BC NDP says $1.5 billion error an exaggeration, as government admits it only missed by $1.46 billion

PENTICTON — The Government of British Columbia spent Tuesday confirming Budget 2026 overstated forecasted natural gas royalties by $1.46 billion over five fiscal years, then asked the public to treat that as a tightening of last week’s $1.5-billion admission.Veteran reporter Bob Mackin noted the unusual timing and the lack of visibility. Media received 44 minutes’ notice that Energy Minister Adrian Dix would address the accounting mishap, he posted, and the appearance was not livestreamed..Dix, taking questions in Vancouver after a background technical briefing, called the largest miss “a serious mistake, but it was a human error.” He said staff assumed Canadian-dollar gas prices were in U.S. dollars and converted them again, “leading to an overstatement of revenue.”Premier David Eby, a few hours before the briefing, said he was “not pleased by this situation.”On August 25, the same premier told reporters he was “not familiar with any error in the budget related to oil and gas revenues.”.Senior staff from the energy and finance ministries told the briefing the errors had been independently verified. The quarterly fiscal report on September 14 will carry the corrections. Officials would not say Tuesday what that does to the deficit.The largest mistake was a currency-conversion formula dragged incorrectly across a spreadsheet. Fixing it cut the 2026-27 forecast price by 44 cents per gigajoule. A unit-conversion error took another five cents. Two further mistakes, both from using 2025 cost data instead of this year’s figures, cut one cent from the plant-inlet price and added three cents to the outlet price.Budget 2026 published plant-inlet prices — the value of unprocessed gas — ranging from $2.34 to $4.83 per gigajoule. Those figures are now treated as wrong.The combined correction averages $292 million a year from this fiscal year through the year that starts in 2030. It peaks at $378 million in 2028-29. This year’s royalty line falls 24%, from $1.297 billion to $991 million, a $306-million cut.A ministry representative described the work as “a formula … incorrectly dragged across cells” by “technical people inside the ministry.” Officials promised new quality-assurance steps and outside reviewers..The $1.46-billion official total is the same number the Office of the Premier floated August 27, hours after Business in Vancouver published an investigation that put the miss nearer $500 million a year. Simon Fraser University economist Nancy Olewiler, who co-authored the last independent review of the royalty system, called the government’s explanation incomplete and confusing and said $292 million a year sits at the low end.West Moberly Chief Roland Willson has said Treaty 8 technical staff put the problem in front of Dix at a closed-door meeting in Fort St. John on June 29, and that four Treaty 8 First Nations handed Eby a letter on July 14. Willson says the premier never replied. Staff told Tuesday’s briefing the conversion errors themselves were uncovered in July.A recording of the June 29 meeting, first reported by Business in Vancouver, captured Dix telling the nations the new royalty framework would yield $2.4 billion more over five years than the previous plan, and that the number came from Budget 2026.A ministry official on Tuesday could not say how much of that $2.4 billion is now at risk. The ministry has separately said the $2.4 billion was “based on information available to the minister before the administrative error was identified.”.Cabinet still aims to bring the new framework into force on January 1, 2027, with a stated goal of returning 50% of profits after production costs. Treaty 8 experts put the capture rate at 11% to 14% under most price scenarios and said Tuesday’s material still cannot be properly analysed. Dix said officials were “on the right track” and that the design should be “fair for the taxpayers and the owners of the resources,” including First Nations.Conservative finance critic Gavin Dew has put three questions on the file: whether the new royalty design returns a fair share of a public resource, whether a forecasting error of this size is a competence problem, and what Dix and Eby knew when they sold the Budget 2026 numbers..“What kind of dog and pony show, half-baked, Podunk, just-fell-off-a-turnip-truck-government is David Eby running where errors this basic are able to make it into the fundamental budgetary documents of this government?” Dew asked on X Wednesday morning.Josie Osborne, who is marine biologist by vocation and has zero professional background in finance or accounting, inherited the finance portfolio on August 14. September 14 is her first chance to put a corrected royalty line into a public fiscal document. The legislature returns October 5.

BC NDP says $1.5 billion error an exaggeration, as government admits it only missed by $1.46 billion

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