Eby Government Admits $1.5B Gas-Royalty Budget Error — Show The Spreadsheet
The mistake is no longer hypothetical. The accountability question is who saw the warning, who checked the math, and when B.C. taxpayers get the full calculation.
The B.C. government has now acknowledged a nearly $1.5-billion mistake in its latest budget forecast for natural-gas royalties, according to a Business in Vancouver investigation carried by Castanet. That is not a rounding error. It is a fiscal alarm bell in a province already asking families, patients, students and employers to trust Victoria’s numbers.
The premier’s office reportedly said the Ministry of Energy and Climate Solutions found an “administrative error” connected to its natural-gas price forecast. The government’s correction would reduce expected royalties by an average of $292 million per year over five years, with the adjustment promised in a September financial update.
BIV’s reported expert calculation was even larger. The story says independent experts calculated the province had overstated natural-gas royalty revenue by roughly $500 million per year. SFU economist Nancy Olewiler, whose earlier work helped trigger B.C.’s royalty-framework overhaul, is cited as having verified the error. The government disputes the explanation offered by critics, saying the issue related to unit and currency conversions rather than transportation and processing costs.
That disagreement is exactly why the spreadsheet matters. If Victoria’s lower correction is right, show the math. If the experts are right, the public needs to know how such a basic resource-revenue miss made it into Budget 2026 and whether policy decisions were built on bad numbers.
The Indigenous consultation context makes this more serious. Castanet’s BIV republication says Premier David Eby had denied knowledge of the budget error earlier in the week, despite a July 14 letter from four Treaty 8 First Nations chiefs warning about the mistake and its longer-term implications. That is a reported claim, and the public should see the letter, the routing record, the ministry review and the response timeline.
Budget 2026 was already ugly before this correction. The province’s own budget release said deficits were projected to decline from $13.3 billion in 2026-27 to $11.4 billion in 2028-29. A resource-revenue miss of hundreds of millions per year is politically material in that context.
Natural-gas royalties are not abstract accounting. They are the public return on resources extracted from Crown land. If the government is redesigning the royalty framework while Treaty 8 leaders and independent experts are warning that the numbers do not add up, British Columbians should not have to wait for a carefully managed update to learn what went wrong.
Premier Eby should release the full calculation, the July 14 warning letter, the ministry’s review, the assumptions behind the September correction and any briefing notes given to cabinet. A government that cannot show its math on billions in public resource revenue has not earned another blank cheque.