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“You know Minister James to be prudent and she will be monitoring daily revenues in and expectations out,” said Horgan. “But at this point, we are going day-by-day. When we are still in fiscal year 2019-20, to talk about 2020-21, is premature.”

Should revenues fall well short of the pace of spending Horgan left no doubt that the New Democrats wouldn’t try to close the gap by cutting public services.

“I did not want to form a government just to balance the budget,” he said. “It was to deliver services for people and I said during the election campaign that our objective was to make sure that people had what they needed to prosper and thrive in B.C. and that remains unchanged.”

James did include some leeway in the budget as a hedge against a downturn in the economy. There’s about $1 billion in unallocated funding in the budget for the financial year starting April 1 and a further $1.5 billion or so still to be allocated in the year ending March 31.

All that and more could be used up in a serious downturn. During the 2008 credit crisis and recession, provincial revenues plummeted by about $2 billion — and that at a time when the total budget was about two-thirds the size of what it’s today.

The B.C. Liberal government of the day responded to the challenge by amending the province’s balanced budget law to allow it to go into deficit. They ran successive deficits totalling $5 billion over the next four years before bringing the budget back into the black.