Vancouver’s 2026 Budget Is a Replay of Gordon Campbell’s 2001 Cuts — And We’ve Seen This Movie Before
When Vancouver City Council passed its 2026 budget — freezing property taxes while adding another $50 million to the police budget — something about it felt eerily familiar. For anyone who lived through the early 2000s in British Columbia, the déjà vu is unmistakable.
This isn’t new.
This isn’t bold.
This isn’t “Zero Means Zero.”
This is Gordon Campbell 2.0.
Austerity Disguised as “Smart Management”
In 2001, Gordon Campbell swept into power promising tax cuts. And he delivered — but those cuts came at a devastating cost:
- Thousands of job losses
- Entire ministries dismantled
- Deep reductions to social services
- Cuts to women’s centres, mental health, housing, legal aid, environmental protection
- Vulnerable people pushed into even deeper poverty
He called it “efficiency.”
He called it “fiscal discipline.”
But British Columbians lived through the human cost of those choices.
Fast forward to 2026, and Vancouver is being told the same story.
Ken Sim’s Budget: A Familiar Pattern
The new Vancouver budget freezes property taxes — a political promise kept, but at the expense of the services that make a city livable. To balance the books, the City must cut more than $120 million across departments. Those cuts land exactly where they always do:
- Arts & Culture – cut
- Planning, Urban Design & Sustainability – cut
- Community Services – cut
- Infrastructure & facilities maintenance – cut
- Environmental and climate programs – cut
- Up to 400 city workers – gone
And yet, the Vancouver Police Department receives an additional $50 million.
It is a near-perfect repeat of the 2001 strategy:
defund community supports → expand policing.
Respond to social problems through enforcement, not prevention.
Who Pays the Price?
The same people who paid the price in 2001:
- Renters
- Poor and low-income residents
- Seniors
- Disabled people
- People on social assistance
- Indigenous communities
- Youth who rely on arts, culture, and community programs
- Workers who lose their jobs to “efficiencies”
When sustainability programs get cut, we lose our future.
When planning gets cut, housing becomes even more chaotic.
When community services lose funding, people fall through the cracks.
When the police budget grows while everything else shrinks, we are repeating the oldest political trick in the book.
A City Budget Should Reflect Its Values — Does This One?
A budget is not just dollars and line items.
A budget is a moral document.
It tells us who we care about and who we sacrifice.
In 2001, the province sacrificed the vulnerable.
In 2026, Vancouver risks doing the same.
With a 23-page budget (compared to 373 pages last year), the public is given almost no detail. The city voted through a budget without clearly showing where the savings come from, who gets cut, or how the community will be affected. That alone should alarm every resident.
This moment demands transparency.
It demands scrutiny.
It demands that we remember our history — because we’ve walked this road before, and we know exactly where it leads.
History Is Warning Us — Will We Listen?
British Columbians eventually rejected the Campbell-era cuts because the social damage was impossible to ignore. Homelessness soared, services collapsed, poverty deepened, and inequality exploded.
Vancouver cannot afford to repeat that era at the municipal level.
A thriving city is built through community — not austerity.
Through arts, culture, sustainability, planning, and local workers — not just policing and property-tax slogans.
The question Vancouver faces in 2026 is simple:
Do we learn from our past?
Or do we repeat it?
No comments:
Post a Comment