It’s hard to tell whether the government members are just relaying what they heard during a pre-budget tour of the province, or are actively promoting the concepts.
The committee held numerous meetings to inquire about people’s preferences for next February’s budget. The committee wound up with dozens of recommendations for Finance Minister Mike de Jong. Over the years such committees have filed such reports, there’s no record of them having any kind of dramatic impact on a budget. There has been more than 20 years of sustained complaints about the property-purchase tax, for instance. It still exists and brings in almost $1 billion a year.
But the report does shed some light on what the people who take part in the exercise are thinking of government priorities.
There are some clear indications that B.C. Teachers’ Federation members had a strong interest. Some of its work overlapped the crisis during the teachers’ strike. The committee did an online survey about the public’s priorities, and among the 1,264 people who responded, education trumped health care by almost a four-to-one ratio, which is distinctly unusual. The same survey found that increasing taxes — a BCTF position for several years — was a runaway favourite over cutting spending.
That concept runs counter to 14 years of Liberal fiscal philosophy, which is simply to keep taxes low. So it’s unlikely to get much traction.
On education, the MLAs concluded: “The evidence presented to the committee indicates that increasing operating, maintenance and capital costs are exceeding current funding allotments.”
In other words, education is under-funded. That’s not something the government has ever acknowledged. During the teachers’ strike it went out of its way to establish just the opposite — that there was more than enough money allocated; it just had to be spent properly.
Nevertheless, the MLAs recommended “adequate, stable and predictable” funding for school operating expenses and new capital costs. They were also enthusiastic about new personalized-learning projects and special-needs funding. Also on the to-do list is more money for English-language skills.
On the post-secondary side, the committee urges increasing operating grants and more capital spending. Those are both problems that the government has either refused to acknowledge or denied existed. There’s also a pitch for lowering the interest rate on student loans and tying grants to completion — making them incentives for finishing courses, rather than just enrolling in them.
On social services issues, the committee endorsed something the Opposition has been advocating — a comprehensive poverty-reduction plan. That might be heartening for advocates of such a move, until it’s noted that the committee did the same thing last year and nothing happened.
More specifically, the MLAs recommend a review of income-assistance rates, which haven’t been raised in six years, along with a review of the minimum wage, the clawback of child-support payments and the rate for disabled people.
The time-honoured argument over the property-transfer tax is also featured once again in the report. The real-estate industry and other interests mount a concentrated assault on the tax nearly every year, but make little headway in getting it abolished. They made a tiny amount of progress this year, convincing the committee to suggest an exploration of “options to change the tax to assist first-time buyers.” They are exempt from the tax if the purchase price is below a certain level.
There’s a sleeper idea parked in the same part of the report. “Consider ways to mitigate the effects of property speculation on housing affordability.” Empty homes purchased by flippers turned into an issue of some note during the civic election campaign in Vancouver. And housing speculation has been identified as a problem in some red-hot resource communities.
De Jong will wade through the ideas, but anything that threatens the core principle of keeping the budget balanced has a slim chance of going anywhere.
