The bottom line, for many of you, is an extra $20 a month for your health-care premiums.
When the province’s new budget was unveiled Tuesday, a big deal was made about lowering Medical Services Plan costs for poorer people.
Much less fuss was made about who will pay more — couples — or the reality that the overall amount collected from premiums will rise next year and keep climbing after that.
So, if you’re asking what was in the budget for Vancouver Island, the answer is that it depends on what your household looks like.
The MSP changes will have the most immediate impact. Premiums for children will be eliminated Jan. 1, 2017 — a big savings for single parents. More lower-income people will be eligible for help, too. But couples will be billed at the same rate as two individuals, which is a bit of a jump.
When combined with an overall four per cent increase, that means:
• If you’re a couple (with no dependent children) netting $45,000 a year or more, or a senior couple netting over $51,000, your premiums will rise to $156 a month from $136.
• A two-kid couple earning over $51,000 will see premiums go to $156 from $150.
• A single parent of two, earning $48,000 or more, will see premiums drop from $150 to $78.
For the government, the changes mean about $80 million more coming in next year, contributing to a budgeted rise in annual MSP revenue from just over $2.4 billion today to just under $2.8 billion three years from now. That doesn’t come close to covering health spending that will top $19 billion next year, almost three times the amount of a couple of decades ago.
“MSP premiums account for just under 14 per cent of that,” Finance Minister Mike de Jong said Tuesday.
He defended the use of medical premiums (B.C. is the only province that still charges them) by arguing that they remind people that health care isn’t free.
Nonsense, replied the Canadian Taxpayers Association’s Jordan Bateman: Administering the collection of premiums merely adds to the cost of the health-care bureaucracy.
The MSP changes weren’t the only budget measures to affect Vancouver Islanders. A tax break for buyers of new homes was aimed at the Lower Mainland, but is expected to stimulate construction in Greater Victoria, too. (The TC’s Andrew Duffy writes about that elsewhere on this page.)
There’s also another $77 a month if you receive disability assistance (though if you’re one of those who currently get a free bus pass, they’re taking it back, leaving you to pay for it out of the increase).
Other than that, the budget held few surprises for Islanders (other than the brief moment when de Jong began speaking French so badly that I understood every word).
We already knew about the big transportation initiative, the long-awaited McKenzie interchange. It was announced last summer during an orgy of (ultimately unsuccessful) pre-election spending by the Harper Conservatives, who committed $33 million in federal money toward the $85-million project. Construction is to begin late this year and be done by late 2018.
The province, feds and Langford are splitting the cost of the $22-million extension of the Westshore Parkway, which will link the Trans-Canada and Sooke highways by March 2018.
There was no immediate magic-bullet solution to the Malahat announced Tuesday. Nor was there a philosophical about-face to take the pressure off B.C. Ferries. Construction of the $3.5-billion Massey Tunnel replacement — a Lower Mainland project of interest to Islanders — is supposed to begin in 2017.
The two replacements for aging hospitals in Campbell River and the Comox Valley are to be completed by the summer of 2017. (And don’t forget a quasi-government project, B.C. Hydro’s $1.1-billion John Hart dam replacement, due to be done in 2019.)
Other than a seismic upgrade at Courtenay’s Vanier Secondary, no more big K-12 projects are in the works (Royal Bay, Oak Bay and Belmont high schools all opened last fall).
Likewise, there were no new big building projects unveiled for any of our post-secondary institutions, though there was mention of a UVic program “that combines health and environmental research by collecting X-ray diffraction data from single-protein crystals to better understand their role in the production of renewable energy sources and impacts on human health.” (Personally, I think it was at this point that the Finance Ministry’s budget writers got punchy and decided to mess with our heads.)
A couple of items might help the Island economy down the road. De Jong singled out Victoria’s Viking Air as one of the reasons for pumping $5 million into the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada. Another $5 million will be spent marketing our wood products in India.
