Okay, one last post on MSP premiums. I swear. I really mean it this time.

The question raised by yesterday’s post is just who will be paying the increased MSPs? Statscan can give us a rough idea by breaking out the number of people at various income levels in BC:

The MSP changes in the recent BC budget have both The Vancouver Sun and David Schreck flustered. Here’s an overview of the changes:

The federal government announced, among other things, its updated forecast of future budgets. And not only will they be living up to the Liberals’ election promise to run a deficit, they expect to be running even bigger deficits.

While the deficit may have shrunk, the debt in the last BC budget grew. Confused? Me too.

The more you look at natural gas, the more of a mystery the BC government’s natural gas royalty optimism becomes. There has been a decline in the natural gas production going on for almost a decade:

Surprisingly enough, the BC government is being pretty up-front about how badly things are looking for natural gas. The once highly-touted natural-gas royalties from new projects weren’t included in the BC Budget’s revenue:

The BC Budget was released yesterday, and it looks like they’re expecting nothing but surpluses in the next few years. Hooray! I’m sure there will be absolutely nothing else of interest about it for me to post about over the next few days, so here’s the balances:

The collapse of the Canadian dollar has once again led to claims that Canada is a petro-state, entirely dependent on gas revenues to drive its economy. That certainly isn’t the case, and in fact, gas is a relatively small portion of the economy. For example, let’s have a look at total Canadian wages across a selection of categories:

Following in the path of far too many governments before them, the Liberal government is considering giving more aid to Bombardier. This is virtually guaranteed to be a terrible idea, because Bombadier will almost certainly come back for more money. But is that so bad? Maybe it’s just the cost of placating Quebec. Unfortunately it’s difficult to even judge that, because we have no idea how much money has been spent on Bombardier. The best I could find is a $1.1 billion total since 1961, which doesn’t say how much was spent year to year, or how much provincial governments have given to Bombardier.