Vancouver Sun | By Vaughn Palmer | November 28, 2025
Vaughn Palmer: The NDP points to new schools and the like to justify deficits, but day-to-day spending is to blame for half of it
VICTORIA — Finance Minister Brenda Bailey released a budget update Thursday confirming that Premier David Eby has thrown away the good financial position he inherited from his NDP predecessor, John Horgan.
The proof is evident in a side-by-side comparison between two financial updates: the last one from the Horgan government, delivered Nov. 25, 2022, and the one Bailey delivered this week.
The one from three years ago, covering the first six months of Horgan’s last year in office, showed he left behind a budget surplus of almost $6 billion. Eby’s latest update projects a deficit for the year of $11 billion.
The $17 billion turnaround in just three years ranks as the most dramatic reversal in the B.C. government bottom line in the more than 40 years I have been covering provincial finances.
Note, too, that Bailey only managed to cap off the deficit at $11 billion by bringing forward almost $2 billion in future payments from the settlement with Big Tobacco.
The province won’t get some of that money for another 18 years. The province’s independent auditor general has challenged what Bailey characterized as a “standard accounting treatment.” She went ahead and counted the money as if it were cash on hand.
On another point of comparison between the two NDP premiers, current and former, Horgan left a total provincial debt of $90 billion.
Eby has already boosted the debt to $155 billion, up 75 per cent, and again, he’s done so in a mere three years.
New Democrats would have one believe that Eby’s debt loading was mostly undertaken to pay for schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, transit lines and other capital projects.
In fact, the budgetary fine print shows that about half of the increase ($32 billion out of $65 billion) was to cover successive operating debts from program spending, not capital projects. Eby is outspending revenues at a record pace, making for record deficits.
Interest payments are also rising.
When Horgan left office, debt servicing cost $2.7 billion a year. Today, it has hit $5.1 billion with no end in sight. Interest on the debt is now the second largest program in government, exceeded only by the budget for the Health Ministry.
Yet, in many ways, the most remarkable thing about the Eby government’s performance is that it has comparatively little to show for all this debt.
Hospital ERs are still closing. Public safety is at risk in many communities. Ambitious NDP programs like child care have fallen behind, according to advocates.
Bailey says the government is making progress on getting the budget under control. But you’d be hard pressed to find the evidence in the 75-page financial update released yesterday.
She said the province is “on track” to reach this year’s goal of $300 million in budget savings. If she does manage to hit that far-from-impressive target, she will have saved much less than one per cent of the $95 billion she and her colleagues are planning to spend this year.
The financial update showed that the minister had also presided over a reduction of 700 positions in the public service, mostly by attrition. That, too, is less than one per cent of the positions in a public service that the New Democrats have increased by almost 50 per cent since taking office.
Horgan, in a memoir published this fall, was genuinely proud of his accomplishment in managing provincial finances.
“One of the myth busting things that we were able to do was end the narrative that the NDP can’t manage money,” he wrote. “With Carole James as finance minister, we chalked up some massive surpluses that enabled us to pay down the provincial debt as well.”
“We needed to demonstrate to voters that the mythology that we could not run a peanut stand was just that — a myth. When it came to fiscal matters we had to be better than our opponents all the time. And we needed to instil that fiscal discipline in a fractious group of people — which the B.C. NDP has always been.”
Finance Minister Selina Robinson, who served as Horgan’s finance minister after James retired, may have been poised to continue his record.
But a few days after she delivered the above fiscal update, Eby demoted her to the ministry of post-secondary education. She became the first finance minister in modern times to be fired after delivering a surplus.
Her replacement, Katrine Conroy, showed not the slightest interest in getting a handle on spending, deficits and debt. The only time I asked about a plan to balance the budget, she just laughed.
Bailey, for all her talk about working on a plan, projects deficits in the $10 billion range next year and the year after. The debt is scheduled to hit $208 billion two years from now.
Thursday she tried to put the first helping of blame on “unjust and unpredictable trade policies,” originating from Donald Trump’s America.
But a comparison of this year’s books with the results from three years ago shows that the main perpetrator of B.C.’s fiscal fiasco is a fellow named David Eby.