British Columbia is running a record budget deficit of $13.8 billion. On the Looney Hour, in the week before an October 24 election, the host put a chart on the screen. The 2026 budget, he said, estimates interest charges of $6.5 billion, rising to $8.7 billion in 2029. He then called the bill about $24 million a day, the cost of two new hospitals a year. The arithmetic needs a cleaner sentence. Eight point seven billion dollars a year is about $24 million a day. Six and a half billion is closer to $18 million a day. Either number is a hospital. Neither number is a rounding error. The direction of the chart is the fact the guest did not dispute. The province is paying more to stand still, and the argument in Victoria is still about whose tax bracket should go up.
That is the idea, and it is the only one. A deficit of this size is an interest bill looking for a mill, a gas plant, and a mine that were not built on time. A promise to permit major projects in 120 days does not pay the bill. The project that can still clear First Nations, the environment, and a real clock is the investment. The election is the noise around it. This piece is not a recommendation to buy or sell any company, and it is not advice on how to vote.
What the guest actually said
The guest was Lorne Doerkson, the new leader of the B.C. Conservatives, interviewed by Steve on the Looney Hour with Keith Dicker and Richard Diaz on the panel. Doerkson had been asked, on a long flight, to let his name stand. Kerry-Lynne Findlay had stepped down. A snap election was coming. He said he had turned the job down once before, because he had promised to serve as assistant deputy speaker. This time he said yes. The vote is October 24.
He is not a career premier in waiting. He told the show he was born in New Westminster, grew up in Surrey, spent time in Salmon Arm, and has lived for years in the Cariboo, in Williams Lake. He sold ads and ran the Williams Lake Tribune. He had small businesses. He spent five or six years in the investment business. He fought a fire with a constituent because he happened to be there. None of that is a resource model. It is the reason he talks about business as a person who has had a payroll, not as a person reading a deck.
Asked how a province goes from a surplus under John Horgan to a record deficit under David Eby, he did not pick one villain. He said it was all of the above. Revenue worries him, and he counts residents who are not working as part of that revenue. His line, repeated until it became the spine of the hour, was that much of this can be fixed if business starts feeling better. He said the NDP has brought in 40 different taxes or tax increases, and that the platform keeps going. He said he has not talked to anyone who wants to pay more. He said his side has announced no new taxes and no tax increases. He thinks a paused expansion of the provincial sales tax, frozen just before the writ, has an incredibly high chance of coming back if the government that paused it is returned.
The tax that hits the income a house requires
The host, who works in housing, put a second number next to the deficit. National Bank, he said, puts the median home in Vancouver around $1.1 million. The income required to qualify is about $265,000. In Victoria he put it near $235,000. That is not a Shaughnessy mansion. He called it a three-bedroom suburban townhouse. The NDP proposal he described would raise the provincial brackets at $190,000 and again at $265,000, with a further bracket for income over a million.
Doerkson said the tax had been introduced as a hit on people who make a million dollars. The next day, he said, it stretched down to $190,000. Doctors, engineers, and the people a province might want in those empty condos sit in that band. The host added a quieter cut. Brackets frozen until 2030 are no longer indexed to inflation. That is a stealth tax. A higher rate on the lowest bracket means the bill is not only for the top. Doerkson’s phrase for the method was continuous taxation. He does not think it builds a house, staffs a hospital, or restarts a mill.
Set the politics aside and look at the collision. The income you need to buy the median home is the income the new bracket calls rich. A worker who finally earns enough to qualify is the worker the treasury wants a larger share of. That is not a plan for affordability. It is a plan for a treasury that has decided the hole is a shortage of tax, not a shortage of paycheques. Doerkson’s answer is the other diagnosis. If people are done paying, the dollars have to come from new GDP. He named forestry. He named LNG. He said small business and large business have to feel better at the same time. Feeling better is not a line item. Permits, power, roads, and a tax system that stops adding a new name every session are the line items.
The tunnel is the template
The host grew up using the Massey Tunnel. He said that in 2017 the replacement was shovel-ready. An eight-lane bridge, green-lit, at an estimate of $3.5 billion. The government that followed scrapped it. The current scheme, he said, is a six-lane tunnel at $8.5 billion, with construction barely started and a hoped-for completion around 2031. Fewer lanes. More than double the money. Years later.
Doerkson called it mismanagement. He said the province would have had a bridge about three years ago for probably half the cost. He then made the comparison that matters for anyone who builds. The same decision, to stop what was already moving, was made around LNG. If those plants were up and running, he said, the province would be in a different situation. Not only GDP. Direct income to the treasury. The tunnel is concrete and visible. The gas plants are the ones that did not pour. Both are the same habit. Cancel the version that was ready. Study a new version. Pay more. Arrive later. Then act surprised that interest is a straight line up.
A mining investor has seen this template on ground that does not look like a highway. A project with a study, a route, and a power plan sits while the design is reopened. The capital cost inflates. The construction window misses the labour that was trained for it. The debt that funded the delay does not pause. The Massey numbers are the host’s account of a highway. The pattern is why a permit timeline belongs in a mine model next to grade and recovery. Time is not free when the province is paying billions a year to carry what it already owes.
Four or five projects, and one that got through
Doerkson’s resource case was specific and still unfinished. About ten years ago, he said, four or five LNG projects were on the books and ready to go. Only one ever made it through. Shame on the government, in his words, for not pursuing the others in a better way. He allowed that David Eby has lately shown more interest in LNG, and that politics has been a problem on these files. The companies, he said, speak in trillions. For British Columbians the nearer figure is billions, and nearer than that is jobs.
The north, he said, had a workforce of 20,000 to 30,000 men and women building pipelines, LNG, and Site C. That wave, he said, is kind of done. Those people will not be absorbed by the condo market the host had just described. The platform the host put to him aims to double natural gas production by 2032. Doerkson did not walk it back. He said you cannot wait eight or ten years, and you also cannot ignore the work today and hope 2032 arrives by itself. The date is a destination. The digging starts now or the date is a poster.
Read that as an investor, not as a cheer. “Ready to go” is a politician’s memory of a lineup. It is not a final investment decision, a pipe size, or a signed offtake. One project did get built, which means the province is not incapable of finishing a hard thing. It means the other four did not clear a gate that one of them cleared. The spread between those outcomes is the risk. A promise to double output by 2032 is a target sitting on top of a record of one-for-five. Targets do not service debt. Molecules do, if they ship.
He paired gas with the forest. Mills and logging are not a side note in the Cariboo. They are the paycheques in the towns he described. A province that loses the forest industry and then wonders why income tax disappoints has confused a resource base with a grant program. Getting forestry “going” is as vague, on this tape, as getting LNG “into a better place.” Vague is allowed in a campaign interview. It is not allowed in a model. The investor’s job is to ask which tenure, which mill, which power line, and which cut level. The interview did not answer those. It told you the leader thinks the answer is more activity, not another bracket.
One hundred and twenty days is a condition, not a wand
The host asked about a 120-day permitting act. He said the real process is not 120 days. It is more like six years. Doerkson did not pretend a stamp appears on day 121 for anyone who asks. He said the companies he is talking about already do a great deal of work before they apply. They have better relationships on the land. His test has parts. Do the research. Make the relationships with First Nations and with the other people who share that landscape. Meet the environmental standard. Put forward a plan the people in the immediate area will walk forward with. Then, he said, the government should get the heck out of the way.
That is a narrower promise than the headline “120 days.” It is a promise to stop adding years after the hard agreements are already made. It is not a promise to skip those agreements. A mine, a pipeline, or a plant that shows up without the local work does not get a shorter clock under the words he used. It gets the same mess he called, in the housing part of the hour, an absolute chaotic permitting system. He had just heard a builder who was not waiting on a municipal stamp. He was waiting on provincial permits, including a well. Doerkson said the chaos hits industry as well as houses. The same desk that cannot clear a well is the desk a mine has to cross.
He also said a Conservative government, if elected, would host a business summit in Vancouver and invite the world back. The agenda he named was regulatory challenges, land, relationships with First Nations, and other tenure holders. A summit is a room. A permit is a document. Investors have attended a generation of rooms. The test next year, if he is in office, is whether a complete application that already has its agreements moves in 120 days, or whether 120 days becomes the new name for the start of the old wait. He said the province has no choice but to do things differently, because eight or ten years is no longer affordable. The interest chart is why he is right about the cost of waiting. The chart does not, by itself, make the new clock true.
The condo tax is the same reflex
The host’s housing charts were bleak, and they rhyme with the resource story. New condo sales in Metro Vancouver, he said, fell from about 19,000 in 2021 to about 1,000. Completed and unsold units, the figure he said Eby has quoted, are about 5,000. Units under construction and unsold are about 8,000. The policy response he described is a 2 percent tax on unsold condos. Ninety days earlier there had been talk of a bailout the host did not like either. The swing, in one season, was from help to a penalty.
Doerkson said no investment company on earth builds 8,000 condos in order to sit on them. Developers he has talked to are desperate to move the product. A tax on the unsold unit does not make it cheaper for the buyer. It adds a bill to a seller who is already paying interest, strata, and property tax in a soft market. He floated, without detail, some relief on the property purchase tax to get transactions moving. He did not defend a bailout. He defended the obvious point. You do not heal a market that cannot clear by taxing the inventory that will not clear.
Construction, the host said, is about eight or nine percent of the provincial economy. When the buildings that are underway finish, and the next ones do not start, that workforce needs another job. Doerkson’s north does not have the Site C and pipeline camps it had. The south does not have the pre-sales it had. Two labour pools, one slow province. A government that answers both with a new tax is raising money from the stall. It is not ending the stall. The investor who owns a Vancouver developer and the investor who owns a B.C. explorer are watching the same habit. When activity disappoints, the treasury reaches for a levy. The levy then becomes one more reason the next project waits.
What the interest actually buys
Doerkson looked at the rising interest line and compared it to a household credit card. There is a point where you pay it down or you take drastic measures. He thinks the province is there, and in worse shape than a household, because the business sector is off at the same time. A household with a big card and a job can still grind. A province with a big card and a quiet mill cannot tax its way to the payment without shrinking the thing it is taxing. That is the loop. Weak business, weak revenue, higher tax, weaker business. He wants to break it on the revenue side by building, not on the rate side by taking more from the people who are still earning.
The host’s hospital comparison is the right scale even after the daily figure is cleaned up. Billions in interest are billions that do not hire a nurse, pave a road, or clear a permit file. They rent the past. Every year the deficit stays at this altitude, the rent goes up, which is what the path from $6.5 billion to $8.7 billion is describing. Doerkson did not table a line-by-line plan, on this hour, that shows LNG and forestry closing a $13.8 billion gap by a named year. He said the alternative, more brackets, has already been tried and people are done. An investor should treat that as a direction, not as a forecast that the books balance. Directions do not have coupons. Interest does.
He was also plain that some spending goes up before any new royalty arrives. More police. Recruiting through the Justice Institute. Treatment and housing for addiction, because he does not believe the answer to drug addiction is free drugs. Security in hospitals. He said the downstream cost of disorder is almost impossible to count. Shops that cannot get insurance. An anchor tenant pulling out. Nurses who do not feel safe. Those costs are real, and they are not a mine. A platform that cuts taxes, hires police, treats addiction, and still talks about front-line services has to get the resource revenue. If the revenue is late, the deficit is the residual. He did not, on this tape, show the residual getting to zero. Honesty is noticing that.
A microcosm, if you can stand the word
The host called B.C. a microcosm of Canada. Resources that need the neighbour. Housing that needs an income the tax code then punishes. Crime and drugs. A revenue problem that is really a building problem. Doerkson did not give a lecture on Ottawa. The rhyme is still there. A country that cannot permit a pipeline, a plant, or a pit on a human schedule will meet the same interest line, at a larger size. The Massey decision and the LNG lineup are provincial versions of a national habit. Study it again. Split the difference. Arrive after the cost has doubled. Then announce a summit.
The rest of the episode wandered, as this show does, into Quebec’s election, French bonds, and a Canadian dollar the panel had sitting near 70 cents. Keith Dicker’s point, stripped of the jokes, was that fiscal policy, social strain, and debt are colliding in more than one capital, and that governments rarely look in the mirror. That collision is the weather. It is not a reason to blur the B.C. numbers into a theory of everything. The investable object on this tape is a province with a named deficit, a named interest path, a named permitting promise, and a named failure to build four out of five gas projects. France can wait. The B.C. file is already thick enough.
What an investor can underwrite, and what they cannot
You cannot underwrite “business feeling better.” You can underwrite a project that already has its Indigenous agreements, its environmental work, and a product the market will take. Under Doerkson’s own test, that project is the one the 120-day clock is supposed to serve. If he wins and the clock is real, the value shows up as fewer years of carry, not as a slogan on a lawn sign. Years of carry are where mines go to die. A pit that waits eight years burns the same treasury, in salaries and concessions, that a tunnel burns in concrete. Shortening that wait is worth money. Pretending it has already been shortened is how people overpay in the week after an election.
You cannot underwrite a doubling of gas by 2032 as if it were reserves. Doubling means wells, plants, pipes, power, ships, and customers. One of the old projects got through. The others did not. A buyer of a gas producer, a pipe, or a service company in this province should ask which of those missing four is actually alive, and whether its problem was politics or geology or price. Politics can change on October 24. Geology will not. Price will not, just because Victoria hosts a summit. A change of government is a change in the odds of a permit. It is not a change in the rock.
You cannot underwrite the forest from a sentence about getting it going. You can ask whether the tenure is real, whether the mill has logs, and whether the power and the road still exist. The Cariboo towns Doerkson described do not need a narrative. They need shifts. A junior miner with claims in that country is not a substitute for a mill, and a mill is not a substitute for a mine. They share a permitting culture and a labour pool. They do not share a cash flow. Do not buy one because the leader was kind about the other.
You also cannot ignore the debt path if you own anything that depends on the province as a partner. Power contracts, roads, tax stability, and the willingness to leave a signed deal signed all get harder when interest is marching from $6.5 billion toward $8.7 billion. A government that feels poor reaches for retroactive conditions. The condo tax is a small, fresh example. The PST pause is another. Doerkson thinks that pause does not hold. A project model that assumes today’s tax and today’s royalty for ten years, in a province adding brackets to fund a record deficit, is a model that has not read the news. Stress the fiscal terms. The rock is not the only thing that moves.
What would make this reading wrong
The reading is wrong, on the politics, if the election produces a government that really does leave signed projects alone and really does move complete files in something like 120 days. Not a summit. A file, with a date stamp, that a company can show its lenders. If that happens, the carry-time in a B.C. model should come down, and the people who demanded proof before they believed it will have been slow. Slow is allowed. Early faith is not a substitute for the stamp.
The reading is wrong, on the money, if LNG, forestry, and the rest of the resource base produce provincial revenue fast enough to bend the interest line without a new bracket. Doerkson is betting on that sequence. He did not price it on this hour. If royalties and income taxes from new work show up in the estimates before the interest line hits $8.7 billion, the loop breaks the way he said it could. Count the dollars. Do not count the press conferences.
The reading is wrong, on the diagnosis, if the business stall is mostly price and demand, not permits and tax. A forest can be quiet because the customer is quiet. A condo can sit because the buyer cannot borrow. A gas plant can wait because the offtake price moved. In that world, getting government “out of the way” is necessary and not sufficient. Doerkson’s tape puts the weight on policy. A honest investor puts some weight on the commodity. Both can be true. A mine delayed by Victoria and a mine delayed by a weak metal are different trades. This interview is about the first. It does not repeal the second.
What to check before you resize a B.C. position
Between now and the first budget of whoever wins, a holder of a B.C. developer, a gas producer, a forest company, or a mine does not need a new theory. They need five documents.
The first is the interest line itself. If the next update still climbs from the $6.5 billion estimate toward $8.7 billion, the province is poorer than the campaign admits, no matter who gives the speech. A leader who says growth will pay the bill has to show growth arriving faster than the coupon. Until that crossing happens, every resource story in this province is a story told in front of a rising rent.
The second is a permit file with dates. Not a promise of 120 days. An application number, a completeness letter, and a decision. Doerkson’s test was research done, First Nations engaged, neighbours willing, environment met, then the government steps aside. A company that claims the new era has started should be able to show those steps, and then show a clock that is actually shorter than the six to ten years both men described. If the first “fast” file still takes three years, the act was a rename.
The third is the tax list. He said no new taxes and no increases. He also said the odds are incredibly high that the paused sales-tax expansion returns if the current government stays. Write both down. After the vote, count the measures. A bracket at $190,000, a freeze on indexation, a 2 percent charge on unsold homes, a sales tax that was paused for the writ and then revived. Each one is a small decision. Together they are the method he called continuous taxation. A model that ignores the list will be surprised by a cash flow that was never just about the commodity.
The fourth is the northern workforce he said is done. Pipelines, LNG, Site C. Camps end. The people go somewhere. If the next wave is real, you will see it in contracts, module yards, and drilling, not in a summit invitation. If you do not see it by the time the 2032 doubling is supposed to be underway, the one-for-five record has become one-for-six. Count projects that ship. Do not count projects that are “on the books.”
The fifth is the forest, because he put it beside gas and meant it. Mills that restart, or tenure that is pulled back into the cut, will show up in shifts and in stumpage. A speech about getting forestry going, followed by another season of curtailments, is the diagnosis without the cure. Towns in the Cariboo cannot spend a diagnosis.
None of the five is a price target. They are how you tell a change in government from a change in the asset. Plenty of B.C. stocks will move on October 24 because the sign changed. The ones that hold the move will be the ones that can put a document next to the sign. Interest does not trade on signs. It compounds.
There is a sixth check, and it sits on the other side of the ledger he described. He said every investment has a cost and a revenue, and that disorder already sends a bill the province can barely count. Break-ins. Insurance that will not renew. A hospital that needs security before it needs another wing. Those bills come due whether or not a gas plant ships. If the next government hires the police and funds the treatment he promised, and the resource revenue is still a 2032 story, the deficit is the plug. Watch the spending votes against the royalty estimates in the same budget. A resource boom that is entirely in the outer years, paired with new spending in year one, is how a record deficit becomes next year’s record. The order of the cash is the whole argument. He wants revenue first. The calendar of politics usually spends first.
Hold the position size to that order. A B.C. explorer that needs a financing in the next year is not leveraged to a 2032 gas target. It is leveraged to whether anyone will still write a cheque while interest is the lead story and permits are still a fight. A producer that already ships is leveraged to the metal and to whether the fiscal terms stay put. A pipeline or a plant that was one of the four that did not get built is leveraged to whether this vote actually changes a file. Three different bets. The interview invites people to treat them as one recovery. They are not. If you cannot say which of the three you own, you do not have a view on Doerkson. You have a mood about Victoria. Moods fade by the first budget. Documents do not. Price the file, or do not price the province at all. The difference is the return.
The idea, once
Lorne Doerkson told the Looney Hour that British Columbia’s record $13.8 billion deficit is what you get when business is pushed off and taxes are piled on. The host’s chart put interest at $6.5 billion in the 2026 estimates and $8.7 billion by 2029. The Massey project, in the host’s telling, went from a $3.5 billion eight-lane bridge to an $8.5 billion six-lane tunnel. Doerkson said four or five LNG projects were ready and only one was built, and that a northern workforce of 20,000 to 30,000 is done. He offered no new taxes, a 120-day clock for projects that have already done the work with First Nations and their neighbours, a doubling of natural gas output by 2032, and a summit to invite capital back. He did not show a ledger in which those promises retire a deficit of this size on a dated schedule.
The interest bill is the fact. The permit is still a promise. Investors should underwrite the project that can clear the gate he described, and they should assume the bill keeps compounding until that project ships. A new tax bracket does not pour concrete. A lawn sign does not either.
A note on sources and limits
The deficit figure, the tax count, the LNG history, the northern workforce, the 120-day conditions, the no-new-taxes line, the Massey reaction, the condo remarks, and the summit are from Doerkson’s appearance on the Looney Hour, as interviewed by Steve, with Keith Dicker and Richard Diaz. The interest chart, the hospital comparison, the National Bank housing incomes, the Massey cost history, the unsold-condo counts, and the construction share of GDP are the host’s, and they are attributed that way. The daily interest figure is restated here so that $24 million a day matches about $8.7 billion a year, not the $6.5 billion current estimate. Public reports around the same campaign confirm Doerkson as Conservative leader after Kerry-Lynne Findlay’s resignation, a snap election set for October 24, 2026, and a platform aim to double natural gas production by 2032. They are used only to fix names and the date. They are not a second interview.
Nothing here is investment advice, a solicitation, or an endorsement of any party or candidate. Election platforms change. Permits slip. Commodity prices move. A deficit can widen under any government that spends the revenue before it arrives. Readers should read the primary filings, the budget, and the project documents, and should speak with a licensed adviser before any decision.