Alone with his son on their backyard rink, Walter Gretzky never stopped teaching Wayne to "go where the puck is going to be, not where it is." The lesson paid off, we can all agree, in rather spectacular fashion for the greatest hockey player ever to play the game.

Recently, B.C. Finance Minister Gary Collins delivered his government's first-quarter budget update. The news wasn't great, but it wasn't really news, either. Everyone in the province knows this isn't where we want to be, at least economically. And where we are now almost certainly won't make any highlight reels.

Still, getting to where the puck is going to be, in this case a balanced budget by 2004-05, must remain the primary objective for the Campbell government.

B.C. taxpayers understand, or know firsthand, that forest fires, water shortages, SARS, and mad-cow have devastated families, communities and businesses this year. The cost of fighting fires alone will be $545 million, which is 10 times more than budgeted.

Mr. Collins added to the gloom by announcing a downgrade to this year's economic growth forecast. His February budget projected real GDP growth of 2.4 per cent. Now it is down to 1.5 per cent, a drop of more than a third. No other province in the country will expand as meagerly. The quarterly budget update also cut projected growth for next year to 2.6 per cent from 3 per cent.

In response, B.C. NDP leader Joy MacPhail chose to call the finance minister "incompetent." Of course, Ms. MacPhail's comment is perhaps the only time we might use the term "rich" in association with a former cabinet minister so adept with her friends at leaving a provincial economy in ruins.

That legacy is why B.C. is still an anemic and unsightly disgrace economically.

But voters in 2001 didn't give Mr. Collins or his government an option to complain, whine or run away when unforeseen disasters happen, as they have this year. And so his commitment to "stick with the plan" was welcome. His insistence that the deficit forecast for 2003-04 will remain unchanged at $2.3 billion was vital. More important, his determination to ignore any lingering NDP ghosts in the legislature that might be calling for the elimination of already reduced tax cuts or to increase spending was necessary.

A balanced budget is the only way for the sacred temples of education and health to get off the wobbly pillars of borrowed time and money. Interest payments on B.C.'s $40-billion debt will consume $711 million of the budget this year. That's nearly $2 million each day which are not going toward tax cuts or improving our standard of living. The only way for those interest payments to come down is to stop adding to the debt, and to begin paying it off.

But it won't make any sense to cheer, as Vancouver and B.C. did in July, about bringing a group of athletes to the province in 2010 if we can't manage to get Team BC into competitive shape. In fact, before B.C. can even get back on the podium as a have-province again, it has a long crawl to the balanced budget start line.

And yet, if in 2004-05 the provincial Liberals manage to keep their promise and put some muscle on the bones of the economic cadaver they inherited, then taxpayers would have real reason to fill BC Place Stadium and town centers to celebrate the same way Vancouver did when it won the 2010 Olympic bid.

To get there, however, and to move this province where it should be as Canada's leading economic player, the Campbell Liberals must focus on one drill: balancing the budget.