Budget ‘fixes’ Liberal problems

Re: Budget 2017 lets B.C. reap what it has sowed, Michael de Jong, Opinion, Feb. 22

Finance Minister (Michael) de Jong’s budget illustrates a dismaying tactic in electioneering. Cut social services and public education to limit spending. Raise rates for MSP, Hydro and ICBC to increase revenues. Ignore the housing crisis to maximize income from property transfer taxes. And then, just months before an election, promise to solve the problems they’ve created by spending some of the surpluses they have amassed.

There could be no better example of this than in public education.

The very government that closed hundreds of schools, cut thousands of teaching positions, drastically reduced services for students with special needs and eliminated spending on school supplies and busing, has now, as ordered by the courts, committed to reinstate conditions that existed years ago.

Let’s hope the public won’t be misled by this “two steps backward, one step forward” approach to governing.

Richard Hoover, Delta