The BC Shell Game of Public Funds

In the 2013 BC Election, the Liberal party pledged the LNG industry would create $1 trillion in economic activity and a $100 billion prosperity fund. Tagline - "It's no fantasy"

Martyn Brown, Gordon Campbell’s former Chief of Staff, reckons Christy Clark and the BC Libs were 'patsies', repeatedly 'duped' by petro industry's sparkling promises of new investments, lots of jobs, and an endless supply of unicorn meat.

Sure, let's go with 'duped'.

"It is difficult to get a premier to understand something," as Upton Sinclair might have put it, "when her salary depends on her not understanding it."

BC In-Sights blogger and researcher extraordinaire Norm Farrell excerpts from Martyn Brown's Energy News Corp column on Clark's LNG fantasy and the gutting of BC's "2008 climate action plan":

"The Petronas precedent also gave those Asian state-oil monopolies a special 25-year indemnity that is underwritten by B.C. taxpayers.

That indemnity will save them harm from any so-called “discriminatory events.”

It assured the LNG industry that any companies covered under such project agreements would not have to face any industry-specific carbon taxes or any new industry-specific GHG reduction initiatives for at least 25 years.

If any future government changes those locked-in tax rates and benefits at a cost to those companies that is greater than $25 million in any year, or more than $50 million over five years, they will be entitled to full compensation, courtesy of B.C. taxpayers.

Similarly, any changes in government policy that impose new rules or tougher standards specific to the LNG industry, which entail higher costs relating to carbon taxes or to greenhouse gas emissions and reporting requirements, will be fully compensable above that threshold."

So what happens to that legislation now that a world glut of LNG and it's non-competitive BC market price has choked on Christy's unicorn meat? Can we repeal it?

Norm is on Canadian Glen's blogtalkradio show The View From Up Here tonight at 6pm PST to discuss the BC Hydro/Site C Dam con and the LNG debacle on The BC Shell Game of Public Funds. That's the question I'm sending in.

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