Nihaal Singh is the Director of Project BC.Recently, British Columbia crossed a consequential line. Following the Cowichan court decision, which threw private land tenure into uncertainty, the provincial government failed to respond by restoring clarity to property rights. Instead, it reached for an unprecedented measure and broke the glass: state intervention to guarantee private property loans.Premier David Eby boldly declared that he would “go to the wall” to protect private property rights. What he did not acknowledge is that his government’s own policies created the conditions now requiring intervention. The offer of up to $150 million in loan guarantees to lenders is not an act of compassion or stability. It is a confession.British Columbians are now officially in the loan-guarantee business.That being said there are in fact rare cases where loan guarantees can be defensible. Temporary liquidity support during genuine emergencies like, wars, natural disasters, and systemic financial collapses can justify extraordinary measures, provided they are narrow, temporary, and governed by clear exit clauses.In limited circumstances, truly critical infrastructure such as ports, power transmission, or water systems may warrant temporary public backing.Private property however, is not one of those cases..When a government that regularly boasts of having an “economic plan” is forced to guarantee private property lending, it sounds the alarm that the policy environment has failed its most basic litmus test: confidence. Markets do not require perfection, but they do require predictability and certainty.When that certainty is breached, capital does not negotiate.It leaves.Property markets function on one indispensable ingredient: certainty. Homeowners, builders, investors, and lenders have never demanded certainty of outcome. They demand certainty of process. Once that certainty is compromised, confidence collapses. When governments are required to guarantee loans for private property, commercial real estate, or land development, it is not crisis management.It is a market failure.The message is clear: capital no longer trusts the rules.That corrosion of trust rests squarely with the Eby government’s policy choices.This is not theoretical. The immediate symptoms are already familiar to British Columbians: stalled projects, frozen financing, and higher borrowing costs. The longer-term consequences are far more serious, erosion of productivity, declining competitiveness, and further corrosion of public trust in institutions that can no longer safeguard the fundamentals of basic economic life in this province..Loan guarantees socialize risk while preserving whatever upside remains in private hands. The taxpayer absorbs the downside. This creates a moral hazard by design: developers pursue projects that would not survive normal market scrutiny, and banks will lend aggressively knowing risk has been transferred to the public balance sheet. Credit rating agencies may not react overnight, but this is precisely how fiscal damage begins. When a government must insure private property lending, it is admitting that its policy environment is fundamentally unstable and that banks will not lend without taxpayer backed insurance. Therefore, every British Columbian has now become a co-signer on risk they never agreed to assume.Today it is described as “temporary support.” Tomorrow it becomes higher borrowing costs, tighter public budgets, and fewer dollars for essential services.Even more damaging, these interventions delay the necessary legislative reforms.Political leaders and bureaucrats will defer responsibility by masking uncertainty with bandaid-like guarantees, allowing temporary measures to turn into permanent dependencies.For those occupying policy advisory roles in the Premier’s Office who do not understand markets; endlessly recycling empty slogans like “Look West” while undermining property rights will not solve this problem.Ranchers, cattlemen, farmers, foresters, and land developers are being forced to operate in an economic climate where tenure is no longer secure and financing is no longer reliable. These are capital-intensive, long-horizon businesses that depend on stable land rights to plan and invest across decades. The result is an accelerating hollowing-out of the productive economy as we know it, because when land becomes politically contingent, those who steward it are punished first and the people pay the price for years to come..Our stewards aren’t the only victims of this collapse in confidence, ultimately young British Columbians will have to bear this burden. For a generation already locked out of homeownership, burdened by record rents, student debt, and high unemployment, this will be detrimental. When capital retreats, it’s not just abstract markets that suffer, young workers will further lose job opportunities. Every gut punch of poor public policy that undermines the economy delays family formation and drives talent out of the province.A society that cannot offer its young people a credible path to ownership, and opportunity, is a failed society.This path rarely ends well.The underlying causes of uncertainty remain untouched. UNDRIP and DRIPA will continue to cast a long shadow over property rights and investment decisions. Until the province does a full reversal of this radical reconciliation agenda, investor confidence will not return, no matter how many guarantees are issued.British Columbians are looking for clear, coherent, unequivocal leadership on this issue and Eby along with the entire NDP have failed to deliver.Leadership is not measured by how many programs a government launches in response to crises of its own creation. It is however measured by how few crises it creates in the first place and on that metric, Eby has failed and likely caused the largest investor confidence crisis in our provinces’ history.British Columbia now faces a stark choice: restore confidence by reaffirming clear rules and dismantling every barrier to prosperity or continuing down a path of unprecedented decline where every shock requires another guarantee, another subsidy, and another quiet transfer of risk from policymakers to the public.This problem is existential and Eby knowing that, has officially broken the emergency glass. The emergency, however, is entirely of his own making.Nihaal Singh is the Director of Project BC.
