VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — The finance minister has presented the 2017 BC Budget but critics say some major topics appear to be absent from the financial road map.

Liquefied natural gas

If you turned the budget into a word search, it would be hard to find the letters LNG.

What was once the topic of headlines and Liberal promises of prosperity, the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) industry was nearly unmentioned in the budget.

“The big election campaign of 2013 is completely dead. None of it happened. A lot of talk and no follow through,” according to Bruce Ralston, the NDP natural gas development critic.

“The price of natural gas has tumbled dramatically. It was as high as $9.50 or $9.80 a unit and it’s now projected to be about $1.50 a unit. You can see that was a dramatic drop. It’s a world price, the government doesn’t control it.”

The province is putting $400 million into a prosperity fund which was intended to be filled with money coming in from LNG.

Affordable housing

If you are hoping the BC budget will help ease the tough rental market in Metro Vancouver, you may not find much reprieve, according to the BC Non-Profit Housing Association.

CEO Kishone Roy says the budget is missing long-term or significant cash for building affordable places for people to live.

“Last year the government committed nearly $1 billion to begin to build affordable housing again in British Columbia. This is a really important investment but what we would have liked to see was a commitment to keep doing that. So there is no long-term plan.”

Roy says he would like to see the province rethink its various rental supplement programs and try out a renter’s grant, likely based on income.

Medical Service Plan revenue

A lot of people seem happy about the budget plan to cut to MSP premiums, except for a senior economist for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

“Cutting MSP is a good step, it’s just the money should have been replaced with something else. I think we should instead just flow it into personal income tax. The money needed for the entire MSP revenue would be a much smaller tax increases then you might imagine,” Iglika Ivanova says.

“We are sacrificing about $1 billion dollars a year that we could have spent on health care services, on mental health, inadequate services, services for youth.”

Under the 2017 budget, families making less than $120,000 a year will see their MSP premiums cut by 50 per cent.