For the first time in 151 years, British Columbia is getting smaller. Forty thousand people, on net, gone in a year. Fourteen percent of the country, forty percent of the decline. You can dress that up with federal immigration charts if you want. Families do not move on charts. They move because they cannot see how they stay. I have been saying this for years. I almost moved a business to Alberta myself, for the same reason thousands of people are looking at Alberta now. You can earn more, pay less tax, and still buy a house. That is not a mystery. That is a verdict. David Eby will blame Donald Trump. The economists on that program already took that excuse away. B.C.’s underperformance started years before any tariff. Costs up. Investment scared off. Public sector grown past what the books can carry. Private-sector jobs going the other way. That is homemade. The population number is the symptom. The disease is this: we used to attract working-age people. We do not anymore. Vancouver already loses people to the Okanagan and the Island because they cannot afford to live where they work. Alberta takes the ones who leave the province. Jock Finlayson said the group you cannot afford to lose is under forty. He is right. Lose them and you lose the next tax base, the next crew, the next small business. Housing is the proof. Starts falling off a cliff. Builders telling me they will work somewhere else because the red tape and the fees make the math impossible. Two hundred and thirty thousand construction jobs sit on that book, more than half of them residential, and that work is shrinking. You do not fix that with another press conference and a housing target nobody hits. And you do not fix it while you keep kicking the legs out from under the industries that actually pay for this place. Old-growth deferrals took the cut down. Permits that never come. Land title so uncertain that appraisers put disclaimers on the paperwork and capital looks at Washington state instead of here. You cannot tell people to stay in British Columbia and then make it illegal, or endless, to build anything that would give them a reason to stay. Ottawa inflated a temporary-resident bubble and then popped it. That is on Ottawa. What is on Victoria is this: when those people left, there was nothing underneath. The big projects were done. The government is broke. The next mines, mills, and export lines were never approved. So the province shrank. People are not abandoning B.C. because they stopped liking the mountains. They are voting with their feet because this government made it too expensive, too slow, and too uncertain to build a life here. That is the problem. That is the part that does not get fixed in 2028 if we keep doing the same thing.

81 days of documented ER closures so far this year. David Eby will tell you things are improving. They are not improving in Mission, where the hospital keeps shutting overnight. They are not improving in 100 Mile House, Merritt, or Lillooet. They are not improving in Fort St. James, where we built a new hospital and still cannot keep the emergency room open. If you need help in the middle of the night, too often there is no one there.