The new B.C. NDP government has set some lofty expectations in all kinds of policy areas – those expectations tend to accumulate when a party spends 16 years in Opposition – and it is bound to disappoint at least some of its special interest group supporters.
But it also inherited a mess of varying degrees from the departed B.C. Liberal government, notably in a couple of Crown corporations.
The worst one of the lot, as I have pointed out here before, is the Insurance Corporation of B.C.
Attorney General David Eby is reviewing an assessment of ICBC carried out recently by Ernst Young, and intends to cast an even wider net as he goes looking for solutions. It’s not an easy mess to fix.
The former government drained ICBC of well more than a billion dollars from 2010 to 2015 and weakened its capital reserves. The raid on the Crown’s bottom line falsely strengthened the government’s bottom line at the expense of ICBC’s financial security.
On top of that, the cost of settling accidents and repairing vehicles damaged in accidents has skyrocketed in recent years, to the point that a discussion about “capping” the amount that can be awarded in most accidents has to begin.
I don’t envy Eby’s task. He will have some hard decisions to make, and some may undoubtedly be unpopular. It’s a price he may have to pay to keep auto insurance rates from increasing more than 30 per cent.
Another Crown corporation presenting some challenges for rookie Energy Minister Michelle Mungall is B.C. Hydro. While in nowhere near the bad fiscal shape that ICBC finds itself, B.C. Hydro has more than a few issues to address that were kicked down the road by the former government.
Chief among them is B.C. Hydro’s continued reliance on “deferred” payment of some expenses. It’s a practice that alarms the province’s auditor general and the amount of money involved now reaches billions of dollars.
B.C. Hydro’s debt has also rapidly increased (it’s expected to almost double from 2010 to 2019, to $23 billion) largely because of required upgrades and maintenance of its massive network of dams, generation facilities, power plants and transmission lines (even power poles).
Mungall will have a daunting task keeping electricity rates frozen for any length of time.
On the high expectations front, Transportation Minister Claire Trevena set the bar pretty high when she was the NDP’s B.C. Ferries critic, demanding the government make the ferry system part of the highway system. Such a move would require a huge lift in the government subsidy of B.C. Ferries, and so far she hasn’t said the new government will actually go that far.
The list goes on: health care wait times must be reduced, the tolls on the Port Mann Bridge must disappear, kids have to stop dying while in government care, the K-12 education system must be given hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding, scores of daycare centres must be built, and on and on.
It’s a long list but as an NDP cabinet minister tells me: “I’d rather be trying to solve these problems than just complaining about them.”
The NDP government will undoubtedly come up short on some of these expectations. But then again, governments always do.
Keith Baldrey is chief political reporter for Global B.C.
