A year-end interview with Premier Christy Clark.
Tom Fletcher: Are you still confident that we’re going to see a major LNG project approved by the end of 2014?
Premier Christy Clark: We’re still in negotiations with Petronas and Shell, so I don’t know if it will be by the end of 2014, but I’m hoping in the next few months.
(Days after this interview, Petronas announced a delay in their investment decision until 2015.)
TF: I talked to a couple of SFU climate mitigation specialists, and they agreed that it’s unlikely to the point of impossible to have a major LNG industry and still meet Gordon Campbell’s ambitious greenhouse gas target of a 33 per cent reduction by 2020. What do you think?
PCC: I think we may prove them wrong. Many of these facilities, not all of them, will be partly or fully electrically powered up, so that reduces those impacts, and there’s going to be a real incentive to invest in new technology to minimize that as well.
I think the bigger picture is what really matters, which is that in shipping 82 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas to Asia, we help them get off coal and other dirtier sources of oil, and that is the biggest contribution that we’ve ever made to reducing climate change.
TF: Ontario and Quebec have taken a page from your book. They have seven conditions for an oil pipeline, Energy East, which involves conversion of gas pipelines and taking Alberta oil to the East Coast. What do you think?
PCC: I think they took our five conditions and elaborated on them. So you’ve got British Columbia, Alberta, now Ontario and Quebec, all signed on to some version of the five conditions. And, of course, Enbridge and Kinder Morgan as well.
TF: What about the conditions they have added?
PCC: One of the things they say they want to protect against is a shortage of natural gas coming to Ontario and Quebec. These are the same two provinces that have put a moratorium on extracting natural gas.
They want to make sure that we do it here, good enough for us to do, and send it to them, but they won’t do that themselves. I look at their last two conditions, and I roll my eyes a little bit.
TF: All the way to New Brunswick, they’ve basically bought the anti-hydraulic fracturing myth?
PCC: Yes. Somehow they all watched an American mockumentary or whatever you call it, and believed it. Here in British Columbia we do fracking better than anywhere in the world. It is the gold standard.
TF: Finance Minister Mike de Jong says we have a surplus estimated at more than $400 million for this fiscal year, and he suggested that much of that would have to go to pay off deficits from previous years. Of course, the Opposition is interested in welfare rates and, in particular, ending child support clawbacks. What’s your view?
PCC: Like any family that’s been through tough times, the first thing you need to do when you get back to finding a job and making an income again, is to pay off your credit cards. And that’s what we’re going to do.
We are going to see if we can find ways to improve some of the programs over time, but can’t do that until we can afford it. It’s typical, the NDP want us to spend the money before we have it.
Tom Fletcher is legislature reporter and columnist for Black Press newspapers. E-mail: tfletcher@blackpress.ca
