Conroy always struck me as the biggest liar in the cabinet. She has confirmed this with her interview on the budget. For the gory details see Rob Shaw’s piece in today’s Orca.
Mark Twain said it best when he opined that there are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. All three were on display in abundance Thursday during Katrine Conroy’s swansong press conference as finance minister.
Let’s start with the “damned lies” category, which is where you’d have to slot Conroy’s answer to my colleague Vaughn Palmer’s question about a provincial budget awash in red ink and a future forecast of deficits stretching as far as the eye can see.
“Most of the finance ministers in modern times have produced the plan to balance the budget,” said Palmer.
“I've not seen one from you. And you've got a $5-billion deficit. Are you likely to produce one before you retire?”
Conroy quibbled momentarily with the question before answering.
“We have a plan,” she said. “We have a plan to balance the budget, definitely.”
Alas for the minister, you need only to consult her own documents to disprove her statement.
The most recent February budget forecast three more years of provincial deficits, on top of the one finalized Thursday.
At $8 billion in fiscal 2024-25, $7.7 billion in 2025-26 and $6.2 billion in 2026-27, you could not be further from a balanced budget if you tried. It’s not a plan, it’s a mountain of debt atop an IOU for a balanced budget written in invisible ink. It’s not a path, it’s a sheer vertical cliff of deficits.
Perhaps Premier David Eby intends to table a plan to balance the budget as part of the NDP’s re-election platform.
That would be a bit rich, however, given that the NDP has attacked the Opposition BC United’s proposal to balance the budget within four years as unrealistic, claiming it would require massive cutbacks, school closures, nurse layoffs and other catastrophic events.
“Some would make deep cuts and increased fees to balance the books on the backs of people,” said Conroy. “That's just the wrong approach.”
If four years to balance the budget is unrealistic, how many years would the NDP need to do it if re-elected? Seven? An even 10? Twenty maybe? Perhaps the issue can be passed down to the children and grandchildren of the current cabinet to handle.
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Conroy will, instead, go down as perhaps the most extravagant finance minister in the history of the province. She’s overseen an avalanche of spending so immense that at times — especially during last year’s rush to blow out an excess one-time surplus — ministers couldn’t even publicly articulate what they were spending the money on.
She has shown no restraint, no discipline and no humility as she’s shattered deficit and debt records that would have made most politicians blanche.
https://www.theorca....in-debt-9399732
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