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BC Liberal candidate Michael de Jong tried, but not very successfully, to discredit NDP spending plans, writes columnist Vaughn Palmer, who considers the plans more a change in priorities than a massive increase in spending. JONATHAN HAYWARD / THE CANADIAN PRESS

VICTORIA When the New Democrats one-upped the B.C. Liberals by announcing they would phase out bridge tolls this week, the governing party responded with a predictable how are you going to pay for that?

Never mind that the Liberals, through 16 years in office, routinely tapped contingency funds and other discretionary sources to pay for their schemes, half-baked and otherwise.

The Liberals were stung by the New Democrats having upstaging news coverage for their own promise of $30 million worth of relief for commuters in the form of a $500 cap on annual tolling payments.

If the New Democrats were going to eliminate a $200-million-a-year source of revenue for the Port Mann and Golden Ears Bridges, they need to provide a full accounting immediately.

Turned out NDP Leader John Horgan and crew were happy to oblige. And the answer, when it came with the release of the party election platform on Thursday, was diabolically clever.

Horgan would finance the elimination of tolls by liquidating the Liberals vaunted prosperity fund.

Or Christy Clarks LNG Fantasy Fund, as the New Democrats put it, not missing an opportunity to stick in the knife over the Liberal failure to deliver on the biggest promise of the last election campaign.

The fund was the intended repository of the proceeds from the three count em three terminals for exporting liquefied natural gas that Clark promised would be running by the end of this decade.

None have got beyond the promise-making stage to date. But that didnt stop the Liberals from cobbling together $500 million worth of discretionary funds from elsewhere in the budget and booking the total to the prosperity fund as if LNG were already a going concern.

Having contrived the LNG version of a Potemkin Village in the government accounts, the Liberals could scarcely deny the money was there to be used for other purposes if a successor government chose to do so.

Thus the Liberal stunt with the prosperity fund would help the New Democrats pay for a populist gesture to commuters angered by the arbitrary application of bridge tolling in B.C.

The New Democrats did not disclose a permanent financing scheme for the elimination of tolls once the prosperity fund is exhausted, as it would be in a few years.

Nor did their platform fully account for other promises like eliminating medical service plan premiums altogether over four years, stopping a projected 42-per-cent increase in auto insurance rates, and freezing B.C. Hydro rates for a year.

Also notable were a couple of dogs that did not bark in the capital plan. The New Democrats are proposing a five-year $7-billion increase in capital spending, on top of projects already announced, as the platform said.

On that basis, Horgan made no move to defund two of the most controversial projects in the existing capital plan, namely the $9-billion Site C dam or the $3.5-billion replacement bridge for the Massey Tunnel.

The gaps, real and perceived, in the NDP budget plan drew protests from Finance Minister Mike de Jong in a briefing for reporters shortly before noon. The usually-on-top-of-his-game de Jong started late and struggled with the numbers. A sign perhaps of having to rely on Liberal campaign staff as opposed to the able public servants in the Ministry of Finance.

He levelled a broad-brush accusation that NDP spending promises would mean massive increases in taxes and deficits and a downgrade in the provinces Triple A credit rating.

Maybe. But at first read the NDP plan did not represent all that massive a shift from the three-year budget the Liberals themselves tabled in February.

Horgan would increase program spending by 1.4 per cent above what the Liberals were projecting for the current financial year, by 2.5 per cent in fiscal 2018 and threeper cent the next year.

Those increases, for the most part, would finance readily defensible priorities including a long overdue increase in social assistance, elimination of interest on student loans, hiring more park rangers and conservation officers, androlling back ferry fares on the smaller routes.

On the paying-for-it side of the ledger, the New Democrats would restore a higher bracket for folks with taxable income in excess of $150,000 a year, boost the corporate tax by a point and impose a special tax on homes deliberately left vacant for speculative purposes.

Their platform also projects returns of almost $700 million over three years from unspecified elimination of government waste and hoped-for economic growth. On the strength of those numbers, the NDP claims the budget would over the three years havesurpluses in the $100-million range, about half the size of what is projected by the Liberals.

But as noted here Thursday, B.C. budgets include significant contingency funds and allowances against downturns in the economic forecast. Those measures of prudence total almost $2 billion over three years in the Liberal budget and fiscal plan and they are retained in the NDP plan as a hedge against the unexpected.

For all the unanswered questions and potential controversies to come, the NDP passed the first test of building an election platform.

To govern is to choose, as saying goes. On Thursday, John Horgan signalled that it is time for some different choices than the ones the B.C. Liberals have been making for the last 16 years.

vpalmer@postmedia.com

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Vaughn Palmer: Smarting Liberals try to discredit NDP spending plans - Vancouver Sun