Delivered in the first inning of an unprecedented Canada-U.S. trade war, this week’s B.C. budget was out-of-date before it was printed.

While the budget documents acknowledge the threat of U.S. tariffs – and the B.C. government has published estimates of how a bilateral tariff war could affect our economy – the economic and fiscal forecasts underpinning the budget embody an oddly a rosy outlook, basically ignoring the still unfolding bilateral trade conflict.

Rather than economic (real GDP) growth of 1.8 per cent in 2025 and 1.9 per cent the following year – as assumed in the budget – the province is likely to experience a near-term recession, provided the just-announced tariffs are in place for the rest of the year. The outlook for 2026 depends heavily on what happens on the trade front in the next few months.

Once we factor in the American and Canadian retaliatory tariffs, the effect is to render null and void many of the budget’s fiscal projections. True, the Ministry of Finance has included a hefty $12-billion “contingency” to reflect the impact of the tariff war on the government’s bottom line over the revised three-year fiscal........

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