The MLA for Cariboo-Chilcotin said there are concerns about yesterdays (Thursday) BC budget for 2024-25 that many people in the Province are going to share.
Closer to home Lorne Doerkson said at a glance he didn’t see anything significant for the Cariboo in it and shared another concern he has.
“But I do see and I think this will be consistent with many reports that you’ll hear out there is an unbelievable amount of growth in our debt. We see a debt that has taken my breath away. By the end of this 3-year cycle we will owe collectively as a province $165 billion. To put that into perspective, it took us a 130-years or so to amass a debt of $50 billion in this province and over the last 7-years we’ve doubled it, but going forward over the next 2 or 3 we’re going to add tens of billions of dollars to that debt so that is absolutely frightening I think to all of us.”
Doerkson noted we’re going to see the Carbon Tax go up by a billion dollars and last year at this time we had the same conversation we’re we saw it going up by another billion dollars as well for the entire province.
“Putting that into perspective, last year we saw a billion dollar increase in Carbon Tax and a billion dollar decrease in forest revenue in this province.” Doerkson said, ‘This year forest revenue has sort of flattened out at about $700 million, now of course that’s not all the revenue that you would see in the forest industry but largely that is what the province would receive that’s certainly concerning as well.”
He added there has been mention of a reduction in the allowable cut for the province and that will be decreasing from 47 to 32.
“I don’t know how that is going to affect us in the Cariboo-Chilcotin but I’ll certainly be trying to sort that out a little bit more.”
Doerkson said there will be much debate about this budget next week which will be seen from all sides of the house so there will be some real interesting speeches made and lots of conversation to fully understand what these numbers mean.
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