Orders of the Day

Hon. M. Farnworth: In this chamber, I call continued debate on the budget.

[2:35 p.m.]

[R. Chouhan in the chair.]

Budget Debate

(continued)

Hon. S. Robinson: It is my pleasure to be up on my feet in the House, in a full House today — we have, it looks like, some students who are joining us — to provide my response to Budget 2019.

It’s a pleasure, I have to say, to represent Coquitlam-Maillardville. My community is on the traditional territory of the Coast Salish people and the Kwikwetlem First Nation. Coquitlam is a traditional suburban community that’s in the process of transformation as investments and transit infrastructure have seen the Coquitlam central area create a city centre with high densities, restaurants, shopping and so much community activity. It’s a community that my husband and I have chosen to raise our family in because of the good schools, the good neighbourhoods, the community amenities and, certainly back in the early ’90s when we arrived there, because of its affordability.

Now, I do want to speak to affordability because it’s a very important issue to our government. It’s an important issue to British Columbians. Before I do that, I want to just take a moment to thank the staff who work so hard on my behalf while we spend so much time here in Victoria as well as travelling the province as a minister. I want to thank my constituency assistants — Laura Gullickson, Linda Asgeirsson and Erica Williams — for the work that they do to make sure that the citizens of Coquitlam-Maillardville are well served and understand what their government services are, and to help to make sure that they are connected to their government.

I also want to take a moment to thank my ministry staff, because they spend so much time making sure that we’re able to deliver on our government’s priorities in the areas of municipal affairs and housing as well as TransLink. I want to thank Craig Ashbourne; Daniela Gardea; Matt Djonlic; Christine White; Lisa Grant, who has gone on to work elsewhere just recently; and also, new to our team, Jena Rayner. They really do help keep my office going and making sure that we are able to deliver.

Back to talking about my community and about the affordability issue. When I arrived in Coquitlam in ’94, afford­ability was manageable. We could find enough resource in our capacity to pay for a mortgage and pay for child care, pay for dental care, do all of the things that we want to be able to do when we have a young family. I know that all members of this House have heard just how difficult it has become. We certainly heard that on the doorstep in the 2017 election.

It’s becoming so much harder for families over this last decade. It’s become so difficult. It’s resulted, I have to say, in stressed out families who are concerned about their survivability in my community. We are seeing instances of seniors who are being priced out of their rental accommodations; young people who are unable to move out of their family home.

Now, this reminds me of a family that I came across when I was knocking on doors back in 2017. It was the very last door that I knocked on, and there was a young couple who answered the door. I asked them some questions about what was important to them and what mattered to them, and their priority was that they wanted to be able to save money to get out of their parents’ house. It was really important to them to be able to find a way to move forward.

I asked them. I said: “So tell me a little bit more about who you are and your family.” And they said…. One of them was a pharmacy assistant, and the other one worked in the medical technology field. They had finished their education. They were looking to move forward in their life. But they could not move out of his parents’ basement. They couldn’t figure out how they were going to, on their salaries, make it work.

This has always stayed with me because we know that the previous government ignored this issue. It’s one that’s been going on for a very, very long time. Because of the previous government’s lack of interest in it…. Or maybe it was their choice to not act on it. I’m not going to pretend to understand, but they clearly chose not to act to make sure that housing was available for people when they needed it.

[2:40 p.m.]

I’m really proud of all the three budgets that our government has brought forward. Budget 2019 is a continuation of the budget update that we did in 2017 and then that we presented last year in 2018. Again, I have to say that when you take a look at the scope of what we have been able to do in 18 months, I think it’s absolutely outstanding. I’m very proud to stand here and to defend the budget that was presented by the Minister of Finance.

Just to remind everyone in the House and to remind British Columbians, in 2017, our government made historic investments not just in transit infrastructure but also in housing and in child care. These three things combined have been starting to put money in people’s pockets. Investments in these key areas mean that people can not only work and participate more fully in the economy, but it means that they can find a place to live, a place to raise their family. This is a part of a strong economy that we need. We need it in every urban centre in our province, and we need it in rural British Columbia.

Now, I think it’s important to remember that people have been asking for these investments for years. I’m proud that we are able and willing to deliver them. I also think it’s important to recognize that the business sector has been strongly advocating for these investments as well. We’ve certainly heard from the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade. They were calling on addressing housing affordability. They’ve been calling on the need for child care and, absolutely, the need for investments in public transit.

The thing that I think we need to remember is that when you invest in these things, you actually put money back in people’s pockets. When people have money in their pockets, they can buy more things. They can go out to more restaurants. They can get haircuts. They can also save for the future.

I have heard from constituents, particularly on the child care front, about what it means for them when they have an extra $400 or $500 in their pocket because of our investments in child care. This one family said: “I’m thrilled to have this money, because I can do two things with it. One, I can now afford to buy new hockey gear for my son, who keeps outgrowing it. While I do go to the KidSport fundraiser and get used equipment, sometimes I can’t find what I need. Now I don’t have to figure out how I’m going to pay for new skates or new shoulder pads.”

The other thing she said where she’s putting some of those savings is into an RESP, because she knows that she wants her child to be able to go to post-secondary education, whether it’s a trade school or academic setting. She wants to be able to help her children to thrive and to have those opportunities. So she feels like a good parent. She feels like she is preparing her children for the future, and that means that she has the confidence that her family will be okay and taken care of. These are the kinds of things it really means when you invest in people.

Now, Budgets 2017 and ’18 also invested significantly in housing — 2,000 supportive modular homes. About 800 of these homes have opened already. More are opening every week. And 1,700 homes that were made more affordable — that was back in 2017. These, too, are coming to fruition, and they’re making a difference in people’s lives.

Budget 2018 built on that — $7 billion over ten years in housing. That is the single-largest commitment that any government has ever made in this province on housing. We’re seeing the first of 4,900 homes announced last fall for families and seniors who are falling further and further behind, because it’s getting harder and harder for them to find the kind of housing they need.

Also, we have an Indigenous housing fund. We are committed. We’re the first government committed to support Indigenous people living on reserve and supporting them in their housing, because they’re British Columbians, and they need housing that works for them. We’re committed to working with them. The first of 1,100 of these homes were announced last fall.

[2:45 p.m.]

Women fleeing violence. This is the first time in 20 years that a call has been put out to communities that this government is investing in the families that are affected by violence, making sure that those children and those women have a safe place to call home. Almost 300 of these homes are moving through the development process as we speak.

We’re investing in additional supportive housing that is building on Budget Update 2017, an additional 2,500 units of housing over the next ten years. I have to say, given the response from local governments and homelessness and housing task groups from around the province, Budget 2019 has added an additional 200 homes just like this so that, all told, we have 4,700 homes for those who are most vulnerable in our province that will be coming on line over the next ten years, with 2,200 of them in the near term.

Budget 2019 is a continuation of this work, recognizing that there is still so much more to do. Life in British Columbia has become unaffordable for most British Columbians. Now, those at the top, under the previous government, benefitted. There was lots of opportunity for them. But many British Columbians certainly got left behind.

Budget 2019 builds opportunities for British Columbians, and it introduces the B.C. child opportunity benefit. Nearly $400 million will be returned to B.C. families, those families who are raising children, those families who have been saying: “It’s getting really hard. I can’t do it. I have to think about leaving this province.” Or it’s been creating so much stress that it’s actually destroying families. This is a commitment that our government has made, and I’m very proud of that commitment.

When I hear members from the other side say that they’re not going to support this budget, then they’re not interested in supporting these families who have been struggling for so long, or providing them with some relief. They’re saying they don’t support relief for families.

We’re also eliminating interest on B.C. student loans. We’re fully eliminating the MSP, saving families as much as $1,800 a year. Again, when I hear members from the other side say they’re not supporting this budget, they do not support eliminating the MSP. In fact, if I recall, it doubled under their watch.

Again, it’s about paying attention to who British Columbians are and what they need. British Columbians are people trying to raise their family, trying to get ahead, trying to make sure that their kids have the resources they need so that they can fully participate in the economy. People in Coquitlam-Maillardville are looking for relief, and this budget provides those families with the relief that they have been desperately looking for.

When I think about what this means, when they have this money in their pocket, when they have that little bit of extra, I think of the families who want to make sure that their kids get swimming lessons. They want to make sure that their kids and their families get dental care. They want to put away money so that they can purchase a house. They want to be able to send their child to a summer camp or to take guitar lessons or gymnastics or karate lessons.

Having that extra money in their pockets means that they will be able to deliver for their children. When I hear the members from the other side say that they’re not interested in what this budget brings to the table for British Columbians, it says that they’re not interested in supporting those families.

I want to say a little bit more about what we’ve been doing, particularly in my community, because I think we need to recognize that in Coquitlam-Maillardville, we’re sort of in between two hospitals. At my community hospital, which is Eagle Ridge Hospital, it was announced recently by the Minister of Health that we’re finally, finally expanding the emergency department. I have to say how grateful I am that it also means that the health authority doesn’t have to sell the land, that we made sure that the hospital and the expansion are funded properly and appropriately.

I know that that will bring relief to people in my community. They’ve been asking for it for years. The foundation has been working on this for years, and I’m very, very proud to be part of a government that is delivering on that kind of health care for the people in my community.

[2:50 p.m.]

Now, I also want to make a couple of comments about the CleanBC and that our government has made a commitment for over $900 million to put us on a path to a cleaner, brighter, low-carbon future: reducing air pollution and saving families money through the clean energy vehicle program, incentives for energy-saving home improvements, a net-zero building code and programs to help communities transition to cleaner energy solutions.

I also think it’s important to recognize that our 2018 budget, where we are investing almost $1 billion into energy retrofits for social housing right across this province to make sure that it’s quality housing that will last for another generation and also reducing GHG emissions, is part of this plan. That’s a significant investment in housing that currently exists.

I also want to point out that the largest single-transit infrastructure in the Lower Mainland is also contributing to lower GHG emissions. We have a million more people coming to the Lower Mainland, and making sure that we have a transit infrastructure that’s built out to accommodate that is absolutely critical — making sure that people get out of their vehicles and have the opportunity to do that in Vancouver and out to Surrey, as well as 900,000 more hours of bus service so that we can actually reduce congestion but also reduce our carbon footprint.

That’s also an investment that our government is making, and I think that’s really important to recognize.

I also want to just make a few comments about some things that I’m also really proud about and it seems like members on the other side aren’t interested in supporting. That’s our commitment to expand high-speed Internet in rural and remote communities throughout B.C. That’s $50 million.

I have been the critic for local government, and now I’m the minister responsible for local government. In all these years, I’ve spent a lot of time really wanting to make sure that I understood the challenges of rural and remote British Columbia. I am an urbanite, a suburbanite. I’m very familiar with that kind of living in an urban environment, where we really do take high-speed Internet for granted. But it’s really a challenge in rural communities, and it’s really a challenge in remote communities. Making sure that they have that is absolutely critical to their survival and to their growth.

Imagine that you want to take courses, but you can’t access the Internet because you don’t have a high-speed Internet connection. So you can’t build an economy, you can’t build a business, and you can’t get an education. I think it’s absolutely critical that we support that, and I would hope the members on the other side would consider that.

I also want to point out that, as a responsive government, we have been listening to communities, because that’s what responsive governments do. We’ve been hearing from rural and remote British Columbia that there have been certain challenges, certainly in the northwest. The pressures from private sector investments that are coming to the northwest are significant.

I stood very proudly with the Premier not too long ago, and with a number of mayors from the northwest, as we announced a $100 million northern capital and planning grant that will go to four regional districts and their 22 municipalities. We recognize that the hard-working people of the northwest absolutely contribute to the prosperity of our province, but the success of that hasn’t been poured back into their communities. In fact, Prince Rupert still has wood pipes.

I have to say that the mayors of Kitimat and Terrace, both of those mayors, were present. The mayor of Terrace was weepy when we made the announcement. She kept saying: “You heard us. You heard us. You heard what we’ve been saying for years — that our capacity to support resource investment, as a community, is so hard. We don’t have the capacity to do that.” This grant opportunity gives them the ability to do the planning that they need so that their communities don’t struggle under the burden of having to respond to the excitement that comes with resource investment.

I’m very proud of that. I think having a government that is prepared to put a budget together that responds to all of those needs, those challenges that people have in all parts of the province, is something that I know that everybody should be proud of. I know that everybody on this side of the House is very proud of that — very proud of a government that is committed to listening to people and responding to the needs as they describe them.

[2:55 p.m.]

That’s not just those top 2 percent, not just those who get the ear at a lobby event, but those who are on the ground doing the work, those who are saying: “I worry that my kids will never be able to stay here because they can’t afford a home” or “I worry that I can’t get an education because I can’t access the Internet, so my ability to move forward in my life is being compromised” or “I’m concerned that my kids won’t be able to get the education they need because the interest is going to add such a burden to them that they’re going to be overwhelmed with it.”

So we’ve taken those steps. There is more to do, but I really do want to encourage everybody in this House to support the budget, because it’s a damned good one.

A. Wilkinson: Of course, this is the time of year when, in the halls of government, hopes run high. We all converge for the first day of the sitting for the throne speech, and we wait for a week for the budget. This year, sadly, we were dearly and steeply disappointed.

The throne speech contained next to nothing, and of course, it ended with this pearl of wisdom on behalf of the government: “Too many British Columbians feel that no matter how hard they work, they can’t get ahead. Affordability remains the biggest challenge facing B.C. families. Many people are working two or three jobs, commuting farther for work and spending less time with their families just to make ends meet. But no matter how hard they work, they cannot seem to get ahead.”

On one point at least, the government is exactly correct. This budget, after that statement in the throne speech, does absolutely nothing to help people to get ahead in British Columbia.

It’s all about affordability. We all know what the issue is. And what does this government do in its budget? It increases taxes by $6 billion over the next three years. That boils down to, amongst five million British Columbians, $1,200 for every living, breathing human being in this province. Only about half of us pay taxes, because some are children, some are seniors, some are incapacitated, so for a family that’s merging up to $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 per family in increased taxes that have to be paid to pay for this government’s agenda.

On the other side of the coin, this government has laid out nothing whatsoever to stimulate the economy, to support entrepreneurs, to create opportunity, to support our resource projects. There is nothing in this throne speech or budget to build the future of British Columbia. This is something of which this government should be ashamed.

There are a few pros in this budget that they can be proud of and that we support them on. Increased support payments for foster parents. This is a good thing. Mental health initiatives for youth — a $74 million agenda. That is a good thing. We wholeheartedly support those initiatives. But overall, this is a budget that leaves people with less money in their pocket, no sense of hope or opportunity and a future where the state takes on more and more functions at the expense of citizens of British Columbia.

Piling on these taxes does not create prosperity. You cannot tax your way to prosperity. That is a lesson that this government has failed to figure out from all of its legislative history in the early ’70s and all through the dismal decade of the 1990s where they thought that government knows best and money is better off in the hands of the state than it is in the hands of the citizens. This is a continuing pattern with this budget.

The housing initiatives that they constantly tout, having started the election with 114,000 houses they’re going to build…. What are we seeing? We’re seeing a few thousand modular homes for people who have otherwise been homeless, but nothing whatsoever for working British Columbians no matter what their income is. The consequences of their housing policy has been a crash in high-end housing prices, so it’s cheaper for rich people to buy a house.

They have accomplished absolutely nothing in terms of affordability of housing in the middle and lower ranks for people who are having regular working lives. This has been a shameful effort on the part of this government, which is really an investment in a pending recession in the housing industry with no benefits to the people of British Columbia — just a pending construction crash with unemployment in the construction sector but no cheaper housing for people who are in need of that housing, unless they happen to be fabulously rich.

[3:00 p.m.]

This budget assumes that people will continue to pay higher and higher ICBC rates. We hear the games being played by the Attorney General, where he’s moving numbers around the balance sheet and pretending that the deficits rocket up and down magically and that somehow, with his magic beans, he’s going to solve the ICBC problem the next year. But in the meantime, he’s been slapped down by the courts on his first initiative. It’s gone to pieces already.

Average British Columbians, all of us who drive motor vehicles, are going to pay more for ICBC, and it’s still going to run deficits. They keep pretending, on the government side, that the deficit is going to go away. This model of auto insurance is broken, and it’s time for an honest assessment of what we can do better for consumers and automobile insurance.

The goal of government has to be to make life better for citizens, not to keep piling costs onto them because government knows best, because all too often government doesn’t deliver on the grand promises. We’re seeing that right now, and I’ll talk about that further, with respect to daycare and with respect to housing.

The carbon tax, sadly, has turned into a cash grab — $6 billion of revenue projected over the next three years. That comes from people who use gasoline, who heat their homes, who have to go and drive around the countryside to do their work or to visit their family members. It’s individual British Columbians who pay it. There’s no way around that.

Out of five million people, $6 billion in revenue, every single person in British Columbia is going to pay $1,200 in carbon tax. Not all of us have a car; not all of us drive. Some of us are seniors or under the age of 16. They’re not paying carbon tax, but everybody who has a motor vehicle is paying it, and everybody who heats their home is paying it. And everybody who goes to a shopping mall is paying it indirectly. What that amounts to is thousands upon thousands of dollars in carbon tax, and it is no longer even a dream that it would be revenue-neutral. There are no corresponding tax reductions, the way there were under the B.C. Liberals. It’s a cash grab by the NDP.

We are faced with a government that is having trouble balancing its budgets. In spite of being given phenomenal economic success after 16 years of good government, this government has inherited a surplus, which has disappeared. It’s now running a budget where it’s back into the House here, asking for permission, because nine of its ministries overspent by hundreds of millions of dollars. That has not happened since the Great Recession of 2008. This government says we’re in prosperous times, so why are they overspending? It’s because they don’t have a handle on their fiscal picture.

They don’t have the ability to manage their ministries to keep them on budget. This is a huge disappointment and a shameful performance by this government, because British Columbians are now being asked: “Oh sorry, Mom and Dad. We’re in the last six weeks of the school term. I just need a few thousand more dollars.” That’s what this government is doing. It is coming back to the bank and saying: “Sorry. We spent all the money you gave us. Can we have some more?” They surely must do a better job than that.

They’re also being saved, whether we like it or not, by a one-time $1.6 billion transfer from Ottawa. Think about that. That’s $320 for every British Columbian, which we got out of the clear blue sky unexpectedly. What has this government done? They turned around and instantly spent it. It’s gone. We have a government that’s a little drunk on spending and drunk on taxation and seems to have forgotten where it all comes from.

This is a government that doesn’t seem to be overly concerned about where the economy generates this wealth. That’s most notable in the housing situation. In their own budget book, it shows a massive impending collapse in house starts — from 50,000 in 2018 to 31,000 this year and 30,000 the year after. Think about that. If 20,000 new homes are not being built, what happens to the tens of thousands of people who work in construction? They’re sent home with no income.

Think of the purchasers of homes. If they’re looking for a place to live and the number of housing starts drops, what happens? Supply and demand. The prices will stay up. Affordability goes out the window. Those 10,000 construction workers can’t afford anything. We’re seeing that in certain quarters of the province already, notably in Surrey, where there’s a lot of anxiety now about the impending slowdown in construction.

[3:05 p.m.]

On the flip side of that, the prices aren’t going down. We’ve all noticed that. What’s happened, of course, is that a lot of people who’ve been chased out of the upper end of the market have come into the mid-market, and they’re driving the prices up or keeping them floating up. There’s no cheap housing out there, folks. There’s nothing affordable, even though this government said it would make it happen with their fiction of 114,000 new homes.

Let’s add on to that the resource economy. We’re looking at, by their own numbers, a 30 percent drop in resource revenue. They don’t seem to be overly concerned about this. They’ve admitted it, for the next three years. We’re seeing a massive slowdown in the resource sector, but we hear nothing from them about it. “Oh well, that’s too bad.” Maybe that’s because the vast majority of the NDP seats are well removed from the resource economy.

They represent most of Vancouver Island. They represent much of the eastern suburbs of Vancouver. They do not represent the Interior of British Columbia, 250, where all of British Columbia and the Interior, with the exception of Smithers, Prince Rupert, Nelson-Creston, Castlegar and Trail…. Everywhere else is represented by the B.C. Liberals. There is a cold, complete silence from this government about that resource-based economy because they, apparently, couldn’t care less what happens to our resource-based industries. That is starting to show in a budget that does nothing at all to help the resource-based economy of British Columbia.

We’ve also seen a few little tricks in their budget. There was much talk, and a complete section of the budget last year, about the speculation tax. “This is going to be the greatest thing going.” It would create opportunities for people to rent properties. It would put people back into housing. None of this has come true. Instead, what did we get? Well, 1.6 million people are being asked to fill out a 20-page form to prove that they exist, they’re telling the truth, and they’ve paid income tax. They may or may not have children. Are they renting? How many days a year? It’s an interrogation, and people resent it.

I had that experience last weekend in Coquitlam. There’s a tiny town called Belcarra, population 800. It’s just outside of Port Moody. It’s on Indian Arm, across the way from Deep Cove in North Vancouver. These have been seasonal homes, traditionally. There’s now a road to Belcarra, but there are still a lot of cabins up Indian Arm — hundreds of them. They have fallen within the speculation tax zone. Many of these cabins have no running water. Most have no insulation, and none of them are habitable year-round. They are all in the speculation tax zone, and they are all being told: “Unless you rent this place out, you’re a speculator.”

Some of them have been there for 70 years. They are owned by fourth-generation family members. And these people are not people of means. Last week I met a woman who is widowed. She’s one of three family owners in a cabin. Her income is $22,000 a year. She is being deemed a speculator, has to fill out the form and is now libel for the speculation tax. This is an offence to so many people in British Columbia who are being accused of things they have never done, under an NDP-driven ideological agenda with a tax policy that doesn’t work.

Lo and behold, in this year’s budget — poof! — no mention of the speculation tax. It has disappeared because it’s not working. This government said last year that in the first three months of this year — now — they’d be collecting $87 million in speculation tax. It has proven to be such a gigantic blunder. They haven’t even got the forms back yet, let alone collected any money. And they certainly haven’t generated any housing stock in terms of people putting things on the market or people moving into those houses or renting them out. Nothing has happened in a good way from the speculation tax. It’s nothing but a class warfare way of collecting revenue for a government that has run out of ideas.

Now let’s talk about the employer health tax for a moment. We have heard endless stories in the last year where companies, small and large, say: “It’s not worth building your company in B.C. anymore.” Window manufacturers in the Fraser Valley, freight-forwarding companies in Vancouver — companies all over this province — say they’re not hiring in B.C. anymore because the cost base has gone up so much that it’s easier to hire people elsewhere or, worst of all, to move your manufacturing operations to Washington state.

So here we have…. The NDP’s idea of social equity and tax fairness is to drive jobs out of British Columbia and penalize employers. This has been a debacle, and the NDP refuse to admit it.

[3:10 p.m.]

For those employers, the MSP premiums are still in place, so their bill has tripled this year. Why didn’t they put it up incrementally if they were going to do this? Why a big whack of tax all at once in 2019? It’s because this is a government that seems to think that if you’re employing more than a dozen people, you’re some kind of fat-cat capitalist who should be penalized for it to benefit the workers. Nothing could be further from the truth, because what happens is that for those employees, their numbers are capped or they’re laid off because the jobs are going elsewhere.

We’ve seen the same attitude with this government’s approach to rentals: “Let’s protect the renters.” I was a renter for 15 years. I lived in a dozen different rentals. It was challenging at times, but it was fun. It was part of growing up and getting better. We’ve all done it. It’s kind of a wacky time of life, but it can be really enjoyable. Being a renter is a fact of life; it’s a rite of passage.

What this government has done is try to pander to renters with their $400 renters rebate, which suddenly vaporized. There’s no sign of it. Two years into their mandate, nothing has been done. They’ve put all kinds of restricted caps on the behaviour of landlords around changing rents, long-term leases and renovation of apartments. The net effect is that people are getting out of the landlord market. Why would you go and take that on?

In particular, some of those folks in Belcarra said this. The ones who have road access say: “It’s not worth having a tenant anymore, and it’s not worth having this cabin anymore because of the speculation tax. Now I can’t sell it, because nobody wants to buy a cabin that they’ll be forced to rent out, and there’s no way to deal with a troublesome tenant.”

What do we get? Shrinkage of the rental market — congratulations to the NDP — and static rental situations where you can’t find a place to move to. Most renters move up the scales, slowly but surely. I crawled out of those tiny basement suites into a place with some sunshine and finally was able to purchase a place. You kind of moved up the ladder because there was another place to rent. Nowadays it’ll be tough to find anything to move to because the landlords are not interested anymore.

We’ve also seen this in the child care policy of this government. The information we get from the city of Victoria: 250 new spaces were created; 450 closed. Why? The operator said that the NDP has dictated such restrictive, oppressive terms that they can’t make it work anymore. We’ve heard any number of stories — from Amanda Worms in Kelowna, from a six-pack of providers in Maple Ridge. These are all women in their 30s whose life’s dream was to run this nice little business, rent a place for five years and provide top-quality child care.

One day they woke up, and the NDP said: “What you’re doing isn’t good enough. You can’t make it work. You’re going to go broke.” It’s over — shattered dreams, shrunken spaces, disappointed parents and frustrated kids. Congratulations to the NDP on yet another high-handed state-run concept that turned out to be driving the car into the ditch.

The proof is in the pudding in terms of human behaviour. The budget itself says that in the last three months of 2018 the total net migration from other parts of Canada — I moved here from Alberta — was 400 people a month. It has shrunk dramatically because British Columbia is no longer the land of opportunity. It’s a place to be wary of.

My own kids don’t intend to live here, because they can’t see the opportunity here to match the cost of living. They just don’t see the chance to get ahead and to climb the ladder here, so they’re looking elsewhere. As a parent, I’ve got to tell you: that hurts. You feel like you’ve watched the world go by, and somehow you bear it, because it’s your problem. You didn’t fix it.

I have the sad duty of telling them: “Don’t worry. It’ll be better if we can just remove the NDP from government. Wait, hold on. Hold your breath. Don’t write us off completely.” That’s a sad way to describe the province of which you’re a citizen, of which you’re very proud and which, like all of my colleagues in this House, you decide to dedicate your best adult years to making a better place. Instead, you’re making excuses for the performance of this economy and the performance of this government.

Let’s talk about building B.C. Let’s start with how you actually build the infrastructure. We’ve all heard about community benefits agreements. Well, we call them union benefits agreements. There was a very good column yesterday in the Vancouver Sun by our most eminent columnist in the province, probably, Vaughn Palmer, pointing out three major projects, totalling $4.64 billion of our taxpayers’ money — the Pattullo Bridge, the UBC SkyTrain and a project in the Interior.

[3:15 p.m.]

All of those are coming under the community benefits agreements, which means that the costs are going up by at least 7 percent, for the benefit of union bosses and no discernible benefit for the workers or for the communities.

These are dressed up as some kind of wonderful social project and engineered agenda. They accomplish absolutely nothing for the people who are affected by them, and they mean that we pay in that case. Put 7 percent out of $4.5 billion. That’s $300 million of other opportunities squandered, because this is an ideological government trying to support its pals in the union movement. Not all their pals are in the union movement, only the ones who were donors to their past campaigns. They are amongst the 19 selected locals that are eligible for community benefits agreement employment.

We visited a crane company out near the Port Mann Bridge. They were Teamsters Local 31, and only Teamsters Local 33 was allowed to be in the community benefits agreement. They’re shut out completely. So they have to go to their workers and say: “You know, folks, you’re going to have to look for another job, or go to your union and say we’ve got to change locals, because the NDP is playing games. They’re saying you’re not good enough. You have to be a certain kind of Teamster — not Teamster A. You’ve got to be Teamster B.”

What kind of arrangement is this, where people are picking favourites that way because of past political donations? This is an offensive kind of behaviour by the NDP, and it’s got to stop.

We also have the whole phenomenon of investment attraction. There is nothing in this throne speech or budget about economic prospects for British Columbians, no sense of encouraging small business. The tech sector gets no mention whatsoever — after we’ve had all kinds of chit-chat from this government about having an innovation commissioner who’s going to do wonderful, magical things and create the kind of technology sector we see everywhere else on the west coast of North America.

It was a budding, burgeoning sector under the B.C. Liberals. Thousands of people have been employed. Most of us who are aware of the Oscars know that Sony Imageworks won the Oscar for best animation with their team based in Vancouver. Vancouverites won that Oscar. What does this government do? It ignores them completely. It does nothing for the sector. They need talent, they need ideas, they need capital, and they need markets. This government ignored them on all four counts.

It’s time that we had a government that served British Columbians. We need to be the land of opportunity so that my kids and yours can be happy and contented and say: “This is the place I’m going to get ahead. This is the place where I can be my best.”

We also have to look at the resource projects going on. The long and sad story of Trans Mountain — we won’t recap that here. But where are we now? All we’ve got left is a scrawny little lawsuit run by this government that will probably fail to try and stop the government of Canada from providing for the export of Canadian resources to foreign markets. Is that a goal we should pursue? Is this something we should be doing as our purpose in life — fighting the rest of the country in the courts and pretending the constitution doesn’t exist, all because of some shallow dream from the NDP to block the development of the Interior economy?

Coastal GasLink is part of this huge LNG opportunity in British Columbia. All of us are wanting it to happen. What do we have with this government? They announce with great enthusiasm, October 1 of last year, that it’s going to happen. Then they start dilly-dallying with all kinds of obscure interests for trying to block the project. It’s their job to deliver this project, not to say: “Well, your $40 billion might or might not be of interest. I’ve got to go talk to my friends, and they might not want to do it.” It’s too late for that. It’s time to get on with it.

That’s the job of the government — to make opportunities real, rather than be part of what the C.D. Howe Institute calls the $100 billion loss of capital projects in Canada because of the kind of behaviour we see from this government. It’s time for us to wake up in this government and this province and say: “We cannot just depend on ongoing prosperity.” We can say: “We’ve got the lowest unemployment in the country. Isn’t that great?” That’s no good if you can’t afford to live here.

The Premier himself had two or three jobs just to try and get ahead. What happens? People can’t get ahead. They get despondent, and they leave. What good is full employment if you can’t afford to live here? We all have to take that to heart, look at it through the eyes of our kids and our citizens and say: “What’s the purpose of government here?” It’s to make life better for everybody. It’s our duty to the citizens of this province. The key issue in this province is that there’s not enough take-home pay to get by and get ahead.

[3:20 p.m.]

The solution to not having enough take-home pay is not to increase taxes by $6 billion, take more money out of your pocket and reduce your take-home pay. That just leads to despair, the sense you’re never going to get anywhere. Off to the Payday Loan operation — that these folks are trying to regulate even further — because people are going to run out of steam. Those tens of thousands of construction workers not only on major projects but on residential housing who face unemployment have to find a way to get ahead, and they may find it somewhere else. That would be a failure for all of us.

So what do we people do? What do we need to do? What’s the purpose of being here in government and trying to sort things out? What we propose is to get people out of that rut of looking for their second or third job just to get by. We need lower taxes so that people have the money in their pockets to get ahead. This is critical. This government doesn’t care to understand it, because they think they know better what to do with your money than you do. This is their whole philosophy — that the state, embodied by the NDP, is smarter than you are. History has shown that is just plain dead wrong.

We’ve got to lower the cost of living. There’s a critical issue around housing, and it will not be solved by constraining supply and putting on tighter rental rules. It will be solved by providing more housing for the 60,000 people who move here from elsewhere every year. They’re coming mostly as immigrants, just as I did. As we have heard earlier, the interprovincial migration from Ontario and Alberta has completely dried up because B.C. is starting to close its doors and shrivel up as a place to do business and get ahead.

We have got to focus, as I’ve said, on lowering the cost of living, increasing take-home pay and making sure that there are good jobs out there. Sadly, this budget did nothing at all on the employment side of the equation. Nothing on major projects. Nothing for small business. Nothing that will lead to the kind of prosperity we need in this province to get ahead.

We should be able to look people in the eye and say: “We work every day — on the government side, the Third Party and us — to make this a place where you can get ahead and have a good life. The state is not smarter than you are. Our job is to support you.” We want the citizens of British Columbia to have that smile on their face of their take-home pay going up, their costs going down and an even better job on the horizon — not the prospect of the NDP telling them how to live.

With that remark, I’ll close my speech and say we all have a duty here to keep things in focus. It’s not working right now. So let’s make British Columbia a better place. Let’s work together to do some things that are good for the people of British Columbia, and let’s make it possible to look our kids in the eye and say: “You are going to be successful here. You’re going to have a great life right here in British Columbia.”

Sadly, it may not be this year.

M. Dean: It truly is an honour to be here on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt people and for me to take my place in the debate on Budget 2019.

I’d like to start by taking a few moments to thank some of the so many people who play a major part in my life as an MLA and support me during my time here at the Legislature and in my constituency of Esquimalt-Metchosin.

My constituency assistants are enormously dedicated, and I feel very grateful and fortunate to have them in our office. Thank you to Nubwa Wathanafa, Andrew Barrett and Lawrence Herzog for everything that they do day in, day out in my constituency office and across our community.

Thank you to all of the volunteers and those who support me every day in so many ways. Thank you especially to the people of Esquimalt-Metchosin, who inspire me every day with their generous, hard-working spirit of getting things done and taking care of each other. It is a really fantastic community to call home, and I’m honoured to represent them, all of them, here at the Legislature.

Thank you to all of the staff working here at the Legislature and all over the precinct. We’re surrounded by a high level of professionalism every day, and I do not take that for granted.

I’m also supported by our administrative staff here at the Leg, Noah Mitchell, in particular. My gender equity work is supported by a wonderful team of Molly Henry, Kelly Sather, Melanie Stewart, Carolyn Jack and Miranda Mason.

[3:25 p.m.]

Thank you so much to the Minister of Finance for her support and guidance. Thank you to all of my colleagues here in chambers. It really is an honour to participate in democratic work with everybody.

Lastly, thank you to my husband, who looks after our amazing daughter — and special mention to her, as she is my inspiration. This is a budget that I’m proud of for all of our children.

Now, just over a year ago, I was asked by Premier Horgan to take on the role of Parliamentary Secretary for Gender Equity. I am so proud to serve in this role, in a government that is acting to make life better for people across our province. British Columbians and people in Esquimalt-Metchosin believe in fairness, in equality and respect. I’ve heard these words over and over again as I’ve spoken with British Columbians all around this province. Fairness, equality, respect — these are values which guide our government and our actions.

We know that, for too long, British Columbians haven’t been able to get ahead, and that is especially true for women, transgender and gender-diverse people. They deserved and looked for fairness, equality and respect but have not found it.

In the past year, people in my community of Esquimalt-Metchosin and across the province have shared with me how the last government ignored their problems. I’ve heard from families held back by a lack of quality affordable child care; from women, Indigenous people, immigrant groups, people with disabilities and others who have fallen into poverty because of years of cuts to the programs and services that people need; from women wanting to leave violent situations but who were turned away because of the lack of shelter beds.

Well, from day one, our government got to work tackling these urgent issues and more, and with our first full budget one year ago, we set out on a path to make British Columbians’ lives better. Now with Budget 2019, my colleague the Minister of Finance has presented a budget that is going to make a big difference for people across Esquimalt-Metchosin and across our whole province, that will continue our work of making sure everyone is treated fairly, with respect, and has access to opportunity.

There is no question that after years of neglect, there is a lot that needs to be fixed. This budget takes another important step forward in supporting the people of B.C. and creating a more equal province.

Last year we made a historic $1 billion commitment to affordable child care, an investment that is going to make an enormous difference for families and for women, especially.

[J. Isaacs in the chair.]

For too long, B.C. parents have been forced to choose between career and family. Lack of quality child care spaces and hefty child care costs forced them into that choice. Now, research shows that women are held back from participating fully in the economy because of the exorbitant cost of child care. This has long-term impacts on their income, their career and their savings for retirement. British Columbian families need support, and our growing economy needs these workers.

I heard from a young couple living in the Lower Mainland. They were new to Canada and pregnant with their first child. They were talking about how worried they were about being able to afford both rent and child care costs. They were actually thinking, planning and intending to leave the province, to move out of B.C. to bring up their family, until our government announced our child care strategy.

Then they were able to find a child care space. They received the child care subsidy, and with that support, they have stayed in greater Vancouver. These are two young professionals that are able to stay here to contribute to their community and to the local economy and keep their family together.

[3:30 p.m.]

I was so proud to be here in this House as my colleague the Minister of Finance announced this historic investment in child care.

This budget sees our government move further forward to set the foundation for full implementation of our affordable child care program. Today, tens of thousands of B.C. families are already benefiting from our government’s investment in quality child care. With our government’s new budget, more children will get the quality child care they need and deserve. More moms and dads can go back to work or school knowing their children are getting good care from early childhood educators who know their work is valued.

Until now, B.C. was the only province in Canada without a poverty reduction strategy, and I’m so proud that this budget gives support to B.C.’s first-ever poverty reduction strategy. Our government is taking steps to lift people up.

We’re taking more steps to ensure people are supported and are not penalized as they strive to move forwards, because we know that women — particularly single moms as well as women with disabilities, Indigenous women, women of colour — and transgender and gender-diverse people are overrepresented among low-income British Columbians. This budget will make a huge difference for these people and their families in particular.

Now, one of the elements that I’m most proud of in this budget is how our government is prioritizing care and caregivers. Family-based caregivers, like foster parents, will receive higher support payments starting April 1. This is the first increase in a decade. At the same time, we’re making sure that extended family, like grandmoms and aunties, who support children and keep them out of care, will finally have payments equal to foster parents. This is a really important response to recommendations from Indigenous communities and Grand Chief Ed John.

I know this is going to be make such a difference in my community. I remember a local elder in my community came to me with a story of her sister in her 70s, living alone and on a fixed income. She had three grandchildren in the care system, but she had them with her for a week. She fed them. She sheltered them. She took them to school. She took them to activities. But for all that, over a week, she only received $100 in support. That wasn’t enough. Now she and many families like hers will be able to take care of each other without that kind of a struggle.

What’s more, our government is bringing in the new B.C. child opportunity benefit. This is a historic investment that puts more dollars in the pockets of working and middle-class families, and this will particularly help single moms, who are fighting for a better future for their children.

The YWCA tells us that single moms are the poorest of any type of family in B.C. Half of single-mother-led families are living in poverty — people like Kat, a young single mom living in my constituency of Esquimalt-Metchosin. She works three part-time jobs and has a nine-year-old daughter.

She’s trying to hold on to her home. She budgets. She takes extra hours at work. She buys secondhand clothes and out-of-date food, yet she can’t make ends meet. This new benefit will help her provide the care and necessities that they need. It’s going to make such a difference for their family.

Most families in B.C. will receive the benefit. It provides support from the day a child is born up to the age of 18. For the first child, the benefit is as high as $1,600 a year, and the total amount rises for families with more children.

[3:35 p.m.]

This support will have a profound impact on making lives better for thousands of working- and middle-class families. These extra dollars will mean that people like Kat will be able to buy her daughter new clothes, maybe her soccer gear. It’s a transformational change for families in my community and across B.C.

Over the last 18 months, our government has taken important steps to open opportunities for all. For example, community benefits agreements are one approach that will open doors for women, youth, Indigenous people to receive training and get good jobs on major infrastructure projects.

In Budget 2019, we’re providing a real boost to women seeking to get an education. Consider this: more than 60 percent of student loans are held by women. Interest-free B.C. government student loans mean real money in their pockets so they can focus on school and on their future. I am thrilled by this initiative introduced in Budget 2019 and implemented already to help thousands of students.

Our government is listening to people. Over the past 12 months as parliamentary secretary, I’ve been privileged to have the opportunity to look women in the eye in Burnaby, Prince George, Kelowna and Vancouver and tell them: “Our government heard you when you told us you needed more safe spaces for women and children leaving violent situations.” This new budget affirms our government’s plan to build 1,500 new transition homes over the next ten years — homes that will help women and children, because no one should have to face the choice of homelessness or violence.

In my community, for example, we have a counselling service in the community that’s provided to women experiencing domestic violence. But when a young woman came to the centre a few years ago scared for her safety, her counsellor could not find her a safe place of refuge. The nearest shelters were miles away and were full. Well, thanks to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing’s Building B.C.: women’s transition housing fund, we will have new transition house in the West Shore, and women like her will have a safe place to go.

There is no question that these investments really matter to people. When I was in Prince George, we were fortunate to spend time with the Elizabeth Fry staff and board. They told us about a recent donation drive that they’d been holding where a man came along and gave them a really significant donation. He told them how he had lived in their shelter in Prince George as a little boy and how it saved him and his mom at a time of great risk. Stories like these are why our government is taking action to dramatically increase the number of safe spaces available for women and children leaving violence.

When I was in Prince George, I also had the opportunity to speak with people benefiting from our Highway 16 bus services. I met a lovely young Indigenous mom on the bus with her little baby. She was travelling off to visit grandma. So it was her mom — grandma to her little boy.

It was going to be a two-hour journey, which she was happy to take. But in the past, before the bus service, her mom would hitchhike all the way to Prince George to visit her grandson. This young woman had always been so anxious about her mom being so vulnerable on that stretch of road. Now the family is safe, while still being able to visit each other.

Also, there I spoke with a program coordinator, and she told me that drivers are reporting far fewer hitchhikers along the route. Affordable, reliable transportation makes women and other targeted people safer.

[3:40 p.m.]

That’s why I’m so pleased to see $21 million invested in transportation in this budget to improve bus services in 30 communities around the province. Affordable, reliable, safe public transportation isn’t just an economic issue. It isn’t just an environmental issue. It’s a women’s issue.

Our government is also working hard to combat gender-based violence. Women, transgender, gender-diverse people face higher rates of domestic violence and sexual assault than other people in our province. Since forming government, we’ve announced more than $20 million to assist victims of gender-based violence and sexual assault. This money is helping reduce wait-lists for critical services and better meet demand for vital services such as counselling, outreach and crisis support. It means organizations can better meet demand for vital services.

Because women’s health and family health matter to this government, we’re investing $24 million over three years to support the B.C. Children’s and Women’s Hospital. This means better services for women, mothers, newborns and families.

Now, there are many reasons to be very proud of this new budget. I’ve mentioned just a few of the key measures that are important for the gender equity that we’re striving for. But there is also another one that I’m especially happy about. That is the introduction of gender-based analysis plus.

Gender-based analysis is in place in one form or another in every other province in Canada and at the federal level. Gender-based analysis plus recognizes how diverse and marginalized groups of people may be impacted by policies, programs and budgets. It tackles the systemic issues. Our gender equity office is working hard to build capacity and understanding throughout government about this new tool.

Budget 2019 is the first step as we integrate GBA+ into all our government actions. This is an essential part of making sure our government has equity at the heart of all our actions. I am so proud that it’s now underway here in British Columbia.

Advancing gender equity ensures that everyone can benefit from opportunities and reach their full potential. It makes our communities and our economy stronger. Later this year, I’m going to welcome colleagues from across Canada, here in Victoria, for the annual status of women federal-provincial-territorial meeting. I’m looking forward to sharing with them the many steps forward that our government has taken to promote gender equity.

You know what, Madam Speaker? The person that I’m really excited to share Budget 2019 with is my daughter. Like many of you in the House, I’m a parent, and like parents everywhere, I hope the world I leave my daughter and her children is better than the one I inherited.

There is much to be done, but with this new budget and all the work we’re doing as a government, I’m confident that here in British Columbia, we are moving forward.

On behalf of my community of Esquimalt-Metchosin, I’m very proud to support this budget. And when I tuck my girl in bed tonight, I can tell her that we are building a better, more equal British Columbia for everyone.

D. Davies: I just want to start off today by talking a little bit…. It is Pink T-shirt Day. I do have my pink T-shirt. I wasn’t sure of the rules in the House, if we could actually wear a T-shirt. I am wearing my pink T-shirt in spirit today to recognize this extremely important day — in fact, a day that I first introduced when I was on city council in Fort St. John and had it proclaimed in the city of Fort St. John about seven or eight years back, one of the duties that I did, first as a city councillor as well as a school teacher, seeing the extreme importance of Pink T-shirt Day and the anti-bullying movement.

[3:45 p.m.]

Thanks to everybody here in the House that…. I think pretty much every single person has participated in this extremely important debate. It is my pleasure, though, to rise today and debate what I would call an unaffordable budget.

Before I begin, though, I would like to thank my constituents first and foremost, for giving me the incredible honour to represent each and every one of them in this chamber. You know, in the face of government’s wild spending and lack of planning, in my opinion, I certainly take my responsibility as more important than ever. As the representative of Peace River North, I will make the fight here in this chamber ever-present, with my hope to build a stronger and brighter future for the communities that I represent in Peace River North.

I certainly want to thank my wife, Erin — without her, certainly, I would not be here today — as well as my children, Hana and Noel, who I get my motivation from to do this job. I do it for their future — as well as the future for all of our children here in British Columbia — so that they also might have a bright and prosperous future and stay here in British Columbia. I think we’ve heard a theme for the past few days during the budget debate. I really feel that that is something that is being threatened, where we may not be providing enough opportunity for our children and our grandchildren to stay in this incredible province.

I want to thank my staff in Fort St. John as well as in Fort Nelson, in my two constituency offices: my CAs, Tamara Wilkinson and Kim Eglinski, as well as my auxiliary staff, Lori Slater, Lavena Brekkas and Julie McNeice. I also want to recognize my LA here in the Legislature, Jaspinder Badesha. Again, with all of these people working with us, we can certainly deliver the services that are so important to our constituents and fellow British Columbians.

This past year the community of Old Fort, which is a small community immediately south of Fort St. John, suffered a horrible landslide that cut off complete road access to the community as well as all utilities. It was cut off, basically, from the world for a number of weeks, and the entire community had to be evacuated.

I do want to take this time to thank the Solicitor General, Public Safety Minister, for his quick action and willingness to regularly meet with me, and the support that has come from his ministry, as well as the Ministry of Transportation — the hard work they did in getting access back into the community once it was deemed safe. Again, myself and certainly the residents of Old Fort appreciate the action.

As I’ve stated in this place before, my region is a very unique region in this province. With a land mass of 161,000 square kilometres, it is only the second-largest riding, just by a little tiny bit. But to give you a bit of perspective, my riding is the same size as the countries of Ireland, Nigeria and the entire Vancouver Island combined. That is the size of my riding.

It gives a unique perspective when I have to move around my riding. If I were to drive from the district of Taylor, which is at the far south end, right up to the Yukon border, I’m looking at a 14- to 16-hour drive, depending on the roads. To visit my next major community, which would be the community of Fort Nelson, I’m looking at a five-hour drive. In the winters, when we’re sitting, right now, at 20, 30 below with snowstorms, it certainly makes it challenging to get around.

I was born and raised in Fort St. John, which is the largest community in Peace River North. We’re very lucky to call home a variety of industries. Oil and gas. We have a strong forest sector, and agriculture, mining as well as tourism. All of these industries provide well-paying, family-supporting jobs and careers for hard-working British Columbians all over the province, as well as up in my riding. And they are an extremely important part of the way of life that we embrace in the north.

That is why this budget is so troubling to me. I see the future of my place, which is right now the envy of Canada, as the strongest province — British Columbia — being threatened. It seems as if this government’s plan is to keep making big promises while doing nothing to ensure that these promises are sustainable or possible for the long term.

[3:50 p.m.]

Combined with declining resource revenues, with no job creation initiatives, topped off with 19 new or increased taxes over the past year and a bit means trouble for the northeast and trouble for British Columbia. And the throne speech gave me very little reason to be.

The throne speech gave me very little reason to be optimistic. From the robust debate that the government put up on their throne speech, or should I say the lack of debate, I really hoped that this year would have been different from 2018. But I guess I was just dreaming that.

Even one of the notes that it did hit on, that seemed exciting for many people, was the genuine need for better cell service in the province. I’m sure that none of us would argue that. But even this promise rings a little bit hollow, as that falls outside of the realm of British Columbia and is within the federal jurisdiction.

Last year I criticized the NDP for their tax-and-spend plan in B.C. There’s no private sector jobs plan. There’s no plan to meaningfully grow the economy of British Columbia. So many of these promises that are in this budget are destined to be a pretty pan flash.

In fact, even the name of the budget, Making Life Better, seems like a mean-spirited joke, especially for the people of Peace River North. The first thing that truly — I can say this — lit my hair on fire was the 30 percent decrease in resource revenue. I’ll tell you. I had a full head of hair before I heard that.

When government predicted that there would be a 30 percent decrease in resource revenues, that is extremely scary for communities like mine that rely on the resource industries. It’s a complete threat, and we don’t see anything other than the government rolling over and saying: “Okay.” That’s what really worries me and my constituents.

When I see that this budget is supposed to make life better for British Columbians, raising the income tax for individuals and corporations, raising the carbon tax…. Then you add on disasters like the employer health tax, speculation tax. It’s a worry. Hiking taxes means ratcheting up prices for our communities that are already going to be and already are starting to see hard times. So much for making life more affordable.

I’m going to look at a couple of areas that are particularly lacking in the eyes of folks in the northeast. That’s around energy and agriculture, the indifference that this government has shown in these areas — the lifeblood, the true lifeblood of the Peace River as well as the whole province.

It’s even more frustrating given the government’s refusal to work with other provinces that are in favour of projects that would benefit the residents of Peace River North and my constituents, as well as constituents across northern British Columbia and all throughout British Columbia. It really bothers me that we have a government that is constantly fighting that.

The North Peace has a heavily diversified economy, as I mentioned, with incredible potential and potential not, again, only for the residents of Peace River North but for every single resident of British Columbia. Despite the steep price tag that this budget that includes no job creation, or very little, very little around growing the economy…. The mention of the decrease in resource revenues and the increase in carbon tax and the increase in all these other taxes is startling.

I’ll refresh, maybe, some of my fellow members here about the importance of the contributions of Peace River North and the northeast and the people who live there today — what they contribute to the B.C. economy. While we’re typically associated with oil and gas, which is, no doubt, extremely important for the folks in my area, we also have a very strong forest sector, certainly around Fort St. John.

We also have the largest agriculture region in British Columbia. We have 1,800 farms that produce over $100 million annually, including 90 percent of B.C.’s grain. And 95 percent of all of B.C.’s canola is produced up in the Peace Country.

[3:55 p.m.]

We’re also big producers of livestock, being home to the largest bison herds, as well as llamas, alpacas, wild boars, to mention a few. If anybody has looked at the budget, I’m not sure where agriculture was, but it was quite vacant. There was very little mention about growing the agricultural economy in British Columbia.

Along with no real support for our farmers in Budget 2019, here’s an example of an even more complicated issue, one that apparently has been neglected by the other side in drafting their budget. In the North Peace — as well as, probably, the South Peace, I’m quite certain — many farmers own small businesses, maybe welding shops or pipefitting shops, on their property. Oftentimes, they work in the natural resource industry. For many farmers, this is a necessity just to be able to continue farming because the farm season is only four or five months long.

Last year I explained my concerns when the changes to the zoning practices were raised and introduced, which have now made it even more difficult for farmers to be able to continue farming and to raise money for their families while operating these businesses on the side. The lack of relief in Budget 2019 for these farmers, and in the face of this rezoning, makes me wonder if government is even concerned about the livelihood of the farmers in the northeast at all. Burdening farmers with regulations and taxes is doing far more harm to the farmers in the region than good.

There’s another area where natural resources and the agriculture industry intersect, and that is the competition of two industries trying to transport their goods to market. At times, farmers have over 20 tonnes of grain stuck in elevators, in my riding. Farmers are often forced to literally watch their product rot because of the lack of infrastructure to move their crops to market.

Many of the rail cars that we need to move this grain are now being deprioritized because of the absolute need to be moving oil to market because of a lack of pipeline. I gave it away there. I shouldn’t have said that. I should have talked a little more about it.

You can see where I’m going with this, Madam Speaker. There is an easier and safer way to move oil from the coast that would free up these rail cars so that farmers could benefit and profit from their hard work. A pipeline would not only move the oil more quickly, with far less risk of environmental catastrophe to our province, but it would greatly help out the farmers in the northeast. These rail cars would be free to move agricultural products to markets throughout B.C., as well as throughout the world.

The North Peace can also claim to be the historical and current centre of B.C.’s oil and gas industry, as mentioned. Things that really worry me…. We start to see things like the carbon tax being increased, corporate taxes being increased, the amount of red tape that is being reintroduced into our industries, permitting issues, land use issues. We look at issues, like around the caribou. I’ll talk a little bit about caribou here in a second, how the land use issues around caribou are being handled in secrecy.

Well, when we are trying to attract capital to our province from people around the world and elsewhere in our country, when we want to bring those capital dollars to British Columbia to invest in our province so we can have great health care and good education, well, these big companies that are looking at this unstable environment aren’t going to come here. There are many other jurisdictions around the world that they can go to that offer a much better environment for them to invest in.

Going back to my opening remarks, this really worries me, when I hope to have my children and grandchildren stay in this province to work. But I’m worried there’s not going to be anything for them. The less support that you give these communities who rely on the industries in these down times, as this budget is projecting, the more that people are going to become bitter in that the government isn’t looking out for them.

[4:00 p.m.]

I hate to say it: people are going to start leaving. Companies have already left our province. Companies are not investing in our province. That is a real concern.

In the northeast, as I’ve also mentioned, it gets cold. It gets really cold, in fact. This has probably been the longest cold snap that I can remember in many years. We’ve been probably, for five weeks now, hovering around minus 20, minus 25 degrees. I see my colleague from Prince George–​Valemount nodding her head. I think they’re in the same boat. This is something that we can relate to. But I think a lot of people miss the point when we talk about….

I need to heat my home with natural gas, and I use a lot of it. I have to. I have no other choice. Earlier I was showing my colleague from Chilliwack here my gas bill that I just got, which, for the two months, was almost $400. The commodity was $69, and the carbon tax was the same price as the commodity that I had to purchase. This is only going to be going up. Well, that is going to have a much larger — much, much larger — impact on people that live in the Interior, in the north, than it is on anybody else in the province.

Again, as I mentioned, being a vast region, we have a number of people that have to run pickups. They have to run pickups for their work. They have to run pickups to provide for their families. When it’s 35 below and you’re working out in the fields, you can’t shut your truck off. It won’t start in the morning. You have to leave it running. I’ve worked at certain jobs where I never turned my truck off for a week. You could not, because when the weather locks in at 35 or 40 below, you’re not shutting your truck off because you’re not going to work the next morning.

When we go back now to the carbon tax and how that’s layered onto me already heating my home at ten times what many others do, having to leave my vehicle running or using my three-quarter-ton or half-ton to provide for my family, like many of my residents do, it starts layering on an incredible cost for residents of my riding. We’re penalizing people that are already, right now….

Some people say: “Oh, it’s pretty busy up there.” There are a lot of people that are just making ends meet in the northeast, because it’s not that busy. It’s not that busy, as I already mentioned — I can go back — because, I believe, of all the policies and the layers of red tape that are being smothered onto our industry that is shutting down or that is making our corporate partners around the world say: “Oh, maybe we better wait before we invest in British Columbia. We’re just going to wait.” Well, that waiting amounts to people being unemployed.

It was good to see, though, that LNG was mentioned in the budget. Of course, we know that our government previously worked tirelessly to see that this was going to come to fruition. It’s great to see that there is movement now. I’m still not fully convinced of this government’s commitment, though, to get this project and be committed to this project.

If we look at the Coastal GasLink pipeline issue, it doesn’t seem like government is completely invested in making sure that this pipeline gets through. Unless we get these issues resolved in the Coastal GasLink, we’re not going to see anything happen with this incredible opportunity before us with LNG.

I’m not even sure how much time I have left.

Interjection.

D. Davies: Two hours? Oh, excellent. I could easily go on for two hours.

[4:05 p.m.]

Anyway, I am happy to see that there is movement on this file. I’m still not, again, fully convinced. I’d like to see more incentives for some of these sectors to invest this capital that we so much need to be brought into our province.

Again, I’m sure that everybody in this chamber knows that most Canadian oil comes from Alberta, a province that this government has repeatedly antagonized. We heard, today, the Premier talk in his remarks about…. It’s important to build relationships with our neighbours — and speaking to Governor Inslee in Washington. But if he could build the same relationship with our partners in Canada as he is with Washington state, we might actually get some stuff done here. I hope that we can, again, come to some resolve in getting some of Canada’s natural resources to market.

I’m going to flip through here, as I think my time is running out.

Interjections.

D. Davies: Yeah, like I say, I can talk for two hours, green light or no green light.

It, again, really bothers me that we see such an incredible relationship being built with foreign countries when we’re ignoring our neighbours here in Canada, certainly in Alberta, that we need brought forward.

I’m just going to talk very briefly on one of my areas in my riding, Fort Nelson. Fort Nelson is in a situation that just keeps getting worse. Communities like this and others in the northeast are heavily dependent on natural resources. Fort Nelson seems to be getting hit with a double whammy. There’s hope of a forest industry returning, but I’m not too sure if that can happen with the inaction that’s happening right now in the forest sector.

It seems that the natural gas sector…. Fort Nelson has an incredible abundance of natural gas, and I’m not sure if it’s ever going to be realized. Again, as I mentioned, this government seems adamantly opposed to oil and gas initiatives. In combination with the decreased revenues and policies that scare away investors in this province…. They have very little to look forward to in investing in our province.

With the amount of revenues that come from the northeast, this government doesn’t seem to have included…. I’ve got to do a shout-out for this, because the Minister of Transportation is here. No mention of replacing the Taylor Bridge — nowhere, even in the long term. The Taylor Bridge is a critically important piece that connects the entire north. It’s an 800-metre bridge that is in dire repair. It seems to be closed more than it is open at times.

Some extra money to enhance rural roads would have been nice. We have communities in my riding, like the community of Baldonnel, that can’t even get school buses or emergency vehicles out at times, because the road is in such disrepair.

I rose in the House just a little while ago — I think it was last week — and talked about the mountain caribou plan. When I mentioned to the Minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources what he was going to do and what it looked like, we got nothing. We have been getting nothing for a year. When we look at industry, they are scared, because as a stakeholder, they’re not even being spoken to.

The importance of the caribou recovery plan and the meaning it could have on the land use, combined with other agreements that are already in existence, is still another incredible hurdle that our companies are looking at.

One final thing as I start moving toward wrapping up. We’ve recently heard…. I know, in the North Peace, we have a search and rescue group. The North Peace Search and Rescue provides an incredible service to the residents up in the northeast. Unfortunately, that is another piece that was completely missed in the budget.

[4:10 p.m.]

It’s one of those things that we hope we never need to call on, but when we do, we want to make sure that they’re outfitted well and that they have a good turnout. I worry that groups like the North Peace Search and Rescue are going to be faced with some critical decisions that they’re going to have to make this year in light of lack of funding.

Also, as a city councillor previously, we’ve been working with Northern Lights College and UNBC, as well as other partners, about getting a nursing program in the northeast. We’ve brought everything that was required by the ministries. The plan has been in place. But again, there was nothing mentioned in the budget about moving forward with this.

To wrap things up, I don’t think we’re going to see any meaningful positive changes from this government over the course of the next fiscal year. This budget, if anything, is an ominous sign of hardship for our resource sector here in British Columbia and the communities that it supports, like mine up in the northeast. The tax increases only serve to worsen the hardship, and there does not seem to be any plan to move into building a stronger economy, building jobs and building careers, which all of us rely on.

This government needs to do better. It is deeply frustrating to me, as well as the residents of the North Peace, that they might need to be doing some critical planning this year, because I think this is going to be a very tough year for many folks here in British Columbia.

With that, I’ll take my place. I thank you for your time.

Hon. K. Conroy: Before I begin, I’d like to acknowledge the traditional territory of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples, on whose land we do our work.

I’m very pleased to respond to Budget 2019. As we can see from the detailed outline by the Minister of Finance, Budget 2019 is all about putting people first. Our government is taking action to make life more affordable, to deliver the services that people need and count on and to build a strong, sustainable economy.

As the MLA for Kootenay West, it is truly an honour to represent such committed and passionate people, who live in a magnificent area, full of beauty and natural resources. I don’t get home as much as I used to, but when I do, it’s always such a pleasure to connect with everyone, whether it’s at the grocery store, the arena, the drugstore — wherever I am. I’m always running into people who it’s so good to connect with.

I want to take a minute to thank the tremendously important people who work in my constituency office in Castlegar, my constituency assistants, Elaine Whitehead and Angelika Brunner. They provide such amazing, excellent service to our constituents, and I’m incredibly grateful for the work that they do. I also want to acknowledge the hard-working people who support me in my ministry office: Paula Gunn, Alisma Perry, Edena Brown, Emily White and Kaitlin Morton. Thank you to all of you amazing women who support me both in Castlegar and here in Victoria.

I also want to thank the many people who work in my ministry: Deputy Minister Allison Bond and her team here in Victoria, as well as people who work for the ministry right across the province, who do such incredible work each and every day to make children and families’ lives so much better in this province.

As well, of course, a big thank-you to my family, who always support me: my husband, our four kids, our grandkids, my brothers and sisters, my in-laws, my nieces and nephews. Just in response to the member for Peace River North, who just finished his response, I just want to let him know that our youngest son left B.C. in 2002 because there was nothing here for him. He is finally coming home. I am so excited that all our kids will be home, home to work in B.C. It’s been his goal for many, many years, and it’s happening. We’re really happy about that.

Also, a big special thank you to, I think, one of my biggest supporters, my dad. He is 90 years old, and he continues to live in the house we grew up in. He curls. He golfs. He’s incredibly active. He’s always telling me what I should and shouldn’t be doing. He’s an amazing role model for our entire family. Love you, Dad, so glad you’re still here giving me what I need. It’s great.

[4:15 p.m.]

I feel I’m an incredibly fortunate person. Not only am I the minister of a really dynamic ministry with many opportunities for the future at Children and Family Development, but also I’m honoured to be the minister responsible for, as we like to say in the ministry, all things Columbia: the Columbia River treaty, Columbia Basin Trust and Columbia Power Corp.

I understand and appreciate how the Columbia River treaty has had long-lasting impacts in the Columbia Basin, and I know the benefits that the Columbia Basin Trust and Columbia Power Corp. have provided for basin residents since the ’90s.

In early 2018, the governments of Canada and B.C. began to meet with the United States government to start negotiations around the future of the Columbia River treaty. They continue this week. They are actually in Washington, D.C. Last year our government also furthered its commitments to engaging with Indigenous nations affected by the Columbia River treaty, a first that this is happening. These are incredibly important discussions that I’m glad are continuing.

I also want to take a moment to talk about a really exciting development in the basin — the Waneta expansion, which was built through a partnership among Fortis, Columbia Basin Trust and Columbia Power Corp. It was an expansion of an existing Waneta dam. In January, just a few months ago, our government approved the purchase of Fortis’s 51 percent share of the Waneta facility by the Columbia Basin Trust and the Columbia Power Corp.

These are long-term benefits that will return to the basin residents as well as all British Columbians, and it will benefit budgets for British Columbians for years to come. It is an incredible opportunity not only for basin residents but for British Columbia residents right across the province.

Columbia Basin Trust continues to support basin residents by generating $63 million a year in total revenue, and it delivers $52.4 million in grants and initiatives. It has provided $6.2 million in new business loans. They have done incredible work in the basin, providing supports — things including housing, initiatives with early childhood education, environmental initiatives. Those are just to name a few. They work closely with our government to provide supports right throughout the basin.

There has actually been more good news for our region. “Not only did we buy a dam,” as my grandkids like to say. Earlier this month we made the announcement of a new ambulatory care and expanded pharmacy for Kootenay Boundary Regional Hospital. It’s a $38.8 million investment, with the province committing $23.3 million. I was really pleased to make this announcement on behalf of the Minister of Health.

These improvements are so needed and are so important for patient care in our region and add to the expansion of the ER, which is already underway. This hospital was built in the ’50s, and we think some of the places in the hospital are original. So this is very, very needed.

There’s also a new investment in the Arrow Lakes Hospital, in Nakusp, and that will provide better care for the patients in the northern part of my constituency.

Budget 2019 creates opportunities so that all British Columbians can thrive — not just a few and not just the well-connected. It continues on our transformative path that our government set in Budget 2018. Last year we eliminated tuition fees for youth in care and enhanced the agreements with young adults program, providing much-needed additional supports, year-round, for youth right up to the age of 27.

Childcare B.C. was also launched in last year’s budget, committing $1 billion to child care and early learning over three years. This was the single largest investment in child care in B.C.’s history.

I think one of the smartest things…. Well, he’s done a lot of smart things, but one of the smartest things our Premier did was having the foresight to appoint the MLA for Burnaby-Lougheed as the Minister of State for Child Care. I have to say her passion and drive has ensured that Childcare B.C. has unfolded to provide the much-needed services to families right throughout the province.

A big thanks and acknowledgment to all the staff who have been working on this file under the impressive leadership of our assistant deputy minister, Christine Massey, and her team. We regularly hear from families who are benefiting from affordable, accessible, quality child care and what a positive difference it’s making in their lives.

Our budget this year is about creating new opportunities to help people reach their full potential. Under the last government, only a few at the top benefited. From housing to tuition to child care, young people and families were left to struggle. Many even questioned if they could continue to live in B.C. We are taking a different approach. We’re putting people first.

[4:20 p.m.]

A balanced budget doesn’t mean that you have to neglect people. This year we have eliminated student loan interest so that young people can get a good start on their careers without worrying about taking on more debt. We are fully eliminating MSP premiums as of January 1, 2020, saving families up to $1,800 per year. CleanBC, one of the centrepieces of this year’s budget, is the biggest investment in climate action in the history of this province.

We continue working toward reconciliation in a new revenue-sharing agreement with First Nations to share stable, long-term funding with Indigenous communities. With these funds, First Nations will be able to invest in services and infrastructure for their communities like child care, supports for new parents, housing and economic development.

Finally, this year our government also introduced a transformational new B.C. child opportunity benefit. Starting in October 2020, this new benefit will replace the early childhood tax benefit and will provide hundreds of millions of dollars each and every year to families. While the early childhood tax benefit supported children up to age six, the new B.C. child opportunity benefit will support children right up to age 18. It’s one of the many important steps we’re taking to make life a bit more affordable for families and to help lift them up.

Now, I couldn’t be more pleased with Budget 2019’s focus on children and families. I say that not just as the Minister of Children and Family Development but as a mom of four, a granny of nine, an early childhood educator and someone who worked in the family service sector for many years before my election as MLA. I know how hard life can be for people when government does not have the interests of children and families at the centre of what they do.

After years of underinvestment and even deep cuts to services by the previous government, there is a lot of damage to repair, but I am proud to say we are starting to do just that. I’m so proud to stand up in support of this budget and undertake the work it supports through an overall lift, for our ministry, of more than $272 million.

Specifically, this year we are investing in B.C.’s future by making these investments in our families and children: $15.5 million to boost the monthly rates paid to foster parents, the first increase in a decade; $5.3 million to nearly double the rates paid to caregivers caring for extended family and increasing the rates paid to adoptive parents; $6.3 million to significantly cut wait-lists for respite services and to increase the annual respite funding available to families of children with special needs; $31.3 million to address the years of built-up wait-lists for children with special needs; $9.3 million to improve services for children, youth and families under the mental health strategy.

The budget for child care increased to $366 million this year, up from $182 million last year, with an additional $9.3 million in new funding to further our commitment to make accessible and quality child care a reality for B.C. families.

I want to expand a bit more on some of these initiatives. One of the first events I attended as a minister in 2017 was the B.C. Federation of Foster Parent Association’s annual general meeting. That was when I first met Russell Pohl and his husband, Darrell, and heard their wonderful story of fostering and adopting. They have fostered over 60 kids and adopted eight of them, and they just told me the other day they think they’ve taken on their last foster child — I hope not: a little two-year-old guy who’s really an incredible little one.

The conversations I’ve had with foster parents like Russell and Darrell have made such an impact on Budget 2019, and it has made it even more meaningful. For years, caregivers have been calling on the government to raise their maintenance rates. Many of them have been digging into their own pockets to support the kids that they care for as the costs of living continued to climb.

We are acting by providing $15.5 million a year to boost the monthly maintenance rates paid to foster parents. Across the board, foster parents will receive an additional $179 per month to help them provide the basic needs of raising a child, the first such increase in a decade. Not since 2009 have these caregivers received a raise to their maintenance rates. Their calls for help fell on the deaf ears of the previous government.

For Russell and Darrell, who I mentioned, Budget 2019 addresses some of the struggles of being a foster or adoptive care giver. Russell wrote me a letter on budget day about what it meant for his family, and it was so moving.

[4:25 p.m.]

I can’t read the whole letter, but just one of the things he said: “Today’s announcement will help B.C.’s families immensely. Foster parents will once again feel valued, not because of a dollar amount. Rather, they were considered and part of a plan, that someone is looking out for them.”

With the maintenance rate increase and more help through post-adoption programs, Russell feels like his work as a foster care giver and adoptive parent is finally being acknowledged. He also estimates this new funding may help recruit and retain caregivers at a time when long-time foster parents are aging and retiring.

But we know it’s not just foster parents who face the added financial pressures of caring for kids who cannot safely stay with their parents. Grandparents and other family members who care for young relatives, a common practice in Indigenous communities, have been especially struggling.

For years, they were paid roughly half of what a foster parent might make. Those extended families would step forward and provide the care needed out of love. Many did it and still do, in spite of the financial burden they were taking on. Others simply did not have the means. This might be grandparents or aunties or uncles living in poverty and unable to afford the added costs of caring for a child with complex needs.

One story that stays with me is the Indigenous grandmother I met who had been raising her three grandchildren. With her old age pension and the low rates that extended family care givers received, she just couldn’t afford to support all three of her grandchildren. She could only keep one grandchild, and she had to send the other two into foster care. She said what made her feel the most guilty was the child who stayed with her, because she didn’t have the same resources for that child as the foster parents who were taking care of her other two children.

That has to change, and that will change now. At a time when we’re working to better support families to safely stay together, including changing our legislation to make this possible, we needed to do more to help extended family members to step in and keep young relatives connected to their families, their communities and their culture.

That’s why, through Budget 2019, we are investing $5.3 million to nearly double the rates paid to family members who are caring for kids under the extended family program, bringing them up to the same level as other caregivers. This is a move that addresses one of Grand Chief Ed John’s key recommendations from his 2016 report. It is another step on our path to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples in this province.

We are also increasing the rates paid to newly adoptive parents to align with the cost-of-living increases. These increases are long overdue, as adoptive parents put in so much effort to welcoming children into their families. I am so proud our government has taken this step. The positive impact for foster parents, extended family care givers, adoptive parents and the children in their care is significant.

We know more needs to be done. That’s why we are currently reviewing our entire system of care. This includes a network of foster parents, group homes, children living in the home of a relative, and adoptive parents to ensure all these heroes are supported and treated equitably in the very important and specialized care they give children.

Now, all parents know how difficult raising a child can be at times. While it has immense rewards, there are tough days, times when you question your ability to hang in there and moments when you question whether you can continue to cope. Parents caring for a child with special needs endure daily stressors that many other parents do not. Often they need a break in order to rest and recharge.

I have heard from families that respite is one of the most crucial supports a caregiver can receive. It also gives the child the opportunity to become more independent and develop meaningful relationships outside of their family.

Access to respite care can be challenging. The Representative for Children and Youth has noted this in reports to the ministry, and we have been listening. Budget 2019 provides relief to families with an investment of $6.3 million to boost the province’s respite program. This new funding will enable more eligible families to receive the annual respite benefit, helping to significantly reduce the wait for respite services.

We are also increasing the annual respite benefit entitlement for families, another increase long overdue. This funding will help families recruit respite providers who best meet their child’s needs.

[4:30 p.m.]

Many families are waiting for special needs services. This year we’re boosting our special needs budget by $31.3 million to assist families and address wait-lists. This funding will go towards autism and medical benefits for special needs children in care.

[R. Chouhan in the chair.]

It will help delegated Aboriginal agencies and children and youth in care with special needs — critically needed to all of these families and children. Sometimes, a child or youth’s additional needs aren’t immediately apparent by looking at them. That doesn’t mean that what they’re dealing with is any less acute. I’m talking about children who struggle with mental health challenges.

It’s time B.C. had a child and youth mental health system where families can ask once and get help fast. More than 28,000 children and youth are receiving community mental health services each year across B.C. This is more than double the number of kids supported in 2003. To address this demand, our fiscal plan this year provides $9.3 million to improve access and expand on an array of services better supporting mental health and wellness.

Our focus is on prevention, early intervention, treatment and recovery. We are working hand in hand with the Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions to make sure that issues of mental health are treated with the seriousness and respect they deserve. I want to acknowledge the incredible job our Minister of Mental Health and Addictions is doing every day to deal with the very troubling and tough situations she has to deal with and is doing an amazing job at it.

Our ministry is such a dynamic, busy ministry. I haven’t even yet started talking about one of the most exciting developments, and one that is close to my heart as an early childhood educator, and that would be Childcare BC.

When we took office in July 2017, child care in this province was in an absolute crisis. The proof of that was that child care emerged as one of the top election issues in 2017. Report after report gave the previous government failing grades on child care. But B.C. families didn’t need to read a report to know that child care under the B.C. Liberals was completely neglected. Fees for child care were going up without any hopes for relief for parents. Spaces were impossible to find, and there was no support for early childhood educators at all.

In fact, the previous government was infamous for what became known as the ABC policy, anything but child care. We heard the concerns of parents and families, and in Budget 2018, inspired by the ten-year vision of the $10-a-day plan, we launched Childcare BC and made the largest investment in child care in B.C.’s history.

Based on the three pillars of affordability, accessibility and quality, we have taken great steps towards our long-term goal over the past year. We’ve introduced two affordability measures that are already delivering significant services to families. Through the affordable child care benefit combined with the child care fee reduction, some parents are already paying the equivalent of $10 a day or less. For some families just scraping by, earning under $40,000 a year, child care is now completely free.

Through the fee reduction alone, we have put almost $83 million back into the pockets and family budgets of British Columbians. We have to think: when was the last time a government put $83 million back into the pockets of families? In November, we announced 53 Childcare BC universal prototype sites across the province. Parents at these sites are paying no more than $200 a month, and these sites will run until the end of March 2020. The feedback we gather from these prototype sites will be used to shape the future direction of our Childcare BC plan.

We have also announced several initiatives to speed up the creation of licensed child care spaces. In just 18 months, we have already built more child care spaces than the previous government did in 16 years. We began our new space creation initiative, the new spaces fund, in the summer of 2018, and around 2,000 new spaces have already been approved for funding. We are on track to deliver on our target spaces for this start-up year, which is very exciting.

We are also delivering a comprehensive recruitment and retention strategy. This will improve supports and opportunities for those in the child care sector. The heart of a child care system is, of course, the providers, our early childhood educators and staff who care for and teach our children.

For the first time, government is valuing and investing in the people at the centre of early learning and child care. This includes a wage enhancement for eligible early childhood educators. That is only in our first 18 months as government.

[4:35 p.m.]

In the coming year, we’ll be addressing rates of other types of licensed child care through the affordable child care benefit to help parents save even more. We’ll also be improving our child care fee reduction initiative, and we’ll continue to roll out new spaces across the province.

Budget 2019 sees the budget for child care increased to $366 million this year, up from $182 million last year, with an additional $9.3 million in new funding to build on our commitment to universal child care. Our investment in child care will grow to more than $1.3 billion over the next three years.

We know that thousands of families are already benefiting from the first year of our child care B.C. plan. Some parents have said the savings they are seeing are life-changing and that our plan means they have a little bit of extra money to save for a rainy day, or, as parents have been telling me, they can actually start to save for a down payment for a house, start to put money away so that their child can go to post-secondary school, start to buy healthy food.

One mom was just so…. She came and hugged me in Safeway on Saturday. She said: “I can finally afford to buy healthy, good food for my kids, and it’s the first time I’ve been able to do that in years.” I am so proud to say that we are keeping our promise to B.C. parents to deliver the child care system they need and they deserve. By making choices that put people first, our government hopes to transform lives and create a better future for everyone.

We are tackling big problems in B.C. like affordable child care, but we’re doing it while balancing the budget and continuing to build on the strongest economy in the country. As Minister of Children and Family Development, I can’t tell you how incredibly honoured I am to be minister of that ministry. I know that Budget 2019 has it right when it comes to investing in families, investing in children and youth and investing in our entire province as everybody should be invested in.

R. Sultan: Let me begin by saying that I think we’re fortunate to be served by the member for Kootenay West in such an important portfolio. I think looking after, as I understand the numbers, 6,000 children, youngsters, babies who have been entrusted in the care of the government surely must be about the highest priority of all of the complex assignments the government of British Columbia has undertaken and has an obligation to perform.

Thank you for doing what you do.

I’m pleased to respond to the NDP’s Budget 2019. Perhaps, more accurately, we should call it the Green-NDP budget. Since the alliance has served us almost half of their maximum term, we can stand back now and better appreciate where they are taking us. What is their longer game? It’s taken more time than I expected for them to take ownership of what’s going on.

They have a curious faith in the enduring power of our government of the past, even though it exited the stage almost 20 months ago. Whenever bad things happen or awkward questions are asked, they tend to respond with the automatic phrase “16 years.” In other words, whatever is going on is attributable to circumstances and decisions made as long ago as 18 years. Well, I knew we were good, but I didn’t know we were that good.

They ignored the advice I gave to the member from Sunshine Coast a few weeks ago that he could save lots of trees from being cut down to make paper for Hansard merely by shouting the number 16 whenever the occasion arose, because through their endless repetition, the opposition probably knows the talking points flowing from the number 16 better than they do at this point.

Back to the longer view, the NDP is living up to its tax-and-spend reputation. Spending is growing at an annual rate of over 5 percent. At 5 percent, government spending will double in 15 years.

[4:40 p.m.]

By their own forecasts, the share of the economy representing activities of the provincial government will climb from about one-quarter today to begin to approach much closer to one-third of the entire economy. That huge chunk of our affairs will be managed through policies adopted right here in this building, in this chamber, by MLAs, through the legislation that we propose and debate and the laws that we pass — administered by cabinet ministers that we look in the eye almost every day, who, of course, are in charge of implementing the budgets and laws that we endorse.

I would, frankly, be surprised if British Columbians would feel comfortable, given all of the circumstances, particularly of what’s been happening recently. That degree of control over their lives to the folks sitting right here in this chamber — as wonderful as we all know that we are….

On the taxation side, the forecast is simple, a slogan from the past: “Up, up and away.” The Finance Minister has increased taxes by billions of dollars on individuals, on homeowners and on businesses. Over the next three years, the NDP plans to increase taxes on average by over $1,500 for every man, woman and child. Getting down to the individual households, that translates to much more than a $3,000 increase.

That’s the unassailable bottom line of this budget. They’ve increased taxes right across the board, in fact. If the NDP constructs a hypothetical family, as they are prone to do, to illustrate that taxes have been reduced, say, $1,000, and affordability, therefore, has improved, you can take it as an arithmetic certainty that there will be somebody else over on the other side of town whose taxes have gone up by an equal amount. That’s just plain mathematics.

Let me list 22 new or increased taxes or fees which we are now subject to: (1) employer health tax, (2) Airbnb taxes, (3) additional school tax surcharge, (4) speculation tax, (5) photo radar, (6) cannabis taxes, (7) ICBC unlisted driver premiums, (8) ICBC learner premiums, (9) B.C. Hydro crisis fund, (10) ride-share trip charges, (11) surcharge on professional fees to pay an Uber regulator.

We’re halfway through the list: (12) increased personal income taxes, (13) increased corporate income taxes, (14) Vancouver and Victoria gas taxes, (15) luxury vehicle tax, (16) tobacco tax, (17) property transfer tax surcharge on real estate, (18) foreign buyers tax, (19) carbon tax, (20) parking sales tax, (21) development cost charge increases, (22) TransLink property taxes.

Although we could certainly argue about who is ultimately responsible for TransLink, and maybe it would be unfair to burden the provincial government with full responsibility for that important entity.

So 22 items. This is a rather impressive list, I guess is one way of describing it. It’s certainly not a short list. But let’s give the Finance Minister her due. She has balanced the budget — although barely. They increased spending a lot, but they increased taxes to pay for it. And let’s give them credit for that.

Also, of course, they got lucky with a $1.6 billion surprise transfer from the federal government. It would be wishful thinking to expect that such a pleasant surprise will be a regular feature of life in the Finance Ministry, and we must soberly realize that if it wasn’t for that unexpected item, the B.C. Budget 2019 would be showing about an $800 million operating deficit. So they quickly consumed the surplus left behind by the previous B.C. Liberals.

[4:45 p.m.]

In fact, I must say that the NDP ridiculed us for not spending all of the money they found sitting in the bank, as if this was some sort of character weakness or, in fact, outright stupidity. That was the impression I got, which illustrates the low value they assign to thrift. Whatever you’ve got, you’re spending it in a hurry. Where, oh, where are the careful Scots, those thrifty paragons of finance who have made the Canadian banking industry world renowned? Weren’t some of them at least recruited into the NDP at some point? Apparently not.

In today’s world, according to the London Economist, only nine national governments out of 43, from Hong Kong to Denmark — that great big table in fine print you see at the back of the magazine — do not run an operating deficit. So I’m throwing another bouquet to the Finance Minister here. To have kinship with what I would call the thrifty nine is something to be proud of. British Columbia stands out in Canada for its continuing operating surpluses, however temporary it may turn out to be. Congratulations, Minister. I hope you stay the course.

The British Columbia government has now operated in the black for seven consecutive years. This has been seized upon, most recently by the speaker just before me and by other sloganeering journalists, as evidence that B.C. has the strongest economy in Canada — thanks, of course, to the NDP. Well, certainly they get credit, but 5/7 of that acclaim should be funnelled over to the B.C. Liberals. But whoever gets the credit, let’s say we can all agree: it’s a good thing not to shove onto the backs of our children payment for the things that we enjoy today, for that’s what debt financing does.

So what does the future hold? Can such extraordinary virtue be sustained? I really don’t want to rain on the NDP parade and its balanced budget, but the government should look around the world a bit. Storm clouds are gathering on the horizon. We see China struggling to maintain the fast rate of expansion of recent years, having to deal with Mr. Trump’s tariffs and other internal issues.

In the United States, we see the still-largest economy of the world and our closest ally — as Mr. Trudeau once said, whether we like it or not — struggling to contain the tweets and turns of a rogue president creating anger and apprehension in many places, believe me. The Federal Reserve is in a high state of uncertainty.

After years of quantitative easing, a euphemism for printing money, after the 2008 financial meltdown — a monetary expansion creating huge pools of liquidity which has sloshed around the world, some of it sloshing into B.C. — the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank is now trying to run down its balance sheet — shrink it, make it smaller.

Quantitative easing is edging into quantitative tightening, and this motion in the backfield, as you might call it, may prompt some to wonder whether the aggressive tax cuts in the U.S.A., on top of this huge growth in liquidity of the last decade, has merely created a temporary sugar high. If so, our mid-term future may be bumpier than the mid-term past, and of course, when America sneezes, British Columbia tends to catch a cold.

In Europe, the European Union is being torn apart by the failures of political leadership in the U.K. And on the continent — dare I say it — is confusion and contradiction in governments fragmented by proportional representation.

Things are scarcely better in our own hemisphere. Venezuela is struggling with damage inflicted by Castro-style socialism. Brazil is racked with social upset. Argentina is finding it hard to face up to many decades of lost opportunity.

In this sea of uncertainty, I cannot resist tossing another bouquet. We should celebrate our strong economic relationships with such well-managed friends as Japan, a country frequently overlooked in our own thinking.

[4:50 p.m.]

So to believe it’ll be smooth sailing for the global economy and, therefore, trade-reliant Canada, I think, requires a deep faith, buttressed by not reading too many headlines.

When I look at my home province, I wish I could say I see a stronger economy in their future. I believe we will pay a price for slamming the door on foreigners, and that’s how it can be interpreted.

I see a forestry industry which has largely run out of fibre and is busy expanding in places like Sweden and Alabama but not in B.C.

I see a mining industry, for example, with high-potential gold, copper porphyrys identified in the Toodoggone area and equally fabulous copper moly silver deposits in the Gold Bridge area — I’m beginning to sound like a mine promoter, I know — languishing for lack of investor interest due to uncertainties with respect to UNDRIP and a generally cool, if not outright hostile, regulatory climate.

It’s said that in Australia a new mine can be created in less than five years from first exploratory drill hole to shipment of the first concentrate, whereas in British Columbia, that is typically more like 13 years. Five years versus 13 years. Where would you invest your money?

The B.C. chamber says business confidence in B.C. has plummeted. The number of businesses believing this government supports them has dropped by about half since the election, I am told.

We are seeing the final nail in the coffin of the B.C. Liberals’ revenue-neutral carbon tax of over a decade ago. Today only 15 percent of the NDP’s $6 billion increase in carbon tax over three years will go to CleanBC, which is sort of the NDP’s climate change universal soldier, while the other 85 percent will go into the maw of general revenue.

The one-half of the Medical Services Plan premium, which the NDP tends to crow rather loudly about, has been lifted off the backs of consumers, but it’s merely been put back onto the backs of their employers, demonstrating, again, an unfortunate insensitivity — perhaps it would be a kind way to put it — to the problems of employers, not to mention a year of double-dipping at employer expense.

There’s really nothing in the budget that I can find to stimulate investment or private sector growth. The NDP itself admits in the budget that the economy will be slowing down, with housing starts down 30 percent over five years, resources and revenues off by a third.

The government kind of shrugs this off and says: “Well, that’s just the way it is.” It doesn’t really take any responsibility at all for helping make it happen.

Now, let’s concede, as perhaps illustrated by the critically important ministry I referred to at the outset, that government has expanded the government services in the social sector, in some cases much needed. And, of course, who can argue against education and health? This has contributed to robust employment numbers in certain sectors, of course. The breakdown in job growth between public versus private, however, is less reassuring, because I think a definite skew is appearing.

I think the private sector is waiting for some sort of message from the government that their success would be celebrated in British Columbia, and right now it sort of sounds like a one-trick pony. The government’s enthusiastic embrace of Christy Clark’s LNG vision is certainly one that we support strongly, but of course there’s much more to our private sector life than LNG.

I reflected on this the other night, as I tried to jot some scribblings down for these remarks, as to the culture which has created what I interpret as the situation. I wrote down on a scrap of paper some key words drawn from the NDP lexicon and recalled George Orwell’s Animal Farm categorization. George Orwell wrote: “Whatever goes on two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes on four legs…is a friend.”

[4:55 p.m.]

Friendship in these chambers isn’t based on the number of legs. I’d have to say, to a considerable degree, it’s based on whether something is public or private. The words “non-profit,” “cooperative” and “community” describe a friend. The words “profit,” “corporation” and “multinational” describe an enemy. It’s as simple as that.

Since on that definition, much of the world outside of B.C. is an enemy, the ideology certainly cramps our vistas as we venture forth in the world, as we have no alternative but to do. This is very significant, since we’re so reliant on trade, so interwoven with our free enterprise neighbour to the south and so reliant on the inflow of foreign capital, particularly when our own labour and capital are so mobile.

Finally, we come to the theme of the budget itself, which is “Making life better” for you. It has, in the handout, a very nicely scripted illustration of the eight different cost-of-living savings for a family living in Metro Vancouver.

These include eliminating the MSP, eliminating student loan interest, adding up three different children’s benefits, eliminating bridge tolls, saving on the purchase of an electric vehicle and helping pay for a heat pump. It all adds up, and I’m sure the arithmetic is correct, to $26,675 a year, plus $8,000 in one-time savings for this hypothetical family of four earning $70,000 a year in Metro Vancouver.

But whoever prepared that list overlooked eight other items that I could conjure up. For example, it’s quite conceivable the company where this person worked abandoned its planned 2 percent wage increase because now it’s the company and not the individual who would pay the health insurance premium.

ICBC car insurance for this family could have well gone up $1,500. The head of household may now be spending an additional 10 percent of the workday in a queue waiting to get through a tunnel under the Fraser River, which has its own cost. The increased carbon tax on gasoline certain adds up to several hundred dollars a year.

Municipal taxes can easily go up $500 to pay for the municipality’s share of the employer health tax. The value of this family’s home, following the statistical trend in Metro Vancouver, is down 8.5 percent on the year in price. Now they have to pay a cabin tax of $1,000 — just to invent an alternative hypothetical.

Presto. All of the promised $35,000 savings of this hypothetical family in budget benefits were used up, and the family is right back where it started from. Well, at least you could say they’re even. I suppose that’s some grace.

It may, in fact, have been one of those families described in the Finance Minister’s own preamble, which talked about a family struggling with two or three jobs to pay all the bills. We all concede this is a genuine situation that we have — particularly Metro Vancouver. We should not belittle it nor demean the efforts to address a very genuine and disturbing problem.

Turning to my own riding in conclusion, I have to relay the story of a phone call we received the day before yesterday, as relayed to me by my constituency assistant: an 80-year-old widow living on the slopes there on the North Shore — beautiful suburb, of course. When she and her husband bought this house when they were in their 40s, they bought an extra lot next door because they wanted a place for the kids to play. The kids grew up, and they had a wonderful yard, a big yard, to play in.

Now the kids have grown up and moved away. She’s living on a fixed income, and she’s just been hit by a B.C. Assessment Authority notification that the tax on the vacant lot will be $12,000 a year. She doesn’t have an extra $12,000 a year. So what is my constituent going to do?

[5:00 p.m.]

You might say: “Well, if you’re sitting on a property worth that much money, sell it. Move on.” Unfortunately, it’s really not that easy, because all the problems younger people are struggling with in Metro Vancouver are also the problems that older people are struggling with. What on earth do they do?

What does she do with her network of friends in the community? Does she go up to Chilliwack or something? If you stand back and look, in fact, at what’s happened…. The property she lives in has probably been whacked in terms of value.

We did a calculation, based on a B.C. Assessment aggregate valuation, of all the homes in my riding, and the number astonished me. I thought: “Well, it might be, I don’t know, $5 billion or $6 billion.” That’s a big number. Try $34 billion. I would guess, too, that the value today of that same aggregate number is more like $25 billion. In other words, in not too much over a year, we’ve clipped about $9 billion of market value off those homes of all shapes and sizes in my riding.

Meanwhile, that $9 billion number…. Keep it in mind. It happens to be an estimate that I ran across of the number that the government thinks it will cost to build 114,000 new homes over the next ten years. While I know the connection may seem a bit distant, you might say it’s a race between the decline in market value of real homes in one community versus the increase in the value of promised homes in another. Right now I’d say the affordable housing side of the equation is losing that race.

This is what’s going on. Of course, it impacts my constituent, who is not only hit with a $1,000 a month tax bill, which is perpetual…. It’s not one time. All of a sudden she finds that the house that she thought was worth quite a bit of money isn’t worth quite so much.

The demoralization of one housing sector is not being replenished by new hope and optimism in another. That’s my conclusion.

To wrap up, here’s what the leader of one of our leading development organizations had to say about the tax environment which this government and this budget has created and the outlook for housing starts on the Lower Mainland. I quote from my conversation with that person: “It is going to take different taxation policies in the housing sector if the government’s ambitions for growth of housing supply are to be realized. As things stand now, the sector is contracting, not expanding. The loss of jobs is going to be serious, and the loss of accommodation will not make housing more affordable.”

Thank you, friends in government. You have delivered a budget which makes life less affordable, which expands the public sector significantly but, unfortunately, it seems, at the expense of the private sector and which is discouraging investors, which will discourage the economic growth we all depend upon in the future.

J. Routledge: I’ve been listening to this budget debate with great interest for more than a week now, and I’m so pleased that today I get to take my place in the debate.

I’ve been fascinated and sometimes perplexed by the way we sometimes talk past each other across the aisle. In the time allotted to me today, I want to concentrate on the philosophical underpinnings that separate the two approaches to setting economic policy. By the end, I hope that you’ll agree with me that while our approach is different from that espoused by the opposition, it is based on sound and tested economic practice and will benefit British Columbia.

[5:05 p.m.]

Let me begin by recalling the words used by the Minister of Finance to introduce Budget 2019. She shared some important childhood memories, memories of a time when, in her words, “Dinner hour…was animated with discussion, and then a wave out the door, as family headed off to a volunteer meeting, to support a cause or to help out a neighbour.” Her grandparents and mom “never lectured us about why we dedicated our time to people. It was just part of our everyday life.”

The member for Kamloops–North Thompson called her words “a speech about nothing.” Now, that wasn’t really very nice. Or maybe he just didn’t get the point. But after sitting across from them for almost two years, I still haven’t figured out whether the B.C. Liberals are being provocative or they really don’t understand. So let me spell out what I think the minister was signalling to the people of British Columbia and why I think it’s so important.

The Finance Minister was reminding us that there was a time not so long ago when average, hard-working families knew that their efforts would be rewarded with a decent standard of living and a secure future, when parents could be confident that their children would be better off than they had ever been themselves, when people felt like contributors to society and not resources to be exploited and when we viewed our neighbours as people with whom we shared a mutual dependency, not as competitors who might take our jobs, devalue our homes or get an advantage before we did.

I remember those times too. In fact, I was already in my 30s before I saw someone sleeping in a doorway. Yet today homelessness has become so endemic that hundreds of people in cities all across Canada held Coldest Night of the Year walks this past weekend to raise money for the hungry and the homeless. To understand the significance of this budget, it is important to refresh our memories about how we got here.

I have a long memory, and I can almost pinpoint the moment in history when the sense of hope and social cohesion that characterized the post-war era took a turn towards the despair, rage and alienation that seem to define the world today. Things started changing right around the time Ronald Reagan became President of the United States, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of Britain and neo-liberalism was unleashed upon the world.

Neo-liberalism is the belief that markets are smarter than any human, that the market should be allowed to go wherever it wants in pursuit of cheap labour and abundant raw materials and that nothing should be allowed to stand in its way, not unions, not health and safety, not the environment, not human rights — nothing. So we entered the age of privatization, international trade agreements, union-busting, deregulation and austerity.

Does that sound familiar? Well, it should, because it exactly describes the program of policies stubbornly pursued by the B.C. Liberals for the 16 years they were in power and by their ancestors, the Socreds, who came before them. That’s why the B.C. Liberals sat by and let housing prices spiral out of control right under their noses. “Not our job; let the market decide.” That’s why they let B.C. Hydro and ICBC rack up huge debts. “The market knows what it’s doing.” That’s why they cut corporate taxes to historic lows and shifted the burden to average British Columbians by doubling tuition, doubling MSP payments and introducing a wide array of fees.

[5:10 p.m.]

That’s why they gutted the labour code, privatized long-term health care and weakened workers compensation. And that’s why they didn’t notice that money laundering had become such a lucrative industry. “If it was a problem, the market would have let us know.”

They said they were stimulating the economy, but really they were just following a formula, and they are still beating the same drum today. Their entire critique of Budget 2019 is couched in dog whistle neo-liberalism, and I challenge the very premise of their critique. Neo-liberalism is not economics. It is ideology dressed up as economic policy, and it does not work, at least not for the vast majority of the world’s population. That includes the average B.C. family.

It’s been more than 40 years since Reagan and Thatcher promised that if we set the corporate sector free, it would make massive profits, and those profits would trickle down to the rest of us. When? When is this going to happen? Forty years later the people of the world are still waiting. The hopes and dreams of three generations have already been sacrificed like guinea pigs to this experiment.

The reality is that those huge profits are not trickling down and never did. That’s what French economist Thomas Piketty concluded after completing his groundbreaking research into the way wealth has been accumulated and distributed over the last 250 years. In fact, the gap between rich and poor has grown alarmingly around the world, nowhere more so than in the United States and Great Britain, the earliest adopters of neo-liberalism, countries that seem to be on the brink of social disintegration.

Today 82 percent of all the wealth in the world has been concentrated in the hands of the richest 1 percent — 82 percent, almost all of the world’s wealth. The people of British Columbia did not escape this trend. By the time the B.C. Liberals had left office, the richest 3 percent of British Columbians owned 54 percent of all the wealth.

Even Alan Greenspan, longtime and now former chair of the Federal Reserve of the United States and, arguably, one of the architects of trickle-down economics, admitted, after the sub-prime mortgage and credit crisis of 2007, that he was wrong. Yet the B.C. Liberals keep repeating their tired, old, discredited free trade mantra.

It begs the question why. Why can’t they connect the dots? Why can’t they see the connection between the choices they made in government and the unprecedented number of people living precariously and dying of overdoses? Now, if they want to believe that the Earth is flat, let them. That’s not going to hurt anybody. But by forcing neo-liberalism on the people of British Columbia, people do get hurt.

So, again, why? Well, their Finance critic gave us a clue last week in her response to the budget. What she said was: “There is only one way to grow the economy and create jobs.” Only one way? That kind of statement is dangerous and irresponsible, and it’s one that you should not make lightly, especially if all you’re trying to do is score points and undermine the credibility of your opponent.

Need I remind her about what is happening right now in the United States and Britain, where right-wing parties are marching in the streets, Trump supporters are physically attacking reporters, racists are not even trying to hide their hostility anymore, and fundamentalism, the belief that there is only one true way, is on the rise.

[5:15 p.m.]

Canada and British Columbia are not immune to what is happening around the world. We even saw it play out in the Burnaby South by-election, when some particularly ugly slurs were shouted out at all-candidates meetings. In all my years in Burnaby politics, I have never experienced this before. Legislators need to choose our words carefully and with regard to who may be listening and what absolutist notion they may think it validates.

Now, I don’t entirely blame the B.C. Liberals for hanging on, even beyond the point of reason, to what is now a discredited and bankrupt ideology. For one thing, neo-liberalism is pretty hegemonic. As the saying goes, what can a fish tell you about water? Think of the generations of economists and national leaders who were trained and advised by Milton Friedman and, before him, Friedrich Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society and all the high-powered think tanks created to give credence to neo-liberal thought — like the Fraser Institute, just to name the one closest to home. Neo-liberalism is everywhere.

Speaking of economist Milton Friedman, who wielded immense influence during his lifetime, let’s remember that he left his fortune explicitly to be used to destroy the public education system. Today 70 percent of Trump’s White House staff are part of the neo-liberal thought collective, as is his Vice-President. And to use the B.C. Liberals’ own terminology, we shouldn’t be surprised that neo-liberal thought is baked into their politics.

Now, before turning to how Budget ’19 is actually transformational — how it expands the horizons of what is possible for individuals, for families and for society — let me talk about how the average citizen has had to adapt to survive under neo-liberalism.

Well, firstly, people started working longer hours. Overtime wasn’t something that you did on occasion; you came to count on it to pay the bills. I remember in the 1980s, when I was a union rep, a lighthouse-keeper called me just before Christmas, absolutely distraught. He had always worked overtime on Christmas, and for the first time, his employer was giving him those stat holidays off. He did not know how, without that overtime, he was going to pay for the Christmas presents. That’s how much people like him had come to count on overtime.

Another thing. Another way that people survived is they started taking on huge, unprecedented debt loads, and the expectation to be in debt for the rest of your life became common. Now, when I was a university student, I didn’t have a credit card. We couldn’t, as students, qualify for credit cards. We didn’t have any money. But by the time my son went to university, banking regulations had been loosened up, and all the big banks were up on campus flogging their cards to young kids who could all of a sudden live as if they had money.

Think about the arrival of Walmart and McDonald’s. That meant that people could afford to buy lots of stuff and fill up on cheap food. Never mind that our cheap jeans were being made by workers on the other side of the world for $1 a day.

I’ve been there. I’ve visited those workers in their shanties, where they slept on dirt floors. I’ve dug around in my purse to find aspirin to give to a mother, because she couldn’t afford to buy it herself, to bring down her child’s fever. And don’t get me started on the contradictory choices that pension fund investors had to make to ensure that the fund would still be there when the time came to retire.

Individualized survival comes with consequences, and the chickens have come home to roost. People have started turning on each other, blaming each other for the narrowing of their prospects. Again, just look at what is happening south of the border. Here at home even, extremists are getting bold. But it’s not too late.

[5:20 p.m.]

The people of British Columbia are breathing a sigh of relief today, not just because Budget ’19 contains concrete measures to put more money back in their pockets; not just because we’ve eliminated interest on student loans, which means that Jovy, who lives in my community, is planning on going back to school to upgrade her skills, get a better job so that she can make more of a contribution to her family income; and not just because this time next year MSP premiums will be completely eliminated, returning as much as $1,800 to families to spend on other necessities.

It’s not just because Budget 2019 introduces the new B.C. child opportunity benefit. Starting in October 2020, families with one child will start receiving up to $1,600 every year until that child reaches the age of 18. Those with two children will receive up to $2,600, and those with three or more children will receive up to $3,400 per year. This benefit can make a huge difference in many families. It can mean new warm winter coats or piano lessons or more fruits and vegetables on the dinner table and school lunches and a bus pass.

It’s not just because extended B.C. families — like grandmothers and aunties who support children and keep them out of care — will have their support payments increased to match those of foster parents.

These are just some of the highlights of Budget 2019. All told, it will reduce the tax bill of the average B.C. family by 43 percent. But this is not the only reason that British Columbians are breathing a sigh of relief. People that I talk to are relieved because this budget signals that the era of doctrinaire austerity is over. They are relieved because, finally, they have a government that is investing directly in people, a government that knows that the economy is more than just an abstract concept. It is the people who build the economy with their talents and skills, and grow the local economy with the goods and services they purchase in their own communities with their wages.

Budget 2019 commits an enormous capital investment to schools, roads, hospitals and other infrastructure. These projects will provide good-paying jobs to thousands of British Columbians with money to spend. These projects will also sustain a vast network of local suppliers.

This budget is balanced, and I don’t mean just that it balances the books. This budget represents a more balanced approach than we’ve seen in 16 years. It balances the needs of both the business community and the people who work for them and purchase their goods and services.

It’s not like we’re making this up out of our heads. It’s not some theory that was cooked up at a resort in the Swiss Alps. There are living models thriving right now in the real world where this balanced approach has produced stable economies, political stability and better living conditions for everyone. Countries like Finland, Sweden, Denmark.

Remember how the Finance Minister introduced the budget by reminding us of happier times? Well, that could be us again.

T. Wat: Before I speak to Budget 2019, I would like to thank a number of people who are so crucial to my continued efforts to well serve British Columbians and my constituents. I couldn’t have done my job in Victoria well without the support of staff Siyun, Karen, Sam, Stephanie, Stuart, as well as all the caucus staff. Thanks for your hard work and dedication.

I’d also like to thank my constituent assistants: Trix, David, Nathan, Tony and William. Without this team of very dedicated and outstanding staff, I would not have been able to serve my constituents effectively. I’m so grateful to them.

My parents, who are in their 90s, lived with me in the same house for more than a quarter of a century, until 2017, when they had to move into a long-term-care home to spend their final years in comfort and good care.

[5:25 p.m.]

I always feel bad that I cannot visit them more often, but I am so lucky that my parents totally understand that I should spend more time with my constituents and British Columbians, to listen to their concerns and to bring their voices to the Legislature.

Mom and Dad, thanks for your understanding and consideration.

Of course, I would be remiss if I did not mention my sweetheart and only child, Tin. Tin is the one who convinced me to go into politics in 2013 to serve British Columbians. I still remember her words when I told her that former Pre­mier Christy Clark asked me to run for the 2013 provincial election. She said: “Mom, you have spent many years of your life looking after me and taking good care of dad when he suffered from cancer for eight years.” So I am grandma and grandpa. “Now is the time for you to spend your time giving back to British Columbians, as it was such a blessed and rewarding experience immigrating to Canada.”

Tin, thank you for your encouragement and your ongoing support.

Now I feel so blessed that Tin is happily married with Terry, and I’m a proud grandmother of an 18-month-old baby boy.

I would also like to take a moment to thank my consti­tuents for providing me with this privilege, honour and opportunity to serve them in the last six years. The many great organizations that serve the residents of Richmond well include the Richmond Centre for Disability; the Richmond Chinese Community Society, RCCS; Bayit synagogue; Chabad Richmond; Richmond Cares, Richmond Gives, RCRG; and Little Wings Daycare, just to name a few.

We had some unusually snowy days in February in British Columbia. To add to the bitter cold, Budget 2019, presented by the NDP government, has made us shiver even more. Eighteen months into this government, they have no plan to grow the economy or to create well-paying jobs and they have no intention to make British Columbia more competitive in international markets. This budget continues the NDP’s spending spree that will cost every taxpaying British Columbian an extra $1,100 in new taxes, $2,500 per family, over the next three years.

Since taking office, this government has been making up tax policy on the fly. They have introduced 19 new or increased taxes that will affect homeowners or businesses. Let’s first take a look at the half-baked speculation tax. This tax has contributed to nothing but market instability. Fewer homes are built. Housing starts dropped 6.4 percent in 2018 and are projected to drop another 16.7 percent in 2019 and another 10 percent or more in the years afterwards. It doesn’t address what its name suggests — wills, estates and speculation.

This government is clawing back the capital that British Columbians have worked so hard to save and have invested in their homes. Only a month ago 1.6 million British Columbian homeowners discovered they had to declare their ownership. Otherwise, they would be deemed speculators.

It has been such a burden to so many people, especially those whose first language is not English or seniors who need help filling out their forms. Many constituents in my Richmond North Centre riding are immigrants to this country. They come to British Columbia for a better life. Many of them have struggled, worked hard and saved over the years to help build that dream. Now they stand to be punished by the NDP government for having dared to prosper.

In addition to the speculation tax, the Finance Minister is also punishing British Columbians with the employer health tax. So 2019 is a year of double-dipping of taxation on B.C. employers who have to pay not only MSP premiums but also the employer health tax, which took effect on the first day of 2019.

[J. Isaacs in the chair.]

The B.C. director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Kris Sims, said: “The employer health tax will have a cascading effect across the province, putting a chill on new hiring and pay raises and risking property tax hikes from Port Alberni to Prince George. This is a huge downloading of taxes from Victoria onto the backs of job creators and municipalities across the province.” We can only imagine what kind of damage this tax will do to small business. Small businesses are the backbone of British Columbia’s economy.

[5:30 p.m.]

Richmond is a place with all kinds of small businesses, and we have heard so many concerns raised by small business owners. All these taxes imposed by the NDP government mean that businesses are faced with the difficult choice of raising prices or laying off employees. Is this what the NDP government meant by making life more affordable?

Another issue I hold dear is the establishment of a Chinese-Canadian museum. The NDP government talked about the establishment of a Chinese-Canadian museum in the throne speech, loud and clear. However, the budget has made no mention of funding for the museum, which has led me to worry that this is just a political show.

Chinese Canadians have made tremendous contributions to British Columbia’s history, culture and economy, and they will continue to be an important part of our society. As the former Minister Responsible for Multiculturalism, I have always encouraged everyone to celebrate the differences among us and stand against discrimination, racism and xenophobia.

Multiculturalism is integral to the prosperity and identity of British Columbia. That is why the establishment of a Chinese-Canadian museum must be a non-partisan project. We cannot let our political differences stand in our way. We need to work together to establish this museum. I can’t stress enough that it is very concerning that a promise was made to the Chinese community, public consultation was carried out, but no funding was mentioned in this budget.

I’m encouraged to hear the Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture touch briefly on the Chinese-Canadian museum in her budget response speech. Regrettably, the minister talked about an additional $5 million investment to the B.C. Arts Council, but she did not give any indication of the financial support for the museum. I look forward to hearing from the NDP government on how they expect to fulfil this promise without any funding from the budget.

I would also like to ask on behalf of my constituents: when will the acute care tower be built for Richmond Hospital? An announcement was made in March 2018 that the replacement of the original Richmond Hospital tower was moving ahead and a new patient care tower was on the way for people living and working in Richmond. Now, nearly one year later, there is no word about when we can expect the new hospital tower.

Richmond Hospital has been serving the community since the 1960s. However, it is aging, seismically unsafe and can no longer satisfy the needs of the growing population in Richmond. As Richmond’s population continues to both age and grow, the strain placed on the Richmond Hospital has only increased.

Our entire community of Richmond is behind this project. The Richmond Hospital Foundation has been so successful in raising awareness of the need for a new tower and, most importantly, has rallied our generous community behind its fundraising endeavours. I can’t say enough good things about this group and its hard-working staff and volunteers.

On a different note, I do welcome the $50-a-month increase to disability and welfare rates, the immediate elimination of interest charges on student loans and the government’s investment in child and youth mental support. However, how is the government going to get the money they need to implement such policies? In this budget, we see no effort in stimulating the growth of the private sector. There is no policy in place to encourage foreign investment or export.

British Columbia depends on trade with the world. If the NDP government is “woke,” as they would like to call themselves, they should know that the slowing economy in China and the U.S.-China trade war, as well as Brexit, are all factors threatening the stability of the world economy. As a former Minister of International Trade, I’m very disappointed that the budget is not doing anything to buffer against the risk or come up with any innovative export or trade strategy. We need a plan to make B.C. an attractive place for trade and investment.

[5:35 p.m.]

Meantime, business confidence has sunk in British Columbia. According to the Collective Perspective Survey Report 2018-2019, done by the B.C. Chamber of Commerce from nearly 900 businesses from across the province, 54 percent don’t feel that the provincial government is supportive of business, 79 percent believe the cost of doing business in B.C. has increased and 49 percent say their confidence in B.C.’s economy has declined. I wonder, with such low business confidence, what the government’s plan is to generate revenue to pay for all the promises they have made to British Columbians.

This government taxes a lot. But even with raising taxes in July 2017, this government is barely projecting a surplus of $274 million for the coming fiscal year. Life is neither more affordable nor better. “Tax and spend” is the motto of this government, which we cannot afford. British Columbia needs a government that creates opportunity for all.

D. Routley: It gives me a good deal of pleasure to rise to speak to the second budget of this B.C. NDP government.

Before doing so, I’d like to echo many of my colleagues in issuing thanks and appreciation to all the people who have supported me over these years in this House, particularly, of course, the constituents who have voted for me to represent them here. Of course, more personally, my loving, dear spouse, Leanne Finlayson, without whom none of what I do would have meaning, so none of what I do would happen. I love Leanne beyond measure.

We recognize that we’re here meeting on the traditional and unceded territories of Lekwungen-speaking people, and I recognize that and give tribute to that. But I would also like to thank the many First Nations that I represent. I represent six First Nations in my constituency, and they are all important in every consideration I make in this House. They have a core importance to everything that we do — all of us in this House.

It was with a good deal of pleasure that I heard the Finance Minister begin her speech by reflecting on her own past and the open door policy of her parents and grandparents. How her home was a home to many. How they took people in, adopted and friends, from the community and the neighbourhood. How it was a beehive of activity and generosity.

I think that characterizes her as a person, but also her role in the history of British Columbia as a Finance Minister in such a very important time, as our province grapples with so many vexing and difficult issues that are causing our province to be jarred and wounded and bruised. The opiate crisis, the housing crisis, the homelessness crisis — all of these are indicators of inequality in our province that has a very direct and measurable effect on people. It has a very direct and measurable effect on our economy as well. As people do not achieve their fullest potential, we all suffer.

That’s what this budget is about. This budget is about the spirit of what the Finance Minister reflected on when she spoke of her childhood home. This budget is about those people who find themselves in the terrible circumstance of being homeless or that awful struggle of living in poverty.

This budget is about choices. All budgets are about choices. Budgets may be defined by numbers and dollars, but they are truly about values. They are about principles — choosing who and what will benefit, choosing who and what to focus our energies toward.

We saw the previous government’s choices, and they were made clear. They offered support to those who, I would say, were already advantaged. Those who needed the least received the most. Almost every measure you could point to had some component of that factor. It was quite discouraging, year after year, to hear budgets read that left out the very people that I represent, particularly First Nations.

[5:40 p.m.]

Now, I have to give credit to previous Premier Gordon Campbell for moving the treaty process forward and beginning a phase of this reconciliation that had been ongoing since the Nisga’a treaty in the ’90s. But what we saw, in its totality, were public policies that drove more and more people into poverty, drove more and more people onto the streets and did less and less — in fact, less than zero — in achieving reconciliation.

When we set up lofty goals for our relationship with First Nations in this province, and we offer such hope but then allow it to be dashed against the rocks of a cynical lack of delivery and follow-through, then it gets harder and harder every time to actually encourage hope and trust.

That’s our job now. This is not an easy job. We have had a long history of leaving behind First Nations in this province and not considering their interests. But we have committed to UNDRIP. We have committed to bringing a full circle to the relationship with First Nations to, rather, see it as one of the greatest advantages this province has — the youthful energy and the beautiful culture of First Nations, an amazing asset to every British Columbian.

This budget also tackles the biggest and most vexing problems of poverty, housing, reconciliation and child care while achieving surpluses. This budget shows the people of British Columbia, in a crystal-clear way, that all of the previous 16 years were also about choices — choices that did not put them to the front of the parade, choices that put a narrow and elite group to the front of that parade, while their interests were left wanting.

The previous speaker misconstrued the hard work to build capital in a home with the out-of-control real estate inflation that we experienced. She indicated there was no support for small business or no measures for business in the budget. Well, there was a 20 percent tax cut for small businesses. There’s the largest housing investment in B.C. history. There’s a massive capital investment in the province. All of these things create thousands of jobs. The other side knows it. If it were them, they would have put that bumper sticker with: “Tens of thousands of jobs.”

Well, this side is a little bit more modest than that. We know that billions of dollars of public investment in housing, education and child care will create jobs throughout this province in every community and not just benefit the limited few that have enjoyed protection over the past 16 years before the B.C. NDP took government.

Budget 2019 is all about creating opportunities. It’s about lifting people up. It’s about putting dollars back in peoples’ pockets. It’s about making life better for British Columbians. No longer will the few at the top be the only ones who benefit. People were told by the previous government that they had to choose: a strong economy or investments in people. That is something that we reject in totality. We know that without investments in the people of the province, we cannot have a sustained and thriving economy. We’re putting the people of British Columbia first.

We are experiencing the strongest economy in Canada. But the problem with that, over the previous years, is that the people have not benefitted broadly from that. How could we have the strongest economy in Canada and call previous budgets by the B.C. Liberal government fair, when we had the highest poverty rates, when he had the highest homelessness rates, when we had the highest rates of inequality and the lowest wage-growth rates? Those things do not equate to a fair economy.

What this budget attempts to do is establish fairness. The core principle of the party that I represent is equity. Equity — delivering equity, building equity, striving for equity. This budget provides equity. This budget is an investment in the equity of the people of British Columbia. This budget re-establishes balance and equity in the way people benefit from their government’s public policy decision.

[5:45 p.m.]

This budget is a display of principles by the party I represent that say that every person matters, that as long as we are not reaching our full potential and thriving as individuals, nor can we as a province. We are determined to deliver the services people need and, at the same time, build a strong and sustainable economy.

This budget moves forward on the biggest middle-class tax cut in a generation. That puts thousands of dollars back into people’s pockets, not this few elite who might take those dollars, invest them overseas or take a trip to a foreign country. Maybe some of our supporters will be able to do that. But most of what we’re doing, in supporting families, will be putting money into supporting that building of equity. That money will stay in the local economies and be cycled through many times, benefitting many people. We will see the benefit of that for years to come.

We are establishing a new B.C. child opportunity benefit, and that will allow more kids in British Columbia to reach their full potential. This will help families in a way that they had never imagined possible, looking back over the past 16 years. When you total it up, we’re looking at a 43 percent reduction in the burden of taxes and fees to families.

Eliminating the MSP premiums saved families $1,800. We’d already saved them $900 by reducing it by 50 percent, reversing the 100 percent increase that we had seen under the previous government for the previous 16 years. Now we’re eliminating it entirely — $1,800 per family — on top of child care benefits that can range as high as $20,000 per child.

This is such a significant change for young families that now they might actually be able to dream and hope of buying a home. In trying to do that, they will see that their government is also taking steps to reduce the out-of-control inflation, the money laundering and the speculation that had put them in a position of never being able to afford to own a home in the communities in which they work, in which they grew up. This is a significant game changer for families. This cannot be overstated.

This is, in fact, why I am here. I have sat in this House since 2005. Every time I come into this building, I’m struck by the ornate beauty of it, and I consider that that beauty was not established to celebrate and champion the interests of the elite, of the powerful, but instead is to elevate the honour and respect of the public interest and the people of British Columbia. That’s what this place should do at every turn. Every decision that is made in this House should be made thoughtfully, with deep consideration on the impacts, potential good and negative impacts, of public policy on the people of B.C.

The way you lift up families is not by loading them up with fees and cutting back on services, making the education of their children a lower-quality experience, making their lives more expensive. You do it by offering things like the child opportunity benefit, which will benefit families of one child to the tune of $1,600 up to a net income of $100,000.

We are eliminating the interest on B.C. student loans. This will have a $2,300 impact on many students over a ten-year period. These are game-changing steps. If you are not directly impacted by them, you might actually underestimate the effect that they have in the lives of struggling British Columbians.

We all know, and I would wager strongly that the members on the other side know well, that the people who come through the doors of our constituency offices generally don’t come in when things are going well. They come in when they struggle. They come in when they are at the end of their rope of hope. They don’t know what to do.

[5:50 p.m.]

We see people in these circumstances all the time. I know that this budget will help those people. I know that many of the people who come in, in tears, with their kids, not able to provide housing; not able to provide adequate food; not able to provide the kind of whole experience that we all hope for, for our children — sports and music and all the other experiences that round a person fully and allow a person to thrive as a human being. Those experiences have been difficult to provide, for the parents of British Columbia, to their children. This budget helps thousands upon thousands of families do that every year, beginning this year, and I’m very proud of that.

Putting thousands of dollars back into people’s pockets is a good thing. It’s good for people, for communities and for our economy. Creating opportunities is good for our economy and good for the people of B.C. We do that by investing in people. We are investing nearly $1 billion to make sure that every person can reach their full potential, in programming that is not…. This is an investment in the most cherishable and important asset in our province: the people of the province.

The child opportunity benefit. For the first child, the benefit is as high as $1,600 a year; for a family with two children, as much as $2,600; and for three children, as much as $3,400. Over the course of a child’s upbringing, families with one child will receive as much as $28,800. For families with two children, that number can exceed $40,000. This will put nearly $400 million a year back into the pockets of hard-working families, an enormous boost to their livelihood.

They will leverage that in a way that will benefit them and their children, but they will also leverage it in a way that benefits local economies, because it will be spent serving and supporting their children and their families in the community. That is where we need it most and where they need it most. There will be an additional $26 million invested in income and disability assistance enhancements. That will make life more fair for some of the most vulnerable people in this province. We all know them. They all come through our doors.

We’re investing in care and caregivers. We’re giving help to those who need it the most. We’re making sure that caregivers are supported. Family-based caregivers will be supported as foster parents are and will receive higher support payments starting April 1. This will be the first increase in a decade. Extended families will finally have their payments equal to foster parents.

With the housing crisis that we face, we’ve introduced a 30-point housing plan. Part of that plan is to organize and operate rent banks. The province will be funding local organizations to operate these rent banks. They will provide short-term, low- or no-interest loans so that renters don’t end up on the street because of a short-term crisis. We will all pay a much heavier price should a person end up on the street because of a transitory or temporary crisis. This is an important investment that will stabilize the lives of people who need it most.

The homelessness action plan will be supported with a $76 million investment that will support land acquisition and services to bring the number of modular homes, for people who need them, to 2,200. The people in Nanaimo who found themselves in a tent city downtown with nowhere to go are some of the people who will benefit from this kind of investment — and already are.

The Homes for B.C. plan has already begun to generate success, and 17,000 additional homes have already been built or are under construction. This is an extraordinary achievement. I’m surprised that it’s so large, actually. When I look at the numbers, I’m proud and I’m surprised that we could take such great strides in such a short period of time. I think it’s a testimony to the dedication and commitment of the Premier and the cabinet of the B.C. government.

[5:55 p.m.]

All across the board — be it legal aid, health care, education — we are attempting to improve the lives of British Columbians. With health care, we’re attempting to deliver more care, faster and where people need it. There’s $1.3 billion over the next three years in increased health funding, which will offer more hours of direct care and support of the health services that people depend on.

This investment will include funds to support new drugs being covered under Fair PharmaCare — for the B.C. Cancer Agency, it’s increasing the number of cancer-related surgeries, diagnostic imaging, expanding PET and CT scans — and increased chemotherapy demands. It supports B.C. Children’s and Women’s Hospital. It invests $4.4 billion over three years to expand and upgrade hospitals, including the ICU in Nanaimo, which was rated in 2012 as the most dangerous ICU in the country. We have been waiting, and this budget delivers. This will deliver medical and diagnostic equipment, and health information and management systems. It will provide more direct care hours, and it will hire more health care professionals.

In mental health and addictions, we heard of many announcements of programs and coordinated efforts between ministries to finally answer this crisis, which has vexed so many individuals and families in our province. I would wager that every family in this province has been affected. Mine certainly has been. This budget makes a $74 million investment in a child and youth mental health strategy that will save lives. It will save lives. That is something that is priceless and that, at any price, is worth it.

In education, we saw years of starved systems, with downloaded costs from the provincial government, unsupported, being put on to school districts — a cynical approach to funding that went to per-student funding when the government knew very well that demographically, the population of students would decline. Attaching the funding package to a declining number of students was guaranteed to pull funding down. They could even increase per-student funding a little bit and brag that it was the highest level per student ever, even though it added up to cuts. Over 240 schools, I believe, were closed by the previous government, many of those schools in the district I represented as a school trustee.

Madam Speaker, take my word for it. We did not close those schools on the grounds of educational pedagogy. This was not done to benefit the education of students. It was done to save school districts that were financially put into hardship by the previous government. At the same time, they created a decade-long political battle in the Supreme Court with teachers, which they lost on behalf of British Columbians and at the expense of the students and families and teachers of this province.

Budget 2019 is investing over half a billion dollars to ensure that our schools deliver the quality education that British Columbians expect — $58 million over three years for the classroom enhancement fund, which will support better classrooms, and $1 billion into new schools, additions, seismic upgrades and property purchases. It’s the largest capital investment in B.C.’s history.

As a former school trustee and the grandson, son and brother of teachers, I am thrilled. Billions have been invested in new schools, additions and seismic upgrades already. More is coming. Record investments are achieving smaller class sizes, improving schools and classrooms, giving children more support and giving children a better experience in public education.

[6:00 p.m.]

A friend of mine, a teacher, tried to describe to people how the cuts to education affected the experience of education. Teachers and students and the parents who support them struggled on, still delivered excellence in terms of marks and grades. British Columbian students are at the top.

But what was impacted more than anything else was the experience of being in school, in a classroom like my sister’s classroom, where she had three grade levels and, a few years ago under the previous government, had eight special needs children spread across three grade levels. She’s an excellent teacher, devoted beyond measure, yet she just about quit her profession because of the stress and pressure that she was under. We are responding to that, and I’m so proud of that fact.

We are building a strong economy. B.C.’s economy is forecast to grow by 2.5 percent this year, 2.6 percent next year, leading all of Canada. Wages grew by 4.1 percent last year, the highest rate of wage growth. Compare that to the previous decade under the B.C. Liberals, when we had the lowest wage growth in the country. This is a huge turnaround for the people of B.C. — one that they deserve richly. We lead the country with the lowest unemployment rate, 4.7 percent. And we are balancing budgets, with a projected surplus of $274 million this year and more to follow.

Our debt-to-GDP ratio is at its lowest level since before the financial crisis, and we remain the only province with a triple-A credit rating from all three major international rating agencies, something that members on the other side predicted would be lost the minute the NDP were elected into government. Well, things haven’t quite worked out that way, have they?

The operating debt has been eliminated for the first time in 40 years. As well, $20 billion is being invested in infrastructure throughout the province. That is the largest capital plan in B.C.’s history. That will create thousands upon thousands of jobs in every community, every corner of this province. Construction of schools, roads, health care facilities, post-secondary institutions — those alone will support over 80,000 jobs during construction over just the next three years.

We are investing $902 million in CleanBC — the largest investment in climate action in B.C.’s history. We are reducing climate pollution by shifting homes, vehicles and businesses away from fossil fuels. These are the things that this budget achieves — a budget measured in numbers but quantified, really, in values and principles.

The judgment of what we’re doing and the effect it’s having on people’s lives will be clear because the families of British Columbia will live better lives because of this budget. That makes me so proud to stand and support a budget that does act on principle, that does address the core value of the party I represent — that being equity. This budget builds equity. This budget provides equity.

This budget delivers equity — equity in people, equity in the capital value of this province and equity in the environmental sustainability of this province. It’s equity in fairness, justice and the recognition that this place, the public policy decisions made here and the spending of public money should always be predicated on the highest benefit and value for the citizens of British Columbia — all of them, not just a privileged few.

I thank you. I’ll take my place and tell you again that I am so proud to support this budget that really reflects the values that I hold, the principles that I fight for and, I think, the reason that the people in Nanaimo–North Cowichan have elected me to represent the B.C. NDP in this House: to deliver equity, to deliver what they want. This budget achieves that.

Deputy Speaker: Shuswap.

[6:05 p.m.]

G. Kyllo: Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s the first time I’ve risen in the House to actually see you sitting in the chair. Welcome. It’s great to see you.

This is always a great time and a great opportunity to thank those who have allowed me to take my place here in the people’s House, in the Legislature. First off, I just want to give a special thank-you to my lovely wife, Georgina, my wife of 31 years, my high school sweetheart. Georgina, thank you very much for all of your support and allowing me to actually be away from you and the girls and the family and the grandkids to represent the hard-working women and men of the Shuswap.

Also, it’s great to recognize I’ve got four amazing daughters — Sarah, Brittany, Angela and Samantha. They’ve been very productive the last number of years. I’ve got to admit that this is the first time in, I think, six years that one of them has not been pregnant, knock on wood. But they’ve blessed Georgina and I with eight amazing grandchildren just in the last five years. We have Kylie, Siddha, Nova, Hannah, Nolan, Journey, Addison and just recently, a few weeks ago, our second grandson, little Harvey.

I think when we all talk about the reasons that actually drive us and motivate us to be here in the House, to actually do the work of the people of this province, it’s largely about our kids and our grandkids and those individuals that we represent. I quit working for myself a long time ago.

I remember about 25 years ago my wife and I were actually on our way up to Hudson’s Hope to visit my grandfather, whose health was failing. We stopped in Prince George, and we stayed at my Uncle Bob and Aunt Laura’s house.

I was very proud at that point in time. I’d been working in the family business, and I’d just recently acquired a very small number of shares — not a lot. But I really felt that by having some ownership stake in the company, I was finally working for myself.

As we were leaving on a very cold minus 25 morning, we had our two older girls strapped into the back seat. They were about three and…. Actually, Brittany was only a couple of weeks old. I remember being outside talking to my uncle, sharing with him how proud I was to finally be working for myself.

He looks at me and says: “You’re not working for yourself.” I said: “No, Uncle Bob, I actually am. Like, I know I only have a few shares in the company, but I’m actually working for myself.” Now, he says: “No you’re not.” So I’m actually arguing with my uncle about the fact that, no, I actually feel that I’m working for myself.

I totally missed the point. He pointed in the back seat and said: “You’re not working for yourself. You’re working for them now.” That has never been lost on me. Once you get married and you start a family, it is all about your kids — and now the grandkids. It is not so much about ourselves, but about those that we’re working for.

I just want to share and echo some of the comments made by some of my colleagues, even members opposite, about the reason why we’re here, what drives us to do this job. It’s about that opportunity to represent the next generation, those future leaders that are going to actually represent our amazing province.

This is also a great opportunity to recognize my lovely constituency assistant, Holly Cowan. Holly has been doing the role…. She was working as George Abbott’s constituency assistant for about 12 years before I joined the ranks. So Holly certainly has lots of tenure. She’s got such an amazing relationship with the different businesses and individuals and all of the different social service agencies within the Shuswap riding.

My ability to be successful in serving constituents of Shuswap largely resides in the ability of Holly and the great work that she does. So Holly, thank you very much. Not a day goes by that I don’t appreciate all the amazing work that you do. I just want to let you know that I certainly appreciate everything.

I’m very proud, as I mentioned, to represent the hard-working men and women of the Shuswap riding. Shuswap is an amazing part of our province. The Shuswap riding is about 8,600 square kilometres — nothing near the size of my colleague for Peace River North — but a significantly large riding.

I know some of our colleagues in the Lower Mainland have ridings that only span six or eight city blocks. So there are some ridings that are very small. I think that it’s always worthwhile to just kind of share the differentials between Metro ridings and rural ridings. A lot of MLAs that represent ridings in Metro, larger areas, do not necessarily have the same issues that you would see in a riding like Peace River North or in Shuswap.

[6:10 p.m.]

In Shuswap, we have five different municipalities. We have the municipality of Salmon Arm, which is the largest city in the Shuswap riding, a community of about 17,600 residents. We have a new mayor, Alan Harrison, who’s doing an amazing job in leading his council.

The next largest community…. We actually have two communities that are right adjacent to each other. The city of Armstrong, which is one of the older communities in British Columbia, is surrounded by the township of Spallumcheen. Those communities are about 5,000 population each. We also have the city of Enderby and the town that I reside in, the municipality of Sicamous, which is, unfortunately, only about 2,700 people during the winter months, but it grows and thrives to about 8,000 people during the summer months.

My hometown of Sicamous is also recognized as the “Houseboat capital of Canada.” We’re on the sunny shores of Shuswap Lake, which is one of the top houseboating destinations in North America. It brings literally tens of thousands of visitors from across our great province and from south of our border to experience the amazing splendour of Shuswap Lake.

Shuswap Lake has about 30 different provincial and marine parks. Much of Shuswap Lake is accessible only by boat, which provides an amazing experience. Although the houseboat industry years ago was more akin to a floating RV, in recent years, the companies have actually expanded, and they’re more like floating condos. Some of these large boats are upwards of 80 feet long and 22 feet wide, with ten to 12 different staterooms and three or four bathrooms, hot tubs, fireplaces. It’s an amazing industry that provides a great experience for folks, as I mentioned, from around the globe.

As we start to look at the budget, which is, I know, top of mind for all of us here, I just want to go back a little bit to what got us to this particular point. I’m sure that I’ll see some eye-rolling across the aisle, but we need to go and look back at what has brought us to this point.

I know that the members opposite certainly like to talk about 16 years, but I think it’s important, when we have a look at the context of the budget, the fiscal performance of our province, to have a look at what happened back in the 1990s.

I know it was a long time ago, and I know of lots of constituents that may not have been born then and may not have a strong recollection of what actually happened in the 1990s. This was a time when the economy across Canada was largely very prosperous. B.C., at one point in time, in the early 90s, was leading Canada in economic growth. But under the NDP government, after consecutive budgets of increased taxation, B.C. lost its business friendliness, and we started to see unemployment rates rise. We started to see capital start to exit our province.

By the end of the 1990s, for the very first time, B.C. actually became a have-not province. I’m not sure about other members here in the House, but for me, when I look at the wealth and the amazing talents of British Columbians, to think that this province could actually fall to the status of a have-not province is very troubling.

What we also need to give consideration to is that we saw B.C. also have the highest unemployment rate in the entire country. As capital started to flee, our employment started to plummet. British Columbians were forced to go outside of British Columbia borders to find work.

In 2001, when the then Gordon Campbell government took the reins…. We also might recall that when the NDP lost power in British Columbia, they lost 77 of 79 seats. Just think about that. Out of 79 seats that were available in the province back in 2001, the NDP lost 77. Now, if that’s not telling and sending a message, I don’t know what is.

When Gordon Campbell came in, they inherited from the NDP government….

Interjection.

G. Kyllo: Well, that’s true. They did win two seats. Yes.

When the B.C. Liberals took the reins, what they inherited from the NDP was a $5.6 billion structural deficit. For those that may not recall, you might remember the fudge-it budgets, some of the challenges with some of the monkeying that was going on with the fiscal books of this province.

[6:15 p.m.]

There was a lot of hard work to be done in the early 2000s, and a lot of hard work was done. There was a requirement for lots of cuts, lots of austerity measures, in order to get the fiscal books of this province, of the people’s House, back into order.

As our leader indicated earlier today in his remarks, you cannot tax your way to prosperity. So when the B.C. Liberals came into power in 2001, there was a lot of heavy lifting to do. There was a lot of work to be done, and to try to get our fiscal house into order, there was requirement to actually look at paying down the operating debt. A lot of work to be done on failing infrastructure that had had largely no investment through the 1990s.

B.C. Hydro was one. During the 1990s, there was almost zero capital expenditure invested into B.C. Hydro to actually maintain infrastructure, much of which had been built back in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. So think about when the B.C. Liberals came into power in 2001 and some of the challenges that the B.C. Liberal government had in order to try and correct all of the wrongs that were done in the 1990s, all of the negative impact it had on the investment community in B.C. and the business community. As we moved forward into 2017, the economy was doing extremely well, but that wasn’t by chance. That was from hard, focused work.

I had the honour of serving the member for Prince George–Valemount as her parliamentary secretary to the then Ministry of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training, with the primary responsibility for the B.C. jobs plan. That was a strategic, focused plan on looking at how we could actually grow the economy in this province. It wasn’t focused on any one sector; it was very broad. It focused on all the resource sectors, like forestry and mining and natural gas development. It also focused on advanced education and the agrifood sector, as well as tourism, transportation and technology. It was a very broad approach, looking at diversifying B.C.’s economy.

At the same time, there was a lot of work done to try and diversify the economy of our province. The economies of Ontario, if my memory serves me correctly…. I think that in Ontario, 90 percent of their trade is with the United States. In Alberta, about 80 percent of their trade is with the United States. And if we go back to 2001, about 74 percent of all of B.C.’s trade was with the U.S. We were intrinsically linked to the U.S. economy, and there was a focused effort by some of my colleagues and previous members to look at growing trade ties with Asia, to look at diversifying our economy so we weren’t relying on just one economy south of our border. And it was largely successful.

By 2017, we reduced our reliance on the U.S. Don’t get me wrong. The U.S. is still our single largest client, our single largest trading partner. But we went from 74 percent trade with the United States, and that reduced down to just over 50 percent by 2017. The diversification of different industry sectors which we focused on in our province, as well as the diversification of markets, led to a very strong and robust economy. There was a lot of work done.

As the NDP well recognized when they came to power, in conjunction with their three Green Party members, in 2017, they didn’t inherit a $5.6 billion structural deficit. They inherited a $2.7 billion surplus. Now, that surplus was also supplemented this past fiscal with an additional $1.6 billion from the federal government. That also was related back to the strong fiscal performance of the province of British Columbia during the reign of the B.C. Liberal government — a far cry, a very different set of circumstances by which the NDP came to govern our province.

The NDP took charge of our province at a time when our economy was growing. We had the lowest unemployment rate in the country. Yet in spite of inheriting a $2.7 billion surplus, what did they do? Well, there are a couple of things. The first was, although there was no demand, no need for it — you don’t need to raise taxes when you are sitting on a $2.7 billion surplus — they chose to raise corporate taxes by 1 percent.

[6:20 p.m.]

Now, people may say: “Well, 1 percent is not a lot.” Well, I’ll tell you what. It is a lot when you have a look at all the different jurisdictions that we have to compete with around the globe.

They also raised the top tax rate for British Columbians by another 2 percent. And the other thing that they did which was very interesting — this is their midterm budget update in the fall of 2017 — is they repealed the requirement for the revenue neutrality of the carbon tax.

Now, why would that happen? The carbon tax is a tax that the NDP voted against, that they actually campaigned against. I’ll probably get the terminology wrong, but I think “Axe the tax” was the actual slogan that they ran on. Yet when they suddenly take the keys of the treasury of our province, the first thing they do….

In spite of running on a platform about being concerned about the environment, the first thing they do is they tell British Columbians: “You know that carbon tax you’ve been paying?” — which, over the next three years of the next fiscal, will be about $6 billion…. “Of that $6 billion in carbon tax we’re going to be taking out of your pockets, we’re going to repeal the requirement so that we no longer have to share with British Columbians how we’re spending it.”

That is offensive. As we start to look at the budget and the different increases in taxation that have actually been piled on, it is punishing businesses in B.C. It is driving investment out of our province. The storm clouds are on the horizon.

I’m a very positive guy. I’ve been in business for a long time. I’m normally a cup-half-full type of person. However, I am very concerned, as are many of the different businesses in my riding of Shuswap. We’ve seen tax increase and new taxes layered on, in spite of the Premier of the province, during the 2017 election, claiming there would be no new taxes other than those that are contained in the NDP election platform. When they came to power, they brought in the employer health tax.

They’re calling it an employer health tax. The employer health tax is going to layer on about $1.9 billion annually of new additional taxation onto businesses, employers, across our province. The member opposite, earlier in his remarks, talked about: “Hey, we reduced small business taxes by 20 percent.”

Let’s put this into context. The small business tax rate is 2½ percent. So dropping the rate from 2½ to 2 percent is a 20 percent reduction. That is saving you half a percent. So let’s have a look. There’s a company that I’ve spent time with. They do about $13 million a year in top-line sales. Their net pre-tax profit goal and objective is about $500,000 a year. The reduction in the small business tax rate from 2½ to 2 percent is going to save that business $2,500 a year. So the 20 percent reduction is $2,500.

But you know what? The new employer health tax is going to cost them an extra $176,000 a year starting in 2019, in this year. So “Hey, we’re making it affordable. We’re going to reduce your taxes. We’re going to give you a gift. We’re going to reduce the small business tax by 20 percent. We’re going to save you $2,500. But on the other hand, we’re going to be digging into your pocket to the tune of $176,000 a year.” That is offensive. That is not affordable.

The members opposite will talk about the reduction in MSP premiums. I think — to give full marks to the B.C. Liberals — it was the B.C. Liberals that actually announced a 50 percent reduction in MSP premiums starting in 2018. That was part of their budget, and the NDP did match that and then went one step further to say that they were going to eliminate it.

We know they have not eliminated it. They have just transferred that tax. They’ve replaced it with another form of taxation. So when you have a look at the impact of the MSP reduction, that will save the average business $450 a year.

Interjections.

Deputy Speaker: Members, come to order.

G. Kyllo: Thank you, Madam Speaker.

[6:25 p.m.]

Just to put this in perspective. If you have an employee that you’re paying $50,000 a year, a 1.95 percent employer health tax premium — that’s roughly 2 percent — is going to cost that business $1,000. So in this fiscal, they get to pay $1,000 for that individual, plus the $450 in MSP, whereas last year, they were paying $450. That was a commitment that was made by both parties: that in 2018, MSP premiums were going to reduced by 50 percent.

Instead of paying $450 a year on an ongoing basis, the NDP have replaced that — where in this fiscal, for an employee at $50,000 a year, the business is now paying $450 in MSP plus an additional $1,000 in the employer health tax, for $1,450.

When we have a look at the tech sector or we have a look at the mining industry, those jobs are paying upwards of $100,000 a year. What is the impact of the employer health tax on that business? Well, at 1.95 percent, that’s $1,950 now in employer health tax, plus the $450. Doing the quick math, that’s $2,300.

So whereas that business was anticipating paying $450 in MSP premiums on behalf of that employee, based on the 50 percent reduction under this government, they get to pay $2,300 a year for an employee making $100,000. That is offensive. That is not providing supports for businesses. It is telling businesses: “We’re going to punish you. We are going to make you less competitive.”

It is not just the employer health tax. It is the carbon tax. It is the increases to minimum wage. There are so many things that have just made businesses in B.C. less and less competitive. At the same time, when we have a look at…. You know, when I wake up in the morning, I’m Canadian first, and I’m British Columbian second. We have an obligation to our fellow Canadians to assist them in providing them an opportunity of getting their products cost-effectively to market. Picking a fight with Alberta, in opposing the Trans Mountain pipeline, is not making friends with our neighbours. It is un-Canadian.

The NDP are starting to weigh into things that are not set out in the constitution. There is a reason why things like pipelines, railways, highways and airports are under the auspices of the federal government. It’s because we are one nation, and we need to be standing together to assist one another in providing a cost-effective means of getting product to market. Just because we have the privilege of living on B.C.’s coast does not, in my estimation, give us the right to preclude other provinces from being competitive and having access to markets.

We see the investment climate starting to change. This is not just a B.C. phenomenon. This is across Canada. We’re seeing investment start to flee, and we’re seeing it in so many different sectors of the economy. In the housing market, the government’s own numbers are projecting a 30 percent reduction in housing starts. Well, for housing prices, it’s basic economics 101. It’s supply and demand. If you choke down the supply and the demand is continuing to grow, prices are going to go up. It is that simple.

The speculation tax, again, picks fights with other Canadians. Certainly, it’s not building any friendships and attracting any capital from Alberta. As they undertake these different measures, we wonder why and where B.C.’s economy is going to continue to grow and how we’re going to have an opportunity to stay ahead of some of the economic downturns that are being projected around the globe. I’m extremely concerned. This is a tax-and-spend government. They have an insatiable appetite for increased spending.

I guess I’ve got to give full marks. There are some things in the budget that are definitely valuable. I believe that even the previous B.C. Liberal government was finally getting to the point — after paying off the credit cards, looking at retiring operating debt — to start giving back, to start making those necessary investments in all those support services that so many citizens in British Columbia rely upon. So there were a couple items of note in the budget that I certainly feel were worth mentioning. One was the increase in funding for foster parents. Foster parents provide such an important and essential service for our youth that are without a home.

[6:30 p.m.]

I don’t think there’s anything more valiant or that should be not just respected but celebrated than those families that are willing to actually adopt youth in our province that are without a home. So full marks to the NDP for an increased lift in funding for foster parents.

The other piece is the…. I believe it’s about a $76 million lift in funding that has been announced now to help youth with mental health. We do need to provide those necessary supports for our children.

My lovely wife, Georgina…. I’m very happy that she doesn’t mind me sharing. She’s quite open. She suffered with depression and mental health issues for a number of years. As a young father and as her husband, I didn’t understand, 30 years ago, what that was like. And it wasn’t hard just on Georgina or even myself; it was on the entire family. The girls struggled.

I think that anything we can do to provide additional supports for children, on increased education…. Anything we can do to reduce the stigma around mental health is certainly a valiant effort. Again, full marks to the NDP. That’s supportive.

In opposition, our responsibility and my responsibility…. I share a co-critic role for Jobs, Trade and Technology with the member for Richmond-Queensborough.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

Our focus, and the whole idea of “critic,” is to criticize, to critique. Government has tens of millions of dollars that they spend through an organization called government communications and public engagement, talking about all the wondrous things that they are doing on an ongoing basis. Our job as opposition, and for various critic roles, is to ensure that we are holding government to account, that we are identifying and sharing with our constituents and with British Columbians those pieces that the government is not telling you.

I go back to my main focus, and again, this fits in with the role that I had previously on the jobs plan. The NDP government has no jobs plan. They were 20 minutes into the throne speech before the word “job” was even mentioned.

When I have a look at the minuscule funding lift that was provided to the Minister of Jobs, Trade and Technology, when I have a look at the absence of any concrete plan, with any set objectives, with any measurables by which this government even intends to measure their performance or their success with managing the province and increasing investment into B.C…. It is offensive that they have not made it a top priority.

Because all of the wondrous things that the NDP are rolling dollars out with have only been able to be provided because of our strong economy, our strong fiscal performance, our fiscal prudence that was exhibited for 16 years, where we actually focused on correcting many of the wrongs that were done by the previous NDP government. So I certainly have concerns, as do many of my constituents and many of the businesses throughout the Shuswap.

The member opposite mentioned First Nations reconciliation. In addition to the great communities and the regional districts that are part of Shuswap, I’m also very fortunate to have a number of First Nations communities within Shuswap. We have Splatsin First Nation, largely in the Enderby area. We have the Okanagan Indian Band, which is down the west side of Okanagan Lake. We have the Neskonlith First Nation, and we also have the Little Shuswap Indian band.

There are a number of First Nations communities in and around the Shuswap. They aren’t entirely within Shuswap, but they are part it, and they create a lot of the fabric of our communities. They are extremely welcoming.

[6:35 p.m.]

As much as the member opposite in his previous comments commented about, maybe in his estimation, the lack of focus by the previous government, there was a lot of work done for economic benefit-sharing agreements.

I see the light is on, and my time is up. Thank you very much. I certainly will not be voting in support of this current budget.

J. Brar: It’s a real honour for me to stand up in this House and respond to Budget 2019. I will come to the budget speech in a moment.

First of all, I would like to convey my sincere thanks to the people who have been part of my political journey. I exist in this House because of the people of Surrey who elected me as their representative four times. That is certainly a rare honour. Therefore, I would like to convey my sincere thanks to the people of Surrey-Fleetwood for giving me the opportunity and putting their faith in me.

Huge thanks to the two staff members, Navneet Kahlon and Deanna Fasciani, at the Surrey-Fleetwood office and to Gurbrinder Kang in the Victoria office. They’re doing an excellent job, serving the people of British Columbia and assisting me in doing the same on a day-to-day basis.

Last but not least, thanks from deep inside of my heart to the love of my life, my friend, my beautiful wife, Rajwant Brar, and to my daughter, Noor, and my son, Fateh. For their unconditional support, I would like to say thank you to them as well.

Coming back to the budget speech, I did listen to the member for Shuswap with full interest, and I will make comments about the comments he made.

The first thing I want to say…. The budget is all about making choices. The budget is the biggest and most important decision that any government makes for the people. The last government made choices for 16 years, and now our government is making choices. How are our choices different from their choices? That’s the key question in this budget debate.

Before I go into that, I would like to respond to the member for Shuswap. There are many things he said in this House. If there’s one thing that’s outstanding about B.C. Liberals which I want to say right now…. B.C. Liberals are masters in fearmongering. They’re masters in fearmongering. If there’s any award, they will get all the awards in that category.

Before the last election, they said to the people of British Columbia that if the NDP form the government, the economy will be dead and people will move to Alberta. That’s what they said at that time, and that was completely wrong.

I will go back to the choices the previous government made. They made the choices that benefited the top 2 percent of people in the province of British Columbia, while they forced the middle-class people to pay more for everything. That was the philosophy they worked on.

The dark era began in 2001 when they took power in B.C. On the very first day, their government made a choice to give a huge tax break to the top 2 percent — a huge tax break to the top 2 percent. On the other hand, they cut services people depend on. I would like to mention to the member for Shuswap that they were able to give that tax cut because the NDP left behind a $2 billion surplus.

Interjections.

[6:40 p.m.]

J. Brar: You can laugh around. They gave all that money to the…

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Members.

Thank you.

J. Brar: …rich friends they have. In addition to that, they cut funding for health care, education and other essential services for the people of B.C. They even cut the bus pass for seniors. The bus pass for seniors — they cut that. They sold land in Surrey that was purchased to build a hospital for the people of Surrey. They made choices to close 240 schools in the province of British Columbia, making learning difficult for our students.

They signed long-term private power contracts that forced British Columbians to buy expensive power and sell it at a loss. These insider deals will cost every B.C. Hydro customer an extra $200 for the next 20 years. In total, people in B.C. will have to pay a staggering $16 billion in unnecessary costs because of the choice they made to sign IPPs.

The unfolding story of money laundering is even more disturbing. The unfolding story of money laundering is even more disturbing for the people of British Columbia. The report by Peter German points out that the previous government, members on the other side, turned a blind eye to dirty money, in spite of clear links to organized crime, drug trafficking and real estate. They made a choice to cancel funding in 2009 for the special police unit tasked with investigating illegal gambling. That’s the choice they made when the dirty money process was going on in casinos in B.C.

The Globe and Mail newspaper’s report claims that about $5 billion of dirty money was invested in the real estate industry, making housing unaffordable for people.

Those were some of the choices the old government made — choices, basically, that put more money…

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Members.

Thank you.

J. Brar: …in the pockets of the top 2 percent, wealthy people, while opportunity became further out of reach for most British Columbians. Those are the choices they made for 16 years. That’s why they’re sitting on the other side. That’s why they’re sitting there.

We, on the other hand, are making choices to make life better for all British Columbians. Our Budget 2019 is about creating opportunities so that people can thrive and realize their full dreams. We are putting thousands of dollars back in people’s pockets. That’s what we’re doing, with the biggest middle class tax cut ever in the history of this province. We have given that to the middle class. They have given a tax cut to the top 2 percent. That’s the difference between us and them.

We are taking a different and balanced approach. We are putting people first. They can laugh about that, but that’s the reality. We are tackling the big problems that people face in B.C. We are balancing the budget and continuing to build on the strongest economy in the country and ever in the province of British Columbia. We are investing in people to build a strong economy for today and for tomorrow, creating a foundation on which everyone can thrive and realize their dreams.

[6:45 p.m.]

I would like to highlight 11 things we are doing in this budget so the members can remember, you know?

The first one is about the economy. Our plan is working. B.C. has the strongest economy in Canada, with the highest wage growth in a decade. The British Columbia economy is thriving. B.C.’s economy is forecast to grow by 2.5 percent this year and 2.6 percent next year, leading all of Canada.

Wages grew by 4.1 percent last year — the highest rate of wage growth in the country. B.C. continues to lead the country with a 4.7 percent unemployment rate, the lowest unemployment rate we have ever had. By the by, I would like to tell members that there is a 5 percent vacancy in the province of British Columbia. If you factor that in, there is zero unemployment at this point in time.

Interjection.

J. Brar: I know it’s painful for the member to hear. It is painful for the member to hear, and it happens that way.

Budget 2019 is balanced. It’s the third budget in a row that’s balanced. That’s what happened. We are eliminating the operating debt for the first time in 40 years — in 40 years. We are investing $20 billion in infrastructure in communities throughout the province.

Interjections.

J. Brar: I know it’s hard for members to listen to that. But I will continue to tell the story, a success story, of this government.

The largest capital plan in B.C.’s history, ever, took place. The construction of these schools, roads, health care facilities and post-secondary institutions will support over 80,000 jobs during the construction over the next three years.

Our economic success should benefit the people who make our economy work. That’s the fair approach. Our Budget 2019 puts people first. It provides endless opportunities for people, and we are taking action to make life more affordable, to deliver the services people depend on and to build a strong, sustainable economy.

Budget 2019 moves forward on the biggest middle-class tax cut in a generation, putting thousands of dollars back in people’s pockets. We are creating new opportunities so that people and businesses can thrive.

Two, Budget 2019 offers the B.C. child opportunity benefit. To make sure every child has the opportunity to thrive, Budget 2019 introduces the new B.C. child opportunity benefit. I want to tell the member that the benefit gives support to families for every child they have up to the age of 18 years. For the first child, the benefit is as high as $1,600 a year. For a family with two children, the benefit is as high as $2,600. For the third child, the benefit to the family is as high as $3,400. That’s good news for many families and for the people of British Columbia.

Interjection.

J. Brar: They’re listening now.

The child opportunity benefit is a historic investment that puts more dollars in the pockets of middle-class families. That’s a good thing.

Three, we are eliminating interest on B.C. student loans. I don’t know why the members on the other side have problems. Our government is delivering on our commitment to eliminate interest from all new and existing British Columbia student loans. As of February 19, 2019, all B.C. student loans will stop accumulating interest — very good news for the students. Students and young families with loans will save an average of $2,300 in interest charges over a ten-year repayment period. Instead of worrying about going into debt, young people will be able to focus on learning.

[6:50 p.m.]

Four, we are eliminating MSP premiums for British Columbians. We are fully eliminating MSP premiums on January 1, 2020, saving families as much as $1,800 a year. At $2.7 billion, this is one of the largest tax cuts for the people of British Columbia in the history of the province, and we are proud of that — in the history of the province, one of the biggest tax cuts to the middle class.

They could never think about doing that. It should be noted that members on the other side want to keep the MSP, forcing families to pay as much as $1,800. That is their plan, but we are going to eliminate MSP completely.

Five, we are increasing income assistance and disability rates for the most vulnerable people. Our government has already increased income assistance rates by $100 a month. Budget 2019 increases income and disability assistance rates by an additional $50 per month, bringing the total increase to $150 a month, or $1,800 a year. This means more money for groceries, transportation and life’s basic necessities.

Six, we are taking action on housing affordability and homelessness. For the first time in B.C. history, the province will be funding local organizations to operate rent banks that will provide short-term, low- or no-interest loans so that renters don’t end up on the street because of a crisis. It’s a good thing.

We are moving forward on a homeless action plan with a $76 million investment to bring the number of modular homes for people who need them to 2,200. Our Homes for B.C. plan, introduced last year, is already showing results. The housing market has begun to moderate across all segments, and 17,000 additional homes have already been built or are under construction.

Seven, we are investing in health care, completely ignored by the other side when they were in power. We are moving forward with investment in our health care system to deliver better and faster medical care to people.

Budget 2019 provides more than $1.3 billion over three years to the Ministry of Health to offer more hours of direct care and to support the health services that people depend on. We are investing $4.4 billion over three years to expand and upgrade hospitals, medical and diagnostic equipment and health information management systems to give patients the quality care they deserve. More direct care hours means British Columbians get the care and support they need with their first visit, instead of being left in hallways and waiting rooms, as happened for 16 long years.

Eight, we are building a system for child and youth mental health. That was completely ignored by the other side for 16 years. It is time B.C. had a child and youth mental health system where families can ask once and get help fast. Budget 2019 starts to build that system with a $74 million investment in a child and youth mental health strategy, including more Foundry centres for youth 12 to 24, to bring integrated services under one roof, and more programs, including in schools, for parents and families to support kids’ early-years development. This is part of our government’s work to improve mental health services for people who deserve this service.

[6:55 p.m.]

Nine, we are making a major investment in our education system. I know the former Minister of Education is there and will listen carefully. Our children deserve a good education and safe and supportive classrooms. Budget 2019 invests half a billion dollars to ensure that our schools deliver the quality education British Columbians expect for their children.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Members.

J. Brar: This includes $58 million over three years for the classroom enhancement fund to support better classrooms for our kids. We have invested almost a billion dollars in new schools, additions, seismic upgrades and property purchases, the largest capital investment ever made in the history of the province in education. We are also making a record investment to achieve smaller class sizes, improve schools and classrooms and give kids more support.

Ten, Mr. Speaker….

Mr. Speaker: Member, noting the hour, if I might ask you to budget your time.

J. Brar moved adjournment of debate.

Motion approved.

Hon. M. Farnworth moved adjournment of the House.

Motion approved.

Mr. Speaker: This House stands adjourned until 10 a.m. tomorrow morning.

The House adjourned at 6:56 p.m.