PALMER: DETAILS FUEL CONCERN OVER LNG
Polarizing energy: NDP was supportive initially, but their concerns have increased as more details emerge
With the B.C. Liberals preparing to recall the legislature to approve a project development agreement for liquefied natural gas, Opposition leader John Horgan is signalling that the New Democrats will likely be voting no.
“We’ll have to take a good hard look at what they’ve got on the table,” he said, referring to the government promise to release the full text of the agreement with the Petronas-led consortium that is proposing a $36-billion LNG development in B.C.
“But based on what I know, I’m pretty disappointed with where we’ve gone on this file,” Horgan told me during an interview last week on Voice of B.C. on Shaw TV. “There are a whole host of giveaways from a government desperate to get a deal at any cost.”
He cited the Liberal decision to lock in natural gas royalty rates on a long-term basis: “So if the price goes up, and the value of our gas goes up, we won’t benefit from that,” he said.
Plus he challenged the move to indemnify Malaysian-government-owned Petronas and its investor-partners against future changes in provincial taxes and regulations that would negatively impact the LNG sector.
“Any tax changes that have an impact on Petronas will be frozen from this point until the end of the project,” Horgan complained. “I didn’t sign on for that. I signed on for getting the most value we could for the people of B.C., and what the Liberals have done is focused on the needs of Petronas.”
Horgan “signed on” to LNG last fall, when he led the NDP caucus to vote in support of the government’s proposal for a new tax on the production of natural gas in liquefied form.
“We wanted to make sure that the investment community understood that on some issues, there’s bipartisan support,” the Opposition leader said. “We need to have ground rules for investment to follow when they come here.”
By his own admission, Horgan got “a lot of grief from within the NDP and outside the NDP” for that bipartisan gesture. It put him in the position of supporting fossil fuel development in general and natural gas fracking in particular.
But having insisted on assuming the NDP leadership in 2014 that the party most needed to develop a credible platform for economic growth, Horgan has continued to defend LNG development as long as it delivers a fair return. Still, he would appear to be positioning the party to vote against the Petronas deal on grounds that it falls well short of a fair return.
If that expectation is borne out, he’d risk undermining his other stated reason for supporting the LNG tax — to refute the Liberal propensity for saying the NDP is against all development. “You won’t be able to say that with this bill,” Horgan told the Liberals at the time of the vote, “because we’re going to stand side by side with you and vote in favour of it … as deficient as it may be.”
Horgan is also raising another potential point of departure with the Liberals by signalling stronger support for calls to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, an almost 50 per cent increase from the current $10.25.
“I’m certainly sympathetic to the B.C. labour movement’s notion that $15 is a target that we need to get to,” he told me. “The challenge is how do we get there? And we have to bring small businesses along the way, and I’m going to do that.”
The B.C. rate is scheduled to increase by 20 cents (“two dimes” as Horgan characterizes it) in September. But given the promise of Alberta’s new NDP government to go to $15 by 2018, I wondered if that would put pressure on B.C. to move more quickly as well.
“I would think so,” Horgan agreed. “But it also depends what’s happening in other jurisdictions across the country, and south of the border as well. It’s good economic policy to increase the minimum wage. Whether we get to $15 in 2018 or 2019, that remains to be seen.”
Wait for the NDP election platform, in other words.
“I think it would be, certainly at this point in the mandate, irresponsible for me to be saying I’m going to get to $15 by a certain day,” he said. “The closer we get to the election campaign, the easier it will be for me to make predictions about what our economic future looks like. … So I’ll be quite clear going into the next election how I plan to get to $15 and how long it’ll take me to get there.”
Another measure ticketed for the next platform is relief from medical service premiums. “I would like to do away with MSP premiums,” Horgan said, “but it’s a billion dollars plus in revenue.” Actually, $2 billion plus, but point taken. “We need to do these things over time,” he continued. “One of the planks of my campaign will be do to something about MSP.”
The next NDP platform will be fully costed, he promised, like those in previous campaigns. The challenge is communicating those good intentions to the voters and thereby persuading enough of them to support a change of government.
“We did have a very comprehensive plan in 2013. We were all about job creation,” Horgan said. “But it didn’t come through, so we have to be better communicators. We need to communicate that I and my colleagues want the economy to grow. We want prosperity, we want jobs for British Columbians, but we also want to deliver the services that we expect to have.”
Easy to say, much harder to do — which Horgan knows as well as anyone, having finished four elections in a row on the losing side.