Orders of the Day

Hon. R. Kahlon: I call Motion 23 on the order paper.

[2:35 p.m.]

Government Motions on Notice

MOTION 23 — MEMBERSHIP CHANGE TO
AGRICULTURE, FISH AND FOOD COMMITTEE

Hon. R. Kahlon: I move Motion 23, with respect to the membership on the Select Standing Committee on Agriculture, Fish and Food, standing in my name on the order paper.

[That Megan Dykeman replace Kelly Greene as a member of the Select Standing Committee on Agriculture, Fish and Food.]

Motion approved.

Hon. R. Kahlon: Hon. Speaker, I call Motion 24 on the order paper.

MOTION 24 — MEMBERSHIP CHANGE TO
CHILDREN AND YOUTH COMMITTEE

Hon. R. Kahlon: I move Motion 24, with respect to the membership on the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth, standing in my name on the order paper.

[That Michele Babchuk replace Kelli Paddon as a member of the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth.]

Motion approved.

Hon. R. Kahlon: Hon. Speaker, I call Motion 26 on the order paper.

MOTION 26 — MEMBERSHIP CHANGE TO
LEGISLATIVE INITIATIVES COMMITTEE

Hon. R. Kahlon: I move Motion 26, with respect to the membership on the Select Standing Committee on Legislative Initiatives, standing in my name on the order paper.

[That Spencer Chandra Herbert replace Mable Elmore as a member of the Select Standing Committee on Legislative Initiatives.]

Motion approved.

Hon. R. Kahlon: Hon. Speaker, I call Motion 27 on the order paper.

MOTION 27 — MEMBERSHIP CHANGE TO
PUBLIC ACCOUNTS COMMITTEE

Hon. R. Kahlon: I move Motion 27, with respect to the membership on the Select Standing Committee on Public Accounts, standing in my name on the order paper.

[That Spencer Chandra Herbert replace Fin Donnelly as a member of the Select Standing Committee on Public Accounts.]

Motion approved.

Hon. R. Kahlon: Hon. Speaker, in this House, I call continued debate on the budget.

In Committee A, I call supplementary estimates for the Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation.

[S. Chandra Herbert in the chair.]

Budget Debate

(continued)

Deputy Speaker: Thank you, everyone.

The member for Kamloops–North Thompson to continue.

P. Milobar: Thank you. I’m pleased to stand and continue my remarks from yesterday. Obviously, in the spirit of time, yesterday I wasn’t able to get into the whole budget. It also afforded the evening to dig into things just a little bit more.

I want to touch on a few other areas of this budget that are of concern to the opposition and that should be of great concern to members of the public as well, because history sometimes, in this place, does repeat itself.

Although we roll our eyes when the current government mentions 16 years and things of that nature, and they roll their eyes and we talk about the ’90s, there was one event in the ’90s that was of note. That was the term “fudge-it budget.” That’s the moniker that this government party managed to have created. We’ve heard it referenced recently with other government programs. In terms of the Colwood collections building and the calculations of how much over budget it is or it isn’t by this government seems to be creative.

Why it’s important to note is that we haven’t seen something in a budget happen since around 1997, when that was reared up. I’ll direct the public’s attention to page 83 in the budget. In there, there’s a chart, and it’s the ministry’s outlook for B.C. compared to the private sector. What this is, is a chart that compares what the Ministry of Finance staff thinks, for GDP growth, is going to happen in the province, versus the Economic Forecast Council, which helps advise those same people in terms of economic forecasts.

What we typically see in B.C. is an error on the side of caution, in terms of what the Economic Forecast Council advises. This is a collection of several different agencies around the province. I sat in on their update to the former minister on her last couple of days before the cabinet shuffle. They advise what they see for the long-term projections, in the current and future years, for economic growth within the province.

Typically, for that level of caution that happens, the provincial government will budget under that forecast GDP growth, to make sure that they’re being very cautious in where they expect growth to be, especially on revenues to help pay for things moving forward.

[2:40 p.m.]

A good example is, in 2023, this year, the government is doing that once again, and it was 0.5 percent by the Economic Forecast Council. The government budgeted, projecting 0.4 growth. They did that last year, 2.8 versus 3.0. The troubling part is that when you look at years 2025, 2026 and 2027 in this budget book, the government has reversed that course, and they’re actually exceeding the expectations of the Economic Forecast Council.

Why that’s a concern is that when the Economic Forecast Council says 0.23 percent growth, instead of budgeting the usual 0.21 or 0.22, this government is now forecasting 0.24, and this might interest the leader of the Green Party in particular.

The interesting part is…. I’ll read from it:

“The ministry’s near-term forecast for B.C.’s real GDP growth is lower than the outlook provided by the Economic Forecast Council, with 0.2 percentage points of prudence in 2022 and 0.1 in both 2023 and 2024. This differential is one of the levels of prudence built into the fiscal plan. The ministry’s medium-term outlook is slightly higher than the average of the Economic Forecast Council forecast to account for the anticipated effects of LNG production over that period.”

Here we have a government that took until the last paragraph on page 15 of a 16-page speech to even mention the natural resource sector, who is essentially, one could say, cooking the books in the future, not with a gas range but with an LNG range. But they don’t actually want to acknowledge LNG. They don’t want to acknowledge our natural resource sector, and that’s troubling, because that is what generates a lot of the wealth in this province, as witnessed by their own chart of projecting growth higher than what all the experts are saying for British Columbia.

When they, on the one hand, want to talk about how they’re doing all these great things to get us away from fossil fuels, the reality is that their budget is still very much built on that. Now, obviously, this side of the House, our party, fully supports LNG. I know we have a difference of opinion of the Green Party on that. Fair enough. People can disagree in this chamber. Frankly, we never waiver from that support. We don’t try to play games with language out there so that people aren’t sure what is actually happening or not happening.

Why that’s important is…. I referenced it yesterday, and I’m going to put a little more detail to it today. When you look at the forestry projected revenues for this year, at $846 million, and you consider that, last year, this government had already projected the revenues for this fiscal year to be $879 million, this government has spent a year planning for what is exactly happening in our forestry industry.

They knew it was coming. They actually wanted it to happen. They budgeted for it to happen, and now that it’s happening, they’re putting up their hands and saying: “Oh, we didn’t know mills were going to close. Oh, we’ll have to scramble and try to figure out a way to support workers and communities.”

They took no meaningful action over the last 12 months to help all these forest-dependent communities, despite the fact they were budgeting for exactly what we’re seeing happening. Why that’s important is that indicates a government that is unwilling to take on the heavy lifting when they see rough troubles. Considering this budget is based on language around “tough times ahead,” that should scare everyone in British Columbia.

Now, we’re not saying that they could have magically turned back the clock and still collected that extra billion dollars in forestry revenues. But they sure as heck could have done something to maybe minimize the losses, maybe get that $840 million of revenue back up to $1.2 billion in revenue, help a few forestry communities, help several hundred if not thousands of millworkers and the related jobs that go with those mills.

But that’s not what this government has chosen to spend their 12 months doing. They’ve done nothing meaningful to help these communities transition or to modernize and advance things in the forestry sector to try to keep it as a viable option for these communities. In fact, they have been budgeting purposefully for its demise, and that’s shameful. That’s shameful for all of those communities.

[2:45 p.m.]

I want to touch on a few other areas in the time that I have, to add a little more depth to some of the comments I said yesterday.

The Minister of Health, in question period, said that I was being critical of the doctors’ new pay structure. That is not what I was saying, and that’s not what I was being critical of.

We acknowledge that the doctors, for a long time, have needed a new way to be paid. What we’ve been saying all along is there is no way to tell if the extra money going into the new agreement is actually accomplishing anything or is actually making the situation any better, because this government refuses to say what a good result would be.

The doctors’ agreement is a shining example. Is the government’s intention with all this extra money and the new, reworked pay structure to attract enough doctors to B.C. so that in five years only half a million people in British Columbia no longer have a family doctor, instead of the current million and growing? Is the government’s intention that it just stems it and keeps it at a million year, over year, over year? We don’t know, because the government won’t say.

That is what we’re critical about, because that is fundamentally at the core of the problem with this government’s budget and their ongoing programs. They don’t want to be held accountable to any measurable data that would indicate success or not. What is the point of dumping billions upon billions upon billions of dollars continually back into the same type of programming when you don’t know if it’s actually accomplishing a good result or not?

The results we’ve seen in health care over the last six years? Longest wait times in Canada for a walk-in clinic, if you can find one. Kamloops has no more walk-in clinics since this government took office. None. They’ve all closed.

By the way, for all of you smaller communities or communities the size of Kamloops that have an urgent primary care centre, forewarning: we were the first urgent primary care centre in B.C. So get ready for what’s coming into your neighbourhood soon, because it was after that opened that we started seeing our walk-in clinics close.

The end result now is that one in five British Columbians don’t have a family doctor and two in five in Kamloops don’t have a family doctor. That has all developed under this government’s watch. So when I see health care spending with no discernible targets and the same platitudes that we’ve seen for seven budgets in a row, yeah, it gets frustrating.

And it’s not just myself. If you look at the quotes from stakeholder groups and affected unions, BCNU president Aman Grewal said of this budget: “All this money’s being invested in health infrastructure, but where are you going to get the nurses from? We already have 5,325 vacancies here in B.C. alone.” That’s the nurses union. So their concerns around trying to have proper care standards for people haven’t been met by this budget.

Despite the money and infrastructure, most of it is go­ing to cost overruns on projects that have been long announced, are long delayed, and they also get rolled into this $37 billion of infrastructure being spent, as if that’s all happening in this year. The vast majority of that infrastructure spending is all on projects that have been announced over the last few years, the vast majority of which are delayed and over budget.

We’re not getting more for less money. We’re getting less for way more money. There are only four new capital projects in this year’s budget, the most expensive of which is the $224 million long-term-care facility. The other three are less expensive than that. That’s it for new infrastructure spending in this budget.

Why that’s particularly frustrating for someone like myself from Kamloops is that three years ago, the former Premier stood in Kamloops in October, during the snap COVID election that he called, and promised a cancer centre to be operational in Kamloops, doors open, by the end of their mandate, by the end of October 2024. That cancer centre, despite a ten-year cancer plan, elicited one word of Kamloops in this budget and not one word of it printed in the ten-year cancer plan. That’s how far behind we are three years after a promise has been made on a facility everyone acknowledges needs to get built.

[2:50 p.m.]

So when the province, when this government brags about $37 billion of infrastructure and the residents of Kamloops have to feel like beggars to try to get $40 million or $50 million to build a cancer centre, which the Premier said would be like the one operating in Victoria, so we know what the concept is, it’s pretty insulting.

When the Minister of Health stands up and talks about cancer results and you’re from a city that for three years has been sitting, cap in hand, and waiting for capital dollars to be approved on a project that everyone agrees needs to be built…. Right now everyone is having to drive two hours for treatment in Kelowna. If they can’t afford to stay there, they have to drive back and forth, which actually creates the worst patient outcomes you can imagine. It also services people from Williams Lake south.

It’s a huge strain on people. It’s a huge stress on people. People don’t have their family supports as they’re going through treatment, on a nightly basis, because a whole family cannot travel with them, obviously.

Even the doctors in Kelowna agree. This isn’t a Kamloops versus Kelowna debate like it usually is with health care. The doctors in Kelowna agree. Kamloops needs this centre.

People will say: “Well, you had 16 years. Why didn’t you build it?” We didn’t build it because there wasn’t the need, in terms of the number of cancer patients, at the time.

It was supposed to, originally, have been built in Kamloops. If we go back to the ’90s, that was an NDP election promise too. Right after they formed government, they reversed course and located it in Kelowna.

That equipment is at its end of life. It needs to be replaced. Over the years that cancer centre has been open in Kelowna, it has done great work, but two of the five linear accelerators are fully used by people in Kamloops and the surrounding area now. It simply makes no sense to continue having two machines out of five machines worth of people continuing to travel two hours to get cancer treatment. Here we are, three years later, and not even the capital money in the budget to get moving forward.

How many years do people reasonably have to wait to even have access to a local cancer centre, which the government actually has promised and agrees needs to be done? That’s the lack of action and lack of results we’re seeing in this budget.

Mental health and addictions. Again, where is the access to treatment? Where is the ability to get into a bed that’s sitting empty currently? Because it’s in a for-profit treatment centre, this government’s ideology refuses to fund that for a person. This government is saying they’d rather see someone struggling with addiction issues stay out on the street, causing chaos and havoc in people’s neighbourhoods, than fund a bed that’s sitting empty.

What’s the alternative they have proposed? They propose to build regional centres. Today, when asked…. We could not even get a page number from the Finance Minister of where that capital money is identified in this budget. They reference a lump sum of money.

They obviously have no defined plans and no ability to move forward, in a timely fashion, on an issue that people desperately need to literally save their life. That’s not a result. That’s an abdication of responsibility by this government.

When you look at our Better Is Possible plan, when you consider what can be done…. You look at our Better Is Possible plan. That spells out $1½ billion of investment in mental health and addictions treatment and how widely accepted, across the mental health spectrum of providers, it was embraced. Then you look at the comments, post-budget, from people around this plan that this government has presented.

[2:55 p.m.]

It’s very clear. Treatment and recovery are not even their secondary priority. It appears to be third, fourth or fifth on the list of what needs to be done to help make people whole and healthy again, which also makes communities whole and healthy again. But that’s not what this government wants to focus on.

Seniors — precious little for them in this, precious little for seniors in this budget. They were among the hardest hit in the pandemic, yet very little in this budget.

Here’s what the employer’s health union had to say of the budget: “In 2020, the NDP government made a commitment that they would fix seniors care, and we don’t see that money in this budget.” Not our words.

This is one of the biggest supportive unions of this government. Over the years, one of the biggest donators, till the rules changed, to this government. Those are their words about their government’s budget. “What we’re disappointed with is that there’s no funding for long-term care.”

That’s after a report from the seniors advocate declaring that B.C. is the worst place in Canada to be a senior. Let that sink in. The worst place in Canada to be a senior is in B.C. where, with our climate and people’s ability to avoid snow at most times of the year, we attract seniors for their retirement. It’s just like cancer care. Our quality of life has dropped if you’re a senior.

Education. Carolyn Broady, president of the B.C. School Trustees Association says: “This is a disappointing budget for B C’s. K-to-12 sector.” So although an expansion of a food program is good news — we agree — there are obviously a lot more fundamental problems in education, in K to 12, going on than this government wants to admit and, sadly, they don’t want to deal with.

There’s little new funding in this budget to build key new schools. The one new school, ironically enough, is actually in Kamloops–South Thompson. That was announced in this budget, except this government announced it…. Literally, this is the third budget since they first agreed that the school needed to be built, and in budget estimates, they agreed to that school moving forward. It took them three budgets to actually put the money in the budget, though. That’s one of the four capital projects in this plan.

Where is the money for the school in Pitt Meadows that’s been long promised, in elections, by NDP candidates? How about the Mission secondary schools? Where are those? Long promised. The Olympic Village elementary school? Those have been campaign promises by this government and their members. Not mentioned in the budget.

Not one new school mentioned in the budget for Surrey, which was supposed to have no portables left by 2020, under this government’s watch. If you go to the project list of projects over $50 million…. Given that a school in Kamloops was just priced out, for an elementary school, at $63½ million, I would suggest to you that any new school in this province is going to be $50 million plus.

There is not one new school listed for Surrey. None for Langley. None for Chilliwack. None for the Tri-Cities areas. In Langford, I think there are none new, but I think they’re almost pushing $1 billion over the term of the previous Premier’s reign in Langford, so they did pretty well with school capital. The rest of the province? Not so much.

Let’s move on to business. Page 35 of the budget, table 1.4, shows the direct disconnect this government has with the business community. On the one line, they show that they expect corporate tax revenues to plummet this year — in half, from this current fiscal to next fiscal.

[3:00 p.m.]

Yet the very next line below it is the employers health tax, which is paid by employers whether they’re profitable or not, and they want to collect hundreds of millions more in employers health tax than they had first anticipated needing to collect, because they stubbornly refuse to adjust the rate that the tax is charged at or the threshold at which the tax starts to be collected.

On the one hand, they actually recognize that businesses are no longer as profitable and are going to have a tough time over the next year, and literally, in the next line in their budget, they decide to whack them over the head with a different tax increase. That’s how this NDP views business. The pockets in the front of their pants are empty, so we’ll reach around and dig a little bit out of the back pocket.

The quotes by the business community across the board have been damning of this budget, from the Surrey Board of Trade, from the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, from the B.C. Chamber of Commerce and the B.C. Business Council’s chief economist. You name it. They’ve all panned this budget. This budget doesn’t talk about the economy in any positive terms. It doesn’t talk about any actions being taken to try to improve the economy, to try to put your shoulder to the wheel and try to make things as good as they possibly could be, despite what might be happening around the world. No, no.

Just like we’ve seen with the forestry sector, this budget conveys, essentially, a shrug by government that business will do what business is going to do, and we’re just going to keep doing what we do as government. That’s tax them and not find a way to try to incentivize them to reinvest in their business to move forward in a way that helps their bottom line at all.

The carbon tax is another example businesses have a lot of understandable concern around; so do we. I was saying earlier to some of my colleagues that it feels like a game of three-card monte, the way they keep moving around these carbon tax revenues now between CleanBC and other programs that are or aren’t part of CleanBC, stuff they’ll take credit for as part of CleanBC or green energy that any government would be funding, regardless — things like transit.

Over the next seven years, the annual carbon tax increase will raise the price of a litre of gas by an extra 26 cents a litre. Now, that’s a massive hit to people on their daily commutes. Over the next seven years, we’re not going to see enough investment in electric vehicles. That is going to be the tipping point. We may wish it that way, but that’s not the way things are trending.

What else does carbon tax impact in your daily lives? We have seen a lot of cold weather over these last three weeks. Let’s take a look at what carbon tax over the next seven years does to your natural gas bill. Now, keep in mind you are currently paying more in carbon tax to heat your home than the gas you’re using to heat your home. Let that sink in. Your carbon tax on your natural gas home heating bill is more expensive than the gas itself currently. That’s at $0.0979 for a cubic metre.

According to schedule 1 on Bill 10, which is the bill that accompanies the budget, natural gas will rise to $0.324 per cubic metre. It’s already more expensive than the gas on your bill at $0.0979. Let’s raise it up to $0.324, keep the income thresholds the way they are on our carbon action tax credit that goes back to only low-income people and assume that people that have no choice but to heat their home with natural gas are somehow going to be able to shoulder this cost increase.

[3:05 p.m.]

When you look back to gas, it’s gone up 52 cents a litre since the NDP became government, on average. We should not be so desensitized that we suddenly think a buck-75 is a bargain at the pump, yet that’s where we seem to be this days.

With natural resources in rural B.C., it’s important to note, once again, the NDP are slating a 33 percent drop in revenues over the next two years. Again, that’s over the next two years. They budgeted for all these declines a year ago. So when we hear lip service paid to speeding up permitting to help get projects moving, that’s what we view it as in this budget: lip service.

Permitting has been a problem since not just a year ago. Permitting has been a problem under this government since they took office. It was always a little slow. Now it’s a couple of years for the most basic permits, across the board.

Good luck if you’re looking for forestry permits. Good luck if you’re looking for mining permits. But just even a general, front-counter type, “I need a regular permit,” a range permit, anything — it takes forever these days.

Now, the timeline the government doesn’t want to talk about is when they say: “We’re going to hire 160 more people.” When you talk to people in the field, permitting is a bit of a complicated process for government officials, and rightfully so. They have to make sure everything is on the up and up and things are done properly, and they should. It takes a heck of a lot of time to train people up. You don’t just put an ad out on an online job search engine, have somebody apply and think that they’re fully up to speed on permitting without a couple of years of experience under their belt.

This situation has been building over the last few years and getting worse and ignored by this government. The result of this budget is not going to match the words. It simply won’t. Instead of figuring out a way to make permitting more streamlined while still protecting the things that you need to protect within that permitting structure, this government’s default response is always: “Let’s just hire more people. That’ll do the trick.”

Hire more people that are going to take years to train up. Hopefully, the ones that are trained up…. Actually, their training times out with the people that will undoubtedly retire in that same time frame, so it’s going to be this perpetual loop for a while.

But let’s not find efficiencies in the permitting system. No, no. Let’s keep the system that we have created over the last six years, which has jammed permits into purgatory and finger-pointed everyone else for why things aren’t moving. And not just in rural B.C. Talk to municipalities that are near a highway corridor when they’re trying to do a subdivision, when they’re trying to get a rezoning done for a multifamily housing unit and they’re waiting on Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure sign-off. You name it. Across the board, it is a drag on our economy.

When things needed to be moving quickly to try to beat the rising interest rates so projects could be locked in and final decisions could be made and financing could be in place at lower rates, this government didn’t respond. The foot-dragging continued on, and we’re seeing projects across this province shelved to wait for the economic conditions to change.

[3:10 p.m.]

This is why you heard the government actually being fairly pessimistic in their view over the next couple of years, but not pessimistic with an undertone of: “We’re ready to accept the challenge and fight the good fight and try to right the ship for people.” It was a defeatist: “We’re just going to throw more money at this stuff, because times are hard.”

Under every category I’ve just talked about, results have gotten worse under this last six years. Under every one of these categories, the government’s response in this budget was: “We’ll just throw more money at the exact same programming, and that’ll work.”

I don’t know anyone that would stand, other than the government MLAs…. It either means they’re totally out of touch with their constituents or just willing to stick to the speaking points. But other than the government MLAs, I don’t know anyone that would say there have been improvements in housing affordability for ownership or rentals over the last five years. I don’t know anyone that says the health care system five years ago was worse than it is now.

Health care has never been as bad as it is. Health care has never been perfect in this province. Absolutely. It has never been as bad as it is now. Full stop.

Crime has never been as bad as it is — the street disorder, the vandalism, the random attacks. It’s never been as bad as it is right now. Other than government MLAs, I don’t hear anyone else saying that things have gotten better.

Mental health and addictions — the data says it all. Sadly, whenever this government reaches out to try to get some form of data, if they don’t like what they’re seeing, they scrub it. They shut down research. They don’t want reports finished. They only want to see things that fit their narrative. The simple reality is that we’re losing six-plus people a day, dying in an opioid crisis that was only first getting started in 2016 or so. It has exploded fully under this government’s watch.

I’m not saying that the opioid crisis was created by this government, but it exploded under this government, as it did in many jurisdictions. But those jurisdictions have adapted. They’ve tried doing things to actually get better results for people. They haven’t just sat back and presided over it month over month over month, saying, “It’s complex, and we’re seeing what we can do,” and blaming others. That’s what this government’s response is. That’s not saving lives. The numbers back it up. Just like cancer care, it’s not something that can afford to wait.

When we look at the mental health and addictions plan in this budget, the lack of detail is astonishing when you consider that they’re trying to attach $1 billion to it. The fact that the bulk of the $1 billion is in year 3 is another problem. The government likes to talk about everything that’s in this budget, which is a three-year plan, as if all of it is happening in this year. It simply isn’t.

It’s actually cruel to offer that type of hope to families — who are desperate for care for their loved ones, to have access to recovery options — to make it sound like it’s going to be happening in the next month or two, when, at best, it’s in year 3 of the plan that construction may or may not even get started. It’s not right that the government, in this budget, would remove any mention about future wait times for access to treatment for recovery.

[3:15 p.m.]

In the years moving forward, they haven’t even decided what an acceptable wait time would be. Is it 14 days to access treatment? Is it seven days? Is it 12 hours? Is it 29.3 days, like the budget book references once and then for future years has been removed and says “to be determined”?

Again, we don’t know, because this government doesn’t want to be judged. They don’t want to know whether or not what they are doing or not is actually having the desired outcome, because no one actually knows what this government feels the desired outcome is.

When the government stands up and shakes their finger at opposition and says why don’t we get on board and we don’t agree…. We agree that housing needs to be fixed, because we’ve watched it erode for the last 5½ years under their watch. We agree crime and disorder need to be fixed. We agree mental health and addictions needs serious interventions and serious efforts put into the recovery side of the equation. We agree health care is a mess and needs proper targeted investments on a wide range of areas, not the least of which is cancer care.

Where we differ is that this government seems incapable of providing any actual tangible result that makes any of that better. Given this is the seventh budget that they have used the words “historic investment” and “unprecedented,” one would have thought and hoped that they might have succeeded on one of those fronts over the previous six budgets. Instead, we get the same rehashed words on the same programs, moving forward.

Housing. In this budget, the government has decided they’re going to keep the 13 housing taxes they’ve put on housing since they formed government. They’ve decided that they’re walking away from their ten-year housing plan on year 6, because it’s failed miserably, but we don’t know what the new plan is. They decided to walk away from any type of target or measurable of the 114,000, which was the centerpiece of the 30-point housing plan, because they’ve only delivered 8 percent of it after six years.

Their solution is to dump more money into housing without a plan, without any targets, under a backdrop of a B.C. Housing agency that previously had a bunch of money dumped into it by this government, which has resulted in a forensic audit needing to be undertaken that’s not finished yet. That’s what this government seems to consider a housing success, while, at the same time, their budget document acknowledges that housing starts are going to drop over the next few years.

It also acknowledges that their own housing provider, B.C. Housing, will be hard-pressed to deliver 3,000 units in a year, not even the paltry 3,900 they delivered in a previous year. I say that because if you think of a ten-year plan that was supposed to deliver 114,000 housing units, that’s 11,000 housing units a year that that plan was supposed to deliver. Now we’re down to B.C. Housing acknowledging that they’re not going to be able to make 3,000 in a year. No wonder this government doesn’t want any measurable targets for the public to judge them on.

Let’s consider this. The justification this government is using for rampant cost overruns on the Colwood collections building, where it’s now almost $100 million over budget, is because they redesigned it with green energy in mind, which is not a bad ideal to do, but that’s what resulted in the massive price spike, according to the government. Now, it’s always a slightly different story, especially when it comes to things around the museum.

[3:20 p.m.]

What does that mean to housing, then? In one building, it almost doubles the price in a more temperate area of the province, compared to other parts of the province, in a building that’s already designed heavily around whole HVAC and dehumidification and everything else because it’s supposed to be a repository to safely store artifacts. You don’t just put a bathroom fan in one of those. So despite the initial design, which one would have thought would have had a pretty energy-efficient building, it’s going to take an extra $100 million to have Lord knows what level.

How does that tie into housing? Well, here’s what the Canadian Home Builders Association had to say about this budget. Let’s keep in mind that this is a budget that’s supposed to be delivering affordable homes. “Unfortunately, funding for CleanBC enhancements has been drastically reduced from $24 million to $11 million for the ’23-24 period. While this investment potentially allows the CleanBC Better Homes program to continue, it is inadequate to enable low-carbon market transformation and new residential construction.”

Let’s just think about the government priority here. When they need to add energy efficiencies to their pet project in Colwood, they have no problem finding an extra $100 million of taxpayers’ money to do that. The building industry that’s supposed to be building our affordable housing for people, which was relying on a grant through CleanBC to make energy-efficient homes for British Columbians at, hopefully, an affordable price, just had their grant reduced from $24 million to $11 million.

Talk about backwards priorities of a government, making sure they feather their own nest for their own pet projects and not looking out to the broader community in terms of things that people are trying to do to accomplish the issues that they would like to see addressed and in terms of their own pride in what they’re building. It’s simply not acceptable when you look at where they have pulled money around here and there on the justification that somehow this is a visionary budget.

It simply is not. The reviews are in; they’re horrible. Again, I don’t know anyone that feels things have gotten better in this province over the last five, six years.

It’s actually quite hard to put into words, despite how long I’ve already spoken for, just how lacklustre this budget is. I said in one interview…. It’s almost like we’re all in an episode of Oprah, but instead of everyone getting a car, we all get a toaster. Everyone is wondering: “What are we supposed to do with this?” “You get a toaster, you get a toaster, and you get a toaster.” “But I didn’t want a toaster.” “It doesn’t matter. Take it. We’re getting results.”

There’s no vision. For a budget that has more revenue coming into it than we’ve ever seen in this province…. The fact that it has been mismanaged this badly in this document, on day 101 of the Premier’s new days of action, is shocking.

Now, I touched on this yesterday briefly, and I’ll touch on it again just before I close off my comments. Let’s look at the promises that were made in those 100 days. There was no actual action taken in the 100 days. There were just promises made, promise after promise after promise — 100 days of promises, not 100 days of action.

So 230 or 240, whatever it was, police officers are going to be added to the provincial police ranks in the RCMP. Well, how genuine of a promise is that, when the Solicitor General, rightfully so, stands up in this House, over the last two weeks, in question period, and rightfully acknowledges that it’s very hard to get new officers out of Depot in Regina?

[3:25 p.m.]

Between retirements and needs in other communities and other divisions around the country, it’s very tough to get new officers. How are we magically going to find 250 new officers, like are in this budget, in the next short term? Where do they magically appear from?

I can tell you, as the former mayor of Kamloops…. Our detachment commander, our superintendent, came forward while I was still there and said: “We need two officers a year for the next five years.” I said: “No. Ask for ten this year. It’s going to take us six years to get you ten.” And it did. We had to start budgeting for and asking for just to get one or two officers extra a year into our detachment. That was for ten officers. This is for 250.

Now, I don’t know. I do know there is one large pocket of RCMP officers, which is currently stationed in the province, that, I guess, technically, if the RCMP no longer needed them for municipal duties, would be freed up. If the province is able to negotiate with the RCMP to keep them in British Columbia, the Solicitor General would have a pool of officers to work on.

That would require the Solicitor General to actually tell the people of Surrey that the government is not approving the move back to the RCMP. That is the only pocket of RCMP officers of any size and of any consequence in this whole country that the Solicitor General and the Premier can tap into to meet their promise of 250 officers in this budget. If they’re doing that, that’s fine.

Just tell us that’s what you’re doing. Tell the people of Surrey that’s what you’re doing. Enough with the game-playing. If that’s not what you’re doing, the 250 officers is a false promise. It simply won’t happen.

Communities and policing areas that desperately need those resources need to know the truth, whether they’re going to see any of those 250 officers or not. I don’t think it’s asking too much of a government to provide a very clear explanation on the timeline and where exactly these 250 officers are coming from.

That would require bravery from this Premier. We haven’t seen it. We haven’t seen it in this budget. We certainly haven’t seen bold ideas from this Premier in this budget.

We’ve seen rehashed ideas. We’ve seen the same programs getting a few extra dollars put on to them to be called historic, on budgets, seven times in a row now, that are continually delivering worse and worse results, ever-worsening oversight and understanding of what’s actually going on with these programs that have been announced by government, worse and worse tracking of deliverables, a firm adherence by this government to not want to be held accountable by having any tangible, real measurement of any program.

Again, it’s not just about dollars spent. The amount of dollars being spent on a program does not automatically equate to a success.

[J. Tegart in the chair.]

You need to know several things about a program. How much is being spent? What’s the desired outcome? What’s the desired timeline? What’s the check-in point so that you can review it and say: “Is it working, or isn’t it working”? If it’s not working, what needs to be adjusted? Does it need to be completely scrapped and rebuilt, or does it just truly need a few more dollars to make it work better? When you have none of those systems in place, you’re just dumping money into a pit and hoping for a better result.

Government ministers of the Crown are supposed to lead. They’re supposed to drive the change. They’re supposed to get their colleagues at Treasury Board and cabinet to agree on the program they want to implement as a minister, and then they’re supposed to guide it and drive that program to be successful.

[3:30 p.m.]

What it feels like with this government is that the ministers seem to think you get support for the funding, you get support for the name of the program, you announce it, and your work’s done. It’s just simply not good enough.

There’s a finite number of tax dollars available for any government to work with. We’re hitting the breaking point. By the government’s own words in the throne speech and in this budget, we’re hitting the breaking point. There isn’t the luxury of just flinging money around and hoping that you might get a better result. People’s lives literally are depending on it.

This government is more content to try to point a finger back to some event that happened in 2002 than deal with the fact that they’ve been in government since 2017. I have news for the government. Someone struggling with cancer today really could care less what happened in 2002 in the health system. You know what they want in the here and now? They want access to an oncologist. They want access to treatment.

We’ve heard cases where people are waiting four weeks to get a feeding tube so they can continue their cancer treatment. Do you think any of those people that we heard about today in question period really care what happened in 2002 in this chamber? I’ll guarantee you they don’t. Their families certainly don’t. Someone struggling with addictions that wasn’t even born then, whose family is desperate for them to get treatment now, actually needs to see government action on that. They need to see government result on that. They need to see it delivered — not talked about, not scoffed at by this government but actually delivered.

That would require this government to actually say that they truly value recovery and treatment at the same level as other parts of what’s going on in the mental health and addictions sphere. Their words say they do; their actions say they don’t. It’s the actions that actually matter. It’s the actions that will actually save lives. It’s the lack of actions that will cost lives. It’s simply not good enough.

This government is on their second Premier. They’re on their third Finance Minister. They’re careening towards the third election. At what point do they look in the mirror and say: “A lot of this mess is our own.” I can tell the members, once you step out of these chambers and join the real world outside of these walls, that’s what the public is wondering. They’re wondering how a government can be bragging about $37 billion, basically all on projects they’ve already announced, when their MLA they voted for promised them a school over the last six years that still isn’t in a capital plan.

Our cancer centres aren’t built. Nanaimo was promised a cancer centre at the same time as Kamloops. It’s in the same limbo as Kamloops. Now, certainly the member for Kamloops–South Thompson and myself and Shuswap and Fraser-Nicola and Cariboo-Chilcotin are raising the alarm bells, because that cancer centre would serve all of our constituents. Frankly, it’s been a little disappointing hearing the silence coming out of Nanaimo, other than the mayor. I’m sure members of the government remember who the mayor of Nanaimo is. They worked with him in this chamber enough.

Some of these projects are literally rounding errors in the overall capital spend of this province over the next few years — rounding errors that would actually save lives.

I do hope the government members, as they get up to address this budget, actually reflect on that — reflect on the shortcomings that, over the last six years, have been created and the lack of results that we’re seeing.

[3:35 p.m.]

I get that it’s not easy to hear. I get that it can be: “Oh, well, there’s that guy from Kamloops–North Thompson blustering on again like he always does in this place.” Sometimes the truth hurts.

It’s not my words that are providing the evidence. It’s the emails that flood all of our in-boxes about the lack of access to health care, the lack of access to cancer care, the repeated broken windows, the loved one that got randomly attacked on a street, the catch-and-release system, the fact that their child can’t afford to live where they found a job.

The amount of young people that we get emails from in my office…. Their child has found a job and something they want to do. Especially if they’re from a smaller town, they need to move to a Kamloops or somewhere else because that’s where the job is. They can’t find housing that they can afford, even though they’re gainfully employed as welders and things like that. It is shocking.

Guess what. Their average income will be high enough that they won’t qualify for the renters rebate — you know, that renters rebate that was promised six years ago. It actually can’t be actioned for another full year, because you can’t action it until you file your income taxes this time next year. That renters rebate. That renters rebate that the government tries to say will have 80 percent of renters in the province qualifying.

Is the government honestly trying to tell us that they think that 80 percent of the residents of British Columbia have household incomes of $80,000 or less, who are renters, when the average income needed to rent in Vancouver alone is $100,000 a year for a one-bedroom apartment, $150,000 for a two-bedroom apartment?

Vancouver rents aren’t that dissimilar to the rest of the province. I hate to break it to people. Kelowna is just every bit as expensive. Victoria. Kamloops is right up there now. My son’s apartment in Kamloops is $1,600 a month for a one bedroom. He and his wife won’t qualify for the renters rebate. Their household income will make it that way.

We don’t know, in the renters rebate, what they actually define as household income. If you have a roommate, whether you’re married or not, common law or not, is that a household?

Again, a lot of fanfare. The fact is that they had six years to think this up and design it. And this is the best that we can have?

It’s historic, all right. It’s historic for how long a simple concept like this takes this government to try to roll out. It will still be fraught with bureaucracy and misunderstanding of who qualifies or not.

That’s really the theme of this budget. An underwhelming and underperforming budget to match an underwhelming and underperforming government over the last six years. It has done nothing, has nothing in it to meaningfully change the trajectory we are on, on crime, on housing, on health care, on cancer, on housing, none of it.

While the government may want to pat themselves on the back, I will put everyone’s attention back to how I started my comments today. I would be very cautious.

When you start looking at the forward projections that this government is using now to exceed their own Economic Forecast Council’s guidance…. It got this government in trouble once before, which means it got all of the province of British Columbia in big trouble previously. We’re careening down that path again. It masks underlying problems this government doesn’t want to admit are there. Ironically, they’re trying to mask it on the backs of LNG.

[3:40 p.m.]

I do hope the government members read this budget with a bit of a cynical eye — many of them know how to read it as if they were in opposition; they were in opposition for a while, just as we are now — and ask themselves what their constituents truly would think about this, and ask themselves: “What’s actually going on in my email in-box from my constituents, in their lives?”

“Are they truly all emailing me, saying what a wonderful job we’re doing as a government? Or are they emailing me, desperately trying to get a cancer drug covered? Are they emailing me, desperate to find an oncologist? Are they emailing me saying: ‘I don’t have a family doctor, and the walk-in clinics either aren’t open or the lineups are too long’?

“Are they emailing me asking me what I’m going to do, as an MLA, about all the broken windows and random assaults that are happening on our streets and all the tent cities? Or are they strictly just emailing opposition members that, and do the government MLAs just get nothing but praise in their email in-box?” Just ask yourselves that.

I’m willing to bet, given the volume of emails I’m cc’d on and that go to government members, that it’s not all praise. Maybe, for a change, you could actually recognize that those are real people, with real concerns, in your constituencies. This budget does nothing to help them and their concerns that they’ve been raising over the last six years that this government has been in office.

With that, I will wrap my comments up. Thank you for this time.

S. Furstenau: It’s my pleasure to rise and speak to the budget today.

I studied history, so I like looking back into historical records, into archives. One of the things that I was doing just now, while listening to the member for Kamloops–​North Thompson, was looking at budget responses in the 2014, 2015, 2016 era, when the House was in the other way.

What is fascinating, Madam Speaker, and I expect other people that have been here a long time might also have the same sentiment, is that it seems like a pretty consistently scripted play that we’re all in.

The Finance Minister for government stands up on budget day and delivers a budget. There are all sorts of great communications, and it’s a huge celebration: “Look at all the great things we’re doing, and this is a wonderful day for British Columbia.”

Then the opposition critic stands up and says: “This is terrible. Oh, my. I couldn’t think of a worse budget. This doesn’t meet any of the expectations that we want to see for British Columbians. This is just a complete and terrible, terrible day.”

There is, however, now a Third Party, and we’re somewhat…. As you can see, Madam Speaker, I don’t have a written speech. We’re a little bit interested in not partaking in the same play that has been playing. As much as I love theatre, we think that we could have a different approach to this.

I would say that for British Columbians, the history repeating itself over and over again, year after year, can start to feel a little bit disconnecting, for the people out there that we serve. Every budget that’s presented in this place has some really great aspects to it, does some things that help people, that they need help with. No budget ever presented in this place has solved every­thing; that’s for sure.

[3:45 p.m.]

Year over year, we get into this same scripted play that we’re in here. I think we could change the script. I really do. I think we could do something different, because what’s fascinating is that this script and the outcomes that we get are pretty consistent.

I talk a lot about what we measure, and I think that I want to go into a little bit of that. When we look at the budget…. I’ve got this year’s budget, and I’ve got last year’s budget, and the things we measure…. We measure rev­enues, we measure expenses, and we measure GDP. Then there are other things we measure — employment, which is good. We measure all of the ways that we’re spending capital. We look at forecasts.

But we keep measuring the same things, and we keep pouring more and more money — $80 billion. That’s a lot of money, $80 billion. Yet year over year, if you look at all the responses to budgets, we keep coming back with much the same concerns or deepening problems with what conditions people are facing.

We’ve heard a lot from the opposition critic about housing, about cost of living, about the kinds of things that people are experiencing — lack of access to health care. We know very well all of these problems that we’re all facing. I want to make the case that if we started measuring differently, we could actually start getting different outcomes, not just from our budgets but from our governance and even from what happens in here.

There was work under the confidence and supply agreement, when we had a minority government, to actually start to incorporate GPIs, genuine progress indicators, into the budgeting. Unfortunately, since we have hit the majority government, I don’t see much indication of that work carrying on, so we’re just right back to where we used to be, GDP.

There are social determinants of health that we could be looking at. Are our budgets delivering improvements for the things that we know determine people’s health and well-being? Housing, education, healthy food, access to health care, community belonging, all these things. That’s not in here.

The Canadian government even has a quality-of-life index. They are actually doing some of this measuring of quality of life. Are we improving that? That’s the goal.

I want to point to a government that I’ve been referencing a lot, and that’s New Zealand. New Zealand has been doing well-being budgets now, and they just came out with their first well-being report for 2022. A couple of things about this report are really fascinating.

When you start to read it, you’re not getting what you typically get from a government, which is: “Everything is awesome.” That’s typically the kind of communications we get from governments. “We’re doing a great job. Every­thing’s wonderful. Look at all these investments we’ve made. Everything is great.” Then we have the same script on the other side.

In this well-being report that just came out from New Zealand, they look at a whole swath of ways to measure whether the budget is delivering well-being. I’m going to put this list on the record, because I think it’s very interesting.

They talk about individual and collective well-being, because as we know, our individual well-being is very much connected to our collective well-being. We are not all separate. I’ve been watching these murmurations in the evening, outside of my hotel windows. The starlings all gather, and they do these amazing murmurations. I look at those starlings, and I think: “They know something we don’t know.” Somehow, they can fly in all these different directions and not bump into each other, and they make this incredible kind of art. It’s like they’re playing, and they’re making art right in the sky, collective well-being.

The kinds of things that New Zealand looks at to try to determine well-being…. They look at: do you feel like you have a sense of identity? Can you express your identity? What about artistic expression?

Oh, wow. What if we thought about measuring: are people able to have artistic expression? What do we value from the past? What do we look at? We look at beautiful architecture, beautiful art. We look at literature. We look at poetry. This is the greatest expression of being human. So wouldn’t it be neat if, as a government, we said: “Let’s value artistic expression. Let’s value whether or not our citizens are able to express themselves artistically.”

[3:50 p.m.]

Connection to ancestral roots for Māori people, the number of languages that you speak. The sense of belonging that you have. Whether you feel like you have a say in government decisions, which is way more than just: did you vote? Do you feel like you are participating in your government’s decisions?

They measure things like how many children are living in poverty, household income, meeting basic needs, food security, household worth, education, free time, play, recreation, sport, work-life balance, family violence, safety.

They measure crime. They measure road accidents; work-related injuries; life satisfaction; employment; hourly wages; unemployment; unpaid work; volunteering; access to parks and green space; drinking water quality; how many droughts are happening in any region; the impacts from pollution; the natural environment health; connection to family, friends, community; loneliness; health; mental health; life expectancy; housing; primary health care. They’re measuring all of those things in New Zealand as a way to understand how effective government spending is at creating collective well-being and individual well-being.

Now imagine if our budgets every year came out with, also, a report on the previous year’s budget, and we looked at these factors for well-being, and we asked ourselves every year at budget time: did last year’s budget improve well-being for people?

This is the thing about this report from New Zealand. In their measures, they look at: where is well-being going up? Success. Where is well-being staying the same? Hmm, work to do. Where is well-being going down? That’s where we invest.

One of the measures that they found was that child poverty wasn’t improving. In fact, it was getting worse. So the budget that comes out invests heavily to decrease child poverty, because isn’t that the measure? I mean, wouldn’t that be? Wouldn’t we all agree that the measure of our success as a society is our children and that having children live in poverty is a failure? So let’s invest in making sure that fewer children, ideally no children, are growing up in poverty.

But until we actually decide to make that a measurement of the work we do in here, we’re going to continue going from year to year, budget to budget. We’re going to have all these announcements, and we’re going to go through the same play in here — “this is wonderful; this is terrible.” We’re never really going to know, quantitatively and qualitatively, what we are achieving.

I want to look at last year’s budget. Some of the high-level…. The news release: “Budget 2022 Moves Us Forward to Build a Stronger B.C.” This was a year ago. It feels like a long time ago. This was a year ago.

Here are some of the things, some of these big an­nouncements in last year’s budget. Fifteen First Nations primary care centres. Wow. That would be awesome. I don’t know if we achieved that. I’d love to know if we achieved that.

Taking a proactive approach to respond to and prevent homelessness through new complex care housing. Okay. Great. How many of those did we get built? That would be really good to know.

Supporting survivors of sexual assault by providing stable funding to approximately 50 community-based sexual assault response organizations. I would love to find out how many of those organizations got funded. What did that funding do? How many more people got support that needed it when they showed up?

So 280 remote, rural and Indigenous communities to get high-speed Internet. Okay. How are we doing on that? Accelerating investments to build more affordable and mixed-income housing projects faster. Good. Did we succeed?

That’s just a couple of things from last year’s budget. I think it’s really…. I’m not doing this to be like: “Oh, I gotcha.” I’m doing this to be like: we could do better in here.

[3:55 p.m.]

We could do better for the public by showing our work. We could do better by not just always starting from scratch, as though this budget comes out of nowhere and it’s all the shiny things this year, and we’re not going to talk about last year or the year before that.

This is how we can change how we do things in here. And if we change how we do things in here, we change how we serve British Columbians. But this thing, oh boy, it’s been going on for a long time, and the speeches are the same. It’s amazing. Just swap sides; same speeches. It’d save on a lot of staffing costs. Just go through Hansard. It’s all there.

For me, I sat down after I became leader of a provincial party, the Third Party — I never saw that one coming in my life, but here I am — and I thought: “Okay, what do I think about what we could be in British Columbia?” This is a joke with all my staff. I’m always making charts. I put things on big charts because that’s how I…. I’m sort of a visual learner, and I like to represent all the things going on in here on a big chart so I can see it and other people can see it.

I have this chart that I made. It has four pillars. At the top is: people’s needs are met, and they have the conditions to thrive. That’s one. That’s what I think we could be as a province.

Two, our natural systems are healthy, and they’re able to keep us healthy — clean water, clean air, soil, ecosystems, biodiversity, all the things that we need. Because we’re not separate from that. We’re not separate from nature. If nature is unhealthy, we are unhealthy. That’s two.

Three, our communities, where we live, are thriving. They’re diverse, they’re connected, they’re a place of safety, and we feel happy about living there. That gives us that collective well-being for our individual well-being.

Then four…. I don’t think we talk about this a lot typically, but for me, the fourth pillar is really important: we trust our institutions; we trust our government.

So you put those four things together. This has been driving my work for the last two years — our whole team. This chart is up there. It’s pretty. I made drawings around it, made it look nice.

The idea that we have is: are the things that we’re putting forward, the ideas that we’re putting forward…? We’ve done a lot of this in the last month. All these ideas — lower tuition, increase public transit in this province, bring people with disabilities out of poverty, invest in psychologists as part of our health care system, put community health centres in every community in B.C.…. You move into a community, and just like with a school, that you know where your kids are going to school, you know where your community health centre is. You have a team of primary care providers.

With all these things, we ask ourselves: does it meet one or two or three or maybe even all four of these outcomes? And it does. They improve that.

It’s really important, I think, that we ask ourselves, as representatives of our communities, as members of this House: what does the horizon look like that we’d like to…? What’s the shape of that future that we want to be a part of building and making? And then: does this decision, does this investment get us closer to that?

And how do we measure that? We measure that by looking at well-being writ large. We can do it. We can actually measure these things. It’s not out of the realm of possibility.

But if we only measure GDP…. We keep hearing: “GDP is strong. We’ve got GDP growth. We’ve got a strong economy.” Over and over and over again: “strong economy.” We have a million people without a family doctor. We have more and more people who can’t afford housing. We have more and more people for whom their kids are going into classrooms that are too crowded, under-resourced, don’t have access to mental health care. That doesn’t feel like a strong economy to me. It feels like we’re measuring one thing.

As has been said about GDP for so long, it measures all the things except what matters. It doesn’t measure any of those things that are laid out in New Zealand’s well-being report, none of them. None of them are measured by GDP.

[4:00 p.m.]

We’re not measuring what it actually is to be human in this society, but we measure this external — how much money, how many goods and services are moving around — as though that is the thing that we’re trying to achieve, and that only. It doesn’t make sense to me.

I think these moments, this time we’re in…. I think there’s pretty general agreement that this is a crisis time we’re in. We’re facing…. There’s a term, polycrisis. Climate change is a crisis. It has certainly impacted communities where you live, where you represent. We are seeing, in B.C., some of the most devastating impacts of climate- and weather-related events. It’s a crisis. It’s an existential crisis for humans, but we have other crises.

We have had an ongoing pandemic that continues to wreak havoc to hospitalized people. We continue to see people die. It has absolutely crushed our health care system, which was already challenged.

Growing inequality is a problem. I taught history. If you look at the conditions that lead to authoritarian or totalitarian governments, the one most consistent condition is too much of a gap between rich and poor. We have a billionaire problem: too many of them. Too many billions in too few hands — that is a problem.

When we’re in a time like this, we can kind of keep doing the same thing and wish that it would turn out differently, which is sort of what we’re doing here: “Just a little; we’re going to just tinker here.” But really, we’re going to act as though we’re not in these overlapping crises.

I pointed out in question period today that climate is almost nonexistent in this budget; $17 billion in damages from an atmospheric river in 2021, and a year and a half later, we’re like: “Climate? Meh. Put that in contingency.” We have to get in front of this. It’s not going to be like: “Yeah, you didn’t budget for it, so we’ll take a reprieve on climate impacts for a year or two.” That’s not how it’s going to work.

We can recognize, in a moment like this, that if we continue to do the same things, if we continue to operate the same way, we’re going to get more and more of the same outcomes. Or we can say: “Wow. In a moment like this, in a time of crisis, this is a time when we can be creative.”

This is when we can think of new ways of doing things, when we can recognize that the partisanship, which has become so deeply embedded in our political and governing systems, is not really serving people very well. It starts to feel like it’s just a game of point-scoring in here.

People need us to work together; people need us to listen to each other. We have all these perspectives in here, 87 different communities. We bring the perspectives of the people that voted for us in all of those communities and the people who didn’t vote for us. We hear from them all.

Imagine if we were willing to really listen, to really think. Wow. Good ideas don’t only come to you when you’re on one side of the House. We all have good ideas. We all have incredible people in our community. We’re all hearing about incredible solutions all the time, in the meetings that we have, in the correspondence we get and the phone calls and everything.

There are so many solutions, but we’re kind of trapped in this: “No. You know, you only get to be on the solution-making side of the House if you’re over there. If you’re over here, you’re in the criticizing side of the House.” Everybody just plays their role and carries on, and on we go.

What are some of the really neat things that are happening? Well, I think democracy, more democracy, is the answer always, messy and complicated as it can be. But there are countries around the world that are not only looking at different ways of budgeting and measuring their government work, like well-being — New Zealand, Iceland, Scotland, France; but there are countries, at the same time, that say: “We’ve got to strengthen democracy right now.”

[4:05 p.m.]

This is a fragile thing. This is not the standard operating principle of governments through history. It’s new, relatively speaking, and it’s fragile. We’re seeing all sorts of threats to democracy all over the place — misinformation, disinformation. We’re seeing a lack of interest in people even showing up to vote, much less wanting to run for office. We’re seeing a kind of cynicism about politics and about government, a lack of trust.

So that fourth pillar in my chart is trust our institutions. Trust our government. Trust our democracy. But to do that, we have to invest. We have to make it stronger.

In Belgium, they have brought a permanent citizens’ assembly into their parliament in East Belgium — 50 randomly selected people, kind of like jury duty. Even just having them in the room with the elected legislators has reduced partisanship. It has improved cross-party work. It has brought issues to the table that would not have been brought to the table. The public is much more courageous and bold than we are, typically speaking.

Something happens in this place. People get nervous. People get anxious, going for the wrong thing, I think, which is to hold onto power. As soon as that becomes the orientation, oh, I think we get in trouble.

France just released a report on its French citizens’ assembly on climate as part of its deliberative democracy efforts. This was way beyond what any political leaders are talking about in terms of action on climate. The public is ready. The public wants to engage in solutions. The public feels this crisis, these overlapping crises, all the time and wants action and solutions.

If we invite the public in more, we would make better decisions. We’d make longer-lasting decisions. We wouldn’t be in this other thing that happens in a first-past-the-post system where one government does a whole bunch of things, and then they get knocked out of power. Then the other government comes in and undoes all that and does a whole bunch of other things, and then they get knocked out of power. Then we just have this cycle repeating and repeating. Meanwhile, the public says: “Oh, I’m so tired.”

This was something for me in the budget yesterday, and it was last year as well. We have an Economic Forecast Council in B.C. In accordance with the Budget Transparency and Accountability Act, the Minister of Finance, in preparing the provincial budget, consults with the Economic Forecast Council — a 13-member council, and 12 out of 13 of the members are bankers.

I’m just going to say that GDP is a great thing for banks. They love that we measure things in GDP. It’s working great for them. Banks have been taking record-breaking profits for as long as I can remember, but that’s not the public. The member for Saanich North and the Islands attended the session that involved the meeting with this economic council. He said that it was akin to seeing $80,000 of suits walk into the room.

I want to hear from single moms. I want to hear from small business owners who are trying to keep their doors open. I want to hear from people in rural communities who don’t have access to transit. We do hear from them in the committee that travels around the province, but they don’t have the same kind of influence as this 13-member panel, 12 of whom are bankers, on how we budget.

I think we can do better. I think we can invite the public in, not just as a sort of show. “Oh yes, we’ll listen to you, year over year, and put a report together.” Then almost none of it…. Maybe after ten years, your initiative gets funded in the budget. I think we can do better than that. I really do.

[4:10 p.m.]

The last couple of things I want to talk about. I think we have to do better in here, not just in our jobs as elected representatives. We have to do better in here for the people that we invite in to sit in these seats.

We heard a speech last week from the member for Vancouver–Mount Pleasant, who made it abundantly clear that this wasn’t a place that she ever felt comfortable. She did good work. She did excellent work as a minister. She did the work on behalf of those people that I want to hear more from. She did work for youth aging out of care, so that they can go to post-secondary. They can get training and education. That is phenomenal.

She did work on bringing in the first Indigenous law program. This is excellent work, but she’s choosing to leave. We’ve seen Indigenous women choose to leave parliaments over and over again. We’ve seen women of colour choose to leave parliament. We’ve seen women choose to leave, citing that these places don’t work for them. They want to work for their constituents. They want to work for the public. They want to work for people whose voices typically haven’t been represented in here, but we haven’t succeeded in making this a place that they want to stay. That’s on all of us.

I think we have to ask ourselves: if we keep doing the same thing in here, how are we going to expect different outcomes? I think we can do things differently. I don’t think we have to be limited by: “This is the time-honoured tradition. The two sword lengths.” Oh, I can’t even stand it. Two sword lengths. Give me a break. Really. Honestly. Have we not come beyond that? Could we sit in a way that we’re not all grouped together in our own little our own little tribes in here? Could we sit in an oval? Could we actually spend more time talking with each other across party lines?

I think we could, and not just in committee rooms. I always hear this. “Oh, in committees, we all work so well together.” Yeah, but then we don’t adopt any of the recommendations from those committees. That was great work, and it amounted to very little. What if we took that work more seriously? That work actually is excellent work of democracy. We bring in the public. We bring in the experts. We deliberate across party lines. We find consensus. We can do so much with consensus, and then we don’t. We’re too timid. We’re too afraid.

We are all temporary occupiers of these seats. I’ve said this in the past, but I think it’s really important to say it again: for me, the measure of my work in here is absolutely about service to my community, service to British Columbians, service to future generations, and it’s also service to democracy. All of us should ask ourselves: have we made our democracy stronger since coming here, have we let it be the same, or have we actually contributed to it being weaker?

How do we weaken democracy? Less transparency. Less accountability. Less data. Less access to information. That weakens democracy. More partisanship — I’d argue that weakens democracy. An inability to show British Columbians that there are 87 adults in this room all committed to service, and that we can find ways to operate in here the way that they would hope and expect we could.

I would hope that all of us could look at a moment like this, when we have a budget, and step outside of our typical roles and ask ourselves: how can we do this better? How can we measure in a way that actually means and matters to British Columbians?

[4:15 p.m.]

How can we go year over year and begin to say: “Look. These investments we made a year ago — this is how it improved well-being in this sector and over here and here, but we have made investments here, and actually the well-being diminished there, and now we know that that wasn’t an effective way to invest, so we’re going to do something differently”?

But to do that, we have to be honest, transparent, open and willing to say that just because we’re in government, that doesn’t make us perfect in every way. The defensive shields go up. “No, don’t criticize us. We’re perfect. Every decision we make is absolutely wonderful. Everything is awesome.” And this communication machine goes out and makes sure that that’s what’s going on.

When people can feel that what’s being said and what’s being done, or what’s being said and what’s being felt, don’t connect, then we lose that precious currency of democracy, which is trust. We have to care about that. We really do.

Madam Speaker, with that, I thank you for the opportunity to speak, and I look forward to all of the innovative ways that we find to improve our service to British Columbians.

S. Chant: Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to address the members of this House in support of Budget 2023.

Before I begin my remarks, I would like to acknowledge that I’m currently working and staying on the lands of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ, specifically the Songhees and Esquimalt people. North Vancouver–Seymour, which is my riding, where I live and work, is in the territory of the Coast Salish, the Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish Nations, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to work and learn with these Indigenous communities.

There are also some people I need to thank, because they worked with me to review the budget and formulate this response. Bella Devereau, Jenna Hrechka, Zaina Khan, Ben Rutkowski and Kevin Wong are our caucus interns, and I appreciate their contributions to this discussion.

I also want to take the opportunity to acknowledge the spectacular work that is done in my constituency office by the staff there. Eli Mallin, Michael Charrois and Heather Andrews do a wonderful job of meeting and hearing from constituents, reflecting the community’s concerns to me so they can be integrated into discussions and questions here. Additionally, my constituency office staff is quick to recognize and celebrate the achievements of North Vancouver–Seymour, particularly the myriad organizations that are based there.

This past year represented a year of recovery. The pandemic is still active, but now we have a toolkit of strategies to manage it and mitigate its impact. Now it’s not the first variable to consider when people are making decisions, although it is important to keep it as a significant factor.

We have seen a lot of changes in the Legislature — a new Premier, new ministries, a cabinet shuffle, some MLAs leaving to go on different journeys. What has not changed is the ongoing work to be done by all members of this House towards strengthening and supporting the people of British Columbia.

The throne speech laid out the focus of our work in the coming year, and Budget 2023-24 allocates the resources to do that work.

Let’s start by talking about health care, a subject I have been deeply entrenched in for most of my adult life, all of my adult…. Anyway, great strides were taken last year to increase the number of health care providers through increasing training spaces and facilitating a more efficient pathway towards qualifying internationally trained clinicians.

This year we will continue to support that growth as a number of new strategies come online, and we need those folks to staff the variety of new health care service sites, such as assessment centres for kids that are demonstrating care needs, treatment and recovery beds, Foun­dry centres, urgent and primary care centres, new and updated hospitals.

As an example, Lions Gate Hospital in my community — our tower is continuing to grow. We’ve got a tower happening, and I am really looking forward to the service hub that’s going to be in that tower and the new model of client-patient beds, because now we’re going to be single-occupancy beds instead of four to a room, which is the former model. That hospital is going to make a big change in our community when it gets finished and updated.

[4:20 p.m.]

Also, I’d like to talk a little bit about the cancer care centre that has been allocated — the $270 million over three years that has been dedicated towards increased access to screening, early detection, diagnosis and treatment of cancer. As we know, cancer is a malevolent disease that is not particular about who and how it strikes.

Additionally, the physicians who are working at cancer care centres will be getting compensation that reflects the value of their specialized work. Compensation funding has also been lifted across the health care workforce, so that we can retain valuable clinicians in our province.

We know that cancer is something that touches all families in British Columbia. People want to know that their loved ones are getting the best quality of care, which is why our budget is investing to expand cancer care teams and service hours, attract professionals, improve cancer screening programs, support cancer research and increase supports for Indigenous patients and those who must travel for care from rural communities.

These measures will save lives by reducing wait times. As we attract more professionals to B.C., it will also help to improve care and bring comfort to so many British Columbians and their families.

Mental health is also a part of overall health, and mental health and addictions care is an important part of our overall health care system. Our province has already established a broad range of strategies for prevention, intervention and recovery throughout people’s lives. There are more supports on the way.

This budget includes more than $1 billion in new funding, over three years, for mental health and addictions care and treatment. Managing safe and effective care for people with complex mental health care needs, substance use challenges or brain injuries is something that requires a careful blend of appropriate care and a purpose-built environment.

Budget ’23-24 includes funding for more complex care housing to be built and for health care supports in current sites to be enhanced. For people with addiction and substance use challenges, we’ll be expanding the number of treatment and recovery beds. More trauma-informed, culturally sensitive and knowledge-based Indigenous treatment centres will be built in First Nations communities in consultation with those communities.

In North Vancouver, we were fortunate to be able to have a model piloted of the Peer Assisted Care Team. It had documented, assessed success. This model was a group of people from the Canadian Mental Health Association who would go out after hours when there was some kind of mental health crisis going on, or just go out and consult with families who were looking for help.

It has had great success on the North Shore and in North Vancouver. It has also been implemented in New West, and we’re looking at having it implemented in various other parts of the province. These are other things that support our population and support people who are dealing with mental health and addictions issues.

In addition, we also are looking at further car-based services going out. We are fortunate in North Van that we’re having RCMP and nurses go out, together, on calls. That service has been expanded over the last year, and we’re looking at expanding it further. There are other places in the province that will be doing that work.

I’ve spoken about why a wide range of specialized health services. What about public health in general? As a nurse, I understand firsthand the importance of accessible, affordable, quality public health care and what it means for those we hold closest to us.

Public health care is something that we, as Canadians and British Columbians, have taken much pride in. While some people might suggest that we might move towards privatization of health care, our government is saying no to that path. Our government is committed to providing public health care that is accessible to everyone in the province — not only accessible but of excellent quality.

We know the COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on our health care system and especially on our health care workers, who were essential in helping us get through the crisis. We have heard from health care workers that they need more support, and we want them to know that we hear them and that we value their work so much.

Nurses, doctors, care aides, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, speech therapists — there are so many clinicians that are involved in the health care system. You could spend all afternoon…. I could take my entire time just naming clinicians.

[4:25 p.m.]

Those people are all vital to us and all very much valued. We honour them. We want to keep them here, and there’s a variety of things we’re doing to work on that goal.

Our budget has included increased funding to the B.C. health care workforce strategy. This funding will not only recruit new staff, but it will retain the valuable staff that we already have and redesign and rebalance their workloads to address the pressures that have been put on our health care workers over the last few years.

I am very proud that our government is stepping up and investing in quality care in so many ways. Additionally, we have got bursaries and grants towards health care education that are being enhanced and increased in number, which provides more support to our health care students.

Starting just one month from now, prescription birth control will be free in B.C. For someone who pays $25 a month for birth control pills, this is a $300 savings every year and an over-$10,000 savings in a lifetime.

This is a huge win for gender equity in our province. The unequal burden that the cost of birth control places upon women, trans and non-binary people is coming to an end, and that’s about time. It will have a significant impact for women and families across the province.

Next, I’ll start talking about housing. Housing is top of mind for people in my riding and all across the province. Finding a place to live is hard. Affording a place to live is hard, and it has been getting harder for years.

While this province has seen strong economic numbers in recent years, Madam Speaker, the high cost of housing means that people have less money to spend at our businesses, on services and on things that make our life more enjoyable. This also means that businesses are often unable to find the staff that they need to stay open.

More than that, the high cost of housing makes it harder for folks to live in B.C. Young people have a challenging time finding a footing and getting started in life. Families struggle to find homes that meet their needs. Seniors on fixed incomes are sometimes put in positions where they need to make a tough choice between paying for food, paying rent or paying bills.

When housing becomes out of reach for people, staying in British Columbia stays out of reach. Our government understands. We don’t want to lose our young people. We know they can flourish here, with some help. For years, getting people into homes they could afford was not a priority in this province. Housing was a profitable market, rampant with speculation, and little attention was ever paid to building homes that people could afford.

Our government has taken a different, active approach in taking on B.C.’s housing challenges, and we have been making progress. Since launching the Homes for B.C. plan in 2018, the province has funded more than 40,000 affordable new homes. The speculation and vacancy tax has seen thousands of once empty homes returned to the rental market so that people can live in them.

We need to do more. In Budget 2023, we’ve refreshed the Homes for B.C. plan, getting more shovels in the ground so that we can get roofs over people’s heads. Through the BC Builds and Building B.C. programs, we’re building thousands of homes for people. We’re working with the federal government, to help people who have urgent housing needs, through the rapid housing initiative.

New student housing units, including units at Capilano University in my riding, will be available in 2025 to reduce some of the pressures on the rental market right in my community.

We’re giving as much as $400 to moderate- and low-income renters through our renter’s tax credit, a benefit expected to reach 80 percent of renting households in the province.

On top of all of those important investments, updating the rules and regulations that govern housing, working to reduce zoning restrictions so that more multi-unit homes can be built, incentivizing homeowners to construct secondary suites that can house family or renters. All of these efforts will continue in the coming years so that the people in B.C. can feel that the housing they need will be there for them where they live.

Our government recognizes that families raising children in B.C. are facing rising costs on things, from clothing to school supplies to groceries. New investments to the B.C. family benefit will put money back in the pockets of parents starting in July. With $1,750 for the first child, $1,100 for the second child and $900 for each subsequent child, families will have more to spend on items they need or want, such as children’s extracurricular activities.

[4:30 p.m.]

More and more families are moving to British Columbia and North Vancouver to provide a better future for themselves and their children. Over 100,000 people in 2021 made B.C. their home, the highest annual total since 1961, and many students are enrolling in our school systems. Budget 2023 invests more than $218 million to meet the needs of the growing number of students in our K through 12 schools.

Over two decades ago in my neighbourhood, two elementary schools were closed, because we were running out of kids. Now, Lynn Valley Elementary School is being expanded. The portables are finally being replaced by actual classrooms so that we have sufficient classroom space to accommodate those kids.

By investing in our schools, our government is ensuring that all students are properly supported to achieve their full potential. Schools will receive supplemental funding based on children and youth in care, Indigenous learners, rural school districts and students with support needs. Specifically, the learning improvement fund will support classrooms that have students with complex learning needs through additional education assistant support teams.

As the Parliamentary Secretary for Accessibility, I am proud to be part of a government that prioritizes the needs of students with support needs. I am passionate about ensuring all students have the appropriate supports, regardless of ability or learning needs. This investment will make education more accessible to students throughout British Columbia.

[S. Chandra Herbert in the chair.]

The pandemic has been extremely difficult for students, teachers, parents and administration. The classroom enhancement fund will support teachers, special education teachers, psychologists and counsellors to offer additional supports to students to help them succeed in the classroom.

Also, funding for nutritious school foods programs has been included so that kids can have access to meals at school to promote healthy learning and support active play. It’s estimated that 17 percent of B.C. families with children experience food insecurity. Students cannot focus or learn when they are hungry, and ensuring students have basic necessities and resources is critical to successful and healthy learning.

This new investment will help reduce food insecurity and provide supports that enable student access to a variety of nutritional foods. The importance of school foods funding cannot be understated, and I’m pleased that we are prioritizing this initiative.

Students in post-secondary education can now look forward to increased support in paying for their schooling and the associated costs by doubling the student loan maximums. Additionally, the amount they can earn before they have to start repaying the loan has been increased, which allows them to accumulate some funds for the transition into the working world.

For too long, child care was not a priority for government. The lack of affordable quality child care focused people to stay home from work or pay extraordinary child care fees or even leave their communities in order to find care for their children. Having accessible, affordable child care not only helps children and parents, it helps an entire community, because parents are able to participate in the local economies. By making child care more affordable for families across B.C., we have seen more and more women re-entering the workforce.

Additionally, child care is more than just a safe place for children. We know education during a child’s early years can be pivotal and shape the rest of their lives. Our government’s historic investments in child care not only support families today but also support our children’s learning for the future. Our $10-a-day ChildCareBC centres are revolutionizing the way we care for children in our province and are an important step in the province’s historic path towards making affordable child care a core service for B.C. families.

Capilano University Children’s Centre, Parkgate Child and Family Centre, Seymour Heights play-based, Seymour school age care and Tsleil-Waututh Child and Family Development Centre are all now $10-a-day ChildCareBC centres in my riding. This means families in North Van accessing these sites are paying more no more than $200 a month per child, which is life changing for so many people in our community and throughout the province. There are now over 12,700 $10-a-day ChildCareBC spaces in B.C.

[4:35 p.m.]

For those not in a $10-a-day site, the child care fee re­duction initiatives, affordable child care benefit and young parent program all support families by reducing costs for child care. Budget 2023 continues to support all of these programs so they can offer support to our families.

I have heard from many people in my community that they need a boost in income and disability assistance. For the first time since 2007, the shelter rate, which is an integral part of the income and disability assistance rate, is increasing by $125 per month, starting July 2023.

Not only that but people receiving income and disability assistance who rent will be able to claim the new renters tax credit. That can provide as much as $400 annually, which means that 160,000 people, including 33,000 children, throughout B.C. can look forward to increased assistance soon, this year.

As a former foster parent, I’ve been exposed to the needs of our most vulnerable youth, and providing this type of care has allowed me to understand just how impactful support to youth in foster care really is.

Our government is increasing financial supports for foster and extended family caregivers by 47 percent, which is huge. This helps foster families cover the rising costs of essentials like food, gas and clothing, as well as being able to do things with the kids that other families do — such as birthday parties, expeditions and community activities. Youth in care deserve every opportunity to thrive, and this increase in funding will help with that.

For so much of our history as a province, Indigenous voices and perspectives were ignored and overlooked. This budget is taking further steps towards meaningful reconciliation. It is important to include these relationships when making any decisions within this chamber, because of our historic commitment to the United Nations declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples. Working government-to-government and shaping every piece of legislation with the shared goals of the First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples of B.C., we continue to work towards a B.C. that reflects every single one of us.

Indigenous peoples, especially youth, are overrepresented in the criminal justice system and the child welfare system as a direct consequence of the impacts of colonization and residential schools. Our government is working with the B.C. First Nations Justice Council to open ten new Indigenous justice centres over the next two years to provide free and culturally safe places to get help in navigating the legal system.

This is part of our government’s goal of improving access to justice and building safe and healthy communities. It creates more spaces for Indigenous communities to have safe and holistic access to the justice system. In addition, our government’s investment in virtual bail hearings means that people across B.C. do not have to travel to the bigger cities and can remain close to their support and cultural systems, as well as their families.

My riding on the North Shore is made up of people who travel to Vancouver for many reasons, including work, access to amenities and services, medical treatments and entertainment. The province’s investment in improved infrastructure and transit systems will benefit the people of North Vancouver. Through offering alternate ways to travel, it allows people to spend more time in their communities while also reducing traffic congestion.

We will continue to see the difference these things make in our community when we look at the $100 million for active transportation projects, which will allow people to have better biking infrastructure, enjoy top-notch public services, and reduce our emissions overall. Cleaner air and water, a healthy ecosystem and a vibrant community — that’s what we’re all looking for and looking towards.

Our changing climate has led to more wildfires, floods and emergencies than ever before, leaving our communities and families at risk. We need to take meaningful action if we hope to secure a real future for our children tomorrow. Budget 2023 invests in climate action and the innovative new technologies that make our communities more resilient and sustainable.

[4:40 p.m.]

One company making a difference in my riding is HTEC, which has built one of the first hydrogen refuelling stations in North Vancouver. Hydrogen vehicles only emit water vapour and are some of the cleanest vehicles on the planet. Thanks to the stations built by HTEC in North Van and across the Lower Mainland, people will rest assured knowing there’s a network of support for hydrogen vehicles.

I met with the HTEC folks probably two weeks ago, and they’re looking at hydrogen stations right across the province. It has just announced it’s planning to build a new clean hydrogen plant in North Vancouver–Seymour with ERCO Worldwide, which will fuel hydrogen stations throughout B.C.

Making innovation happen takes more than just investment. It takes people with specialized knowledge, skills and experience. That is why the Future Ready plan is so important and why our province has put up to $480 million, over three years, for individuals and businesses — to make sure that people are ready today for the opportunities of tomorrow, to make sure that future generations can participate in and benefit from clean technologies, as they change the world around us. That’s what it’s going to take to make sure B.C. continues to actively participate at the leading edge of clean technology.

CleanBC has been an unprecedented guiding strategy to fight climate change and already is delivering real results for people. From individual energy-efficient upgrades in our homes to low-carbon building technology for manu­facturers, we’re choosing to make a difference as communities and as a province to do better. Programs like CleanBC go electric will continue to change the trajectory of our climate outcomes, and we will continue to build on this strategy to improve our futures.

As we bolster our clean economy, it’s important that people are not forced to take on the burdens of addressing climate change alone. That is why as the price on pollution rises, so will the climate action tax credit. By eliminating the largest subsidy to oil and gas companies, we’re putting money back into people’s pockets to help them address rising costs.

This budget outlines the work of our government this year, and it’s been a pleasure to share some of the highlights. Building a province where everyone can thrive is our priority, and I’m looking forward to continuing my share of that work as the MLA for North Vancouver–​Seymour.

E. Ross: Budget 2023 — uninspiring, a word that’s getting thrown out there right now by the newspapers as well as critics from all the different programs across B.C.

It’s not the first time we’ve heard this word. A member of government actually used this word just a few weeks ago. To hear this word, in the context, coming from a member of government was actually very discouraging. Really, the context was talking about how uninspiring rural B.C. is, and that couldn’t be further from the truth.

In February of 2023, the B.C. Parliamentary Secretary for Rural Development, ministry of social housing, stated that supporting our natural resources sector was “uninspiring” and a “vision for what rural communities were 100 years ago.”

Kathleen Connolly responded on behalf of rural B.C. and said:

“One would offer that rural communities provided economic stability for the entire province through the course of the pandemic. Without rural communities, the industries that have invested in our province and the workforce that lives in rural B.C., the financial health of our province would not be as strong as it is today.

“The members of the Fort St. John and District Chamber of Commerce are deeply concerned to see the disconnect and disrespect from the parliamentary secretary and expect Premier Eby’s team to represent all British Columbians and industries with equality and inclusion.

“Mr. Russell’s comments require an apology to all residents of rural British Columbia.”

Deputy Speaker: We’re not using names in the chamber, Member.

E. Ross: Pardon me?

Deputy Speaker: We don’t use members’ names in the chamber, as you well know.

E. Ross: What did I say?

Deputy Speaker: You’ve named a couple of members in the chamber. We speak about job titles, not names of members.

E. Ross: Sorry about that. I didn’t realize that. A good correction.

For those at home, you’re not supposed to use names. You’re supposed to use titles. So I’m being corrected by the Chair, which is absolutely correct.

Really, what Kathleen Connolly is asking for is an apology, an understanding of what rural British Columbia brings to British Columbia: revenues, economy.

[4:45 p.m.]

Those revenues, in turn, pay for roads, hospitals, teachers, nurses. It actually makes the quality of life better for all British Columbians. I agree with her.

In fact, Skeena…. I’m very proud to come from Skeena. I’m proud to come from a small First Nations reserve, which can be categorized as rural. I don’t find rural communities uninspiring. I don’t find rural people uninspiring. I don’t believe they are living 100 years in the past. I’ve always been inspired by labourers, millworkers, carpenters, welders, longshoremen, pipeline workers, business owners, plumbers.

What I find uninspiring…. Not only is it this Budget 2023, but what I find uninspiring are politicians and government officials that say things that are so condescending and disrespectful to B.C. citizens. No matter where we live in B.C., we should be proud of who we are and what we do to make this province stronger for all of us. We shouldn’t be trying to divide British Columbia, whether we’re talking about our societies or our communities.

Cedar LNG falls into this category but also under the category of reconciliation and First Nations self-determination. That, in turn, helps resolve poverty, children going into government care, Aboriginal imprisonment and suicide. It is absolutely unbelievable that this NDP government approved the $40 billion LNG Canada project, with the largest tax breaks in B.C. history, but they’re making the Haisla Nation, my band, grovel and beg for an overdue decision on Cedar LNG, which is only $3 billion, because it’s complicated.

I was at the table, directly, at the LNG Canada negotiations, as well as the Chevron negotiations and the Cedar negotiations. I can tell you that, by far, the Chevron project and the LNG Canada project were the most complicated negotiations I’ve ever had in my life. Cedar is not complicated in terms of impact on the land, in terms of infrastructure that has to be built, but the benefits that are going to flow to the region and First Nations, specifically, are transformational.

I’ve heard many, many speeches here, even today, talking about…. Somehow reconciliation was just discovered by the NDP government. Before the NDP came along, it never existed. That is false. That is absolutely false. In fact, if anything, the actions of this government are taking reconciliation back 40 years, to 1982, when section 35 of the constitution was first enacted.

By the way, I am not a poor, dumb Indian begging for government help. I never did. I never wanted government money. I never wanted more government programs. To insinuate this in this Legislature shows how far the NDP government is behind the times.

First Nations want economic reconciliation. They want to be engaged in the economy under section 35 of the constitution as well as all the pursuant case law: Haida, Mikisew Cree, Gladstone. The tools are all there. To ignore all this case law is to ignore the self-determination wishes of First Nations across B.C., if not Canada.

You only need to see the Haisla and all the First Nations from Prince George to Kitimat to see that this worked. It worked from 2004 to 2017. Why are we ignoring it? Not only are you uplifting a generation of people out of poverty. You’re making B.C. stronger.

I know it’s not going to stop. The condescending remarks talking about First Nations like we’re still living in 1982 are highly disrespectful. In fact, the other day….

I’ve got to apologize, Mr. Speaker. You were in the chair one day when I made an outburst to one of the members of the government making a speech. They were talking about reconciliation and how the previous government hadn’t actually pursued it, when really, it was bands like mine, in cooperation with the previous government, that helped write the protocol on how to enact the Haida court case.

[4:50 p.m.]

Later on, it was mentioned that comments triggered me. Yes, I do admit it. I do apologize for my outburst. I do apologize for not obeying the Chair. That’s not right. Everybody’s got to follow the rules. So I do apologize for that, but it did trigger me.

In fact, anything that mentions Aboriginals as a political tool triggers me. Talking about the most disadvantaged people in Canada for political purposes triggers me. I will try in the future to contain myself. But it’s hard. It’s difficult, very difficult, because a lot of what I’m hearing here in the House is false.

Anyway, back to Budget 2023. Back in 2017, we heard a lot about the renters rebate. It was $400. Six years later, we kind of got something in relation to that. But it’s not the universal rebate that was promised in 2017. Like other NDP government promises, it comes with conditions.

The rebate will be in the form of a tax credit and will be based on income. It won’t be available till 2024. In 2024, renter households making under $60,000, hopefully, will receive the full credit of $400 a year. So those making under $60,000, hopefully, will receive this tax credit. Those making between $60,000 and $80,000 will receive some sort of indexed tax credit. It won’t be the full $400. We don’t know what the amount will be. We don’t know what the details are just yet.

But here’s the thing. In 2017, when this promise was first made, the average rents in Vancouver were $1,236. In 2022, average rents are now $1,675. The $400 tax credit barely keeps up with the rental increases from 2017 to today. If you do qualify, if you do make less than $60,000 per household, then your credit…. Let’s say you make $60,000 a year, and you qualify. Well, that equates to $33.33 a month that comes through in a possible tax credit, saying that there are no more conditions.

Not only does it not keep up with the rental costs from the last five or six years; that’s not going to even help with what renters are facing today. We’ve just got to be mindful and watch as the details come out here to make sure that this full amount is achieved for those making $60,000 or less per household. By the way, if you make over $80,000 a year, you do not qualify at all.

If you make over $80,000 a year…. You’ve got to remember that for the average renter in Vancouver, you have to make at least $130,000 a year. So this announcement doesn’t do anything for anybody that’s trying to make $130,000 a year in a household. But we’ll be watching.

The health system. I imagine every single MLA in this House — 87 MLAs — hears the complaints about the lack of health services in their communities, in their ridings, in their regions. Let’s face it. The health system has collapsed. None of these grand announcements has actually made a difference in the last five years. The downward trajectory in the last five years is showing no signs of letting up.

[4:55 p.m.]

Ambulance wait times. Emergency rooms closing. Doctors leaving. Public health nurses quitting their jobs to join the private sector and then coming back to do the same work they were doing as a public health nurse and making more money with less stress. Think about that for awhile. I really don’t know what to say to this when people are talking about our public health system, the national health care system, but you’re having private nurses coming into our facilities and making more money.

I don’t blame the nurses for doing this. They’re overworked. They’re stressed, pulling double shifts, and then they see a private nurse coming in making more money than them. They’re doing even more work. The public health nurse is doing even more work, so it just makes sense that they quit their public health job and go work for the private sector and come back and do the same job with more money.

On top of this, when you’re talking about emergency rooms closing down, you’re talking about a shortage of doctors and nurses. We’re still seeing clinics not opening or clinics with wait-lists so long that you have to line up before the clinic opens if you even want to have a slim chance of seeing a medical professional.

In my riding, Skeena, Terrace specifically, there was word that at least seven doctors left Terrace. I couldn’t find out the facts in this. I couldn’t find out. People were coming to my office saying, just like everybody else across B.C., that they didn’t have access to a family doctor. Without getting facts, it was hard for me to advocate down here in Victoria in terms of exactly what is going on, but I did receive a letter.

This letter was sent out to patients in Terrace, and it’s from a Summit Medical Group. It says: “Dear patients, I’m writing to inform you that I will be closing my practice October 31, 2022. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a new physician to take over my practice, largely due to the state of affairs of primary care in this province. I encourage you to consider advocating to your MLA for change, as I fear that the loss of family doctors will only continue if the system continues to treat family physicians the way it currently does.”

Now, we’ve already seen the newspaper article that was talking about the toxicity in health care facilities and how these health care professionals don’t feel respected or valued anymore. We’re talking about doctors and nurses that truly care.

The doctor closes his letter to the patient saying: “I am heartbroken to be closing my practice, but I cannot continue to provide primary care under the current conditions. I have postponed closure as long as possible in the hopes of change, but unfortunately, the situation is getting worse rather than better, despite advocacy locally and provincially.”

When we bring these stories down here, the answer is the record amount of investments.

We’ve heard this for six years, and the conditions just keep getting worse. I’m not sure about the other 86 MLAs in here, but I’ve run out of things to tell these citizens, exactly what they should be doing. It’s even harder for rural people, because we’ve got to travel from a place like Terrace to Vancouver or Victoria for treatment. From Terrace to Vancouver is an hour and 40 trip, and it’s expensive, there and back.

If there is any cancellation or delay, the people of Terrace and Kitimat have got to eat that cost. It’s not like down in the Lower Mainland, where you can drive for an hour or two hours and get to the facility. Maybe your appointment gets cancelled. Well, you can go back tomorrow or next week. It’s not like that for rural people. It’s harder. I think everybody acknowledges that the geography of our province is making life more expensive when rural people are trying to access medical treatment.

[5:00 p.m.]

I was listening today to the questions. I try not to get involved with medical questions because, mainly, I can see the suffering and the pain that people are feeling all over Skeena, as well as all over the province, but I was shocked today.

My mother passed away from cancer a couple of years ago, and it was terribly upsetting. It was traumatizing, but I was thankful that my band had gained enough revenues that they could actually utilize to help fill in some of the gaps that the health care system wasn’t providing.

To hear the story of Francis Tran today brought that all back. It brought back stories. Many constituents have been coming into my Terrace office, and especially my Kitimat office, with similar circumstances.

Francis Tran, a former Comox Valley resident, died from liver cancer last year. He was brought to the emergency room by his family in March, where doctors discovered a ten-centimetre liver tumor. Despite the urgency of the situation, he waited for 11 excruciating weeks before receiving his first oncologist appointment, and it was too late.

What are we going to do about it when these stories are all across B.C.? Can we collect the stories, put them in a catalogue and finally point out to the government that the announcements you’re making are not adding up to results?

It’s getting worse, and these people, along with their families, are suffering, not only physically. They’re suffering mentally. The anguish of a family watching a loved one just drifting away towards death, and there’s really nothing the family can do, because the wait times are so long. I really don’t know what to tell the citizens of B.C. anymore.

Now we’re starting to see more complaints coming from women in British Columbia. I have said this before. I can’t truly understand what a woman goes through, because I’m not a woman. When they try to explain to me what they’re going through, it takes me a bit of time to realize some of the terms they’re using and some of the processes they have to go through. Then I can finally see the disadvantage that women are going through, especially now, with a collapsed health system. Women are saying that it’s vastly different for the thousands of women diagnosed each year with gynecological cancers in B.C.

This is how oncologist Dr. Sarah Finlayson feels. She says: “It’s heartbreaking. The wait times are the longest they’ve ever been in my career. The moral distress among our group is the highest it has been in my career.”

I try to equate that with everybody that’s suffering from cancer and can’t get an appointment with an oncologist, whether they be male or female, and what they must be going through. Yet when we’re talking about this, we don’t really get to the root of the problem. Believe me, I’ve tried.

The people that I think, in my mind, have a direct reason, a direct rationale for why the health system has collapsed, are health care professionals themselves — doctors, nurses, administrative people. But every time I get a message from a doctor or a nurse, they’re terrified that somehow I’ll mention their name and they’ll get retaliation. I don’t get it.

[5:05 p.m.]

If this is such a crisis, why are doctors and nurses not allowed to speak out, especially when you consider the fact that, in 2019, this Legislature passed legislation that protected whistleblowers?

Those are grand speeches. Yet a public health nurse describing to me what’s going on in the emergency room, or a doctor describing to me what’s going on, does not really want me to say anything about it because people might put two and two together and trace it back to them, and something is going to happen to them.

These are doctors and nurses pulling double shifts. They are understaffed. They are overworked. They are stressed. They have a family back home that misses them, yet we can’t talk about it because they’re afraid of what will happen between them and their employer.

A few years ago, we were banging pots to show our appreciation and support of health care workers. But now, when we bring up questions like this, government takes offence and falls back to their stump speech on how many investments they’ve made. That doesn’t translate to results.

Like many others, I did what I thought was right during COVID, but we’re not over COVID. I understand that, but we are facing a collapsed health system. We have a doctor shortage, a nurse shortage, health care worker shortage. What doesn’t make sense to me is that this government is not willing to bring back health care workers that are unvaccinated. That doesn’t make any sense.

This government is willing to bring back B.C. ferry workers who are unvaccinated, and why? It’s because they have forced a number of recent sailing cancellations. That’s the reason. It’s got nothing to do with health. The fleet is running on overtime. That’s just the recipe for burnout. We’ve been seeing this for months. That’s what Eric McNeely told CTV news. Unless there are some real, fundamental changes taken quickly, it’s going to be difficult.

You could say the same thing about doctors and nurses. Substitute the fleet and put in doctors and nurses. Doctors and nurses are running on overtime, and that’s just the recipe for burnout. We’ve been seeing this for years. Unless there are some real, fundamental changes taken quickly, it’s going to be difficult.

The government also lifted vaccine mandates for federal employees and domestic travellers and international travellers. So lifting vaccine mandates is okay for B.C. ferry workers, travellers, transportation sectors, federal employees, but it’s not good for our health care workers in the midst of a collapsed health care system with a shortage of doctors and nurses. You’ve talked about everything in terms of how to address that but refused to bring back unvaccinated health care workers.

I personally put 100 percent faith in a health care worker who knows what a communicable disease is, how not to contract it and how not to spread it, regardless of vaccination status. I can tell you that I got terribly sick twice over the holidays, and three times I went for COVID testing. I wasn’t even allowed in the building until I got a COVID test. Once they saw I was negative, they sent me into emergency. I saw two nurses and a doctor.

When I went into the hospital, I can tell you…. This goes for my family and friends as well. I had a lot of questions. But I did not have one single question of whether or not the nurse or the doctor was vaccinated. I didn’t care, because I trust doctors and nurses. My family and friends trust doctors and nurses. The only ones that don’t trust doctors and nurses are this government. If it’s such a crisis, bring them back.

Interjection.

E. Ross: You don’t want to bring them back? No?

Where are you from, Member?

[5:10 p.m.]

I hate looking at this map. This is an old map.

There we go. Powell River–Sunshine Coast.

Interjection.

E. Ross: Why not?

Interjection.

E. Ross: Because you’re the one heckling.

Deputy Speaker: I’m not sure we’re going to engage in a debate between individual members. You’ve got a chance to make your debate.

E. Ross: Aw, come on, Speaker.

Deputy Speaker: Other members will then get a chance. Rather than trying to start something, let’s just keep focused on the debate. Thank you, Member.

E. Ross: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Interjection.

E. Ross: Yeah, I will try harder throughout the heckling. You know what? I’ve always trusted doctors and nurses. I’m going to continue to trust doctors and nurses.

Deputy Speaker: Well, the member has the floor. We’ll just continue.

E. Ross: Thank you.

So why not? Why don’t we bring back all these doctors and nurses? Because it’s a crisis, and the same goes for what’s happening with addictions.

There were First Nation members in the gallery listening to the speech yesterday, and they were impressed. They heard about partnerships. But there are a number of First Nation communities and groups across B.C. that have advocated for shovel-ready projects to this government — Carrier Sekani, the Northern First Nations Alliance. So they’re ready to go, and given the surplus that we’re aware of right now in B.C., there’s enough to fund these projects.

Mr. Speaker, I’ve only got a minute left, but we do need to talk more about forestry mills shutting down all across B.C. because of the lack of supply. We need to talk about municipal infrastructure. The RBA was just down here last week. We’ve got to talk about senior living residences being proposed for Kitimat that could use some funding and support. We’ve got to talk about the neonatal clinic proposed by the R.E.M. Lee Foundation in Terrace, fundraising right now — $15 million.

To those watching at home, if you want a more fulsome description on the budget and how uninspiring it is, give a listen to my colleague from Kamloops–North Thompson. He spoke for at least an hour and a half, which is pretty impressive. So if you want more information on that, get into Hansard here at the Legislature. You can find his video or the transcript, and you can learn more.

J. Sims: It is a pleasure to be able to rise and speak in support of what I see as a very inspiring…. Let me stress that: a very inspiring budget. I use that word very, very carefully, and I use it in the way it is meant. We all know that being in government matters. I have sat in opposition at different times in different places, and yes, it’s a very, very important role, but we know, in British Columbia, that it does matter who is in government, because it’s the government that’s going to be putting forward a budget, and that budget is going to be impacting your lives from day to day.

So encourage everyone to vote. Do your homework, and vote for the kind of B.C. that you want. We have a government right now that people are inspired by. They see a government that is working for them, not just in this budget but since they have been elected in 2017.

Mr. Speaker, I come from the most beautiful riding in the province. I know. I’ve lived in your riding as well. It’s pretty special. That’s pretty special too.

[5:15 p.m.]

But I would still say that I come from a riding where my constituents continue to inspire me to do better and to do more for them in this House. I’m forever grateful to them that they have confidence in me to send me here to be their voice, their advocate but also a fighter for them.

Before I get into the details of this budget, because it does matter who is in government, I want to give sort of what has led to today’s budget. That is very, very important. I have lived in B.C. since 1977, and I’m not going to give you a history going back to 1977, Mr. Speaker, though I’m sure you would be fascinated by it.

What I saw before this government got elected was a government here for 16 long years, where working people, people teaching and people in the health care sector all felt very much ignored, as if they didn’t matter. I want to tell you how inspired they were in 2017, when the B.C. NDP government was elected, and what they saw. They saw the importance of their vote. I’ll tell you what they saw.

They began to see ICBC rebates instead of ICBC being looted, and the money taken from there to do a pseudo-balancing of budgets. What they saw was that they were getting money back in their pockets. This budget is based on those policies. What British Columbians saw, especially those who live south of the Fraser — tolls disappeared. What they saw — MSP premiums gone. What they saw — huge benefits from the new child care investments. Investments in education, health care, new Pattullo Bridge…. I could go on and on.

What people began to see was that for the first time after 16 long years, what British Columbians had was a government that was focused on the people of British Columbia — on making their lives better, day to day to day. I’m very, very pleased. I know that some of my colleagues in opposition may not find that inspiring, but I do, because when I talk to people, they tell me what a huge difference our government has made in their lives.

I also want to comment on my dear friend from the Third Party, who made a comment that being in here is too confrontational and that every budget has that same rhythm. One side proposes; the other side opposes. And then we just carry on. I want to tell her that I have been in this House when a different group has proposed a budget. I can tell you: I was not inspired. I was, I would say — along with many British Columbians in the past — very, very disappointed.

I do want to assure her that I don’t see everything through rosy-coloured glasses. I will say that our government has done lots. I was going to put another word in there, and I thought about it. We’ve done lots. But I say it everywhere. Lots done. Lots more to do. When you are bringing in budgets after 16 long years of deficit budgeting — decimation of the social safety net, attacks on public education, attacks on health care, attacks on racialized workers — it’s going to take time.

It’s going to take time, because we want to make sure that we have a very sound budgeting process where we’re looking at economic growth, which I think everybody can see when you look at where B.C. is compared to the rest of Canada and the rest of the world. We are doing well, folks. We are doing well.

In order to take care of those deficits of 16 long years…. It can’t be done overnight. I want to do it over­night, but it takes time. It has to be done incrementally, in many cases, because of the resources that we have, which are very limited.

[5:20 p.m.]

As a result of now being in government, we began to address some of those. I’ve already mentioned a few of them. Now I want to go into a little bit more detail about each one of these areas, which are so, so important to the people of British Columbia.

Let me tell you, there isn’t one person in this House who would disagree that the last four years have been very, very challenging. We’ve seen a number of pandemics. We’ve seen natural disasters unseen by my generation and, therefore, unseen by most of the people in this House.

I will say that despite all of that, and because of due prudence and the economy doing better than forecasted, this government ended up with a surplus. Part of that surplus is being used to make life better for British Columbians. It’s being used to support infrastructure that had been neglected for 16 long years or infrastructure that is outdated.

So $1 billion of that surplus is going back into our communities. Every community around this province is going to get money that they can start putting into infrastructure and projects. That, in turn, is going to create jobs, and that’s very, very important. I’ve heard the Leader of the Official Opposition say that is not a good use of money. Well, I know that when he was Premier, his attitude towards the budget was totally different. When he was Premier….

When you look at what was happening at that time, what did he do? He hiked the MSP premiums. We got rid of them. He cut child care funding. We’ve invested billions of dollars into child care. He froze education funding, froze advanced education funding and started the fire sale that eventually sold $1 billion of public lands, including the Surrey hospital land, which I will get to a little bit later.

You know something? That’s not what British Columbians want. That’s why, in 2017, they voted for a government that would look after all British Columbians, not just the top 2 percent.

Interjections.

J. Sims: Mr. Speaker, my colleagues will get a chance to speak. I hope they will stand up and do so, but I would really like an opportunity to use my time to say what I have to say. I do just want to say that.

Right now we have a government that cares about people. We know they’re hurting. We’re going to invest in people and in infrastructure because that is what is good for the economy.

Let me talk about child care, where the cuts were made by the previous government. I want to talk about child care in my riding alone, just to give you an example. In my riding alone, over 350 child care spaces are being created. These are brand-new child care spaces. In my riding alone, which is Surrey-Panorama — as most of us know, Surrey has nine ridings — parents saved $14.5 million on child care.

Now, that $14.5 million did not disappear and go off to the Canary Islands to sit in a tax shelter somewhere. That is money that gets spent back in the community. That is money that leads to parents being able to buy clothes, take little holidays, improve the nutritional value at their dining room table and feed the local economy. All of those things…. I’m just talking about Surrey-Panorama. Because of the limited time, I cannot possibly go over what happened all over the province.

I want to go on and talk about education. As we all know, it’s a subject very dear to my heart.

[5:25 p.m.]

I know our Premier of the day…. When he was running to be Premier, he made commitments. At that time, Surrey had just over 7,400 portables, and he said they would be gone. Well, over 13,500 student places have either been funded, completed or are in process of being completed in Surrey, and that is a commitment.

However, we do know we have many portables. We have a lot more to do. Surrey has about 1,600 new people who arrive there every month. These people are young. They have families, so we have a growing problem.

We also know that something else added to the growth in portables, and for that, the previous government, the one that was here for 16 years, needs to take responsibility. In 2002, they stripped the teachers’ collective agreement, took away students’ working conditions and supports for students with special needs and basically went to war with the professionals in public education.

You know what? That case went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, and the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that what had happened to the teachers’ collective agreement was not right. I’m trying to use really polite language here because I know I’m in these hallowed halls.

They knew it was not right, and as a result, many, many more classrooms were needed. So not only, for 16 years, did they not build schools to keep up with the population, but they also created this kind of a false situation here where many, many students were crammed into very, very small classrooms. Even libraries were taken over as classrooms simply because of the lack of construction that took place.

Once again, as I was saying, in education, we have seen a lot of investments right in my riding. I can tell you that when I look at the investments that have taken place in Surrey…. Right across from my office at 144 and 64, almost a brand-new high school, with 600 plus new seats. Now, let me be real. We could do with almost that size school again. But the fact is that our government did that.

Panorama elementary school. I’ve got a whole list of schools here. Sullivan Elementary School, as well, getting — how many? — eight new classrooms. Wonderful. Panorama has had eight new classrooms added. Sullivan, over 700 more student spaces have been created. Once again, I’ve tried to stick to actionables that have happened in my riding, because that’s really, really important.

Now, let me get back to fiscal management. We often hear that the party which sits in opposition are really good fiscal managers. Having been a teacher for a long, long time, I find that hard to swallow, and I want to explain why.

One of the basics of economics that we all know is that for economic growth to happen, government does play a role. But let me tell you, management of our assets, management of B.C.’s. government assets, rests with the government. This government…. Not this government, the government that was in power for 16 years before our government, in order to make it look as if they were good fiscal managers, did a sleight of hand. What was their sleight of hand? Overnight they sold $1 billion worth of property, which was sold ridiculously below market, what many have called a fireside sale.

[5:30 p.m.]

I come from a farming family — back in the Punjab, of course, not in England. One thing I learned from my father was that you don’t sell your assets. You don’t sell your home. You don’t sell the land you have.

We’re a growing province. The previous government knew that that land would be needed for schools, for hospitals, for child care centres and for industrial development. But you know what? They sold it just so that they could have this mirage of having balanced their budget.

Out of that fireside sale, there was a piece of property that was sold that’s in my riding, the riding of Surrey-Panorama. Do you know what, Mr. Speaker? That’s where…. When the opposition was in government, they had a minimum of three press conferences at that site to say: “We’re going to build a hospital here.” Guess what. Before they were defeated, they had sold the land. So obviously, they had never intended to build a hospital at that location.

That is the kind of fiscal manager they are. In a growing city, where infrastructure is needed, what they did was sell land.

I’m getting back to the budget. In this budget, what we have is the hospital…. The land is there now. It’s in a different riding. The original location would have been perfect, but it’s in a different riding. It’s a great location. The business plan is completed. It’s out to procurement, and we’re hoping to get shovels in the ground in the very near future. That hospital is going to be built.

You know what? You can tell how committed the opposition is to the people of Surrey. Guess what the official opposition leader has now said. “Oh, it’s the wrong location.” First, he sold the land. Now the location we have is the wrong location. So what is he going to do now — not build a hospital for Surrey or delay it by another decade?

Not going to happen. That hospital is going to be built by our government. That’s the commitment we have made, and we’re going to keep that commitment.

You will hear a lot from the other side, Mr. Speaker. “Oh, these are just words. These are just words.”

Building a hospital, which is a $1.7 billion project, does not happen overnight, especially when our predecessors had sold the land. Maybe the project could have been completed a lot quicker. They sold the land, and we had to start from scratch. There was no plan for that hospital. So all of the business plan, the concept plan, the stages had to be done.

I want to give an assurance to the people of Surrey that this hospital is going to be built. They will be seeing shovels in the ground not too far into the future because the hospital is at procurement.

We’ve heard a lot of discussion about cancer — very serious. The word “cancer” scares the life out of me. I mean that literally. I’ve lost three uncles and an aunt to cancer. My aunt passed away when she was 38. I lost an uncle last year, an uncle five years ago and another uncle eight years ago.

As I’ve shared in this House before, two years ago my daughter was diagnosed with cancer. I can tell you, as much as I had all those feelings before…. When it happens at home, I cannot tell you how you fall apart. I don’t fall apart that often, but this did make me fall apart.

I’m very proud of our government. This new hospital is going to have state-of-the-art cancer treatment, cancer research, a cancer diagnostic centre, at the new hospital.

[5:35 p.m.]

We’ve seen the announcement that was made by the minister recently on the new commitments to cancer care. Yes, our health care system is challenged. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the minister say that it’s not facing challenges. We are. But let me tell you. Having this state-of-the-art cancer hospital built at the new Surrey hospital means a lot to a lot of families like me, to a lot of others and to all of us, I am sure. I’m very, very happy that that cancer centre is going to be included in there.

I want to change the tone a little bit now. There is so much in this budget. I just don’t know where to start.

When I look at the capital investments in this budget…. Those capital investments are not just dollars being spent for the sake of it. That’s much-needed infrastructure. That’s completing the deficit that was created and building for our current population. When you build capital projects, you create jobs. When people are employed, they pay taxes. That money comes back into the system.

There used to be, in B.C., a right-wing government and a Premier who used to actually believe in investing in infrastructure in British Columbia. We have some of our infrastructure today that goes back to that period. Then somewhere along the way, that was lost. Now we’ll just hear about other things and not about the need to invest to grow our economy.

You know what? When we’re facing international challenges, that’s the very time to invest and grow our infrastructure that we need.

Surrey should have had a second hospital, probably, 20 years ago. It’s going to get one now, because we have a government that believes in investing in people and growing good-paying jobs.

Not only that. I know…. I’m a mom, I’m a grandmother to two beautiful granddaughters, and I have a great-granddaughter.

When it was announced that prescription contraceptives were going to be free in British Columbia, I think there was a “hurray” heard right across Canada, in North America and, I would say, in Europe as well. We are the first jurisdiction to do it in Canada. I think that is a huge, huge step forward. When we think of a woman’s reproductive rights, those are very, very important.

We can talk for days, but there is a group of people, those who are on social assistance and disability, that hasn’t seen a change, despite all the rent increases, in their housing allowance being lifted. To have it lifted in this budget, by 30-plus percent, is huge. Is it enough? Many will say that it needed to be more. I will say…. Still, it’s a 30-plus percent increase, and we should be celebrating that.

Doubling the student loan maximums. We all say that education is the foundation of our economy. Not only did our government make grade 12 adult education free, but right here we’ve got money in this budget for scholarships for those who are economically challenged to be able to afford that education, and also giving people more time to pay off their loan repayments.

The renter’s tax credit is a topic that has been talked about a long, long time. I’m glad our government is doing this. Yes, it is income-tested, but that was the way it was always meant to be. I don’t think anybody ever said anything different. For me, yes, it’s there. It is going to be income-tested, but it will support those at low and middle incomes. That, once again, is huge.

[5:40 p.m.]

The B.C. family benefit — that alone is going to make a huge, huge difference to many families, especially those who are struggling.

When you put together a budget, even for your family, you look at your family and where the needs are. What you do, as good parents, is try to match the needs of all the family members. This budget, I think, in its scope, has done huge investments in developing housing, in child care, in infrastructure and in health care. I think it has hit the full spectrum. But, as my colleague said previously, is it enough? No. Do we still have more to do? Absolutely.

There is one area that I really have to hit on before my time runs out. That is the area of mental health and the opioid crisis that we’re in. That is our third pandemic. I will tell you that the investments that are going in there are just absolutely amazing to me.

When I became elected, this ministry didn’t even exist. Now we have a ministry that’s fully operational, and it is going to have huge…. Almost $1 billion is going to be in there for mental health and addictions, with over $500 million going into the spectrum of care, including creating more beds and seamless care, which we need — care when you need it and where you need it. All of those steps are being taken by this government.

Let me conclude by saying that who you vote for matters. Who forms government matters. And I think British Columbians will see by this budget that when they elected a B.C. NDP government, they elected a government that cared for all people in British Columbia, not just the top 1 or 2 percent.

What they’re seeing going back to them from this government is assistance when they need it — what we have done since we have formed government, whether it was the tolls, the MSP premiums, ICBC rebates, the climate change credits, all of those things — but also an investment in education, investment in health care, investment in addressing the mental health crisis and huge investments in getting prepared for natural disasters.

Mr. Speaker, time always runs out so quickly, and I barely got to skim the budget, but I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak.

K. Kirkpatrick: I would like to thank the member for Surrey-Panorama for the explanation of financial management. It was much appreciated.

I am grateful to have the opportunity to stand in this House today and speak to this budget. I recall that earlier the Leader of the Third Party stood up and started talking. I was madly writing all my notes here, and she was talking about how we shouldn’t be just reading off pieces of paper here, how we really should be having a conversation, and that every time and every year, everything we say in this House just sounds like the exact same thing that we said the previous year.

To test that, I went to Hansard to look at my speech from the previous year and realized that the first two paragraphs are, in fact, exactly the same. So I am going to try and follow her lead and not strictly speak from my speaking points.

I would like to acknowledge the hard work of the minister and also of the ministry staff. I understand that preparing a budget is very complex. It’s a difficult task. Many people are involved in doing it, so I just would like to thank them for that.

I’d also like to start on a positive note. I was very pleased to see the inclusion of free prescription contraception in the budget. [Applause.] We’ll applaud for you there.

[5:45 p.m.]

I’m proud also that the B.C. Liberals have been advocating for that for years, brought a question up in previous years’ estimates. My friend the MLA from Kelowna-Mission has spoken in this House about it, made two-minute statements on it. She has spoken in the media. She has published articles about it. You can be assured that this side of the House, certainly, supports that, and we’re very excited about it.

I was, personally, also very pleased to see the increase to foster parents and care providers. People who look after children, who support vulnerable youth, are so important. It is something that I have hoped, for years, that there would be more support and an increase for. I have personally had experience with the foster care system, which I have not talked about, but I will tell you that the people that step in as foster parents can change a child’s life. I’m so pleased to see that government has added that in.

We’ll talk about some of the things that I think we’ve had some fails on or that this government has had some fails on.

I would like to go back to what the Leader of the Third Party was saying also, talking about how we measure things, how we judge things, the idea that we have to look not just at GDP — now, I disagree with her on this; I mean, that is an important thing that we need to be measuring — but at that qualitative aspect of what we are doing as a society.

Are British Columbians happy? Is their health better than previous years? Is their mental health better than previous years? I do want to recognize that I do think those things are very important.

When I was running a social services organization — and I’m sure there are other members who have been in non-profits who can relate to this — you would be judged by direct service hours. How many hours have we actually provided in counselling? How many hours have we supported in victim services, as opposed to that qualitative measure? It’s really, really hard to come up with that. There are lots of conversations about that.

As a government, though, I think that we can look more at a lot of those qualitative measures. We have to look at mental health. We have to look at what’s happening in our communities. Patting ourselves on the back and saying, “Look, we’re spending all this money, and everything is great,” is not good enough. We’ve got to look at what’s actually happening, on the streets and in the houses, to people in British Columbia. It’s not good, and it’s not going in the right direction.

I do want to acknowledge that I really enjoyed what she was saying. I’m very supportive of looking at other ways to measure government’s success. GDP is certainly part of it. It’s part of a suite of things that we should be alive to. It’s not easy for government to do it. It’s not easy to figure out what these metrics should be. I will say that I find, when looking at the results of this government now, even measuring things in easy ways, just looking at numbers, seems to be challenging. So trying to find those qualitative measures would be even more challenging.

Yesterday the NDP presented their seventh budget in this House — proposing, once again, record-high spending, and from what we’ve seen, delivering record-low results. After six years now, we see that the province is still left in multiple crises. British Columbians want more than what we’ve seen provided for them in this budget. We know that life has never been more unaffordable. I don’t think any members on the other side of the House can disagree with these things.

It has never been more unaffordable: the highest gas prices and the highest housing prices in North America. People are literally dying because they cannot access basic health care. Emergency rooms are shutting down in every corner of the province experiencing this. So many on both sides of the House have experienced these real impacts with these things in their own life.

When we’re talking about not being able to get into a walk-in clinic and having issues accessing emergency, my 96-year-old mom lives with us. She was very, very sick a little while ago. It was on a weekend; we couldn’t get hold of her doctor. Luckily, she has a doctor. We were phoning all over to find out: could we take her to a clinic? Where can she go?

We were told: “You know what? She’s too elderly. She’s too frail to come and wait for three hours at the walk-in clinic. We recommend you call the ambulance to get your mom taken into emergency.” She didn’t want to go, because we knew she was just going to lie on a bed or something for hours before someone took a look at her.

[5:50 p.m.]

These things are impacting all of us in the House. This is not some people out there somewhere that we don’t know and that are being hurt by these things. Violent prolific offenders committing vicious random assaults daily — this is still happening.

B.C. really does lack a comprehensive and strategic plan to support those people in British Columbia who are suffering from mental health and addictions. We’ve got to be able to measure this. How do we know if we’re being successful? The media doesn’t think this government is being successful. British Columbians don’t think this government is being successful. We need to measure what’s happening, and government needs to pay attention to that.

This issue is top of mind for most people, this mental health and addictions crisis. My colleague, the MLA for Kamloops–North Thompson, mentioned in his response that the word “crisis” seems to be losing meaning. It has been a crisis for such a long time. Now it’s just something that we call it. It hasn’t been dealt with the same way that we dealt with the crisis of the pandemic.

Something has to be done. The NDP plan hasn’t been working. Why are deaths increasing? Why are deaths continuing to happen?

If you choose one thing to measure to tell us if the NDP government’s mental health and addictions plan is working, deaths could be one of those things you could measure. There are still six or seven people dying, on average, daily in British Columbia. If you tell me you’re going to take a look at that and say: “Well, gee. We’re doing a great job….” That number is not going down. It doesn’t take much to figure out that is indeed a sign of failure, not a sign of success.

So while we sit here every day on this side of the House, we hear members of government pat themselves on the back and talk about all the money that is being invested in addictions treatment but never recognize and take responsibility for the fact that we still have an extraordinary number of people suffering and dying. It is not the right way to approach it.

The mental health and addiction crisis requires more than just money. If it was just money, we would have resolved the crisis, so it’s not money. It’s what we are doing with that money. There needs to be a dramatic change in the way that the NDP are dealing with this.

Fees will continue to be barriers to access treatment. That wasn’t removed when we had the budget. The budget documents admit the average wait for treatment today is a month, and they have no target to reduce the wait. Well, some of us who have worked with people suffering from addictions….

I can tell you that when someone has a moment of clarity where they will take support, where they will reach out for support…. They have a moment of clarity and you say: “Okay. Well, six weeks from now or four weeks from now on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock we’ve got a time for you to go and get an assessment so you might be able to get into a treatment bed.” Well, that moment of clarity moves pretty quickly, and you’ve lost that person from being able to have access to treatment and being successful.

Here’s a quote from one of our legislative reporters from yesterday. It’s Rob Shaw. He never pays attention to me, so it’s okay if I quote him — Rob. “I will say this about the NDP’s addiction treatment plan. It is, in most ways, a demonstrably lesser plan than the B.C. Liberal proposal. No regional care centres. No elimination of fees. Not even money to begin collecting data on wait-lists, usage of beds, etc. Unimpressive.”

We also hear concerns that this government is creating a two-tier addictions treatment system that only those who can afford to can have access to.

I have a very good friend of mine whose daughter became an addict, was suffering, was street entrenched and had a young child. That young child was taken away by MCFD. I think we forget, also, that connection between the individual who is suffering with an addiction and the impact it has on their children and the rest of their family. So often with those suffering addiction, MCFD is a part…. Housing is a piece of that. MCFD is a piece of that.

For her daughter, it was months and months until she was able to actually find treatment. She had to leave her job. She had to stay home with her daughter, because her daughter had decided that she wanted to seek help. She didn’t want to be by herself. She needed her mom there with her.

[5:55 p.m.]

It took about seven months for her to actually get into a treatment program. She had to pay for it. It was a seven-week program. The good news is, because this demonstrates that if you do get support and treatment it can work, this young woman is now…. She has her daughter back. She’s now in school. She really has created a life for herself. That’s what a recovery-focused approach to addictions treatment really gives us. It gives us hope. It gives us a life, to move forward, and that’s what we really need.

In backwards land, which I will…. You’ll understand why I refer to that. Budget 2023 has funding going towards decriminalization “to prepare for the change.” There’s money put in this budget to get prepared for decriminalization, which has already been brought in previously.

There are a number of commitments that, yes, have to get done and that are being budgeted for this year, but these all were supposed to have been commitments prior to decriminalization coming in. These are all of those supports that we need to have, wraparound and access to treatment beds when somebody needs treatment. That all should’ve been done already. It’s a bit backwards that we are now putting the supports in place that were supposed to come in at the same time as decriminalization came in.

Despite promising to expand the Red Fish Healing Centre…. We looked through the capital plan. There was nothing in there for the Red Fish expansion or recovery communities. We asked the minister this morning. We were told that, yes, this was in the budget. One of my colleagues asked. We will look forward to finding out what page that is actually on in the budget document because we were unable to find it.

The bulk of the new addiction treatment funding is actually back-loaded in the fiscal plan, after the next election. There’s nothing in the budget about providing free recovery treatment. That was a cornerstone of the plan put forward by the B.C. Liberal Party, the Better is Possible plan.

There are other things we should look at. We need to be able to take down the barriers to access for mental health, for counselling. Saskatchewan has a really interesting program they run, with a group of their non-profit counselling groups, where they actually provide free walk-in counselling services. If somebody is walking along…. These non-profits are engaged to provide these services where somebody in a mall or walking along the street can see you can actually have access to a walk-in counselling session.

So looking at these ways that we can support people without fees, support them in real time. We need to be more innovative in the approach…. This government needs to be more innovative.

The NDP also, and we heard it with the previous speaker, is famous for trying to villainize the opposition and for making unsubstantiated claims that this side of the House would cut all spending. This is not the case. Just look at our commitment in the Better is Possible mental health and addictions plan.

There are people on this side of the House…. I speak to them outside of this room. I know they care. We share stories. We shed tears about people in our own communities who are suffering, who can’t access health care, who have a child who is suffering, who have these really, really difficult stories of living in poverty. We understand the need to support people with disabilities. We understand the need to make sure people are living above the poverty line.

It’s not about this side of the House wanting to cut. This side of the House wants to make sure the money we’re spending is being spent in the right way and is actually having the outcomes that we expect it should be having. That’s what we would do differently.

[J. Tegart in the chair.]

It’s not about cutting. It’s about spending to a plan where we know it’s going to help the most, and it is directed where it needs to be directed and not a scattershot of dollars for à la carte projects. It’s just never going to get us where we need to go. Talking about how much money you’re spending is just not the same as actually getting things done.

[6:00 p.m.]

I’ve used this example before. I’ll use it again. In the two great non-profit organizations that I ran in the past, can you imagine that I’m going to go to my board, and I’m going to say: “Well, you know what, board? We didn’t do the things we were supposed to do this year. We didn’t serve as many people as we should have served. The quality of what we did wasn’t as good, but I have great news for you. We spent more money than any board or any CEO previous to this has ever spent.”

Do you think that is really what that organization is going to want to hear? No. All organizations who are responsible track what they’re doing. They don’t just have rhetoric and talk about how great they are. They can come, and they can say: “Look what we’ve done. Here’s the number of people we served. Here’s the quality of what we did.” It doesn’t matter how much money you spend. We need to spend in the right places.

Now, when we are talking about spending money, I wanted to also say…. See, I’m off my notes here. I could be talking for an hour now. Is one of those boards…?

I just want to thank you guys. One of those examples I was talking about…. I was the CEO of the Real Estate Foundation, and I found out last week that the Real Estate Foundation is the most amazing organization in the entire world. They can do no wrong, and I just have to say thank you very much. They actually are the most amazing organization in the whole world.

A little frustrating while we’re listening to this on this side, but I was very pleased that you understand who the Real Estate Foundation is. I wasn’t sure there was complete clarity on what they did, listening to the speeches, but they are a great organization.

We need to spend in the right places. I would wonder how many British Columbians feel that we’re spending in the right places, with the Premier’s office reaching a new high record of $16 million in spending for the Premier’s office. Shockingly or not, that is 80 percent higher than in 2017. Is this how we invest in British Columbians to help them weather the storm? Is that the kind of investment that British Columbians want?

We need to provide services. There’s no argument from us there. We need to invest in people and provide services. But this government is adding another 11,303 government workers. Total employment in the B.C. public sector has increased by nearly 128,000 positions under the NDP government, or 33 percent, and on all accounts, things are worse. They’re not better. Have we seen a correlation in the increase to enhance government services and outcomes? I think most would say definitely not.

Again, we need to spend money in the right places. But, you know, I’m a mom. There are many parents in here, grandparents in here. I do worry that we are…. Something called intergenerational debt, which is that if we do not pay attention to both sides of being fiscally responsible and investing in people, we are going to be putting a lot of burden on our children in the future. We’re transferring provincial debt to our kids. Taxpayer-supported debt is dramatically increasing, to $100 billion. That is a double the debt level from when the NDP came into office.

Today, with rising interest rates, debt servicing costs will grow by $1½ billion. This is going to mean that there’s going to be less money for health care, less money for housing, for crime, for addictions treatment. If this trend continues, our children are going to be hit with higher taxes and reduced services.

You look at this side of the House and say: “Oh, they only want to cut.” No, we want to invest in British Columbia to make sure we can afford to provide the services in the future that British Columbians need, that our kids need, that our grandchildren need.

By the way, there is nothing in this budget that talks about growing the economy, generating more revenue, supporting small businesses. Small businesses make up such a huge and important, integral role in our society, and they are feeling that they were left out of this. Government numbers in the budget show that this government actually expects revenues from businesses in British Columbia to be decreasing this next year.

[6:05 p.m.]

What have we given them? We’ve given them an in­crease in the EHT rate. But what else have we given them? We’ve got to support both sides of the balance sheet.

Now, I’m going to give you a quote here. We’re moving to a new topic. I’d like to talk about child care for a moment. “Amid all the new investment in critical services, I was surprised that the budget was relatively silent on continued expansion of child care spaces.”

Now, this is a quote from CUPE president Karen Ranalletta. As the Minister of State for Child Care knows, we’re going to have to ask a lot of questions when we’re in estimates, because it’s really hard to peel out these numbers. Where is that money going? It looks like there’s an increase in child care spending that’s less than inflation this year, and by any measure, that is actually a reduction in spending. So I’m hearing about a big commitment to child care, but I’m certainly not seeing that there.

I want to talk about children and youth with special needs. Not surprisingly, there are many parents that were looking to see what support the government was going to provide for their youth and children with support needs. In the recent report tabled by the Representative for Children and Youth in this House last week, the research that has been done clearly shows that CYSN services and these new family connections centres need additional funding, more than the funding that they were getting, not the same, not less — more.

The quote from the document: “Without a substantial infusion of new funding, wait-lists will be even longer, service quality will be more compromised, and CYSN and their families will suffer as a result. Perhaps the most important question to be addressed is this one. What is the ministry’s plan for additional funding, both interim and long term, to address current funding shortfalls, existing service wait-lists, existing service inadequacies and the influx of additional CYSN children under a future transformed system?”

That was last week that we heard that. It’s going to come as no surprise to the Minister of MCFD and her staff that we’re going to have to really dig down and figure out how these things are being funded and where the support is for them.

The budget claims there will be $95 million over three years for a variety of things, including, ironically, to engage in deeper consultation regarding the funding and service model for children and youth with support needs. Well, that’s ridiculous. That was supposed to be done five years ago. So now all of these….

The four centres and FCCs have been rolled out. Families with children with autism were put under all of this stress and everything for the last two years, and now government is putting money towards actually doing some detailed consultation with those being impacted.

My goodness. I only have five minutes left. I might not even get to housing. That was the one I wanted to…. With the minister here, I wanted to make sure he had that ability to hear me.

The budget claims, again, $95 million, but if you’re looking at the actual CYSN budget, there’s only a 10 percent increase over the previous year. If you look at the salary increases required and inflation, again, that’s actually a decrease in a funding commitment for children and youth with support needs.

As the shadow minister for Housing, I was particularly interested in seeing how this government intends to help British Columbians find and keep safe, affordable housing. The budget promises more money for B.C. Housing and the HousingHub. Well, we’re all still waiting for the completion of a forensic audit. Hopefully it will be tabled so we can see what’s happening there.

Also, we’re hearing that units participating in the HousingHub are now being found listed on Airbnb, and current interest rates have now made the HousingHub simply not viable anymore for partnership with developers. So the HousingHub, the housing flub — we can continue to invest in it, but it’s not working. It needs to be changed.

The budget promises $4.2 billion over three years, and this is to go towards building “thousands of new homes” for renters, people with middle incomes, Indigenous peoples and students. So that’s thousands of units over three years, but nowhere was there any mention of the 114,000 units that were promised six years ago now.

[6:10 p.m.]

My understanding is that there have only been 11,000 that are actually open and that people are able to live in. It’s not surprising that when you look at the new budget and the service plans that there are no metrics in there anymore. I guess government feels they can just say thousands, but if we don’t put a number down, you can’t hold us to account for it. I’m not particularly hopeful that those thousands — I hope they do — will actually get built.

My colleagues have talked about the renters rebate. I found it was actually funny when it came out yesterday. Since 2017, it’s been this big, exciting…. This renters rebate that’s going to happen. It is worth almost nothing now. You’re not going to get it till the end of the year. It is not a rebate. It’s a tax credit, which is not what had initially been promised to British Columbians. Again, that’s just an example of a failed promise or something that’s dressed up to look like something that it’s actually not.

We know housing and affordability crisis has only gotten worse with rent and mortgage payments skyrocketing. The NDP government’s budget, its own budget, says this is as good as it’s going to get. We need more housing supply, and the budget predicts housing starts are going to fall over the next three years. So how are we going to get those thousands of units for British Columbians if we’re also saying that we’re predicting that housing starts are going to fall over the next three years? Those things don’t fit together.

Health care. Despite the rhetoric on health care, the outcomes have never been worse. North Vancouver, where I come from, where the MLA for North Vancouver–Seymour, the MLA for North Vancouver–Lonsdale…. The three of us share this wonderful North Shore of Vancouver. We have got the worst wait-lists in Canada on the North Shore. The worst wait-lists in Canada for walk-in clinics. I go back to talking about my mom, a 96-year-old woman. We can’t take her to a walk-in clinic where you have to wait three hours. There are people that are not seeking medical assistance and supports when they need to, because there are so many barriers, just physical barriers, for them even to be able to access this.

We can talk about cancer. We’ve been talking about cancer, and those stories that we told in question period. They’re not stories. They’re real. There are real people behind those tragic issues that are happening. I talked about my own cancer experience in this House, and because of that, many women reach out to me and talk to me about the fear that they are experiencing with these long waits. Very concerning.

So 48 seconds. Wow, time really does fly in here. I’m going to have to go to the big ending here. Okay. I am very worried about the future of British Columbia. I am worried that the members of government make a lot of promises. I didn’t even have a chance to talk about the disappointment in the capital budgets.

Young Guns from Mission, I just wanted to shout out to you, because you’re already tweeting about the fact that you did not get your Mission high school. I know you were amazing young people who advocated a lot for that. Not in this budget. You are not getting that high school.

Madam Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to speak to this budget.

Hon. R. Kahlon: Sorry to the member across the way. Almost got in before me.

It’s my pleasure to speak in favour of this budget. I want to first thank and congratulate the Minister of Finance. I think colleagues from both sides of the House have mentioned and said thanks to the staff — people who put a lot of work in to make sure that these budgets are presented in a way that people can use them for information. People can see the impacts they’re making on people’s lives. It’s a lot of work, and I want to say a big thank you to everyone in the Ministry of Finance, but in particular, to my colleague, the Minister of Finance. Her first budget. I think she did an amazing job.

Before I dive into the budget, I just want to touch on something important. Today my new nephew, who was…. Well, both my nephews visited the Legislature with my mom, which was pretty special. I told her I was doing a speech, but she seemed not interested in staying to hear it, but perhaps she’s watching online.

[6:15 p.m.]

But I do want to recognize my older nephew, who’s a couple years old now, Amari Kahlon, and my brand-new nephew, who was born just over three weeks ago, Amroze Navroop Singh Kahlon, who visited the Legislature for the first time.

It was pretty special to have both of them here running around the halls, going to the Speaker’s office and getting some chocolates. It was just lovely to be here, especially because my nephew that’s just been born is named, his middle name, after my dad, who passed away a couple of years ago, so extra special.

This budget is so important, not only for many reasons that I’ll highlight in my remarks but for my community in particular. I am so proud of representing North Delta. I have such an amazing community, have such amazing people in my community. I spend every two weeks on the doorstep, where I go and talk to people. It’s my favourite job of being an MLA. Sometimes I feel like I’m disconnected, and being able to go on the doorstep and hear from people is awesome. I love it.

What I love about my community is the ability to be able to share with them the things that are happening. There are a few things in particular that we have been able to deliver in my community and that I’m particularly proud of.

The work that’s happening right now on Highway 97 and Highway 17, which is a $260 million project that is helping goods move through our community faster but also helping to ensure that people get home faster. I know this work is something that people in my community often raise as critically important. We’re almost at completion, and I’m just thrilled about that.

The $8 million for a brand-new track that was built in my community. It’s a game-changer. One of the things I said when I got elected…. I said we were going to build that track, and we were able to deliver that track, which is obviously a huge impact for my community.

The four playgrounds that we have in our community. Jarvis Elementary, Chalmers Elementary, Richardson, McCloskey — new playgrounds in every single one, all these four elementary schools. This is huge because it talks about important pieces that are in the budget.

We know, coming out of the pandemic, that it’s been hard. It’s been hard on people. It’s been hard on their mental health, but in particular, kids. I have talked in this place about how hard it was for my family, having a young one who couldn’t socialize with his friends. We discovered, through the pandemic, that our playgrounds, our outdoor spaces, are vitally important to ensure not only physical health but mental health. The ability to have these playgrounds in my community — and more coming, thanks to what’s in this budget — I think is phenomenal.

I want to go through a couple of the pieces here. I did want to comment on something that the leader of the Green Party mentioned in her comments about assessing the economy. She made some comments about using GDP as a metric and perhaps highlighting some of the flaws of looking at the economy through just a GDP lens. You know, I agree with a lot of what she had to say. It is an important metric. It’s how people look at our economy, but it shouldn’t be the only way. It shouldn’t be the only way to assess whether things are going well or not.

I do want to share with that member — and I certainly will if, next question period, the question comes again — that we have actually been doing a lot of work on looking at models to look at the economy other than GDP. In fact, we actually have a partnership with FNLC. We funded them last year, about $1.3 million, to get a centre of excellence around economic development for Indigenous communities.

Part of that work we’re doing there is actually a conversation about how we assess whether the economy is working or not. There’s a real desire from First Nations communities, Indigenous communities, to use more of a wellness model to assess our economy so that we use learnings from Indigenous communities.

I had an Elder share with me that the way that many communities used to look at the strength and success and economic vibrancy of their community was whether the community was growing in population. When they were growing in population, they knew that they were healthy and that they were successful, so we desperately….

I think we have a real opportunity to learn from jurisdictions like New Zealand and other jurisdictions who have already moved to a wellness model. I know a lot of work is happening in the Netherlands on this as well, looking at a whole host of metrics to see whether the economy is working for people.

[6:20 p.m.]

I think what comes from that engagement and from that conversation will help inform the province on how we can assess whether the economy is working for people or not. I do want to put that on the record so that folks know that that work is actually happening.

There are some themes in this budget, certainly: health care, housing, addressing cost pressures that people are facing in their lives, ensuring that we have safe communities and also focusing on a sustainable and clean economy. Those are some of the themes that we have in this budget. I certainly want to go through each of them.

I’ll start with advancing B.C.’s strong and sustainable economy. It was a real pleasure for me over the last few years to have the responsibility of being the Minister of Jobs, Economic Recovery and Innovation. JERI doesn’t have as cool a name as JEDI does now, but it was still the same folks that were working there. The work that we were doing there during uncertain times, meeting with businesses and trying to figure out what the future looks like and how to help them navigate it, has actually helped position us where we are now.

It’s vitally important to recognize that the approach that we took as a government, which was that we’re going to invest in people, we’re going to invest in our small businesses, we’re not going to go with loans, we’re going to give them dollars so they don’t have to pay them back…. We knew two things. One, we knew that if we gave them loans, like the federal government did, later those businesses would have pressures to pay those loans back. So we decided it was going to be direct payments and allowing the flexibility for those businesses to decide where they wanted to use….

Interjection.

Hon. R. Kahlon: The member across the way wants to jump in on this. He should know that $550 million was invested in communities, in small businesses so that they could survive and be able to manage the challenging times we had — some of the highest per-capita supports in the country for people and businesses.

Interjection.

Hon. R. Kahlon: I can go back and forth with him all the time. I certainly hope that he gets a chance in question period sometime to ask a question.

Interjections.

Deputy Speaker: Members, the minister has the floor.

Hon. R. Kahlon: I don’t think I’ve seen that yet, but if he does get a moment to ask me a question, I’m certainly happy to answer that question.

Those investments, I think, put us in a place where we are now, leading the country in economic recovery. That’s something that we all should be proud of, all members. I say that because I know that members from all sides of the House would bring cases of businesses that needed supports to us, and many, many of those cases we were able to navigate and find ways to support. That is why we’re in the position that we’re in now.

Part of the economic recovery, beyond just the pandemic…. Looking into the future is where our focus has been. It’s a focus of this budget. It’s a focus of the StrongerBC economic plan.

Part of the discussions we had when we built that plan, when we engaged with communities, was an understanding in our population, in our people, whether it was business, not-for-profit, others…. They don’t see a separation between social investments and economic investments. The two go hand in hand. That’s a lesson that we learned in the pandemic. There is no separation. If you don’t have health care, if you don’t have mental health supports, if you don’t have all this critical housing, then you don’t see success in the economy.

This is something we’ve been saying for a long time, but I think the public is overwhelmingly telling us that this is what we need to do as we move forward. Certainly, that’s what you see in this budget. This is something that you’re seeing from our government in our investments as we go forward.

One of the things that was a pillar of the StrongerBC economic plan, and that you see front and centre of the budget here, is the understanding that we must prepare our population. We must invest in our population for the jobs of the future. I think, and I know my colleague who is the minister responsible…. We believe and my colleagues believe that investing in our people and their skills is the most important economic initiative that we can be doing going into the future.

We have heard for the longest time that capital is mobile. Capital can go to other jurisdictions. But what we know now coming out of the pandemic is that labour is mobile. People can also move. What that means is that we have to invest in our people more than we’ve ever invested before.

[6:25 p.m.]

We have to not only help our people have the skills for the future, but we also need to ensure that our workforce that is working right now has the tools to pivot. Climate change is not something that’s coming. Climate change is happening right now, and it’s impacting the workforce that we have. We need to invest in those people now so that when those shocks happen, they are better positioned to pivot and to transition into other parts of the economy.

So the skills for the jobs of the future, the key pillar that was in here…. I know that plan is coming. I am so excited for it to be public. I know that those investments we have to make in people are going to be vitally important.

I think it’s important here to highlight that I hear from employers all the time in my community, in my previous role. People still reach out to me because I’ve built some relationships with folks who want to talk about the challenges they’re facing with not having the people they need for their businesses.

Of course, immigration is our great success. I’m here because of immigration. Everyone that I see in this chamber is here because of immigration. What we know is that the historic numbers that we’re seeing coming to British Columbia are a huge opportunity for us.

People are coming to British Columbia in record numbers because they see the strongest economy in the country. They see a government that is focused on providing supports like child care and all these other supports that we’re doing, a government that understands that when you have both those pieces, this is the place to come. This is a place for opportunity.

Now, what we need to do is when we have these people come, we need to also ensure…. It is vitally important that when they come with skills, they’re able to use their skills to better their lives, to better our economy, to give themselves a better opportunity to succeed in this country. Now, that hasn’t always been the case. This is something that often doesn’t get talked enough about. This is that for too long, we’ve had an economy where we’ve relied on immigration to serve lower-wage jobs and not give people the opportunity to flourish.

Interjection.

Hon. R. Kahlon: The former minister for jobs has thoughts, and I’d love to hear them in her speech.

Interjection.

Deputy Speaker: The minister has the floor.

Hon. R. Kahlon: The immigration piece is vitally important, so it’s vitally important to do multiple things. This is what I really like about this budget. What I really like about the direction we’re heading is not only recognizing, in a better way, people’s skills when they come. But when they need upgrading, whether that’s English, which we made free so that people can upgrade their English….

This wasn’t always the case. It’s something we made free because we knew that was a vital piece to ensure that new immigrants can be successful. But it’s also giving them the opportunity, like we’re doing with health care, where they’re able to get courses covered, get their credentials recognized faster so they can get into the market, into whichever field that they want to get in, to support.

What we know is that this is not only good for the economy, but it’s key to addressing productivity challenges that we have. We know that productivity is lacking in Canada, compared to many of our G7 nation partners. So investment in our people is vitally important. That’s why this budget has got this particular focus. But it’s more than that.

There is a section here about mining. I think there are huge opportunities in mining in British Columbia. I’m so excited about the record numbers of investments we’re seeing in exploration. I really appreciated that we have a challenge around permitting. We need to get permitting done faster — $77 million. I know that this is a conversation that’s been going for 20 years-plus. Mining executives and others have been saying it needs to be faster, but it’s a particular focus we’re putting in here.

We know that critical minerals are going to be needed for the economy of the future, and British Columbia has those. Not only is it the $77 million to speed up the permitting process, but also the $6 million over the next three years for the critical minerals strategy. This will position B.C. not only to support our initiatives, but also be able to sell our products all over the world, and for jurisdictions to know that it comes from a place where we have high environmental standards, where we respect Indigenous communities, and where we’re creating good-paying jobs for people in the community.

[6:30 p.m.]

I think we’re very well positioned. I really, really appreciated this particular highlight in the budget.

There’s a big shift in the economy happening. I’ve been listening to a lot of economists talk about this concept of reshoring. Manufacturing is now shifting because of the pandemic, because of the war in Ukraine, and there’s a shift happening. A term which I like…. It’s called “friendshoring,” where you’re now starting to see jurisdictions shift their manufacturing to jurisdictions that are value-aligned, whether that’s their belief on climate, whether that’s their belief on democracy. You’re starting to see investments made in manufacturing, and you’re starting to see those investments shift.

I think there are huge opportunities in British Columbia. In particular, it has highlighted the B.C. manufacturing jobs fund: $180 million to help attract the type of investment we want to see here. It has huge opportunities for us, partnering with the opportunities around trade.

I know that we’re working on a trade diversification strategy marrying those two together to ensure that not only are we strengthening the trade relationships that we have…. Also, we’re looking to build new relationships and new markets for our products and to attract those investment dollars closer to our communities.

Now, there are a lot more things in this piece. I could go for hours on just the economic side. I’ll go a couple more minutes.

What also is in this budget, which, I think, is critically important for the economy, is our commitment to close the digital divide. As I travelled through the province, I heard from communities what happens when connectivity comes to the community: the opportunities for new businesses to form, the opportunity for young families to move to communities which give them different opportunities than, perhaps, some cities do.

What comes from that innovation in those small communities, to be able to create new businesses and new opportunity…. Our commitment to having the province connected by 2027, I think, is going to help not only grow the economy overall but ensure that the economy is growing in all parts of this province. I’m particularly happy that has been highlighted and that investments are in this budget.

Obviously, the budget talks about a whole host of other things around climate-resilient communities. We know that climate change is here. We know the impacts are being felt right now.

What we see in this budget is an investment to ensure our communities are better prepared for the impacts. What we see in the budget here is around $750 million to help communities that are affected by the impacts of the pandemic, floods, fires and other impacts but also a focus on…. What do we do to prepare our communities for further impacts that might come because of a changing climate?

I’ll go next to helping people through challenges they’re facing right now.

One of the pieces that I had an opportunity to do prior to getting shifted was a trade mission — five countries in ten days. Perhaps it was a little too ambitious. I lost my bags. You know what happens with that. Meeting with officials in shorts and a T-shirt was never a nice thing.

What I learned when I was in the Netherlands, in Germany, in Ireland, in Finland and, of course, in London, in the U.K., was that the challenges we’re facing here are very similar to the challenges they’re facing there. The conversations they were having were very similar. Mental health challenges coming out of the pandemic. They were having challenges around housing. Dublin is in a housing crisis. Rotterdam is having a housing crisis. London is having a housing crisis.

All of those jurisdictions were looking at the same challenges that they were dealing with for their populations. All of them were saying: “Let’s share ideas and share ways to address those challenges so that we can all come out of this in a better way.”

Now, we know the pressures we’re facing because of inflation, because of the impacts of supply chains, because of the war in Ukraine…. All those things are having impacts on us. They’re having impacts on people across the globe. That’s why there are so many pieces in this budget to help address those pressures that people are facing, the cost pressures that they’re facing.

[6:35 p.m.]

There have been a lot of pieces already there. I know one of the big things that I heard from the small businesses in my community was around the $400 credit from B.C. Hydro. It’s $100 for individual households. There was also $400 for small businesses. That came at a very important time in the holidays, where many of them really appreciated that.

I’ve got a laundromat in my community that sent me a lovely basket of flowers. They faced pressures in a big way. I know that helped quite a bit.

There is a whole bunch of pieces in here. Again, time is limited, but one of the special pieces in here is the $214 million, over three years, to expand the existing school food program. That is a huge program. I think that’s going to have a huge impact.

Last year I had a meeting with Microsoft. They were doing a study on the impacts of schools being shut down in Washington state for a year and the economic impacts of that over the year. Part of the study…. They were also looking at what happens when kids are coming to school without meals. What happens to outcomes? What is the impact on the economy in the long run? For us to take these steps to ensure that kids have food in their stomachs so that they can learn…. That’s what we want.

I look at the Chair, who was a teacher. I know she’ll appreciate how important it is for our young kids to have not only amazing teachers teach them but also ensure they’ve got food so that they are not distracted by hunger.

There’s been a lot said…. We’re now the first jurisdiction in Canada to make prescription contraception free for all residents. Of course, I love the budget, but I did appreciate the moment when there was unanimous support for that specific piece.

I think we all know how much of an impact this is going to have for families, for individuals. I could spend a lot of time talking about it. I’m really, really proud that we’re the first jurisdiction. I think it’s going to be dominoes from here. I think every other province is going to head in this direction. It would be foolish for them not to. I do think it is a no-brainer.

The B.C. family benefit. It, obviously, is going to be a huge benefit, not only for those who have already received it but now the additional dollars that are coming.

The $400 income-tested renter’s credit. I’ve already had people reach out to me and say they appreciate it. Those folks, of course, $60,000 and under, get the full amount. Up to $80,000 get some support as well. That’s going to have an impact. It’s going to help a lot of folks, I know, in my community.

In the interest of time, I have to continue to move.

We also talk about how important keeping B.C. communities safe and healthy is. I have to say that this new $1 billion fund, which will support our local governments to build critical infrastructure, to build the amenities that communities desperately need, is not only going to help our communities be stronger and be more resilient, but it will also help us to get more housing online.

I’ve heard from a lot of communities that say: “If I could invest more in my infrastructure, I could get more housing.” I think that giving local governments the ability to decide what their priorities are and supporting them with these dollars are going to go a long way, not only, as I said, to make sure we have resilient communities but also to ensure that it’s creating jobs locally.

I know this fund is going to go a long way. I certainly have heard from my mayor, who’s very excited to get more details so that he can put those dollars to work.

Part of keeping communities safe and healthy is, obviously, the investments in health care. We can spend a lot of time talking about the impacts of the pandemic on our health care system. I know people are tired. I’ve got cousins who are nurses. I’ve got a cousin who’s a doctor. They’re tired. Everyone is tired. They’ve been working really hard.

When they see these investments, they know that there’s help coming, especially around the B.C. health care workforce strategy, which is $995 million over three years. That will help to recruit new staff. It will help to retain staff, which I know is going to be very important, and, in many cases, to redesign and rebalance workloads in our health care system. That is going to be vitally important to ensuring that we can keep people safe.

[6:40 p.m.]

Also, I think, what’s particularly special in this budget is the highlight on the investments we’re making in our new hospitals. What’s happening around St. Paul’s Hospital, $2.2 billion; the new Surrey hospital, $1.7 billion; Cowichan hospital; Royal Columbian; and what’s happening in the Richmond Hospital.

Not only is this amazing for the infrastructure that we need to make sure people have the health care they need, but also, it’s connected directly to the growth we’re seeing in the life sciences sector in British Columbia. B.C.’s life sciences sector is the fastest-growing life sciences sector in the country. We’re seeing record investments. We have so much interest.

It comes back to something I said earlier: they are coming here because of our talent. I hear that all the time. I was in Ireland, and they said: “You know what? In B.C., you’ve got talent, and that’s why we want to invest in British Columbia.”

When I say, “The investment in our people — it’s not social; it’s economic,” I mean it. We’re seeing it with the life sciences sector, which is telling us: “If you keep training people, we will keep hiring people. Train them as fast as you can, and we’ll hire them.” We hear that from tech. We hear it from the life sciences sector.

Our investments in the health of our population are directly able to impact our economy. We’re seeing it with the life sciences sector and in the economic benefits that come with that.

My critic mentioned to me, in her comments, that she didn’t even get a chance to talk about housing. And here I am, two minutes left, and I’m now in the same situation as she was. I know that both she and I will have lots of exchanges on housing. I would say…. There are historic investments being made in housing right now. It’s going to be vitally important that we support people through this challenging time.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

I highlighted that…. This is the same conversation in Ireland. This is the same conversation in the five European countries I went to. In fact, it’s the same conversation happening in the Silicon Valley, when I was there. It’s the same one happening in Portland. It’s the same one happening in Seattle, on the west coast. There are jurisdictions that are all trying to grapple with this.

One of the pieces that I want to highlight is this new $500 million rental acquisition fund. It’s going to be game-changing. I’ve had meetings already. I’ve got a meeting with the minister from Quebec. Ministers are reaching out from across the country, wanting to know how we structured this and how they can also get an opportunity to create a similar type of fund.

They’re facing similar challenges. For them, what’s vitally important is the ability to protect those rental units, to put them in the not-for-profit sector, to protect those tenants so that those tenants can continue to stay in those places and so that we can not only build new housing but also ensure that we continue to protect the housing that we have in this province.

Hon. Speaker, I know time is coming short. I’ll just say that our focus, on the housing side, will continue to be on speed, on supply and on synergy.

Speed is going to be vitally important. It’s going to be important for us to address permitting and to make sure permitting time moves much faster, both at the municipal level and with some permits that have to happen at the provincial level.

We need to get all types of housing supply online, whether that’s the not-for-profit sector or the private sector.

Of course, synergy is going to be vitally important. In order for us to be successful, we need the federal government at the table. We need local governments to be at the table.

Hon. Speaker, I’ll just say, in closing, that I’m a huge fan of this budget. I want to congratulate the Minister of Finance for all the work she has been putting in on this. Of course, you probably heard, quite clearly, that I’m in support of this budget. I want to thank you for the ability and for the time.

Hon. R. Kahlon moved adjournment of debate.

Motion approved.

[6:45 p.m.]

Mr. Speaker: We’ll be waiting for the committee Chair to come back.

Committee of Supply (Section A), having reported progress, was granted leave to sit again.

Hon. D. Coulter moved adjournment of the House.

Motion approved.

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

The House adjourned at 6:46 p.m.