BC’s Budget ‘Protects Core Services,’ Says Finance Minister

Besides tariffs, British Columbia’s 2025 budget pointed to health care as one of the province’s most pressing issues, pledging $4.2 billion over three years to improve access to care across the province.

“This is not a budget that has splashy new announcements,” Finance Minister Brenda Bailey said Tuesday. “This is about protecting core services like health care and education.”

“Publicly funded, universally accessible, quality care is part of who we are as Canadians. We will never be the 51st state and we will never be a place where people have to pull out a credit card to pay for health care,” Bailey added.

When it comes to improving health-care access, the budget prioritizes building new health-care facilities, maintaining funding for addictions treatment and recovery and supporting seniors to stay in their homes.

Health Ministry operating spending is forecast to increase by 6.9 per cent in this fiscal year to $35.1 billion.

Hospital Employees’ Union secretary-business manager Lynn Bueckert said it’s notable that this is not an austerity budget despite the challenging economic times.

“It’s really important in tough economic times for government to choose to support people and the services they’ll need as they go through tough economic times,” Bueckert said.

Conservative premiers in Alberta and Ontario are moving towards privatizing health care, so it’s pleasing to see the BC NDP invest in public health care, she added.

B.C.’s budget puts $433 million towards the province’s primary care strategy and more than $870 million towards opening hospitals such as the new St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, the Royal Columbian Hospital redevelopment in New Westminster, the Mills Memorial Hospital replacement in Terrace and the Royal Inland Hospital enhancements in Kamloops.

The budget commits a further $15.5 billion in capital funding over three years to build and upgrade hospitals, long-term care centres and cancer centres.

Major projects include a new acute care tower in the University Hospital of Northern BC; a new Surrey hospital and BC Cancer Centre; new long-term care facilities in Chilliwack, Kelowna and Squamish; and new cancer centres in Nanaimo and Kamloops.

COVID-19 reminded B.C. why building out health capacity is so important, Bailey said.

Previous governments were more interested in selling hospital land than developing it, she added.

“We were running so skinny in health care when the pandemic hit, we didn’t have room to respond,” Bailey said.

BC needs new nurses, ER closure solutions, union says

BC Nurses’ Union president Adriane Gear said she is happy to see the capital investments being made in hospitals but wants to know about the province’s operational budget too.

“You can build new buildings and add additional beds but if there’s no nurses to staff those beds, then they’re just empty beds,” she said.

B.C. is currently facing a shortage of around 6,000 nurses, and that’s before the province builds new facilities or implements nurse-to-patient ratios, which will increase the required number of nurses at any given health-care facility, she said.

Gear also said the budget didn’t seem to focus on a solution to emergency room closures, which have been affecting rural and remote communities for years and have recently impacted overnight services in urban centres such as Delta and Saanich.

Part of any solution will be to build out primary care so patients can avoid using emergency departments for basic health care, Gear acknowledged, “but that isn’t going to address the physician shortage or the nursing shortage, which would have been an area I would have liked to see more targeted funding and strategy around.”

In a statement, Health Sciences Association president Kane Tse applauded the government for protecting health care with a modest increase in funding through the budget and for maintaining its investments in training, and recruitment and retention supports.

But Tse also called for the province to increase its baseline numbers of specialized professionals like CT, X-ray, MRI and PET technologists in order to reduce surgical cancellations and shorten wait times for critical care.

Addiction and recovery, Community Living BC

Budget 2025 includes a new $500 million over three years to maintain existing addictions treatment and recovery programs, such as Road to Recovery, Foundry, secure care, supports for children and youth, and Indigenous-led treatment, recovery and aftercare services.

This builds on Budget 2023’s investment of $1 billion to support people living with mental health or substance use disorders. This year’s budget says it will “support services ranging from withdrawal management to treatment, recovery and aftercare, as well as crisis response teams and initiatives to help save lives and respond to the toxic drug crisis.”

The budget did not mention “harm reduction,” “prescribed alternatives” or “safer supply,” but it did point to the 3,600 treatment and recovery beds it currently supports in over 300 health authority and community care facilities.

The budget also did not specify how $380 million allocated to Community Living BC should be spent. CLBC supports more than 29,000 adults living with developmental disabilities. It was given an additional $127 million per year “to meet growing demand,” which has mostly emerged due to B.C.’s aging population.

Earlier this year a coroner’s inquest called for a complete overhaul of CLBC in response to the death of Florence Girard, who had Down syndrome and starved to death in the care of a provincially funded home share provider in 2018.

The province has not yet publicly responded to the recommendations put forward by the coroner’s inquest.

BC General Employees’ Union president Paul Finch said the best way to implement the coroner’s inquest recommendations would be to reduce CLBC’s use of private contractors. The Crown corporation now contracts out services to private companies and community non-profits, which then hire care providers.

This would save money and improve patient care and staff experience, he said.

The BC General Employees’ Union represents 90,000 members in 550 bargaining units in the public and private sectors in B.C., including workers who provide health care and related services, like nursing care, personal care, housekeeping and building maintenance.

Finch would also like to see LifeLabs, which was bought by a U.S. company last summer, brought in-house. LifeLabs is the go-to laboratory in B.C. and Ontario that collects biological samples and tests for the public health system, for example blood tests, electrocardiogram monitoring or testing for sexually transmitted infections.

Considering the trade war Canada is about to embark on, Finch said he was pleased Tuesday’s budget didn’t introduce cuts — but he said the province will need to keep a close eye on what it spends on health care for its aging population.

Supports for seniors and youth

K-12 education will also be getting a health boost. The K-12 education system was allocated $370 million over three years to build “a supportive and inclusive learning environment,” with part of that funding going towards staffing teacher psychologists and counsellors in schools.

The Shelter Aid for Elderly Renters program will see 1,600 new seniors who rent added to the program, which will also increase its income threshold to $40,000 from $37,240.

Seniors will also continue to benefit from funding committed through Budget 2024 for home and community care, increasing from $45 million in 2024-25 to $146 million in 2025-26 and $163 million in 2026-27. Enabling seniors to live at home longer frees up space in hospitals and care homes, Budget 2025 says.