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Coralee Oakes wonders where money is for wildfire recovery, roads and climate change impacts

Cariboo North MLA sees many positives in the B.C. Budget but also has many questions
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Cariboo North MLA Coralee Oakes sees several positives for the province as a whole in Tuesday’s provincial budget, but she’s asking where the additional resources and investments are for issues like wildfire recovery and roads in our region.

“I was hoping there would be certainly more for rural communities and more support in the way of some of the infrastructure challenges I had identified after the throne speech,” Oakes said Thursday, two days after the B.C. Budget was released. “Where are the additional resources for wildfire recovery? Where are the infrastructure dollars for things such as roads and rehabilitation? And unfortunately, they were not in the budget.”

Oakes did see several positives for the province as a whole in the budget.

“I’m really pleased they increased supports for foster parents,” she said. “I think that’s a really important piece, and to expand to include the same supports for, say, grandparents or aunts and uncles in the system, I think that was a really important step.”

She was also pleased there is going to be a capital investment in the Royal BC Museum in Victoria.

“I’ve long been a strong supporter of museums in the province, including Barkerville of course, and having that investment in RBCM is really important,” she said. “Any kind of investments in that is critically important, and hopefully maybe out of that too, because they have strong partnerships with Barkerville, that recognition of the importance of heritage will also translate into investments with Barkerville.”

Now that the budget has been released, Oakes is going through the estimates and looking at the finer details and will be asking questions about the numbers.

“Some of the concerning things is they are calling for that the natural resource revenue will be dropping by 30 per cent,” she said. “For a community like Quesnel that’s resource-dependent, when they’re projecting a 30-per-cent drop over the next three years, that means there’s going to be significant implications, of course, in our communities. What I didn’t see in the budget is where then are those investments in the community to help us transition?”

Oakes also wonders where the money is for supporting agriculture, something she had been happy to hear about in last week’s throne speech.

“I’ll canvass this when we get through estimates, but in the throne speech, it talked about the importance of food security and agriculture, which I’m a very strong supporter of, and yet, going through the budget, I see no increase anywhere in the budget,” she said. “There’s no additional money that has been identified for export readiness or any of those pieces they had kind of talked about in the throne speech.”

Oakes says the government spoke about investing in “wildfire resiliency,” and they have increased the budget in the three-year fiscal plan, but she isn’t sure it will help communities actually get ready for another damaging wildfire season.

“When you read the budget on page 20, when it talks about this increase, what it says is in recognition of increased wildfire activity in recent years, they will provide additional wildfire control capacity and increase communication resourcing for community engagement,” she said. “I’m thinking that this was the money they announced for connectivity. I think it is important to be making sure we are investing in connectivity, whether it’s high-speed Internet in the province, but don’t discount the incredible needs we have in our communities for actually getting our communities ready for wildfire.”

The transportation budget is another area Oakes is looking at closely. She sees decreases in the safety improvements budget and the highway corridor budget, which concern her.

“The only area where I see there is a little bit of an increase around things that may affect us in the Cariboo is the side road improvement fund,” said Oakes. “We utilize that one regularly. We have a lot of side roads in the Cariboo, and [that budget] went from $108 million to $110 million, so an increase of $2 million. What I can say is the small piece we are looking at for an egress for Kluskus, so the Kluskus road, that portion alone is $3 million. So $2 million, while it sounds great, it doesn’t even cover a bridge.”

Oakes says a significant focus of her budget response will be making sure our communities are safe.

She says there has been a lot of discussion from this government about its climate action and clean energy plans, which she thinks is “critically important,” but there needs to be investment to go along with the talk.

“If you look at the new carbon tax, and it’s going to be an increase of $6 billion over the next three years, and yet only I think 15 per cent of that is going into actual green initiatives,” she said. “The rest is going into general revenue. Why aren’t they taking some of that money and making sure they are putting it into communities that are dealing with climate change ground zero, which we are? Make the investment in our road infrastructure, such as West Fraser Road, and I asked in Question Period again this week about when that road is going to be re-opened and they continue to study it. Where is a significant investment in side roads and making sure we are fixing our culverts and we’re upgrading them?

“If we are paying a significant portion of that carbon tax — which northern British Columbia and the Interior, I would say, certainly pay more than our fair share just by nature of our weather and our travel on so many levels — why isn’t some of that money actually coming back to help us address some of the challenges we’re facing with climate change?”

Provincial budget documents can be found online at bcbudget.gov.bc.ca/2019/default.htm.