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B.C.’s economic plan represents an eight per cent boost to the $60-billion B.C. budget tabled in February, and is worth about two per cent of B.C.’s gross domestic product, said Horgan.
Though welcome by B.C.’s business sector, it won’t come close to mitigating the damage caused by widespread business closures, job losses, travel bans and the collapse of the tourism sector, said Jock Finlayson, executive vice-president of the B.C. Business Council.
“We are basically engineering the steepest recession in B.C.’s history as part of our public health strategy, we need to understand that’s what’s going on,” Finlayson told Postmedia News.
“We estimate under two different sort of scenarios that on an annual average basis real GDP in British Columbia in 2020 will shrink by 7-12 per cent, which is totally unprecedented.”
