You forgot total BC debt increasing from $63.8B in 2014-15 to $65.96B in 2015-16. Balanced indeed.

What about the 900 million they took from ICBC ? What about the hundreds of millions taken from BC Hydro.. increase in MSP again.. sorry elderly but give us more..

Prudent fiscal management… what a joke.. family first now means.. the first one we raise fees and taxes on is families.

Why did the gov’t keep saying there simply was no money when the teachers were on strike? And NOW there is a surplus? Wonder if they are in the business of selling bridges too?

What about the tax break to corporations and the rich?
Cheers

@Bent – they didn’t say there was “no money” for anything during the teacher’s strike. What they did say was there wasn’t the kind of money the teachers union wanted. All the “surplus” would have been eaten up and the highlights quoted above would not be in this budget for sure.

If you check the highlights it is all aimed at lower to mid incomes. The first highlight may put some of these kids parents above the poverty line.

This with the hit on oil revenues is something. Next year may not have a surplus if the barrel stays low. Revenue sharing is good, however then you have to look at lowering the government funding to those you revenue share with.

Fate the BC Debt is like our own personal debt we balance our bank accounts to be in the positive yet like the government there is always that next purchase which is bought with credit there are not a lot of people in this province who can say they are debt free and who don’t do the exact same thing as the government except our debt is on a considerably smaller scale

The Globe and Mail got it right stating that BC’s balanced budget comes with higher user fees and little tax relief. No wonder Business and our Chamber of Commerce likes this budget!

Could be worse! Try Ontario

IMO if you believe anything this government says you are very foolish. Time to let someone else take a look at the books and I don’t care who.

They claim a surplus now but as soon as someone wants or needs money they will be broke.

We are 63 billion in provincial debt.. Increasing approx $8000 a minute.. Yet we are getting a balanced budget.. Yeah right

@ 4:21 PM by slinky
…
If you check the highlights it is all aimed at lower to mid incomes. The first highlight may put some of these kids parents above the poverty line.
…
———
Add up the costs of all those “highlights.” All combined are worth less than the tax cut the 2% are receiving (over $150k income). Every…single…one…added together, worth less than the tax cut for the 2%. Still think the budget is aimed at the lower income?

Seriously? Are you drinking the “debt free” cool-aid too? Also thinking there’s no new taxes?

@Dearth – no, its nothing like that. It’s like living off your income and then increasing your mortgage every time you needed to buy something extra. How is you income and output balanced if you can’t afford anything extra? If your debt is always increasing, you’re not balanced. Balanced would imply income=expenditures. This is clearly not the case.

@Fate – maybe you can’t read but child support will be exempt from income assistance (ie welfare or disability payments).

Say you are a single mom and the court allots you a meager 400 a month in child support payments, instead of this coming off dollar for dollar from your social assistance or disability check it is now grocery and extra money for the child – like it should be. What could any single mom (or dad) on income assistance do with an extra 4,800 bucks a year (in this example)? Then 20 million in funding income assistance programs, hopefully this means some type of schooling and the ministry already has a child care subsidy if they have to attend classes…this is huge for the low income sector if they make use of it, and that is just line 1, add 660 in child tax credit…

So they dropped the temporary highest tax bracket of 16.8 percent back to what it used to be 14.7 percent – so after 105,000 net they get to keep an extra 2.1 percent of their earnings like they have in the past. They still pay the same federal rate unless they drop that in Ottawa.

@PVal Adding 1 billion into the health care system annually does come at a cost, including a 4 percent hike in MSP premiums. If every household in BC pays an extra – say 100 bucks a year times 1.8 million households in BC – that is an extra 180 million in revenue (less because some are on premium assistance). But the increase to medical is about a billion a year. So the government is pulling 800 million out of its coffers to make up the difference. Most retirees and elderly are on MSP premium assistance and pay what – zero bucks a year for if they earn less than 22,000 net annually or 1,833 net per month? The 4% hike affects those over 30,000 net on a basic return. Read about it here {paste in your browser bar):
http://www.health.gov.bc.ca/msp/infoben/premium.html

Balanced my A$$!

Funded more and more by regressive taxation and less and less by the 2% privileged.

BALANCED!
a.k.a. creative bookkeeping, or imaginative accounting.
metalman..

You couldn’t have an ever expanding economy, (which is vital if your main emphasis is on creating ‘jobs’), without a corresponding expansion of debt. That is the way the financial system currently functions.

To believe that a government’s budget could be ‘balanced’ SOLELY from taxation in the manner many here seem to believe, i.e. that in any one and the same fiscal period all government taxation revenues exactly equal ALL government expenditures, including those for the creation of new capital assets (infrastructure, is an obvious one~ but there are more), is a major fallacy.

This would only CURRENTLY be possible at the cost of virtually leaving every other ‘budget’, those of you, me, and everyone else here , including those of all our businesses, unbalanced; or, alternately, in the equally virtually impossible likelihood that there was a massive influx of money from exports ~ something that would, in any case, never be sustainable.

The PROBLEM is NOT the rise in governmental, personal, and corporate debt. It is the decreasing ability for this ever expanding flow of debt to be fully repaid as projected when it was incurred. Already the record low interest rates artificially remain so, because if they did not there would be massive, world scale defaults. Further lowering of them, to the extent that is even possible, will NOT correct that.

The current financial system contains within it a correctable ‘flaw’ which prevents it from being fully ‘self-liquidating’ in each successive cycle of production/consumption, as it is supposed to be to match what it also supposed to be an exact numerical REFLECTION of. The physical REALITIES of that ‘production’ and ‘consumption’.

Until this ‘flaw’ is recognised for what it is, and appropriate measures taken for its correction, we are going to increasingly find ourselves in a position where what is entirely “physically possible, socially desirable, and morally correct”, is going to be ever increasingly “financially” impossible. The ‘figures’ are DETERMINING the ‘facts’, in other words, not REFLECTING them in a way that is appropriate or accurate.

Now which one of those who currently want to govern us is going to be the first to face up to these facts? Or are any of them?

Slinky. The MSP that seniors get for that price coverage is bare bones, most also need to get extra coverage for prscritions etc or they couldn’t afford to buy their medication or other medical needs.

@slinky, I’m very aware of the claw back the BC Gov has been applying to single parents, and am happy to see it ending 6 months from now (why not now?) but still, all the highlights for low to middle income earners will cost the government less than the change in income tax for the $150k+ wage earners. All of them, combined, cost less.

What I find interesting is this “Additional educational funding to cover collective agreements” No real numbers of this cost… the government certainly had all the numbers when the negotiations where on.. yet now that the agreement actually has real numbers on it the government cant figure out the true cost… what a frikin joke.

There is a huge difference between the province’s operating budget, ie what it costs to run the business of government on a daily basis, and it’s capital budget, ie what the province uses to fund the construction or acquisition of any capital asset! so perhaps Mr. Dejong should have made it more clear that what he was ACTUALLY talking about was the operating budget.
As was mentioned earlier in the thread having a balanced or surplus operating budget is simply having income greater than or equal to our annual expenditures.
For the provincial debt also known as the capital budget to go down or at least stop increasing we basically need to stop building schools, hospitals, bridges, dams, highways etc etc. or did some of think that the funds for those projects comes from some magical money tree?
The other option of course is to take funds from our operating budget to pay down the debt faster, but unless we start generating much healthier surpluses in the future that would have to come out of current programs. What do you want to cut back on? The only programs that have high enough budgets to make any sort of serious dent in the provincial debt are Health, and Education so pick your poison but don’t be talking out of both sides of your heads complaining about debt and then complaining about cutbacks!

Mr. DeJong, and all his counterparts in government finance Ministies elsewhere, are really in an impossible spot. They can’t ever really “pay down” the accumulated Provincial, or even National, Debts, without sending an equal amount of money to its destruction as purchasing power.

Money still necessary in the economy as a whole if all costs are to be recovered in prices.

The best any of them can do under the current financial conventions is to literally, “pass the buck.” Or, more correctly, the debt. They can transfer it, to the provinces as Paul Martin did when he was Chretien’s Finance Minister, but there’s no way short of having permanently increasing trade balances with other countries that it can currently be liquidated.

Such so-called ‘favourable’ balances of trade can not be sustained. You cannot continually sell more to some other country, that has the exact same problems you do, than you buy from it. When you do, the value of your currency rises relative to its currency, your exports get progressively more expensive, and you lose market share to other competitors. Materially, a ‘favourable’ balance of trade means you are exporting MORE in REAL wealth than you are receiving back in alternate REAL wealth. Your country is getting physically poorer, not richer. Financial convention currently mis-represents this undeniable FACT. And a good many more.