British Columbia’s government has rejected a last-ditch effort to save a longstanding program of tax breaks that was meant to create jobs and attract businesses to the western Canadian province but was widely criticized for failing to do so.

The International Business Activity Program, created in 1988 and expanded several times, operated under an unusual cloak of secrecy compared with similar efforts in Canada and the United States.

In May, an article by The New York Times found that the province had doled out more than 140 million Canadian dollars, about $109 million, in tax refunds to companies since 2008. But the province would not identify the names of the participating companies, or the amount of money each had received through the tax breaks.

At that time, more than 80 companies participated in the program, according to the Ministry of Finance, which ran it.