please, for a moment. The member should know that it is unparliamentary to make reference to whether members are or are not in attendance in the House at any time.

N. Simons: I apologize, and I withdraw my remark if I made any reference to the presence or lack of presence of a member on the opposite side. What I simply said to the members opposite is that if they're inviting me to play a game, I'd be happy to play a game. But this is serious business, Madam Speaker.

Deputy Speaker: Member. Thank you, Member. The Chair has ruled on this. Will you please resume your comments.

N. Simons: I can resume my comments, with pleasure. I was saying that members opposite are inviting me to play a game. I think that if they believe this to be a game, if they believe this issue — the budget that has been presented yesterday or the throne speech of last week — is in any way a game, then they've obviously missed the point.

The issues that are of primary concern to British Columbians are the fact that we continue, despite all of the nice things that are said by members opposite,

despite the fact that there's a disconnect between this economic situation we're in and the fact that we lead the country in child poverty.

As the critic for child and family services, I think it's my opportunity and my right to speak to those constituents who have not had a voice in this budget. I can tell you, Madam Speaker, that children and families have not had a voice in this throne speech or in this budget. That concerns me, because it is not the first time that this government should know that the needs of children and families in this province have gone unmet.

It happened last year, and it happened the year before, and it happened the year before because this government has been successful in maintaining their rank as number one in child poverty for four years in a row. So that is not a joke to me. That's not about playing games.

There are families in this province…. It's not just statistics. There are families, there are little boys and there are little girls in this province who go to bed hungry. There are little boys and little girls in this province who don't have the same kind of clothing as their friends in school. There are little boys and little girls in this province who need the attention of this government but are not getting it, because they're more interested in self-promotion than in the interests of families in this province.

Where does this government get off talking about the challenges of poverty, mental illness and addictions when we know that they have been an abject failure in dealing with those issues in the last seven years? This is shameful. It is actually shameful, because while they're talking about the wealth and bounty of this province, they are also ignoring those who should benefit from it. That is the failure of this government.

The failure of this government has been their inability to deal with the real issues, but their ability has unfortunately been in the glossy self-promotion. We will soon see the tarnish on that shiny little exterior.

There are victims and casualties in our society, and we saw nothing in the budget and nothing in the throne speech to address that, except words to acknowledge that they exist. On one hand, in the throne speech they say there are victims and casualties in our society — injured, hurt, lost and isolated — who can't find their way off the street into a home, out of addictions and back to health.

What did this government do in their budget? Nothing. This government has once again decided that they're going to choose a topic of the week. That's the way this government sees it, because they did that with children in 2006. Are children any better off? How could they be better off when we have a poverty rate the way we have it now? How can it be that the number of children in care for first nations is now over 50 percent?

That's a failure of this government's policies. It's a failure of their vision, and it's a failure of their commitment to the hollow words that we now see resonating through the previous throne speeches.

It is not my favourite occupation to criticize people. It is my responsibility to point out where they are lacking, and they are lacking in their ability to serve the people of British Columbia.

Let me bring you an example, Madam Speaker. A 19-year-old man on Vancouver Island, when he was 12, was brought into care. He was brought into care, and he became a ward of the state. That's what it was called — in permanent care. The parent of this young man was the state.

He has an IQ in the range of 62. He is eligible for services as a developmentally delayed adult. He is fully aware that he does not have the faculties that many people around him do. Yet he's unable, as the psychiatrists and psychologists and caseworkers have said repeatedly, to make decisions that are in his best interest. He's unable to make decisions that will prevent him from getting in trouble with the law.

He appeared, soon after being discharged from the care of the Ministry of Children and Families onto the streets, before a judge in Provincial Court. And the judge said: "Why is this man before me? What is he doing before me?" The lawyers looked at each other and said: "I have never seen a case like this, Your Honour." I don't think it was a good example of government's commitment to families.

This young man was charged with vandalism. He was let off. The judge specifically said: "I hope this man gets the services he needs. I hope he finds a place to live." This man lived in a shed attached to a garage behind a house. Now, that is not the way a child raised in the care of the state should be. That is not the place that young man should be when he turns 19 and leaves the care of the state. We should be providing for these young people. We should be providing so that they don't have to live a life of sadness, a life of poverty and despair.

These young people need to be supported in environments where they will be safe, where they will be fulfilled and where they will be contributing members of our society. Yet in this province of wealth and bounty we choose, through government policy and government legislation, to allow them to go onto the street on their own.

He was beaten up. He was threatened. He's attempted suicide on more than one occasion. He's without a home. He is soon to be one of the many homeless in this province. The homelessness situation is bound to get worse unless this government recognizes their need to address poverty.

Poverty affects children early in their life. Studies as recent as…. One was quoted two or three days ago in the Financial Times. Poverty is the biggest threat to the well-being of a child and their ability to cope in society as they grow older. In fact, the direct quote is: "Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain."

Let me just quote from the director of Harvard University Center on the Developing Child. It's Jack Shonkoff. He says that policy-makers have to take note of the research, because "the foundation of all social problems later in life takes place in the early years. The earlier you intervene to counteract the impact of poverty, the better the outcome in the end, because the brain loses its plasticity as the child becomes older."

I continue: "Stress hormone levels tend to be higher in young children from poor families than children

growing up in middle-class and wealthy families. Excessive levels of these hormones disrupt the formation of synaptic connections between cells and the developing brain and even affect its blood supply. It disrupts the brain's architecture."

We're talking about children who are now young children in the province of British Columbia whose parents are living in poverty, who we know now are going to have less of an ability to succeed because of that poverty. Until this government recognizes that poverty underlies most of the social problems coming from it — unless they realize the interdependence of poverty, mental health, addictions problems and, in many cases, historical problems like colonization and the loss of language and culture — and until this government realizes the underpinning of social problems later, we are going to continually have the same kinds of problems.

That troubles me, and it troubles me even more because this is well known. This is well known to government. I don't believe there is anyone on the government side of the House who doesn't recognize that poverty has a severe impact on our ability as a society to call ourselves a just society. I would wish that this government recognize that and actually put their concerns, if they had them, into practice through legislation and policy and regulation.

Poverty, Madam Speaker. We all know that British Columbia has a wealth of natural resources and brilliant minds and energetic people and creative artists. We also have the responsibility because we're capable of doing it. We have the responsibility as legislators to find solutions, to plan solutions and to implement solutions that impact positively on families, all families in British Columbia.

It's not about judgment, and it should never be about judgment. We should look after people regardless of their circumstances. It's our responsibility to do so, and in my most positive language possible, I encourage the government to make a plan to deal specifically with the issues of child poverty and their concomitant impacts on society.

I think that if we recognize that — our need to address issues of poverty — we will also, by extension, address needs of young people as they come out of care and the support we need to provide for children while they're in care and when they come out of care, and for the families that try to raise them.

With that, I would like to close with just a comment. There are some lofty goals we've heard about in the throne speech. There was a single-minded approach in the budget. I hope this government realizes that it's supposed to be the government for everyone. It's supposed to be the government for all of British Columbians, and I wish that they could expand their horizons — expand their vision, in fact — to see beyond themselves to what is good for the province, not just now but for in the future.

Hon. R. Coleman: Good afternoon. I'm honoured to rise and respond to the budget speech and the government's budget for the next generation of British Columbians. I'm also honoured to have been in the House a week ago and to have listened to the throne speech.

One of the most telling moments for me was actually in only the second paragraph of the speech. That was where it said we owe a special debt of gratitude to MCpl. Colin Bason and MCpl. Darrell Priede, who fell while serving in Afghanistan. I knew Colin Bason, my wife went to church daily with Mrs. Bason, and we know Colin was a young man who had committed to his country. He believed in what he was doing in Afghanistan, and he believed in what he was doing on behalf of Canadians.

We sit in a legislature that's pretty peaceful most of the time, except for maybe a little bit of ruckus during question period. That's all it is, a ruckus. That's because we have freedom. We actually can change our governments with a ballot and not a bullet. We can have the ability to have debate in our province and in our country in a way that people allow us to do it, because some sacrifices of many were made for us.

My father-in-law was in the Royal Navy in the Second World War. My father was in the Royal Navy in the Second World War. My father-in-law was at D-Day. I've got to say that when you sit and reflect on the impact of one individual in my community who lost his life and the suffering that family went through, your prayers go out daily to those who serve overseas on behalf of our country.

I know that the opposition doesn't support the budget or the throne speech. I know they don't support the 33 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020. I know they don't support leadership on the environment and climate change and the reduction of GHGs.

I must say this. As we came through the process to develop our position on climate change and the budget, I was fortunate enough to sit on the cabinet committee on climate change. I know we listened to well over 175 presentations from people from all walks of life — scientists, non-scientists, people that were concerned about the environment and what have you — who told us that there is an opportunity here for somebody somewhere to take some leadership and try to change the paradigm that is climate change and how we handle our own consumption as people in this world.

One of the arguments people will make is that a small population of four million people in a province, in a country, can't make a big difference in climate change. They've got bigger polluters in other areas of the world. There are other people with larger populations, and they have more cars. There are other people in different populations that might use coal to create their electricity without sequestration of carbon monoxide.

But if somebody doesn't stand up and try and change the direction on climate change, what happens? What happens to us? What happens to my children? What happens to that grandchild that my daughter tells me I'm going to have — the first one — in the first week of July of this year?

I think we can, frankly, set a direction. I think that we as a society in British Columbia can actually change people's opinion by doing something bold. And I think you saw that opinion start to shift, even in this country, in the last couple of days, as you saw the headlines and read the stories about the fact that somebody had stepped up to the plate to try this. I think it's very important.

I live in a region of the province in the upper Fraser Valley that has an inversion. For the members opposite and the members of my own cabinet and caucus, an inversion is where the air traps what doesn't move. If you don't get the rain and the wind, you actually have everything hanging over you. In the Fraser Valley, specifically the upper Fraser Valley, that means everybody's pollution. That means what comes from Vancouver Island, what comes from Vancouver, from Bellingham and in some cases even Seattle comes up and gets trapped in the upper edge of that valley.

I remember when I became an MLA — 12 years ago, believe it or not. I was meeting with a doctor in my office 12 years ago after I was a pretty greenhorn MLA. He told me the major medical issue that he faced as an ear, nose and throat specialist was that the population in the Fraser Valley suffered a higher percentage of those types of irritations and diseases because of the pollution they lived in.

We can sit back and say, "Well, you know, we can't change that," but we can. We saw our cars get cleaner, which actually had some impact on that airshed. We saw us stand up to SE2 because of the pollution that was going to trap in that same airshed, that was already affecting people's lives. As time goes on, you will find that the leadership we can take, as a House and as four million British Columbians, can actually change the world.

I think that's a pretty laudable goal. That's a pretty big goal for all of us, for anybody that serves in this House. It means that we have to get smarter about consumption. We actually have to mean it when we say reduce, recycle and reuse.

We have to decide that we're going to do things that are innovative, like they did in the state of Minnesota many years ago when it came to recycling, a novel idea that my younger brother told me about. My younger brother, by the way, is an engineer who specializes in sewage treatment. He told me about how they actually got people to reduce and recycle in one of the major cities in Minnesota. What they did was…. If your garbage was picked up on any given day and you were the address on the list and you had the proper separation between the things you had — between the recyclables, the bottles and the garbage — you got a thousand dollars. Now, they did that 15, 20 years ago because they knew they had a solid waste problem.

In our province just recently, for the first time, our major regional district has actually come to the conclusion that maybe their garbage shouldn't be dumped in somebody else's backyard. It shouldn't be. It's an opportunity to reduce, reuse, recycle and actually turn some of that into energy and other uses for our society rather than just thinking you can dig a hole somewhere and have it leach in to the future generations of our society.

As we go through this, we know that we run into significant challenges as we try and accomplish this. There are always going to be those who say: "You can't. You won't be successful. You won't get there." I say that I didn't get here to not try something different. After listening to people like Dr. David Suzuki and even the auto dealers of Canada and North America and the other industries that came before the climate change, I didn't think it would be that difficult to actually have a shift, for people to understand how important the future is — how economically beneficial action on climate change and dealing with stuff in our environment can be for our own province and how we could become the clean energy place of the world.

We can become a place where, when we manufacture, people say, "We want the goods from that jurisdiction," because they've actually taken into account all the values of their society when they produce something through their companies and forests, or whatever the case may be.

As I listened to the budget and I listened to the throne and I thought of the sacrifices of Master Corporal Bason and his colleague, I thought: boy, we can't let these people down. We cannot, as a province or a country, let the people down that have made it possible for us to be here in peace and think about what we can do to improve and better the world, rather than sitting back and just consuming and consuming and forgetting about those people who our lives might affect or touch.

Every day as the Minister of Forests I deal with climate change. I deal with the largest devastation of a forest in our history as a country and perhaps in the world. We have a mountain pine beetle that's out there that got into our forests in 1994. In 1994 the theory, as tradition was for forests, was that a cold winter would stop the beetle, because it always had. It wasn't anybody making a mistake on an assumption. That's the way it had always been.

So what happened? We didn't get a cold winter at the right time of year to stop the beetle at any time over the next number of years. Ironically, we are the impacters of why we face the mountain pine beetle today. In 1905 in British Columbia there were about 400 million cubic metres of wood that was mature pine. Today, 13.5 billion metres of mature pine. Those numbers might be…. I think I've got the acres and the others mixed up, but the reality is…. It was 1.2 billion. So four times as much mature pine in B.C.'s forests over a hundred-year period.

How did that happen? The forest naturally regenerates itself by having fires. Over a period of a hundred years what we did as a society, because we were thinking that we're going to protect our resource, was that we put out forest fires. We were very good at it. Instead of having only 400,000 cubic metres of mature pine in a forest in any given year available and having 1.2 billion, we had this older, mature, pristine forest that could actually be more valuable in our sawmills.

It made a lot of sense, except for one little problem. As we get older as humans, we actually become more susceptible to viruses and flus and pneumonia and other things. Well, so do trees. The pine beetle actually likes to attack mature trees between 80 and 110 years old. We actually set the table for the pine beetle, and we set a table that left us with a challenge that we now have to face for the next generation.

Now, we can sit back and say that all that wood out there is going to burn. We can sit out there and say that there's nothing we can do about it now. Or we can invest a billion dollars over ten years to make sure that we're replanting aggressively, cutting the wood as we can, putting it through the sawmill and building another industry beside our forest sector and our pulp and paper sector that we have in B.C. today, and that is one that makes bioenergy out of our wood products.

We as a society need to shift on how we manage the waste in the bush in British Columbia. We have to decide to make that shift so that (a) we can take care of some greenhouse gases, (b) we can plant millions more trees that can sequester carbon, and (c) we can do what's right — not leave these huge waste piles and burn them every wintertime because we don't take them out of the bush but build an industry around it with a future.

If we were in Scandinavia or Finland and they saw what we did with the waste in our forests, they would shake their head and walk away. They would say: "Why aren't you using that for biofuels and bioenergy? That's what we do. We get the maximum value, and we still take care of the ecosystem and the biodiversity of the forests." They'll tell you how they do. That's a shift that we have to make.

That's why, just a few weeks ago, the Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources and myself as the Minister of Forests and the Premier announced the new bioenergy plan for British Columbia. Some people will pooh-pooh it, but I can tell you that if we don't try it, we fail everybody. We fail the climate, we fail the economy, we fail the environment, and we fail the next generation of British Columbians.

So we're going to try it. We're going to be aggressive. We're going to get power out of wood, and we're going to actually make electricity so that we can have a stable source of power that we can build on for the next generation of British Columbians. It's all so important. No member around this House isn't aware of it because all of us, everybody, is affected by the forest sector in British Columbia.

We have in B.C. today the biggest and most significant challenge ever to face our industry and our communities when it comes to forests. We have a perfect storm that's taking place. We have one marketplace where we send 85 percent of our total production — 85 percent of our total production — south of the border to the United States.

That marketplace has gone from 2.1 million housing starts a year ago to a predicted number of housing starts in the United States next year of 700,000 units. One of the financial analysts today came out and said this: "We need to take three billion board feet of production out of the marketplace, because it's got nowhere to go." So the price is way down, and our companies are being hurt badly. Then the dollar moved up, and we have the sub-prime mortgage pricing situation in the United States on top of that.

Remarkably, there are still thousands of people at work in the forest sector in British Columbia today — thousands of them. There are those that have been hit by bankruptcies and shutdowns and those that are in layoff. They're hoping to get back to work as the market turns, but there's still a big sector of our forest sector that's working today.

They're doing that because they are competitive, because the industry in British Columbia made significant investments in modernization and efficiencies in the last number of years so that they would be competitive in a marketplace and survive. And we got some stability.

Now, the stability that came, came from the softwood lumber agreement, which some people do and some people do not agree with, and that is part of a debate in a fair society like ours. But I can tell you, Madam Speaker, that I was at a conference in Prince George last week, and there were three guys in the washroom when I came into the washroom. They were having a conversation about how they're doing.

All three of them were value-added guys, all three of them were still in full production, and all three of them said this: "Thank goodness for the high-value cap in that softwood lumber deal."

This is what they would have been facing today if there was no softwood lumber deal. They'd probably be at a 29 percent or 30 percent duty at the border, because Americans don't like our lumber. They always think we dump it on them — right? They'd be paying $290 in duty on every thousand dollars' worth of product going south of the border.

However, because of the high-value cap, they pay 15 percent of $500. They pay $75 on every thousand board feet they send south of the border. That's a saving of $215 per thousand. Can you imagine the difference that makes for companies that are value-adding products in B.C.? It's a lot of work, it's a lot of certainty, and it's a lot of people still working in forestry in spite of the huge challenges we're facing in the market today.

We know this. We have to make sure we check every cost factor, every rule we have that may have an effect on the ability of our sector to operate. That's why we're doing another regulatory review and policy review within the ministry.

But we also know we need to know what the future is. That's why we'll have the forest round table, which will go forward out into the communities and listen to what we can do for the future of forestry in British Columbia.

I don't make any bones about the fact that we're in a challenging period of time. I don't make any bones about the fact that every time I hear about a layoff or a mill closure, it bothers me, as a minister, tremendously. I don't make any bones about the fact, though, that I

will do everything in the power of this government to make sure the format that's there for our industry to occupy and to do their business will be done, but I also recognize there are some things that are not in my control.

So we will do what's in our control, and we will work with industry so that we can build a strong future, but we should all recognize that it is an interesting challenge that we face today.

In yesterday's budget we also talked about some other things. Particularly, there was a small mention of housing. I was actually quite amazed today to see a quote from one of the members of the opposition saying, "Oh, there's nothing in the budget for housing," and: "They're not doing anything on housing and homelessness."

I know that those who have been there long enough, who have been in government and opposition on the opposite side, know that the text of the budget doesn't necessarily tell you everything that's happening. I also know that those members are probably aware that British Columbia has taken its housing budget from $120 million in 2001 to over $380 million today.

I listened to the member for Powell River–Sunshine Coast a few minutes ago. He talked about how we don't care about the family, how we don't care about families with children, the fact of the child poverty rates, and all that. I never hear about what we've done for people in housing. I want to walk through a list of things so that people will know what's going on in British Columbia.

A year ago we put in place a rental assistance program for families. Low-income families — it started out at an income of $21,000 and below — got assistance with their rent, wherever they lived in British Columbia. In January or February we changed that to $28,000 of income, wherever you lived in the province, if you had a family. In the budget yesterday we raised that income threshold to $35,000 a year, wherever you live in the province.

I want you to understand the significance of that. I got a letter a couple of months ago from a lady named Savannah. She wrote me:

You know, Madam Speaker, in the last year alone 4,400 families are receiving rent assistance where they live in British Columbia — 4,400 families. Do you know how long it's taken to just get 200 units out of the ground at the Woodward's project in Vancouver? Seven years.

In one year 4,400 families are actually living healthier, receiving a supplement from us for their rent. They have their own dignity and pride, because nobody says where they're living. It always goes to them, and nobody else knows they're getting the support but them. They are changing the direction of their lives. It's absolutely incredible — 4,400 families in a year.

We want to do more. We've changed the SAFER rules, the Shelter Aid for Elderly Renters. Since 2001 there are 3,000 new seniors receiving rent assistance where they live in British Columbia.

We also know there's a population that is homeless on our streets, quite frankly — that goes into our shelters every night, that needs to be connected into supports for mental health and addictions, and that needs to have supports to actually change their lives and move forward. We made a significant shift in our government a few years back, particularly when Housing Matters came out a couple of years ago, that we were going to go after supportive housing as a piece of the puzzle that needed to be there for people who were homeless and had mental health issues and addictions.

What happened? In 2001 we became government. There were 1,300 units of supportive housing in the entire province. Today there are 3,500 units of supportive housing across British Columbia. Oh, it gets better. There are another 946 on top of those 3,500 under construction in the province.

Last week we purchased another 330 units of housing for alternative supports in British Columbia. We've signed MOUs with municipalities to do another 1,500 units of supportive housing. That's remarkable, because the other piece of this puzzle that comes along with it is this: we have outreach workers in 28 communities in the province. Those outreach workers connect up with people that are homeless on our streets every single day.

What do they do? They help them fill out their social services stuff, because they may have literacy issues. They help them connect with a doctor. They help them connect with housing. They help them to try and turn their lives around by helping them get into supportive housing. In the last year alone 2,000 people that were homeless on the streets of British Columbia have been connected to housing and supports, and 85 percent of them are still housed today.

When we did that, we said: "All right, we could do more." So we took the emergency shelter bed system and actually increased it so that there wouldn't be a person turned away from a shelter in British Columbia when the weather got cold or inclement. We also took all the shelters in B.C. and funded them 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and put meals in there. We put our support workers in there so that we could connect with people during the daytime as well as in the evenings, when they're on the streets.

We actually are building 430 units of supportive housing with first nations in a relationship with the Aboriginal Housing Management Association. We gave them 3,000 units of aboriginal housing to manage for first nations in British Columbia, the only jurisdiction in Canada that's had the guts to step up and try that. Do you know what happens when you actually say to people: "You have the ability to do this; you can manage this process. We'll just work with you on it"? This is what happens.

I had a meeting with ministers of housing from across the country last week. They're all wondering

how British Columbia is pulling this off. They all got the same federal money that we got, by proportionate amount, to do aboriginal housing in their provinces. There is one province in Canada that's actually got the money on the ground and getting the housing built, and that's the province of British Columbia.

Today 80,000 households are helped in British Columbia with some form of support and social housing in B.C. In the last year alone more than 10,000 people have been helped by this government. Imagine — 10,000 people helped in just one year. It's a remarkable accomplishment on behalf of the government.

As we look at that, we also said that there is another group of people — severely mentally ill, severely addicted, with all kinds of other issues in their lives — who cycle through our system. They're in police custody. They're in our emergency rooms. They're with our social agencies. They're on our streets. They can't function in supportive housing because they have so many barriers to their ability to function in society. They need more help than that.

We used to have some form of institutionalization to help people like this, but successive governments actually closed a lot of that institutional capacity in Tranquille and Riverview in British Columbia. The notion was that they could go back to the community, and they would function in the community with support, because the supports and the facilities would be there for them.

Madam Speaker, I don't think it's any secret to anybody in public life that governments have failed on that task. They have failed those people, maybe 150 to 200 people like that on the lower mainland of British Columbia.

So what do you do? The Minister for Housing and the Minister of Health sat down with the Minister of Employment and Income Assistance and said: "Look, we need to get a handle on this problem." We went out and looked at facilities at Willingdon and Riverview, identified buildings that could be renovated for secure care for people that are severely mentally ill and addicted, and we said that we're moving. The health authorities got on board, and they're moving.

We're going to renovate a building at Willingdon, and we hope to have it up within six months so that we can have a place for those people to go. We'll do a second building at Riverview in order to have more places for those people to go and to give them the secure care they need to stabilize their lives and turn them around so that they can actually have productive lives, rather than ones that tear them and their families apart.

The housing initiatives of this government are remarkable, quite frankly. A budget of over $380 million, more than tripled in six years; $80 million deployed in capital in just the last year alone; a $250 million endowment fund that allows us to take $10 million a year and target it to specific initiatives, to get initiatives with new thought and new ideas and new results for housing in the province. It's absolutely an amazing story.

There's so much stuff in the budget and the throne. Health care has got more money — the highest rate of dollars invested in health care in the history of this country, in British Columbia. Advanced education, education and public safety have all received additional funds. As a matter of fact, we're the government that made the largest single investment in policing in Canadian history.

Then there's the fact that we're going to actually celebrate what we are and celebrate the fact that we're the leaders in the world as far as climate change is concerned, trying to give people the opportunity of saying something for the next generation of Canadians and British Columbians. We're going to celebrate it with the 150th anniversary.

November 19, 2008, is Douglas Day in Fort Langley. The cabinet will be there. The caucus will be there. The community will be there, and we're going to have a great year because we believe in the future of the great province of British Columbia.

R. Fleming: I'm pleased to take my place here this afternoon alongside other members of the House to respond both to yesterday's budget and last week's Speech from the Throne.

Before I begin, I want to thank a few people, staff members who help me and are important to all of the MLAs and members of this House in accomplishing their job on a daily basis. Here at the Legislature, I would like to thank my legislative assistant, Brian Kowalski. He recently celebrated a significant birthday. Brian is invaluable to me and other MLAs. He also has other high-maintenance MLAs that he takes care of, including the Opposition House Leader.

I'd also like to thank Mr. Carson Fennell, who is my research assistant here at the Legislature, and Cara McGregor, from communications, for all of their hard work on my behalf.

In my constituency office I'm extremely fortunate to have the assistance of Ms. Marni Offman. She works tirelessly on my behalf. She is a supreme multi-tasker. She helps constituents on a range of files. She works with a large network of organizations, with business groups, neighbourhood organizations, ministries and municipal governments. I am extremely indebted to her work on a daily basis.

Marni is complemented by my half-time constituency assistant, Alice Ross, who really puts her heart and soul into helping Victoria-Hillside residents. I want to thank them all.

This year's budget bookends a collection of three previous budgets by adding another volume in what I would call intellectual dishonesty. I want to speak today of why I think yesterday's much-anticipated so-called climate change budget does not adequately put into action the words that we all heard here in this very chamber a year ago in the 2007 throne speech.

This year's budget rewards behaviours in industries that don't need the money and in fact aren't contributing to the effort that we need to control and reduce GHG emissions. It doesn't provide the proper choices

or the incentives to those millions of British Columbians who would like to get on board, work together and contribute to a global effort — beginning here in their own back yard in this province — in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It doesn't provide them with the options and choices in their lives to be able to do that.

The Minister of Finance talked about enabling lifestyle choices that are low carbon threshold. There is nothing in this document that is going to help people do that in their daily lives, and that's the greatest concern. I'll speak to it later, as I'm sure others in this House will. If we're to make meaningful contributions to the targets that were established in law in this place only a few months ago, then we need to be providing not just tax cuts but programs and infrastructure that will enable ordinary citizens in British Columbia to make the choices that actually are going to make a contribution in a meaningful way to reducing greenhouse gases.

There is a lot of support in this budget document that rewards the political supporters of this government, mainly in the form of lavish tax cuts. They're being brought in, snuck in, while this government tries to distract the public with the hype of a so-called green budget.

So $220 million for the banking sector. How is that tax concession part of the revenue-neutrality in aid of climate change? That's anyone's guess. I think it's crasser than that. That this government found a quarter-billion dollars for the mortgage lenders of B.C., but no such attention to young families aspiring to own homes or find affordable rental accommodation, shows exactly the priorities of this government.

I don't know what the Finance Minister was thinking. Maybe she's helping out her friends in this sector who are exposed to the sub-prime-mortgage lending practices down south. I know they've incurred losses in that part of their portfolio. But to hand $220 million to the mortgage lenders of B.C., while offering no such help for young families aspiring to own homes nor addressing the extreme rental accommodation crisis in this province, is obscene.

This year's budget offers more subsidies for the oil and gas sector, when the price of oil enriches the shareholders in the major oil companies each successive fiscal quarter. I couldn't help but notice that the price of gas, even before the new tax regime, in place of the fuel tax that is the so-called visionary carbon tax…. Irrespective of that, far in advance of its implementation, the price of fuel in this region anyway went up five cents a litre just this morning.

The major emitters from the fossil fuel sector are getting lots of rewards from this government, rewards that overshadow the paltry boutique programs for alternative energy development available and outlined in this budget.

We waited last year when the minister said: "Ignore the throne speech. It's not going to be in the budget." We waited for this budget this year to show that green power and alternative energy development were going to be seriously considered and were going to be supported by policies and programs that would make it real. It didn't happen. It's no wonder that British Columbia as a jurisdiction doesn't have a single wind farm on its power grid today.

Despite this government's years of rhetoric in favour of clean energy, we can see what the priorities are when they count and when they're recorded in the budget document. That is to add $80 million more to the oil and gas sector subsidies and have no such equivalency for the development of real green alternative energy.

In fact, there are actually rate hikes on B.C. Hydro — rate hikes on the cleanest zero-emission power legacy that our province has. In the very same budget document that awards enhanced subsidies to the oil and gas sector, we see hydroelectric power penalized by rate hikes for ordinary consumers. That's going to affect their consumer choices.

The cement and coal industries exempted from any carbon tax implications in this budget. Page 13 of the budget document — it's there. It's unbelievable. No pain, no gain for those industries. It's put on the backs of individuals.

I think when you listen to those that are engaged in the politics of climate change and the science of climate change on a global basis…. And we have a number of Nobel prize winners right here at the University of Victoria in this region who contributed to that effort, to the UN panel on climate change and its key recommendations to the global community.

When you look at the work that has advanced there and some of the major conclusions and the implications that they had for different continents of the world and their abilities for their economies to contribute….

All of them stressed that governments that try and address climate change solely by making it an individual responsibility, without changing the production techniques and the production methods and legislation that support the way goods and services are produced in their economies, will fail. They will unfairly put that burden on the lowest-income members of those nation states. Apparently, that went unheeded by this government.

I've got a range of issues that I want to cover today in my remarks. A lot of them are flowing, quite frankly, from what was not in the budget.

It's always a disappointment when there are some major obvious areas that deserve attention because they've been neglected by government so long, and they don't…. Another year and another opportunity passes by when a budget fails to address them again.

I've got concerns about what government is not doing in the area of advanced education. I've got concerns about what the government is not doing as it regards public transit in my community. I'm glad I was able to hear some of the remarks of the Minister of Forests a moment ago, because I've got concerns about what the government is not doing about homelessness and the supports for those this government and this economy have left behind.

In my constituency what is not in this budget again — and it's of great concern to constituents in Victoria-Hillside — is supports for seniors, who need home

support services to live out their lives in dignity in their own homes. They've seen hours cut. They've seen the services available reduced. Their ability to live independently in their own homes has been limited by this government.

We were hoping to see some of that come back, because every health economist has told this government that home support services are the cheapest, the fairest, the most just way to support seniors. This government doesn't get it, years later.

Seniors in my community that lose a degree of their independence were also hoping that the mess this government has made around residential care facilities would be addressed. But wait-lists are going to continue, and anxiety about quality will remain because this budget fails to address that.

The budget also illustrates that this government is not prepared either to make child care services an attractive career for trained and skilled early childhood educators or to make child care spaces available and affordable for working families.

Let me return to what I characterize as the intellectual dishonesty of last year's budget, the 2007 budget, because there is a pattern here that I want to speak to. This government uses the same playbook over and over again. First it was seniors; then it was children. Last year it was touted as the housing budget. They brand their budgets but fail on the policies and programs needed to live up to the rhetoric.

Last year they touted the housing budget. It did little to address the housing affordability crisis in much of B.C. It did little to address the market failure in the housing sector for three in five British Columbian families that are priced out of affording a mortgage or renting proper accommodation within their means.

That budget did nothing to alleviate our province's excruciatingly low vacancy rates. It was not focused on helping the non-profit sector, the cooperative housing sector and local government–owned housing corporations to build new units, to bring new supply into this province's housing crisis and to lower in a meaningful way the 15,000-person waiting list for housing.

That budget locked up money in an endowment for homelessness, which ignored the urgency and critical situation of a surging underclass on the streets of dozens of towns and cities in British Columbia. I hear from members all the time — in fact, in more candid moments I hear from members on both sides of the House — talking about the explosion of homelessness in their communities. In their more honest moments, even government members will admit that they don't have a handle on this and that they have failed to address it adequately.

Recently we've learned that this endowment, which is supposed to make a $10 million contribution or more each year available to local projects that house the homeless…. In its very first year, only $2.6 million is going to be available from the endowment, and nearly $2 million of this is for a firefighters' burn house.

That is a fantastic project, and I want to stress that. But it is a project that is clearly supportive of families using the health care system. It's clearly a centre that is a recovery and respite centre for family members of burn victims that are hospitalized. Yet we're using the homeless fund that was created by government last year to cover a health expenditure.

That is a terrible way to start down the path of rolling out this new endowment fund. We're already misappropriating money and covering budget overruns or, presumably, declines from ministers in other areas, who are raiding that fund for their own purposes. It's not going to the homeless.

Last year's housing budget needed to be bold, and it wasn't. It reflected again the intellectual dishonesty of a government that wanted to brand or label primarily income tax cuts, and there was $500 million of them last year. They wanted to brand those entirely discretionary income taxes as some kind of housing strategy.

One year later this bizarre scattergun approach is there for anyone's evaluation, and it has failed. It has failed to help the homeless situation. It has failed to help low-income families. It has failed to help the critically low supply situation of rental housing.

I actually think that homelessness primarily, while it's about the lives and suffering of the homeless people themselves who are living on our street, is equally a middle-class issue in this province. I hear it expressed that way by my constituents. It affects our downtowns. It affects our business climate. It affects the retail sector. It affects public safety concerns. It is not right that people in my community, and disproportionately women, do not feel safe going to the downtown of this beautiful great city in the evening or in the daytime. Yet city surveys show that over the last five years, concerns about public safety in the downtown have soared.

Homelessness affects tourism, another economic concern. But most importantly, I think homelessness and the failure of this government to grapple with it effectively really affect the self-esteem of our communities — that we see squalor and suffering in our midst, when clearly a prosperous economy has left so many more behind and created an enlarged underclass.

This is a government that hasn't had any excuses on the revenue side when it comes to housing. They have taken in over $6 billion over the past several years, since they were elected, in property transfer taxes. They have failed to reinvest these revenues — they have failed to reinvest these record windfall taxes — in affordable housing programs.

The minister likes to confuse people, and he was doing it just a moment ago by claiming that he's building housing. He likes to talk about how his budget has grown in housing. I know they put such importance on housing that they don't even have a ministry for it, but on the issue, he likes to claim that the budget has increased.

But do you know what he does, Madam Speaker? He does an accounting trick. He tries to pull the wool over people's eyes and says he's addressing homelessness and building housing supply by pointing to residential care and assisted living units — formerly developed and put into being by the Ministry of

Health, now recorded over on the Minister Responsible for Housing's balance sheet.

It's another cover. This is actually a cover for the broken commitments in 2001 that here today, in 2008, this government isn't even close to fulfilling.

He also likes to take credit and confuse people with the numbers by taking credit for the federal government, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.'s divestiture of their housing portfolio to British Columbia and indeed every province. This happened a couple of years ago.

Now the minister claims that those units divested to B.C. and the overhead supports that come with them are actually units that his government somehow created. Not a single new unit in that, but that's the kind of gamesmanship that goes on. That's the kind of political cover that's being offered on the housing front.

The little attention that is offered in this budget, in 2008, to housing is actually focused on shelters — emergency shelters. Now, any jurisdiction that is successful and engaged in strategies to reduce and eliminate homelessness is not pursuing a shelter-based strategy.

In places like Portland, the U.K., other cities in the States, Calgary now, the focus of those communities is not on opening more shelters. In fact, Portland closed five or six of them — Union Gospel Missions and other kinds of temporary supports that actually enable homelessness. They closed those. The emphasis has been on developing new supportive housing units to get people from the streets and moved into housing and to make a real impact on homelessness and its decline.

The minister talked about some numbers, where he was saying that we've housed all these people. Well, look at the indicators. All of the social agencies that are funded by the province in their estimates say that we have 15,000 homeless people across B.C. today. The minister says there are 4,500. It's laughable.

The Canadian Mental Health Association doesn't validate the minister's message, which we heard a few minutes ago, that they've got a handle on it, that they're addressing homelessness and that they're making an appreciable impact on it. They say the opposite. They say that homelessness is growing by 30 percent a year in B.C.

The shelter-based and rent supplement approach of this government is a failed strategy. Unfortunately, that's the direction that this government continues to take.

Let's look at what was in yesterday's budget. There was $104 million there for homelessness over four years, about $25 million per year, and $78 million of that is to expand hours and staffing complements at existing shelters — so-called 24-7 service.

Does that sound like the core of an effective strategy to end homelessness? It is exactly what other jurisdictions that are making progress have rejected. Portland, as I mentioned earlier, has reduced its homeless population with a housing-first strategy over the past three years by 39 percent.

The shelter-based approach isn't going to help low-income families in my community. Some of them live in motels in my constituency while they sit on affordable housing wait-lists. A mother of three in my community, who I recently visited, is living in a one-room motel with a kitchenette — four in a room, three girls and the mother. The children are aged six, five and one and a half. The youngest was born while her older sisters and her mother have been waiting for family housing on the B.C. Housing list for two and a half years.

Shelters aren't places for children and families, and rent supplements are failing young families as well. The minister…. Actually, I don't know how he can claim that this rent supplement process is in any way successful. Last year he said he hoped rent supplements would apply to 15,000 individuals in B.C., yet he admitted the other day that the takeup rate is only 4,300 — 70 percent lower than the projection.

The reason is simple. The vacancy rate is almost zero in Metro Vancouver and Victoria. I'm not actually opposed to rent supplement programs, but supplements by themselves ignore the basic crisis points in our housing situation in B.C. It is fundamentally a crisis of rental supply.

The city of Victoria wants to tackle homelessness. The city of Victoria recently released a ten-year plan to eliminate homelessness authored by Dr. Perry Kendall, respected chief medical officer of the province. Experts involved of the highest calibre — everybody who should have been at the table was at the table, and they developed that document.

You know what they would love? They would love the province to come and say: "We embrace your housing-first policy. We support the units that you need created. We will work with you over ten years to eliminate homelessness." That's clearly outlined in that plan. But you know what? They haven't.

They've come in. They've picked small pieces out of that document. They're focused on rent supplements and shelters, and that is not going to get people off the street. City hall can't go it alone. They don't have the resources, and nor do they have the political responsibility to do it.

Sometimes I think the minister thinks that housing and homelessness are a zoning issue. In reality, it's a social issue, and we all know it. It's a social issue that this government has neglected badly. How a government that boasts of a growing economy, albeit one that is now slowing, and fails to prevent the growth of such social disparity in our community can call itself anything but a failing government is beyond me.

Transit. I want to come back to some of the other concerns I have about this throne speech and the budget. I will start with the government's much-touted transit announcement, which was trotted out a few weeks ago as a big plan to build transit, primarily throughout the lower mainland. Some of the comments that came shortly after the announcement was made were how remarkably it resembled previous plans from previous decades and how many of the projects at the centre of the so-called transit plan were in fact things that were put on hold in an indefinite capital transit expenditure freeze beginning in 2001.

Now they're back, revived, but put well off into the future — several terms of government down the road before any of them would come into action. And of course, less than a third of the money was even committed to — nothing from the feds, and local government taken for granted, because we know that TransLink is now completely controlled and centralized with the province.

You know what was disappointing after that announcement? It was the sad truth that came out around transit ridership and that at the end of the day, all the investment in fixed-transit lines — assuming it was actually built, and that's a huge assumption with this government — would achieve less than 2 percent of the government's greenhouse gas reduction targets, less than 2 percent of the number that government passed into law less than three months ago.

I have to credit the Minister of Transportation, who was at least honest about it when he said, "Do you have any concerns that so little of the province's GHG target would be met by this transit plan?" and when he said: "I don't pay a whole lot of attention to GHG numbers." So I credit him with honesty. I know the theme here has been dishonesty in budget documents, but I will give him that.

In Victoria there's actually no real transit strategy. We're told that all we get is a busway plan — three kilometres of HOV bus-only land down Douglas Street. This busway, by B.C. Transit's own figure, aims to achieve a modal shift by 2020 of only 2½ percent from cars. No mention of LRT, even to 2030, when it is included prominently in this region's growth strategy.

There's no support for mayors or the business community that are looking at commuter rail options in this community. We don't even get, at a minimum, a promise from this government to do due diligence to investigate the feasibility of this technology.

We actually had a study in 1996 that said LRT was feasible. It said the rights-of-way are in the right place for that line, where the land use changes are desired and where the densities are occurring. Now we need a business plan for it. But the Ministry of Transportation has shown no interest, and we see the spectacle of four new lines in the lower mainland and nothing for B.C.'s second-largest metropolitan area.

I'm actually happy that this government is no longer opposing the Evergreen line to the Tri-Cities area. I'm even happy that on a certain Friday afternoon the minister added $400 million more to it and said that SkyTrain is the appropriate technology. I'd just like to have the same consideration for my community's aspirations on light rail transit.

Let me spend the remainder of my comments here on the area of advanced education. I find it incredible that a so-called green budget failed to invest funds into the Ministry of Advanced Education and our 26 public post-secondary institutions. The green jobs of today and the diversification of our economy by strengthening the knowledge-based sectors aren't receiving the attention they need in this budget. That's a missed opportunity for B.C. to position itself on a more sustainable path and to position itself on a path of continued prosperity.

The wages and salaries earned by those with a post-secondary education are significantly higher and are necessary in the labour market of today's global economy. We already have a skills gap in this economy, and this budget does nothing to address that. British Columbia has less bachelor degree credentials than any other province per capita, and most importantly, this budget completely ignores the affordability crisis facing our students. The Premier continues to ignore the financial hardships facing students.

Members of the Finance Committee well know from travelling around this province that B.C. sees the Liberals as a government that has done nothing to make post-secondary education more affordable, and it's a government that continues to throw up barriers for low-income and middle-income British Columbians.

Unbelievable as it is, there is no relief for students who are facing spiralling tuition fees. This budget didn't address growing student debt, and incredibly, the budget actually erodes established student aid programs. There's a 7 percent cut in StudentAid B.C. included by this government, and that was indeed a shock yesterday to be discovered in the budget lockup.

The throne speech and the budget actually completely skipped the 52 recommendations of the Campus 2020 report, which government itself commissioned, including the most important recommendations: that aboriginal participation rates be equal to those of non-aboriginals by 2015 and that low-income participation rates of students — i.e., the lowest quartile — be equal to the highest by 2015.

The other key recommendation that's completely missed by this government is that it dramatically ramp up support for university-based research and development. B.C. is ninth out of ten in its per-capita support for research and development. We are a laggard on the R-and-D front. That's where the jobs of tomorrow are going to be. That's where the green technology development occurs. That's where the patents and spinoff companies come from that create the salaries for prosperity and a more sustainable path in this province. This government completely missed it.

The only element of Campus 2020 that made it into the throne speech was the ominous references about new, unaccountable boards to oversee higher education. You know, what we absolutely don't need is new health authority–style regional higher education boards to take away political responsibility from the ministry and the government, where it should be, for funding institutions and for running them properly and put them into these remote regional boards. We don't need that. We heard references to it in the throne speech, and I'll tell you that this side of the House will be fighting that if the government goes down that road. We'll be joined by the academic and university administration sector in fighting that as well.

Let me plead with the government on a couple of points, because they really would help them establish

some credibility with the students of B.C. This side of the House put forward a five-point plan to make education more affordable.

Hon. C. Hansen: I think the debate, as we've listened to it this afternoon, sort of underscores some of the fundamental differences between this side of the House and that side of the House. I think it's a fundamental difference in terms of how governments should approach the responsibility of governing the province.

When you look through the budget this year, you see tremendous investment in new social programs, new health care spending, new spending in education. I think what's different between the opposition and the government members is that we recognize that the way you can actually have strong social programs, a strong health care system and a strong education system is to make sure that you, first of all, have a very strong economy that provides the revenue to government.

Earlier this afternoon my colleague the Minister Responsible for Housing was talking about the threefold increase in the amount of money that's being spent on housing and homelessness programs in British Columbia today. That's a tremendous benefit to communities and to families around this province who are able to get into stable housing and be able to afford their housing in a way that they were never able to before. You could not have done that without a strong economy.

When you look at the investment in health care in British Columbia…. I know that in the year leading up to our election as government, there was a total budget for health care spending in the province of about $8.3 billion. In this budget what we see in the coming year is health care spending at $14.8 billion. That's a tremendous increase in just a few short years and an increase that this province could not have afforded if we had not been able to build a strong economy and a strong economic underpinning for our society that actually drives the revenues for that.

You can say the same for education. In this budget — an additional $144 million for education in British Columbia. Those are the kinds of programs that the public in British Columbia look for. We as a government have taken it as our responsibility to make sure that we build a strong economy that produces the tax revenues to government so that we can actually pay for those programs going forward.

Let's just take a minute and look at what's happened in terms of the economy over the last 15, 16 years in this province. If you go back and look at the period from 1992 to the year 2000 and look at the economic growth province by province, for Canada as a whole the Canadian economy grew by 21.8 percent.

You may ask yourself: where did B.C. fit into that picture of economic growth during that eight-year period of time? Well, I can tell you that we didn't even make the Canadian average. Newfoundland, for example, went up by 33 percent. Just to pick out a couple of examples, Ontario went up by 24.2 percent during that period of time.

No, British Columbia was not in the top five provinces. In fact, we weren't in the top seven provinces. In fact, we weren't even in the top nine provinces. Out of ten provinces in Canada, British Columbia came in absolutely dead last with economic growth of 5.7 percent.

In fact, do you know the province that was second to last place had 16.6 percent economic growth? That's almost three times the economic growth that we had in British Columbia, and they were in ninth place out of ten provinces.

We have committed as a government to make sure that we actually build a strong economy in this province. If you look at the track record just over the last five years in this province, it's been pretty incredible. You're going from a period of eight years in the 1990s when we had total economic growth of less than 6 percent. In the last five years we've actually seen the growth going up by 2.3 percent in 2003; in 2004 by 3.7 percent; 2005 by 4.5 percent; 2006 by 3.3 percent; and in 2007, 3 percent.

In every one of those years we exceeded the average Canadian growth rate. The forecast we see in the budget is that that trend will continue in the future. We will surpass the average Canadian economic growth and we will surpass the North American economic growth because of the policies that we have brought in as a province and as a government to make sure that we, in fact, have the economic underpinnings for the social programs, the education and the health care programs that the public of British Columbia count on.

I want to look just for a minute at the job creation record in this province. Since 2001 we have seen a net increase in the number of people employed in British Columbia of 411,000. That is a phenomenal growth rate during that period of time.

If you want to compare that back to the dismal decade, from the period from 1996 to the year 2000, British Columbia was in last place in Canada when it came to the number of jobs being created. It's been a complete 180-degree change in that period of time. British Columbia, during that period from 2001, leads Canada in terms of the rate of job creation, leads North America in terms of job creation and in fact leads most jurisdictions around the world in the rate of job creation.

If you look at the unemployment rate. We saw in the 1990s the unemployment rate in this province went up over 10 percent. The unemployment rate that we had as of the latest StatsCan numbers have B.C. down to 4.1 percent. In 2001, when we formed government, the unemployment rate was 7.7 percent. But was that actually the true unemployment rate at the time?

The reason I raise that is because you also have to look at how many people were just discouraged from even looking for a job in those years because of the lack of opportunity. In 2001, when we formed government, it was actually the year that British Columbia hit the lowest participation rate that we have seen for many, many decades in this province — a labour force participation rate of 59 percent.

That sort of underscores for you how many people in the province were simply discouraged from looking

for a job. My bet is that if you actually had a real reflection of the true unemployment rate in 2001 when we formed government, it would actually be considerably higher than the 7.7 percent that we saw in the official unemployment numbers.

Today we actually see a record high in terms of labour force participation in British Columbia, at 63.9 percent. So those are a lot of statistics, but behind each of those statistics are real families and real people who want to have a job, want to earn a living and want to be able to support their families in a meaningful way. They now have the opportunities to do that that they didn't have just six or seven short years ago.

In 2001 we actually had an average at any one time of 161,000 people unemployed in British Columbia at that time. In 2007 at any one time the average was 100,000. If you think about that, that's 61,000 individuals, men and women, in British Columbia who are working today who would not have been working in 2001, in spite of their efforts to actually look for a job during that period of time.

In fact, if you look back through the whole period of the 1990s, the number of people unemployed in British Columbia never fell below 148,000 people. Today we're down to 100,000, and there's every indication that that trend will continue in the years ahead.

You also have to look at what happened in terms of people's work to find work in that period of time. In the last five years of the NDP government in the 1990s, we saw an out-migration from British Columbia to other provinces of 50,000 people — 50,000 young men and women from British Columbia who were forced to go to other provinces in search of job opportunities. That's a net decline of 50,000 people during that period of time.

If you want to compare that to the last five years of British Columbia's history, we actually see a net in-migration from other provinces of 40,000. Those are 40,000 men and women who are coming back to British Columbia because, once again, there are opportunities in this province. Once again, families are being brought back together. The sons and daughters of British Columbians have the opportunity to come back to this province and build their careers into the future in British Columbia.

There's also, when you start looking forward…. We recognize that there are lots of opportunities still to come in this province. One of the things that we track in the Ministry of Economic Development is what we call the major-projects inventory. These are construction projects valued at over $20 million in Metro Vancouver and valued at over $15 million in other parts of the province. We keep as accurate an inventory as we can. When new projects are announced or building permits are requested through municipalities, we track them as closely as we can so that we get a sense of the kinds of pressures there are going to be on our economy and on our labour force in the future.

Well, I can tell you that back in 2001 there was about $46 billion worth of major projects that were either in development or in the planning stage at that time — a total of 315 projects around the province. I can tell you that as of December of this year that number has increased to $148 billion worth of major projects. That's an increase of more than $100 billion in the kinds of projects that are being planned, because people have confidence in this province once again. Investors have confidence in this province.

That's not about short term. That's not about the next quarter or the next two years. That's about the decades to come. In fact, we've now seen 18 straight quarters of economic activity where we have seen the total value of that inventory grow during that period of time.

Now, I've had some people that have said to me: "A lot of that must be related to the construction of Olympic venues, and what might happen after the Olympics are over?" Well, in fact, the construction for venues for the Olympics is a very, very small percentage of that $148 billion. In fact, when you consider that the total Olympic venue construction budget is $580 million — split half for the federal government and half for the provincial government — that is a very small fraction of the $148 billion of construction that we see.

But the Olympics are going to be a tremendous opportunity for British Columbia. We know that there will be about three billion television viewers around the world who will be able to watch the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games. We know that the direct economic activity is to the tune of about $4 billion. Those are the dollars spent by the VANOC, the organizing committee, but also spent by the sponsors, by the visitors that will come to British Columbia. We know that the economic activity that that will stimulate is going to be many billions of dollars more than that.

We know that the Olympics create about 244,000 person-years of employment and will bring into governments about $2.5 billion in incremental tax revenue. That's the kind of an economic activity that governments need to promote — actually looking at the things that generate economic activity that in turn pay people's salaries, that produce income tax that then flows back to governments — so we can actually pay for the health and the education and the social services that we are proud to provide to British Columbians.

The Olympics are going to be a tremendous world event. The eyes of the world will be on this province. It's going to be a tremendous showcase that I know each and every British Columbian can be tremendously proud about.

In my view, it's not in itself simply a showcase for some of the finest sports talents and cultural talent from around the world. It's also an opportunity for us to tell the story about British Columbia, and it's an opportunity for us to engage British Columbians in all corners in capitalizing on the opportunities that it presents.

That's why we've gone out around the province. We've now hosted 175 business opportunity workshops that have been organized by staff in the 2010 Commerce Centre, which is part of the Ministry of Economic Development. We've actually involved over 5,000 people from 49 different communities in B.C. who have attended those workshops.

We've also hosted, so far to date, 24 Think Asia-China workshops with over 500 attendees in 12 different communities, because we also recognize that this is an opportunity not just about British Columbia, but it's an opportunity for us to use our Olympic designation to reach out around the world.

One of the things that we will be doing is putting in place in Beijing, starting in May of this year, the B.C.-Canada pavilion. This is a showcase for British Columbia and Canada, and it's a showcase opportunity that we have that we would not have been able to make happen were it not for the fact that we were an Olympic jurisdiction.

We were able to go to the Chinese government, go to the government of the city of Beijing, and say that we, as a fellow and a future Olympic host, would like to showcase what we offer the world and showcase our 2010 Winter Games at the time of the 2008 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games that will be held in Beijing at that period of time.

They were receptive, just as the good folks in Italy were receptive when we made a similar proposal to them with regard to the 2006 Winter Games that were held in Torino. At that time, we had over 100,000 visitors come through the B.C.-Canada pavilion. We were able to generate over $30 million worth of earned media for British Columbia, and that's just what we were able to track in terms of the news coverage around the world about British Columbia and about the 2010 Winter Games.

We've set our sights even higher in the case of Beijing this year, where we believe that over 400,000 visitors will attend the pavilion. We will be able to engage with the business community, the academic community and the research sectors in British Columbia to build the kind of opportunities between Canada and China that would not otherwise be there for us to capitalize on.

We will have business delegations coming from around British Columbia, municipal delegations from around British Columbia, who will be in Beijing to build relationships and build business opportunities and community-to-community opportunities over that five-month period of time. Already we have tremendous interest from groups and organizations and delegations that want to take advantage of that opportunity that will be there.

We also will be making sure that the media, as they converge on Beijing for the 2008 Summer Games, will know about British Columbia, the tremendous changes that we've seen in our economy here and the tremendous opportunity there is for British Columbia as Canada's gateway to the Asia-Pacific region.

That is what I hope will actually come out of the message that we will present to the world in 2010 as well — that each of the 250,000 visitors that come to British Columbia, each of the 5,000 to 6,000 athletes that come, each of the 10,000 to 12,000 media that will come to British Columbia will go home fully understanding that British Columbia is the place to do business internationally between North America and the Asia-Pacific region.

This is the centre that a company should look for if they want to open a North American regional head office. This is the place that Canadian and North American companies should look to locating if they actually want to be part of that growing Asia-Pacific opportunity — the growing Pacific century, as we are coming to know it as.

The Asia-Pacific Initiative is something that is really the cornerstone of the work that's being done by the Ministry of Economic Development. We know that there is tremendous opportunity for our province with regard to the Asia-Pacific. We now, as a result of our Asia-Pacific Initiative that we rolled out last April, have over 200 cross-ministry programs that are involved with building those relationships and those opportunities in the Asia-Pacific.

We know that ultimately there's a big prize at the end of that. The prize is as much as $77 billion in increased trade and as many as 255,000 additional jobs by 2020, if we seize the opportunities that are there. We are doing just that.

We engaged the Asia-Pacific Trade Council that was appointed by the Premier in the fall of 2005. They did a tremendous amount of work. A tremendous number of volunteer hours went into the success of the work of that trade council. They, in turn, put in place four market advisory groups — for China, for Japan, for Korea and for India — that looked at the opportunities that we could capitalize on in each of those jurisdictions.

In addition to that, we had two other reports that we commissioned, one that focused on the ASEAN countries and another that focused on market opportunities with regard to Taiwan. We are now rolling out the programs to implement the recommendations that were provided to us.

We have already opened two new offices in the Asia-Pacific region — one in Shanghai and one in Tokyo. We are now in the process of recruiting a full-time representative for British Columbia to be located in Seoul, Korea, where we know there are big opportunities for this province. We will also be putting in place a permanent representation in Beijing to build on the great success that we know will flow from our B.C.-Canada pavilion there this summer.

We've seen over 18 outgoing missions to Asia over these last 12 months to Japan, to Korea, to China, to India and to the Philippines. Many of these have been led by the Premier, by me, by other cabinet members or by senior officials of the provincial government. We've also hosted over 50 inbound missions, which is something that's vitally important. As the world recognizes that British Columbia is a pretty exciting place, the world is coming here to check out the opportunities that we can offer.

We have increasingly each year more missions that are coming in, whether business missions, investment missions or missions that are looking for tourism opportunities in British Columbia. In fact, in this budget there's a total of over $40 million of new money that's going to be committed to the Asia-Pacific Initiative over the next three years to make sure that we can continue to build on those opportunities.

We've also in this last year rolled out the B.C.-Asia twinning toolkit, which my colleague the Minister of

Community Services rolled out in September. Around the province we have dozens of city-to-city twinning relationships — region to region, in some cases schools to schools — and we need to build on those.

We need to energize each of those twinning opportunities to make sure that they're used in a way that really brings people closer together. We can build friendships across the Pacific Ocean that ultimately lead to better opportunities, more educational exchange, more cultural exchange and more economic opportunity that is of mutual benefit to each of the parties to those twinning arrangements. We will see those grow in the months and years ahead.

We've also rolled out the B.C. alumni ambassadors program. We recognize that throughout the Asia-Pacific region there are hundreds of thousands of graduates of British Columbia post-secondary institutions who cherish the memories they have of the time that they spent in British Columbia studying and making friends. They have gone back to their respective countries with a real affinity to British Columbia. They are in fact our messengers; they are our ambassadors.

We need to keep in closer touch with them — something we have not done a good job of over the past number of decades, and something that we are committed to re-energizing in making sure that we are going to get in touch with them. We're going to keep them informed about what's happening in British Columbia and make sure that the goodwill that they have to British Columbia is something that can be part of their day-to-day lives as they're talking to their friends and their business colleagues in their countries — so that we can continue to make sure that British Columbia is front and foremost when they're thinking about opportunities around the world.

I would say that one of the biggest challenges that we have in British Columbia when you look at the economic environment in the years to come is around the area of labour market. It's something that I hear from employers in every single corner of the province. They are experiencing the shortage of workers.

Just a couple of years ago we talked about the shortage of skilled workers, but it's actually more than that today. It's the shortage of workers generally — skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers — and we need to do more to make sure that we attract that labour force to come to British Columbia, so that the jobs of the future can be filled, and we can continue to see the economy of this province living up to its full potential.

We have seen the expansion of our PNP program. In fact, this budget actually has more dollars to allow what's called the provincial nominee program to continue to grow. Since 2001 almost 4,000 foreign workers plus their dependents have made this province their home through this program. They've come here with their skills and talents, prepared to become Canadian citizens and part of the labour force in this province, and we will be continuing to expand that.

We expect in this coming year alone that there will be at least 1,600 skilled immigrants, which is a considerable increase over the number that we were able to facilitate last year. As I mentioned, there's about $7 million of new money that's going to allow us to expand that program in the year ahead.

Another area that's been very important is to make sure that the recent immigrants that have come to British Columbia are able to be employed, with the skills they have and the experience they have, to the full level of their talents and their expertise. That has not always been the case. That's one of the reasons why I'm very proud of a program that we've brought in called Skills Connect. It actually engages one-on-one with recent immigrants and allows them to get the skills they need, whether it's English language skills or counselling, to help them get through a credentialing system so they can get the licensing they require for their occupation. It's been a tremendous success.

Already to date, just in the short period of time that we've had that program in place, over 2,000 skilled immigrants have been assisted. We expect that to reach about 2,500 by the end of March of this year. I've met with some of these young British Columbians who have benefited from this program. The stories are really heartening when you realize that they came here full of excitement and expectation in terms of their lives in Canada, often to have those hopes dashed because they couldn't get into the occupation that they thought they were going to be able to.

Through Skills Connect, we've been able to give them the opportunities that they dreamed were going to happen. They are now proud and excited. It was a great pleasure for me to able to meet many of them one-on-one in these past few months.

I think that, as important as it is that we attract the workers from around the world and across Canada to come to British Columbia, it's also vitally important that we provide the opportunities for young British Columbians to fill the jobs of the future as well. That's why the expansion of the Industry Training Authority and the apprenticeship programs in British Columbia are also such vital parts of the work that the Ministry of Economic Development is doing.

In 2004, when the ITA was first set up, we had fewer than 15,000 registered apprentices in British Columbia. As of the end of December of last year, we now have just shy of 38,000. That is a tremendous increase. It's actually a 158 percent increase since 2004. We've also got more employers who are coming forward saying: "Yes, I'm prepared to hire an apprentice. I'm prepared to encourage my workers to get into formal apprenticeship programs in British Columbia."

In 2004 we had about 6,700 employers as part of apprenticeship programs in British Columbia, and today we have over 10,300. Again, it shows that the private sector is prepared to come to the table and do their part in ensuring that young British Columbians can get into the trades and have those exciting careers of the future.

We're also seeing the number of completions going up significantly. That's a challenge in a hot economy when the young workers would like to get as much time in as possible, as much overtime as they can. Certainly, the work is there.

In many cases the employers are also saying: "I'm not sure if I can free your time up to go and take the formal courses in order to complete your apprenticeship." But we've been working with the employers and apprentices. We've put in the tax credit program to make it even more rewarding for them to do that. We have seen credentials up over 54 percent in just the last year alone, up now to about 4,000 that have received their credentials — or their tickets, as some people often refer to it — to date in this fiscal year alone.

We have also seen more involvement in registered apprenticeship programs at the secondary school level. This is something that I am tremendously proud of, and I know that my colleague the Minister of Education is very proud of, and that is the huge increase in the number of students still in high school who are engaged in formal apprenticeship programs. In fact, it is a 430 percent increase since 2004 in the number of registered apprentices who are still in high school.

Today we have 4,568 youth who are involved in programs such as ACE IT and the secondary school apprenticeship program. When they graduate from grade 12, they will already have the first year of their apprenticeship program under their belts. I'll tell you, each of those young British Columbians is being snapped up by employers because they have the excitement and the energy of pursuing a career in trades. They're committed to it, and they're going to build their futures and their careers in this province in the trades, which are going to be booming in the years ahead.

Credentialing is also a very important area where we're putting more money, effort and focus into making sure that British Columbians with skills, who have come to this province from other countries, can get the credentialing they need. In fact, we see just in this year alone about $10 million from the province to encourage more and faster credentialing as we go forward.

We've also seen more emphasis on venture capital in this province, which are programs that flow through the Ministry of Economic Development. Last year we saw venture capital investments rise to $310 million in B.C., which represents a total of more than 15 percent of the total capital invested in Canada — well up from the 7 percent of the Canadian investment dollars that we were attracting to British Columbia at that time.

In fact, the province attracts 40 percent of all of the life science investment in Canada and more than half of the venture capital invested in clean technology. We know, from this budget that has come down, that those numbers are going to go up as more emphasis is put on research and development and on the development of clean technology industries in British Columbia.

All in all, just in closing, we have seen a tremendous turnaround in the economy of this province. There are obviously some challenges, whether it's the forest sector or some of the specific regions of the province that have challenges, but we know that we have a healthy economy. We know that we have a diversified economy that's going to weather whatever small challenges come along in that period of time.

British Columbians are once again optimistic about the economy in this province, optimistic that they and their families are going to have sound, supporting jobs, family-supporting jobs in the future. Those are the kinds of jobs and the kind of employment and the kind of healthy economy that's going to allow for government to have the revenues to support the education system, the health care system and the social safety net in this province that we know is so important to a healthy and dynamic society.

B. Simpson: I rise to speak to the budget. Of course, given the role that I have in this House, I will not be speaking to the budget as the opposition does — to all of the positive and wonderful things that are in it — because I don't believe that it's there for my community.

I'm going to speak from the perspective of two responsibilities that I have to the folks who elected me. The first is: what does this budget do for my constituents, for the people where I live? Does it address their fundamental needs that they expressed to me as they come to my office, as I meet them in the streets and as I meet them in the coffee shops? I want to speak to that, and then, of course, to the way our structure works. I have an obligation as the Forest critic to speak to that sector and whether or not this budget addresses the needs of the forest industry and forest-dependent workers and forest-dependent communities. That's the context from which I'm going to speak.

Now, I find it laughable that the hon. members on the other side take offence when we talk about the negative aspects of their budget, because I went back and actually read some of their comments about budgets and some of their comments during the time that many of them were in opposition. I found, in many cases, that not one of them had anything positive to say whatsoever. So what goes around comes around.

I'm getting a signal from the other side there to be nice. So I will be nice to start off with. I do like some of the things in the budget. I like the smart metering. It's about time we went down that path. I like the fact that we're going to put electrical power hookups around. That's a nice piece in the budget, and I hope we get that into our neck of the woods and that it's not just down here. Although we don't have ports, we do have trucks, and we have truck stops.

I am pleased that we've got those car co-op tax breaks. I met with some folks in the Kootenays, and that was a grave concern for them, and it's nice that that's in there. The small and medium-sized business tax cuts are necessary because they are the driver of the economy. They are the ones who are creating the jobs in our current economy.

The arts and culture funding. I did sit on the Finance Committee for two years, and I heard a very cogent argument put forward by the arts and culture

community both years. We're a year late on this, but it's nice that that money is in there — although I will be looking at that money with respect to whether or not it's dispersed around the province, which fits into one of the themes that I'm going to speak to, which is that growing rural-urban divide.

The sad fact is that those are minuscule relative to the budget as a whole. It doesn't really address the systemic issues that my constituents raised with me, nor the systemic issues in both the forestry and the agricultural sector, which I will speak to as well.

This budget does not address the systemic poverty in this province. We addressed that in question period today. It does not address the fact that we are in an economic transition in rural B.C. In fact, in many ways it's silent on that, and I'll speak to that. It doesn't address sufficiently the threats to our economy of the U.S. recession. All of the rhetoric aside, with all of the financial agents and financial planners who are trying to be boosters, the U.S. is already in recession. We need to embrace that reality, because we go lockstep with them, usually in about six to eight months.

It really does not address, in my estimation, the broader issue of sustainability and the broader issue of climate change, and I will speak to that when I talk about the macroeconomics that are suggested in this budget. They are dead wrong. What they're trying to do with behaviour change here is a sop to the role that we play in greenhouse gas production in the rest of the world because of the structure of our economy.

Let me go to my constituents. The two questions I asked myself are: does this budget address the pressing needs of my constituents, and does it meet their aspirations for themselves and for their children? The categorical answer that I have for that is a flat no, it does not — not on any count.

Here's the reason why. My riding is made up of a lot of small communities. I go from Hixon in the north to 150 Mile House in the south, from Nazko in the west to Wells-Barkerville in the east. I have 11 small communities. I have the large metropolitan centres of Quesnel and Williams Lake.

I've joked in this House before that people who live in Horsefly and Likely, in Big Lake and all of those other communities think that they're the cappuccino-sucking, latte-drinking urbanites, and of course, Quesnel thinks that's the case for the Okanagan and the lower mainland. So we have an urban-rural divide even within my constituency.

I have many first nations communities who have very definitive needs; who are at various stages in the treaty process, various stages in getting access to the resources they need; and who are struggling with the way that this government both treats them under the forest and range agreements and limits their resource capabilities. And they are struggling very, very deeply with the lack of any sense that this new relationship has any reality to it. I think we saw that in the throne speech and the budget, where the first nations did not support this government by their absence.

Since 2001 we have seen a severe retraction in services to our communities. We have seen a severe retraction in resources provided to allow my constituents and my communities in that riding to be able to address the needs they have.

Here's what my constituents are concerned about. They are concerned about climate change. This is supposed to be a green budget, so I'll address that first. They're concerned about climate change and sustainability. What's missing in this budget is there's no capacity to enable a community response to climate change.

I've done a lot of work in both Quesnel and Williams Lake. We've worked with the Cariboo regional district, the city of Quesnel, the city of Williams Lake, a number of individuals who are very concerned about climate change. We are attempting to put climate change action teams together.

We worked with the Cariboo-Chilcotin Beetle Action Coalition at their conservation strategy meeting to map out a strategy in the hopes that this climate change budget would provide resources to those climate change action teams to get on with the job of the mitigation and adaptation strategies that we need to undertake in our communities.

Is there one penny in this budget for that kind of work? No, Madam Speaker. That is a gross oversight for a government that claims that they're on the climate change agenda.

I guess I'll send my signal to the Premier and his climate change action secretariat. I sure hope, in the six weeks or eight weeks or ten months or whatever it is, when we finally see the secret plan that's being developed, that communities are covered off in there, but they're not covered off in the budget. There's no line item in the budget to support them.

Our highways are one of our major concerns. Our highways are the lifeblood of our community — and not just our main highways but our secondary roads and our tertiary roads. Quite frankly, they're falling apart. We've done some work on resurfacing our main throughfares, our main highways.

I'm pleased the Nazko Highway is getting some attention because we have so many logging trucks on it. But downtown Quesnel has 600 logging trucks that pass our hospital, our seniors care facility and our downtown business — 600 logging trucks a day.

As a result of the sale of B.C. Rail, we have seen a shift to road transportation because CN is not a very good corporate citizen when it comes to our communities and to our needs in the lumber industry and in the movement of goods. We have seen a substantive increase in commercial industrial traffic on all of our roads, and we do not have an increase in our budget for maintenance and for road builds in our areas.

We have potholes everywhere. We have roads that are deteriorating. We have roads that even the maintenance contractors say they cannot put a blade on because they're taking the top surface of the roads off. Fourteen billion dollars was announced, and not a mention for road infrastructure and not a mention of

that reality that we live with. That shows the urban mindset of this government.

Health care — always a perpetual issue. I'm not going to get into the debate around health care. We do enough of that in question period, and we keep the minister busy reading his large briefing book to answer the questions that we have on that. But it is an emerging issue that's growing deeper.

I was in my office on Friday. The bulk of the time on Friday was spent addressing concerns that are growing about seniors care in my community. Not sufficiently addressed in the budget, and doesn't address the real issues that my constituents are raising.

Services to youth. Services to people with disabilities. Again, I'm spending a lot of time in that area. Is it addressed in the budget? No. We have serious concerns about the structure of Community Living B.C. and whether or not that structure allows us to address the real needs that emerge on a yearly basis in areas throughout the province. Not addressed in the budget.

Homelessness and poverty. I do want to thank the Minister Responsible for Housing. We did manage to get some money for a homeless shelter in our community. But I've asked on many occasions…. [Applause.]

But I've asked our community, on many occasions, to investigate why we have homelessness. Why is it growing? What are the underlying issues of poverty that are not being addressed by this government — in fact, they're being exacerbated by this government — that cause us to have to put a homeless shelter in our community?

I live in Quesnel. It has the largest secondary and primary manufacturing facility concentration in the world on a per-capita basis, and we're putting a homeless shelter downtown. The fundamental question is: why is that happening? That's not being addressed.

A big part of it is the way that the government has restructured income assistance, a big part of it is the way the government will not engage in a meaningful dialogue about minimum wage, and a big part of it is government policy that is driving people out of the system and onto the streets so that we have to address it after the fact. Mental health and addictions services that have been undermined. All of that drives people onto the streets, and now we have to have a homeless shelter.

Education. As a Finance Committee member I heard, for two years in a row, a concerted effort — very similar to the arts and culture groups — by our students, post-secondary students, the professors' associations, the faculty associations and the presidents of the colleges, saying: "We must address the issue of student debt, tuition fees and the ability for our young people to get access to post-secondary education as quickly as possible, as meaningfully as possible, and to get them as drivers of our knowledge economy." Not addressed in this budget.

That is a huge oversight and a huge error on the part of this government, because we are burdening our young people with an increasing debt load at a time that we need them free. We need their mental horsepower. We need their innovation to drive change in our economy.

Also not in this budget is any reference to community infrastructure — the ability for our communities to have access to dollars to build the infrastructure that they need because of the downloading that we have from this government — and the ability to directly underwrite the amenities that they need in those communities. I'm going to address that shortly.

Here's my question to the government. What if we took that $220 million in tax breaks to financial institutions and the $327 million in subsidy to oil and gas, put it into rural British Columbia and actually assisted rural British Columbia to make the adjustments that it needs to make in this changing economy? Increasingly, we are not sharing in the benefits of this so-called booming economy. Increasingly, we are being undermined in our communities.

The Vancouver cost overrun is another possible source. What I find as I go around…. The MLA for Nelson-Creston has said a number of times in this House that the current government makes him pine away for the old Socreds. What I hear — because I come from a riding that has a lot of old Socreds in it — is that they're pining away for a W.A.C. Bennett–like rural strategy. What this government offered was a heartlands strategy that disappeared the minute the ink was dry on the page. We need that. Is it in this budget? No, it's not in this budget.

Instead, what we have in this budget is an urban-centric view that was seen in the throne speech and has now been put into the budget. It's shown most clearly in this so-called carbon tax and approach-to-green budget.

Here's how it looks for us. First off, it's a fuel tax. It's not a carbon tax. Members on this side have pointed out who gets exempt and everything else. All the major greenhouse gas producers are exempt. So it's a fuel tax.

In my community they find that they listen to the Finance Minister who says: "We want to enable behaviour change." Well, my community's response to me is: "What can I change?" We don't have the options. We don't have the ability to jump on our bike and ride to work, not when it's 40 below or 30 below, not when the snow's freshly fallen and not when you're living 60 or 100 kilometres from the place of work.

We don't have those choices. We don't have the choice to walk to the bush to go to work. We don't have the choice to haul the feller-bunchers and the D9s and the forwarders on tractor-trailers with a couple of people on bikes that are going to haul them into the bush. Our lifestyles are fundamentally different, and putting an incremental tax on fuels adds additional burdens to people who live in rural B.C., who are not enabled to make the behavioural changes that the Finance Minister says that tax is supposed to stimulate. We don't have those options.

We don't have the situation as we have in North Vancouver or downtown Vancouver where I can either

walk, ride my bike or take a bus to work — if the buses are available; we know that we need more investment in urban transit — or choose to take my car because I need to have it for some flexibility. That's not a choice for us.

Most of the people who live in my area work in the agriculture industry, the forest industry or other resource-extraction industry, or other heavy industries. We actually need vehicles that are working vehicles. I don't have an option of driving a Prius around and getting those tax breaks. I don't have an option of not having a vehicle that I can drive safely on the roads I have to drive on. For rural British Columbians, this fuel tax is extremely punitive, because we don't have the infrastructure to enable us to make different choices.

I'm afraid that the whole argument around revenue-neutrality for rural B.C. is that I take my tax breaks that I get, and I simply pay my fuel charges. That's what "revenue-neutral" looks like, and it won't change behaviour. It will not reduce greenhouse gases. It will not enable me in any way, shape or form to be able to do what I need to do to make my contribution to greenhouse gas reduction.

Do we have a plan to address that? Do we have a plan from this government to address climate change on the larger scale than just simply giving people a punitive fuel tax and then taking some of their personal income tax and giving it back to them so that it becomes a zero-sum game for us with no change to greenhouse gases?

Well, the answer to that is: I don't know, because we don't have a climate change plan. We don't even know how the climate change plan is evolving. The Premier's climate change secretariat…. By the way, the budget for that would fund mitigation and adaptation strategies in my community and other communities quite nicely. It's $15.458 million for the climate change secretariat.

Think about how much real work we could get done on the ground in our communities if that money were made available to enable community responses to climate change and if we were able to take on projects in our communities to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, instead of some secret planning process this government is undertaking at the Premier's command.

We don't know what's happening with the climate change issue. I remain open to surprise. I hope that it does address the fundamental issue of what rural British Columbians have as options to enable behaviour change.

But I find it odd that on Friday last — with a forest industry in crisis, with climate change that we have to address — we had a meeting in Prince George that was invitation-only, closed-door, for a hundred people. The only word we've had of what happened there is the Forests Minister's admission in his speech that he had a conversation in the washroom with some people about value-added and softwood lumber.

What happened to transparency and accountability? What happened to the most open government on the face of the planet? A thing like climate change has to be secret? Why? It makes no sense whatsoever. I believe that members on that side are just as embarrassed by that as people on this side are.

We do know, however, that the budget signals some very troubling things with respect to the context for that climate change strategy, because the macroeconomics of the budget don't make sense if we're truly engaging in change and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

The reason for that is that we continue to provide subsidies to oil and gas. We continue to put money into mineral extraction. We continue to put money into shipping our natural resources all around the world without coupling that with clean technologies — so that if we ship coal, we'll ship clean coal technology with it. If we're going to ship materials for refining, we're going to ship clean refining technologies with it.

Where is it in this budget that there are significant resources for research and development — using all of our capacities at UNBC, UBC, SFU, UVic; using our trades and technology capacities at BCIT — and mounting a massive undertaking to figure out where the clean technologies are that we can couple with our natural resources and sell to the world? Wouldn't that be a fundamental shift in our economy?

Instead, what are we doing? We're trying to change personal behaviours that may or may not reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 7 percent — may or may not — and we're going to ship natural resources to the rest of the world so they can continue to spew greenhouse gases into the air. That is completely unacceptable, a fundamental oversight and a real…. I struggle with it, because it signals to me that this climate change strategy we're going to get will be a sop. It will be nothing. It will mean nothing on the global scale.

We have the capacity to be true world leaders, not with a carbon tax that's really a fuel tax, but in figuring out — through innovation, research and development, through structural change in our industries and in our resource extraction — how to sell to the world, to China and India, the emerging technologies they need to make fundamental change — and also to Europe and South America, which need those technologies as well. We can advance them.

We're not doing that. Instead, we're burdening our young people with debt. We're undermining our post-secondary education system. We're continuing to subsidize old, extractive resource–based economies. We're shutting out rural B.C. from enjoying any of the possible benefits that we could get from taking on a strategy like that.

I want to now switch over to the other part of my responsibility, and that has to do with my job as the Forests critic. One of the things that disappoints me at a very deep level is that this budget has nothing to say about forestry. It has nothing to say about agriculture. In fact, the only announcement in the budget about forestry is a re-announcement of the round table.

The throne speech said that it was buffeted by strong winds. That's the understatement of the year. The Finance Minister has called it a bump. The

Minister of Economic Development just said that it's struggling a little bit. Those are gross understatements as to what's happening in the forest industry in this province, and I'm going to speak to that.

The second thing is agriculture. I find it intriguing that the agricultural announcement of the weekend is not mirrored in the throne speech and in the budget speech. The budget speech only mentions agriculture in the context of a possible bioenergy strategy. That's the only mention of it. There is no mention of the struggles that our agricultural community is going through and the help they need, and there's no line item in the budget to support the needs that they have at this juncture.

The unfortunate thing is that in our communities — those of us who live in the so-called heartlands — we're seeing the simultaneous meltdown of forestry and agriculture. The two real primary industries, the two drivers of our economy, are in meltdown at the same time, and this budget basically is silent on how it's going to address those issues.

Here's the reality on the ground for me. In my riding we live in the heart of the mountain pine beetle infestation. All around us we have red and dead trees that are going grey, or we have trees that have already been burnt over. Our forests are dying. We can't even trust the numbers that we have from the Ministry of Forests and the industry. We don't know what our future holds.

The Cariboo-Chilcotin Beetle Action Coalition did a study where it asked forest workers — in a very large study with a high degree of accuracy — what their optimism was for the next couple of years. "Reasonably high." The reason for that is that we know our mills have to be the last mills standing in this economy, because we have to chew through that mountain pine beetle wood as fast as we can.

When asked what about their optimism for the next five to seven years, the categorical answer was that they were very pessimistic. Here are some startling statistics. Within the next five to seven years, 47 percent of the respondents said that they will likely leave the Quesnel area.

Now, we are a forest-dependent community. It's about 85 percent of our economy. The vast majority of our workforce works in the industry. When 47 percent of those who responded say that they will likely have to leave the area within the next five to seven years — that's in the Quesnel area; it's 39 percent in the Williams Lake area — it's a devastating blow to us, even just from the perspective of the uncertainty that it puts into our retail stores, into our housing market and into all the things that make our economy tick.

More interesting is that, of those who said that they would have to leave, 52 percent were under 30 years of age. Our young people see an uncertain future that's not being addressed by government. They see no hope on the horizon, and they are planning on leaving our communities — again, a huge blow to our communities, both now in terms of uncertainty and later when we realize it.

How do we recover from that? What do we do to offset that? Fifty-one percent of the respondents were between the ages of 30 and 44, so the vast preponderance of our population under 44 are planning on the possibility that they may have to leave our communities. What do we do? Well, as one of the members on that side said, those areas are going to depopulate. We'll just have to live with it. It's the kind of "boo-hoo" comment that we get. It's not good enough.

What does this budget do for that? Well, I challenge anybody on that side to show me the line item that shows me a community transition fund or a line item that shows me a worker transition fund for the forest industry. It is not there. That's more than a gross oversight; that's gross neglect.

The Finance Committee — and here I'm going to admit my age; I'm not in that under-44 category — made two recommendations on this to the Minister of Finance. Recommendation 37: "Consider providing additional assistance directly to forest-dependent communities to allow them to develop diversification strategies and to help mitigate the negative social impacts of the current unprecedented downturn in the industry." Is it in the budget? No. "Work closely with the federal government to develop a more comprehensive and coordinated response to the pine beetle epidemic." Is it in the budget? No.

What in fact we have done, and I'll close with this…. This carbon tax, this fuel tax, is not revenue-neutral. What we have done is added costs to living in rural B.C. We have added costs to the forest sector. We have added costs to the agricultural sector at a time when our rural communities and our agricultural and forest sectors are on their knees.

This is not revenue-neutral. This is revenue-positive, as in putting surcharges on the fact that we live in rural B.C., putting surcharges on the forest industry when it needs costs out of the system and putting surcharges on the agricultural industry that they cannot pass on to their customers.

This budget, as far as I'm concerned, fundamentally undermines rural British Columbians. It fundamentally undermines those two major used-to-be-wealth-generating economic drivers of our province while it remains silent on what it's going to do about it. I think that that is gross neglect. I think that that is something we need to see addressed, and I hope that through the estimates debate and through other debates this government will see the error of its ways and change that.

This fuel tax is punitive to those two industries and to the people who live outside the lower mainland, and it does not work. I cannot support this budget.

J. Rustad: I'm very pleased to have the opportunity to rise today to speak to Budget 2008. I'd like to start off just by saying a few words particularly about my constituency assistants in my offices: in Vanderhoof, Judy King; in Prince George, Maureen Haley and Cathy King. They have done just fabulous work on behalf of the constituents in my riding, and I just want to say thank you very much for the efforts that they do in providing the services for the people of Prince George–Omineca.

Budget 2008 has outlined a goal, a plan, a framework for this province moving forward. It's innovative. It brings forward some great ideas and concepts around how we can shape the future of this province, how we can move and build on what we've already done and move forward to be able to have a bright future.

Coming from Prince George–Omineca a lot of my area is rural area. Even in Prince George many people still think of Prince George as a rural community. I do myself. I think of Prince George as being more rural than urban. So the question and the struggle that comes up is: what's in the budget for rural B.C. What have we done for rural B.C.?

The member for Cariboo North through his previous statements — the previous speaker — continually seemed to target the idea that there's nothing that's been happening for rural B.C. Well, nothing could be farther from the truth. We have done more for rural B.C. than any other government has done, at least in the last generation.

I want to start off on one particular issue. I want to talk about highways maintenance. In this budget, which is built upon the previous three budgets, in my area and in the area across the north, highways maintenance…. Back in 1998 and 1997 in that area there was about $5 million that was spent on upgrades and maintenance on the roads.

Last year alone more than $35 million was spent on improving those highways. The problem is that there was a huge deficit that was left from the 1990s, because the money was not there to maintain those roads. We're playing catch-up, but we're doing that by putting in additional resources and making them available for our area and also all rural areas throughout northern B.C.

Clearly, one of the major thrusts of this budget was climate change. We introduced, in this budget, the idea of a carbon tax. Now, I get that people throughout the province are not interested in another level of taxation.

However, what people need to understand is this isn't another level of taxation. What this is, is shifting existing taxation from the way that it's normally done, which is through your provincial income taxes and such that are paid, to more of a consumption tax on the carbon side. The credits that you get on the offsetting side make this tax neutral. The revenue that comes into the province will be given directly back to the people of the province so that it is neutral.

I've had a few people who've called my office and asked about that, because they're wondering about just how it works. What we are doing right off the bat is giving everyone in this province a 5 percent tax cut over the three-year period of this budget. That's on top of the 25 percent tax cut that we gave in 2001 and on top of the additional 10 percent tax cut that we gave just in the previous year.

An additional 5 percent tax cut, and on top of it we're giving every adult in this province a $100 tax credit and every child a $30 tax credit. We're doing that as part of the revenue that's being raised. Those dollars go directly back to people so that they have the ability to make some options, to have some choices about lifestyle and about how they're going to address their carbon footprint — whether that be weatherstripping, turning the thermostat down at night, changing out some windows, or putting in a more efficient fridge or furnace. All of those sorts of choices are what people are going to be able to do to reduce their tax burden.

We actually are now going to empower people to have the ability to determine part of their taxes that they pay to this province. They can say: "You know what? I don't want to have to pay that much, so I'm going to make some investments. I'm going to make some decisions to reduce that amount of taxes." That's called trying to give people an incentive, trying to give people the ability to be able to reduce their carbon footprint so that they can have a direct impact in our fight against greenhouse gases.

We're going through some pretty challenging times in parts of rural B.C. because of the forest industry. With the high Canadian dollar and the real challenges that the Americans are facing in their sub-prime loans and in the housing market — and with the low demand we have for lumber — this is a pretty challenging time for the forest industry.

Yet I think it's worthwhile to note that, when you look across Canada, our forest industry in B.C. had some of the last mills to start taking downtime. Why is that? It's because we have efficiencies in our mills, because we have policies in place that allow our mills to be able to work efficiently, to be able to move forward.

The speaker before me, the member for Cariboo North, had a survey from Quesnel and from Williams Lake that suggested that 40 percent of the people in the forest industry in Quesnel and 39 percent in Williams Lake say they'll likely have to leave the area. Well, I can tell you something. With the negativity that comes out of the member for Cariboo North, there is no question why people would want to leave. When you're telling people the sky is going to fall and you're running around as Chicken Little saying that the sky's going to fall, guess what. People start thinking: gee, maybe there's a better place to be.

But I can tell you that it's not the attitude in other areas of this province, because people see a future in the forest industry. Despite the fact that we have the pine beetle epidemic problem and that we have this turndown, people see that.

You know what? We've gone through plenty of times, and I've been in and around the forest industry all my life. In 44 years of being in and around the forest industry, I've seen us go through cycles. This is a cycle like other cycles. We will move through this. On the upside, coming out of this we're going to have a stronger industry than we have today. It has always been the case.

However, I do want to say that when you have somebody who is going around saying that the industry has no future, of course people are going to be interested in trying to find something else to do. I want to talk about that future of the forest industry, because

I believe we have some great opportunities. One of the things in this budget that is huge is our bioenergy strategy and the $24 million that's being put from this budget towards our bioenergy strategy. What that does is allow our forest industry to expand. It allows us to look at an entirely new revenue stream to help support our forest industry.

That means that communities like Vanderhoof, Fort St. James, Quesnel and Williams Lake are going to have opportunities to create new jobs. The mills and the operations are going to have opportunities to be able to have revenue coming in to help with their operations. It's a huge initiative that's going to help to transform our forest industry.

On top of that, we have demand in the pellets side of the forest industry. B.C. is considered to be the Saudi Arabia of the world when it comes to the potential for bioenergy. I was meeting with a group of investors from Korea just last week, and they were excited about the potential for forestry in B.C. and about the potential for looking at pellets.

They're looking at the possibility of wanting millions of tonnes of pellets. In countries like Japan they're talking about wanting to move away from using coal for power, and they're looking at the possibility of bioenergy as those options. If they were to go and start using bioenergy and using pellets as an offset, that could mean maybe a million or a million and a half tonnes of pellets that they would potentially need. The entire pellet industry in B.C. was only 700,000 tonnes last year.

You can imagine what potential we have for growth in that type of industry, to feed the needs of the world and the change in the world and their desire to look at bioenergy options, as opposed to what they're currently doing. What that means is more opportunities in the forest industry for looking at our products and what they can potentially do through diversifying the forest industry.

But people are talking about the fibre supply and how that may be impacted. We have spent more than $600 million to date working on fighting the pine beetle. What we're trying to do there is we're actually trying to fight the leading edge. We're trying to put things in place.

We worked with and funded the Cariboo-Chilcotin Beetle Action Coalition that's bringing forward ideas, and we're committed to working with them for implementing those ideas. We're working with the Omineca Beetle Action Coalition. We funded that to go through. We put $185 million into the Northern Development Initiative Trust to help with expanding and diversifying the economy.

But the issue is that we still have a huge fibre basket that's available. Simple changes in utilization standards and potential tenure reform…. If we were to explore those roads it could mean that in ten or 20 years' time instead of being a shrinking fibre basket, we may see an expanding fibre basket. It is those types of thoughts and initiatives that we need to be talking about.

We don't need to be talking, like the member for Cariboo North, about the sky falling. We need to be talking about how we can look at an industry in a different way, how we can expand opportunities with pellets, energy and other potential products so that we can see a positive future. That's what the people throughout the north and the interior want to see. That's the future that the people in Quesnel, Williams Lake, Vanderhoof and Prince George are looking for.

When we were talking about climate change…. The member for Cariboo North says he sees nothing in this budget that is going to help with climate change. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We have a $1 billion action plan that is put forward in the budget towards the environment. What does that include? It includes initiatives in terms of capital and incentives for people to be able to switch over — a whole, wide range of initiatives.

I also want to stay on the economic side of things. The member for Cariboo North seemed to be speaking against putting money into mineral extraction. He seems to think that mineral extraction, mining, is a bad thing. Those are the words that he just used.

He also says that he wants to have a look at our coal exports and try to make it tied to technology and other things. In other words, he wants to put constraints on our ability to diversify and expand our economy, particularly in the mining industry. Well, I can tell you this. Mining has a huge potential in this province. We saw more than $400 million invested in exploration last year, and the best part is that we're seeing a vast majority of that throughout rural and northern B.C.

Just throughout the interior last year we undertook the QUEST program through Geoscience B.C. We funded them for $6 million. That has driven a phenomenal amount of staking, which drives investment in exploration and which drives opportunities in new mines. That's what we need to be seeing. In this budget we've put an additional $12 million towards Geoscience B.C. so that we can expand the work that's being done through the geological surveys and expand the work that we're doing to try to attract investments in oil and gas throughout the Nechako basin and other places in the province.

Those are direct things that are in this budget that will help the people in my riding of Prince George–Omineca, that will help people throughout the north and the interior and that especially will also be able to help the people in the Cariboo.

I will guarantee you, Mr. Speaker…. The member for Cariboo North says he's going to stand up and vote against that investment in his riding. He's going to vote against that investment throughout this area. How can that member say that he is actually trying to do things that are positive for his community and his people when you see him standing up and voting against such things? It's just like he has done in the past with our tax cuts and other incentives that we've put in place.

Some of the other things that the member for Cariboo North is going to be voting against, I believe, are

going to be hugely beneficial for the people in my riding and throughout the area. We've got a tax incentive, a tax cut that's going out to our primary industries — our sawmills and pulp mills. The rural school tax rate is going to go down to what it would be for the business tax.

That's going to mean $20 million a year that's going to go back to those industries. Those are dollars that are going to help an incredibly challenged industry to be able to get through this year and to be able to move forward. Those are huge initiatives that the NDP is going to be voting against. Those are huge initiatives that are going to be helping our forest industry and our rural communities that the NDP is not going to be supporting.

On top of that, we're putting another $10 million towards the pulp mill industry to help them look at green strategies and green initiatives. Those are direct dollars that are going to benefit our industry, that are going to benefit the people throughout our region and the pulp mills in Quesnel, Prince George and Mackenzie.

Those kinds of dollars and that kind of investment the NDP will be voting against. They don't want to see progress. They don't want to see the benefits that are coming, that this budget is bringing to rural B.C. They will be voting against it. That is what really distinguished our government from the opposition. When you look at what they've said, all they have done is come up with…. All they have said is….

J. Rustad: I've got a few more minutes, if I may continue, Mr. Speaker, and then I'll reserve some comments for tomorrow.

I have to say that we are coming forward with ideas. We are making plans on the environment. We're making plans on our economy. We're making plans on how to expand and grow this province. This province has prospered tremendously.

What have we seen from the opposition? They've opposed everything. What have they come out with for their plan? They came out with a forestry plan that calls for us to look at pulling out of the softwood lumber agreement. That would create chaos in our forest industry. That would create the potential for a 30 percent punitive tax. It would shut down the remaining industry that we have in this province.

It's clear what we stand for. We stand for the workers in the forest industry. We stand for the people of rural B.C. to have jobs, to be able to have those opportunities. We're going to be working with them to transition — those that want to go towards retirement and those that want to go back for education — while we go through this period of time. We're looking at trying to grow the industry over time and create those benefits.

What has this side of the House done? They've said that they want to throw it into chaos. They've said that they have a plan that is going to create a trade war. They're pointing fingers because they don't have any viable options.

With that, noting the hour, I'd like to reserve my right to carry on tomorrow, and I'll call adjournment of debate.

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