BC voters head to the polls A ‘golden decade’ in peril?

British Columbia is home to a quarter of the world’s mining and mineral exploration companies, as well as a global centre for mine finance, development, operation and reclamation. It isn’t surprising, then, that miners from around the world are taking a keen interest in the May 17 provincial election.

Gordon Campbell, leader of the current government, is the first elected B.C. premier to contest a second election in more than two decades. The last sitting B.C. premier to win re-election was William Bennett, who led the Social Credit party to victory in 1983.

In May 2001, Gordon Campbell’s provincial Liberal party won 58% of the popular vote and 77 of 79 seats — the greatest majority in B.C.’s history. The province’s New Democratic Party took the remaining two seats.

That election of the centre-right Liberal party signalled a trend toward moderation in a province that, historically, has been polarized, and more than a little bizarre, in its political formations.

Previously, power in Victoria had alternated between the socialist NDP and the far-right Social Credit party, a former provincial dynasty that virtually disappeared in 1991. Each ascension to provincial power brought with it vicious retaliatory measures against the losing party, actions that simply sowed the seeds for more nasty payback when the tables inevitably turned.

In this context, Campbell’s new government was a fresh start, and it had a strong mandate to restore economic health to a province deeply weakened after a decade of waste and fiscal mismanagement by successive NDP governments.

The NDP left the treasury a mess: it had introduced eight consecutive deficit budgets, including two “fudge-it” budgets, and managed to double the provincial debt in less than a decade by wasting tax dollars on such projects as the $463-million “fast”-ferries fiasco.

When the party was finally booted out of office, it left behind a $3.8-billion structural deficit, which had resulted in four credit-rating downgrades.

During the 1990s, B.C. had all the wrong stats: the highest personal income tax rates in Canada; last in Canada for job creation; an unemployment rate almost 50% higher than Alberta’s; and the lowest per-capita economic growth in the country.

B.C. also had become a “have-not” province, receiving equalization payments from taxpayers of Alberta and Ontario, and many of its citizens were voting with their feet by moving to greener pastures in Alberta. Traditionally a “have” province with just about every conceivable advantage, British Columbia started the 1990s with real, per-capita gross domestic product $367 above the national average and ended the decade $3,471 below it.

The NDP government ignored the mining industry and favoured the environmental and aboriginal lobbies, who helped the government impose large obstacles to mineral exploration and mine development. For the mining industry in British Columbia, the 1990s were a lost decade.

On Gordon Campbell’s first day as premier, the Liberals cut personal taxes by an average of 25% and then later cut business taxes and the corporate capital tax. At the same time, the budgets for all ministries — except health and education — were chopped by an average of 25%. (Since 2001, the Liberals actually increased funding for health care by $3.8 billion and for education by $2 billion.)

The Liberals produced two consecutive balanced budgets (this time, unlike the NDP, under generally accepted accounting principles) and posted a record surplus of $1.7 billion in the 2004-05 fiscal year.

As a result, Canada’s bond rating firms have upgraded the province’s credit ratings to the same level as Ontario’s, welfare rolls have shrunk, and B.C. now boasts Canada’s best job-creation record, with more than 200,000 jobs (most of them full-time) created since 2001. The unemployment rate has fallen to levels not seen since 1981, and the percentage of workers making more than $16 per hour, 57%, is greater than in any other province.

Meanwhile housing starts are way up, and there was a net inflow of people to the province in 2003 for the first time in six years.

In all, at an expected 3.3% growth rate this year, B.C will have the second fastest-growing economy in Canada after Alberta.

For B.C. miners and mineral explorers, the provincial Liberal government ushered in a new era of tax cuts and a reduction in government legislation. It also continued flow-through tax credits and made a one-time geoscience investment.

(On the downside, the government cut deeply into its annual geosciences budget, which stood at less than $3 million annually in 2003, compared with $20 million spent by Ontario and $16 million spent by Quebec. Sadly, B.C. no longer has one of the nation’s leading geological surveys.)

Michael Gray, president of the British Columbia & Yukon Chamber of Mines, says British Columbia’s mineral sector is “experiencing a long-awaited period of revitalization in exploration investment, business certainty and government support.” He points out that, for the first time since 1996, higher metals prices and favourable business policies have enabled exploration companies active in the province to spend more than $100 million.

In 2004 almost 47,000 claims were staked in the province, a 13-year high, and claim-staking has since been made easier and more precise with the introduction of Internet-based map-staking.

Campbell’s government has also taken a fresh and smarter approach to relations with First Nations: a multitude of economic and treaty negotiations has brought greater certainty of land access and boosted economic opportunities for both First Nations and the mining industry.

The Liberal party’s broad theme in this election is that the province is on the cusp of “golden decade” that would be imperilled by the election of a regressive, divisive, economically illiterate NDP government.

For its part, the NDP, using the slogan “Everyone Matters,” argues that the Liberals have broken too many promises and that the economic progress has come at too high a human cost.

The provincial NDP is buttressed by the B.C. Federation of Labour and the B.C. Teachers’ Federation (Campbell has described the latter as “Orwellian” and a “huge and sad institution”). The NDP’s mostly negative campaign is primarily targeting public-sector workers who are still fuming over Campbell’s voiding of several civil-service union contracts in January 2002 (a broken promise) and his dramatic reduction of the government’s full-time workforce to 31,000 at present from 41,500 in 2001. Among Campbell’s other broken promises are the partial privatization of BC Rail and the expansion of casino gambling.

The NDP leader this time around is Carole James, 47, a high-school graduate who has never met a payroll and never held a publicly elected office higher than a school trustee.

She has described the Campbell Liberals as the “most callous, out-of-touch government we have ever seen in B.C.” Quite a statement, when you recall former premier Bill Vander Zalm’s Fantasy Gardens, Mike Harcourt’s Bingo-gate, and Glen Clark’s casino scandal.

Today, the Liberals lead the polls by half a dozen points. As recently as December, the NDP actually led the Liberals by several points in the polls, proof enough that B.C. politics continues to be led more by emotion than common sense.

In an unusual move, Bill Bennett recently gave his support to the re-election of a Campbell-led Liberal party, commenting that “the difficult job of dealing with British Columbia from the time he took office has taken a lot of fortitude and understanding and hard work, and I think he’s done all that.”

To say we’re big fans of Gordon Campbell and the B.C. Liberal party would be a stretch — after all, they are linked to the corrupt and discredited federal Liberal party, despite their protestations to the contrary.

But in this election, given their track record of the past four years and the quality of their opposition, Gordon Camp
bell’s Liberals are easily the most sensible choice for British Columbians, especially those in the mining industry.

As an aside, B.C. is unique in Canada in that its provincial election must now be held every four years. This means the next election will be in May 2009, less than a year before the Winter Olympics come to Vancouver and Whistler. Should Campbell win this election, it’s pretty much guaranteed he’ll run for a third term in order to preside over the Olympic festivities and leave office on a high note.