The province’s Select Standing Committee on Finance will be making a stop in Quesnel this year.
A public hearing will take place on Wednesday, June 19th from 4 until 7pm at the West Fraser Centre.
Bob D’Eith, the NDP Maple Ridge-Mission MLA, is the Committee’s Chair…
“People can sign if they would like to come and present to the Select Standing Committee on Finance. The whole point is anything that people feel should be considered for next year’s budget for the province, whether that’s something to do with schools or hospitals or the environment or you name it, they can come and present to us.”
D’Eith says written, audio or video submissions will also be accepted up to June 28th.
Here, he talks about what happens next…
“After all of the submissions are in by July the committee then goes and we convene and go through all of the thousands of submissions and at the end of the day come up with recommendations to the legislature, and then the Ministers will have a chance to look at that in forming the budget for 2020.”
D’Eith says they normally go through this process in September and make recommendations in November, but he says they wanted to try and get ahead of it this year…
“To see if we can get this report in front of Ministers a little bit earlier, which would hopefully allow us to have even more impact on those decisions in terms of what the priorities are for British Columbians.”
D’Eith says it’s a 50-billion dollars budget so there is a lot to go through.
He says it’s important for people to take part in the process as requests can vary from community to community…
‘There are obviously a lot of similarities, especially when we’re talking about healthcare or education post-secondary, in roads, sort of those types of issues, but of course when you’re dealing with rural BC, urban BC, there are obviously different issues, different challenges that different areas have.”
D’Eith says it is an all-party committee.
He says they had 100 unanimous recommendations last year.