BC Liberals hide shameful record of failure

This year’s BC Progress Board report contains the usual prerequisite good news that the Liberals can point to as showing that they have indeed been doing things in the past eight years other than lining their pockets full of taxpayer dollars, but there are some numbers within the report that need to be discussed, particularly because of how badly they reflect on our province and how the future is looking less promising for our youths instead of more promising.
British Columbia currently has a very high ranking among the provinces of Canada for people under LICO after taxes. By comparison to the rest of Canada, British Columbia has the highest percentage of families under the Low Income Cut Off after taxes, with the rate approaching twenty percent in major urban areas. This level of poverty comes as average wages are the third best in the province, demonstrating that the average is almost entirely based on increases in the top earners’ salaries and not on a benefit to those people who need the money the most in society. This level of poverty is unlikely to improve, as British Columbia’s high school graduation rate is continuing to decline, this year reaching a new low of only 70.5% of high school seniors being projected to graduate from high school this year. Combined with statistics showing a mere 49% of aboriginal students graduating within six years at a secondary school, future generations appear to be saddled with an increasing risk of falling into poverty, as the board itself notes in its reasoning for tracking high school graduation rates. What is most disturbing about this statistic is that, as with most other areas of development in British Columbia, it is rural BC that loses out and has the lowest graduation rates, excepting Victoria, which appears to be an anomaly among urban centers in the province. Poor education scores in rural British Columbia are not limited to secondary school graduation rates. This same study has shown that citizens in rural BC are less than half as likely to obtain a post-secondary degree as their urban counterparts.
The rural to urban divide continues in other areas of BC development. Life expectancy continues to be an issue for rural British Columbia, with life expectancies almost two years lower in rural BC as compared to urban areas. Rural British Columbia is also failing to produce as many new businesses as the urban areas, with the per capita rate in rural BC being less than fifty percent the rate for Vancouver and other urban areas in the province.
Of course, there are a few places where the urban and rural parts of the province are being failed equally badly by the BC Liberals. Our children are being failed by the government right from the moment they are born, with a greater percentage of live births being underweight than ever before. This can only come from the fact that there is less primary care available to mothers during their pregnancy period, no doubt a side effect of the Liberals’ cuts to health care funding. Personal and property crimes are also well above the national average and have not been improving either. Vancouver, as a city, was ranked sixteenth among seventeen large urban centers for crime, and the rest of the province does no better, being ranked as the second worst province for personal and property crimes. A very small solace can be taken for urban British Columbians; whatever crime they have is much worse in rural BC, with personal and property crimes being sixty percent more likely to occur in rural BC than in urban British Columbia.
The statistics here were taken from the Government’s BC Progress Council.