Vicki Huntington, Independent MLA for Delta South, is again asking the legislature to move election day from the spring to the fall. She has sung this song so often, she probably has it all memorized.
But it’s a refrain worth repeating, and one legislators should heed. It’s a sensible suggestion that would prevent the legislature’s budget cycle from getting tangled up with an election every four years.
“This is the fifth or sixth time this bill will have been introduced in an effort to move B.C. toward a more transparent democracy,” Huntington said as she introduced a private member’s bill in the legislature Thursday.
“Every four years, British Columbia goes into an election without passing the budget for the coming fiscal year. Opposition members are unable to properly scrutinize the budget before heading into an election. There is a temptation on both sides to use the budget for partisan campaign purposes.”
As required by legislation, the budget — the government’s estimate of how much it expects to spend in the coming fiscal year — is tabled on the third Tuesday in February. MLAs then debate the various components of the budget.
In July, the Finance Ministry releases the public accounts, a detailed record of what was actually spent during the previous fiscal year. The budget is closely examined by the provincial auditor general, who issues a report on the process. It’s one way to gauge how the government performed compared with what it promised.
But every four years, a May election intervenes before the final reckoning of the previous year’s fiscal performance is tabled.
In 2013, as Huntington pushed for a fall election date, she said pre-election budgets are never debated in the legislature and “amount to little more than a glimmer in the eye of the finance minister. This contributes to public skepticism and the perception that election-year budgets exist only for campaign purposes.”
She said with a spring election, government ministries and their agencies are left without spending authority for much of the fiscal year.
“Every four years, government operations are needlessly put in a position of uncertainty while the Ministry of Finance drafts multiple versions of the budget,” she said. “Our provincial finances are left up in the air.”
Private member’s bills are usually swept aside or ignored, but this is a measure all MLAs should support. (The NDP favours it and some Liberals have expressed support for it in the past.)
A fall election would reduce uncertainty surrounding the budget, and voters could go to the polls with an independently certified view of the state of the province’s books.
