In democracies, citizens have not only a right but also a responsibility to exercise their votes and their vocal cords. For the longest time, average British Columbians were locked out of the budget-planning process; now it's time to mark some dates on your calendar. Over the next several weeks, the next provincial budget is coming to a town near you; clip and save this column: it will be a useful reference guide.

The first thing to note about the provincial budget for next year is that choices are already limited because of decisions made in the past. It is not likely that government MLAs on the committee will want to hear their past fiscal sins enunciated, but citizens ought to remind them of a few items.

The chronic deficits the BC government ran in the past now means that less money is available for other items. Interest on the total public debt is at least $750 million higher now than it was back in 1992. It is not clear that the thinking behind the rise in debt had been abandoned, and taxpayers should remind MLAs that public capital debt assumes upon the future earnings of taxpayers.

Unlike personal debt, where repayment comes solely out of one's own future earnings (fair, obviously, given that the object of the debt, i.e., a care or home, is consumed by the borrower), government debt forces everyone into repayment mode. Since the government will still add to the overall debt this year, remind MLAs of that important distinction.

As debt comes from spending, citizens should press MLAs for an end to the so-called fair-wage program. The policy has made public construction projects much more expensive and has also meant fewer construction jobs. Think about it this way: If the government spent $1 billion on ten public projects under fair-wage provisions, fewer jobs are created than if it spent the same amount on eleven projects. Everyone likes a higher wage but fair tendering is what taxpayers deserve, not artificial wage hikes for politically connected allies.

Taxpayers might also care to remind the traveling budget show that it is time taxpayers, and not just government allies such as public sector workers, received a boost in income. The government and the public sector negotiated bogus 0-0-2 guidelines in 1998 and then proceeded to hike selected salaries anyway; thus - public sector wages will be over $1 billion higher in 2001 when compared to 1998. Predictably, when that information came to public light earlier this year, the government defended the wage hikes and argued they addressed low-wage workers in the public sector. Private sector citizens might like to remind the MLAs that private sector saw wage growth actually dropped this past decade in real terms - in part due to the policies of this government.

So, taxpayers should press the government to reduce its own appetite for spending by paring the size of government and passing on the savings to taxpayers. After a decade of the reverse, its time for taxpayers to see much more in tax reductions from the province than they have been offered thus far.