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BC Premier Says Kinder Morgan Pipeline Plan Meets Her Conditions, Opposition Objects

January 13, 2017

BC Premier Says Kinder Morgan Pipeline Plan Meets Her Conditions, Opposition Objects

Project’s foes call Clark’s decision a ‘surprise to absolutely no one’ and ‘simply deceitful.’

Premier Christy Clark
Premier Clark on approval the Trans Mountain expansion: “We always said the five conditions were a path to ‘yes’ and that if the project met the five conditions we would say ‘yes’, and that’s where we are today.” Photo: BC Gov’t Flickr.

British Columbia Premier Christy Clark says Kinder Morgan’s proposal to expand the Trans Mountain pipeline has met her government’s requirements for approval.

“The project has met the five conditions,” said Clark. “We always said the five conditions were a path to ‘yes’ and that if the project met the five conditions we would say ‘yes’, and that’s where we are today.”

NDP leader John Horgan said he’s opposed to the project because it poses too great an environmental risk to B.C.’s coast.

The project would triple the capacity of Kinder Morgan’s existing pipeline between Edmonton, Alberta and Burnaby, B.C. and add about six oil tankers a week leaving Vancouver. It received conditional approval from the federal government in November.

The B.C. government announced Wednesday that it had given provincial environmental approval, with 37 conditions, to the project. Clark also said Kinder Morgan has now met her requirement to make sure B.C. received a “fair share” of fiscal and economic benefits.

Kinder Morgan has committed to paying B.C. up to $1 billion as a share of revenue from the project, which the province will use to fund grants to community groups doing environmental protection work, Clark said.

A government backgrounder says the company will pay the province between $25 million and $50 million for 20 years, depending on whether or not the pipeline is operating at full capacity on its spot market contracts, for a total payment between $500 million and $1 billion.

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Premier Clark on ‘Historic Debt Binge,’ Says Conservative Leader

September 24, 2016

Premier Clark on ‘Historic Debt Binge,’ Says Conservative Leader

‘Debt-free BC’ 2013 campaign promise called unrealistic, simplistic.

Premier Christy Clark
Clark promised LNG revenue would mean ‘debt-free BC.’ Instead, debt up 45 per cent during her tenure. David P. Ball

Premier Christy Clark won the provincial election in 2013 promising a “Debt-Free BC,” but an opponent now accuses her of overseeing a “historic debt binge” since coming to office.

Dan Brooks, who won back the BC Conservative Party leadership on Sept. 17 after stepping down earlier this year, said in a press release that last week’s first quarterly report shows the province’s total debt has grown by 45 per cent — $20.1 billion — under Clark.

Total provincial debt was around $45.2 billion when Clark took office in 2011 and has swollen to $65.3 billion, according to the quarterly report. It is projected to hit $71.9 billion in 2019.

The total debt includes accumulated operating deficits from past years as well as borrowing for any number of purposes, including building schools, hospitals, social housing and public transit. It also includes “self-supported debt” such as that carried by Crown corporations including BC Hydro.

Finance Minister Mike de Jong, commenting on the quarterly report, highlighted the operating surpluses that mean the province has stopped adding to the operating debt. He also pointed out that taxpayer-supported debt has been dropping when expressed as a percentage of the province’s Gross Domestic Product and is lower than in most provinces.

Brooks was unavailable Tuesday, but in the press release said: “From the moment she first took office in 2011, Christy Clark has been spending taxpayers’ dollars in a misguided, reckless manner… If somehow she is able to secure another four-year mandate in 2017, there can be little doubt that the BC Liberals will perceive it as permission to leave an even larger legacy of debt for future generations.”

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Four More Whoppers about LNG in British Columbia

March 16, 2016

Four More Whoppers about LNG in British Columbia

The real facts behind Christy Clark’s rosy claims.

ChristyClarkLNGInBC_610px.jpg

BC Premier Christy Clark: a million-dollar website to drum up LNG jobs, but not a single job yet.

The B.C. budget claims the province is making money from shale gas. But last month The Tyee showed the province is pouring more cash into the industry than it is getting back.

In fact the only time the B.C. government made any money from shale gas was during a land lease boom nearly a dozen years ago. Ever since then, revenues have dwindled to next to nothing due to low royalties and taxpayer-funded subsidies to the ailing shale gas industry.

Dig deeper, and four more claims made by the B.C. government turn out to be liquefied natural gas whoppers as well.

New information on employment numbers, shale gas reserves, transmission lines and the LNG promise of economic prosperity show that stretching the truth remains a persistent trend in the Christy Clark administration.

Whopper #1: Vastly less gas to sell than claimed

Let’s begin with the government claim that British Columbia “has more than an estimated 2,900 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of marketable shale gas reserves,” or more methane in the ground than the entire United States.

Hughes pointed out in a report for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives that the BC Oil and Gas Commission estimated that B.C. only had 376 tcf of marketable shale resources. (Hughes added 40 tcf to this number for good measure, for a total of 416 tcf, to account for possible resources in developing plays.)

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Three Fibs Premier Clark Uses to Sell LNG Dream

December 21, 2015

Three Fibs Premier Clark Uses to Sell LNG Dream

Sorry, it’s not clean. It won’t pay off. It’s not popular. Here’s why.

Why does Premier Clark keep saying LNG will bring a bonanza of jobs and revenues? Photo: Province of BC Flickr.

The more Christy Clark defends her dream of an LNG industry, the more she turns cold gas into hot air. The B.C. premier’s interview with Andrew MacLeod published last week in The Tyee is a case in point. As MacLeod pressed with many LNG-related questions, Clark resorted to three big, bloated fibs.

Fib #1: LNG is ‘clean’

While making our documentary Fractured Land about fracking in B.C., co-director Fiona Rayher and I journeyed to Cornell University to interview Dr. Robert Howarth. He is a global expert on the climate impacts of fracking.

CLARK’S SITE C INCONSISTENCIES

On the massive, taxpayer-funded Site C dam project, our premier remains where she’s always been: all over the map.

First, she told us the power was needed for the enormously energy-intensive LNG industry.

Then she creatively interpretedthe Clean Energy Act to mean that LNG plants could power themselves by burning some of their own gas, saving them money. That would produce three times the greenhouse gas emissions as would electric power. It also means her previous justification for Site C is gone.

Even BC Hydro recently admittedto the BC Utilities Commission that without powering LNG, we wouldn’t need the electricity from Site C until at least 2029.

This dam is therefore an unnecessary taxpayer-funded boondoggle of at least $9 billion that would flood or disrupt30,000 acres of some of the best farmland left in Canada, while violating First Nations’ treaty rights. — D.G.

We told him our premier has affixed the label “Cleanest Fossil Fuel on the Planet” to B.C. LNG (derived almost entirely from a massive increase in fracking in the province’s northeast).

 

Petronas’s Silence on BC LNG Act Sends Disquieting Signal

August 4, 2015

Petronas’s Silence on BC LNG Act Sends Disquieting Signal

Busy passing project terms, BC forgot to check on events abroad.

As the British Columbia legislature passed its “historic” Liquefied Natural Gas Project Agreements Act on July 21 after a lively eight-day debate, the most important player for which the special summer session of Parliament was convened kept an aloof — and worrying — silence.

Petronas, the Malaysian state energy firm with a 62 per cent stake in a consortium proposing to build a US$36-billion LNG project near Prince Rupert, did not offer a public thank you or congratulatory statement to the B.C. government of Premier Christy Clark for its efforts and hard-earned legislative victory.

The Pacific NorthWest LNG (PNW) consortium’s other shareholders, Sinopec (10 per cent), Indian Oil Corp (10 per cent), Japan Petroleum Exploration (10 per cent), China Huadian (five per cent) and PetroleumBrunei (three per cent), have been equally quiet.

It was left to PNW to issue a brief statement that the act — followed by the July 23 ratification of 25-year agreement terms covering royalty, income tax credits and carbon emissions — “brings us one step closer to building Canada’s first world-scale LNG facility.”

“The remaining condition of our final investment decision, environmental approval from the government of Canada, is being worked on diligently with First Nations, stakeholders and government representatives.”

Petronas’s silence is significant as B.C.’s elaborate undertaking to create, debate and pass the LNG act had been made in direct response to the company’s high-profile complaints and threats to call off the project if it did not receive legal certainty and the offer of generous investment terms. Petronas did not reply to a request for comment on B.C.’s new act.

 

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