The BC Government’s 2025 budget formally commits to the rest of the funding for the new acute care tower at University Hospital of Northern BC after the province made a pre-election announcement for the funding before last year’s election.
That project is part of a budget forecasting a $10.9 billion deficit due in large part, the government said, the U.S.-Canada trade war launched earlier in the day when President Donald Trump’s long-threatened 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods went into effect.
The province’s 2024 budget only included funding for $103 million in funding for the first phase of work on the tower, which consists of preparing the site for further construction.
While Phase 1 was anticipated to complete in 2025 in last year’s budget, this year’s budget now predicts it will be finished sometime in 2026. So far, $11 million of the budgeted $103 million for phase one has been spent.
The 2025 budget includes $1.579 billion in funding for phase two, the actual construction of the tower which is expected to be complete by 2031. It will add 109 beds for mental health and substance use as well as cardiac care.
That lines up with a pre-election announcement made by then-Health Minister Adrian Dix, who came to Prince George in August 2024 to announce a business plan for the project with a $1.579 billion price tag.
Of that funding, the budget says $1.246 billion is being drawn from either internal sources or borrowing with another $333 million from “other contributions.”
It’s not clear from the document whether that $333 million is coming from. Last September, the Fraser-Fort George Regional Hospital District Board passed a bylaw approving around $318.7 million towards the project.
If that’s included in the “other contributions,” there would still be around $14.3 million we don’t know the source for.
There’s also a spending update in the 2025 budget for a BC Hydro project adding three capacitor stations as part of the effort to increase the capacity of transmission lines from Prince George to Terrace.
One of the stations is near Vanderhoof, the second is near Burns Lake and the third is near Telkwa.
In the 2024 budget, $27 million of the $582 million budgeted for the project had been spent. The 2025 budget said that $121 million has been spent.
Other than an appendix comparing property tax rates of various BC communities, the only other mention of Prince George in the budget document references the $80 million in funding from the 2023 budget to establish supportive homes or shelter beds in 10 municipalities through the Homeless Encampment Action Response Temporary Housing program.
“Hundreds more units through this program are underway. To build on these efforts and continue to address the urgent need, Budget 2025 provides $90 million more over the next three years to expand these programs,” the document said.
“Funding will support community-based wrap-around supports, including leveraging village-like housing as alternatives to encampments. This new funding will enable this program to expand to additional communities over the next three years.”
There are no listed capital projects in the budget for School District 57 or any post-secondary institutions north of Kelowna.
The budget does include $104 million in funding to help cover negotiated wage increases for RCMP officers in BC, as well as $to help pay for the expansion of body-worn cameras for frontline RCMP officers.
Prince George was one of the first communities to have its RCMP officers adopt body-worn cameras late last year. The City of Prince George was expecting to have to bear $300,000 in costs as part of the adoption.
Reached by phone after the budget was introduced in the Legislature, Prince George-Mackenzie Conservative MLA Kiel Giddens told the Citizen that he was glad to see funding certainty for phase two of the UHNBC tower.
“We want to keep pushing this along,” Giddens said. “We need, obviously, for this hospital to be modernized and we need proper cardiac care.”
While Finance Minister Brenda Bailey dedicated time in her budget speech to talking about how it was a response to American tariffs, Giddens said BC’s “weakening fiscal position” is making this province more vulnerable to them.
After projecting an $8 billion deficit last year and ending up in the neighbourhood of $9.4 billion, Giddens said he finds it hard to believe that BC won’t have a larger-than-forecast budget once again in this fiscal year.
“What we’re seeing right now is a significant decline in economic activity,” he said. “Our exports to the U.S. actually dropped 5.5 per cent last year, so business confidence is collapsing and we’re not seeing enough from the government to actually do something about the tariff threat. There was nothing about internal trade between provinces at a time when we’re seeing Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario … talking about dropping their trade barriers.”
When it comes specifically to his constituency, Giddens said he was concerned by both the scheduled 3.3 per cent increase to BC’s carbon tax on April 1 as well as the Ministry of Agriculture’s projections that 7,000 jobs in that sector will be lost this year.
“That’s seriously concerning for an area in the province where we have ranchers and farmers who are trying to make ends meet.”
Giddens also touted Opposition Leader John Rustad’s idea to impose a carbon tax on coal heading through the Port of Vancouver on its way to the U.S. and holding that money in trust to support the softwood lumber industry.
Responding to that idea in the Legislature last month, Eby said BC can’t tax export goods moving through a federally regulated port.
Despite the public sector hiring freeze announced last month, Giddens said he was disappointed that the budget didn’t tackle the size of the existing workforce. Giddens is the labour critic in the Tories’ shadow cabinet.
He also pointed out that, despite the freeze, the cabinet continues to hire communications officials and has increase the budget for the premier’s office.
Also reached by phone, Prince George-North Cariboo Conservative MLA Sheldon Clare noted some of the projects for his constituency laid out in the budget like repairs to two roads damaged by landslides, work on the new Quesnel Junior School and Carson Elementary, the redevelopment of Cariboo Memorial Hospital as well as the UNHBC tower, but said they represent continuations of old projects, not new ones.
He said he was particularly disappointed to see no funding for the north-south interconnector project he’d like to see to improve safety on Highway 97. Clare held a town hall on this subject back in January and said he has yet to hear a response to 23-page letter with his findings that he provided to Transportation minister Mike Farnworth.
However, the biggest problem he said he has with the budget is that he doesn’t think it does enough to respond to American tariffs. Clare said he thought the government was too busy virtue signalling by taking so-called “red state” liquor off of store shelves rather than seriously addressing the crisis.
“I think this is the same budget they had ready to go back in September,” Clare said. “There’s an at least $10.9 billion deficit, some of my colleagues think (it will be) as high as $15 billion in reality.”
A projected 25 per cent drop in corporate tax revenues and a three per cent drop in exports, he said, are a sign of businesses’ confidence in BC declining.
The 9.2 per cent drop in housing starts listed in the budget isn’t enough to meet growing demand, he said, adding that the budget doesn’t seem to have a real plan towards tackling addictions and mental health issues.
“I think the budget’s disappointing,” Clare said. “It really shows that they are not very good stewards of our tax dollars and I think it is a demonstration of a budget that is heading into a depression and a financial crisis.
Clare, who serves as the Tories’ deputy whip, said he and his colleagues will be caucusing the discuss their response to the budget in the Legislature. With a slim majority for the government, he said his party continues to look for opportunities to force an election.
