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“There are challenges around how we get the economy back on track and that’s going to be the No. 1 priority come the budget in the spring,” he said.
Health care will also be a major part of the government’s agenda in 2021, Horgan said, as he joins other premiers to push the federal government to increase its funding above the current rate of about 23 per cent.
“A big change to how we deliver health care would be generational for Canadians and something I really want to focus on,” Horgan said.
Provincially, health-care reforms will focus on improvements to long-term care in B.C., including hiring more care workers and cutting back on the number of shared rooms at care facilities, he said.
“I also want to make sure we learn the lessons of COVID-19 and that we make changes in long-term care, like reducing the number of multi-bed rooms and making sure we have sufficient staff to get our elders and our seniors the care that they deserve,” he said.
Horgan’s New Democrats won a majority government in October after he called a snap election more than a year ahead of the scheduled date.
The premier said the NDP’s election win after three years of a minority government allows the province to focus completely on pandemic recovery efforts instead of announcements being measured as events leading to an election.
“What I’m happy about, quite frankly, is the politics is behind us,” he said. “If we had gone into the next 12 months … every decision that government made would have been put in the lens of some partisan argument either in favour or against. I don’t have, in my opinion, the luxury to engage in that.”
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