By Jordan Bateman, VP-Advocacy, ICBA
On a quiet night in British Columbia, you can almost hear the money going down the drain at NDP-run WorkSafeBC.
It took three days of budget estimates, but B.C. Labour Minister Jennifer Whiteside admitted what ICBA has been warning about for months: WorkSafeBC’s funded ratio keeps slipping – now at 139%, down from 153% in 2019 and 141% just a year ago.
Each percentage point represents roughly $135 million in employer reserves built up over decades of careful stewardship. That’s nearly $1.9 billion in cushion that has evaporated in six years – even as WorkSafeBC’s investment portfolio delivered billions more than actuaries required. The surplus that employers earned through decades of improving workplace safety is being spent faster than anyone planned, and nobody in the NDP government seems the least bit concerned.
Certainly not the minister. When BC Conservative MLA Kiel Giddens raised the possibility of rate shock, Whiteside waved it away: “That term is just not a term that is in the WorkSafe lexicon.” When he asked for rate increase scenarios for 2027 and 2028, she refused to provide them. When he pressed on why claim costs rose 9% last year to $3.2 billion while injury rates kept declining, the minister offered history lessons, personal testimonials, and lengthy detours into the origins of workers’ compensation – everything, in other words, except a straight answer.
But the most revealing moment came when Whiteside insisted that WorkSafeBC premiums are “manifestly” not a payroll tax and are, in fact, “a bargain for employers, frankly.” This is the kind of statement that tells you everything about how disconnected this government is from the people who actually fund the system.
WorkSafeBC premiums are calculated on payroll, mandatory for every employer, and collected by a Crown agency. The fact that the minister prefers to call them something else doesn’t change what hits the books of a small contractor trying to bid a school renovation or a landscaping company making payroll on a Friday afternoon.
The actual cost to run WorkSafeBC has risen to $1.78 per $100 of payroll – while the premium rate has been frozen at $1.55 for eight years. The gap is being covered by drawing down the surplus and by outrageously good (and likely unsustainable) returns on WorkSafe’s investment portfolio. B.C. is an outlier in the country, as similar insurance systems in other provinces have cut rates as safety has improved.
Not in B.C., though. WorkSafeBC’s own projections show $3.2 billion in surplus drawdowns between 2019 and 2026. That’s not prudent rate-smoothing. That’s running out the clock on somebody else’s savings account.
The psychological injury numbers should worry every employer in the province. The minister confirmed that the average cost of a psychological-only claim is $156,000 – more than fourteen times the $11,000 average for a standard physical injury. Duration runs 235 days versus 45. Claims combining physical and psychological injuries average $318,000; add chronic pain and it’s $488,000. The NDP’s expanded mental health presumptions now carry a 79% approval rate. California and Victoria, Australia already showed us where that trajectory leads, and it wasn’t anywhere good.
Then there was the seniors’ care bombshell. Giddens asked a straightforward question about whether the NDP’s decision to override independently bargained collective agreements in the long-term care sector undermines the integrity of collective bargaining. Instead of answering, Whiteside launched a 20-minute monologue on the history of health care unionization going back to the 1970s – so long that the opposition formally objected and the chair had to step in.
Here’s the irony: the NDP has spent three political generations campaigning on the Premier Gordon Campbell’s decision to “tear up contracts” under Bill 29 in 2002. Whiteside was later the head of the Hospital Employees’ Union, calling it “an abuse of power” and celebrating when the NDP overturned it. Now, as minister, she’s overriding duly negotiated collective agreements in the same sector – without consulting the workers who ratified them or the employers who signed them. Apparently, tearing up contracts is only wrong when the other guys do it.
But I digress. B.C. has gone from the fourth-lowest workers’ compensation rate in Canada to the third-highest, the surplus is being drained at $1.5 billion a year, and the minister’s best response is to insist that the mandatory, payroll-based payments employers make to a government monopoly aren’t a tax. Quite simply, employers deserve better.