Watch or read George Heyman’s response to the 2015 Provincial budget.

Let me begin my remarks on the budget — a budget which I’m sorry I have to tell the member for Chilliwack-Hope I will not be taking great pride in. Nor am I likely to vote for it. But I will outline my reasons for that in as much detail as a 30-minute speech allows me

Let me, first, start by offering some thanks to some people without whom I’d be unable to do my job and the constituents of Vancouver-Fairview would be far less well represented than they are.

My constituency assistants Jarrett Hagglund, Ashley Fehr and Reamick Lo work together as a great team. They ensure that the issues that come into the office — particularly at times like legislative sessions, when I’m not in the constituency very often — are regularly brought to my attention. They’re particularly good at ensuring that there are linkages between issues that residents identify as important and issues that we are discussing and debating here in the Legislature.

I also want to thank my legislative assistant here in this precinct, Elena Banfield, who has been working for us for a few months now and who does a particularly tremendous job of sorting through the issues that come toward me in my spokesperson role, helping me arrange the kind of outreach that I hope will allow me to speak knowledgably about the issues that people in the technology sector or the economic sectors or film and television or people who rely on transit wish me to know about.

Finally — while I won’t name them all, because I regularly phone or e-mail almost every single one of them — I want to thank the tremendous staff that we have in our caucus services. Whether they specialize in communications or research or work together to put together the information that is needed for analyzing legislation, speaking to bills, speaking to budgets and throne speeches and preparing for the questions of the day, they do a tremendous job, and they are very dedicated to their work.

Frankly, they enable us on this side of the House — as do, I’m sure, the staff for the people on the opposite side of the House — to be as knowledgable and prepared as we are capable of being ourselves.

Let me move on from the people I work with to the people I represent. I want to thank the constituents and the residents in Vancouver-Fairview for a few things. Let me start by thanking them for giving me the honour to represent them here in this Legislature. It is an honour that I had dreamed about but that I am very proud to be entrusted with, and I take it seriously.

I’ve learned, and I continue to learn on a daily basis, about the issues that are of importance to them, the issues that affect them on a day-to-day basis, the issues that roil around in their brain as they go to sleep at night trying to figure out how they’re going to deal with the problems that face them in the coming days and weeks.

I will say that one of the things I learned very early in this job — in fact, I learned it during the election campaign — is that I can go to the door of a constituent in Vancouver-Fairview — as, I’m sure, is true, or I hope is true, of every MLA in this House…. I may go with my preconceived ideas of what is important and what the best policies and answers for their daily lives are, but they have often very different ideas that are rooted and grounded in their day-to-day experience and to which they wish me to give my full attention.

I will thank the constituents again for sharing their hopes with me, for raising issues with me. Let me start my response to the budget by talking about some of the issues they have raised with me. They are issues that, unfortunately, we don’t see much, if any, action or response to in this budget.

One of the foremost issues that has come up very often…. Vancouver-Fairview is in the heart of Vancouver. We all know Vancouver is an expensive place in which to live. The issue of social housing — the availability of social housing and the failure of this government and other governments to do more and devote more resources to affordable social housing. Whether it’s in the form of subsidized housing or support for cooperatives or more support for non-profit housing, we simply don’t see enough of it.

It’s an issue that comes up regularly. People worry about whether, if their income has an interruption, they’ll be able to have a roof over their head, let alone stay in the community to which they’ve grown accustomed. They worry about their children. They worry about whether their children will be separated from the neighbourhoods in which they grew up and the friends to whom they’ve grown attached. This is an issue about which we can do more and about which we should do much more. I hope we will.

Another issue that comes up frequently is the issue of transit and transportation. Much of the Broadway corridor — in fact, some of the most congested parts of the Broadway corridor — run right through the heart of Vancouver-Fairview. Some of the north-south arteries as well are congested. People do not get home as quickly as they would like. They waste time and productivity getting from point A to point B. This is an issue for many of the small businesses along the Broadway corridor, along the Main Street community, along the Cambie village and along South Granville.

Merchants and businesses and tradespeople need to be able to move quickly. One of the things that prohibits them from moving quickly is the lack of availability of enough transit to get people who do not need to drive vehicles off the road. People are always making choices about how they will move, and in the absence of affordable, frequent and accessible public transportation options, people default to the car. That is what in fact congests our roads.

While there’s not much mention of it in the budget, sadly, the insistence of this government on rolling the dice of our public transit future with a referendum and then a subsequent failure to stand up clearly and do more than simply say they support a yes vote — to be forthcoming with the kind of information and facts and options and choices that people will be faced with if the referendum fails, all of which will cost far more money than the increase of half a percent in the sales tax — is alarming.

I don’t know why the government chose this one area of capital spending to submit to a referendum. I’ve heard the Premier and the Transportation Minister talk about how proud they are of giving residents of Metro Vancouver a choice, a say, in how they will be taxed for the transit future, but they haven’t done that on other issues.

They haven’t even done that on other transportation issues. They haven’t done it on the proposed Massey bridge. They didn’t do it on Port Mann. They didn’t do it on the South Fraser Perimeter Road. They aren’t proposing to do it on Site C, and I’ll have more to say on Site C later. They haven’t done it on any of the allowances and subsidies and reduced royalties that are being offered to the natural gas industry.

I’m not suggesting they should do it. I’m suggesting quite the opposite. I’m suggesting that governments are elected to make decisions about priorities for the province and to make them in the best interests of the most people, and that includes the interests of the economy and the things that will support a healthy and growing economy.

There is a reason why recently Port Metro Vancouver announced that they will be joining the coalition of forces and community groups and people supporting a yes vote. The people who are responsible for managing Port Metro Vancouver know that one of the worst impacts of congestion, not just for people in the Lower Mainland but for people all around the province, is anything that slows down the movement of commodities and goods from all regions of the province to get to our ports.

I think the Premier understands this. I’m sure the cabinet understands this. I’m sure the Transportation Minister understands this. And I hope it worries them, because it will not be helpful to the economy of British Columbia to have a failed referendum on reducing congestion in Metro Vancouver and to have to live with the economic consequences of that. It’s a bad gamble. It’s a gamble that should not have been taken, and it’s a gamble for which I hope all of British Columbia, particularly residents — drivers and transit users both — and small businesses in Metro Vancouver, will not have to pay a steep, steep price.

It will be completely at the feet of this government if there isn’t a positive outcome, and I hope the government has a plan B. They say they’re not thinking in terms of a plan B. They say that they’re putting all of their attention and focus on having the referendum succeed.

The minister likes to say that I said a year ago that the referendum didn’t have a hope of succeeding, but I want to be absolutely clear: I support a yes. I support a yes not because I think we should have a referendum or because I think there aren’t other funding options that might have been possible to be discussed between government and the mayors of the region and the citizens of the region. I support a yes because I know how critical it is to the future livability of Metro Vancouver, to the future economy of Metro Vancouver and to the future economy of British Columbia as a whole.

Let me move on to another issue that comes up frequently from my constituents in Vancouver-Fairview. They talk regularly about the pressures they feel helping to care for aging parents and their desire for their parents to be able to age in place. Their desire is for their parents, as they are in the last stages of their lives — I don’t mean the final last stages; I mean the final phase, the phase of being seniors and, hopefully, healthy and engaged in the community — to have the supports they need that would allow them to remain in place, to remain among the people they know, to remain among familiar surroundings.

Unfortunately, there simply isn’t enough in this budget for health care generally or for seniors specifically. In fact, there is less service for seniors. There is less for needed home support. It doesn’t make sense to me. While I recognize that that expenditure would affect the bottom line of the annual budget, I also recognize that it’s a proven, safe investment in lower health care costs long-term. Providing home care for people who need it, seniors or others, relieves the strain on the acute care system and the residential care system — a residential care system which continues to not be funded to the level it should.

Finally, a year ago many constituents came to my office to talk to me at length about their concerns about programs that were being proposed to be cut, scaled back or eliminated by the Vancouver school board of trustees, not because the board of trustees didn’t support the programs, not because the board of trustees didn’t think these programs were critically important, not because they didn’t want to offer them, but because there simply wasn’t enough money in the budget to offer them. The school board managed to find some money to continue some of them for another year.

I know that parents will be coming to my office to talk to me — they’ve already begun — to urge me to help them speak out for funding for the critically important programs that help.

The other day I spoke in this Legislature about someone of whom we’re all proud in British Columbia, on both sides of this House — Mark Reid, a teacher who gives so much, not just to the students who take music in Van Tech but to underprivileged youth in Vancouver and Canada’s lowest-income neighbourhood, by offering free classes in classical music.

Music isn’t a frill or a luxury. It’s been shown that music education increases young people’s intellectual capacity. It increases their ability to learn. It stresses and reinforces the important ability to engage in productive team work, something that everyone will use at a later point in their life. It’s something that helps the economy, something that helps our communities, and yet it is music programs that are under threat in Vancouver.

Many parents in Vancouver-Fairview are deeply concerned about this, just as they’re concerned about some of the loss of specialized counselling with respect to drug use and with specialized schooling for kids who have a problem fitting into the normal structures of most schools. I went to a public hearing at the Vancouver school board and heard some of those graduates, who are now very successful in their careers, talk about how if they’d remained in the school in which they were originally enrolled in the classes and the structure that existed, they wouldn’t have succeeded.

They needed some of the specialized attention that they got at City School that helped them realize their own creativity, their own abilities, their own knowledge. Many of them have gone on to be highly, highly productive members of the community in Vancouver and major contributors to the economy.

When members opposite talk about how there’s nothing wrong with encouraging school boards to find a combined $29 million in administrative savings, my response is: “You’ve been asking boards of education to do that year after year after year after year. You may be funding the negotiated wage increases, but are you funding the increases in Medical Services Plan premiums, for which they’re also responsible? Are you funding the increases in B.C. Hydro rates, which they will have to pay?”

On top of that, they’re being asked to find $29 million in administrative savings. If there was money left to be found, they would have found most of it by now, because they’d have to. They’ve been forced to. They’ve been forced to by an underfunded education system.

I say to members opposite that it’s not a reasonable request. It’s not a simple request. If there is that kind of money available in the system, there is, in fact, a crying need for it in other areas, in programs that have been scaled back or cut completely or in the ability to meet the increased fees that members opposite simply have not been talking about.

There’s a common theme for the Liberal government in the budget. They claim credit for and say they and they alone are responsible for a balanced budget, and that’s why we have and continue to enjoy such a good credit rating, and that’s what is fundamentally underpinning the economy that British Columbians want and enjoy.

Let me say to members opposite that you will hear from me a different theme, a different common theme. On paper, when you look at numbers, the budget is balanced, but the Liberals shouldn’t claim responsibility for that. Maybe for the numbers on the page.

What the Liberal government should claim responsibility for is for finding a way to balance the budget on the backs of working families by changing from a progressive taxation system to tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of British Columbians and increased flat fees for everyone else, flat fees that are taking dollars out of the pockets of working families, that are making their lives much, much more difficult and that are fundamentally shifting the responsibility of supporting the activities of government for British Columbians.

Why do we see tax cuts for people who simply don’t need them, people who make over $150,000 a year? It’s simply not necessary. It’s not necessary. Those savings will hardly be noticed by the people who benefit from them. But who’s paying for them? Who’s paying for them with increased fees, whether it’s B.C. Hydro or ICBC or ferry fares or any number of other things? It will be working families.

B.C. Hydro rates are going up by 6 percent in 2015. That’s about $70. It may not seem like a lot of money to the people who are enjoying the tax cut, who make over $150,000 a year. But I assure you that for a family, whether it’s one income or two incomes, who are making slightly above the minimum wage, who are wondering how they’re going to get equipment for their kids or give them music lessons or put healthy food on the table, it is a significant amount of money.

Over a five-year period we will see a 28 percent increase in B.C. Hydro rates or about $300 a year. Since 2001, when this government took office, we have seen or will have seen a 74 percent increase in B.C. Hydro rates. Medical Services Plan premiums — the only province to have Medical Services Plan premiums.

It’s not because we on this side of the House don’t think health care needs to be paid for, but because we recognize Medical Services Plan premiums as being a regressive form of taxation as opposed to supporting it through a progressive income tax system that does demand a bit more from those who have the ability and capability of paying for them. MSP premiums will go up 4 percent, $33 more per person or $68 more per family. ICBC rates are up 5.2 percent, $37 more for basic coverage. Between Hydro, MSP and ICBC, we’re seeing an average increase of $175 this year.

So I say to people on the other side of the House — and any commentator who says that it’s just great we have a balanced budget: I’m not opposed to a balanced budget. I just don’t think it should be balanced on the backs of working people when the only great beneficiaries of this budget are the richest 2 percent of British Columbians who are receiving over $230 million in tax breaks.

What could we do with that $230 million? We could do a lot. One of the first things we should do is provide relief and support to working families who are struggling to make ends meet, who are struggling under wage stagnation in this province since the B.C. Liberals took power. Job growth is seventh in Canada — not first but seventh. There are things we could do. There are things we should do.

There are things that we won’t be doing, because this Liberal government rewarded the people, their friends, who needed help the least, and turned their backs on people who aren’t even asking for significant help. They’re just asking for a fair shake, a decent break, fair treatment and a progressive income tax system.

Let me also say that when members opposite say this budget is balanced, I would say to them: when the Auditor General has pointed out that B.C. Hydro in fact is not making money but is racking up debt and burying it in deferral accounts, why is this government taking a dividend in 2015-16 that’s equal to $555 million and in 2016-17 of $589 million? That’s over $1.1 billion in two years, $1.1 billion that is going to be paid for in a flat tax in the form of hydro rates by everyday working families in British Columbia, by small businesses in British Columbia and by others, so that this government can claim, disingenuously, that they’ve balanced a budget that also rewards the richest 2 percent.

ICBC will pay this government a dividend of $160 million a year. That dividend, as well, will be paid for by working families who see their basic insurance rates go up. All of these increases add up to well over $1,000 in hidden fee and rate hikes since 2001.

B.C. has the highest level of inequality we’ve ever seen. We have the highest level of inequality in Canada. It’s growing greater, and it’s growing greater because of the kinds of policies of this government — the policies that take money from Crown corporations and soak working families through increasing flat fees that have to go back to make up the difference. When you add that together with the cut to tax for the richest 2 percent, you see the real shape of this budget. That’s why nearly one in five children are growing up in poverty. As of 2012, 16 percent of British Columbians live in poverty; 50 percent of lone-parent families live in poverty.

Let me close my remarks by talking about some of the recommendations that I heard and that members on both sides of the House heard requests for as we toured the province with the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. Let’s see just what kind of response this government gave those recommendations.

In communities around British Columbia it’s important that households and small businesses have access to investment. One of the recommendations was to continue to maintain the current provincial income tax rates for B.C. credit unions and not to match the phasing out of that particular tax treatment by the federal government.

There is no mention in this budget of that, so when the phase-out starts and gives credit unions in B.C. the same tax treatment as banks, we will see that it actually isn’t the same tax treatment. When the full phase-out is in effect, the effective tax for credit unions will be over 3 percent higher than it will be for banks. The effect of that will be a $395 million cut in available funds to invest in B.C. households and small businesses, because that is what credit unions do. They don’t take their profits and take them somewhere else.

There was a recommendation to develop strategies to sustain the B.C. forest industry through the mid-term and provide adequate funding to update inventories for forestry and other land-based users and industries. We see nothing in this budget that will expand the ability of our government and our Forest Service to actually know the extent of the resource that is available to us for future development in British Columbia.

There was a recommendation to introduce a comprehensive poverty reduction plan and to review income assistance rates, the minimum wage and the clawback of child support payments. I will commend this government for finally, belatedly, ending the clawback of child support payments. That is important, and it is good that they have heeded the calls of so many families who were suffering under that clawback.

But what do we see for a poverty reduction plan in response to a recommendation not just this year but last year? We see $5 million for a tax reduction credit and an additional $20 million for income assistance. That’s not a plan. That’s a drop in the bucket.

For child care, there was a recommendation to provide funding and support for the development and implementation of a child care plan. This government in this budget says it will provide $660 a year — $660 a year — to families to assist in defraying the costs of child care. Child care has been shown to be absolutely crucial to families to support working parents to contribute to the economy. When we invest in child care, the economy pays that back in relatively short order by increased productivity and taxes. So $660 a year, when many families are paying $1,000 to $2,000 a month for child care, is another drop in the bucket.

Finally, because I am running out of time, what do we see to build the green economy, the diversified economy that this government talks about so much? We see a grand total of $5 million in new money in this budget, $2 million to extend the digital animation or visual effects tax credit to post-production and $3 million for the small business venture capital fund when the technology industry indicated that a significant uptick in venture capital accessibility from both levels of government, but particularly this one, would in fact help spur those new start-ups in the pipeline to create jobs for British Columbians.

We could do better. We should do better. But we’re not doing better, and that’s why I will not be supporting this budget.