Eby’s and Doerkson’s costed plans, side by side. On the deficit it’s close. On the backcountry, it isn’t.

David Eby’s BC NDP and the Conservative Party of BC, led on an interim basis by Lorne Doerkson, published their costed plans four days apart, on 14 and 18 October.^1,2 Each says something about your right to get onto public land, and they say it in very different ways.

For someone on a forest service road, those are two different promises. The NDP would protect 30 per cent of the province’s land by 2030 with Ottawa, and its costing has no line for keeping that land open to the people who use it. The Conservatives would write access into statute.^2,3 Neither plan funds the roads or the trails that get you there.⁴

When the BC Snowmobile Federation asked the parties where they stand, the Conservatives answered officially in support of “responsible backcountry access and opposing unnecessary resource road deactivations and bridge removals.” The BC NDP sent no official answer.⁵ And the money has its own story: the NDP’s biggest single new spending line in 2028/29, $420 million, is labelled “Measures To Be Announced.” First, the money.¹

01 On their own numbers, the plans stay within $1 billion a year. The Conservatives borrow $1.15 billion more over three years, and only they cost a fourth year, at $10.8 billion.

What this means: on each party’s own figures, the Conservative deficit is larger in 2027/28 and 2028/29, and it comes out ahead only in the year the NDP did not cost, or on the Conservatives’ own adjustments to the NDP’s numbers.

The two plans begin at the same place. Each takes the Ministry of Finance’s first-quarter forecast for this year, adjusted for the PST expansion the government paused in September, and builds from there. The NDP calls it the “Q1 Budget Balance adjusted for PST pause.” The Conservatives call it “the NDP’s own starting point.”^1,2

From that common line, the NDP adds about $1.3 billion a year of new spending by 2028/29 and pays for it with new revenue: a tax increase on the top 3.88 per cent of earners, higher housing taxes, and $730 million a year it books as “Targeted Economic Growth (Major Project FIDs).” The Conservatives cut income tax by about $2.9 billion a year, phase in $1.425 billion a year of new spending, and pay for it by holding back spending, chiefly the province’s contingency fund, and by counting on faster growth.^1,2

Here is where each party says the deficit lands. Tap the buttons to add the starting point both plans share, and the Conservatives’ own estimate of where the NDP plan would really land.

Read on each party’s own terms, the gap is small and it cuts both ways. The Conservative deficit is $63.4 million smaller this year. It is $882.4 million larger in 2027/28, when the full-year tax cut arrives, and $333.2 million larger in 2028/29. Over the three years both plans cost, the Conservatives would borrow about $1.15 billion more for operating deficits than the NDP says it would. The Conservative plan only pulls ahead in its fourth year, against its own extension of the NDP plan.^1,2

The Conservatives argue those NDP figures will not hold, and they name the line they doubt. “Major-project revenue that hasn’t arrived.” is the heading over the $345 million rising to $730 million a year that the NDP books from major projects without a method. Strip it out, allow for high earners moving income, and the Conservatives say their deficit is smaller in every year, by $481 million this year and $1.48 billion by 2029/30.² That is a fair question about the NDP plan. We asked it ourselves when the NDP costing came out.⁶

The same scepticism applies to the Conservatives’ own revenue. Their plan assumes real growth of 2.5, 2.8 and 3.2 per cent from 2027 to 2029, which it says brings in $2.62 billion over three years. The Canadian Press set those figures beside the Bank of Canada’s July forecast of 1.4 per cent in 2027 and 1.8 per cent in 2028.^2,7 Neither plan names a year when the budget balances. The Conservatives promise only this: “We will chart a realistic return to balance over time.” Neither publishes a debt forecast of its own.^1,2

02 Only the Conservative plan writes public access into law. Neither plan funds the roads or trails that get you there.

Here is what each plan commits to the backcountry, in its own words, with the page. Where a plan is silent we say so; each “not in the plan” is backed by an exact-text search of the document.⁴

The NDP’s 2024 platform promised to “Develop and improve access roads, trails and infrastructure.” Some of that was delivered. Forest service road maintenance rose to $16.5 million in 2025/26, its Forests minister told the legislature, and its Parks minister put $21.59 million over five years into the recreation site strategy.⁶ Then Budget 2026 cut the division that runs BC Parks and Recreation Sites and Trails by about 6 per cent, to $93.0 million. The Forests ministry closed the Walker road, the only B.C. road to Kakwa Park, on 22 July 2026, and 2024 was the most expensive year on record for contracts to remove forest roads; Rady Creek’s road went to tender for removal this fall.^6,8,9 The 2026 plan drops the promise altogether. In our view, that is a promise half kept and then abandoned.

Neither plan puts new money into roads, trails or recreation sites. The NDP’s plan does carry one very large line that could hold anything, because it does not say what it is for.¹

03 The NDP’s biggest spending line in 2028/29 has no name. $420 million, a third of its new money, is “Measures To Be Announced.”

The costing does not say what the $420 million is for.

The line is empty in 2026/27, $295 million in 2027/28 and $420 million in 2028/29: 27.7 per cent and then 33.3 per cent of everything new the NDP says it will spend. Its five-year capital list carries another $45 million under the same name, on p. 2. Neither page describes it.¹ In our view, a costed plan that leaves a third of its new spending unnamed is asking voters to sign a blank cheque.

The rest of the NDP’s new money goes first to health care: $348 million in 2028/29, against $293 million for the Conservatives, whose new spending phases in over four years and reaches $658 million that year. The Conservatives’ biggest line is seniors’ care, at $158 million on the way to $350 million.^1,2

04 The NDP raises taxes to spend more. The Conservatives cut taxes and hold spending back.

The biggest single number in either plan is the Conservatives’ contingency cut: $7 billion of the $11.7 billion in restraint over four years. The NDP calls that a cut to care. “Cutting contingencies is a backdoor health-care cut,” it said on Sunday.⁷ The Conservatives say they would move “moving the expected cost of wildfire and signed wage settlements into ministry base budgets.”² Which of those descriptions is right will depend on what a Conservative first budget actually puts in those base budgets, and the platform does not show it.

05 On forestry, the NDP brings more money and the Conservatives bring a harvest floor.

Both plans put money into mills. The NDP books a $120 million Forestry Jobs Protection Fund over two years, and $60 million a year for the BC Manufacturing Jobs Fund by 2028/29. The Conservatives extend the same Manufacturing Jobs Fund at $30 million a year at full cost, which is $14 million in 2028/29.^1,2

Where the Conservatives go further is the wood itself. “Permits will increase sustainable access to fibre with a floor of 45 million cubic metres.” They book the stumpage from it: $56 million, $118 million and $177 million on an extra 4, 8 and 12 million cubic metres.²

06 In their own words, the Conservatives promise restraint and the NDP promises no cuts to care.

07 Economists doubt the NDP’s tax revenue and the Conservatives’ tax cut. Neither plan is independently costed.

No economist or institute has yet published an independent costing of either document, and the Conservative plan is only hours old. What exists is comment on the headline measures, and it lands on both sides.^7,10

On the NDP plan, the doubt is about the top-bracket tax. Trevor Tombe, a University of Calgary economist, put its yield at about $700 million by 2027, against the $925 million to $1 billion a year the NDP books, before any change in behaviour.¹⁰ David Freeman, a Simon Fraser University economist, put it nearer $500 million: “Even if we do that, it barely puts a dent in the massive deficit the NDP are running.”¹¹ The Globe and Mail’s editorial board wrote that “economists have said the actual revenue will be lower, perhaps just one-quarter of the NDP’s projections.”¹² Marc Lee, an economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, defended the plan as a shift in who pays: “For households with income up to $150,000 to $160,000, you’re definitely better off in B.C. compared to any other province, including Alberta.”¹¹

On the Conservative plan, the doubt is about the size of the tax cut. Justin Wiltshire, a University of Victoria economist, said of it: “It would make an already bad deficit worse, increase the share of future tax revenue that goes to paying interest on the debt.” Lee said it “moves the deficit completely in the wrong direction.”¹³ The Globe said the PST exemption on business equipment “has merit as a pro-growth policy,” and then: “Bluntly speaking, B.C. cannot afford such a tax cut.”¹² Those comments came before the costing was published, so none of them weighs the $11.7 billion of restraint the Conservatives now set against the cut.

08 In our view, the Conservative plan serves the backcountry better. The fiscal case is closer.

In our view, neither plan settles the money question. On the parties’ own figures the NDP borrows a little less, and on the Conservatives’ figures the Conservatives do. The answer turns on which assumption you find harder to believe: $730 million a year from major projects with no method behind it, or growth well above the Bank of Canada’s forecast and a $2-billion-a-year cut to the contingency fund.^1,2,7

The backcountry question is not close. The NDP costing is silent on roads, trails, recreation and parks, after a 2024 platform that promised money for all of them, and its biggest new line in 2028/29 is $420 million it has not named. The Conservative plan does not fund them either, and that matters. But it is the only one of the two documents that promises, in writing, to guarantee British Columbians’ access to Crown land, parks and the backcountry in law, to put hunters and anglers at the table on wildlife, and to put the working forest back to work.^2,4,6 For people who live and work beyond the pavement, in our view that makes Lorne Doerkson’s plan the better of the two.

Both parties’ plans are linked below, so you can read them yourself. Our reading of the NDP costing is here, and our reading of the Conservative costing is here.^6,14

Go back to the two promises at the top. One would protect 30 per cent of the land with Ottawa and “preserve public access,” with no costed line behind either. The other would “guarantee public access to Crown land, beaches and backcountry” for all British Columbians, in law.^2,3

One plan says it will preserve public access. The other says it will guarantee it in law, and in our view that is the plan that serves the backcountry.

Advance voting runs from 16 to 21 October, and Final Voting Day is 24 October.¹⁵ Portraits: RoyalObserver, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Doerkson); BC NDP, CC BY 2.0 (Eby).¹⁶