P.G. Waits for Word on Federal Funds for Beetle Epidemic
By 250 News
Monday, April 24, 2006 04:00 AM
The Federal Cabinet will huddle this week, and the budget will be on the agenda.
What will be in it? It is pretty clear there will be the 1% reduction in GST and there will be the much talked about childcare program, but it’s a pre-election promise that has Prince George and B.C. waiting.
When Stephen Harper visited Prince George last fall, long before the election was called, he made a commitment that if elected, his government would commit $100 million a year for ten years to flow to B.C. to mitigate the damage done by the mountain pine beetle epidemic. “I greatly anticipate that we will see that in the budget, that commitment of that $100 million dollars” says Jay Hill, M.P. for Prince George-Peace River.
Still there’s been no exact date for the delivery of that budget although Hill expects it will be soon “I’m hoping a couple of weeks, mid May at the latest.”
Hill says putting together a spending plan in a short timeframe is no easy feat “It is a huge challenge for the Finance Minister and the Finance Department to put this thing together in about two months when normally it takes eight or nine months to put together a federal budget.”
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Posted by: YamaDooPolCat on April 24 2006 11:14 PM
This is a potential billion dollar slush fund which makes the $800,000 to the OBAC and CBAC look like peanuts.
How much do we want to bet that too much of the money will not be spent on high quality diversification projects and that much of it which will, will end up in businesses which will either be created or extended and will be back to the "same olde same olde" track after five years and will thus die?
SO, I assume that just as with many such ventures, some will take hold, and the rest ... well, as I said in other posts about subsidizing one thing rather than another thing, in either case the money gets put back into the economy and will not be burned.
Except ..... in bigger amounts like this, one has to be a bit careful that it does not go to laying the foundation for creating a service or manufacturing operation which will eventually be outsourced to another province or another country.