Image Credit: BC Wildfire Service / Two Mile Road wildfire / July 20/21

By Greg Kyllo, MLA for Shuswap

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SOUND OFF: Small businesses survive pandemic, only to face wildfire woes

Aug 5, 2021 | 9:49 AM

This summer isn’t shaping up the way we expected. As more and more people got their COVID-19 vaccines and health restrictions started to ease, I know a lot of us — myself included — were looking forward to a fun summer of making memories with family and friends we’ve missed over the past year. My riding of Shuswap provides the perfect outdoor playground to do just that.

But then came the wildfires. Whether it’s the Two Mile Road wildfire near my home community of Sicamous, the Hunakwa Lake fire near Seymour Arm, the Three Valley Lake blaze between Malakwa and Revelstoke, the Bunting Road fire at Mabel Lake, the Crazy Creek Gorge fire near Malakwa, or the White Rock Lake fire near Falkland, people remain on edge because of evacuation orders and alerts. Just recently we saw the North Okanagan Regional District and the Okanagan Indian Band issue evacuation orders for dozens of properties in the region.

We’re also having to contend with a lot of smoke, which not only makes the outdoors unpleasant but poses a health risk to everyone — especially those with pre-existing health conditions or respiratory infections, those who are pregnant, and older adults as well as infants and young children.

Another group struggling with post-pandemic and present-day wildfire stress are our business owners. They too were looking forward to a summer where they could welcome visitors once again, and regain their financial footing after a difficult year and a half. Now they’re facing a second summer of reduced customer numbers and dwindling revenues.

It’s going to take a massive effort to lift them — and our provincial economy — out of the hole. Unfortunately, John Horgan and the NDP don’t seem to have any sort of plan in place to do that.

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The latest evidence is in the 2020/21 Public Accounts, which show that the provincial deficit sits at $5.5 billion. Taxpayer-supported provincial debt has increased by $13.5 billion in 2020/21, with total provincial debt now at $87 billion. What does that mean to you? Well, it works out to $16,919 in debt for every British Columbian.

While our Official Opposition backed the government in providing support to British Columbians during these challenging times, we also repeatedly called for a clear plan to rebuild the economy. Yet John Horgan and the NDP have refused to come up with any sort of roadmap to ensure there are jobs in every corner of our province.

Instead, what we continue to see from Statistics Canada’s monthly jobs numbers is an NDP government focused on public-sector job gains, which we know are unsustainable. The NDP has added 104,000 public sector jobs since 2017, at a cost of $10 billion per year.

Meanwhile, private-sector jobs continue to fall, with the NDP continuing to botch support programs that are supposed to be helping business owners. Without a proper plan in place, we can only expect to see more businesses — and the jobs they create— fall by the wayside.

The grim reality is that more than half of British Columbians are within $200 of insolvency and many businesses are still in survival mode. With two more months of wildfires and smoky skies ahead of us — bringing more financial suffering to our small businesses — there don’t appear to be many bright spots on the horizon.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.