Month: September 2009

Vaughn Palmer asked the Finance Minister a question in the Budget lock-up on the day of the Budget speech.  How about a list of all those programs you’re going to cut?  No can do, Finance Minister Colin Hansen replied.  You’ll just have to wait until the Public Accounts are published next year. In the Liberal… View Article

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… View Article

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… View Article

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… View Article

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… View Article