Record Deficits for Years to Come Define B.C.’s End of Spring Session

On May 28^th, the B.C. Legislature adjourned for the summer, closing an eventful spring session -  to say the least. From the ongoing debate over the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA) – which is clearly weighing down Premier Eby and his NDP government - to the opposition B.C. Conservatives picking their new leader, the 2026 B.C. Budget introduced back in February can’t be overlooked as a defining feature of the recently concluded spring legislative session.

In what has become an all-too-familiar theme for British Columbians, the February budget showed the province continuing to pile up record deficits while ignoring practical advice on how to turn its finances around.

B.C. Budget 2026 showed a province swimming in red ink—even with $800 million in new taxes. The record-setting $9.6 billion deficit in 2025/26, partially offset by a one-time $2.7 billion tobacco settlement, is set to balloon to $13.3 billion in 2026/27 and stay above $10 billion mark for the following two years. That amounts to over $30 billion in new debt, pushing total provincial debt to a whopping $189 billion by 2029.

While the Premier doesn’t have a magic wand to wave away these record deficits - and the corresponding rise in debt - his government can take practical, achievable steps to rein in costs that are exacerbating B.C.’s fiscal challenges.

With a stroke of the pen, the B.C. NDP government could cut costs on needed public infrastructure by doing away with a restrictive labour policy that makes building these projects a lot more expensive. As esteemed Vancouver Sun columnist, Vaughn Palmer, noted in an opinion piece from February, titled After making construction costs soar, the NDP calls a halt, “The NDP’s insistence on union-favouring community benefits agreements added tens of millions of dollars to the cost of selected road, bridge, transit and hospital projects.” However, where Vaughn slightly missed the mark in his column is in the scale of these costs.

Studies by the independent Cardus think tank—most notably its 2024 research paper, Benefits for Whom? Assessing British Columbia’s Community Benefits Agreement—find that when government policies shrink the pool of workers and contractors eligible to bid on public projects, construction costs rise by not just tens, but hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s funding that could make a notable reduction to the province’s deficit.

Case in point: three separate Community Benefit Agreement (CBA) projects have resulted in cost overruns totalling over $1.3 billion. These projects include the Cowichan District Hospital expansion, now standing at a staggering 63 percent (or $559 million) over original budget estimates. The Patullo Bridge replacement, another project that has used this restricted labour agreement, has come in $706 million over budget and at least 2 years behind schedule. In that same column mentioned above, Palmer has rightly predicted that we should brace ourselves for when the latest construction costs are revealed for the eventual Massey Tunnel replacement—another project that has - you guessed it - used restrictive labour policy to date.

Over the years, this flawed public labour policy has effectively shut out 85 percent of B.C. construction workers from many public projects. It’s all because these workers have chosen not to unionize or to affiliate with unions other than the Building Trades.

Fortunately, history is not a bottle of shampoo—we don’t need to rinse and repeat. B.C. can get on a path to break the cycle of perennial deficits by committing to prioritize better public value and fairer treatment for all contractors and their workers. That would go a long way in building public trust, delivering more critical public infrastructure projects and fostering a more stable B.C. economy.