One question that is missing from the public debate on deficits and debt is whether we’re getting the best bang for the stimulus buck. Even if we accept that it’s appropriate for governments to borrow and engage in deficit-financing during a recession, as I have argued here, we need to have a discussion about the [...]
Entries Tagged as 'budget'
What should our government be spending money on?
September 16th, 2009 · Iglika Ivanova · Comments Off · Economy, Education, Environment, resources & sustainability, Provincial budget & finance, Taxes
Tags: budget·child poverty·childcare·children·debt·deficit·Olympics·public investment·recession·role of government
On tough times and priorities
September 10th, 2009 · Iglika Ivanova · 2 Comments · Children & youth, Education, Provincial budget & finance
The BC government cannot afford $130,000 for the budget of BC School Sports, a volunteer organization which organizes sporting events for students. This is likely to affect 100,000 high school athletes across the province whose meets and competitions will be canceled. “It’s not business as usual right now,” explained Education Minister Margaret MacDiarmid, quoted in [...]
Tags: budget·children·Education·Olympics·spending cuts·sports
Doing the math on all-day-K
September 8th, 2009 · Iglika Ivanova · Comments Off · Education, Provincial budget & finance
Amid the corner-cutting exercise that was the September BC budget, there seemed to be a glimmer of hope: actual money was alloted for the expansion of kindergarten to full day. Could it be that the BC government has finally started to get it and is planning to heed its own report on childcare (as I’ve [...]
Teeny Budget factoid
September 3rd, 2009 · Keith Reynolds · 2 Comments · Economy, Privatization, P3s & public services, Provincial budget & finance
It appears when it comes to the heavy lifting of cutting spending in BC, not all public agencies are equal. The February Budget documents stated that: To ensure that health services are protected in the current economic environment, the Ministry of Health Services and health authorities will be required to achieve efficiencies and administrative savings [...]
Take Two: BC Budget 2009 September Update (Notes from Marc and Iglika)
September 1st, 2009 · Marc Lee · 1 Comment · Economy, Health care, Poverty, inequality & welfare, Provincial budget & finance, Taxes
The September BC Budget is a new look at a budget most have come to see as a fake. February’s budget was not passed through the legislature due to the May election, and up to E-Day the government maintained the fiction that it had a small-ish deficit of just under half a billion dollars. Since [...]
Tags: budget·deficit·spending cuts
Watch out for that train
May 13th, 2009 · Keith Reynolds · Comments Off · BC Election 2009, Economy, Provincial budget & finance
Is it too early to start talking about what happens now the election is over? Because that light at the end of the tunnel really is a train. In their February Budget the Liberals said they were going to have a $500 million deficit this year. Nobody believed them then. Marc Lee called the Budget [...]
Tags: budget·deficit·service cuts·tax cuts
School funding an election issue at the local level
April 30th, 2009 · Keith Reynolds · Comments Off · BC Election 2009, Children & youth, Education
It hasn’t particularly reached the level of a provincial election issue, but school funding is quietly percolating along as an issue at the local level. The provincial election overlaps with the time that school boards set their budgets and many of those school boards are making cuts due to lack of funding. A few examples? [...]
Tags: budget·Education·school boards·schools·service cuts·teachers
Oh, about that recession …
April 27th, 2009 · Marc Lee · Comments Off · BC Election 2009, Economy
BC’s recession started in 2008. That is the upshot of today’s release of Statistics Canada’s Provincial Economic Accounts, which provides the first estimates of BC’s GDP for 2008. Unlike national data, which are provided quarterly and on a timely basis, we have to wait about four months to tally the various provincial beans. These numbers [...]
Tags: Agriculture·budget·campaign·construction·deficit·exports·fishing·forestry·mining·oil and gas·recession·service cuts
The NDP Platform and BC's Economic Challenges
April 20th, 2009 · Marc Lee · Comments Off · BC Election 2009, Climate change, Economy, Provincial budget & finance
Below is an oped of mine that was done at the request of the Vancouver Sun and that ran in today’s paper. Unfortunately, for reasons that are not entirely clear, the last two paragraphs were cut off, leaving the oped hanging. I put them back in below, and have requested that the online version be [...]
Tags: budget·cap-and-trade·carbon tax·deficit·flaring·green infrastructure·greenhouse gas·NDP·oil and gas·platform·recession·tax cuts·unemployment
Behind the dramatic drop in the budget of the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and the Arts
February 27th, 2009 · Iglika Ivanova · Comments Off · BC Election 2009, Provincial budget & finance
Budget commentators across the province (including Marc Lee on this blog) noted the lack of drastic spending cuts to government programs. While there were some cuts to the budgets of particular ministries, such as Aboriginals Relations and Reconciliation, Community Development and Finance, most of those did not seem debilitating (see Table 1.4 on p. 11 [...]
Tags: arts and culture·budget·tourism
