{"id":42760,"date":"2019-01-14T12:12:24","date_gmt":"2019-01-14T17:12:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42760"},"modified":"2019-01-14T12:12:24","modified_gmt":"2019-01-14T17:12:24","slug":"bc-energy-minister-on-her-site-c-reversal-no-regrets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42760","title":{"rendered":"BC Energy Minister on Her Site C Reversal: No Regrets"},"content":{"rendered":"
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BC Energy Minister on Her Site C Reversal: No Regrets<\/a><\/h3>\n

Michelle Mungall once firmly opposed the mega-dam. Now she\u2019s a powerful figure in a \u2018complicated\u2019 party.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n

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Critics criticize. But once you\u2019re in government, says Energy Minister Michelle Mungall, \u2018It\u2019s not so easy to put your mark in the sand and say it\u2019s never going to change.\u2019 Photo by Christopher Cheung.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n
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Michelle Mungall says she\u2019s not generally a fan of hockey metaphors.<\/p>\n

But she uses one to explain what it was like to join British Columbia Premier John Horgan to announce<\/a> the government would continue building the Site C dam, a project she had fiercely opposed in Opposition.<\/p>\n

It was like taking the ice in a Stanley Cup championship game against a much stronger team, knowing you can only lose, said Mungall, the energy, mines and petroleum resources minister.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to go out there and you have to do your best all the same,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was a tough day for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s the reality of being in government, not Opposition, says Mungall, first elected to the B.C. legislature in 2009 as the 31-year-old MLA for Nelson-Creston.<\/p>\n

The Site C decision was one of the defining moments of the NDP government\u2019s first year. While it pleased some supporters, including the unions whose members would help build and operate the publicly owned project, it was deeply disappointing to others.<\/p>\n

A year later, Mungall does not regret the decision.<\/p>\n

An NDP government wouldn\u2019t have started the project, she said during an interview in her office, much of it conducted with her five-month-old son Zavier on her lap. But that didn\u2019t make it easy to stop.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the nature of being responsible for decisions, is that you have to weigh out everybody\u2019s interests,\u201d she said. In Opposition, the NDP\u2019s Power BC<\/a>plan emphasized conservation and other alternatives to building the dam.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BC Energy Minister on Her Site C Reversal: No Regrets Michelle Mungall once firmly opposed the mega-dam. Now she\u2019s a powerful figure in a \u2018complicated\u2019 party. Critics criticize. But once you\u2019re in government, says Energy Minister Michelle Mungall, \u2018It\u2019s not so easy to put your mark in the sand and say it\u2019s never going to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[11645,94,23950,23949,12600,23884],"class_list":["post-42760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-liberty","tag-andrew-macleod","tag-british-columbia","tag-mega-dam","tag-michelle-mungall","tag-site-c-dam","tag-thetyee-ca"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42760"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42761,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42760\/revisions\/42761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}