As the premier and his jobs minister were traipsing around India this week in search of big business deals, fired members of the province’s Small Business Roundtable had to be wondering why their services were no longer required.

It has been long understood that the BC NDP government has a tin ear and heart when it comes to business, and Premier David Eby has demonstrated a propensity to make the pursuit of prosperity a profound problem. His government hadn’t met with the roundtable of small-business entrepreneurs for more than two years when it was dismantled at year’s end after two decades of service.

The roundtable was a sounding board for Gordon Campbell, Christy Clark and John Horgan, but the Eby government thought itself so obviously wiser than to listen to representatives of 99 per cent of the province’s businesses.

Eliminating the roundtable was not a housekeeping move. It was a signal that structured, independent advice from people who actually sign the front of the cheque hardly mattered in the shaping of economic policy. It replaced dialogue with a digital suggestion box in a new initiative in the wake of last year’s collapse of Small Business BC, and called it progress.

For 20 years, the roundtable did not dispense grants, cut ribbons or write cheques. Its value lay in institutional listening, something far less visible and far more important. It gathered business owners from across regions and sectors, filtered anecdote from trend, and distilled........

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