Lots of people are analyzing BC’s Budget Speech. I just watched this webinar – BC Policy Solutions – Making Sense of the BC Budget 2026 (text also at https://bcpolicy.ca/2026/02/
The first two speakers from BC Policy Solutions were informative (and were at the budget lock-up), but for the ~38-49 minutes segment, Sven Biggs (Stand.Earth) spoke on climate, primarily on LNG. He also addressed the last question in the Q&A with his comments that there were no ‘environment’ or ‘climate’ words in the speech, and LNG 5 times, and his conjecture that the government is not serious about moving forward with an update to CleanBC (that would not be a surprise even before the speech).
Relatively hard budgetary times indeed, and where climate action gets kicked to the curb yet again…the Province’s doubling down on LNG when indicators (e.g., international ‘glut’) and informed forecasting (i.e., stranded assets) suggests otherwise continues to bewilder me, even if solely looking at it from a ‘net revenue’ perspective relative to alternatives (including building independent communities, supply chains and circular economies, decentralized jobs across the entire province through the richness of our natural resources).
Sven showed one slide that compared the anticipated revenues from LNG to Lotto and BC Liquor store revenue. The revenues from each of the latter two surpassing the first! I thought I used to be good at math…who’s doing the ‘math’ in government these days?