In the year-end review, B.C. NDP minority government premier, John Horgan, tells reporter Richard Zussman that effective January 1, 2020, B.C. residents will no longer pay premiums for B.C. medical and that B.C. was the last province to make this change.
As usual with any NDP government, they shoot from the hip without doing any research on the topic as Ontario and Quebec residents still pay a portion of their medical premiums through individual income tax, even though both Ontario and Quebec still have an employer health care tax, based on a premium paid on their total payroll.
Horgan does not realize that B.C. is the eighth province to eliminate medical premiums, not the last as stated by him.
Horgan also told Zussman that paid medical premiums always went to government general revenue and not into health care. He is correct, but former NDP premiers, Dave Barrett, Mike Harcourt, Glen Clark, and Ujjal Dosanjh, also put medical premiums paid into general revenue.
Maybe John Horgan was born yesterday, but the B.C. taxpayers were not born yesterday. How shameful to have your premier telling false information.
Joe Sawchuk,
Duncan