The Pacific Carbon Trust hasn’t even succumbed yet, but the scavengers moved in Wednesday to argue over cause of death.
Weeks ago, the legislature’s public accounts committee scheduled a hard look at the PCT as part of its oversight role. Oddly enough, the meeting started one day after the agency fell victim to the government’s core review.
Cabinet minister Bill Bennett announced the outfit is being dissolved and the work will be folded into the climate action secretariat, done by five people instead of 18.
Which turned the committee meeting into a bit of an academic exercise. They were probing the conduct of a death-row inmate after he’d already been walked to the gallows.
Still, it was a revealing few hours. The focus was on the incendiary report in May from former auditor general John Doyle that attacked the trust’s handling of two key offset projects. He condemned the thinking and the process behind the work.
The PCT fought back to an unprecedented degree, challenging most of his findings and insisting he was flat-out wrong.
It was one of the more remarkable showdowns in the history of the audit office. And both sides in the bitter argument, the auditor general’s office and the PCT’s executives, showed up at the committee meeting Wednesday to make their cases.
It was a pretty restrained showdown by ultimate-fighting standards. But it’s clear nobody is giving an inch.
The report centred on two projects the PCT spent about $6 million on a few years ago, with money it collects from the levy all public-sector organizations pay for their carbon emissions.
One was a different gas drilling technique Encana tried out. The other was the preservation of 55,000 hectares of Kootenay wilderness — the Darkwoods — by way of purchase by a conservancy. Saving forests from logging can count toward offsets.
The audit said both projects were supported without proof that the funding was needed in order that they succeed. That principle of additionality — the funds have to create new offsets, not just be used to support something that would happen anyway — is a key criterion.
The Encana project to reduce gas-well flaring didn’t use the right baselines, it said. And there were a host of problems declared with the forest purchase. The probability of logging if it wasn’t purchased was low, which means the offset was overestimated.
The PCT rejected the assertions and fought back, saying the auditor general’s office didn’t understand what it was studying. And a separate round of hostilities started over how the PCT gave outside parties confidential reports, and “orchestrated” a campaign against the audit’s findings.
MLAs drilled deep into the details trying to understand the black-and-white differences on many of the key arguments.
There were lengthy exchanges on whether the preliminary findings the auditor shared with the trust were considered confidential. There was another argument about whether the PCT tried to stall out the audit, but dragging its heels on meeting dates.
And there was a protracted review of the Darkwoods project from start to finish, and whether spending public money on the purchase was legitimately part of the PCT’s mandate.
But with the trust set to be dissolved, the arguments are fading rapidly into history. The offset program will be folded into government.
Past the three-hour mark, with both sides still camped on their divergent points of view, committee chairman Bruce Ralston concluded the interrogations with: “We’re not a court. I just don’t see us resolving this.”
The whole point of the trust was to be the mechanism by which the B.C. government became carbon-neutral. But a key point from the session was made in an almost by-the-way fashion. It’s that the B.C. government’s emissions are increasing or holding steady at best, not trending down from when B.C. “first stepped on the scales” in 2010. Even after acknowledging it takes time for reductions to take hold, one official said the three-year trend line isn’t satisfactory.
Government is carbon-neutral because it’s offsetting more emissions, not reducing them. Moving the job in-house won’t change that.
