Real investment in health, education would pay off over the long term
KAMLOOPS — Suppose, just for a moment, that BC decided to hire and pay a salary to doctors willing to locate to communities outside of the Lower Mainland. For sake of argument, let’s say we committed to pay 200 doctors, $150,000 a year to set up practice in the Interior. Add in another 25 per cent for benefits and the total annual cost to we, the taxpayer, would be $37,500,000 a year.
Apart from health, education is another vital part of our community as it creates future wealth by training the next generation of workers.
In Newfoundland and Labrador they have lowered tuition and made the provincial portion of any student loan a non-repayable grant. What if we did a hybrid version of that and simply contributed, in the form of a non-repayable grant, $2,000 towards tuition?
According to Stats Canada, there were 112,000 full-time university students registered in BC last year, so it would cost the taxpayer a whopping $224,000,000 per year and that would be crazy wouldn’t it?