An initial look at the Conservative platform costing document makes it clear why they’ve been hiding it.

The document is packed full of shell games, wildly unrealistic growth projections, and deep healthcare cuts hidden in plain sight.

This includes claiming $2 billion in annual savings from cuts to the contingencies envelope, which mostly funds healthcare caseload pressures and unavoidable expenses like wildfire-fighting costs. Cutting contingencies is a backdoor healthcare cut.

Doerkson’s plan to cut $1 billion from contingencies in this fiscal year will force health authorities to cancel surgeries, close primary care clinics, and reduce services at hospitals and long-term care centres before March 31st.

Other shell games to cover their cuts include:

• Torquing and exaggerating economic growth assumptions just enough to cover their multi-billion-dollar budget gap.
• Completely excluding major promises, including the removal of PST on Canadian alcohol ($280 million).
• Wildly undercounting the cost of promises, like estimating the cost of removing PST on machinery and equipment at $500 million, $600 million less than the GDP-adjusted BC Liberal government’s costing of the same measure from the 2016 Commission on Tax Competitiveness.
• Double-counting parts of their economic growth assumptions by counting LNG revenue growth on its own as well as part of revenue from their anticipated GDP growth.
• Forecasting a 43% increase in natural gas royalties even though their LNG production targets fall short of what is already underway under the BC NDP.
• Counting interest on the debt as part of the BC NDP plan, but not part of their own, even though the Conservative deficits are higher.
• Signalling future corporate tax cuts to “attract more investment” without identifying which taxes or accounting for any revenue loss.

They also increased the BC NDP’s deficit estimate and arbitrarily reduced the BC NDP’s economic growth forecast to claim their own deficits would be slightly smaller.

In fact, the Conservative plan projects larger deficits than the BC NDP plan