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The Business Council of British Columbia (BCBC) submitted to the province in July two-dozen recommendations aimed at spurring economic growth during the pandemic.
The ideas included reducing the provincial sales tax (PST) to help households and small retailers, ramping up infrastructure spending for ready-to-go projects, such as the SkyTrain extension to UBC, and reworking municipal structures to expedite permitting.
Greg D'Avignon, BCBC's CEO, said he is pleased that the government took some of his advice, and that he is encouraged by some of the short-term actions announced today, but he said the plan lacks longer-term, non-monetary strategies, such as cutting red tape, which is needed for a strong future recovery.
“There’s no talk about the non-monetary things they could be doing … around how do we get the big GDP drivers in the economy up and running," he said.
What is needed, D'Avignon added, is “to unshackle the balance sheets of the private sector and create investment certainty and regulatory efficiency going forward.”
