Three decisions that will define the fall session
A housing-target review, a water act amendment, and a health staffing formula — each arrives with a deadline attached.
The order paper for the fall session is long, but three items on it will do most of the deciding — and all three carry deadlines that make deferral, the legislature's favourite outcome, unusually expensive.
The first is the housing-target review: the two-year-old system of municipal targets comes up for its scheduled evaluation, and the government must either put numbers behind its enforcement threats or admit the targets are advisory. Twelve municipalities, four of them in the Interior, are currently behind their curves.
The second is the water act amendment, which decides how the province allocates water in basins that are already fully subscribed — a category that now includes most of the Okanagan. The current rules resolve scarcity by seniority of licence; the amendment would let regional boards weigh use. Every irrigation district and every growing city has a position, and they are not the same position.
The third is the health staffing formula, the funding mechanism behind every rural emergency-room closure notice of the past two years. The proposed replacement funds teams rather than positions. Whether that sentence means anything will be visible in the schedules of about forty B.C. hospitals by spring. The session opens the first week of October. The Current will read the fine print so you can read the consequences.
