B.C.’s Tough Budget Babble

B.C. budget | BCBusiness
B.C.’s penny-pinching budget may be recourse for voting down the HST.

Wednesday’s tough budget will spread pain all around and so has raised a babble of discussion. The government says it has to be done because B.C.’s economy is sliding, but our voting down of the HST may have had something to do with it.

I find Wednesday’s provincial budget and the reaction to it somewhat baffling.

First, wasn’t this supposed to be a warm and fuzzy government that was going to make B.C. a wonderland for families, hockey moms and all things good and true? But instead, with his budget, finance minister Kevin Falcon comes on like the grim repo man who’s going to take back your toys because times are, well, kind of hard.

I mean, who does he think he is, Don Drummond telling Ontario’s spendthrift Liberals to clean up their act?

In the budget, Falcon flattened any thoughts of government growth. He put a hammerlock on every government ministry by minimizing budget increases, stiffed the all-powerful government unions who want, as usual, large wage increases, and hiked a bunch of taxes not only for businesses, but consumers as well.

Then everybody said, well, he had no choice. This budget is all about the next provincial election.

Falcon had to come on heavy, the thinking goes, to re-capture the province’s conservative vote, which has been flirting too much with a reviving BC Conservative Party as the province drifts back to a past of traditional right-wing, left-wing thinking.

And, to be sure, times are harder, although it hasn’t quite reached B.C. just yet. America is still in the economic dumper despite the recent surge in its stock market, Europe is a basket case of fiscal malaise and even mighty China is starting to slow down.

Whatever. Restraint, apparently, is going to be the watchword all around. Some even refer to the situation  as “grim,” which, frankly, is a little over the top. (We’re nowhere near grim; Greece, where 40+ per cent of young people are unemployed, is grim.)

So while everybody is throwing around theories about the sudden turn to the right, I’d like to throw mine in.

I think it’s payback for voting down the HST.

Think about it: the province wasn’t doing too bad, especially after it put in the HST, which would bring a few billion into government coffers over time.

Then the populace was whipped into a frenzy of anger about the tax, and brought it in a landmark vote. Talk about heady: reversing a tax – it was almost up there with revolution.

But that kind of euphoria has a price. Instead of gaining a few billion, the government loses a few, plus it has to pay a couple billion back to the feds who bribed us to sign up for it.

Where did all those anti-HST’ers expect this money was going to come from?

The biblical phrase “reap what you sow” comes to mind.