I fear this week’s throne speech represents a low point in British Columbia’s political history, as it contains the most impoverished view of B.C.’s future ever promoted by a premier.
In the throne speech, Premier Christy Clark claims B.C. is at a turning point, that we simply must create a liquefied natural gas industry to maintain the public programs and services British Columbians have come to expect. According to Clark, if we fail to get into the LNG game, B.C. will be choosing a path of decline.
This is a shockingly bankrupt and narrow-minded view of the options British Columbians have to create a truly sustainable economy, one that will protect B.C.’s ecosystems while still taking advantage of its abundant renewable and non-renewable natural resources.
Gone from the throne speech is the bluster about a prosperity fund, paying down the debt and the hundreds of thousands of jobs we’ll get from LNG. Instead, we’re told that LNG is a “chance, not a windfall,” and that we must have LNG just to maintain the public services we now have — public services and a public sector that are a mere shadow of what they were before the Liberals took office in 2001.
In an effort to sell the idea of LNG to a rightly skeptical B.C. public, the premier suggests the government is merely expanding the market for B.C.’s natural gas, just as the Liberals did for the forest industry when its U.S. market collapsed. The throne speech then makes the outrageous claim that expanding the market for lumber products into China has put B.C.’s forest sector and forest-dependent families in a “good position.”
Our forest industry is in crisis. Mills are still shutting down. More job losses are being added to the tens of thousands of jobs that have been lost in the forest sector under the B.C. Liberals’ watch. And forest companies have publicly warned the government that more mill closures and job losses are yet to come.
In addition, the Liberals have utterly failed to manage our public forests so that future generations can enjoy them for both their ecological and their economic values.
Many experts and agencies have told the government the following: it does not have a vision for our forests and the forest sector; it does not have the data and inventory to manage our public forests; it has passed forest laws that are unenforceable and cannot protect ecosystems and social values; it is allowing the over-cutting of our public forests by maintaining unacceptably high annual allowable cuts; and that British Columbians are getting absolutely minimum benefits from their public forests.
The negligence the Liberals have demonstrated with respect to public forests — a renewable resource — should cause every British Columbian to be rightly skeptical that the Liberals will manage B.C.’s non-renewable natural-gas resources any better.
In fact, in response to questions about her LNG strategy after the throne speech, the premier stated that B.C. is a province in a hurry to develop its natural gas resources. I just spent three days touring the oilsands in northern Alberta. I witnessed first-hand the devastating environmental and social costs associated with hurried and unplanned development of that non-renewable resource.
We don’t want that kind of unsustainable and environmentally damaging development in B.C., just so the premier can attempt to keep an outrageous election promise she should never have made.
British Columbia still has an abundance of opportunities to sustainably manage its renewable resources: forestry, fisheries, agriculture, tourism and renewable energy. We can be a leader in the sustainable development and value-added manufacturing of these resources.
We can reduce our dependence on temporary foreign workers by slowing down the development of our non-renewable resources while requiring that the best available technologies be employed in their extraction. We can also demand that industry create value-added products from our natural resources and create more B.C. jobs.
We don’t have to accept the premier’s impoverished view of B.C.’s future. It isn’t LNG or bust for us.
We have choices. Let’s choose an economy that is truly sustainable for the long term and that gives our children a future.
Vicky Husband is a Victoria environmentalist.
