With money flowing into communities across B.C. as the province gears up for an election May 9, the sheer number of funding announcements being made locally is raising eyebrows, even among those used to seeing government largess right before a provincial vote.
In the Central Okanagan this week alone, two of the three incumbent Liberal MLAs have been kept hopping, moving from media event to media event, making multiple funding announcements each day.
And, in addition, they have lent their voices—via quotes attached to news releases—to a host of other funding announcements too.
On Wednesday alone, Kelowna-Lake Country MLA Norm Letnick, B.C.’s agriculture minister, and his “Team Okanagan” colleague Kelowna-Mission MLA Steve Thomson, the province’s forest, lands and natural resource operations minister, made three local stops to announce money for local and provincial projects.
There was the green light for school planning in Rutland and Lake Country, $5.2 million for consultation costs and seed money for a new agency to administer revenues from hunting licences in B.C. to manage wildlife and $10 million for food banks across the province.
Those announcements followed $15.4 million for Okanagan College’s new health sciences centre the day before in Kelowna and Friday’s blockbuster reveal, $96 million in federal and provincial funds for water projects in Kelowna, West Kelowna and Lake Country.
Then there was the news release Wednesday announcing $2.4 million for affordable housing here.
On Thursday the government announced $22.9 million for 1,900 new campsites across B.C., including 50 in the Okanagan and $3.8 million to a school upgrade, classroom supplies and nine new school buses, also a re-announcement. While some of the announcements were re-announcements, others were new money.
Some estimates have put the amount of provincial money steered towards the Central Okanagan’s this month at close to $50million.
And Letnick makes apologies for that.
While he appreciates some members of the public may be more sensitive to funding announcements just weeks before an election, he said work has, in many cases, been underway for a while to secure the funding so it is not coming out the blue.
And he said he plans to keep pushing for more money on behalf of important local projects, saying that’s what he was elected to do.
“I’m sorry if some people don’t want me to do that, but if that’s the case, they have the wrong guy,” he said Wednesday.
“I’ll keep working (as the MLA) until the election writ drops (on April 11). “I’ll keep fighting.”
But the timing of the such large amounts of funding seems suspicious to the NDP candidate running in Kelowna-West (currently known as Westside-Kelowna).
Shelley Cook, who will try to unseat the third member of “Team Okanagan,” Premier Christy Clark, said she feels the public will see the funding announcements now, just six weeks before the election, as “disingenuous.”
“In fact, they should mad as hell,” said Cook.
As a former executive director of the John Howard Society, she said she saw first hand how cuts by the province “decimated” social service agencies and what the impact was on clients of this agencies.
Cook said while she is always happy to see money come into the community, saving spending announcements for just before an election is a cynical way to attract votes.
Especially, when the government has claimed in the past that it does not not have the money to fund certain programs to a level many feel is adequate.
“The Liberal government has balanced its budgets on the backs of average British Columbians without realizing they were on their knees already,” said Cook.
She cited examples of legal aid, seniors’ programs, mental health and and child poverty as examples of where government funding has been cut, or come up short, in the past.
In the recent provincial budget, the government announced it had a surplus of more than $2 billion dollars that it it wanted to “give back” to British Columbians.
A large part of that surplus was used to half the monthly provincial Medical Service Plan premiums British Columbians pay, with a promise to eliminate them altogether some time in the future.