Third Session, 41st Parliament

(2018) OFFICIAL REPORT

OF DEBATES

(HANSARD)

Thursday, February 22, 2018

Afternoon Sitting

Issue No. 85

ISSN 1499-2175

The HTML transcript is provided for informational purposes only.

The PDF transcript remains the official digital version.

CONTENTS

Routine Business

Introductions by Members

Orders of the Day

Budget Debate

(continued)

L. Throness

B. Ma

P. Milobar

S. Chandra Herbert

S. Furstenau

R. Leonard

J. Thornthwaite

Hon. J. Sims

G. Kyllo

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2018

The House met at 1:32 p.m.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

Routine Business

Introductions by Members

Hon. K. Conroy: All of us in the House have talked about how we have to miss special

family days because we’re down here in Victoria. I’m, of course, no

different. Tomorrow is our granddaughter Sarah’s third birthday. I know her

mom has the TV on, and she’s watching me at work in our castle, as she likes

to call it, granny’s castle. I want to tell her that I won’t be able to make

her birthday party, but I want to tell her that I know she’s going to have

an absolutely fantastic PAW Patrol party, and grandpa will be there

to give her hugs from me.

Orders of the Day

Hon. M. Farnworth: I call continued debate on the budget speech. For the information of

members, we will be adjourning today at 5:30.

Budget Debate

(continued)

L. Throness: I continue my theme on the budget today, speaking to Budget 2018. I

want to note that for every budget in every year, I’ve called attention in

my budget speech to the American debt and deficit. I think it’s a risk

factor that is not taken into account among the risk factors in the

budget.

Donald Trump’s new tax cuts are going to add $1 trillion to the

American debt. I looked at my budget speech from 2015. I noted with horror

that the American debt would rise to $20 trillion by 2025.

[L. Reid in the chair.]

Well, on December 7, the American debt limit was raised by Congress to

$20.5 trillion, seven years ahead of earlier projections. That is very

scary. It can’t continue forever, which means that at some point, it all has

to end. The question is: what would this look like? What does it mean in

practical terms for B.C.?

[1:35 p.m.]

I would encourage the government to study that question. I would

encourage the government to insulate us as much as possible from economic

shock — for example, to do what we’ve been doing for the past 16 years and

diversify our trading; diversify our markets so that we’re not so dependent

on the United States, as other Canadian provinces are; and also, of course,

to be more fiscally disciplined.

Now, let me turn to some elements of the budget. I thought I would

approach it in Chilliwack terms and what it will mean for Chilliwack on the

ground, in my places in the riding. Well, the government is spending a huge

amount of money, and we hope that some of that will come to Chilliwack. How

might we get our fair share?

There is no mention of Chilliwack in the budget, nor of the other

place names in my riding. My constituents will be interested to know that

there are no funds to widen the No. 1 Highway. Instead, we’re doing the

Pattullo Bridge. Why is that?

Could it be that the Massey Tunnel, leading south of Vancouver, and

the No. 1 Highway into the Fraser Valley, leading east of Vancouver, lead

into areas that are not particularly friendly NDP territory? Could it be

that the NDP is actually punishing them for that and, instead, building the

Pattullo because people in those areas voted NDP? I wouldn’t put it past the

highly partisan NDP to do that.

We B.C. Liberals would have done the Pattullo Bridge in addition to

the Massey Tunnel and the No. 1. I think the NDP is playing some games here,

and I think that’s sad.

Now, the new school for south Chilliwack that we need was not listed

in the budget. It could be hidden in the fine print of the budget. We

certainly hope it’s there, but it’s not on the list in the main

document.

There is no money in this budget for supporting foster parents or

recruiting new foster parents. There was a story not long ago in the

Chilliwack Progress about a critical shortage of foster homes

throughout the province, particularly in Chilliwack. There was nothing for

that.

There’s no mention of adoption in the budget. Although we have 1,000

children in B.C. waiting for adoption, the Representative for Children and

Youth produced a report in December expressing his concern at the lapse in

this government’s activity on adoption.

There’s a new payroll tax starting next January, bringing in $1.9

billion in its first year. That will hit some businesses in

Chilliwack.

Minimum wage will rise by a third over the next four years. For some

workers in Chilliwack, that will be helpful, although some young workers may

lose their jobs. I think, in general, it will hurt the bottom line of

employers and reduce the number of available jobs.

The carbon tax will increase by $5 on April 1. That’s going to affect

fuel and natural gas prices. My constituents are always happy when gas taxes

go up, and they’re always happy when they see their natural gas bill, where

the carbon tax is often more than the cost of gas itself.

I would also point out that the carbon tax will no longer be

revenue-neutral. This marks an effective $1.2 billion increase. Any

tax-relief programs that were funded by the carbon tax earlier are now in

jeopardy. One of those is the 80 percent relief of carbon tax that

greenhouse operators in my riding get. I’m not sure about the fate of that

program.

A new speculation tax on housing will cover the Fraser Valley.

Initially half a percent of assessed value, that will rise to 2 percent of

assessed value in January. That will hit all property sellers and buyers in

Chilliwack. Of course, the NDP wants to brand ordinary folks who own homes

as speculators, even if they’re selling to move elsewhere or to downsize. We

think it’s wrong. It’s just a cash grab. We have to add to that the foreign

buyers and domestic sellers will be disappointed. Real estate agents locally

will see a downturn in the market.

I see that the government is going to review the homeowner’s grant. To

me, that’s an ominous sign. Its reduction or elimination would mean an

effective property tax increase of hundreds of dollars, annually, for every

property owner in B.C. I would point out that many of our seniors on fixed

incomes are also property owners. Something like this could really work

hardship on them. But to the NDP, anyone who owns a home is rich and

therefore bad, and we have to punish them. I think they are fixing to do

that in this budget.

There are also possible opportunities for Chilliwack in this budget,

and I want to point them out. The building of courthouses in the valley was

begun by the last government. It was confirmed in this budget, and I think

this will include Chilliwack’s planned courthouse expansion.

The expansion of B.C. parks was confirmed. No doubt this will include

the 25 new spots at Maple Bay, which are already underway.

The government will build 2,500 new units of housing for the homeless.

Although this might be inadequate, we have yet to find out if any of this

will come to Chilliwack, where the need is great. We will certainly lobby

for more in Chilliwack.

We do have preliminary approval for two projects: community services

and the Salvation Army, which have yet to begin. Hopefully, these will go

ahead, and we will get even more under this funding.

The budget promises $15.8 billion for infrastructure over the next

three years, and I’m hoping that we will get some infrastructure projects in

my riding. I think especially of Cultus Lake, which has an infrastructure

proposal in for its wastewater treatment facility. I’ll be looking to

Victoria for that.

UFV may benefit from $450 million for student housing. There is $50

million in the budget for Indigenous languages, and UFV students may benefit

from that.

[1:40 p.m.]

There are some good things for seniors in this budget. They will once

again enjoy free rides on ferries from Monday to Thursday. There are

commitments to build affordable housing for seniors and Indigenous

people.

Shelter Aid For Elderly Renters will increase, on average, by $930 a

year. We have many seniors in Chilliwack on that program. That’s welcome

news. There’s more for PharmaCare as well. In general, funding for more

hours of care for seniors in residential care is a good and welcome

thing.

Of course, MSP premiums will be phased out completely, although not

for two years, not till January 1, 2020. This, of course, was our idea. The

NDP are borrowing many good B.C. Liberal Party policies, and I can’t

criticize them for that.

I want to move on to the area that I criticize, Children and Family

Development, and I will pick out a few things about child care that I want

to talk about. It’s one of the two big-ticket items in the government’s

budget.

First, I want to talk about the $10-a-day daycare. That’s almost all

we heard about in the last election. The NDP mentioned it a dozen times in

its platform alone. Allow me to quote from it. This is what the platform

said. The NDP was offering “full-day care for $10 and part-time care for $7

a day, with no fee for families with annual incomes below $40,000 a

year.”

Well, the final product, of course, didn’t appear like that. We found

out from the Premier, speaking on Global News , that this was just a

brand anyway, a slogan designed to attract votes. To the NDP, the actual

words don’t seem to mean anything. I find that to be troubling for people

with their fingers on $160 billion of taxpayers’ money over the next three

years. They keep their promises if it’s convenient and if it’s expedient to

do so.

Now, we don’t oppose the general direction to provide more child care.

In fact, we promised a lot of help ourselves on child care last summer. The

B.C. Liberals promised 13,000 new child care spaces by 2020, and 5,000 of

them would have been created in 2017 alone. We would have kept that promise.

In fact, the NDP has now been government for seven months, and they’ve

provided no new child care spaces since they took government. Any money for

child care that they announced was already announced in the B.C. Liberal

budget of February 2017.

Let’s get on to the government’s goal. The goal of the government is

to create 22,000 new child care spaces in a new, universal child care

system. What does the Finance Minister mean by the word “universal”? I can

tell you how many child care spaces we have right now in B.C. We have one

full-time, 24-hour-a-day space for every child in B.C. By law, child care is

now, and always has been, universal and 24-7. The question that the NDP

wants to answer is: who takes care of the child?

By universal care, the NDP means universal public care, resorting to a

standard, big-government institutional model. In its drive for universal

public child care in the province, the NDP is offering an inflexible,

big-government solution. This is their strategy. In describing their

“affordability,” “quality,” “public administration” — the same concepts on

which our health care system is based.

The NDP appeals to these ideas because they want British Columbians to

think of daycare like they think of universal health care, to draw an

analogy in their minds with health care, to associate child care with health

care, because, of course, British Columbians support government-provided

health care.

However, just think of our health care system for a moment. One of its

people in this House have experienced waiting lists in the health care

system. Of course they have. In theory, it’s perfectly accessible, but far

too many people experience something radically different in practice. Do we

really want that kind of system for child care? Do we want more waiting

lists than the ones we have now?

I ask this because all public-only, big-government programs are

plagued with the same problems: rising costs, heavy bureaucracy, a

regulatory burden and waiting lists. I predict it will be the same for our

new universal child care system. There will be rising costs due to

unionization. I would note that a total of 49 unions supported the call for

$10-a-day daycare. They are keenly anticipating a whole new crop of

thousands of quasi public servants to organize for higher wages and better

benefits at the cost of the taxpayer. That will cause the cost of daycare to

rise.

The new universal public system will be cast as an extension to the

K-to-12 education system. Class size will therefore become an issue in child

care, just as it is in the education system. There will be a constant

struggle over worker-child ratios. The ideal of the family home, where there

is a one-to-one ratio, will be the driver behind continuous calls for ever

smaller worker-to-child ratios and attending higher costs.

[1:45 p.m.]

There will be a new bureaucracy to take care of this new system, as a

small army of public servants will be hired to inspect and regulate existing

and newly licensed providers and to ferret out those unlicensed providers

who are caring for more than two children at once, contrary to government

rules. They will be ready to impose a high regulatory burden on new

providers, who will be enticed into the system through financial

inducements, which I’ll describe in a moment.

First, I’d like to say a few words about the regulatory burden. It is

a heavy one. The child care licensing regulation is a long and comprehensive

law. There are significant costs to licensing. These costs include fees but

also modifications to the family home and yard, programming requirements for

children in care, detailed recordkeeping, requirements to notify authorities

in various situations, special insurance for home and vehicles, training

requirements for the provider and much, much more.

All these providers are subject to intrusive inspection by the

Ministry of Health, who can disturb their privacy, enter any time and go

through their daycare. If that daycare happens to be in the family home,

this will be an issue for many people.

Now, how will the government create its universal plan? Well, there’s

a place for every child right now, as we know. Some of them are in licensed

care, but most of them are not. The government wants to pull those providers

into the public sphere, so it will have to get unlicensed providers — that

is, people who are caring for one or two children now, usually in their own

home — into the public system. It wants them to get licensed.

This is how the government will do it. I think it’s a very ingenious

plan. It’s also quite coercive, in my view. The government will offer a

grant to an unlicensed provider to join the state system. It’s a financial

carrot for the provider. It will help defray the costs of initial licensing.

That’s the positive side. That’s the carrot, although I would point out that

the government will not help with the ongoing costs of

compliance.

However, there’s a financial stick too. The government will wield the

financial stick against parents, withholding benefits under the new child

care benefit to parents who use unlicensed care. They will only get the

child care benefit if their providers are licensed, so parents will be

pushing their unlicensed providers to become licensed.

I think this is quite coercive, as I said, because it removes choice

from parents. They will effectively have no other choice but to go to a

licensed provider to get the benefit. This, I think, is the intention of the

government.

Will unlicensed providers take that step to go through the licensing

process? Let’s explore that question for a moment. What’s in it for the

provider? The child care provider won’t benefit in any way except from the

start-up grant to become licensed. For the rest of time, they will have to

comply with a truckload of regulations on their own, and I mean a truckload.

I’ve gone through them. I’ve looked through the regulations, and they are

formidable obstacles, particularly for a one- or two-person

provider.

Providers who get licensed will receive so-called fee reductions from

the government for every space every month, but those reductions are

supposed to be passed along to the parent in reduced fees. Nor will the

provider who licenses get any more from the parents, who paid from their own

pocket before licensing and will pay roughly the same amount using the new

child care benefit after licensing.

What’s in it for the provider — say, a person taking care of one extra

child in their family home — to license with the government? Very little, I

would say, except a boatload of government compliance and oversight

headaches. I would venture to guess that many, rather than undertaking the

time, the effort, the cost and the intrusion into the privacy of the family

home, will just stop offering the service, and the parents will go looking

for a licensed provider so that they can get the child care benefit. But

then we will have fewer child care spaces, not more.

Here I want to note something very important. The NDP are boasting

that they will create 22,000 new spaces, but to me it’s unclear — maybe

purposefully so — whether unlicensed spaces that convert to licensed spaces

will be counted among the new spaces the NDP wants to create. If so, these

new spaces will not be new, because they will not be spaces where there was

not one before. They will be existing spaces that just change their label

from unlicensed to licensed spaces. It’s about conversion, not

creation.

I suspect, having worked with large public service organizations in

the past, the public servants will simply not ask what a new licensee was

doing before, because they don’t want to know. They will simply assume that

those old private spaces are new public ones. But the bottom line is that

there may be no incremental child care spaces created and, in practical

terms, no greater access for child care to payments. The growth will all be

on paper.

[1:50 p.m.]

In their budget documents, the NDP refer repeatedly to the phrase “new

licensed spaces.” That carefully chosen phrase suggests to me that they are

hoping for a certain number of unlicensed spaces to license, and they will

claim that those are new spaces. If they do that, it will be a political

fraud. It will be fake spaces, a sham, and we will call them on

it.

There’s something more about the big-government child care plan I want

to address. It’s not explicitly stated. It’s not an outright accusation. It

is a soft, subtle insinuation, an implication, but it is there. In its child

care plan, the NDP is calling into question the safety of unlicensed

caregivers, many of whom are ordinary people — moms and dads giving care in

their family homes. The government wants them to license to ensure quality,

which to them means safety.

Why this push to license caregivers, who are your neighbours and mine,

if the parent is happy with the care provided? It must be because the NDP

thinks that these people are a safety concern, and in this the NDP could not

be more wrong. Unlicensed providers only caring for one or two kids are

mostly parents themselves, who provide excellent care to their own children.

They are good, loving, competent people providing a good service at a

reasonable price. The government should not be driving them into the

licensing system.

Now, I want to address something else that was contained in the throne

speech, although it was absent in the budget. The Speech from the Throne

said the following: “Government will introduce new legislation to give

parents vital information about unlawful or problem providers of unlicensed

child care. These new rules will give families the information they need to

make sure they are making the best and safest choice for their

child.”

What exactly does this mean? To me it’s unclear. Are we talking about

a public registry for caregivers? Does it mean more intrusive inspections?

Does it mean that unlicensed caregivers will have to, by law, give their

private information to the government, even if they don’t want to license?

Will there be reporting requirements for anyone providing child care? Will

unlicensed providers effectively be forced into a licensing system in all

but name? This has the potential to be intrusive, and we will be watching

carefully for this legislation.

I want to move on to another weakness of the NDP universal plan. That

is a critical shortage of early childhood educators. The budget documents

say that there are about 11,000 in service right now and that we’ll need

12,000 more. The documents acknowledge the shortage, but I was astounded to

see nothing whatsoever in the budget for increased wages for them, just

another of the NDP’s many commitments to study the matter.

We can be sure that the shortage will persist, and the government may

be unable to deliver new spaces without new workers. Child care providers

will get a new fee reduction of up to $350 per space, but if they pass that

reduction along to parents, as they’re supposed to, early childhood

educators won’t get that money in higher wages. Higher education

requirements for early childhood educators, as the NDP have been talking

about for years, will only increase the worker shortage.

What is likely to happen? I think what will happen is this: given all

the new money floating around, and given that there is no new money for

early childhood educators, providers will have to increase the wages for

child care workers and pass it along to the parents in higher fees. Just as

we see the new subsidies kick in, we may also see the cost of child care

rise across B.C., and child care will be inaccessible.

The NDP universal, public plan could be anything but universal in

practice, although they will still claim to have created 22,000 new spaces.

Mark my words, and give it a year or two. We will see. Honestly, I want the

best for children and parents in B.C. I sincerely hope that the NDP will be

successful in creating at least 22,000 new spaces. We on the opposition side

will be watching very closely to make sure that it’s done.

Now, I’ve spoken in a negative fashion about NDP child care policy. I

want to speak for a moment in a more positive way about what I think the

policy should be. First of all, parents need and want choices. No one loves

the child as much as their own parent. That’s why we have to respect their

choices. The mode of child care should be up to the parent, and the state

should be neutral with respect to the mode of care parents choose. We should

not be offering financial inducements to drive all parents and providers

into one system, as the NDP are doing today.

In other words, we should help lower-income families take care of

their kids no matter how the parents want to do it. We need a flexible

system. I would point that lower-income parents who prefer informal care —

for example, with family members — get nothing extra in this budget. It’s

unclear just what they will get, but the budget infers that it will be a

lower amount. It’s like they’re second-class citizens. I think this is

unfair. In addition, lower-income parents who prefer to care for their own

children at home get nothing from this budget.

[1:55 p.m.]

To me, this is not only unfair; it doesn’t make any practical sense.

If a low-income parent prefers to care for a child at home rather than work

outside the home, why would we pay a professional, instead, to do the child

care? Why not help the parent directly? If we offered this as an option to

all low-income parents, it could also relieve early childhood educator

shortages by several thousand people and free up spaces for others who would

prefer to work outside the home.

B.C. Liberals would continue to support publicly subsidized care for

families who need help, but this is only a part of the child care picture.

Parents need a variety of options in a mixed public-private system that will

meet the unique needs of each family. Remember, some children deal well in a

large daycare with 20 kids in it, but some don’t thrive there. A family

setting with one caregiver is a much better option for some children, and we

need to have that available for parents to meet the unique needs of their

children.

The NDP decried, in their budget documents, the so-called patchwork of

child care that currently exists. They want to push everyone into the same

mould, but every child is different, and every family is unique. Using the

NDP analogy, which they use in a negative sense, a patchwork quilt of many

colours and fabrics can even be stronger and warmer and more beautiful than

a quilt that is of a monotone colour and a single fabric. I would venture to

say that a diversity of child care options, both public and private, makes a

more accessible, more efficient, less expensive system that is just as safe

and of equal quality to government care.

Instead of increased subsidies to public institutions, B.C. Liberals

would increase subsidies to parents. Daycares would thus respond more to the

needs of parents, improving quality of care and giving more choice to

parents. I would like to see a child-centred approach driven by data, which

says that attachment to parents develops most in the earliest years. I would

not follow Sweden’s public-only child care model, in which 92 percent of

children are in public care, at a tremendous cost to the state of around

$20,000 per year per child. This is closest, I think, to the NDP

model.

Instead, we in B.C. should follow the highly praised Finnish model and

provide financial support, as Finland does, to lower-income parents in the

form of a home care allowance so that parents could keep the option of

licensed or unlicensed child care or keep their child at home for the first

three years. It would be the parent’s choice.

Now, moving onto kindergarten, B.C. Liberals introduced optional

full-day kindergarten for children five years of age in 2010. I would like

to see B.C. Liberals extend that to optional all-day, play-oriented

preschool or playschool for all children of age four. It would be optional,

but it would be available, just as it is for all five-year-olds in B.C. I

would point on that almost all five-year-olds do take advantage of it.

Instead of incenting at-risk families to take their children to government

daycare, B.C. Liberals should beef up StrongStart, where parents attend at

no cost, together with their children, to make families stronger.

To close, although child care must always be universal, we don’t

believe in one big public system, which will suffer from the flaws of all

big public systems. We believe in a mixed public and private system, where

the unique needs of children and families are served by the individual

choice of each parent, assisted by the government. When we have the good

fortune to become government again, we will make that happen.

B. Ma: It is my honour and privilege to be able to speak to the budget speech

today and express my support for the direction that this government is

headed in and, really, the progress it has been able to make in many areas

in such a short period of time.

I’d like to also thank the member for Chilliwack-Kent for his

interesting comments. I won’t attempt to respond to every comment that the

member has made, although I will note that he had asked earlier why the

government seemed so intent on ensuring that child care is safe, licensed

and affordable and why we believe that non-licensed child care is not

necessarily always the best way forward. I’d like to bring up the story of

Baby Mac. I won’t go further into that, because I would like to talk about

child care a little bit later on.

[2:00 p.m.]

I do want to let the member know that although I don’t agree with most

of his comments, I do definitely agree that our universal child care program

will indeed produce many, many long-term, well-paid jobs that support

families. I appreciate the member acknowledging that earlier.

I would like to take a moment to make a few acknowledgements. Firstly,

I would like to congratulate the Squamish Nation councillors in my riding of

North Vancouver–Lonsdale who were elected to serve their community in

December. Their recent elections were the result of a renewal campaign that

the community pursued. I would like to say that they were successful at

that.

Eight out of 16 Squamish Nation councillors are brand new, and they

are all under the age of 35. Given the age of our representatives in this

House, I don’t think I need to elaborate on how incredible that

is.

The Squamish Nation councillors, and I would like to acknowledge them

by name, are: Dustin Rivers, Wilson Williams, Christopher Lewis, Jacob

Lewis, Marcus Wooden, Alroy Baker, Carla George, Joshua Joseph, Richard

Baker, Deborah Baker, Deanna Lewis, Kristen Rivers, Chief Ian Campbell,

Brandon Darbyshire-Joseph, Joyce Williams and Orene Askew.

They’re an army of young people fighting for their community, fighting

for the revitalization of Indigenous culture and the revitalization of

Indigenous languages. I truly do hope that our budget’s commitment of $50

million to support Indigenous language revitalization is able to serve them

very well. I’d like to congratulate them all, and I look forward to working

with them to build better communities.

I would also like to note that on November 12, while we were away from

the Legislature, a 7.3 magnitude earthquake hit the Kermanshah province of

Iran. It was the deadliest earthquake of the year, and it created tremors

that were felt as far away as Pakistan, Lebanon, Kuwait and

Turkey.

The Iranian-Canadian community is an extremely important part of the

North Shore community. I know many members of that community in my

constituency continue to mourn the tragedy that took place.

Last night hundreds of people gathered at the Music Gives

Philanthropic Foundation’s event at Centennial Theatre to raise funds to

support the victims of that terrible earthquake. I’d like to extend my

deepest thanks and warmest regards for all of the people who gathered in

that theatre last night to support these victims.

Finally, I’d like once again to thank the people of North

Vancouver–Lonsdale for putting their faith in me by electing me to be their

MLA. It is a diverse, beautiful riding that is full of compassionate, kind

people who care about each other.

It is also a constituency that few people believed would elect an NDP

representative and that, I might say, many people underestimated in that

regard. But I also think that’s perhaps something that members opposite did.

They underestimated the resolve that people have to fight for change and

fight for a better B.C.

The people of North Vancouver–Lonsdale inspire me. I’ve met with

dozens of people from across the constituency over the last — how many

months has it been? — maybe seven months, eight months that I’ve been

elected. They’ve shown me how much that we care about each other and how

they care about each other.

We’ve had community members who chipped in to buy a new bed set for a

struggling elder. We’ve had tenants who help out their neighbours understand

their rights against, unfortunately, some bad landlords who were pushing

illegal and unfair evictions. We have an incredible number of not-for-profit

service providers who help our most vulnerable neighbours to access services

and resources they need — services and resources that I believe this budget

will improve.

[2:05 p.m.]

The goodness of these people amazes me every day. Often when community

members come into our office to share their experiences or advocate for the

people they love — maybe it’s about seniors care; maybe it’s about child

care; maybe it’s about public education; maybe it’s about the needs of

low-income renters or the needs of housing in the community — quite

frequently, they say the same thing to me: “Don’t worry about me. This

already happened to me. This bad thing has already happened to me. I’m here

to tell you about it so that you can make sure that it doesn’t happen to

anyone else.”

It’s been an extremely touching experience. It’s a beautiful sentiment

of selfless service, and that’s how I strive to perform my work as their

MLA. Every day I’m working with my colleagues to put people first. I believe

that we can make a B.C. that works for everyone, and I believe that this

budget demonstrates that very, very well.

Over and over, I hear from my constituents that after 16 years of the

B.C. Liberals, it’s like a breath of fresh air after being trapped in a

dungeon. I hear from not-for-profit agencies and municipal councillors that

the change in government has been like a weight lifted off their

backs.

Interjections.

B. Ma: The members might not agree, but these are the messages that I have

been hearing from my community members.

Projects and issues that have been stalled out for years suddenly

resolved. Conversations stuck in limbo suddenly moving again. In reaching

out to members in my community, I hear over and over again: “This is the

first time we’ve ever had an opportunity to engage with the government like

this. This is the first time we’ve heard from our MLA to actually listen to

us. Thank you.”

I want to share with you a tweet that I received recently. It said:

“This feeling of being proud of my government is new and weird, but I like

it.” I think that that’s a sentiment that I also share. I think a lot of

people in B.C. do have a lot to be proud of with this government.

Even before we managed to get to this budget, already so much has been

done. Let’s take a look at the short list of a few of my favourite ones from

just the first 100 days of this new government.

Less than 72 hours after being sworn in, our government increased

income assistance rates and disability payments by $100 a month. Earnings

exemptions for people on income and disability assistance was increased by

$200 a month. In December, an additional $52-a-month transportation

supplement was added. I’ve had constituents in my office in tears over this.

I’ve had constituents tell me: “Because of you, I can afford a little bit

more food every month.” I can’t tell you how much that touches me that they

would share that with me.

programs were also eliminated, removing financial roadblocks for those

upgrading their education.

For a community like mine where there are many immigrants from

very highly educated and very skilled professionals, I meet a lot of people

who come into my office to tell me that they have trouble finding work in

them a new sense of hope. I’ve had many community members tell me that

will improve their chances of finding work in the future.

For former youth in care, the post-secondary education tuition fee

waiver program was extremely meaningful to them. Former youth in care are

200 times more likely to experience homelessness than their peers — 200

times more. It’s an order of magnitude that’s almost unimaginable for

someone like me.

I’ve had the privilege of having parents who maybe I didn’t always

agree with but who certainly do care for me. They’re still around. I know

that if I ever truly needed their help, they would be there for me. It was

certainly shown during my election campaign. My mother was right there by my

side. My sister was there. I have a wonderful family and support network.

There are so many youth who were formerly in care who find themselves

entering adulthood with absolutely nobody. I cannot imagine how hard that

must be.

[2:10 p.m.]

The small act of being able to provide them with free post-secondary

education is life changing. This program could very well literally save

people’s lives, so expanding that program to all 25 of B.C.’s post-secondary

education institutions is equally as meaningful. That means that youth are

able to stay closer to their communities. They’re able to access the schools

that are closer to their home where they have connections — albeit

potentially limited but very valuable connections, nevertheless. The list

goes on and on.

Of course, we’re not here to talk, necessarily, about the first 100

days, though I love a lot of these. I mean, bringing back the Buy B.C.

program. Amazing. The increased funding to kindergarten-to-grade-12

education. I’m definitely all for that. I also love that we ended the

grizzly bear hunt too. I know a lot of my community members were happy with

that.

Interjection.

B. Ma: There you go. That’s right.

Having said all that, that was the success of the government in the

first 100 days. Now we have this new budget to look forward to, and oh boy,

it is a pretty amazing budget. I have to admit it was better than I

expected. I recognized that choices always have to be made when you’re in

government, that you can’t always do everything it is that you hope to do in

the first seven months. But the amount of success that the Minister of State

for Child Care, the Minister of Children and Family Development, the

Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, the Minister of Finance, the

Attorney General and all of the other ministers who have contributed to this

budget have made, in such a short period of time, absolutely astounds

me.

This budget has been described by…. It’s easily the best budget in a

generation. In my local community, the top three issues that I hear about

are normally housing, transportation and child care, so I’ll focus my

comments around those areas.

I want to start with housing. Housing affordability — I think it would

be fair to say — is the number one issue across the province. There are, of

course, many other extremely important issues, but housing affordability

seems to be at the crux of it all. In my community, over and over, I hear

from renters who tell me that if they lose their home in their current

rent-controlled apartment, they will end up on the street. In my community,

there are 750 members of the population who are homeless.

We also have, of course, a lot of families who are seeing their young

adult children leave the communities because they can’t find a place to live

on the North Shore. This is heartbreaking to families who want to stay

together but can’t afford to do so. This is heartbreaking to grandparents

who find their grandchildren leaving the North Shore. Perhaps they’re going

out to Maple Ridge or Chilliwack, and although the physical distance is

quite short, traffic congestion is really terrible out on the North Shore,

so the commute and time that it takes to visit…. Of course, everyone is

very, very busy. It makes it very difficult for them to actually see their

families.

We have a lot of seniors who are becoming more and more isolated

because members of their family and their community are moving away to find

more affordable housing. I also hear from seniors who…. They themselves are

forced to leave the communities that they have spent their entire life in

because they can no longer afford housing.

That’s why I am so incredibly grateful to know that our government is

making the single largest investment in affordable housing in the province’s

entire history. I can’t tell you how much that will mean to everyday people

who are struggling. Housing affordability affects us all, and I do believe

that, for too long, B.C.’s housing crisis was absolutely ignored.

[2:15 p.m.]

In this comprehensive housing plan, we’re able to tackle speculation.

We’re going to be curbing demand. We are increasing housing supply and, of

course, improving security for renters. I want to thank the member for

Vancouver–West End for his advocacy for renters for all of these last many

years.

For a long time, I felt like there were no voices in government who

actually cared about renters and the challenges facing renters. But the

member for Vancouver–West End has been absolutely diligent, has been

absolutely passionate in his advocacy for renters, and it really inspired me

as well. It made me feel as though there was hope. When I was a renter, I

would look at the work that he did, and I would start fighting for my

rights.

Now, as MLA for North Vancouver–Lonsdale, I’m able to help other

renters fight for their rights. I’m really proud, as well, that we were able

to close the rental loopholes late last year. The fixed-term-lease loophole

was actively hurting people in my community, and certainly the geographic

area rent increase provision was being used by some, unfortunately,

unscrupulous landlords to threaten renters into actually accepting new

leases that they didn’t necessarily have to accept.

I’d like to talk a little more about the housing plan, of course. We

produced a 30-point plan for housing affordability in British Columbia, and

having read it, I think it is a fantastic plan. Again, I have to give kudos

to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, for working with the

Minister of Finance, and the Attorney General for putting this

together.

Under stabilizing the market, we’re going to be taxing speculators who

are driving up our housing costs. I think that this is a fantastic measure,

and a lot of members of my community are absolutely thrilled to see that

this is happening. If you own a home and you are not living in it, it’s not

your primary residence, you’re not renting it and you’re not paying income

taxes, you’re going to be taxed a speculation tax.

We’re also increasing the foreign buyers rate to 20 percent from 15

percent, but unlike what the B.C. Liberals did when they first introduced

it, we’re actually going to be including grandfathering clauses so that

we’re not interrupting contracts midway.

We’ll also be expanding the foreign buyer tax to areas outside of

Metro Vancouver, and I think that that’s a very good thing, because we’ve

heard from a lot of community members that housing in areas that the foreign

buyer tax was not applied to started to increase. Basically, all the

speculation was moving outwards. The increasing of property transfer tax on

homes over $3 million is, I think, a progressive measure as well.

We’re also cracking down on tax fraud and closing loopholes, so taking

action to end hidden ownership, including a new beneficial ownership

registry. We don’t actually know who owns and who benefits from a lot of

portions of our real estate market. This makes it very difficult for us to

know how to actually manage the market and how to crack down on speculation

and fraud when we don’t know who’s actually benefiting and who’s actually

owning these properties. That is also a really fantastic measure.

Of course, we’re making a $6-billion-plus investment in affordable

housing — the single largest investment in affordable housing in the

province’s history, building rental units for middle-class income earners.

We’re providing housing for women and children who are affected by violence,

and we’re going to be working with universities to actually build university

student housing.

I know I’ve mentioned to the House before that Capilano University in

North Vancouver has recently opened student residences, and the positive

impact it has had on their students has been absolutely incredible. Prior to

the availability of student residences, there were many students who were

living in their cars, living in tents behind campus and couch-surfing who

were having to make the decision as to whether or not they would continue

school or not because they couldn’t actually afford housing.

[2:20 p.m.]

I think that’s a terrible situation, and I’m so glad that we’re going

to be able to make it much better. Of course, we’re building 2,500 new

supportive homes for people struggling with homelessness.

We’re also adding security for renters by increasing benefits to

seniors who are living independently, so the SAFER grants are going up. The

RAP, the rental assistance program, is going up. Of course, we’re working

with partners to build and preserve affordable housing.

Now, when it comes to the next major issue that my community faces,

child care, I have to tell you that when the Minister of Finance was reading

out the B.C. budget for this year, I was choking back tears, not very

successfully. A few of them definitely flowed.

The whole time she was talking about the new child care program that

we’re rolling out, I was thinking about the community members — my family,

my friends, my neighbours — who have been talking to me about how difficult

it is to make ends meet, particularly when you have young

children.

The city of North Vancouver has one of the highest rates of families

led by single parents in the province. Almost one in five families in the

city of North Vancouver are led by only one parent. To have a young child

and try to work during the day…. Frankly, I don’t know how many of these

families do it.

I’ve got single mothers who are working three jobs a day, and they

can’t afford child care. They’re shuttling their children off to friends. If

they have family, maybe their families are chipping in. But it’s all in all

an extremely stressful situation.

My own godchildren, four of them, live with their parents, of course.

They are parents of low income. Their total combined family income this time

last year was $40,000 a year, for two adults and four children. They

actually live in Burnaby. They don’t live in North Vancouver, but the

challenges are very, very similar, of course.

My beautiful friend, the mother of these four children, had her first

child when she was in high school, so she wasn’t able to finish her high

school diploma. She spent a lot of her life struggling and wondering what to

do about the future. Before long, she and her family…. She had a family of

four children. I’m sorry. I’ve seen how these families struggle, and I’m so

grateful that our government is able to…. I’m sorry. This doesn’t happen

normally.

I’m so grateful our government was able to put together a child care

plan, the biggest investment in affordable child care in the province’s

history. It’s going to allow families like my friend’s — who, unfortunately,

no longer need child care because their children are a little bit older….

But it’s going to help families who make less than $45,000 a year actually

make ends meet. I don’t think the members opposite really understand what

this really means to people.

The first portion of the program that will be rolled out will be in

April, where child care providers will be able to receive a $350 per month

per child fee reduction. Families across B.C. will be able to see that in

April. And that will be supported by an additional affordable child care

benefit of up to $1,250 per year per child for those families making less

than $45,000.

[2:25 p.m.]

Even families that make up to $111,000 a year will continue to be able

to benefit. I have many friends. Of course, as an engineer, I have many

engineering families — they have very good jobs, professional incomes — who

recognize that this portion of the plan might not benefit them to the extent

that it benefits those lower-income families. But they also know that this

is just the first part of the universal child care plan rollout. It’s just

the first stage.

Our plan is to eventually create a universal child care program in

B.C., but it takes time to roll out. We’re focusing on the families who need

help the most right now, but there’s a lot more to come.

There is so much more in this budget, but I’m a little worried that

I’m going to continue to sob here, so I’m going to take my seat now. I thank

the House very much for allowing me to speak to this budget.

P. Milobar: It’s always a pleasure to be able to rise in this House and speak to

matters. Certainly, the riding of Kamloops–North Thompson looks to myself to

make sure that their voices are heard in this House. That’s what I think we

strive to do, all of us, every day — to make sure our constituents are well

heard and well listened to in this House.

I just want to assure the member opposite who finished up before me

that in fact, on this side of the House, we do equally love our friends and

family and do understand the struggles in life that they go through from

time to time, and we can sympathize with her emotion around a close personal

friend that had struggles in life.

I want to address the budget and some of the problems I see with it.

Now, over the last couple of days since the budget has been introduced, I’ve

been walking around Victoria, back and forth from the accommodations that

I’m staying at, and a couple of people have noticed that I’m walking around

with both hands in my pockets.

The simple answer to that is I want to make sure that at least I know

when the government is reaching into my pocket to take money out of my

pocket. In this budget, that’s very clearly what they’re doing — but not in

an upfront, very blatant way. No. They’re characterizing a $5½ billion

taxation budget as affordable. They’ve tabled a budget that has probably the

single largest increase in taxation as affordable. Their marketing strategy

is to tell you that in the seven months since they’ve taken office, adding a

cumulative $8 billion in taxation is affordable. I would suggest to you that

it’s not.

There are a few examples I want to touch on in the budget document.

It’s very troubling. I likened it in an earlier conversation to watching a

live-action game of three-card monte happening in front of our eyes, where

there are very real-world consequences.

As we’ve heard in question period, the members opposite seem to think

it’s quite funny when we ask questions about possible layoffs and job

reductions and decreases in hours worked and people still having the ability

to have a viable business and be able to provide for their families and make

sure that the workers within their companies have good-paying,

family-supporting jobs. It seems to get met with laughter, as if it’s not

serious or that there are not real-world ramifications.

The ideology piece is one thing. But when you ask questions about

what’s really happening on the ground, and when you’re conveying back to a

government what your own constituents are raising to you as concerns, one

would hope that the government, regardless of political stripe, would take

those concerns seriously and not, essentially, laugh back in the faces of

our own constituents as we’re voicing those concerns in this House. But

that’s what we’ve been seeing over the past couple of days.

We will continue to advocate for our constituents to the government.

We hope that some day the government will actually take those concerns

seriously and not just turn everything into a laughing matter.

[2:30 p.m.]

Now, I would point out, within housing…. It’s a small piece of it, but

again, it comes down to marketing. It’s so small one wonders why it even got

any mention of any significance whatsoever in the budget document, let alone

in the speech by the minister.

However, the hotel tax, the vaunted hotel tax that is going to save

affordable housing options for people in municipalities and give

municipalities this wonderful tool to be able to provide housing for all….

Well, here’s a little background.

I have a unique perspective on this because not only am I a former

mayor who is very familiar with the municipal side of the municipal hotel

tax act; I’m a former hotelier, whose family was actually one of the leading

people that brought the hotel tax into fruition in Kamloops. In fact, our

family fought against the first implementation of it because it needed to be

adjusted to better reflect industry. Once that adjustment was made, we fully

supported and got on board to make sure it was implemented.

I think I can offer a bit of a unique perspective, which it seems the

government is totally unaware of, when it comes to this tax. First off, this

tax only exists if the majority of hoteliers, representing the majority of

value as well as the majority of rooms in a municipality, agree to allow the

tax to exist. Now, the reason that clause is in there is because, as the

current legislation stands, it’s supposed to be used for tourism marketing.

It’s supposed to be used for things to help with tourism in the

area.

The government’s grand scheme to try to funnel more money into housing

with local governments is to change those rules so that that tax that’s been

collected by hoteliers can now be used to provide housing in

communities.

[R. Chouhan in the chair.]

Now, that’s an laudable goal. However, here’s the other kicker to that

piece. It gets renewed every five years. Guess what. If the hoteliers

suddenly say, “We don’t want to keep collecting this tax on behalf of

government so that it can go pay for housing and not provide any marketing

support to us whatsoever,” there’s no more tax to provide housing. That’s

the first problem.

The second problem is, even if they agree to do that, you then have no

more marketing dollars left for the tourism industry within that area. I can

tell you in every jurisdiction where this tax has been implemented — and

this tax has been successfully rolled out in terms of leveraging advertising

opportunities, partnering with the regional tourism marketing boards and

partnering with the provincial marketing boards — there’s been a spike in

tourism activity. That’s not accidental. That’s what happens when you market

properly.

If you take those marketing dollars away, you are going to impact the

livelihood of thousands of people that work in the tourism industry. But as

we have seen with Family Day discussions, this government doesn’t seem to

want to support the tourism industry. We are not sure what industry they

want to support. Apparently, they don’t want to support resource industries.

Now they are taking an all-out assault on the tourism industry in various

different forms and creating these internal conflicts within municipalities

and tourism marketing boards, somehow turning a tourist marketing dollar

into affordable housing units managed by a municipality.

Municipalities don’t have the taxing authority and the ability for

transfers of wealth like a provincial government does, which is why, for the

most part, they don’t provide day-in, day-out housing options. They try to

scramble…. They try to come up with land assemblies so government can build

on those and still hold on to the land value. But they don’t have the

operational dollars to provide day-in, day-out housing options.

This government seems to think that taking some marketing dollars and

removing them from marketing, hurting our economy and the tourism sector,

and putting it over to housing to let municipalities start taking over

housing options is a good idea. I call that a blatant download to

municipalities and property taxpayers, and it certainly isn’t going to make

life more affordable for people that are property taxpayers.

The last point on this I would point out is we also have to consider

the order and magnitude of dollars. In Kamloops’s case, it’s approximately

$1 million a year that they collect on this tax. A million dollars. That’s a

far cry from trying to build a proper, affordable housing continuum within a

municipality.

In Salmon Arm’s case, they just started this. The heart of tourism

country in the Shuswap. They collect $180,000 a year, it’s projected, on

this tax, yet somehow this tax is being held up as some magical thing that’s

going to help solve affordable housing without damaging tourism and without

creating a lot of conflict within municipalities.

[2:35 p.m.]

Now, when you look at other tax increases…. There are plenty of them.

We heard the Finance Minister today rattle off a list of taxes that was so

long, I started to lose count. There are other ones that are a little bit

troubling to me.

A tobacco tax increase. I’m not standing here advocating for tobacco

use. I think tobacco use is horrible. I’ve never been a smoker. However,

there is a fine line between raising tobacco…. It’s well documented in all

jurisdictions that when you keep raising tobacco tax, you drive up the

black-market consumption of tobacco. Anyone in law enforcement knows this to

be true. It is a documented fact.

Although it seems like a good idea on the front side to try to

restrict tobacco use, to try to drive that use down, it’s no different than

the conversation we’re hearing about the legalization of pot, where if it

gets priced too high, if it’s taxed too high, the black market will still

exist.

To try to pretend that doesn’t already exist with tobacco…. People are

kidding themselves. You can’t openly talk about the impacts on one style of

combustible enjoyment, shall we say, and not acknowledge that it’s a very

real-world consequence with tobacco. I’m not confident that was thoroughly

thought-out. It’s small dollars in the grand theme of things, but I think it

just speaks to the broader issue.

Now, when we look at other things within the budget that are troubling

to me, I would note that buried deep in the bowels…. It’s a normal process

of documentation, so it’s not like this government has done anything any

different than how the budget books are laid out regularly. But I’ve always

found that when you go farther back into these documents, some of what seem

to be very convoluted charts reveal some very interesting facts.

I came upon a page. Being newer to this House, I thought I would check

with a couple of colleagues that have been around and are much more

experienced that I was actually reading it correctly. It essentially shows

delayed capital spending. What it shows — based on the timeline, as I can

ascertain within this book — is that since this government has taken office,

in seven short months, they have delayed $850 million worth of capital

spending.

So $850 million of capital spending has been delayed, one can only

assume, because of mismanagement. Now, there is certainly an understanding

around a transition time, but we’re talking two quarters’ worth of time now

— two quarters’ worth of time where these projects that were already

pre-planned, that were supposed to be moving ahead, have sat and waited, for

whatever reason, because government cannot manage their capital

properly.

I would note, as a special interest to our area, that $330 million,

over one-third of these delayed dollars, are transportation. So $330 million

of transportation projects that have already been approved, that had already

gone through Treasury Board, are sitting awaiting the Minister of

Transportation to do her job and get them moving. But what do we get? We get

press release after press release, in the Interior, talking about

accelerated projects. “We’re making the Trans-Canada widening move faster,

and we’re going to get things done quicker than ever before.” In seven

months, $330 million of projects has been delayed.

Since this government took office, $105 million of — here’s the kicker

— social housing projects…. So $105 million of social housing capital is

sitting in limbo, doing nothing, waiting for this government to actually do

their job and deliver projects, instead of study upon study upon

study.

There is delayed capital in there for schools, for K-to-12. There’s

delayed capital in there for post-secondary institutions. There’s delayed

capital for health care. All of these are delayed — all delayed, for who

knows how long, to the tune of almost $1 billion. But we don’t hear talk

about that, and when we try raising that in the House, we get laughed at yet

again by the government — laughed at.

[2:40 p.m.]

I would point out that when the government sits and laughs when you

are raising concerns from your constituents…. They’re not laughing at me. I

can take it. I don’t mind it. I’ve been told I’m a big boy. I can live with

that.

They’re laughing, through me, at my constituents. Every single one of

our members that raises constituents’ concerns in this House, that hears

laughter from the other side…. That’s what they’re doing. They are directly

laughing at every constituent I represent who has valid concerns about

timing of much-needed highway projects.

Instead of getting told by a Highways Minister that they’re being

accelerated, when I look in the budget book, I see $330 million worth of

delayed capital spending on transportation. That’s not humorous to me. That

makes me question if they understand their budgets within their own

ministry, if they know how to get projects moving and if they know how to

keep projects on time — and certainly a concern around keeping projects on

budget.

Now, I’ve said this is kind of like a three-card monte game. I would

also note, when we’re talking about the ability to manage projects and

budgets, in the seven months…. It’s actually not even seven months. In this

last quarter, in the last update since the previous update, the surplus has

decreased by another $39 million. Another $39 million — poof! — gone. It was

budgeted to be to the good. It’s gone.

The surplus has been dropping monthly since this government took

office. For them to be projecting a $220 million surplus a little over a

year from now…. Frankly, I find that a little hard. They started with $2.7

billion seven months ago, and we’re down to about $110 million or something

like that, off the top of my head.

It seems pretty hard-stretched to think that over the next 16, 17, 18

months before the next fiscal year-end, they’re going to keep a $220 million

surplus pure. That would indicate to me that, even in their best wishes,

we’re going into deficit territory. It will be interesting to see the

ministers of the Crown react when they don’t get their wage holdback because

we’ve gone into deficit.

I would point out that that $220 million surplus seems to be a very

interesting number to me. I would note that with the Medical Services Plan

double tax that we see in the budget, a double tax that is going to generate

$450 million in revenue while they’re still collecting medical services

premiums…. Without that $450 million of a double tax, you have approximately

a $230 million deficit.

No wonder the Minister of Finance is so adamant that we need to have

this payroll double tax happening a year in advance of MSP being transferred

into the payroll tax. The government needs the money to be able to balance

the books, or the ministers of the Crown will face the financial penalty of

not getting their full salary.

I think that’s shameful. It’s absolutely shameful that we’re

double-taxing businesses in our communities just so the ministers of the

Crown can make sure they get their full salary, instead of managing the

budgets properly and making sure that we don’t go into a deficit —

absolutely shameful.

I’ve talked a little bit about those issues. I’m obviously the critic

for the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, and I want to touch on

some of these issues too. Frankly, I’m absolutely stunned that the Green

Party is supporting this budget. It floors me that they have been caught up

by the marketing of this budget.

When you actually look and you actually read into the numbers of the

appropriations for the Minister of Environment…. Despite what the minister

said during estimates in October, November that it was a high priority for

this government — the Minister of Environment and their budget…. “Just wait

until the budget in February. Just wait and see how much more we get to do

with the Ministry of Environment come February.” It’s all there in

Hansard , from estimates. I was trying to be as fair as possible

during estimates.

[2:45 p.m.]

The budget for the Ministry of Environment, with the budget update,

was the same budget that the B.C. Liberals had tabled. I recognize that.

Myself and the Minister of Environment had established that very early on in

estimates. It was the same budget, so it wouldn’t be fair to hold and start

asking questions — “Where is this? Where is that?” — especially when he gave

assurances that come February: “Wow, the world is going to change when it

comes to the Ministry of Environment and their budget.”

Let’s look a little harder into that budget, those line items, and

then we’ll let the public decide. We’ll let the public decide if the Green

Party has truly sold their soul and their core supporters decide if they’re

comfortable with what their MLAs are doing right now in terms of clinging to

power in this House.

Let’s look at these numbers. The environmental assessment office.

There’s been lots of talk about revamping the environmental assessment

office, lots of talk about revamping it, lots of talk about making things

new and reinvigorating it. One would think that’s going to require some

funds. But in fact, when you look at the appropriation, the budget for the

environmental assessment office is flat. No new money.

Climate action. With an increase in carbon tax, with everything else

going on, surely the climate action department line item is going to see a

nice boost to the Ministry of Environment’s budget. But in fact what we see

is a million-dollar drop. They actually took $1 million out of the climate

action line item in the Ministry of Environment, and the Greens are

supporting this.

Environmental protection. We’ve heard lots about how they’re going to

ramp up environmental protection. It was promised, actually, in estimates.

“Wait till February. Wait till February. Environmental protection. High on

our list.” Well, that’s flat too. There’s no new money for environmental

protection.

Environmental sustainability. Surely there must be money for

environmental sustainability. Alas, nope. No new money. Same money as the

year before for environmental sustainability.

I find it interesting that after years of both the NDP and the Green

Party railing against the B.C. Liberals for lack of environmental

assessment, for lack of climate action, for lack of environmental protection

and for lack of environmental sustainability, their budget in February,

which we had already established back in estimates was the same budget

number as ours last February, actually sees a $1 million drop for those four

items. Those four items that they said we didn’t put enough into, they’ve

actually cut $1 million from. It’s right there in black and

white.

It’s shocking the Green Party would support that. It’s not so shocking

most members of the NDP probably haven’t read that line in the budget, but

shocking nonetheless.

Let’s look at a couple of other interesting tidbits out of the

Ministry of Environment budget, shall we? First, we hear — big feature

moment — $5 million for 1,900 camping spaces. That sounds like a wonderful

program. We’ve been advocating for stuff like that for years, so it’s great

to see. It’s absolutely great to see. Let’s look at where that $5 million is

coming from, shall we?

There’s a term called “statutory appropriations” which means there are

certain parts within the Ministry of Environment that you have to spend the

money on certain things. One of those is park enhancement. One of those,

park enhancement, derives the revenue from things like licence plate sales,

campground reservations and that like. Guess what budget has actually gone

up on the revenue side by around $5 million or $6 million. Oh, the statutory

one. So guess where the money for all the park enhancements, where it should

come from, is coming from. The park enhancement fund.

Why is that interesting to me? Because the B.C. Parks budget, which

isn’t the statutory piece of this…. I want to make sure the members opposite

are paying attention to this one, because this is the kicker.

[2:50 p.m.]

We’ve increased $6 million on the statutory side because our

campgrounds are generating a lot of revenue, and the B.C. Parks licence

plates are generating a lot of revenue. That’s all good stuff.

The B.C. Parks budget in this budget has dropped, not by $6 million.

It’s dropped by $9 million. So $9 million has been removed from the B.C.

Parks budget, yet we had a government promoting a $5 million expenditure for

campground spaces, making it sound like they were doing a wonderful thing in

B.C. Parks. They’ve net cut out $3 million from B.C. Parks. It’s absolutely

shameful how they’re trying to move the funds around to demonstrate that

they’re doing something good.

We also heard about the conservation officers. Conservation officers,

I would add, used to be promised conservation officers and park rangers. But

no. Instead, we have a watered-down delivery of 20 conservation officers to

try to cover this entire province. Much needed. It’s an increase. I’m happy

with that.

That $3 million and the $6 million out of the statutory fund make up

the $9 million cut to B.C. Parks. No net gain for B.C. Parks

whatsoever.

Now, there are a couple of other interesting things in here. This is

why I’m shocked that the Green Party, frankly, has just taken this budget

and run with it. They’re in opposition. They should actually be pointing

this stuff out. They’re supposed to be the environment party, but they’re

not pointing any of this stuff out. It’s shameful.

Let’s look at where the spending in the Environment Ministry is. Well,

we know that it’s actually up $6 million total. There’s a total of $6

million of new money into the Ministry of Environment. But I would point out

that salaries in the Ministry of Environment…. Do you know how much they’ve

gone up this year?

Do you know what the salary line item for the Ministry of Environment

has gone up by, even though they only have $6 million more to work with? The

salaries have gone up a shameful $7 million. That would mean that they have

basically said: “We’re taking $1 million out of the Ministry of Environment

because we need an extra $1 million away from services and programs to pay

for the same staff we currently have.”

Now let’s go to their capital spending. Surely there must be some good

news in the capital spending. It’s up $5 million, after all, for the

Ministry of Environment, so one thinks they’re going to do some pretty great

work. Obviously, the Greens haven’t read this part of the budget, because I

can’t believe that their leader wouldn’t be up in arms about

this.

Capital spending up $5 million for the Ministry of Environment. That

would be a great headline. Unless you say: capital spending is up $5 million

for executive and support services in the Ministry of Environment. It seems

like there are going to be some nice renovations to executive offices, but

there’s not going to be a whole lot going on out in the real world where the

environment actually is.

What we basically have is a budget increase in the Ministry of

Environment of $6 million. We have marketing where they’re spending an extra

$5 million on campground sites. The average person would look at that. They

would connect those two and say: “Oh, perfect.” But what we’re actually

seeing is program cut after program cut, reduction after reduction in the

Ministry of Environment, and that is absolutely shameful.

It’s shameful that the Third Party, which is supposed to be all about

the environment, will not even at least address or talk about this. The fact

that they just shake their head when we try raising it is shocking. The fact

that they think that actually less money for the same programs which they

used to accuse the B.C. Liberals of not putting enough money into is okay is

shocking. It’s just unbelievable that this is what we’re faced with in a

budget.

All in all, when you take everything into account, what we have is a

budget where the ideals are great. But I would just ask everybody that’s

watching, the six or eight, to go back, all the way back to not even a year

ago, to when we were all running in the election. Don’t take my word for any

of this. Don’t take the B.C. Liberals’ word for any of this. Read the

platform from the NDP.

[2:55 p.m.]

At every election forum, in front of every crowd, their candidate

stood up and said, “This has been fully costed against the B.C. Liberal

numbers” — B.C. Liberal numbers that had $8 billion less of taxation than

this current budget does.

Every one of their promises…. The members of the government told the

public in the election: “Trust us. Every cent has been accounted for. Every

one of our promises can be delivered, and it’s all in the existing funding

envelope.” Instead, what do we have? Watered-down, broken promises, the

shelling of the Ministry of Environment and $8 billion more in

taxation.

People out there don’t need to take our word for it. People out there

have to really start seriously asking the government: why are they not

keeping their word? Why were they such poor fiscal managers that they were

able to promise they could deliver everything and now, $8 billion of

taxation later, they’ve barely touched anything that they said they were

going to do.

They have a lot of questions to answer. They have a lot of explaining

to do. They wanted to be government. They’re government now. Maybe they

should take some time and, instead of laughing at our constituents for

having serious concerns, actually get down to the business of governing and

figure out how to make sure a budget doesn’t run over.

S. Chandra Herbert: Well, it gives me incredible pleasure to speak in support of this

budget and to share why I think it’s the right budget at the right time for

British Columbia and my constituents.

First, I want to say thank you to my friends in Vancouver–West End,

Coal Harbour. The neighbourhood of Coal Harbour and the West End have been

so good to me, and I do my best to be so good to it, because those people

are my neighbours. They deserve the very best from their MLA, me.

They ask me sometimes: “What party are you with?” I sometimes say:

“Well, I’m with the West End, Coal Harbour Party, made up of all sorts of

folks from all sorts of political backgrounds trying to get the very best

for our community.”

Today, with this budget, I’m also very proud to say I’m part of the

New Democratic Party. It’s a vision — of course, with support from the

Greens — that I think unites the best in British Columbia in a lot of ways.

I think it’s the kind of document, the kind of planning, that brings people

together — independents, folks with no political affiliation. Heck, I’ve

even heard from some Conservatives and some Liberals — dyed-in-the-wool

Liberals, they tell me — who really support this budget as well because it’s

the right kind of vision. Why is it the right kind of vision for B.C. at

this time?

Well, one second. I first have to say a special, special thank you

before I get into why it’s the right vision. I couldn’t do this work without

the support of my constituents, without the support of my incredible

constituency office staff, community office staff Murray and Alex, and of

course, my family, most notably my husband, Romi, and my son, Dev, who’s a

little over a year old now. They put up with a lot. They support me at all

get-out and inspire me every day. Thank you to them. And, of course, the

Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish peoples, whose unceded traditional

territory I call home in Vancouver’s West End.

Why is this the right budget, the right time? Well, I’d say it’s

balanced. Now, some would say: “Balanced? Well, you know, you sound like a

Conservative. You sound like somebody who’s just focused on the

fiscal.”

As I’ve been coming into this House and speaking on just about every

budget that’s come through the time that I’ve been here, I always look at

the balance. Does it balance fiscally? Does it balance socially? Does it

balance environmentally? Does it meet that test? Of course, you could

balance on the budget side and have poverty shoot through the roof,

homelessness increase, climate crisis get worse. That’s not balance, but

that’s what the former B.C. Liberal government called balance. It clearly

was not.

Clearly, we are now in the place where we have to respond to the fact

that so many of the things that we call important — values, community,

health, equality, the liberty to do what you want in a safe environment, to

follow your dreams, all those sorts of things — got pulled apart.

Some people did incredibly well. They got the best luxury cars, the

best luxury mansions, the best luxury whatever you want, a private school

education. The list goes on. They did very well in our province.

Unfortunately, most British Columbians did not. The gap between those with

the very most and the rest got wider and wider and wider. More and more

people started to fall through that gap and ended up on the street, ended up

in health care crisis, mental health crisis, addiction crisis.

[3:00 p.m.]

I think the word of the day in B.C. seems to be crisis. There are so

many crises — ICBC, Hydro, and the list goes on — because of the complete

lack of attention to the need for a real balance in British Columbia when it

comes to budgeting. With this budget, we’ve got that balance

right.

What does that look like when we talk about achieving that balance?

One, I’ll talk about the fiscal side. It’s important, because you can’t do

anything unless you’ve got the money and the budget to back that up and the

strong economy to do that as well. Right now we’re continuing to outperform

economic expectations for this province — the lowest unemployment rate in

Canada, some of the highest numbers of jobs and employed people in B.C.

history, a triple-A credit rating. That’s a good thing. It means we can

borrow at a lower cost. That is important.

It’s exciting to see that we’re also…. I think the former leader of my

friends in the opposition used to have on her bus “Debt-free B.C.” When we

pointed out the debt had shot through the roof, they changed that to

“operating-debt-free B.C.” Two years earlier than the B.C. Liberals were

going to get there, we have actually, with this budget, achieved eliminating

the operating debt as well.

This is a strong fiscal framework that allows us to do so much more.

I’m very proud that it balances in each and every year. It also achieves

that balance on the social and the environmental side.

It probably won’t surprise you that constituents of mine, for their

top priority issue…. The top priority issue I’ve been raising in this House

since I first joined it back in 2008 has been housing — housing, housing and

then housing. Rental housing primarily but homelessness, purchase housing,

homes, condos, house, home — anything that gets a roof over your head where

you’ve got some stability.

That’s been a concern of my constituents. Unfortunately, year in and

year out, they were ignored by the former Liberal government. They’re not

getting ignored anymore, and that is incredibly clear with this budget with

the record investments in housing, action on the Residential Tenancy Act,

security, speculation, foreign buyers, and so on. The list goes on, and

that’s incredibly important.

I’ll go into some of the detail. The 30-point action plan on housing

affordability that the government has addressed? I think we couldn’t even

barely get one point out of the former government for action on housing. So

30 points are pretty good. There’s clearly more that we’ve got to do. But 30

points versus what? Housing — move to Fort St. John, I think, was the

Liberals’ answer for years. But I digress.

It also includes record investments in child care. In the West End and

Coal Harbour that I represent, we have a lot of kids jammed into a really

small area. We’re probably one of the smallest ridings in B.C. but one of

the densest. Parent after parent after parent has come to my office since I

was first elected pleading for more child care spaces and more affordable

child care spaces.

Whenever we would go to the government of the day to say, “We need

this action because these people can’t work” or “They’re going to lose their

housing because they can’t afford the child care,” and the list…. The

affordability challenges they face are so vast, and they’ve only gotten

worse. The answer would be, “No, no and no” and “Oh, maybe we’ll do a couple

hundred” — when the problem was vastly underrepresented and you need

thousands.

Well, we’re doing that with this budget. We are finally responding to

the child care crisis with the first universal access social program in a

generation at least. You can probably jump back to universal health care

before you saw something quite as vast, all-encompassing and beneficial as

this program — a program so beneficial that it’s united people from all

walks of life, from boards of trade to chambers of commerce, labour unions,

city councils from wealthy communities and city councils from communities

struggling with poverty challenges.

The need is so vast and so real, you couldn’t help but respond.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. It was ignored, and it has gotten

worse. But you know, we’re going to lower costs for parents, increase the

number of child care spaces, and make sure those spaces actually meet the

highest standards of care.

I want to thank the advocates. Again, we are all MLAs. We represent

our communities. But in the end, it’s the advocates, the people who push to

get the changes they need to support our communities, that we have to thank.

In the end, we are only doing what our communities allow us to do, support

us to do through their own money, investments, taxes, belief and

voices.

[3:05 p.m.]

In my own community, I can think of a few. I think of Rita Chudnovsky.

She’s been at my door just about every year, a couple times a year, working

on this file. I think of Don Hann, who was, I think, the first gay child

care worker probably in Canada and has been advocating on these issues since

the ’70s.

I think of Pooh Corner Daycare and other child care centres in my

community whose parents have come to me, whose board of directors have come

to me, calling for action. And I think of all those parents who couldn’t get

into child care and are struggling right now still trying to find a way to

do it. They’ve told me that this budget gives them hope. They know that it’s

going to take time, but it’s the right action, and it’s something that

should’ve been done a long time ago.

Well, we’re getting there. The creation of more than 22,000 new

licensed child care spaces through the province is going to be possible

because of this budget. A new child care fee reduction program will benefit

up to 50,000 families in licensed care with fee reductions of up to $350 a

month. That’s going to help my constituents. A new child care benefit

provides up to 86,000 families with up to $1,250 per month in child care

cost relief by 2020. That will help my constituents, and if they are able to

have their children in care, they can work.

That’s the other challenge I’ve heard from business — getting skilled

workers. When you meet skilled workers, and they can’t do the jobs they want

to do because they can’t get the child care they need, and you talk to the

child care facilities, and they can’t get the skilled workers to work in the

child care facilities, you’ve got a problem. This clearly is being addressed

in this budget. So I want to thank our Minister for Child Care, our Minster

of Children and Family Development and the Finance Minister for

acknowledging this problem and, most importantly, providing

solutions.

Housing. Housing, housing, housing. Well, what’s there to say about

what we can do? Well, there’s a heck of a lot. I’ve worked on the rental

housing file for a long, long time. The number of stories, the number of

people that I’ve seen harmed because of the inaction, who’ve lost their

communities because of government inaction, who’ve been pushed into

long-term care when they weren’t ready for it, who’ve gotten ill and ended

up in emergency rooms and hospitals because of the lack of attention and

lack of care for housing, because the government could barely even say the

word “renter”….

The list is long of those stories. Each one of those people deserved

so much better. Some of them we were able to help. Some of them we were able

to keep in their homes, we were able to defend, and I want to thank all

those advocates out there who work on behalf of renters to try and do that.

I want to thank the good landlords who’ve worked and reached out to me to

support tenants in struggle as well, because we need more of them — good

renters, good landlords, good rental housing. This budget is going to help

do that.

Why don’t I take us through some of the big steps, some of the 30

steps? My friends in the opposition, I’ve heard them say: “Oh, there’s

nothing in the budget. What are they going to do for renters? There’s

nothing. There’s nothing for housing. What are they going to do?” Lots of

sturm und drang , I think is the phrase. Or sound and fury, but

we won’t finish that quote.

I would say that we’ve got action on speculators. Now, I think some of

the folks who’ve been working on trying to get us to address speculation as

a province for many years told me that they couldn’t believe we actually

said the word “speculator” in a provincial budget, but we did.

You know why we did? Because housing prices have shot through the

roof. People in the international financial markets have seen housing in

B.C. as a great thing to buy because the value to you, as the buyer, goes

through the roof, and you don’t have to pay anything. You pay almost

nothing, and you get huge, huge returns on that housing — meanwhile, pricing

the locals out of the market and creating an international commodity that,

in many, many cases, sits empty.

In my community, in Coal Harbour, you have about 25 percent, arguably

— give or take, here and there — of the housing sitting empty. That’s

housing that was built so that people could live there, not sit empty, and

that’s hurt local businesses. I’ve had folks tell me they’d set up their

local businesses in Coal Harbour, expecting this number of people, but when

it’s actually this number, they can’t make the numbers work.

Taxing speculators who are driving up costs will help push them to

provide that housing on the market and reduce that speculative drive for

increased costs. It should be about housing first for British Columbians,

homes for people, not homes to hoard your cash. It should be about housing,

so I’m really glad that tax measure was included.

Increasing the foreign buyer tax — again, people have been trying to

game the system — and expanding it to other markets that have also been hit

by the drive around speculation is the right thing. There are other things

around the fact that millionaires with $3 million homes have been paying

really relatively similar tax rates to the person who owns a $300,000

condo.

[3:10 p.m.]

Well, when I’ve gone out in my community, I’ve heard from people who

will tell me, “I own a $3 million condo” or “I make $300,000 a year. I want

more of my tax money to go into supporting education, supporting addressing

the homelessness crisis we see in the community, supporting addiction

treatments, supporting mental health support.” Up until this budget, the

B.C. government had largely not done that kind of thing, but this is a

progressive budget and realizes that those who have more can give more. It’s

the right thing to do. It’s progress. It’s progressive, and it will help in

so many other ways.

Another challenge in my community was, and continues to be, the issue

of Airbnb and short-term rentals. You can make a lot of money doing

short-term rentals. Hotels would have to pay the hotel tax, the tourism

industry would pay these taxes, but the short-term rental operator could

charge less, fly under the radar, take that housing out of the local rental

market and just turn it into tourist housing.

Well, again, we should be focused on, if you want, the locals. A

friend of mine used to always say: “Well, if it’s good for the locals, it’s

good for tourism.” I think that’s true. I think we need to be focusing on

the locals. Ensuring that things like Airbnb actually pay the taxes to put

them on the same level as the tourism industry is a good thing. That’s part

of this plan — but also making sure that condos and stratas, which don’t

want those short-term rentals in their properties, can actually go after

them with fines.

They don’t like that kind of taking it out of the housing market. They

want a neighbour there permanently, not somebody treating their home as a

resort. Giving them an increased fine power will help as well. That’s been

an issue in my community that I’ve heard a lot about.

Some other things out of the 30-point plan that I think will be really

useful. You know, if you try to learn who owned much of the housing in my

constituency in Vancouver, British Columbia, you wouldn’t be able to find

out. Why? It’s because governments of before seemed to prefer keeping that

information hidden, as a good thing.

Some people say X percent of housing is owned by people from this

country and not living locally. Well, you can’t actually test that for a lot

of housing because they’re hidden with numbered companies, corporate

registries, and so on that are not up to date. So, then, tax fraud and

evasion and those kinds of things can run rampant. When you can’t actually

find out who owns a place, it’s really difficult to be able to track who’s

paying taxes and who’s not, and that includes presales.

I had a fellow stop me the other day. He said he was getting rich. I

said: “Well, jeez, that’s nice. How did that happen?” He said he was playing

the presale game. He was buying presales, watching the property shoot up,

flipping them, assigning them on and on.

Unfortunately, when you talk to the tax collectors, when you talk to

people who study this stuff…. A lot of people got away with making lots of

profits and paying no taxes on those profits. Well, that ends because we’ll

know who has flipped, who has changed. It’s so you can actually ensure that

people who are trying to game the system can’t game it anymore. They have to

pay their fair share of taxes. I think that will help reduce that

speculative urge to make as much money as you can without paying your fair

share.

Nothing really gets people more than thinking that they’re paying

taxes and other people are getting rich and laughing at them while not

paying taxes. I think that’s been a challenge in B.C. The rich have gotten

very rich in B.C. Meanwhile, others have seen fees go up, like the MSP and

so on, which I’ll address a little bit later. It’s a flat tax that I’m so

proud to be seeing ended.

We’ve got to strengthen provincial auditing and enforcement powers.

It’s not sexy stuff, but it’s the right thing. Again, people have said:

“Well, how is it that fentanyl dealers have been running their money and

laundering their money through our housing market?” Well, it’s because

nobody was asking questions. Of those that were asking questions, there were

very few of them, with massive caseloads, and a government that didn’t seem

willing to actually take the problem seriously.

Well, thank you to my colleagues the Attorney General and the Finance

Minister for recognizing this as the problem it is, so that we can actually

do more to make sure, again, that housing is for locals — and locals that

are following the law, not cheating the system.

Close property tax loopholes on the ALR, the agricultural land

reserve. Jeez, farmland should be for farming rather than for mega-mansions

— what an idea. Working with the federal government as well, to prevent tax

evasion — again, something that should have been done years ago. Permanent

provincial-federal action to combat money laundering, tax evasion and

avoidance — again, things that I’m proud to see in a budget.

Now, here’s another one: making the largest investment in B.C. history

in affordable housing — $6 billion and more — because, unfortunately, we

just don’t have enough affordable housing. Why is that? Well, we can go

through the history.

[3:15 p.m.]

The federal government stopped getting involved. The B.C. Liberals,

when they took power in 2001, stopped building affordable housing. After

huge community outcries, action from the New Democrat opposition, we started

to get community buy-in. We started to get some housing built — clearly, not

enough to catch up to the backlog, with homelessness now rampant in

community after community. But when you work with local governments, you

work with the private sector, you work with non-profits and you work with

the co-op sector, you can start building affordable housing again — housing

that will be there for the long term.

Now, I know that in my community when you say “affordable housing,”

people want to know what that is. Some people have sold affordable housing

and said it’s affordable when, clearly, it’s not for most people. Well,

we’re looking at rent-geared-to-income. We’re looking at how you ensure that

low-income people can get housing. How do you make sure that middle-income

people can continue to call our community home — across Vancouver, across

Metro Vancouver, across B.C.? It’s got to be a B.C.-wide and, indeed, a

Canada-wide solution.

The 14,000 more rental units, again, are clearly needed. The supply of

rental housing is incredibly, incredibly low. The vacancy rate is near zero.

It’s not just building more than 14,000 more units but also allowing zoning

for rental housing. In Vancouver, what we’ve found is they’ve rezoned areas

to say: “This is going to be great for affordable housing.” But due to the

out-of-control speculative market that the Liberals let get out of control,

the land value is so high that if you sold it as a condo, it might be a $1

million condo.

If we’re going to do more mass transit like the Broadway line and

other things, we need to zone those areas for rental so that you can

actually maintain affordable housing there and have it not just become yet

another penthouse pad for the rich. Average British Columbians need to be

able to afford to live close to where they work. Rental-only zoning is going

to be a huge, huge win, I think, in many parts of B.C. but, I know, in

Vancouver specifically.

Student housing — what an idea. Some of these things I say — “We’re

going to allow colleges and universities to build student housing so that

students can live close to where they go to school” — are somehow a

revolutionary step, something that should be included in the 30-point plan

on housing. It seems kind of farcical. You’d think: “Building student

housing? Well, surely the government has been doing that for years.” You

know what? I’ve met with so many students, so many colleges and

universities, desperate to build student housing. They know that it will get

paid for through rent. They know it will prove a positive return. But the

Liberal government of the day said no, no, no and no.

We’re not saying no. We’re saying yes to student housing. We’re saying

yes to those construction jobs, yes to affordable student housing, yes to

student housing. If those students who are living in many places across

Metro Vancouver can move into the student housing, that housing that they’re

in right now becomes available to everybody else as well. So we’re getting

an increased supply, which should help on the rental side, which should help

people to increase the vacancy rate. We should make it so that landlords

have to compete for tenants, as opposed to tenants having to compete for

landlords, which is the current problem we’ve got in rental housing

today.

Oh, I’m excited. There are so many things, whether it’s housing for

Indigenous people or working to build 2,500 new supportive homes for people

struggling with homelessness. I’ve spoken about that commitment before in

this House. You can’t help somebody to change their life, and you can’t

assure them that they have a hope for the future if they have no conceivable

way to get into housing. For too long, that was the case.

Homelessness has been one of the pervasive social problems — one of

the reasons I got into politics, I think. It’s an old, hackneyed phrase for

me but maybe new to someone else: homeless people are tired of being stepped

over, and people are tired of stepping over homeless people. It’s a mutual

challenge that has pulled apart communities and, in some cases, has led to

real division, when it shouldn’t.

We all should be there for each other when we’re falling through the

cracks. We all should be there be there to ensure that you’re not freezing

outside, you’re not burning to death as, unfortunately, homeless folks have

done in B.C. in the last number of years. You’re not dying from preventable

illnesses because you’ve been outside in the cold for so long. This is a

great, great step. Clearly, we’ve got to take action. Provincewide,

federal-wide, a homelessness action plan is coming up. Again, there’s just

so much to recommend this.

Now, something that seniors in my community would come to talk to me a

lot about is the Shelter Aid For Elderly Renters program. It’s a program

which provides a subsidy to support seniors who are on fixed incomes to deal

with their rental costs.

[3:20 p.m.]

Year after year after year I’d bring this forward at budget time. I’d

bring this forward in the fall, the winter, the spring, the summer, to say

that we need increases in this, because seniors are falling further and

further behind. More of their food budget is going to their housing budget,

and they just can’t eat.

You go to the food banks, and you see them in the lineups. Now, when

they’re not in the lineups, in some cases, it’s because they feel such a

sense of personal shame that they cannot feed themselves properly, so they

hole up in their homes. In cases, we’ve had to go in and find them to bring

them food to their homes because they just are not making it.

We shouldn’t do that to our elders. The Shelter Aid For Elderly

Renters program is seeing a real increase — an increase which is $116

million over three years, for both the Shelter Aid For Elderly Renters

program and the rental assistance program. Both of these programs are vital.

For seniors, that means an extra $930 per year.

When you have been talking to seniors and they are saying concerns

about a cost increase to them that might cost them $2 extra a month, $930 a

year is a big deal. Because trust me when I tell you, they will bring their

budgets in. They will bring how much they’ve been working to save. They

weren’t able to make it for years, and they were ignored.

We are not ignoring seniors in this budget. We are ensuring that they

have some greater security and dignity in terms of their housing with this

program, and I’m so glad. I want to thank the West End Seniors Network. I

want to thank seniors advocates, the West End Seniors Planning Table and so

many more — Isobel Mackenzie and others — who have advocated for this over

the years.

I would like to see it become a program similar to the old age

security program at the federal level, the GIS program, where you don’t have

to apply every year. You turn 65. If you are at that income level, you get

the resources. Because I’ve found, too many times, seniors were not aware of

the program and were even in worse shape. We’ve had to work hard to try and

prevent those seniors from being evicted because they weren’t able to make

their rents. And thankfully, many landlords have been willing to work with

my office to do that.

Clearly, this will help. Making it just something that happens as a

matter of course, I think, is the next step, and I’m pleased to say that

I’ve met with Finance officials, and they encouraged me to continue on that

path. It’s the right thing to do.

Now, we come to protections for renters, part of a 30-point plan in

this budget. Increasing the resources of the residential tenancy office, as

we did in the last budget, was the right thing to do, and we’ve continued to

do with this budget.

You also need to do things like we’ve done — getting rid of the

fixed-term tenancy loophole, getting rid of the geographic area increase

clause. Incredibly important, because people have lost their homes. People

have been forced into homelessness because of these loopholes that the

Liberals put into the law when they took over government and wouldn’t

change.

Even though we could point to them…. They were being abused by a few

landlords who decided that profit was better than being good to somebody.

Profit was better than the law. Greed ruled. Well, hon. Speaker, greed rules

no more. Community rules. I think acting on the Residential Tenancy Act,

renovictions, demovictions and those kinds of issues needs to come. I’m glad

that the government has acknowledged that. Clearly, we need more action for

renters.

This government has acknowledged that the Residential Tenancy Act

needs work and that renters need a hand up. I’m going to keep working around

the question of a renters rebate, because I think, again, when homeowners

who have the security of their home get a tax rebate, renters don’t. I’ll

continue to work that. I’ll continue to reach out to my colleagues in the

Green Party to try and find a way to make that happen, as well as my

colleagues on all sides. I know my friends in the Liberal caucus would never

do that when they were in government but now seem focused on the renters

rebate. I’m hoping that they themselves will push for a renters rebate, as

well, and support it.

So far, they haven’t. They have said it was a stupid idea, but they

also continue to say that it should have happened. I’m a little confused by

that. But there you go. They don’t support it, but they want it. Anyways,

I’m hoping we can find a way to get that done, because I think renters need

that kind of help as well.

We need to invest in the quality and affordability of the existing

housing. Unfortunately, too much of the housing that counts as affordable

housing in B.C. has been let to go to rot. Investing in maintaining that

housing is also incredibly important. I’m glad this budget does

that.

I look at the Coal Harbour Co-op in my community. They’ve maintained

it very well and, I think, have been able to keep it relatively affordable

because of that. We need to support that kind of leadership.

Now, I see the lights have gone green, hon. Speaker. I still have

probably two to three to four to five hours of speech-making to do here on

the budget. I’m so excited about it. But I’m not the designated speaker, so

I don’t get to speak for two hours on it.

Suffice to say, this budget does more for progressive action to build

community, to create a unity, to create a shared prosperity and a better

vision for B.C. than 16 years of the previous government. It’s an incredible

forward-looking document.

[3:25 p.m.]

I haven’t even talked about action on climate change. I’m so proud to

say that we’re going to start to see an increasing price on pollution again

so we can invest in fighting climate change as we should have been doing for

years.

There’s more to do on a number of fronts, but that’s the great thing

partners, when you develop a common vision, you can do those

things.

I’m hearing from people around my age who said: “Well, I grew up under

a B.C. Liberal government, and I started to believe change was not possible.

I started to believe that you couldn’t make things better, that government

was just a problem.” But they’re not thinking that anymore. I’m hearing from

people saying they have a new hope that you can make change if you work

hard, if you’re persistent and if you’re a strong advocate.

I haven’t even talked about the arts, the creative industries, and on,

who are also seeing increased supports in this budget. I haven’t talked

about health care, home care, education. My goodness, there’s just so much

to get excited about here, and I know I’ll have more opportunities to share

in how we can make a better province together.

Finally, I just want to say thank you. I’m an individual who has all

sorts of flaws, as friends will tell you, but I’m made better by a community

that wants me to succeed and that wants us all to succeed. Because when we

succeed, they succeed.

S. Furstenau: Congratulations to the government on their first full budget. There is

much to be proud of this week. I’d like to recognize the Minister of Finance

and the Minister of State for Child Care, in particular, as I know they’ve

been working tirelessly these past many months to pull everything

together.

The budget takes a number of steps on a variety of important files.

Some, like the billion-dollar investment in child care and early childhood

education, are huge. Others, like the new housing initiatives, are more

cautious. And others, like investments in K-to-12 public education and

climate change initiatives, are still lacking.

Noting that many of the members from the official opposition are using

their platform to drag out the tired “all taxes are bad” narrative from the

1980s, I’m going to look to our future and try to articulate ways in which

government may be able to do better going forward, as compared to Budget

2018. To do this, we have to take a brief detour back in history to identify

some of the main forces that have shaped where we are now and how we got

here.

Coming out of the Second World War, there was a strong, growing

sentiment that the role of government was to look after people. The world

had been through the Great Depression and two world wars in one generation.

There was a huge surge in labour and social democratic political parties who

followed Keynesian principles that promoted the use of government spending

to stimulate the economy.

This philosophy guided government policies for most of the 1950s and

’60s while economies in the western world expanded. In the 1970s, as people

became more affluent and debt became more available with the introduction of

credit, consumerism began to rise. The increase in demand for goods was not

accompanied by an equivalent increase in supply, and high levels of

inflation ensued.

By the end of the 1970s, inflation was chronic and public unrest grew.

There was a strong public opinion that there needed to be an adjustment,

because inflation was out of control. A debate on how to fix these growing

problems ensued between the monetarists and the Keynesians. Monetarists, or

the Chicago school economists, led by Milton Friedman, believed that the

economy could be controlled by manipulating the money supply, versus the

Keynesian counter-cyclical fiscal policies that focused on demand

management, policies which often took effect after an economic problem had

set in.

Margaret Thatcher was the first major global leader elected on a

pro-business, monetarist platform in 1979. Her model became what we now call

neo-liberalism. Ronald Reagan, in the U.S.A., and Brian Mulroney, in Canada,

followed her in 1981 and 1984, respectively. The backlash to the inflation

and economic stagnation, termed “stagflation,” of the

1970s became deeply entrenched across the western world.

The monetarist policies of these political leaders were effective at

getting the interest rates down and inflation under control, but came with a

pro-business and anti–social safety net price. Taxes and government spending

were kept low, and there was a systematic deregulation and decreased

spending on enforcement.

[3:30 p.m.]

The economy continued growing through the 1990s and into the early

2000s, but affordability challenges simultaneously began to take root with

devastating impacts, which we are reckoning with in Budget 2018.

B.C. is now the worst-performing economy in Canada for younger

generations. Compared to 1976 levels adjusted for inflation, the cost of an

average house is up nearly $500,000. Not only are wages not up $500,000;

they are down $9,000. I would encourage everyone in this chamber who was old

enough to buy a home in the late 1970s and early 1980s to think about how

their life would be different had their home cost half a million dollars

more and their income been $9,000 less. How would that have impacted the

course of your life?

To reference data from Generation Squeeze, an organization which has

grown out of Dr. Paul Kershaw’s lab in UBC’s School of Population and Public

Health, B.C. has lost control of home prices more than any other province.

It took five years of full-time work to save a 20 percent down payment on an

average home from 1976 to 1980. From 1991 to 2001, it took seven to eight

years to save the down payment. Over the last government’s term, from 2001

to 2017, it rose from eight years to 20. Twenty years of working in a good

job to be able to save a 20 percent down payment for an average-priced home

in B.C.

On top of that, good-paying jobs are harder to secure. Full-time

earnings have fallen more in B.C. than in any other province, since 1976 to

1980. While Statistics Canada data indicate that the average five-year

mortgage rates have fallen from a high of 10 to 13 percent between 1976 and

1980 to a low of 3.76 to 4.38 percent from 2011 to 2016, today’s higher home

prices negate any benefit this may have brought to young British Columbians.

Despite much more favourable borrowing rates, the typical 25-to-34-year-old

in B.C. must devote more than eight months of their full-time work year to

cover mortgage costs on an average-priced home in B.C. That’s an extra three

months of their paid work each year to cover annual mortgage costs compared

to the same-aged Canadian in the 1970s.

Young citizens must increasingly come to terms with renting for longer

periods, if not indefinitely, and personal debt is on the rise. Again, to

quote Dr. Kershaw’s data, since 2001, university tuition rose more than in

any other province, and today the average amount of debt held by British

Columbians under 35 is $40,000. Why do we hear so much about how B.C. has

the fastest-growing economy when it is the worst-performing economy in

Canada for young people? It’s because the real estate sector is propping up

our GDP, which is a problematic measurement to begin with.

Using 2015 figures, mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction

combined account for 5 percent of B.C.’s economy; educational services are

5.5 percent; public administration is 5.5 percent; transportation and

warehousing, nearly 6 percent; professional scientific and technical

services, 6 percent; retail, 6.5 percent; health care and social assistance,

6.5 percent; manufacturing, 7 percent; and construction, 8.5

percent.

Real estate, rental and leasing — today they account for 20 percent of

our province’s entire economy. But while escalating home prices that have

driven B.C.’s economic growth since 2001, they have not grown employment

opportunities at a corresponding pace. Real estate accounts for 20 percent

of our economy but only 2 to 3 percent of our jobs.

Budget 2018 certainly makes some great affordability adjustments, but

it is operating within the same neo-liberal framework. The governing

principles from the last 30 years have taken us to a very unhealthy

place.

[3:35 p.m.]

The “taxation is bad; consumerism is good” story will not save us.

Let’s remember that the system is perfectly designed for the outcomes that

you are getting. When used properly, the taxation system can be a tool for

achieving goals in the public interest. Together we need to draw a new map

for where B.C. is going.

Part of that narrative must be a broader analysis of our economy and

how it is serving British Columbians. Gross domestic product measures our

province’s economic activity. It does not account for economic or social

well-being. The devastating fires that we had last year, for example, will

be counted as an increase in GDP, because we had to spend $750 million to

fight them. Are we better off as a province because of those fires and that

money spent? I don’t think so.

We cannot hold GDP as the sole measure of success. Even treating it as

an indicator of general well-being is inaccurate and dangerous. GDP

measurement encourages the depletion of natural resources faster than they

can renew themselves and conceals a growing disparity between the haves and

the have-nots. We are using an antiquated tool that never really did

represent health, well-being or intergenerational equity to measure how

we’re doing. It is a backward-looking tool, and we need to be

forward-looking.

It is time that we asked instead: what kind of growth are we achieving

and at what cost to our environment and our communities? Today the answers

to those questions are not positive. The growth we are achieving is

collecting as incredible wealth for the lucky few, while certain groups of

people are consigned to a life of disadvantage and suffering.

In B.C., the most affluent 10 percent of the population holds 56

percent of the wealth. At the same time, 3 percent of the wealth is shared

amongst 50 percent of our population. Think about that. Fifty percent of the

people of B.C., close to 2½ million people, hold only 3 percent of the

wealth in this province.

The narrative that we just need to have people willing to work hard

does not hold water when 50 percent of the citizens have to find a way to

make 3 percent of the wealth work between them. None in this province work

harder than the people who are struggling to make ends meet every day —

sometimes working two or three jobs, juggling the demands of life and seeing

costs steadily rise while their incomes remain stagnant.

Working harder or getting a job is not the solution. The vast majority

of people in B.C. who are living in poverty are working, but the jobs do not

provide the income necessary to be able to make ends meet, let alone to

thrive.

The cost to our environment is immense by the consequences, which will

largely be borne by our children and grandchildren. The Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate Change reports that greenhouse gas emissions must be

reduced well below 1.5 tonnes per person in order to avoid severe damage to

the security of the climate for today’s younger generations and their

children. Instead, the average Canadian is producing 21 tonnes of greenhouse

gases, more than 13 times the level considered to be sustainable.

This means the model of economic growth that is undermining the

financial standard of living for younger Canadians is also compromising the

climate, air, water and soil conditions on which younger Canadians

depend.

People cannot make the necessary changes on their own. They need our

help and leadership. We need to build a system that internalizes

externalities through life-cycle accounting. We need to stop treating people

as externalities and consider ecological economics.

How can we live within our means and elevate the health and well-being

of our fellow British Columbians? How can we live within the very finite

carrying capacity of the Earth? We need to refocus on quality of life.

Everything has been focused on quantity, the frantic pursuit of excess.

Consumerism has not brought us happiness. Instead, it has come at an

incredible cost to our environment and our communities.

[3:40 p.m.]

Beyond the cruelty of it, there is a real cost to keeping people down

— $1.2 billion a year in B.C., in fact. As the B.C. Poverty Reduction

Coalition says: “Inequality negatively impacts physical and mental health,

education outcomes, trust and community life, homicide rates, children’s

health and well-being, drug abuse and more. As a result, more equal

societies have far fewer health and societal problems.”

Poverty is a fundamental determinant of both physical and mental

health. This isn’t surprising, given that living in poverty means that you

are more likely to live in cold, damp or unsafe housing. You are also more

likely to suffer illness, have a chronic health condition and die

earlier.

A significant cause of these health problems is a lack of food. B.C.

is facing a chronic hunger problem and significant food insecurity. After

paying for rent, heat and electricity, people with low incomes have little

money leftover for food, so they are less likely to eat fruit, vegetables,

milk products and other food that provides the nutrients they need for good

health.

Addressing long-term health issues associated with poverty adds a cost

of $1.2 billion per year. In other words, our public health care system

could save $1.2 billion a year if poverty reduction initiatives reduced

health care costs of the poorest 20 percent of British Columbians by raising

their incomes. By not taking action on poverty reduction, our health care

system is overburdened, and we all face the consequences of long wait times;

overworked doctors, nurses and medical staff; and unsafe

hospitals.

“There are measures to tackle the breadth of poverty in B.C. through

investments in the 2018 B.C. budget, but there is little to tackle the depth

of poverty,” Poverty Reduction Coalition said this week. I agree. This

budget is a step in the right direction. Action on housing and child care

will help the economy and make communities healthier, and it doesn’t

preclude larger systematic changes we will need to make. But we need to keep

working on it.

How do you get a system that internalizes environmental and societal

externalities, that prioritizes baseline health and well-being for all? As

opposition members, we can start to facilitate these conversations. To

start, I believe we need to refocus on government’s three main

purposes.

First, the role of government should be to facilitate the highest and

best outcomes for the health and well-being of current and future

generations of British Columbians. According to the social determinants of

health, 60 percent of illness is caused by economic, social and

environmental factors, with income as the number one factor.

If government is going to achieve the highest and best outcomes for

health and well-being, the social determinants of health, especially

liveable income, must be addressed. Our goal should be to ensure that all

people have economic security. This will also have the effect of reducing

the burdens on government spending — particularly in health, which is the

greatest percentage of our budget.

Secondly, government must sustainably manage our province in the

interests of intergenerational equity. The original concept of

sustainability: meeting the needs of the present without compromising the

ability of future generations to meet their own needs. I note those future

generations are sitting up in our gallery right now, and it is to them who

we owe a debt.

Sustainable management is essential if our land, air, and water are to

support life as we know it, now and for years to com