Legislative session: Light on new bills, heavy on Trump talk
Hi all,
Spring session kicks off this week for the first time in nine long months. Nine months! Long enough to gestate a full human earthling. Instead BC had an election and birthed a new Official Opposition party.
Feb. 18 will be the first time the BC NDP and BC Conservatives have faced each other in the legislative chamber since last May. Only now, there will be fewer govt MLAs, the same number of Greens, a lot more Conservatives and the ghost of the BC United. We also lost two party leaders – Sonia Furstenau and Kevin Falcon – and gained a new interim leader, Jeremy Valeriote.
With all this upheaval and the chippy dynamics between the members of the two largest parties, we are expecting a jam-packed, category-5 rip-roaring bullet ride through BC’s choppiest political rapids. [apologies for the mashed up metaphors, but tune into Question Period sometime and you’ll be like, ‘Oh, i get what she means.’]
One challenge as journalists is to not get overly distracted by the Opposition’s theatrics or the sleight-of-hand govt double-speak and keep our eyes on the policies most important to Jo[anne] Public.
To that end, here’s a quick primer on the issues and upcoming session from Northern Beat’s much-venerated columnist, the one, the only, Rob Shaw.
To read his column on our website instead, click here.
Enjoy!
Fran
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Legislative session will have few new bills, lots of Trump talk
Written By Rob Shaw
The BC NDP government returns to the legislature Tuesday for the first time since the provincial election, for a session that will be light on legislation but heavy on Donald Trump.
Government House Leader Mike Farnworth said the government has bills related to its role in the national response to Trump’s trade threats, but legislation will depend on whether the U.S. president follows through on tariffs or not in early March.
“There’s not going to be a large amount of legislation,” he said in an interview. “There’ll be fewer bills than in the past. Very much the focus is going to be the on the budget, the estimates, what’s happening south of the border and the tariff issue impact on B.C. and the rest of the country.”
Some legislation, such as that intended to fast track natural resource projects, is landing regardless of whether Trump backs down. But B.C. has also committed to the national plan to counter Trump’s 25 per cent tariffs dollar for dollar in an unspecified way.
Farnworth said there will also be legislation on miscellaneous items, including motorcycle driver training, expanding park boundaries and extending the term of the conflict commissioner until a new one is chosen.
Opposition Conservative Leader John Rustad said the NDP is using Trump as a crutch for its lack of ideas.
“I think what you’re going to hear from the government is an uninspired throne speech that’s full of excuse, blaming Trump for anything and everything that is going wrong with British Columbia and the province,” he said.
“People in this province are going to be disappointed that it does not have a vision for where British Columbia should go.”
Speech from throne likely a rally against Trump
The session begins with a speech from the throne Tuesday that is expected to be a rah-rah affair about national pride, a refusal to surrender our sovereignty to the United States, and a call to come together.
But come together around what, exactly, other than Trump?
The governing party has faced criticism that in the four months since the election it has put forward almost no new proposals to address the key issues Premier David Eby said caused voters to clip his wings in October: Public safety, the addictions crisis, healthcare shortages and cost-of-living.
If anything, the NDP appears to have gone backwards on cost-of-living, last week cancelling the $1,000 “grocery rebate” that was a centrepiece of the party's affordability campaign promises.
The one exception has been housing policy, where Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon continues to charge forward on the laws put down early in Eby’s premiership, which give the province the power to override municipalities that aren’t meeting provincially-set housing targets. Kahlon has built up new steam since the election, and is on the verge of big-footing elected officials in Sooke, West Vancouver and Oak Bay on local housing rules, to start.
Unfulfilled promises: ER closures, street crime, involuntary care
On the rest of the files, the government has left itself open to attacks that it is adrift.
Health Minister Josie Osborne has taken no steps in three months to address closures of hospital emergency rooms. Instead, they are getting worse — ERs in Williams Lake and Fort Nelson suffered closures in the last week, as did Mission Memorial Hospital in Metro Vancouver.
On public safety, neither Solicitor General Garry Begg nor his minister of state for community safety Terry Yung have proposed changes to crack down on prolific offenders, downtown street disorder or rampant retail theft.
On addictions, Eby has failed to follow through with a promise made almost a year ago to embed chemical tracers in government safe supply opioids to gauge the severity of their diversion into the hands of organized crime — the subject of a recent damning internal report that was leaked publicly.
The spring session is believed to contain some progress on the long-awaited review into involuntary addictions care, first promised eight months ago when Eby hired addictions expert Dr. Daniel Vigo to study the issue. Last year, the NDP committed to opening involuntary addictions and mental health care beds in two B.C. correctional facilities.
But it’s too early to say whether that will make a visible difference on the streets, as Eby has argued, or if involuntary care legislation will become immediately tied up in court challenges by the same civil liberties and harm reduction groups that successfully scored injunctions that slowed the NDP’s efforts to roll back decriminalization.
'He basically spent like mad'
Overshadowing the entire session will be intense worry about the province’s deteriorating financial state.
Finance Minister Brenda Bailey, who was appointed to the job in November, finds herself in the unenviable position of having to craft a budget for Mar. 4, which is right around the time that Trump’s 30-day reprieve on tariffs may turn back into an actual 25 per cent levy on Canada and blow a $2.5 billion hole in government revenues.
“I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this in the country, certainly not in my lifetime,” said Farnworth.
“It seems to change every day. There’s a different announcement coming out of the White House every day, all of which could have significant impacts on this country.
"It’s unprecedented.”
However, economists have pointed out that it was the BC NDP, not Trump, that took an almost $6 billion surplus from John Horgan in 2022 and turned it into a record-setting $9.4 billion deficit projected for 2024-25.
And it was the NDP, not Trump, that increased the size of the civil service more than 31 per cent since 2017 and created a deep structural deficit with new programs and services.
“Over two years, David Eby blew up the B.C. budget,” veteran economist Jock Finlayson told CKNW radio host Jas Johal last week.
“He basically spent like mad.”
The Trump tariffs would be economically harmful, but B.C.’s starting position is especially weak due to the choices the government has made, said Finlayson.
“The fiscal position of the province is deteriorating very, very rapidly, and I think [the NDP] are frightened at what’s happened,” he said.
“The starting point, unfortunately, we find ourselves in today is a very poor one and the blame for that lies with Eby and his government the last two years.
“We’re in a hole and they dug it, not Donald Trump.”
Whether the BC NDP can dig itself out of that hole, both economically and politically, on the key files that it promised to fix but are still getting worse, will be the true test of the spring legislative session.
How far is BC from defaulting on its provincial debt?