ICBA says the Conservative costing “looks reasonable.” Canada’s largest construction association calls Doerkson’s plan balanced.

On the morning of Monday, 19 October, five days before British Columbia’s Final Voting Day, the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association put out a short statement on its X account. The Conservatives had released their 71-page costed plan the afternoon before, and the statement came from the association’s chief economist, Jock Finlayson, one of the province’s best-known business economists.^1,2

He opened with a verdict on the numbers.

Jock FinlaysonChief economist, Independent Contractors and Businesses Association (ICBA)

“The costed Conservative platform looks reasonable. It is a balanced plan, recognizing that there is much that affects the B.C. economy which is beyond the government’s control.”

Coming from the economist for B.C.’s independent contractors, that is an endorsement worth having. Builders depend on governments whose numbers hold, and Finlayson’s judgment is that Lorne Doerkson’s numbers do. In our view his statement deserves to be read in full, and then set against the plan’s own tables.

01 Jock Finlayson spent nearly three decades at the Business Council of B.C. Today he speaks for ICBA, a contractors’ association with a stake in who governs.

Finlayson became ICBA’s chief economist in October 2023, the first in the association’s 50-year history. Before that he was executive vice-president and chief policy officer of the Business Council of British Columbia, which speaks for the province’s largest employers. He sat on the Bank of Canada’s board of directors from 2007 to 2013, and he is a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute.³

ICBA was founded in Trail in 1975 by 169 open-shop contractors who had been shut out of bidding on public projects because they did not belong to a building-trades union. It now calls itself “Canada’s largest construction association,” with more than 6,000 members and clients, and it says it has “stood up against closed-shop policies” such as the B.C. NDP government’s Community Benefits Agreements.⁴

That makes ICBA an interested party. Its members bid on the public construction a provincial budget pays for, and it has fought the current government’s rules for that work. None of that makes Finlayson wrong, but readers should know who is speaking, as they would if the verdict came from a building-trades union.

02 ICBA posted the statement on X, not as a news release. Here is the whole of it, word for word.

The post went up at 11:24 a.m. on 19 October, and it does not appear among the posts on ICBA’s website blog for 17 to 20 October. When we read it on 20 October it had been viewed about 17,000 times.¹

ICBA@icbabc · on X · 19 Oct 2026, 11:24 a.m. PDT

A statement by ICBA Chief Economist Jock Finlayson on the 2026 Conservative Party of B.C. platform and costing:

“The costed Conservative platform looks reasonable. It is a balanced plan, recognizing that there is much that affects the B.C. economy which is beyond the government’s control.

“The Conservatives intend to take a gradualist approach to deficit reduction, which makes sense given the depth of the fiscal hole Premier Eby has dug and the fragile state of the economy. An important element of fiscal strategy under a new government will be kick-starting the private sector, which has been languishing over the past several years while the broad public sector has continued to expand. The private sector accounts for at least three quarters of all economic activity – including employment – in British Columbia; it also provides the exports and drives the innovation on which living standards partly depend. Under the NDP, the priority has been increasing the size and reach of the public sector, even as large parts of the business community have been struggling or in outright decline.

“A healthier business climate and a stronger private sector economy will help to address B.C.’s difficult fiscal situation by bolstering economic growth and expanding the tax base.”

Three claims carry the statement. The plan is reasonable and balanced, its deficit reduction is gradual by design, and a stronger private sector will help pay for it. The plan’s own tables let us check each one.

03 Finlayson calls the deficit plan gradualist. The plan’s own table runs from $13.7 billion to $10.8 billion, with no year of balance.

Finlayson is right about the pace, and he offers it as a virtue: a gradual approach, he says, “makes sense given the depth of the fiscal hole Premier Eby has dug and the fragile state of the economy.” Table B4 of the plan shows what gradual means. The deficit is $13.7 billion this year, $13.5 billion next year, $12.3 billion in 2028/29 and $10.8 billion in 2029/30, about $2.9 billion lower after four years.^1,2

Operating deficit, $ billions. Conservative: Table B4, p.70. NDP: its own costing, which stops at 2028/29.^2,5

Finlayson’s word “balanced” describes the plan’s approach, not its books. The budget does not balance in any of the four years, and the plan promises only to “chart a realistic return to balance over time.” Its anchor is that “The deficit falls every year after our first budget, adjusted for inflation.”²

In 2027/28 and 2028/29 the Conservative deficits are larger than the ones the NDP costed for itself, by $882 million and $333 million. The Conservatives answer that the NDP’s deficits would land higher, because they count $730 million a year of major-project revenue that has not yet arrived.^2,5

04 Finlayson says a Conservative government would kick-start the private sector. The plan counts on growth well above the budget’s forecast and the Bank of Canada’s.

Finlayson’s case is that a stronger private sector will “help to address B.C.’s difficult fiscal situation by bolstering economic growth and expanding the tax base.” The plan puts numbers on that hope. It assumes real growth of 2.5, 2.8 and 3.2 per cent from 2027 to 2029, against 1.9, 2.1 and 2.1 per cent in the budget forecast it starts from, and it books $2.6 billion of extra revenue from that growth over three years.^1,2

Conservative plan, p.55; the Bank of Canada’s July forecast as reported by The Canadian Press. The Bank does not forecast B.C. alone.^2,6

Lorne Doerkson, the Conservatives’ interim leader, called 3.2 per cent growth “absolutely doable” on 19 October. “I’ve talked to so many industries that are just waiting for a change in government to invest in this province,” he said in Maple Ridge.⁷

Hickey’s objection is to the growth, and it echoes a line in Finlayson’s own statement. Finlayson grants that there is “much that affects the B.C. economy which is beyond the government’s control.” Hickey goes further: growth “depends more on what’s happening with the global economy than who our premier is.” He was no kinder to the NDP, whose projections he called “equally silly.”^1,7

05 Finlayson’s statement does not mention the plan’s biggest saving. The plan cuts the contingency fund by $2 billion a year.

The plan’s spending restraint comes to $11.7 billion over four years, and $7 billion of it, about 60 per cent, comes from cutting the Contingencies vote from $5 billion to $3 billion a year. The plan says it would do that by “moving the expected cost of wildfire and signed wage settlements into ministry base budgets.”²

The Canadian Press reported that the Conservatives have not said whether and how the ministries would balance their books as a result. The BC NDP says “Cutting contingencies is a backdoor health-care cut,” and Doerkson says a Conservative government would “fully fund health care.”^6,7

Finlayson’s statement is about growth and the size of government, and it says nothing about this line. In our view it is the line that most decides whether the deficit falls the way Table B4 says it will.

06 Finlayson’s claims, set against the plan’s own numbers. The plan is gradual and costed, but it does not balance the books.

Set side by side, the statement and the tables agree more than they disagree. Finlayson describes the plan’s direction accurately; what his statement leaves out is how far it has to go and what it gives up on the way.

What Jock Finlayson said	What the plan’s own numbers show
“The costed Conservative platform looks reasonable.”	It is costed line by line, with four fiscal anchors, the first of which is a deficit that falls every year after the first budget (p.59). Ross Hickey of UBC Okanagan called it “a little bit thin on the details.”
“It is a balanced plan”	The budget does not balance in any year. The deficit is $10.8 billion in 2029/30, and the plan names no year of balance (pp.9, 70).
“a gradualist approach to deficit reduction”	$13.7 billion, then $13.5 billion, $12.3 billion and $10.8 billion. That is larger than the NDP’s own costed deficits in 2027/28 and 2028/29 (Table B4, p.70).
“kick-starting the private sector”	Growth of 2.5, 2.8 and 3.2 per cent, against 1.9, 2.1 and 2.1 in the budget forecast, worth $2.6 billion of revenue over three years (p.55).
Not addressed in his statement	$7 billion of the $11.7 billion in restraint comes from cutting the contingency fund from $5 billion to $3 billion a year (Table B3, p.67).
Not addressed in his statement	A $1,000 income-tax cut, by raising the basic personal amount, at $2.9 billion a year from 2027/28 (Table B2, p.66).

Words are quoted from ICBA’s post; page numbers are the Conservative plan’s.^1,2

07 The Globe and Mail backed part of the Conservative tax agenda before the costing came out. It said the income-tax cut was the part B.C. cannot afford.

The Globe and Mail’s editorial board wrote on 16 October, two days before the costing, that the Conservatives’ proposal to cut PST on machinery, equipment and business software “has merit as a pro-growth policy,” which is close to Finlayson’s argument. On the much larger income-tax cut it was blunt: “Bluntly speaking, B.C. cannot afford such a tax cut, at least not without spending reductions that not only offset its cost but shrink the existing deficit.”⁸

The costing answers that challenge in its own way. It pays for the $2.9 billion-a-year tax cut mainly with the contingency cut and with growth, and it counts on both. Finlayson’s statement backs the growth; it does not take up the rest.^1,2

08 In our view, the builders’ endorsement matters. The plan still needs a budget line for the backcountry roads its growth depends on.

Finlayson’s endorsement matters because it comes from the people who build things. A plan that leans on a bigger timber harvest, more mining and more tourism leans on roads into the backcountry, and the economist for B.C.’s contractors says its numbers are reasonable. We think he is right that a gradual path is better than a sudden one.

But the same costing has no line for forest service roads, for Recreation Sites and Trails or for Target 8, the province’s own goal for “high-value recreation access and resource roads.” ^9,10 By our estimate a road-and-recreation line would cost about $29.6 million a year, roughly 1.5 per cent of the $2 billion a year the plan takes out of the contingency fund. We set out that arithmetic in our reading of the Conservative costing, and we compare both parties’ costings in our side-by-side of the two plans.^9,11

B.C.’s builders call it a balanced plan. It still needs a budget line for the roads and trails.

09 Finlayson gave his verdict on a Monday morning. Voters have until Saturday to reach their own.

The two tables that matter are short: the deficit path on page 70 and the growth assumptions on page 55. Read them, then ask your Conservative candidate two questions. In what year would the budget balance, and where is the line for the forest service roads and trails?

Advance voting is scheduled to run until 21 October, and Final Voting Day is 24 October.¹²