BC Government Admits $1.46B Error in Gas Revenue Forecasts
Financial errors worth $1.46 billion have been discovered in British Columbia's gas revenue forecasts, according to senior staff at the ministries of energy and finance.
The discrepancies were independently verified and corrections will be included in the province's quarterly fiscal report due later this month.
The most significant error involved an incorrect assumption that natural gas prices were shown in U.S. dollars, when they were actually in Canadian dollars, leading to an overstatement of revenue by incorrectly translating them back into Canadian dollars.
The mistake resulted in a 44-cent decrease per gigajoule of natural gas in B.C.'s forecasting for 2026-2027, and correcting all the errors led to an average annual decrease in expected revenues of $292 million from this fiscal year to the one starting in 2030.