For the third time in three years, the province (arguably) boasts a balanced or surplus budget.
As expected, there's give and take in all directions.
Monthly MSP premiums are going up for the sixth time in five years. At the same time, a higher tax on those making more than $150,000 per year is being rolled back to 2013 levels. Families on disability or income assistance will no longer have their payments clawed back if they received child support.
And though the total dollar amount going into health and education is going up, we can say right now that in 2015/2016 both sectors will continue to feel the strain as demand on the system grows.
It's important to remember the human costs here. News of a balanced budget will be cold comfort for someone struggling to get access to mental health care. The same goes for school boards, which will have to find $29 million in "efficiencies" to keep the lights on.
As Judy Darcy, New Westminster's NDP MLA, is quick to point out, given her school district's challenges, any budget that does not effectively increase ongoing funding issues has to hurt students. As Darcy says, "Our school district is really lean. It has gotten to the point where parents are speaking out and saying, 'We get that you have really focused on classroom learning, but we also need to make sure we have computers, we have books and we have people who know how to take care of our finances.'"
Chances are what she says rings true for other school districts in B.C.
As the NDP health critic, Darcy is also acutely aware that there are major problems with delivering health care in the province. "Hallway medicine," where patients reside in corridors instead of rooms, seems to be an almost acceptable practice now.
But our current government did not campaign and win on making sure the government met the needs of every disadvantaged group. So thinking that they would produce a budget that would consider those groups is, of course, pretty ridiculous.
Thankfully, B.C. isn't hurting the way Canada's other provinces are, especially Alberta with its fortunes tied so tightly to a plummeting barrel of oil. But we also aren't seeing any of the "trillion dollar" LNG bonanza that was the Liberals' raison d'être in its 2013 provincial election campaign.
All in all, it's a budget that promises more of the same - and for many folks that's a curse and a blessing.
