2014 Legislative Session: Third Session, 40th Parliament

HANSARD

The following electronic version is for informational purposes only.

The printed version remains the official version.

official report of

Debates of the Legislative Assembly

(hansard)

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Afternoon Sitting

Volume 16, Number

ISSN 0709-1281 (Print)

ISSN 1499-2175 (Online)

CONTENTS

Page

Routine Business

Statements

Shootings at Parliament Buildings and War Memorial in Ottawa

Hon. C. Clark

J. Horgan

Madame Speaker (Hon. L. Reid)

Introductions by Members

Statements

(Standing Order 25B)

Women in politics

J. Tegart

Small business

N. Simons

Domestic violence awareness

D. Plecas

Cultural diversity and Hindu festivals in Surrey

S. Hammell

Eagle Ridge Hospital

L. Reimer

Protection of Whaletown Commons on Cortes Island

C. Trevena

Oral Questions

LNG development conditions and comments by Premier

J. Horgan

Hon. C. Clark

LNG development and job creation

J. Horgan

Hon. C. Clark

B. Ralston

LNG development and reduction of public debt

M. Elmore

Hon. C. Clark

Funding for aboriginal child welfare programs and First Nations consent to natural gas pipelines

D. Donaldson

Hon. C. Clark

Income assistance policy on child support payments

M. Mungall

Hon. D. McRae

J. Kwan

S. Simpson

Point of Privilege

(Reservation of Right)

L. Popham

Orders of the Day

Second Reading of Bills

Bill 2 — Greenhouse Gas Industrial Reporting and Control Act

Hon. M. Polak

S. Chandra Herbert

D. Barnett

A. Weaver

On the amendment

A. Weaver

Hon. M. Polak

C. Trevena

N. Macdonald

V. Huntington

L. Krog

On the main motion

M. Morris

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WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2014

The House met at 1:35 p.m.

[Madame Speaker in the chair.]

Routine Business

Prayers.

Statements

SHOOTINGS AT

PARLIAMENT BUILDINGS AND

WAR MEMORIAL IN OTTAWA

Hon. C. Clark: Madame Speaker, I rise to make a statement.

Like everyone in Canada today, I am deeply, deeply affected, saddened and shocked by the events that have unfolded in our nation’s capital. Our thoughts and our prayers are with all of the victims and those affected in our national parliament, in the city of Ottawa and across the country.

But we should rest assured that none of us are unaffected by this. No one in law enforcement, in particular, is unaffected. We should remember today how much gratitude we owe to law enforcement in this country, who stand and work so hard to keep us safe all the time, every day, most often without thanks, willingly putting themselves in harm’s way as some have already done today.

We are deeply grateful to them, and we are deeply grateful, as well, for the institutions like our parliament and for all of the leaders that decide to seek public office in this country, who take the risk that it is to lead, the risk that it is to make decisions, because making decisions is hard.

Our institutions are something that we treasure deeply and that we are all called on to protect. Out of these tragedies today, we must all remember, first, to be grateful for those who work for us every day to keep us safe; second, to be grateful for the institutions we have built that have made Canada a model of democracy around the world; and third, to move forward into the future and continue to make the decisions that Canada needs unafraid — unafraid to do what we need to do to stand up for this country, to ensure that citizens in Canada continue to have access to their public institutions, unafraid to defend democracy and the institutions that have defined Canada for generations.

Madame Speaker, today I stand before you deeply saddened by what’s happened. I hope that all Canadians know that here in British Columbia we stand with them. This has happened in a place that is geographically far away but somewhere that we all deeply hold in our hearts as Canadians.

Our sympathies go to the families of the victims. Our thanks go to those who protect us, and our vigilance remains strong to protect these institutions that mean so very, very much to all of us.

Madame Speaker, I’d like, on behalf of all the members today — once the Leader of the Opposition has had a moment to express his thoughts, as well, and perhaps yourself if you choose — to ask members of this House to join us all in a moment of silence to remember, to reflect and to think about the things that are so deeply important to all of us as we send our best wishes to all those who’ve been affected, which is every single Canadian today whether they live inside this country or out of it.

[1340]

Madame Speaker: Thank you, Madam Premier.

Leader of the Opposition.

J. Horgan: I thank the Premier for her words today on what can only be described as a tragic day in Canadian history. I think back to the shootings at the Quebec National Assembly not that long ago and the loss of innocence at that time for our nation. To have it repeated so recently as this morning brings home to all of us who are fortunate enough to be sent here by citizens across this province the privilege it is to be here and the grateful gratitude, of course, that we have for the Sergeant-at-Arms and his staff, who come here every day with the risk and threat, perhaps, of an occurrence just as happened in Ottawa happening here in Victoria.

No one wants to think that. No one wants to even imagine that, but it’s a possibility. They come here every day, and I’m grateful. I know every member of this House is grateful for the work that Gary and his staff do each and every day.

But as we reflect upon the loss of life today and the loss of innocence for our country, I think we also have to recognize that our democratic institutions must — must — be open and accessible to the people who send us here.

As important as security measures will be over the next number of hours and days and weeks, not just here and in Ottawa but in every Legislature in this country, we have to always keep in the forefront of our mind, in the forefront of the decisions that we make around security, that this institution belongs to the people of British Columbia — not to the 85 of us but to everyone who lives in this province. They need to have access to those institutions if we are going to continue to be defiant in the face of the insanity that happened today in Ottawa.

Of course, we don’t want to speculate on motives. That would be foolish in the extreme. But it’s difficult, as we all reflect….

The Premier and I spoke this morning about what we should do, and we both agreed. In fact, the Premier said, “Of course, we’ll carry on,” and I agreed with her.

We need to be here today conducting the business of the people of British Columbia. We need to be here today for the families in Ottawa. We need to be here today to demonstrate that we will not be bowed by terror or in-

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sanity. We need to be here today for the people of British Columbia and for, most importantly, the staff that put themselves on the line each and every day.

I have been to the cenotaph in Ottawa for Remembrance Day. I worked on Parliament Hill. I have friends that still work on Parliament Hill. I know each corner of that building and each corner of the precincts of the House of Commons.

I recall over my time there that security continued to increase whenever there was an incident of any kind. I remember as a young man thinking: “Oh, that’s ridiculous. They’re overreacting.”

Here we are now, 25 years after I first walked into the House of Commons, and I am absolutely in sync with the Government Leader, the Premier. I’m in sync with every member of this House when I say — and stand before you, hon. Speaker — that if we need to increase our security, we will do that. But we must always remember that this is the House of the people, and the people must have access to it. We need to make that as seamless as possible. Thank you very much.

Madame Speaker: Thank you, Mr. Leader.

Hon. Members, today’s horrendous events at the National War Memorial and our federal Parliament Buildings in Ottawa reinforce the importance of safety.

I would like to let everyone know that due diligence has been and is being taken to make sure this parliament is safe for all those who work here and for all who visit.

Today our country faced adversity, and as Canadians do, we are overcoming this adversity through courage, determination and strength. Fortitude defines British Columbians and Canadians, and this is reflected in our democratic institutions like this Legislature.

This is British Columbia’s parliament. It is the people’s parliament, and it will be open to serve the people.

Please join us in pausing and reflecting in silence to honour the fallen Canadian Armed Forces member and the injured from today’s events.

[The House observed a moment of silence.]

Madame Speaker: Thank you, hon. members.

[1345]

Introductions by Members

B. Routley: I’m delighted to have with us today brother John Middleton. John has an amazing history. He did spend time in the Canadian military in the reserves as an engineer. He’s got two university degrees. He spent most of his career and life in construction, as both a carpenter and welder, helping to build British Columbia in places like the Crofton pulp mill, both on land and under the sea, because he spent ten years underwater doing construction.

As well, he was a strong union job steward for many of those years. I knew John when we were younger folks together. He was also a volunteer fireman and involved in local politics in the Cobble Hill area as an area director.

I would ask that the House please join me in recognizing and acknowledging all of his efforts on behalf of his community and welcoming him to the Legislature.

Welcome, John.

Hon. C. Oakes: It truly is my privilege and I’m incredibly proud today to introduce members of the Nazko First Nations: Chief Shawn Patrick, Councillor Stuart Alec, Bernice Cremo, Douglas Cremo, Marilyn Clement, Wesley Boyd, Victoria Dodd, Don Clement and Bram Rogachevsky.

I am extremely proud, also, to introduce Riley Clement. Riley is 11 years old and is a grade 7 future leader in the Nazko community and British Columbia in general. Last month Riley attended a community meeting on treaty negotiations, and at the end of the meeting Riley submitted his notes, which were extremely thorough, clear and thoughtful, and demonstrated an interest and an understanding of the issues.

In recognition of his effort, Riley was asked to accompany Nazko representatives to Victoria and to participate in meetings here in this House. Riley — when I asked what he wants to do when he grows up — would like to be a professional hockey player. We talked about Jordin Tootoo’s new book, All the Way .

But perhaps, Riley, you will also consider one day taking a leadership role. As British Columbians, as Canadians, we need young people like you.

I would kindly ask that the House please welcome these representatives from Cariboo North.

M. Karagianis: Today in the gallery we have a constituent of mine, a retired paramedic, Deborah Price. Deborah was a proud member of the B.C. Ambulance Service for 27 years. She now owns her own portrait photography business in my community.

I’d like the House to make her very, very welcome. I’d like to give a little wave to the person sitting next to her, who didn’t want to be named or mentioned, so I’m just giving him a little wave. But please make them both very welcome.

Hon. S. Bond: I am very pleased to introduce two groups of visitors to the Legislature today. The first one is Mr. Brad Waghorn. He resides in Prince George. He is a passionate advocate for eye safety in the province. He presented to a number of us today from both sides of the House, and I do appreciate the attendance that was there. Brad shared a little bit about the importance of preven-

[ Page 4813 ]

tion and making sure that all of us are role models when it comes to protecting and valuing our eye safety. Please join us in welcoming Brad Waghorn from Prince George.

Secondly, I know that our hearts and minds are in other places today, but it is National Bioenergy Day today. As a result, we’re joined by a very significant group representing the B.C. Bioenergy Network today. We have Michael Weedon, the executive director; Darren Frew; Marnie Plant; Dr. Scott Stanners.

Joining the Bioenergy Network today are Dr. Ranjana Bird, who is the vice-president of research at UNBC; Jerry Ericsson, president of Diacarbon Energy; Brad Bennett, vice-president of operations at Pacific BioEnergy; and Dr. Bryan Imber, who is the president of International Composting Corporation.

[1350]

Please, could we make these guests most welcome.

D. Eby: I rise to take the opportunity to welcome to this House for the first time my legislative assistant, Elena Banfield, who is here. She just joined our team recently. As all the members of this House know, legislative assistants make us look good all the time, and she’s doing a wonderful job. I just wanted to welcome her in to watch question period today.

Hon. D. McRae: Two outstanding citizens from the Comox Valley are here today. Joining us are Beverley and Erik Eriksson. Now, Erik has served on numerous Comox Valley boards, be they economic, philanthropic, athletic or cultural. He’s worked so hard to make our community a better place. It is also his birthday today. Would the House please welcome Erik and Beverley to this chamber, and would they also wish Erik a happy birthday.

I cannot let Eric’s birthday pass without wishing my wife, Deanne McRae, a happy birthday today.

Deanne, I’m not there with you today, but honey, I love you. I’ll try to buy you something really nice this weekend. Happy birthday, honey.

M. Mungall: I have a few people I’d like to introduce the House to today. First, we have Roy McMurter and Susan Bowers, who are joining us. They are residents here in Victoria.

Joining Elena, our newest legislative assistant, is her mom. She brought her mom to work today and will be watching question period. Judy Banfield is a well-respected, well-admired woman in Nelson, and I’m very proud to say she’s a constituent of mine.

G. Heyman: I’d like to join my colleague from Vancouver–Point Grey in also welcoming my legislative assistant, Elena Banfield, who’s also new to Victoria. She has brought to us a history of doing strong work in the community with women and has demonstrated that background already in one short week, in helping me immensely with some research.

Welcome.

S. Robinson: I, too, would like to welcome Elena Banfield and her mother, Judy. Elena is my legislative assistant as well. I want to offer bruchim ha-baim , which is Hebrew for “a blessed welcome,” to the House of the people.

Statements

(Standing Order 25B)

WOMEN IN POLITICS

J. Tegart: Our province has a proud history of women in politics. One hundred women have been elected to this Legislature — thanks to trail-blazers starting with Mary Ellen Smith, the first woman to sit in this chamber, to today with the three most senior positions in B.C. being women. More women were elected in this current session than ever before. However, given they are half of the world’s population, women are disproportionately represented in governance. More progress needs to be done.

Thanks to the support of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, the Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians work to support gender equality — excuse me; it’s a very interesting day — along with increased women’s participation in legislatures across the world.

The CWP, Canadian region, composed of women parliamentarians from provincial, territorial and federal parliaments, conduct outreach programs to educate, connect, empower and engage women. These are wonderful, gifted legislators across the country who serve as role models to a countless number of women considering entering public life.

The operations and representations of the CWP internationally are overseen by a chair, which was assumed by Madame Speaker, chosen by her peers to take on this prestigious role.

Therefore, as we celebrate Women’s History Month this October, I’d like to recognize the Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians on their continued efforts on furthering gender equality and women’s representation in our legislatures.

I believe that Madame Speaker is up to the challenge. I, along with the rest of the members of this House, wish you the best of luck.

[1355]

SMALL BUSINESS

N. Simons: We all know that small businesses are the fuel in the engine of our economy. We know that B.C. has more small businesses per capita than any other province. We know that they account for the majority of private sector jobs and that we have 83 of them for every 1,000

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people in this province. Maybe that part you didn’t know, but it was on the government website.

Whatever the number, it’s also true that most of us in this chamber are immediately or, at most, one or two degrees of separation from someone who runs or works in a small business. Chances are that each and every one of us has purchased goods or services from one in the last week.

I’m talking about this issue because it’s Small Business Month. And as my friend and colleague from Boundary-Similkameen said earlier this week, I’d like to echo her words and to inform the House of an initiative being sponsored by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, one of the umbrella organizations that represent many small businesses.

In an effort to raise the profile and encourage public support of these small businesses, they’re asking that we all mark this coming Saturday as Small Business Saturday by going to a favourite small business and tweeting a selfie or a picture of the business to #myfavesmallbiz — spelling in Hansard later.

This Saturday’s public awareness campaign reflects the CFIB’s ongoing efforts to remind the government of the importance of ensuring that our communities are fertile ground for businesses to flourish by ensuring that regulations and taxation levels are kept in balance with the need to protect workers, the environment and larger community interests.

Small businesses thrive when certain factors which are influenced by provincial government policies are present. They need an educated workforce, safe neighbourhoods and good and affordable transportation — like roads, airports and ferries. They need affordable energy costs as well as communication tools that are reliable and predictable. Of course, they benefit when people have incomes in order to purchase their goods and services.

We can all celebrate Small Business Month and, this Saturday, Small Business Saturday.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AWARENESS

D. Plecas: As was so well articulated by our Premier this morning and the Leader of the Official Opposition, we all need to be attentive to violence in our society and the tragedy that goes with that violence. We also could be reminded by the events of today how quickly our lives can be changed by violence.

We certainly don’t want to take anything away from that tragedy today. We should always have that in mind. But perhaps because this is October, and October being Domestic Violence Awareness Month, it’s something that we can also be attentive to because it is such a common form of violence.

In cities around the world they are being attentive to our need to be aware of domestic violence in our society and to increase awareness about domestic violence and especially its impact on children and women, the most common victims of domestic violence.

The good people of Abbotsford have banded together under the Purple Light Nights campaign. The purpose of this campaign is to do three main things. It’s to remember the victims who lost their lives through domestic violence, to support survivors of domestic violence and to provide support for those who continue to suffer the abuse of domestic violence.

Purple is the colour used internationally to symbolize domestic violence awareness. A campaign adopted three years ago by the Abbotsford-Mission Violence Against Women in Relationships Committee — otherwise known as the VAWIR Committee — is a campaign that has been gaining momentum.

This year the Abbotsford police department, partnering with the B.C. Lions, have encouraged citizens and businesses to display a purple light outside their homes and businesses. They’re joined in this by the Downtown Abbotsford Business Association.

The message is quite clear. Domestic violence has no place in our society. It has no place in Abbotsford or anywhere else in the province.

CULTURAL DIVERSITY AND

HINDU FESTIVALS IN SURREY

S. Hammell: Few constituencies share the depth of diversity we celebrate in Surrey–Green Timbers. This is clearly demonstrated on 140th Street, where you see a mandir, a gurdwara and a church all but 50 feet apart from each other. As a result, at any given time there’s a celebration or festival keeping my constituency vibrant and lively.

[1400]

Friday, October 3, marked one of the most important Hindu celebrations, Vijayadashami, a symbolic celebration of good triumphing over evil. There are many, many mythological legends representing the symbolic righteousness over evil, and one of the most popular is the Ramayana , a Hindu legend describing the victory of Lord Rama over Ravana, the antagonist of the plot.

In a vengeful pursuit, Ravana kidnaps Lord Rama’s wife, Sita, and imprisons her in his island fortress of Lanka. In an epic battle Lord Rama saves his wife and defeats Ravana. As part of the Vijayadashami tradition, a statue of Ravana is burnt in effigy to mark the victory of good over evil. At our mandir the wooden statue was over 20 feet high — and quite an amazing sight to see go up in flames.

Tomorrow we celebrate Diwali, another important festival for Hindus, Sikhs and Jains. This is a beautiful festival of light, which also represents some of the symbolic messages of Vijayadashami as thousands of observers rejoice on this occasion. I would also like to wish you all a happy Diwali.

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EAGLE RIDGE HOSPITAL

L. Reimer: Good afternoon. I’m pleased to stand before you today in this House and speak about a wonderful institution in my riding that is celebrating a great milestone, their 30th birthday. It is Eagle Ridge Hospital.

Eagle Ridge is more than just a facility. It’s a tribute to the dedication of the staff, the physicians and the volunteers who work there, those who have been there since the beginning and those who’ve helped to make this hospital what it is today.

Families today, unfortunately, from time to time find it necessary to visit their community hospital. My family has visited it twice. We received wonderful care there from doctors, nurses and support staff. I would like to take a moment to especially thank the Eagle Ridge Hospital Foundation and the auxiliary volunteers. Both groups play an integral role in making sure that Eagle Ridge Hospital is able to provide a wide range of services.

The foundation strives to provide hospital staff with the best medical equipment, programs and facilities to better serve the Tri-Cities community and also serves as a vessel to promote the professional development of Eagle Ridge Hospital staff by awarding educational scholarships and research grants. The auxiliary volunteers take care of our most important priority, the patients. The work they do in order to ensure that the patients lounges and the patients comfort fund are taken care of is very much appreciated.

Will the House please join me in celebrating this significant milestone and also to take the opportunity to say thank you to past and present staff, physicians, volunteers, donors and government and community partners that have helped to make this hospital a cherished community asset.

Happy birthday, Eagle Ridge Hospital.

PROTECTION OF WHALETOWN COMMONS

ON CORTES ISLAND

C. Trevena: This weekend there’s going to be a celebration on Cortes Island that some thought may never happen.

Whaletown Commons, a 70-acre green space in the centre of the community of Whaletown, has been acquired by the Strathcona regional district as a protected place for the island. The Cortes Island official community plan has long identified the area of Whaletown Commons as a place to be saved. It’s taken years to negotiate with the forest industry owners for it to come into the hands of the community.

The lands now protected were latterly owned by Island Timberlands, the private arm of Western Forest Products. They’ve engaged in discussions for five years, finally settling on the significant price tag of $839,000. But for 20 years people in Whaletown have been trying to keep that land safe — “20 years of perseverance and community spirit,” as regional director Noba Anderson described it. And fundraising. The Whaletown Commons Society managed to put together $60,000, which it contributed.

Whaletown received the support from the regional district because there are no provincial or regional district parks within the community and because — no matter the image of Cortes as a rural Eden — like much of coastal B.C. it does have a healthy forest industry and a vibrant community forest. Three successive regional directors have worked on the negotiations and have had extraordinary support.

In the Whaletown Commons there’s Burnside Creek, which runs through the northern part of it, a salmon-bearing stream. There are high fish and forestry values, and it’s a natural habitat for wolves and other wildlife. It’s a wonderful space, and it was well worth working hard to save it.

[1405]

Saturday afternoon sees the official handover of Whaletown Commons. It’s going to be an opportunity to explore the trails, to meet those who’ve worked so hard to keep this in its natural state and to thank those who made the commitment to hand the land over. It will be a great opportunity to feel the spirit of Cortes, its people and the environment, and I hope to invite anybody who happens to be in the Discovery Islands this Saturday to come over to Cortes and see Whaletown Commons for themselves.

Oral Questions

LNG DEVELOPMENT CONDITIONS AND

COMMENTS BY PREMIER

J. Horgan: Over the past two days the Premier’s many election promises with respect to LNG have been shown for what they truly were: absolutely meaningless. We have a reduction in revenue projections cut completely in half. We have GHG commitments that don’t take into consideration upstream emissions. We have no reference whatsoever to the 100,000 new jobs that were supposed to be created by the LNG boom.

But just two weeks ago the Premier in this House listed five new conditions for LNG. I didn’t know we had any. I went looking for a press release. I went looking for a speech. I had never seen, in all of the time that the Premier has been talking about LNG, which is almost on a daily basis, a reference to the five new conditions until October 8.

What was not listed in those five conditions? Only three of them were articulated that day, but apparently there are five. I’m hopeful that in No. 4 and No. 5 we will hear a commitment to British Columbians getting jobs first and not temporary foreign workers.

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Hon. C. Clark: You know, of course the NDP stands up again and looks into their crystal ball and offers more predictions about what they think is going to happen. I just want to take a moment to talk about the other predictions that this Leader of the Opposition has made.

First of all, he predicted we couldn’t balance the budget. We did. He said we couldn’t balance a second budget. We have. He said we couldn’t negotiate a teachers agreement, and we did that too. Then, of course, No. 4 and the mother of all wrong predictions, the Leader of the Opposition also predicted we would not win the last election, which we also did.

So we have a Leader of the Opposition that has been wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong. On this side of the House we will create a prosperity fund. We will use that prosperity fund to pay off the debt for British Columbians. We will make sure we create an LNG industry that is going to be the primary source of that wealth to pay off the debt, and we will do it because the fifth condition is this: there must be significant economic benefit for the people of British Columbia.

J. Horgan: I think the people of B.C. deserve a little bit better than more hyperbolic language from the Premier. All the Premier has wanted to talk about for as long as I can remember is liquefied natural gas and the fairy tales that go along with it. But my concern, and I think the concerns of members on this side of the House and most British Columbians, is that if you say something, you should actually do it. If you make a commitment to the people of British Columbia, you should follow through with it.

Now, the Premier has said, as recently as in the lead-up to the last election: “Well, it’s an election, and we say things that we don’t really mean.” But the Minister of Finance, who sits to the right of the Premier — the right from her side — said in February in his budget that the tax for LNG would be 7 percent. Then we went hard — “We negotiated hard,” said the Premier — and now it’s 3½ percent.

Interjections.

[1410]

Madame Speaker: Members. Members will come to order. Members will come to order.

Please continue.

J. Horgan: The minister responsible for gas certainly has lots of it today.

My question is to the Premier. You made a commitment to 100,000 jobs, and then you cut a deal for more temporary foreign workers. You said that there would be greenhouse gas emission targets that would be met, legislated in this province, and you’re not counting upstream emissions.

To the Premier: you had five conditions. You haven’t articulated them. Here’s an opportunity. Why don’t you stand in this place and tell us what those five conditions actually are? I’m counting. I’ll put a thumb up each time you get one.

Hon. C. Clark: It’s only now that the Leader of the Opposition has finally told us where he thinks the source of the gas is that I finally understand why he wants a moratorium on extracting it.

Here we have the NDP who say that LNG is a pipedream, but then they say: “Oh, it’s a pipedream, but it’s going to be an environmental pariah.” Then they say it will poison our planet, but they don’t think it will happen. Then they say they’d like to export it, but they don’t want to get it out of the ground.

Clarity in this House exists on just this side of the House, where we have been absolutely clear. We support extracting natural gas. We support transporting natural gas. We support the processing of natural gas so we can put it on ships and send it to Asia. We support the export of natural gas.

We support all of those elements so that we can create thousands and thousands of jobs in British Columbia, so that we can ensure that our province has the revenue that it needs to pay off our debt.

So 100,000 new jobs, a debt that is paid off for our kids — we are clear about that, unlike the Leader of the Opposition.

Madame Speaker: The Leader of the Opposition on a supplemental.

LNG DEVELOPMENT AND JOB CREATION

J. Horgan: I didn’t hear the five conditions there again. I’m reminded of the briefing that the Finance Minister gave yesterday that we had to come back to reality. I guess the Premier missed the memo on that, because we’re not going to achieve a debt-free status by 2025, as she promised in the election campaign. It’s not going to happen.

You have to stop increasing the debt before you can start reducing it. During this Premier’s watch the debt has gone up faster than at any time in B.C.’s history. You can’t say one thing and then do another, but that’s the modus operandi for the Premier. She seems to know what to say, and she even sounds sincere when she says it, but it just doesn’t add up.

Again, my question is…. You make a commitment to leading the country in jobs; we’re ninth in the country. You make a commitment to 100,000 jobs in British Columbia, and then you sign an agreement to bring in more temporary foreign workers. What is it, Madam Premier? Are you creating jobs for British Columbians or foreign nationals?

[ Page 4817 ]

Hon. C. Clark: On this side of the House we have a clear plan. We have a clear ten-year skills-training plan and Find Your Fit to make sure that young people have the opportunity to take on the new jobs that will be created in the LNG business. We’ve set out all of the conditions that are required to make sure that the LNG industry can really thrive in British Columbia.

[1415]

We have supported all of this development all along the way, unlike the Leader of the Opposition. He says he won’t rule out a moratorium on fracking. Let’s look at what some of the rest of his members say. The member for Vancouver-Fairview says: “I think we need to stop fracking.” The member for Saanich South says: “We are facing risks of mass extinction from the very gas that the B.C. government wants to extract and sell as quickly as possible.”

If you want clarity, look no further than what these members say, which is that they do not support a natural gas industry in British Columbia. They don’t support exporting our natural gas from British Columbia. They don’t support creating those jobs. They don’t support creating the revenue it’s going to take to pay off our debt, and they don’t support economic growth. The difference between them and us? They believe in no; we believe in yes.

B. Ralston: On a recent visit to India the Premier spoke to the Economic Times , a New Delhi publication, about the importance of training workers for the LNG industry. She said: “India needs a million skilled workers a year, every year, for the next 15 years. We can help. If we can help train 3,000 of them and 300 of them help us build an LNG industry, it’s good for you, and it’s good for us.”

Can the Premier explain how training 300 Indian workers in India will help her fulfil her promise to create 100,000 jobs here in British Columbia?

Hon. C. Clark: The reality in India is not that there will be a million new workers every year. There will be a million new workers every month entering the workforce for the next 15 years — an absolutely astonishing growth in that country.

There are two things that India will need in order to make that work for them rather than against them. One of them is energy, and we’ve got lots of it. The other is education, and we’ve got lots of that — the highest quality you can find anywhere around the world.

What we did when we were in India with the Minister of Advanced Education is sign numerous agreements for partnerships with post-secondary institutions to ensure that we are working together with Indians to ensure that we transfer Indian knowledge to Canada and Canadian knowledge to India.

There is absolutely no question that our natural gas industry is going to mean that British Columbians are first in line for jobs. But there is also no secret of the fact that at peaks in production there will be some temporary foreign workers who are required. I am at a loss to explain the hostility that the NDP consistently shows to people who want to come to our shores to work, so many of whom may take the opportunity to stay.

I would ask that member to examine his own history. He may be here because his parents decided to come to these shores and help build this country — his grandparents, his great-grandparents. I would hazard a guess that that is true of every member on the other side of the House. I don’t understand their hostility towards this. These are people who helped build Canada.

Madame Speaker: Recognizing Surrey-Whalley on a supplemental.

B. Ralston: Clearly, the Premier is confusing the temporary foreign worker program with programs of immigration that lead to citizenship here in Canada.

A review of documents the government has produced on LNG — there are many, of course — shows that the Premier has only ever identified three priorities for LNG development, the first of which is keeping B.C. competitive in the global LNG market.

Can the Premier tell the House if signing agreements with China for more temporary foreign workers or training workers in India for LNG construction is part of her plan for keeping the British Columbia economy competitive?

[1420]

Hon. C. Clark: I find the line of questioning from the member opposite deeply, deeply troubling. This country was built by people who came from every corner of the earth to put their shoulders together and decide to build a country. There are members across the way who either were immigrants or who are the children of immigrants.

The member is not ignorant of this fact, I’m sure. Of temporary foreign workers that went to Saskatchewan and Manitoba, at least 50 percent of them have ended up already on the track to become citizens. It is a track to become a citizen of British Columbia. It is a track on which people can get to join us in continuing to build this great country.

We should never forget who it was that founded Canada. It was, if you’re not First Nations, people from all over the globe. We should continue to welcome people from all over the world. Frankly, I find the line of questioning that the member has undertaken profoundly troubling and not worthy of this House.

LNG DEVELOPMENT AND

REDUCTION OF PUBLIC DEBT

M. Elmore: In 2013 Premier Christy Clark said her LNG plan will eliminate…

[ Page 4818 ]

Madame Speaker: Member, you do not reference members by their names.

M. Elmore: Sorry. The Premier.

…government debt — including B.C. Hydro, Ferries and Port Mann Bridge debt — by 2028. In fact, she has presided over the fastest-growing and largest government debt in B.C. history. All of these debts are expected to reach at least $69.4 billion by 2017.

Before we can eliminate debt, it must stop growing. To the Premier: on what date will B.C.’s debt stop growing?

Hon. C. Clark: I remember during the election campaign that members opposite — this one probably included — said that we couldn’t balance our budget. We did that. We did it twice. They said that our triple-A credit rating would be imperiled. We’ve protected that. We’ve done that year after year. All of their predictions about these things have turned out to be entirely wrong.

We will build an LNG industry in British Columbia. We will make sure that British Columbians are first in line for those jobs. We will make sure that we take the revenues from that, put it in the prosperity fund and use that fund to pay down British Columbia’s debt.

Our plan is something that we have continued to make happen day after day, month after month, in the time since the election. Everything that they said wouldn’t happen already has, and everything they say won’t happen will certainly happen in the future.

FUNDING FOR ABORIGINAL CHILD

WELFARE PROGRAMS AND FIRST NATIONS

CONSENT TO NATURAL GAS PIPELINES

D. Donaldson: In recent negotiations the B.C. Liberal government linked funding for existing aboriginal welfare programs with approval for natural gas pipelines on First Nations traditional territories. In a written document presented to the Wet’suwet’en titled “B.C.’s Offer With Respect to Proposed Natural Gas Pipelines,” right up front, under “What B.C. Has Done So Far,” child welfare funding is highlighted.

To the Premier: why are the B.C. Liberals using vulnerable children as bargaining chips in a desperate attempt to get this First Nation’s consent for natural gas pipelines?

Hon. C. Clark: I’d like to thank the member. I am always delighted to be able to get up in question period, particularly on my favourite topic, liquefied natural gas, which is going to ensure the future of British Columbia.

I would point out to the member this. We have been working very hard with First Nations and communities all across British Columbia to ensure that they are a part, that they are full beneficiaries, of this natural gas opportunity for our province. This is a generational opportunity to ensure that First Nations have the resources that they need to lead and change the kinds of communities that they really, really want to create for the future. We have a chance to be a part of that.

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I would advise the member and his caucus to please stop standing in the way of the creation of a liquefied natural gas industry. Stop standing up and demanding a moratorium on the extraction of it. Stop standing up and making sure that they do everything that they can to make this reality evaporate for British Columbians.

We are going to do everything we can to make it happen. We are going do everything we can to make sure that those benefits flow to British Columbians — including First Nations, who so richly deserve them.

Madame Speaker: The member for Stikine on a supplemental.

D. Donaldson: Well, that’s a totally facile response. The proof is in the presentation your government made to the Wet’suwet’en, “B.C.’s Offer With Respect to Proposed Natural Gas Pipelines,” “What B.C. Has Done So Far.” Child welfare funding. How does this government expect to build reconciliation and strengthen relationships with First Nations when it links existing funding for vulnerable children with buy-in for LNG development?

Hon. C. Clark: I was very privileged to chair and bring together an historic meeting of First Nations chiefs from all across the province with the entire cabinet and all of the deputy ministers. Over 400 First Nations leaders attended that meeting. At that meeting we talked about the economic opportunities that existed for First Nations — not for us to help First Nations but for First Nations to step up as a full partner in economic growth to ensure that the future of their communities was just as brightly assured as the future of children in other communities all across the province.

The potential for liquefied natural gas in many regions across the province presents the brightest opportunity for economic growth that many of those First Nations have seen in over 100 years. We are going to continue to work with them so that the benefits of LNG can work for them and so that they have the chance to create the kinds of communities that their children so richly deserve to live in.

INCOME ASSISTANCE POLICY ON

CHILD SUPPORT PAYMENTS

M. Mungall: Roy McMurter puts at least $500 aside for his two children every month. That’s his child support payment. He also puts an extra $250 aside every month because he knows his kids are living in poverty with their mother. But as everybody in this House knows, the government then claws that money back every single month

[ Page 4819 ]

because his children’s mother receives disability.

Mr. McMurter wants the Premier to tell him why his children are being punished when he does the right thing.

Hon. D. McRae: I’ve stood in this House and addressed this issue before. I think it’s been well documented that income assistance is a payment of last resort. We want opportunities for our children and for our families to make sure they have a great life. That’s one of the important reasons why we know that British Columbians need jobs.

Now, that being said, there is a segment of our population that is vulnerable, and I’m very pleased to say that we have over 70 programs that we use to support these individuals. That being said, the work is never done. We continue to evolve the income assistance programs to make sure we better serve individuals who are vulnerable, and that work will continue.

Madame Speaker: The member for Nelson-Creston on a supplemental.

M. Mungall: Roy McMurter is here today. He wants to hear an answer from the Premier to his question. The minister in the past, as well as the Premier in the past, has repeatedly said that they won’t be ending the clawback because they can’t afford it. Rather, this government has promised just more talk when it comes to ending the clawback. Mr. McMurter wants his money to go to his children. That’s what the money is for.

How can the Premier keep saying that her government can’t afford to give B.C.’s poorest kids their money back?

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Hon. D. McRae: There are challenges, and I don’t want to diminish those whatsoever. That being said, one of the opportunities in a big way in this province is to make sure we create jobs and grow the economy. I’d like the members opposite to stand up and support situations like liquefied natural gas so we can make sure we continue to invest in health care and education. And yes, we invest in social services.

J. Kwan: Look, it’s been 12 years since this Liberal government clawed back family maintenance for people on income assistance and on disability. The government couldn’t actually rescind that policy when the economy was performing, and now they say we still have to wait. The fact of the matter is that Mr. McMurter cannot wait anymore. He wants his children to get out of living in poverty.

Will the minister just get up in this House and tell Mr. McMurter that he can get those family maintenance dollars for his children today?

Hon. D. McRae: I’m proud of the work that has been done to date, and I’m proud of the work that will continue to get done. Policy reforms like earning exemptions and annualized earning exemptions are just one example of how this province continues to make sure that vulnerable British Columbians have some more resources.

I think it’s a tad rich that the member opposite characterizes this as a 12-year program. I’d like to read a little quote to the member.

“If an individual were able to keep additional money, the fact that it would cost to the province is certainly a consideration of Treasury Board. The pressure that we have on the system right now” — this is all in reference to family maintenance — “that’s one thing that people don’t consider generally. They feel that money is free to the system, but it is not. It is a direct cost to the taxpayers.”

Now, that was not said by a Social Credit cabinet minister. It wasn’t said by a B.C. Liberal cabinet minister. It was said by a New Democratic cabinet minister, a lady by the name of the hon. J. Smallwood, in the 1990s. It is a challenge, because we all know there is more we can do. We will continue to evolve these programs. The work is never done, and I’ll work tirelessly to do my best for the province of British Columbia.

J. Kwan: Look, for the year 2013-14 this government has clawed back $18 million of child support money from children living in poverty. I hope the minister is not proud of that record.

Mr. McMurter does not have deep pockets. He doesn’t have the money to hire lobbyists to lobby the Premier for tax breaks. What he simply wants is what every parent wants: for the money that they earn to go to support their children. In this instance for Mr. McMurter, what he wants is for his child maintenance money to go to support his children.

Why is it so difficult for the government to implement that policy? I ask the minister: will he please get up in this House and just let this man know that his children will be getting his support, his financial support, so he can get the development and opportunities that we all want for our children?

Hon. D. McRae: We all want what is best for our children, vulnerable or not. That being said, the one question the member opposite was asking is: why not now? Well, I’m not going to bring in a policy that we cannot afford at this time. We’re going to continue to grow the economy. We’re going to continue to evolve the policies and the programs to support vulnerable British Columbians.

[ Page 4820 ]

We have shown great examples. Let me, to the members opposite, show some of the work that’s been done in the past. There are over 800,000 MSP premium exemptions in the province of British Columbia. We are doing work. We’ll continue to work. The work will never be done.

[1435]

S. Simpson: The minister sits here and ignores the reality of the situation. We have half a million British Columbians living in poverty, and a third of those are kids. Poor kids is poor families. You get a gentleman like Mr. McMurter who wants to help his kids who are living in poverty and who are vulnerable, and this government and this minister rip away the money that he wants to give to his kids.

How can that be okay? It’s time to remove the clawback. Will the minister commit today to remove the clawback, or will he at least tell us when he is going to do it?

Hon. D. McRae: I will commit in this House today to continue to evolve the supports for vulnerable British Columbians. Making sure the members opposite are aware: there is work that is done — whether it is supports for school supplies, opportunities for PharmaCare exemption; whether it is, for example, opportunities of federal tax credits, or child care credits to make sure that vulnerable British Columbians are getting support. I will commit in this House to make sure that we will continue to improve those resources for those vulnerable British Columbians.

[End of question period.]

Point of Privilege

(Reservation of Right)

L. Popham: I rise to reserve my right of personal privilege.

Madame Speaker: So noted.

Orders of the Day

Hon. M. de Jong: I call second reading on Bill 2.

Second Reading of Bills

BILL 2 — GREENHOUSE GAS INDUSTRIAL

REPORTING AND CONTROL ACT

Hon. M. Polak: I rise to speak to the Greenhouse Gas Industrial Reporting and Control Act. This bill will enact a performance standard for liquefied natural gas facilities and certainty for industry.

The request for legislation was reviewed and approved by the cabinet working group on liquefied natural gas on June 24, 2014. The intent of the new act is to enable a performance standard for prescribed facilities under the scope of the act, initially liquefied natural gas and coal-fired electricity generation opportunities.

For liquefied natural gas facilities, there is an emissions intensity benchmark of 0.16 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per tonne of liquefied natural gas produced. For coal-fired electricity generation, there is a benchmark of zero greenhouse gas emissions. The requirement previously, under the Environmental Management Act, to use carbon capture and storage, will be prescribed in regulations under the new act. The reporting regulation under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction (Cap and Trade) Act will be ported over to the new act with only minor amendments.

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As such, reporting operations that emit over 10,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent will continue to report their emissions, and reporting operations that emit over 25,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent will continue to have their reported emissions verified by a third party.

Regulated operations can meet the benchmark by adopting energy-efficient technology or using clean energy to power the operation. Regulated operations can also comply with the benchmark by purchasing offsets, purchasing earned credits or purchasing funded units that invest in clean technology research and development for long-term emission reductions. A registry is used to help the government track compliance.

The standards for high-quality offsets and processes to create offsets will be prescribed by regulation. There will be a positive list of protocols issued by the director to provide certainty on how to quantify emission reductions and removals.

Earned credits may be generated where a regulated operation performs below the emissions limit applicable to that operation. The money from the funded units is collected by the Ministry of Environment to put into a technology fund or to directly fund clean technology opportunities.

These are the provisions of the bill which, if approved by the Legislature, will set a performance benchmark for liquefied natural gas facilities in B.C. to be the cleanest in the world.

Hon. Speaker, I move second reading.

[D. Horne in the chair.]

S. Chandra Herbert: Thank you, Minister, for moving the bill.

I must admit, it’s an interesting day to speak in a provincial parliament or a legislature, of course reminded of the privilege after the horrific incident up in Ottawa. Certainly, being able to stand and debate, as we do here,

[ Page 4821 ]

is a privilege. Not every country, of course, has that ability. The fact that I can be across from the minister and disagree, agree, offer suggestions, even arguments and still go out in the hallway, being able to have a conversation and not be afraid for my own life or my own safety is something that I feel very privileged for. It’s not something that I’ll take for granted.

I have not told the House before, but the minister and I have some history. I’m not sure if she remembers, but I certainly do. I was a young man, shortly after high school. The minister was on the school board of Surrey at the time. She and I actually had an argument in the parking lot of the Surrey school board about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. Her leadership on the school board had led to the banning of gay books and the stopping of gay-straight alliances in that jurisdiction.

We had an argument at the time, but we’re still able to be here today to have this debate in a forum of respect. People change; things move forward. Thankfully, Surrey does not follow those policies any longer. And the minister and I are able to have respectful discussions even when we have disagreements.

I just want to thank the minister, as well, for her willingness to have a briefing for me on this legislation yesterday. Even though I had a briefing, even though the bill was just introduced on Monday, I do have a lot of questions, it being Wednesday and me being told late yesterday that the bill would be up for debate today. So forgive me, hon. Speaker, as I may be repetitive at times.

I may not be as uplifting or moving as I would have wanted to be in a situation for legislation which deals with a very important topic, which is the topic that brought me into this House, the topic of climate change. It’s one of the main reasons I ran for this Legislature back in 2008. In a few short days it will mark six years since I was elected to this place. So it’s somewhat fitting, I think, that this bill and this minister are here to have this discussion.

Now, why climate change? Why greenhouse gases? Why are we talking about the Greenhouse Gas Industrial Reporting and Control Act? Well, I think it’s important for a few reasons. Of course, the minister has given a very technical speech about what the bill does.

I referred back to speeches in 2008 when the greenhouse gas cap and trade act was introduced. The minister at the time was Barry Penner.

[1445]

He spoke quite strongly about the need to act against climate change now and the huge risk it posed to our economy and our future and the huge opportunities that we could have if we took real action now, with better jobs, with an improving economy in clean technology.

I found it interesting that we had the minister speak so strongly on that at that time. This time we have much more discussion of emissions, don’t really talk about climate change that much and don’t really talk about the need for real motivation, the need for real action now. Instead, we basically had the expectations lowered.

This bill is being introduced because the Premier, before the election, argued that we would have the cleanest LNG in the world. Now, that is a nice dream. It’s a nice phrase. It’s a nice argument. But this bill does nothing of the kind.

I think it’s important that we reflect on the ever-shifting position of the B.C. Liberal government when it comes to the cleanest LNG in the world. It started with cleanest LNG in the world all in, from the extraction through processing, through the pipeline to, of course, the liquefaction and then export. That’s what it used to mean. That’s what the government used to say it meant.

But then, of course, just as we’ve seen with the amount of money that LNG is supposed to bring into the province, just as we’ve seen for the amount of jobs, just as we’ve seen for “Debt-free B.C.,” just about every promise the government has made around LNG has been redefined, retorqued and changed to mean something completely different from what they first said it meant.

I think there’s an interesting argument here that Pembina Institute made, where they argue that if we took this approach in hockey, we expect Team Canada to be the best team in the world. We don’t put that onus entirely on the goalie and then move the goalposts closer together. Best or cleanest — with an asterisk — doesn’t cut it on the ice, nor should it when we come to safeguarding a healthy environment.

The province’s LNG strategy used to read that LNG development in Canada will have lower life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions than anywhere else in the world. Well, I don’t know about you, Mr. Speaker, but when I hear life cycle, I think the entire life. I don’t think just the last ten years somebody is alive. I think from birth to death.

For LNG, the appropriate thought of what that means would be from the birth of natural gas deep in the earth all the way up through the pipelines, through the processing to the liquefaction process and then for export. That is a full life cycle. There is no LNG without the NG — the natural gas. Otherwise it would be just be liquefied — blank. But unfortunately, that’s what the Premier seems to think liquefied natural gas is: liquefied — blank. There is nothing else of the natural gas involved in that.

It is unfortunate that the Premier has taken that tack. But it’s completely consistent with her belief and her disrespect for British Columbians, her belief that people don’t need to see the whole truth. I believe that you can change the meanings of words, that you can obfuscate and modify your beliefs, and hopefully, if you just say it with enough verve, vigour and smiles, people won’t understand the difference.

Frankly, I think that’s insulting. But that is what this government is expecting us to do. They expect black to mean white, green to mean brown or brown to mean

[ Page 4822 ]

green, dirty to mean clean, clean to mean clean even when it’s not.

This bill, just to be clear, of course, “requires industrial operations that emit a prescribed threshold amount of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere to measure and report those emissions and requires industrial operations that are set out in the

schedule to the act to ensure that their greenhouse gas emissions are below a specified emission limit.”

That’s what it says it does. You would have a lot of questions. The minister in her speech spoke a lot about regulations. Indeed, much of the bill, over 25 percent of the bill is left for the future. Somehow, down the road, the government will decide. We won’t be in the room. The public won’t be in the room. So you can modify words to mean different things. You can change meanings. You can do pretty much anything you want with the way this bill is worded.

That is not, I believe, respectful of democracy or giving us a lot of faith in the future of what this government promises, because, of course, if you could change cleanest LNG to be from the whole life cycle of liquefied natural gas, with 70 percent or so, approximately, of the greenhouse gas emissions being upstream, to now have it only focus on the L in LNG — the liquefaction process — you can do anything.

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That’s what this government indeed seems to suggest they’re going to do, because they’ve done it for years. When you look prior to the election to what they are now saying, we get our answer.

I was always taught, as a young person, to look at actions to see if somebody is following through on their word. A word is one thing, but it’s actions that make the difference. It’s: “Do you actually do what you say?” What we’ve got a lot of here is saying but not a lot of doing.

Why is it important that we actually be doing, not just saying? Why is it important that we understand and consider the full LNG — not just the “L,” but also the natural gas part, the whole life cycle, not just the last ten years of your life? It’s important because it is all of our futures. It is our children’s futures and our grandchildren’s futures. It is our province’s future, when it comes to climate change.

You’ve heard me speak in this House many times about climate change and the desperate need for action. It was one of the things that brought me into this House. It’s one of the things that I’ll keep working on, because the situation is so dire.

Now, some on the other side of the House like to accuse me and others of being glass half-empty. Well, the glass could be half-empty; it could be half-full. You could, and ought to, recognize that it can be both. You can’t pretend there’s only the bright side of life, because there is no brightness without darkness. There is no darkness without light.

Again, this government seems to believe there is only one side of the equation — refuses to recognize that when you have profit, sometimes you also have losses. When you have good days, you also sometimes have bad days. The good that could come from LNG — jobs, income into this province, and the real possibility of a boost in the northwest — also has to be weighed with the bad, which is climate change.

There are a lot of emissions that will be created from the liquefication process — but of course, including the 70 percent that is not included in this bill from the wellhead right through to the liquefication process.

Why is it important that we care about climate change? Why do I care so much about it? Well, I was introduced to it from a young age. I had an incredible teacher, an elementary school teacher who started teaching us about greenhouse gases, who started talking about this at a time when we were entering the Rio convention in 1990.

Yes, I am that young. I know that this House has aged me very quickly, has stretched the beltline a little bit and has led to a slight recision in my hairline. Is that a word? I’m not sure. But such is life. I’m still the youngest member in this House, which is, I guess, how it works.

Interjection.

S. Chandra Herbert: My colleague to my left, the member for Delta South, says: “Now, wait a minute.” She certainly is youthful in spirit and has a very, very energetic passion for life with a very creative mind. I really do enjoy working alongside her. She keeps me young too, because this place has a way of leading to cynicism and maybe leading to not the optimism of youth on certain days.

Deputy Speaker: Yes, yes, and I’m certain the member will come to which

section of the bill is the youthful

section of the LNG act.

S. Chandra Herbert: I appreciate the Speaker’s desire for me to speak about the youthfulness of this legislation. This legislation, unfortunately, hon. Speaker, seems to take an older view of the economy versus a youthful view of the economy and where we need to be going into the future. That’s what this bill seems to do, and I appreciate the Speaker’s suggestion that I draw my remarks to the bill.

I think it’s important that we speak about how we come to a bill, what our experiences are when they relate to a bill, because they define who we are as people and define how we see a bill.

At the age of ten I learned about climate change. I learned about the huge threat to our future: the fact that we were losing huge, vast numbers of species through die-offs. We were starting to see forest fires which had never been seen in certain areas before in the same frequency, and massive storms.

[ Page 4823 ]

Everybody said: “You’ve got to do your part.” I remember very strongly saying to my parents: “Wait a second. Pull this car over. I don’t want to go to that big-box store. I’m going to walk home because you’re polluting the atmosphere, and I don’t want to see it anymore.” They didn’t take too kindly to that at the time. They respected my youthful idealism and thought that was pretty cool that somebody would care so much about the planet.

[1455]

You know what? They did change some of their behaviour. They started riding their bikes to work and things like that, as they were able, and certainly are very environmentally minded as well.

I mention that because, again, who are we doing this for? Do we govern just for ourselves? Do we govern just for our constituents who are alive today? Or do we govern for the long term? I think we should be here, of course, governing for the long term.

I’ve transitioned from being that youthful person in short pants — as members of this House often refer to young people. I’m not sure. I don’t see a lot of young people wearing short pants these days. Those would be knickers, I suppose. They might wear shorts but certainly not short pants. But the House is a little bit older than myself. Maybe the youth that they remember wore knickers, but certainly the youth of today are not wearing short pants or knickers.

I wear a suit, which is certainly an older suit — a suit from, I believe, the ’70s. It is a used suit, a reused suit, an antique suit, maybe an elder suit, a suit that certainly is, maybe, for my more fashion-conscious constituents, an outrage, but I enjoy it. It is also a green suit, which I thought was appropriate for talking about improving our environment today, although it could have been an orange suit. The orange suits…. They also care about the environment as well. But I digress. And I know. I haven’t been digressing at all.

Deputy Speaker: Given the member’s digression, shall I assume that you’re the designated speaker?

S. Chandra Herbert: Yes, hon. Speaker. I was waiting for my half-hour to tell you I was the designated speaker so that you could find great joy that you would get to hear from me for even longer.

Anyway, we’ll go from the suit to talking about climate change, to talking about a suite, not a suit, of actions that the province needs to be taking, the legal requirements that we have all said in this House and that we support in this House.

Of course, the most upcoming, the closest one, a little bit over five years, is a cut in our greenhouse gas emissions of 33 percent below 2020. Well, that’s a very large number. At the time, the government said yes; they agreed it was a real stretch goal: “We might be able to get to a reduction by 2012, but to get to that bigger reduction of 33 percent of our 2007 emissions would be a real stretch.” But there’s a moral requirement that we meet that stretch.

The moral requirement, of course, speaks to us in many ways. The moral requirement is that we want a better future, not a future of storms, of disappearing ice sheets, of endangered species disappearing, of salmon die-offs because the water is too hot, of ocean acidification killing our shellfish industry, of massive forest fires and deaths of the forestry industry because of pine beetle — all things that we’ve already seen, all things that are here right now.

Climate change is often talked about in the future, but the results we see now. When I talk about the balance of the money we can make from a strong LNG industry, which is certainly considerable, we also need to respect that there are costs. One only needs to think of the recent storm outside of Calgary, which cost billions of dollars, and put that up against the billions of dollars we could make in an LNG industry, should that ever materialize in this province.

You have to remember that there are assets and there are deficits. Rarely do we get a golden goose and a golden egg without understanding that you also have to clean out the barn that that goose might live in and that you actually have to feed a goose. There are costs to a golden egg as well.

Let’s think about this. The Premier said, of course, that we’d have the cleanest LNG industry in the world, but this bill exempts 70 percent, approximately, of the emissions. Now, I say 70 percent because I asked the government staff the other day if they could tell me how many emissions were upstream and if they could tell me, based on what studies I had, if this was accurate. They couldn’t tell me that.

I don’t know if it’s because they haven’t done an analysis — I certainly think they might; I certainly trust public servants to do that — or because the ministry didn’t want to see that analysis, didn’t want that analysis shared, because it is rather large. I’m not sure, but whatever the reason is, it’s disturbing. If you’re going to make the cleanest LNG industry in the world, you actually have to include that whole industry.

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There are challenges, real challenges with this bill, aside from that issue. Of course, the government suggests that we can clean it up by using offsets. Well, there are problems with offsets. We’ll get to that in a bit.

They had said we can do a technology fund. There are challenges with that, as well. It could be structured well; it could be structured poorly. Again, more to see. The fact is that we actually need to be reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, not increasing them. This plan gives companies a free pass to pollute, to a large extent.

Now, there are ways that we can meet our targets, obviously, but they’re not in this bill. There aren’t any real changes which will reduce emissions in this province.

[ Page 4824 ]

There are only changes in this legislation which will increase emissions in this province.

While we may talk about it as being a bill which looks at greenhouse gas control, it is about controlling an increase. It doesn’t go wildly out of…. Well, I suppose it is going…. If the biggest predictions come true, it would be wildly different than where we are today. I’ll share some of those numbers in a moment.

First, let’s think about what happens if we keep polluting — if we keep letting companies, individuals and others a free pass to put carbon, methane and other pollutants into the atmosphere. It is a free pass. We do get a free pass, largely, because you can’t see it. It doesn’t cost you anything or doesn’t cost you much to pollute.

What happens if we keep polluting? Well, scientists have said we need to focus on a 2-Celsius limit for temperature increase in the globe to avoid the worst of climate change. Now, James Hansen and others have said that 2 Celsius is just one figure. It should actually be lower if we really want to avoid this, if we don’t want to lock into runaway climate change, if we don’t want to see the temperature heat up and heat up and jump higher and higher and higher as we have things like the permafrost melt in the north, as we have the icecaps melt away and so forth.

If we think about it, our body’s temperature…. When we get sick, we get a fever. If it goes up 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 Celsius, eventually you can die. So 2 Celsius is a fever. At 3 Celsius or 4 Celsius, you start thinking you might need to get to the hospital. If you’re not able to get that temperature increase under control, you can die.

While the government might not want to look at that issue, might not want to consider the implications…. I know a number of the government members don’t even believe climate change is real, despite the fact that 97 percent of international scientists have all agreed that climate change is very real and that we are causing it to a large extent. We do need to address this issue now with much more urgency than we are doing currently. Do we want to have on our consciences the loss of whole nations of people on this planet as their island nations go underwater? It’s true. That’s what’s happening.

While some members will giggle and shake their heads as if it’s not real, including one of the members on the Liberal side who I know doesn’t believe in climate change, it is real. I’d like him to go to that island nation and tell the people that what they see around them isn’t real. Tell the grandchildren in the future why we shouldn’t care that we’re seeing worsening storms, because that’s coming. The member will have to explain that to his grandchildren.

Why would we accept this? Of course, in an international world, if we’re doing something and somebody else isn’t, there can be costs. Some will say that, well, companies will move out and move to other jurisdictions where they can pollute for free. Indeed, we’ve seen that, so that is a real challenge. It is a real challenge that we have in our country and indeed in many jurisdictions around the world.

It’s much easier to be a free rider, to not have to pay anything and just pass the problem off to the future, to your children, than it is to take responsibility and leadership. But that’s the reality. That’s what’s going on. People always say: “Well, we’ll push that off. We’ll deal with it next time.”

I’ve heard some argue on the Liberal side that the economic meltdown of 2008 has effectively stopped us from really taking leadership on this because we had to get the economy functioning again. Well, the economy and the environment cannot be separated. They are together. When we have an environment that is sick because we’ve hurt it, we feel the impact. We see that here in British Columbia a lot.

[1505]

For whatever reason — the glass half-empty or the glass half-full — the government will only focus on the glass half-full. They will not recognize that there actually is a lot of air above it, which we have to think of too. They only focus on the light while not acknowledging the dark. That’s not leadership. That is being willingly blind to what we see around us.

That, for me, hurts — to see this action. Again, it is our future that we are messing with here as we jimmy with the thermostat of this world that we still don’t understand very well. Our scientists are working hard to help us understand, but unfortunately, our small human brains, which we egotistically inflate, often in this House, don’t seem to recognize that action is needed now. It was needed yesterday. It was needed years ago. Back in 1990, when I was ten years old, we were being warned very strongly then that we needed real action.

This bill struggles with it. It decides that LNG operations can get 16 percent of their pollution for free. They don’t have to pay anything. You can pollute the atmosphere for free — 16 percent, per tonne of LNG, free pollution. Then they say up to 23 percent, 16 to 23 percent, the government will provide subsidies to bring you back down to 16 percent of pollution.

From 16 to 23, the taxpayers of British Columbia will be paying LNG companies to reduce their pollution, either into offsets or into a technology fund, details to be worked out later. So we look at this. Meanwhile, of course, that’s just the LNG process, the liquefication process, not the rest of the emissions, the 60 to 70 percent of the emissions upstream.

What are those emissions? Of course the terminals, 30 percent; pipelines, 9 percent; extracting process and processing, 61 percent. If the government has better figures, if the industry has better figures, I’d love to see them. I’m working from a Pembina report. They’ve gone through, they’ve talked to industry, they’ve looked at the numbers that they’ve put forward in their environmental assessments, and those are the figures that they could draw. If

[ Page 4825 ]

the government has better figures, it would be nice if they could share them.

Interjection.

S. Chandra Herbert: I hear somebody shouting. I don’t understand why they’re trying to change the subject, because I think there is a real issue here of emissions today. If the member wants to talk about the past, he is welcome to, but I’d like to talk about action today, because I think that is important.

Government says five terminals will equal 13 million tonnes of CO2. Well, if you do the math, if 70 percent of the emissions are upstream, that would be upstream emissions of approximately 43 million tonnes for five terminals. Altogether, that’s around 56 million tonnes of carbon going up into the atmosphere and causing climate change.

That’s the best I could get, because the government has refused to release those figures, whether through freedom of information, through requests or what have you. They have not released those figures. So 56 million tonnes versus — what do we have in B.C. today? — 58 million tonnes for the entire province. That’s not including an LNG industry. That’s the entire province.

Again, I urge members to consider that there is more than just yes or no. Sometimes you need to consider black and white, good and bad, opportunity and challenge, because you cannot get to a true opportunity unless you address the challenge. Yet ministers and members have refused to acknowledge, with honesty, the challenges that we have here.

I get it. It’s politics. It’s the way things have been done: my team is better than your team; my religion is better than your religion; my family is better than your family. That’s the nature of human society, unfortunately.

Sometimes we get stuck in our little hive minds and we can’t acknowledge that what somebody else says — if we’re not on the same team as them or if we’re not from the same party or if we’re not from the same religion or if we’re not from the same country — is worth listening to. That’s, unfortunately, sometimes how humanity works.

We’ve seen that through wars. We’ve seen that through arguments. We’ve seen that through fights. We’ve seen that through huge losses to our human society because we can’t acknowledge that somebody else might have a point, because we can’t acknowledge that in diversity there is strength, that in education and in educating ourselves in things that we don’t quite understand we will get to be better people.

[1510]

I’ve got a lot of respect for those that are working in the industry, because they are trying their best to reduce emissions in many cases. But not in many other cases, because the business model suggests getting the gas out of the ground at the lowest possible price, which sometimes has led to things like venting of emissions straight into the atmosphere, polluting the atmosphere.

Interjection.

S. Chandra Herbert: That is how it works. If that’s not how it works, I invite the member to show me. I went to the industry, and I spoke with them, in his own community, and that’s what they told me. They said they don’t like it, but that’s because they, too, think about their children.

I mention this because it’s easy for some people to other folks who work in the oil and gas sector. I’ve had to argue with my own constituents around the questions of natural gas. They sometimes don’t reflect that they are heating their own homes with natural gas and tell me to shut it down. I say: “No, you can’t. You can’t just shut it down. There are people working and relying on that industry, and our province has relied for many years on that industry.”

When the Premier gets up and makes up stuff in question period to try to other the New Democrats, I find it offensive. We as politicians need to rise above ourselves and above our own partisan interests to try to understand the best for the entire province. What we get here, unfortunately, is spin, spin, spin and a refusal to acknowledge when they’re wrong and only a discussion as if everything is right when sometimes it just plain isn’t.

If we are talking about 56 million tonnes, potentially…. Now, it may be 50 million tonnes. It may be 70 million tonnes. Depending on how many plants get created, it may be slightly lower. It may be slightly more. I’m just going with the figures that the government provided, and they didn’t provide much, which again goes to the question of democracy, or is it about one-party rule? “Maybe we’ll give you something so you can feed on it just a little bit and think you know what you’re talking about, but we won’t really tell you what’s going on.” That’s just the way it is here.

If all of B.C. in 2012 had 58 million tonnes…. And there was a decrease, and it was because of leadership. I appreciated the leadership at the time. There hasn’t been leadership since. We would be adding 58 million tonnes plus 56 million tonnes with LNG. Yet we’re supposed to be reducing — reducing — our total emissions from 2007 by 33 percent by 2020.

How do you do that? How does this bill hope to do that? Well, it would mean we’d need to cut nearly 20 million tonnes, so a 33 percent cut. Actually, sorry. That would be 38 million tonnes we would need to cut. Before LNG we would need to cut 20 million tonnes.

Is that going to be dealt with by the rest of the economy, or are we going to have the government do much the same as the federal Conservatives, as the government of Alberta, as the federal Liberals in the ’90s did as well? We had a lot of talk, but we didn’t get the solutions that we needed — and understandably. It’s hard. You do need

[ Page 4826 ]

to make changes. We all as a society need to make changes. It’s easy to blame just one person or just one government or just one corporation, but we all need to make that change. We all need to argue for it and educate for it and build the constituency for that change.

Would 33 percent, 38 million tonnes, be possible for the rest of the economy to take and continue on as a prosperous economy? I sure hope so. That’s what I’m dedicated to. Unfortunately, this government so far has shown no plan beyond what we’ve got to, to 2012, to actually achieve the goal, aside from talking about LNG. Now, they say we can meet the goal.

When I pressed, I asked: “How?” They said: “Well, really, we might get one LNG plant operating in 2019 and maybe more after that.” What I’m basically hearing is that, well, maybe we’ll meet the goal in 2020, as long as LNG doesn’t get started too fast. Then maybe we won’t make the goal in 2022 if we have a whole bunch of LNG terminals operating with the pollution up and down the line. Maybe we won’t. So we will, and then we won’t.

Of course, we won’t hear that. The hope is that…. Well, 2017 is coming up. That’s the next election, so they won’t be judged on the 2020 target. By 2021, in the next election, they can say, “We met our targets in 2020,” in the 2021 election. Of course, hopefully, the people will have changed the government at that time, and we’ll be able to really have driven down climate change emissions, because this government doesn’t seem too willing to. That seems to be where we are at.

[1515]

We did have a decline, a decline of give or take four million tonnes between 2007 and 2012, 6 percent or so, which is good. But that is a far cry from what we would need to get to either a 20-million-tonne reduction without LNG or a 38-million-tonne reduction with it, based on the government numbers.

Can you do it? Well, what did we have to get that 6 percent reduction? What did we do to do that? Well, we had things like the carbon tax. We had LiveSmart B.C. We had hundreds of millions of dollars going into home retrofits. We had a huge effort by municipalities, who really have been leading the way. Mayors and councils across this province — who are often the closest to constituents, as we often say — have very little financial room to make these changes, but they’ve taken up the leadership with district energy systems, with incredible transit investments and more.

That’s what we had during that period. We had a large shift. But that large shift — with many, many dollars — led us to just a 6 percent decrease. If we’re thinking about getting rid of 33 percent of our emissions, we’re going to have to do a heck of a lot more. We’re going to have to be doing more of those things. If we think about it, hundreds of millions going into retrofits — well, not so much anymore. The government got rid of the program. That’s LiveSmart B.C. and other efforts.

Increase in transit? No. The government has said: “We’ll leave that up to you, municipalities. If you want to do that, you have to have a referendum.” Meanwhile, the government will support bridges, which often lead to single-occupancy vehicles, not to increased transit.

That’s, unfortunately, where they’ve decided to focus their efforts — on a commute, on an attempt to meet congestion — while not acknowledging that when you have more people riding on a bus, you get a much larger reduction in congestion. If you have 20 people riding on a bus who used to all drive single-occupancy vehicles, you’ve taken 20 vehicles off the road and replaced that with one bus. That’s quite an impact, when you invest in transit.

It’s also good for the economy, because it opens up the roads so that we’re not having to build more roads. It opens up the roads so that truck traffic and other forms of traffic can get through, can make it to their destinations on time, increasing the speed of the economy as well as reducing climate change emissions. But no, the government has refused to acknowledge that we really do need a big investment in transit, choosing instead to ignore it, to delay it, to confuse it, to insult mayors, to do all those things that the Liberals are known for, unfortunately, while refusing to take leadership on one of the biggest challenges of our time.

If we think about 33 percent by 2020, what’s the other goal? What’s the other big, big target that we’ve all acknowledged we need to meet? Well, maybe not all of us, since there are a number of Liberals who don’t believe in climate change and don’t believe we need to do anything about it. That would be an 80 percent reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. What’s that look like? Well, as of 2007, that’s approximately a 49-million-tonne drop, which would leave us at around 12 million tonnes of carbon pollution. That’s a pretty massive drop, if you think of it, if you think that we are at 58 million tonnes today.

If we’re going to get a 49.6-million drop, or so — maybe just say a 49-million-tonne drop — in GHGs by 2050, we need to be massively driving down the emissions that we are creating today, not adding more emissions. But the government has argued we can do LNG while meeting those targets. If you’re going to do that, you have to show where you’re going to get that. That means a drawing down of emissions from LNG plants.

This bill, you would expect, would show a

schedule to be able to do that, with continual improvements in technology, if that would be the argument the government made — to be drawing down the emissions from LNG terminals. What we hear instead is: “We’re going to lock in, keep things very much the same, through at least till 2037 — just 13 years out from that 2050 legal requirement of when we must lower our emissions — and then discussion of 100 years of gas, that we could keep doing it for 100 years.

The International Energy Agency very clearly has

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shown how we all must, every jurisdiction — not just Canada, not just British Columbia…. Everywhere in the world needs to be drawing down the amount of emissions we produce, not increasing it, if we want any chance to stay at the 2 Celsius limit, if we want any chance to stay at keeping the very worst of climate change from impacting us, not just keeping it as business as usual.

[1520]

Business as usual…. We’re already well past that, as we see in our communities today, as we see devastation across the province in our pine beetle woods, as we see it in the storms and as we see it in developing erratic weather patterns in many parts of the globe — which, of course, impacts us as well.

If you have climate refugees clamouring to get out of their communities, whether it’s in the parched south or the incredibly stormy southeast…. Sometimes they are parched and stormy at the same time within a week or two of the other, as British Columbia was back in 2007 — when this government decided that climate change mattered, when we all united in this province to say that we needed to take action on climate change. At that time, of course, we had a very stormy spring, a very parched summer and then a very stormy fall.

We’ve continued to see those kinds of weather patterns through on up to the present. They are very consistent that this is going to get worse, and indeed, it has.

If we’re going to meet our legally required commitment of an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, we need to start planning today, because that is quite a change for our economy. That is a massive change for our economy.

We have already seen some changes and some people start to shift, whether or not it is through clean technology; through the tech sector, where you’re getting incredible returns in solar and wind; in the battery storage systems, which can be used to take that power and bring it to people who need it.

You’re seeing that in the home energy sector, where you’re getting incredible green buildings. You’re getting incredible buildings that actually put power back into the system, buildings that don’t put out greenhouse gas emissions through the need to burn gas. As I guess it was in the old days, of course, many of our homes used to burn coal through the coal chute.

We need to be shifting — everyone recognizes it — with a just transition for those workers and respecting their jobs, respecting their livelihoods and respecting that they, too, want their children to have a better future by having a better planet, a planet that is not ravaged by massive storms and a disappearance of many of the species, many of the natural elements that we all love so dear. We wouldn’t want to see that. We wouldn’t want to see that at all.

Of course, with our actions, with our plodding ways, with our big brains that think we can fix everything, we’re bringing that into reality as a human species. This government, this Premier in particular, has decided to step on it. She’s decided that we need to increase it.

One of the things that she often says is: “Well, this will help China.” We all would love to see China’s air quality improve, and I think China is taking steps to do that. They’ve signed a massive contract with Russia to get natural gas from Russia. Certainly, I think we could understand the argument behind it. We could understand that.

The challenge, and this is where we get to a principle that New Democrats take seriously, is the precautionary principle, the question of do you go all in if you’re not totally sure of what the results are.

I raise that because, of course, as we have seen in some studies — Ingraffea from Cornell and others — there is a real question about the pollution power of natural gas and the full life cycle, if done badly, versus coal. He points to things like methane escape and other things, which have in some jurisdictions — in Pennsylvania, principally, where the study was done — led to, on the whole, life cycle emissions similar to coal.

Now, that’s what the study says there. There has not been a similar study done in our northeast of this province, and I understand that geologically it is different. I’m not saying that this is indeed the fact, but I’m saying that we need to have the information. We need to look at ensuring that if we’re going to be pulling gas from the ground — and I believe it can be done in a way that is the best in the world, the best technology in the world — you need to be ensuring you’re not getting methane leaks. You need to be ensuring that you’re not venting off gas, as carbon, into the atmosphere, as we currently see.

It is a challenge. It will mean a real difference. It will mean a real difference in the industry as well. We hear it from the folks in the oil and gas industry and CEOs in their more reflective moments, saying they, too, understand that things are going to have to change. We know how hard it is to make change. We know how hard it is to bring change. But in order to do it, you have to acknowledge you need to change. You have to acknowledge you need to build change.

[1525]

Indeed, we’re not seeing that here. We’re seeing a desire to continue with the practices that we’ve always had, which is letting people pollute for free, which is pushing the problem off into the future, which is saying one thing and doing another — something politicians unfortunately are famous for. This legislation continues in that trend.

There are billions in climate costs, and those costs will continue to rise. I think many in the House will have been approached by the insurance industry with their concerns of the cost of climate change to their industry, of the cost of climate change to communities, of the larger tax bills that will come when we have to deal with disasters, when we have to raise the dikes.

Much of this province, of course, is built on deltas.

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Beautiful Delta South, much of the province on the coast and, of course, in the Fraser Valley are going to have to deal with the rising tides. My own community of Vancouver–West End, of course, is surrounded by the ocean. If you do the climate projections, you can see the impact of storms and the impact of rising water levels there. That’s one part of it. Of course, there are other many, many other issues that come with climate change, and costs.

Let’s think of some of the things the government says they will do for the 30 percent of emissions that they think need to be captured after the 16 percent that they let go free. Well, what they say we need to do is bring in a tech fund, a technology fund — a fund that could, in 2020 or 2021, if it starts to get money, start investing in technology, start investing in trying to come up with ways to deal with climate change. If you think about it, if we’re waiting for a solution to technology from technology that far down the road, that’s a challenge.

All the best scientists show us that the best results in fighting climate change come early, that if you are trying to fix it down the road, you’ll have already increased the emissions so much in the atmosphere that you have a diminishing return, that things are not as effective as if you addressed them today. It’s much better to have low emissions today rather than a genius technology 20 years down the road which might lower emissions then. Unfortunately, we seem to see, similar to Alberta, an argument that a tech fund will deal with climate change.

If we’re going to meet our legally required goals and if we’re going to meet the morally required goals to reduce emissions, we’re going to need to do a lot better than that.

The Alberta tech fund, which has been running for a number of years now, can’t really point to emissions reduction in that province. As you know, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions in Alberta have been shooting through the roof, and they’re scheduled to keep going up.

Even though they’ve been running a tech fund which has hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, they can’t really point to any real climate change reduction that they’ve met, any real greenhouse gas reduction that they’ve achieved. All of it is pushed off to the future. Sometime this technology might be able to slowly reduce emissions down the road.

We’ve yet to find the technology that can completely pull CO2 and methane out of the atmosphere and bring them down to the earth. It’s a nice dream, but the government has not been able to show how to do it. Neither have the corporations. Neither have the best minds in science.

Searching for a technological answer to a problem that we have created seems to be continuing down the course. Some of it will help. I don’t want to dismiss that. Carbon sequestration could be a way to deal with some of this. Certainly, it could be a way to deal with some of the emissions that we have, as are a number of technologies that they’re looking at. But to say that that is a solution…. It’s not, and we need to be honest about that.

If you want to deal with the emissions, you need to deal with the emissions. It’s better not to pollute than it is to pollute and then try to find some technology down the road that maybe could address it. Certainly, we would never say to our children: “It’s okay if you throw garbage on the ground and then pay somebody to develop a technology for 20 years down the road which might be able to eventually come and figure out a way to pick it up.” No, we wouldn’t say that. We would say: “Don’t pollute.” That’s the simplest way to address that.

We need to see emissions drop as a top priority now. We need climate success, not just focusing on commercial success.

Commercial success is great for those investors. It’s great if they get a product that 20 years down the road they can sell and make a lot of money on, absolutely. That would employ people. That would be good for them.

[1530]

But you’re spending 20 years, as we approach the need to be at an 80 percent reduction worldwide of GHGs, greenhouse gas emissions, by 2050…. If at 2020 we come up with a technology that by 2040 could start to bring down emissions, that’s cutting it really close. That’s bringing us to a fever in this world, a fever in our ecosystem that will increase and continue to increase unless we address it now as the top priority.

We need that focus to be on now. Technology fund — maybe that’s the way to do it. Maybe that’s the way to help somewhat, but if you’re going to create a technology fund, you need it to be focused on bringing emissions down now, right now — not 20 years down the road, not 30, 40, 50 years down the road, but now. Unfortunately, Alberta’s fund hasn’t done that. It has not been focused in such a way. I’m hoping that the Minister, if continuing with the technology fund….

If LNG occurs, if we get this industry, and if we potentially get the jobs and the income coming from it, a tech fund, should it be established…. I would argue it shouldn’t be subsidized by taxpayers. It should be subsidized — well, not subsidized at all. It should be from the companies who are going to benefit from it. They should pay for it. They should be the ones paying for it, required to put money into it, if they’re going to do a tech fund with a requirement that its focus be on emissions reduction — not on some other goal down the road, but on emissions reduction now.

The other thing the government has focused on is, of course, offsets. They have talked about the need to use offsets. If you don’t get to 16 percent pollution for your tonne of LNG, if it’s not at 16 percent carbon from just the plant, they’ve said: “We will subsidize you for offsets from up to 23 percent pollution, and then you’ll have to pay the full cost of offsets beyond that, per unit.”

What are offsets? Well, the idea is that if you pollute over here, if you put out a tonne of carbon over here,

[ Page 4829 ]

and somebody else over there is planning to put out a tonne of carbon and you pay them so they don’t, you get to use their lack of putting a tonne of carbon in the air to discount the tonne of carbon that you’ve put in the air. It doesn’t reduce emissions overall; it keeps us about neutral.

Now, this House has heard many, many discussions about offsets — one of the main vehicles the government has used to claim carbon neutrality. They have said offsets are a very important way to meet that goal.

We need to remember that an offset must be additional. You must have additionality, as economists say, as climate scientists will point out. It can’t be something that you were already going to do. If the government pollutes one million tonnes of carbon, they can’t claim when another person does not pollute one million tonnes — if they weren’t planning on polluting a million tonnes — as being an offset because they weren’t going to pollute a million tonnes.

Indeed, that is something that the government has done a number of times to claim they’re dealing with climate change. I think one of the ones that we need to look at and reflect on is, of course, recognizing that offsets can be part of a solution. They shouldn’t be your principal means to getting to the solution. The principal means should be not polluting in the first place.

Let’s reflect on two of the projects. One of the projects…. These were used to reach 70 percent of the government’s goal of becoming carbon-neutral. The Darkwoods project is something that I’d heard about. Darkwoods — beautiful, beautiful woods out in the Kootenays, a forest that is a very important habitat for bears, a very important link for grizzlies in that area. There was a push….

I remember I first heard about it because the Nature Conservancy of Canada was urging people to put money forward to raise enough money so that they could buy it to conserve it, so that down the road, maybe it couldn’t be logged. They bought it, I believe, in 2007. They bought it, and under the way they work, they were legally required to protect it.

The forest was not under imminent threat. There was no plan to log it at the time. It was just something that was out there. They bought it before the carbon offset legislation was created, before the Pacific Carbon Trust came into being.

[1535]

They had already bought it with the intention of saving it — asking yourself, hon. Speaker; myself; and other people all across the province and across the country to donate little bits to be able to help save those woods. They said: “We want to do this. We’re going to do this.”

Nature Conservancy Canada has done a very good job of that in many parts of this nation. They’ve decided that they want to be activists for preserving our natural habitat. In that case I remember hearing a lot about the need to protect that area for the bears.

They were going to do it. They were legally required to do it. There was no chainsaw en route. There was, as the Auditor General has pointed out in his report, no liquidation logger sitting there ready to go. It wasn’t the Minister of Environment stepping forward and saying: “Wait a second. You can’t log it and clearcut it beyond belief so that we can save it for the climate.” No, it wasn’t like that. There was no additionality for the Darkwoods project. It was largely going to happen already, so there was not a saving of climate emissions. That had already happened. It wasn’t going to be logged.

You know, it’s like me polluting a million tonnes and then saying: “Oh well, Johnny over there was going to pollute a million tonnes too.” Johnny says: “No way. I don’t believe in pollution. Why would I do that?” Oh, but I said he was, so I get to offset my million tonnes. That’s kind of like how it went down in the Darkwoods.

Again, maybe because it was so dark in those woods, the government couldn’t see that there was no liquidation logger hiding in those woods ready to cut them down, but they wanted us all to believe there was. Thankfully, the Auditor General was able to point out that that wasn’t the case. It had already had an agreement to purchase.

What they did when they tried to develop what those offsets were for the Darkwoods project…. The government assumed that the worst forest practices would be taken, that a private logger would come in and choose the worst forest practices, which would lead to a huge loss in money through taxation to that logger. No logger would, probably, do that. Certainly, the loggers in that area hadn’t been doing that, so there was no reason for them to believe it. They had to believe that there were 30 percent more trees there than what had been appraised when the land had been purchased in order to get to their offset, but that’s what they did.

That’s the risk with offsets. Despite what the government can claim to be the best system of looking, identifying, searching and trying to make sure that they are real offsets, when you have a program, when you have a potential subsidy to do something that somebody wants, sometimes that can distort the real actions.

Indeed, hon. Speaker, I don’t know about you, but certainly myself and, I know, many of the other members have been approached by people saying: “Hey, I have this wood that I’d like to save” or “I have this piece of land that I’d like to save.” Then I ask: “Oh, is it in threat of being logged? Is it going to be taken out? Are we going to lose it?” Often what I hear is: “No, the landowner has no intention, doesn’t want to see it logged, doesn’t want to sell it to somebody who would log it.”

Then they say: “Do you think I might be able to get an offset? Do you think the government might be able to count this as an offset? I might be able to make it look like the landowner wants to log it, in order to get the money in order to save it.” You have a challenge of

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people not always being as upfront as they’d like to be, as we’d want them to be, because their desire is to save the piece of land.

I understand the desire. They’re incredibly beautiful places that we want to save, we should save, we should protect and we should be taking action for. But just as sometimes people fudge a little bit around the edges to get what they want, just as the government said one thing in the election and is doing another thing afterwards — because, as the Premier suggested, we all say things in politics that we don’t mean, to get elected — that’s what can happen with offsets. That is what the Premier said. That’s the challenge with offsets.

Another project to show the danger and the challenge of offsets, versus not polluting in the first place or versus having the best technology possible the whole way through an LNG process, including the natural gas, not just the liquefication…. What’s another project? Well, it’s interesting.

This is a company that’s given a lot of money to the Premier, a company that’s given a lot of money to the B.C. Liberal Party — Encana. You know, Gwyn Morgan, a big adviser, a person who’s said some pretty, pretty horrible things about First Nations people, a person who’s taken some quite conservative views. Not views that…. Well, maybe the Premier holds those views. I’m not sure. I’ve never heard her say them.

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We’re not quite sure, when you say what you mean, if it’s really what you mean anymore, with this Premier.

Encana. Well, what did they want to do? They wanted to do some drilling for gas, which is what they do. They wanted to do some well drilling. What were they doing? They had been flaring gas. They’d been digging down. They’d been flaring gas and polluting — you know, burning it off and flaring it.

The argument was: “Well, we need technology. We need technology in order to be able to use that gas rather than burn that gas.” I’m glad they wanted to do that. I’m glad that was a focus. Indeed, all gas producers in B.C. — I think we need to be ensuring that they’re getting the most out of the product, out of the people’s product, because of course, the gas belongs to all British Columbians. The companies are being given the rights to work, to use that gas in their processing, and we get paid a royalty for it.

When we waste gas, that’s a problem because it pollutes, but it’s also a waste. I was brought up not to be wasteful. I was brought up to be — I would say frugal; my partner might say cheap — ensuring that I use the resources very, very well. Of course, we see that all across this province, people saying, “Eat up your dinner. Don’t leave anything on the plate,” because, of course, waste is waste. We produce far too much of it in this country. We produce far too much waste. Of course, we know even in the food system that we waste a lot of food. We need to do better there, as well, but in this case they were talking about flared gas.

If you could put the gas in a pipeline, if you could capture that gas and use it to heat somebody’s home, use it to heat up the barbecue, to do something like that, that would be better. That would be the right thing to do because you wouldn’t be wasting that gas. Yes, there would be a climate implication to it. Indeed, there would be, but it’s the same climate implication as if you burned it through the top, if you flared that gas.

They argued: “We need this. We need a carbon offset to be able to do this, otherwise it’s not financially viable and we are unable to achieve it.” Well, they got that carbon offset. The government never really confirmed exactly how much money was given to them, arguing that it was a commercial issue. The best estimate I’ve seen has been that the government gave them about $2 million to be able to bring in the technology so they were no longer burning off gas, wasting gas and polluting the atmosphere in the same way, and instead could use it in their processes, use it to heat homes and those kinds of things that you would want the gas to be used for.

The trouble is the project was set to make the company over $7 million, because they could actually sell the gas now that they had the technology not to waste it. The people, through an offset, gave them $2 million to do a process that made them $7 million. I don’t know about you, hon. Speaker, but if I was that businessperson, I would have said: “I could make $7 million? I’m going to do that right away. I don’t need an offset. Oh, but wait. Hey, if I can get $2 million extra to do a project that I was already going to do, jeez, maybe that makes sense business-wise.”

That’s not how an offset is supposed to work, but that’s what the government argued for, supports and continues to suggest was a good idea. Offsets aren’t meant to be used that way. That is the risk with offsets. You get into the real question of market behaviour. If the money is hanging out in front, people may shift their attitudes to say, “I need that money, otherwise I wouldn’t do what I was going to do already,” and you can’t always tell the difference. It’s impossible to climb into everybody’s brain and be able to find out: were they going to do what they now claim they weren’t going to do unless they had the subsidy from government, the offset?

That is a real, real risk with the offset scheme. If we’re trying to get below 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, if we’re trying to get below a 33 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, you need to make sure that you’re actually achieving it — not that you’re aspiring to it, not that you’re hopeful for it or that you say it but don’t really mean it. No, you actually need that.

It’s not because it would hurt my feelings or somebody else’s feelings. It’s because it heats up the planet. It’s because it costs us all money through climate change. That’s

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why you need to be honest about it. That’s why you need to have real emissions reductions, not just talk about emission reductions.

Well, good for Encana. They made extra money and will continue to make extra money through a better process, and I’m glad that gas isn’t being flared and is being used.

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But you know what? We on this side of the House have called for a long time for real regulations of the natural gas industry to make sure that we’re not venting, that we aren’t doing that kind of process, as much as possible, that we are making sure we’ve got the best equipment possible at those sites to reduce the methane leakage, to reduce the emissions which come from processing, from transportation. That’s the only way if you’re going to get anywhere close to dealing with emissions increases in this industry.

There can be an industry. There could be a good one, with good jobs and good money for the province. But it needs to be done responsibly — not focusing on just the L of LNG but acknowledging that the letter N, natural, and the letter G, gas, are also part of that equation. You can’t get one without the other. Yet the Premier has decided to draw a little circle around an LNG terminal and pretend that’s all there is. Well, that’s not all there is. There are real implications of increases in natural gas use and increases in natural gas extraction.

The Treaty 8 First Nations speak very strongly about it, as do many residents that I have met in the northeast who acknowledge, who say: “I work in the industry. I want the industry to succeed, but I want it done responsibly so that my children could also have the ability to hunt in the northeast, the ability to ensure that the water is there to irrigate the fields for farmers, to be able to ensure that you’re not getting massive storms through the area because of climate change and massive wildfires as well.”

It is a real challenge. People in my community say, “Just stop it,” and I say no. That’s not responsible. You need to respect people in the northeast, who are proud British Columbians who want to work. You need to respect the people whose backyards…. They say, “Well, you know….” They can’t answer it.

I say: “Have you talked to the local First Nations who work there?” They have spoken very strongly about the challenges LNG will pose for them, who also say quite bluntly that many of their members work in the industry because that’s the way they can make a living. They understand because that’s their backyard too. They don’t like to see zero environmental protections, cuts to environmental protections — as the government tried to do by exempting the processing facilities for natural gas.

They tried to get rid of that whole environmental assessment process, saying: “Nah, you don’t need to do it.” Thankfully, of course, the Treaty 8 First Nations spoke up very strongly and said: “Wait a second, you can’t treat us like this.” This is their land. And the government — oh boy, did they turn around quickly. Oh boy, did they start running up there to say, “Oh, we really didn’t mean it; it was just an accident,” when just about every piece of freedom-of-information information we’ve been able to pull out shows that no, it was no accident.

The government debated it, they discussed it, and they decided they didn’t care if there was an environmental assessment for these projects and that people didn’t need one. Well, they did need one, and it was insulting. I appreciate that the members have gotten up and said at various times, “Oh, we’re really sorry,” but it’s a bit rich to get up after the fact and say, “Oh, I’m sorry,” when with full knowledge the government proceeded full ahead without even talking to the people that it would impact.

That’s the way it went. They thought they could get away with it. Boy, were they wrong. Thank goodness that Treaty 8 First Nations spoke up and said: “You can’t do this. You’ve got to treat us with respect.”

It was troubling to me that the government wouldn’t also acknowledge…. They apologized to the corporations who were upset that they couldn’t get rid of the environmental assessment process. They apologized to the First Nations, which was the right thing to do because it’s largely on their territory, and it is on their traditional territory where much of this processing goes on.

But they didn’t ever apologize to the rest of British Columbians, who were also impacted by this decision, whose gas, whose environment, whose air, whose land, whose water are of course also impacted by the potential increase in LNG, in natural gas extraction and processing as well. The people of Fort St. John, the people of Fort Nelson, Dawson Creek. Dawson — you go through that community. Those people deserved that respect as well, and they didn’t get it from the government either.

Offsets — they are one thing. I know Mark Jaccard, who used to be listened to very often by this government, has a lot to say and a lot of good advice. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know more about his advice and learning from him. At one point I know he suggested that offsets were kind of like indulgences. Back in some religions you could commit sins if you paid the church for that sin, and you would be indulged.

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It was a nice, tidy way to increase the coffers of the church and to make somebody’s ego and feeling of guilt go away. It didn’t change the fact that they’d committed the sin. They just tried to pay it off.

I don’t think we should be trying to treat the environment in such a way. We need to treat our environment in a respectful relationship, not in exploitation or domination but in a relationship — a real relationship. We can’t live without air, without water, without the food that comes from the ground, and our souls can’t live without the joy that nature can bring us and the grounding that it can bring us, either.

We can’t afford to stand pat. We can’t afford to do noth-

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ing and just increase emissions. We must be lowering them, and what this bill could have done is shown a real way, through the whole process of LNG, that we were going to lower emissions.

The whole process of natural gas…. We have no final investment decision on LNG yet. We are using natural gas already. Surely we could have had leadership just on the NG side, on the natural gas side, to lower emissions, something that we have called for, for a long time and that folks in the industry tell me they had expected but they didn’t see.

They thought that the whole chain, the whole well to waterline would be affected and that we would get truly cleaner — anyways, more sustainable to an extent or at least less damaging, depending which side of the fence that you sit on in this debate — natural gas. Natural gas is here for a long time. We’ve done very well for it in the province while ignoring the challenges that it has posed to our climate.

We’ve got to think about what we do next. How do we get to that 33 percent reduction? How do we get to that 80 percent reduction? One is being honest, absolutely. One is being honest that it is a real challenge. I haven’t heard that so much from the Liberal side. I haven’t heard the words “climate change” from many on the Liberal side or a demand from them, either, for us to actually really act any longer. Now that Gordon Campbell has left the building, it seems that the desire to do much about climate change left with him.

They claim still to be leaders. Well, let’s look at what leadership means for the Liberals: freezing any sort of price for pollution and refusing to do anything about a price for pollution for five years. Let’s think about cap-and-trade. Well, this bill, of course, repeals the cap-and-trade act. Well, let’s look to see. What did the government used to say about the cap-and-trade act?

Well, on April 3, 2008, six months or so before I came to this House, the government announced that the cap-and-trade act “will make British Columbia the first Canadian province to introduce legislation authorizing hard caps on greenhouse gas emissions.” This is, of course, Barry Penner, awesome Barry. Barry Penner Is Awesome!, I believe, was the website at the time. He would stand there and look stern, point at things out in nature and speak about his passion for the environment.

This is something he was very passionate about. He wanted to argue for…. The Liberals at the time, not the Liberals of today, argued that we needed a hard cap on emissions, that eventually you need to say, “We can’t emit anymore. This is the cap on what we can do, and we will slowly bring it down over time, through a market-based mechanism, to encourage companies to become more and more efficient, to make the changes required in order to be able to meet our climate change obligations, to meet our legal obligations.”

He was arguing at the time…. And the legislation is there, was there. It was never brought into force. This was 2008, but after that cap-and-trade just seemingly vanished. The government stopped talking about it, stopped acting on it.

Meanwhile, we have California and Quebec, two of the original signers, the original proponents for the Western Climate Initiative. They had decided to act on it. We are seeing real change in how an economy fun