Four “Human Errors” and a $1.46B Gas-Royalty Hole: Release the Working Papers

B.C.’s natural-gas royalty story has moved from a budget correction to a full accountability file. Business in Vancouver, carried by Castanet, reported September 1 that senior finance and energy officials told reporters four human-caused administrative errors produced a roughly $1.46-billion overstatement of expected gas royalties over five years.

The details are not reassuring. Officials said the largest mistake came from a spreadsheet formula incorrectly dragged across a cell. They also cited a gas-unit conversion problem and two cases where previous-year data was used by mistake. According to the same report, those errors affected half of the 22 third-party gas price forecasts used to estimate the public share from Crown-owned gas resources.

This is not a clerical footnote. Officials put the average overstatement at $292 million per year, rising to $378 million in 2028-29. CBC’s report, carried by Yahoo News, notes Budget 2026 already forecast deficits of $13.3 billion in 2026-27, $12.2 billion in 2027-28 and $11.4 billion in 2028-29. Hundreds of millions a year matters when the province is already deep in red ink.

The government also has a transparency problem because outside experts and Treaty 8 First Nations were already asking for answers. CBC reported that SFU professor emeritus Nancy Olewiler says the province’s $1.5-billion figure may be on the low end, while a July letter from Treaty 8 chiefs asked Premier David Eby to publicly explain and correct errors in the budget. Castanet’s Sept. 1 report says experts working with Treaty 8 still found the ministry’s briefing too thin to analyze properly.

The NDP’s answer cannot be “trust the next quarterly report.” Senior officials reportedly said the budget will be updated on September 14 and that experts have been engaged to verify future work. Good. But verification after the fact is not the same as disclosure. If the error really was a chain of administrative mistakes, the province should release the working papers, assumptions, corrected forecast table, briefing timeline and quality-control review.

There is an added policy risk. Officials said the errors will not affect the new royalty framework scheduled for January 1, 2027. Yet Castanet also reported that Energy Minister Adrian Dix had previously said the framework’s projected $2.4-billion gains were based on this year’s budget numbers. British Columbians deserve to know how both statements can stand together.

Natural-gas royalties are the public’s return for private extraction of a Crown resource. When the government’s explanation includes a dragged spreadsheet formula and stale fiscal-year data, taxpayers should not be asked to accept summaries. Release the file. Show the corrected math. Then let the public judge whether this was merely a bad spreadsheet or a deeper failure of fiscal control.