James R. Coggins (www.coggins.ca) is a writer, editor, and historian based in Chilliwack, BC.“BC to raise taxes, cut jobs as budget projects record deficit,” proclaimed The Globe and Mail.“BC budget includes tax increases, 15K public job cuts, projected $13B deficit,” announced the CBC News.“BC hikes tax rate as budget delivers record $13B deficit,” declared Global News.These are typical examples of how mainstream media reacted to the British Columbia government’s 2026-2027 budget released on February 17.“We have to get that deficit down,” Finance Minister Brenda Bailey said in her speech to the legislature. “This budget is different from our past budgets, because this moment is different.” She blamed the province’s record deficit on challenges such as US tariffs and a cooling housing market.The budget forecasts a $13.3 billion deficit for the 2026-27 fiscal year, up from $9.6 billion for 2025-2026. It forecasts deficits of $12.1 billion and $11.4 billion for the following two years. The three forecasted deficits add up to $36.8 billion in additional debt. However, the province’s total debt is expected to rise over the next three years from $154 billion to $235 billion, an increase of $81 billion. This is because the BC government, unlike most other provincial governments, does not include capital spending (the cost of building roads, schools, hospitals, bridges, and highways) in its operational budget. This allows the government to downplay the actual levels of new debt..The focus on the deficit in the mainstream media is interesting because this is not a new issue, but an increasingly urgent issue that the mainstream media have been ignoring for years.Only a year and a half ago, I extensively researched the topic in an article called “How British Columbia’s NDP Government Plans to Triple the Provincial Debt,” published on August 7, 2024, in C2C Journal. That article pointed out that historically, BC government spending had been relatively stable, but spending and deficits significantly increased after John Horgan’s NDP government was elected in 2017 and accelerated even faster when David Eby replaced Horgan as NDP leader and BC premier in 2022. BC’s accumulated debt was less than $70 billion when the NDP came to power, but it has dramatically increased ever since. The government’s 2024-2025 budget projected total government debt to increase to $165 billion by the end of the 2026-2027 budget, which is generally in line with projections in the 2026-2027 budget. In other words, the current budget deficit was not caused by US President Donald Trump’s tariffs but because of policy decisions made by the NDP government over the last decade. Despite Brenda Bailey’s assertions, not much has changed.The current focus on the budget deficit is surprising because interest in the subject was almost nonexistent only a year and a half ago. When I was researching my article, the only people who would agree to be interviewed on the subject were Carson Binda, BC Director of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, and John Rustad, leader of the “fringe” Conservative Party of British Columbia. (Rustad brought the Conservative from obscurity to come within a whisker of upsetting Eby’s NDP in the last BC provincial election.)And when, in 2024, I offered a summary of my research to a variety of mainstream media outlets, they wouldn’t even return my calls.What the Fraser Institute calls British Columbia’s “massive debt accumulation” is now widely recognized as a serious problem. But it was already a serious problem a year and a half ago. The evidence was all there. But the politicians and the mainstream media, the people who are paid to pay attention to these things, chose to ignore it.James R. Coggins (www.coggins.ca) is a writer, editor, and historian based in Chilliwack, BC.
