Congratulations to Brittny Anderson on taking her hard-won seat in the legislature. In your campaign, Brittny, you expressed deep concern about B.C.’s environmental crises. Now in Victoria you will come up against challenges working with your party on these issues.
We have a half-finished Clean BC climate plan. Building LNG, and the fracking, leaking methane and emissions makes it impossible to meet our commitments to the world, both our 2030 target and the 2050 one. You’ll find there is no plan to capture the fugitive gas emissions, and we don’t even measure them.
The skyrocketing billions in costs of the Site C dam were hidden before the election, but they will come out. These costs will be paid by BC Hydro rate payers for generations. Meanwhile the LNG and fracking industries will get a bargain deal on the power. You have a mega-problem.
The government failed to tackle the forestry crisis of dwindling forests and exported jobs. The green-wash announcement in September to protect some old-growth was a sham. The truth is old-growth logging won’t be slowed at all. The government has failed to reform management of logging on public or private lands. They tinkered with the professional reliance model, but it still gives the fox purse-string control over protection of the henhouse.
The NDP’s moderate balance of immediate needs of companies for profits and workers for jobs against hard environmental limits will have disastrous consequences, some of which will become glaringly real over the next four years.
Good luck.
Keith Wiley
Nelson