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“It won’t matter for them, but it will matter for small businesses that don’t pay this as a benefit already. This is a net new cost to them.”

In fairness to James, she did say during the election that an NDP government would phase out MSP and find new revenue sources to pay for health care.

“We’re going to be looking at everything,” she said, though you can’t blame blindsided employers for feeling like she didn’t look very far.

Here’s the risk for the new government: In their quest to make life more affordable for working people, they could trigger unintended consequences.

“When you hit the small-business community with an additional payroll tax, there’s only two things they can do: Hire fewer people or don’t give raises to the existing ones they have,” Black said.

That didn’t seem to worry James, as she laid out a three-year budget plan predicting steady economic growth through 2021.

But while the budget hyped lots of new spending on social programs (especially child care and housing) and lots of new taxes to pay for it, there was a glaring lack of attention on the province’s foundational industries.

James delivered a budget presentation at the Victoria Conference Centre, and then a budget speech in the legislature, that completely ignored forestry, mining, oil-and-gas development, fishing, aquaculture and energy generation.

There was not even a single mention of any of these lifeblood B.C. industries. Not one. That’s pretty shocking.

By focusing solely on social spending and raising taxes, the NDP runs the risk of further alienating the rural north, interior and coast of B.C., where unfairly snubbed resource industries make the lavish spending possible.

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