THRONE QUESTIONS
This week’s throne speech set out an ambitious agenda for the government in the new legislative session. It covered everything from raising the minimum wage to forest-industry renewal, from labour-code reform to funding class-size-and-composition requirements, from reducing surgical wait times to increasing the carbon tax, from reviewing the coastal ferry service to addressing the opioid crisis, from replacing the Pattullo Bridge to creating a playground capital fund and from investing in transition housing for women fleeing violence to introducing new protections against bitumen spills.
With so many priorities, one could argue that government has none, but it appears that two stand out — affordable housing and child care. The government’s approach to both raises some questions.
On affordable housing, the throne-speech promise to crack down on tax fraud, tax evasion and money laundering is welcome and long overdue, but the impact on real-estate prices is likely to be limited. Investments in social housing, student housing, seniors housing and Indigenous housing, while all worthwhile, are unlikely to have any effect on the price of a family home in Vancouver. A vow to increase protection for renters, meanwhile, could discourage homeowners from assuming the risk of becoming landlords. It is not clear that the government’s affordable housing measures would greatly influence either supply or demand.
Although $10-a-day child care was missing from the throne speech, Premier John Horgan says he’s not backing away from the campaign promise. However, it turns out $10-a-day was only a “brand” of affordable child care, rather than a real price. Instead of $10-a-day child care, we are offered more regulation — conversion of unlicensed child-care spaces to licensed ones and an increase in training of child-care workers. The government has yet to spell out the eligibility requirements for affordable child care, beyond subsidies already available to families with incomes below $40,000 a year — or whether parents who choose to stay home to raise their children will be entitled to similar benefits to those who opt for out-of-home child care.
It’s up to B.C. Finance Minister Carole James to explain in the budget next week how the government will fund its new initiatives and what the province’s fiscal position will look like over the next few years. The devil, they say, is in the details.