Editor:
The Province’s 2004 Port Property Tax Act capped the mill rate on new heavy industry and set the city of Prince Rupert on the identical course that left many B.C. cities with excessive post heavy industry clean-up costs and unaffordable civic infrastructure.
Exempting global privateers who build, sell and run from paying municipal taxes in exchange for an opening by the Province to tax B.C. worker’s incomes at their source and at every till has not served Prince Rupert residents fairly.
Sold out by the Province, the city goes hat in hand begging for political handouts and corporate largess to supplement already high residential tax rates that barely fill potholes.
With the huge drop in world LNG prices, global LNG “investors” are now looking for a 100 per cent capital investment refund before paying royalties to British Columbia. Gas prices are predicted to drop even lower when 6 new Australian LNG plants flood the Asian market with cheap gas in 2018. According to Australian news sources; as a result of the current low world gas prices the state of Queensland lost over a billion dollars in royalty revenue in the last year.
Before being blindsided by quick buck boosterism and bamboozled by political ambitions into thinking that our non-renewable resources are “limitless”, or that we should be shaking in our boots because foreign corporations will go elsewhere if they don’t get a 100 per cent royalty holiday till we have paid for their plant, we might ask if it would make more sense for domestic companies to invest in and produce electrical power using B.C. gas driven turbines to supply reasonable cost energy to OUR growing cities, mines and industries?
Rather than displacing First Nations from Treaty lands and flooding sustainable farmlands and ranches that grow beef and grain, B.C. Gas turbines could drive growth and transition to clean energy.
Also, why should we export our non-renewable resources out of the province/country royalty free? How are we to fund a B.C. Oil and Gas Heritage Fund? We must consider diminishment rates and net energy yields from gas fields and how we will pay for the modernization of worn out city infrastructures.
B.C.’s timber producing lands have been defined, as have its gas and oil fields. There are no new undiscovered forests nor are there vast undiscovered easily recoverable oil and gas fields. Unlike forests, gas and oil fields diminish permanently.
Is this really the development deal we want for B.C.’s non-renewable resources?
Peter Christensen
Prince Rupert
