While the B.C. Liberal government has been accused of putting all of its proverbial eggs in the Liquefied Natural Gas basket, consider this: the
provincial budget is forecast to be in surplus for at least the next three years without a cent of LNG revenue even showing up on the books.
In fact, the government's own documents suggest that magical LNG money won't have an impact on provincial finances in any meaningful way for perhaps six or seven years.
In the meantime, Finance Minister Mike de Jong has put together an old-fashioned, threeyear fiscal plan that appears to be a tight-fisted restraint program, albeit one with a potential built-in escape hatch.
De Jong is turning off the spending taps in pretty well all government ministries save health, and even there he is continuing to dial back the spending increases that have occurred in that sector for years.
Within that fiscal plan, he has built some considerable flexibility with fairly high forecast allowances and contingency funds, so he may have elbow room to make saving "adjustments" in years two and three.
Something tells me those lofty unallocated dollars won't hold, and may well be used to pay for such things as public sector wage settlements.
Critics (myself included) zeroed in on one particular unrealistic goal of that budget: that health care spending could somehow be contained within a three per cent increase, which seemed unheard of at the time.
Well, what do you know. The B.C. health care budget is coming in with a 2.7 per cent annual increase, largely because reduced laboratory costs, Pharmacare costs, and money saved from shared service efficiencies took the pressure off the spending curve.
But the health care budget will continue to be a challenge in the years ahead, as the federal government's new funding model means less federal dollars flowing the province's way.
Nevertheless, don't expect de Jong to back away from delivering a balanced budget each and every year, no matter the spending pressures that will surely be felt in health and other areas.
Everything the B.C. Liberal government does starts from the premise that the budget must be balanced. Work back from there, and you can start to understand the government's core philosophy.
For all that talk about LNG, it's really the balanced budget concept driving the agenda.
There's another reason to pay some attention to veteran politician Mike de Jong this past week: he tabled his budget almost 20 years to the exact day of his historic byelection victory in the Fraser Valley riding of Matsqui.
I say "historic" because that's exactly what it was, since the result may have changed the course of B.C. political history.
De Jong, an unknown lawyer at the time, beat Social Credit grand dame Grace McCarthy in the byelection.
If McCarthy had won, there was every reason to believe at the time that she could have resurrected the once-proud and powerful Social Credit dynasty. She may very well have convinced another fellow who won a byelection that night - a guy named Gordon Campbell - to cross to her party.
If so, the Socreds may have been able to eventually leap-frog the upstart B.C. Liberals, led by Gordon Wilson, whose leadership eventually crumbled (allowing Campbell to take over).
But de Jong's victory put McCarthy out to political pasture, and the Socreds faded away and eventually died out as a political force.
Meanwhile, the B.C. Liberals eventually became the free enterprise coalition that was the Socreds for so many years and de Jong has been a mainstay of the government's cabinet since 2001.
Keith Baldrey is chief political reporter for Global BC.
