By Cheryl Jahn

BC Budget

Budget has Northern and Rural impacts

Feb 18, 2026 | 4:30 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – The BC budget is being slammed from all corners as ” … delivering new tax hikes that will make life significantly more expensive,” while others cite “tax increases, historic deficits, and record debt.”

And Northerners and rural British Columbians get special consideration when it comes to the annual homeowners grant.

“So effective January 1, 2027, the provincial government is canceling the northern and rural homeowners grants,” explains Carson Binda, BC Director with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. “So this was a program that returned about $200 to homeowners outside Metro Vancouver, the Capital Regional District or the Fraser Valley to help offset some of government’s big carbon tax costs. Now, government claims that this rebate isn’t needed anymore because it canceled the consumer carbon tax. But take a look at the budget. Government is still charging British Columbians hundreds of millions of dollars per year in the carbon tax.”

“Even though it went through the homeowner grant, it was funded out of the carbon tax,” explains Marc Lee with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. “So when we cut the carbon tax, all of that money flowed back to households. And so that the money that that was going into government, that was, you know, providing an extra benefit for northern households was also eliminated.”

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The budget made specific reference to the recent signing of an memorandum of understanding for hydro’s expansion to the west coast. As was the recent announcement – also during the Natural Resources Forum – about the Mount Milligan project.

But Binda says, even that comes with some caution.

“We’re actually seeing a number of ways that this budget is going to make life harder for the resource sector moving forward by. So this budget has started, including on professional services,” says Binda. “That’s things like engineers, professional geologist, architects, exactly the type of people you need to get big resource projects on the road.”

Lee says, while resource extraction generates revenue for provincial coffers, it’s not what is once was.

“Back in the early 2000s, you know, we would get natural resource royalties that are equivalent to a 2 to 3% of our GDP, just like provincial government royalties. And these aren’t different from taxes. These are the return to the province, the owner of the resources for the development of those resources.”