That did not stop me from having an opinion about the federal takeover at Attawapiskat.  My first reaction was that the Chief and Council should have thrown the keys to the federal government and said, “Buster, you broke it, you bought it.”

I have come to think, however, that I had it 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

I am beginning to think that perhaps what the First Nations should be doing is putting Canada under trusteeship.

Think about it. We have a government that was found guilty of contempt of Parliament. By their actions on Kyoto they have shown they are unable and unwilling to live up to international treaties.  The Conservatives lied to people in Montreal about the possibility of their Liberal MP resigning. Even the Conservative Speaker of the House of Commons called that action “reprehensible.”  They broke election laws that allowed them to outspend their opposition so clearly their commitment to democracy is pretty minimal.

And don’t get me started on financial propriety. Year after year the Auditor General raises a litany of issues about that.

So after 400 years of trying to work with our governments I think First Nations might be getting a little impatient. I’m thinking that maybe we should hope to see a First Nations consultant walking up the steps of the House of Commons with instructions to take the thing over.

But the consultant should take doughnuts. After all, that’s what Harpers takeover guy did when he showed up unannounced at the Council offices at Attawapiskat. I hear Harper likes the ones with sprinkles.

I’ve been trying to make sense of Canada’s utter intransigence on climate. After all, our Prime Minister has children, too, so what could possibly be going through his head when the science is so clear about our need to act. Perhaps Stephen Harper and the Conservative party are simply climate deniers, who frown on any evidence, no matter what the scientific consensus, that contradicts their worldview of small government and unbridled capitalism. One can also point to the 2011 Crime Bill as another case in point of ideology trumping evidence.

Another factor is that the politics of opposing climate action is just too compelling for a conservative to resist: the oil and gas industry is a fundamental part of Harper’s base, and therefore a key source of political power; plus it is easy to demonize people who want to challenge the status quo in tough economic times, no matter how unsustainable the present course may be.

It is not just about the tar sands of Alberta, either. In BC, the provincial government is narrowly focused on new coal mines and shale gas fracking as the centrepiece of a provincial economic strategy. Since coming to power earlier this year, Premier Christy Clark, also a mother, has shown little interest in pursuing further climate action, leaving BC set to follow in the unfortunate Canadian tradition of reneging on climate commitments. BC cannot meet its legislated targets for GHG reductions by 2020 while pursuing a fossil fuel export strategy.

Coming back to the kids, I think Harper and Clark know very well that climate change is upon us. Reports from the federal government itself, via Environment Canada, pin the blame for freak weather on climate change. The mountain pine beetle infestation has devastated BC’s interior forests, and extreme weather incidents have been widespread. We know climate impacts will continue to get worse, leaving a terrible legacy for our children.

But rather than act, perhaps the Conservatives are making a leap of faith that wealth and technology will spare Canada from the ravages of extreme weather and altered climate patterns. Or at more personal level, wealth and technology will enable their children to maintain a high standard of living.

This is, of course, nonsense. It is like being unconcerned about a plane crash because you are sitting at the back of the plane. And this callous disregard guarantees a massive injustice perpetrated across generations. Failure to act is already condemning millions of people around the world to suffering and death.

But we are rich, so why should we care? Such is the fundamental injustice of climate change: those who have done the most to cause the problem – rich people in rich countries – are not the ones to pay the price. Executives in the oil industry who have gotten rich by externalizing their costs of production are thus in terrific position to seek shelter in fortified compounds, while the poor and innocent, who have not benefitted from fossil fuels, who must live with the consequences.

Climate change embodies injustice: the rich screwing the poor; the old dumping on the young; humans robbing other species. To make it right we need climate justice, and our work at the CCPA has been to develop a vision of what a post-carbon society could look like, and how we get there. But we have to collectively choose that future.

Two other big stories of 2011 may show a glimmer of hope that we have hit bottom, and change is coming. The Occupy movement came out of nowhere to oppose the inequality of savage capitalism. And Big Oil’s push for pipelines to get tar sands crude to market has run into massive opposition in the US, led by red meat states like Nebraska, and in BC, led by a unified wall of First Nations.

We will need new governments, federally and provincially, to spearhead the collective action required for a climate just world, and that will address our ecological deficits with the zeal we have for budget deficits. The wall of denial will come tumbling down in short order, and our Climate Justice Project is preparing us for a rapid transition that is smooth and fair. In the meantime, as our governments have been occupied by fossil fuel industries, take heart in the fact that people can still say no, leaving the carbon bombs held by Alberta and BC trapped underground.

And with good reason.

Earlier today, I outlined why in a new report for the CCPA which looks at the rapidly expanding usage of fracking in two regions of the province where the gas industry is steadily increasing its efforts to extract natural gas from deeply buried shale rock formations.

The report – Fracking Up Our Water, Hydro Power and Climate: BC’s Reckless Pursuit of Shale Gas – concludes that when all is said and done the gas produced from such operations is the natural gas equivalent of the oil produced from Alberta’s tar sands. The parallels between the two are downright spooky, and even spookier when you consider that a goodly amount of natural gas currently produced in BC is headed to Alberta to . . . facilitate the extraction of raw bitumen from the tar sands.

Both the shale gas fracking indusry and the tar sands oil industry are big consumers of water, big consumers of energy and big emitters of greenhouse gases. And they will be even more so in the years ahead. I was lucky to gain an inkling for what that may mean during a field-trip last year, which took me into the heart of one of the emerging fracking zones in BC’s south Peace region. Fortunately, I had award-winning photographer, Garth Lenz along for the ride. He captured some amazing images of all the ways our public water and hydro resources are being placed at risk as the fracking industry expands. Later, the CCPA’s Terra Poirier worked with the images to create a nifty slideshow which you can access on-line here. You can also check out more of Garth’s images on his website – which also includes portfolios of his photographs in Alberta’s tar sands and over the Athabasca river delta.

Like I said earlier, and as Garth’s work vividly portrays, the parallels between BC’s shale gas industry and Alberta’s tar sands oil industry are many. But the big three of water use, energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions clearly stick out. When you look at those three, the need to enact tough new policies and regulations to deal with BC’s natural gas sector is obvious.

In fracking, immense amounts of water – up to 600 Olympic swimming pools’ worth at some BC fracking operations – are pumped underground along with unknown chemicals and sand to break open cracks or fractures in the shale rock, fractures which allow the trapped gas to be released. That water use is very loosely regulated in BC, leading to all kinds of potential environmental abuses.

The power that the rapidly expanding shale gas industry in BC is projected to need, could, according to BC Hydro, amount to the equivalent of 2 and possibly 3 times the power that would be produced at the proposed Site C dam, on the Peace River, not far from where the pictures in the above-mentioned slideshow were taken.

Lastly, there’s all the additional greenhouse gases associated with shale gas production in BC – emission increases that will undercut any ability for BC to meet its legislatively mandated greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets.

That’s why I argue in today’s Province newspaper that it’s time to put a cap on annual gas production in the province before our shared water and hydro resources and our climate are totally fracked.

The northern coastal Nation has been active in logging for some time, and with its opening of its own trade office in Beijing two years ago has stepped up its direct efforts to boost trade with one of the world’s most rapidly industrializing economies.

Two years after opening that office, as noted in a recent story in the Globe and Mail, one of the largest province-wide aboriginal organizations in the province – the First Nations Summit – along with the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada has unveiled an initiative aimed at emulating the Lax Kw’alaams example.

“The First Nations-China Desk is a portal to help native communities gain access to markets for their forestry and fishery products – at a time when China is emerging as a key customer. In May, for the first time, China surpassed the United States in the value of shipments for B.C. lumber exports,” the Globe’s Justine Hunter reported.

For members of an isolated First Nation operating in a region of the province that has witnessed a sharp drop in sawmill and pulp mill jobs in the past decade, an economic development strategy that puts band members to work logging trees and exporting raw logs has some immediate economic benefits that for obvious reasons are attractive.

But more broadly, is aggressive marketing of the lowest value of all forest products – raw logs – along with growing shipments of low-value commodity lumber products to China a wise move for BC’s forest industry and one that provincial government policies ought to promote?

While it is true that the shocking contraction in the US housing market, now entering its fifth year, has been a harsh and stubbornly persistent reality for the province’s forest industry, forest-dependent communities and the provincial government alike, is simply attempting to replace one market with another a wise move? Or is it possibly setting us up for even deeper economic pain down the road?

I believe the answer to the first question is no and the answer to the second question is yes, and I outline why in a new report released today by the BC office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives – Making the Case for a Carbon Focus and Green Jobs in BC’s Forest Industry. You can check it out here. Or, if you want to, you can read a stripped down version of some of what is in the report in an op-ed of mine published in today’s Vancouver Sun.

What we desperately need and so richly deserve in this province is a new forest policy roadmap. With tens of thousands of forest industry jobs lost over the past decade; with a forest resource showing signs of great stress due to the effects of stupendous insect attacks, increasingly frequent and severe forest fires, unsustainable logging rates and ill-considered reforestation choices; and now, with the with great uncertainties of climate change staring us in the face, we need policies that restore health to our forests and that reinvigorate our decimated forest sector.

The way to do that lies in seriously ratcheting up carefully targeted, publicly funded reforestation efforts and in accepting that now and for the foreseeable future we must extract greater social and economic value from a smaller pool of natural resources. In other words, for each tree we cut we need to produce more jobs and, more to the point, more sustainable jobs. Our government’s and forest industry’s overemphasis on diversifying markets for BC’s forest products outside of the United States and their preoccupation with penetrating the Chinese market in particular is not the way to go if most of what we end up shipping are low-value products that lack distinction on the global stage.

Now, more than ever, we need to embrace product diversification, not market diversification. Happily, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that BC has considerable room to improve in that regard.

Right now, the province manages to generate one full-time forest industry job for very 1,189 telephone pole’s worth of trees logged. Ontario manages to generate one full-time forest industry job with close to one sixth the wood, while Quebec manages the same feat with about one quarter of the wood volume used in BC.

The irony is that despite having what is still one of the richest forest resources in North America BC is embarrassingly low down the value chain. It’s time to move up several rungs on that chain – before it’s too late.

Yet in the intervening months – months in which local residents watched as an unprecedented rush on water resources got underway – there was virtually no word from the provincial government about what its intentions were with regards to Talisman or a number of other energy companies with similar plans to divert large quantities of water from the region’s rivers, lakes and streams.

Late last week Hudson’s Hope’s residents got their answer. The provincial government had granted Talisman the rights to pull up to 10,000 cubic metres of water per day from the reservoir, each and every day for the next 20 years. It is widely expected that in days or weeks the province will issue a similar approval to a second Calgary-based company, Canbriam Energy Inc., effectively doubling the water to be piped below farmer’s fields at a rate of eight Olympic swimming pools per day.

All of which was approved in the absence of any meaningful public consultation – something that local residents and the general public alike were promised two months ago when Energy and Mines Minister, Rich Coleman, rose during Question Period to say that there would be “an extensive process of public consultation, discussion and negotiations with First Nations before anything would go ahead.”

This does not bode well as far as responsible management of public water resources in the public’s interest is concerned. Especially when the government knows just how great and growing the demand for water is in the province’s booming unconventional gas industry. Currently, half or more of all gas wells drilled in British Columbia are hydraulically fractured or fracked, a process in which water is pressure-pumped deep underground (along with undisclosed chemicals and copious quantities of sand) to crack tightly-bound shale rock, which allows the gas trapped in the rock to be released.

At some well pads in northern BC, as much as 600 Olympic swimming pool’s worth of water is used in fracking operations. As of now, there are 17 long-term water licence applications submitted by natural gas companies to the provincial government in just the Horn River Basin alone, the northernmost of BC’s two shale gas zones currently in development. The applications, within the traditional territory of the Fort Nelson First Nation, would result in gas companies gaining access to nearly 20 million cubic metres of freshwater per year in a region of the province where knowledge of water resources is limited and where industry and government are scrambling to get baseline information in place.

Coleman’s promise, in response to a question from Independent MLA Bob Simpson, seemed to indicate that the government understood that how water licences were reviewed and issued was an important public policy issue. But the government’s subsequent actions suggest otherwise.

Simpson, representing Cariboo North, and fellow Independent Vicki Huntington representing Delta South, had days earlier called on the government to appoint a special committee of the legislature to examine all aspects of BC’s emerging unconventional gas industry, in large measure because of the industry’s escalating water demands.

During the same Question Period in which Coleman promised fulsome consultation, Simpson called Talisman’s and Canbriam’s proposed water withdrawals at Williston Reservoir “the worst-kept secret” in BC’s South Peace region. “The question from that region is: what is the public consultation process for a water withdrawal of that magnitude? Both First Nations and the general public would like to know, from whatever minister that’s appropriate for this: what is the process that the public can be engaged in, in the diversion and pipeline withdrawal of 7.3 billion litres per annum from the Williston reservoir behind the W.A.C. Bennett dam?”

Despite Coleman’s subsequent promise that the public would be provided ample opportunity to scrutinize and comment on the proposed water withdrawals, nothing in the intervening eight weeks suggests anything close to that happened; in fact, quite the opposite. The government kept a tight lid on its review of the Talisman application and did its best to avoid exposing public servants involved in the licensing decision itself or the politicians to whom they reported to media scrutiny.

In response to questions about Talisman’s application, communications staff with the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations (FLNRO), told CBC Radio reporter Betsy Trumpener two weeks ago that a decision on the licence would be made by the end of July.

A few days later, on Monday July 25, the decision to grant the licence was apparently made by Robert Piccini, section head of water authorizations for FLNRO in Prince George. However, subsequent calls to Piccini’s office indicate that he was out of the office that week. No statement announcing the licensing decision was released.

On Wednesday The Province newspaper published an op-ed I wrote noting that the decision was imminent and questioning what had become of Coleman’s promise for a robust consultative process. Later that day, I checked a “water licence query” database maintained by FLNRO that indicated that Talisman’s licence had indeed been granted two days earlier. (The database lists only rudimentary information such as licence numbers, licence holders and issuance dates, but no concrete details on the licences themselves.) Subsequent calls to water stewardship officials in the Prince George office were not returned.

The following day a water stewardship official at Victoria headquarters provided me an electronic copy of the full, conditional Talisman water licence. the ministry has yet to post the document on line at a registry where members of the public can view the actual licence documents.

Meanwhile, throughout the last week of July Trumpener and the CBC tried repeatedly to reach Coleman or Steve Thomson, Minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations. Emails sent simultaneously to both Trumpener and Coleman’s office by communications staff with FLNRO indicated that Thomson’s office would be the one to respond to media questions. In other words, the minister who had promised public consultation would not be available, but the minister in charge of water licensing decisions apparently would be.

Except even that proved not to be the case. Late on the afternoon of July 28, Trumpener received an email from Lisa Barrett, communications officer in Thomson’s ministry. The email’s first sentence was not encouraging. “Minister Thomson is unavailable for comment.”

The email – also sent to The Tyee, but not issued as a news release – went on to say that in Thomson’s absence the following could be “attributed” to Thomson’s ministry. The email noted that Talisman had been granted a licence allowing it to draw “a maximum of 10,000 cubic metres of water per day, to a maximum of 3,650,000 cubic metres of water per year until December 31, 2031.”

Because Talisman’s application fell below 10 million cubic metres per year, its application had not been subject to a formal environmental assessment, the statement further said. One reading of this particular detail was that in the view of Thomson’s ministry public consultation is really only required for those projects reviewed under a formal environmental assessment process, which of course is not true, the government’s extensive public meetings to assess public input on the proposed modernization of BC’s Water Act being being but one example.

Another point raised in Barrett’s email was that prior to Talisman’s licence being approved “a technical assessment of water availability was done, as well as several meetings with First Nations in March and April and correspondence with stakeholders and local and federal governments.”

In the absence of any mention in the email of Coleman’s promise, the inference is that in the opinion of Thomson’s ministry “correspondence with stakeholders” – whatever form such correspondence took – is adequate to fulfill the government’s commitment to extensive public consultation.

All of which does not sit well with Simpson, who remains concerned that nobody is taking responsibility for the bigger picture issues. By any measure the water coming into play in BC’s unconventional gas industry is considerable and will only climb as natural gas prices recover. Prices are currently low due to a glut of available gas in North America and no outlet, at present, for domestic producers to ship to overseas markets where prices are higher (ergo the push by BC natural gas producers to build a liquid natural gas processing facility and terminal near Kitimat, which would allow them to ship gas which has been super-cooled to liquid form on tankers bound for China and elsewhere).

“This water is a public resource that has economic, social and ecological values beyond using it for the controversial ‘fracking’ process,” Simpson said in a statement late last week after word of the government’s approval of Talisman’s water licence application came to light. “The government had an obligation to fulfill the Minister’s promise to conduct “extensive” consultation before allowing this significant amount of water to be mixed with unknown toxins and then permanently removed from the Earth’s water cycle.”

Simpson went on to say that the Minister of Environment should halt the issuance of new water permits and licenses in much of northeastern BC where fracking operations are concentrated until baseline data is collected and the public and First Nations are extensively consulted.  Simpson also suggested it is time for BC to consider putting a price on water for use in fracking operations in order to motivate the industry to reduce its demand on BC’s fresh water ecosystems.

But Simpson and Huntington, who have both elicited strong support for their calls for reforms from numerous enironmental organizations, First Nations and landowner groups, appear to be facing an uphill battle. When it comes to managing public water resources in the public interest, the government’s actions to date deal the public out, not in.

Can we pin this all on climate change? Some say yes, others are more cautious about how much we can cite human greenhouse gas emissions. But all agree that what we are seeing is consistent with what climate scientists have been predicting for decades. Would those tornadoes have been averted in the absence of too much carbon in the air, or would they have happened anyway but packing an extra punch due to a warmer planet? We can only speak in probabilities not black and white, but there is a high probability that the extremes we have been seeing are part of our new 21st century climate.

Lots of people are connecting these dots. Canada’s mainstream media is an exception that continue to report extreme weather events on one page and oil and gas developments in the business section, as if there is no connection whatsoever. Worse, during the second (or was it the third?) round of tornadoes, the Vancouver Province ran a story, “No Link Between Tornadoes and Climate Change” (which I think ran through the CanWest media empire). It was a puff article quoting one person who made such a comment with no counter-point, but what is interesting is that some editor felt it necessary to make that a banner headline.

I think this wall of denial is about to fall in the next few years, and with it we need to usher in a new era of climate action. Serious climate action, not the slow and gentle first steps we’ve witnessed to date in places like BC and California (whereas other juridictions have done nothing at all). That means shifting to zero fossil fuels in the energy system as soon as possible, aggressively making our society more energy efficient, and redeveloping our urban spaces into complete communities that are substantially more pedestrian and bike-friendly, and with major investments in public transit.

But I think we need to up the ante for those pursuing business as usual, the relentless expansion of oil and gas infrastructure that is causing these problems and guaranteeing that they will be worse in the future. Actions that lead to mass deaths and displacements, either directly due to a weather event or indirectly from impacts on land and livelihoods, beg for some accountability. I’m no international law-talking guy, but I believe that these things can only be called crimes against humanity.

Let’s say that again. Efforts to expand the oil and gas industry, like the Keystone XL and Enbridge pipelines, are crimes against humanity. Expanding the coal industry, like the proposal to export megatonnes of Washington state coal, is not just bad environmental policy, but a crime against humanity.

The Economics of Climate Adaptation Working Group, including Swiss Re and other prominent grey-suited observers, calculate that weather disasters over the past 50 years have led to $1 trillion in losses and 800,000 fatalities. Those human and financial losses are only going to get worse. It is not polar bears and “future generations” we are talking about. It is the current impacts on people around the world who had nothing to do with the problem. It is about Canada’s First Nations, whose constitutional rights have literally been run over by those massive mining trucks that ply the Alberta tar sands.

I may be willing to give a grace period for actions take before 2000 or so, on the grounds that we did not know better (though we actually did). Nor would I punish regular folks (including me) who burn fossil fuels because of the structure of the world we live in and the lack of alternatives. This is about the dealers not the addicts; about the need for urgent change in response to the unfolding crisis.

It matters not whether such actions today are “legal” (almost all genocides were legal at the time) but they are deeply immoral and wrong. Major shareholders and senior executives in big fossil fuel industries – and the politicians that dote on them – need to understand that their profiteering off of destabilizing the climate will pay a price. That’s a little thing we call justice.

My special thanks to Tyee editor David Beers or whoever it was who chose to run the image of Yosemite Sam to accompany the piece (Yosemite is one of my favourite Bugs Bunny Show characters).

Anyway, I reprint here an exchange of comments in response to the article. They offer some insights into how at least one (and possibly two) anonymous industry insiders viewed my commentary, which focused on Independent MLA Bob Simpson’s recent Private Members’ statement in the provincial legislature and Liberal MLA Pat Pimm’s embarrassing response to it. (Simpson’s statement outlined why he and fellow Independent MLA, Vicki Huntington, had called on Premier Christy Clark to appoint a special legislative committee to study BC’s rapidly expanding unconventional gas industry and provincial policies relating to it.)

The exchange is as follows.

Posted by “Cool Hand”

The Emotional Factor

Quote:

Parfitt: policies in jurisdictions such as Quebec and New York State are being driven by mounting public fears

Some differences:

1. Unlike BC, AB, Texas, and Oklahoma, fer instance, which have been actively engaged in oil/gas drilling/production for over 60 years and have a Ministry/Department bureacracy dealing with these matters, QC and NY haven’t and don’t;

2. The shale gas/tight gas plays in QC and NY are relatively shallow compared to the much deeper plays in BC/AB and the southern U.S.;

3. The ng [natural gas] shale plays in QC and NY are in close proximity to a relatively large population base;

Ergo, some folk become emotionally (versus rationally) driven.

In that same vein, SK has a well-developed uranium mining industry and ON has a well-developed nuclear power industry. Imagine if uranium mining or nuclear power was proposed for BC?

The same emotional reaction exhibited in QC and NY would also occur out here with no provincial experience in those fields.

Posted by Ben Parfitt

Re: The emotional factor

“Cool Hand”, you’re obviously well informed on natural gas and energy industry issues. Do you work in the industry? I ask because you, too, hide behind a pseudonym.

To respond briefly to each of your three points:

1) BC, Alberta, Texas and Oklahoma do indeed have established gas industries, while Quebec and New York State may not. (Although it was actually in up-State New York in 1821 that the very first commercialized natural gas was first developed from a very shallow shale formation.) Readers of your comments may, however, draw the incorrect impression that BC and others have “60 years” experience with hydraulically fracturing or fracking unconventional gas-bearing formations in the manner presently employed. They do not. Combining numerous wells on a single well pad, drilling each well deep into the earth and then out in long horizontal reaches, and then pumping massive amounts of water down each well in “slickwater” fracking operations where chemical friction reducers are introduced to ease the water’s passage, was only perfected in the past decade and has only been in play in BC for a few years. At today’s biggest multi-well pads in BC, 600 Olympic swimming pool’s worth of water is pressure-pumped underground. No government agency that I am aware of has so much as a plan to quantify what the cumulative impacts on human health and safety and the environment are of such operations.

2) You suggest that the deeper depths at which shale formations are found in BC make our unconventional gas resources safer to develop. To date, according to the BC Oil and Gas Commission, there have been 18 reported “communications” between fracked wells in the province, meaning that unforeseen contamination corridors between wells spaced up to 750 metres apart have occurred. This is one reason why noted experts on fracking, such as Cornell University’s Anthony Ingraffea, refer to the below ground events induced by fracking as “non-linear chaos”.

3) Natural gas-bearing shale formations in Quebec and New York State are indeed much closer to large human populations than are BC’s. That will be of little comfort, however, to the residents of Pouce Coupe who had to flee their homes in 2009 following a well failure at an Encana well that was traced to a build-up of frack sand in the well piping and that resulted in highly toxic sour gas flowing into the night air. Should human health and safety and the environment count for less when there are fewer people around?

I agree that the fracking debate is an emotional one. It seems sensible then to have a hard look at it in a non-partisan way by our elected leaders or by an independent commission in a forum in which witnesses are called, a wide-range of professional opinion is sought, minutes are kept, the public has access and a report laying out policy recommendations is produced. You share this view, correct?

Posted by “reallife”

The emotional factor

Not sure about Cool Hands’ expertise but I have been involved with resource development as a service provider and a regulator for many years and continue to make my living in the industry.

1. Yes, the frac jobs have increased greatly in size and use much more fluid, propant and force than early jobs but it is still the same technology.

2. Communication between wells at depth is not a concern for safety of people or the environment. However, it could present commercial issues that may need addressing by the industry.

3. The release of gas at Pouce Coupe is only partially attributal to fraccing. Yes, apparently sand cut out a nipple and shame on Encana for not being on top of this – they should not have left a well untended while it is flowing back treatment fluids. A worse incident occurred many years ago near the Blueberry Indian Reserve where an oil well was being tested after fraccing. Sand cut out a section of pipe and very sour gas was released leading to evacuation of the reserve. This is not a condemnation of fraccing but does point to a need for industry to better staff its field operations.

4. Fraccing is not an issue that calls for a special investigation. However, the business of regulating the entire industry could benefit from a new look. It seems to me that best practices are only employed after an incident happens or an initial application is refused. I believe it would be better if the industry employed best practices at all times. Too many decisions are left to people in the field who are working for a firm that has submitted the lowest bid to the oil company. This too frequently leads to problems caused by cost cutting and lax efforts by the unmotivated field workers. Oil company executives should be held personally responsible for problems in the field. It has long been held that the safety levels in oil operations are inversely proportional to the distance from Calgary (executives do not like to travel a long ways to operations.)



For seven minutes Simpson, Member of the Legislative Assembly for Cariboo North and one of two Independent MLAs, spoke about why he and fellow Independent Vicki Huntington (Delta South), had called on Premier Christy Clark to appoint a special committee of the legislature to investigate B.C.’s ballooning unconventional gas production and its public policy implications.

It was an impressive performance, given the slightly more than 7 minutes that Simpson had to marshal his arguments.  You can watch it all here on a video clip. Look in particular for Simpson’s characterization of B.C.’s rapidly expanding unconventional gas production as the Wild West of resource extraction, and how that comment may have unhinged his Liberal colleague from across the carpeted divide. But I digress.

Private Members’ statements, are an opportunity made available to all MLAs and take place on Monday mornings when the legislature is in session (a rare event the past few years). Statements fall outside of normal government business and are meant to be non-partisan in nature. But just as there’s the Wild West of resource extraction there’s the Wild West of B.C. politics.

During his statement, Simpson touched on a wide array of controversies swirling around B.C.’s accelerating unconventional gas drilling as reasons why he and Huntington (along with a number of environmental organizations, First Nations, local citizens’ groups in the energy-rich northeast corner of the province and others including the B.C. office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives) believed that convening a special legislative committee made good public policy sense:

• Issues of public health and safety, in particular the health and safety risks associated with uncontrolled sour gas releases.
• The escalating volumes of water, sand and toxins being pressure-pumped underground during hydraulic fracturing or fracking operations, a stimulation technique now used to encourage maximum gas flows at about half of all natural gas wells drilled in British Columbia.
• Government subsidization of natural gas industry activities at a time of low gas prices.
• Who, if anyone, is tracking the cumulative impacts on land and water resources as B.C.’s unconventional gas resources are developed.
• Reports from government funded bodies showing that gas produced from unconventional shale formations will result in so many greenhouse gas emissions that the province will be incapable of meeting its legislatively mandated GHG emissions reduction targets and, in fact, court increases in said emissions of 10% or more.

“British Columbia has a long history of natural resource exploitation. The original founding of this province was fur, forests and fish. The neck of the woods I come from, was the gold rush. And if history dictates anything to us it states that we need to be much more careful in how we use our natural resources,” Simpson said.

It was then that he suggested that the escalating development of B.C.’s unconventional gas resources might properly be called the new Wild West of resource exploitation, a phrase, he was at pains to point out that he had not coined, but that he and other fellow MLAs on the legislative finance committee had heard applied to the Peace region’s natural gas plays on two separate occasions when the committee traveled there.

And then it was time for the Wild West’s Liberal MLA, Pat Pimm,  to present his, er, reasoned response. Here’s some of what the MLA  for Peace River North had to say. Believe me when I say it was not the first or last of his embarrassing utterances.

“Why has the member opposite all of a sudden decided to take an interest in worrying about the great folks of northeastern B.C.? I mean, I’m happy you are, but, uh, I think that’s why we have 85 MLAs. And I think I can look after my needs in that neighbourhood quite well. I’d also like to ask the member opposite if he’s going to be seeking election in northeastern B.C. next time around, or if he would be content to try and represent his own constituents in the Cariboo South, or Cariboo North, rather. And, ah, last time I checked they certainly could use a little help in that area. And I think he should be dedicating his time to their concerns instead of grandstanding in this House about the northeastern B.C.”

It was then that Deputy Speaker Dawn Black reminded Pimm that his get out of Dodge rhetoric was inappropriate for the moment at hand and directed the MLA to address his comments to her, something that Pimm, flashing a saccharine smile, undertook to do but evidently had occasional trouble pulling off.

All and all, it was a shocking performance by one of Sheriff Clark’s junior deputies. All the more so because as anyone familiar with unconventional gas developments knows, policies in  jurisdictions such as Quebec and New York State are being driven by mounting public fears over the environmental, health and safety and economic damage caused by fracking operations in other Canadian provinces and U.S. states. In both Quebec and New York, temporary moratoriums on unconventional gas developments were imposed, allowing time for provincial and state officials to investigate the links between fracking operations and potentially deadly gas leaks, explosions, contaminated drinking water wells and groundwater sources, and polluted streams and rivers.

As Simpson said, we can either develop natural resource policies here in B.C. in response to rising protests or our elected leaders can actually be proactive, examine the issues and shape or reshape provincial policies accordingly.

If Sheriff Clark has any sense, she’ll lasso Simpson and Huntington and deputize them to be on a special task force to launch a preliminary investigation into the issues raised by the two Independent MLAs. In the meantime, she might want to send her junior deputy, Mr. Pimm, on a long horse ride out to the outer extremities of the range in his beloved northeast B.C.

Along the way, Pimm could  water his steed at any one of the numerous pits dug into the earth and each filled with 10 or more Olympic swimming pool’s worth of water. The pits were excavated by natural gas companies and then filled with water withdrawn from rivers, lakes and streams; water now destined for pressure-pumping deep underground at fracking operations. A word of warning, though. Avoid the nearby wastewater pits.  Too much salt, sand and chemicals there for a horse’s liking.

For the last few years, a coalition of environmental  organizations, First Nations and others have stepped up efforts to publicize their opposition to the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, which if built would carry oil processed from Alberta’s tar sands to Kitimat for subsequent shipment to China and elsewhere in the Pacific Rim .

But comparatively little has been said about the actual and steadily increasing oil shipments out of the Port of Vancouver, which could further increase sixfold should Kinder Morgan’s plans for a dramatic expansion in tanker traffic get the green light from the National Energy Board among others.

You’d like to think, as Anderson notes, that the prospect of such a surge in oil shipments combined with other related issues such as the dredging of parts of the Burrard Inlet seabed to make way for tankers that could carry four times more oil than was on-board the ill-fated Exxon Valdez, would have environmental leaders tripping all over each other in a rush to get standing before the NEB, which will chair hearings into Kinder Morgan’s proposals.

But nary a one has applied to the NEB for intervenor status. Nor, as Anderson notes, has our provincial government. In fact, our government actually made a point of sending a letter to the NEB saying that it would not be a player in the proceedings.

I wonder why? Is it possible that the province wishes to avoid being seen as supporting such an obviously contentious proposal? Or is it that it wishes to avoid having the spotlight potentially shone on some of the more obviously embarrassing deficiencies in its alleged “environmental protection” plans?

Before considering the adequacy or lack thereof of B.C.’s capacity to respond to oil spills and, more importantly, to work proactively to reduce the prospects of such, consider this:

B.C.’s coastline, with its numerous inlets and islands, is 27,000 kilometres long, more than half the Earth’s equatorial circumference. Over this sprawling area, as well as the entire interior of the province, the provincial government deployed the equivalent of just over 13 full-time staff in 2010 to respond to oil and “dangerous goods” spills. In 2008-2009, we had nearly 4,000 such reported spills in the province, but likely many more that went unreported and undetected given the lack of environmental enforcement and protection staff.

Just across the border, Washington’s spill prevention and preparedness program had 77.7 full-time-equivalent staff in 2010 and its departmental budget allocation for the year was  $29.1 million, compared to B.C.’s paltry allocation of $2.5 million. With a hiring freeze in B.C.’s emaciated environmental departments and plans to reduce already gutted staff further through attrition, our government is flirting with an environmental disaster for which it may one sorry day have to claim some responsibility.

An oil spill in the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca would do incredible damage to the environment in the Lower Mainland and southern Vancouver Island, just as an oil spill on the mid coast from a proposed export facility there would wreak ecological havoc in that place that environmentalists have done so much to cement in people’s minds as our very own ecotopia – the Great Bear Rainforest.

But the damage to the provincial economy caused by a massive oil release in B.C.’s southern waters would be an order of magnitude greater than on the mid coast, for the simple reason that the southern corner of the province is where most British Columbians live, work and play and where countless business are located, many of them tied to the marine economy.

For that reason, we must insist that our elected leaders are held accountable for ensuring that the highest level of environmental safeguards are in place before any substantial increases in oil shipments out of the Port of Vancouver occur, as well as ensuring the safety and integrity of the inland pipeline route that soon may bring a whole bunch more of Alberta’s tar sands oil our way – an issue that the BC Tapwater Alliance correctly foresaw five years ago might soon become an environmental issue of note.

How right they were.

Meaning that Independent MLAs Bob Simpson and Vicki Huntington will have their work cut out for them trying to maintain media focus and public attention on their welcome non-partisan call for the appointment of a special legislative committee to thoroughly investigate unconventional natural gas developments in the province.

It’s a call that 21 organizations and prominent British Columbians – including First Nations, leading environmental organizations, local citizens groups in the natural gas-rich northeast corner of the province, and individual town councilors – all support, and one that we at the BC Office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives have also endorsed.

For years, the policies of provincial NDP and Liberal administrations alike have been squarely focused on increased exploitation of BC’s natural gas resources, which are primarily situated in the Peace River and Northern Rockies regions of the province – an extensive, but remote part of BC that is larger than the state of Nebraska. This fact may help to explain why it has fallen to Simpson and Huntington to propose that the time has arrived for a sober assessment of the industry’s activities and the role that provincial policies play in shaping them.

It was under the NDP that the one-stop-shop for regulatory energy industry approvals – the Oil and Gas Commission – was created in an effort to eliminate the alleged red tape of multiple agencies reviewing applications by natural gas companies to drill gas wells, build roads and and situate pipelines. Dan Miller, under whose tenure as Energy and Mines Minister the OGC was created, would go on to do lobbying work for mining and energy company clients, including Enbridge Inc., the company hoping to build an oil pipeline from Edmonton to Kitimat.

It was largely under the Liberals, but also under the NDP, that various breaks on energy industry royalty payments and other credits were offered as inducements to industry expansion. With billions of dollars having flowed into provincial coffers over the past decade – much of it in the form of one-time sales of subsurface rights or royalty payments – and billions more potentially at play, neither Liberal or NDP MLAs have been particularly vocal about questioning a) whether or not the public should subsidize industry activities, or b) what the cumulative effects of rapidly accelerating industry developments mean for BC meeting its greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets or the environment more generally.

This reluctance takes on added significance in light of the rapidly accelerating use of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” operations to boost natural gas production – operations that only a few short years ago Liberal and NDP MLAs alike could have been excused for not knowing a thing about. Now fracking is assisting in the production of nearly half of all the natural gas produced in the province, led by companies such as EnCana Corporation, whose former  president and CEO Gwyn Morgan went on to become a special advisor to Christy Clark. It is the rapidly emerging usage of this “stimulation” method – which involves pumping copious amounts of water under extremely high pressure deep underground to crack or fracture “unconventional” formations such as tightly bound shale rock, thereby releasing their gas – that lies at the heart of Simpson’s and Huntington’s initiative.

The rapid deployment of hydraulic fracturing at gas pads where numerous wells are located close together – and where each well is drilled deep into the earth and then drilled out horizontally for 2 kilometres or more – is a relatively new phenomenon dating back about a decade and with its origins in the state of Texas. As I wrote last year in a report released by the Program on Water Issues at the Munk School of Global Affairs, natural gas companies in northeast BC – including EnCana, Apache Canada and Talisman Energy – all increasingly employ fracking technology to boost gas production, in some cases setting industry records for water usage in the process with hundreds of Olympic swimming pools worth of water pressure-pumped underground at some sites.

The Oil and Gas Commission has approved hundreds of temporary water use permits allowing energy companies to divert hundreds of millions of gallons of water from streams, rivers and lakes in the Peace and Northern Rockies regions. Massive water diversion proposals involving longer-term water tenures known as water licences have also been submitted by energy companies to water stewardship officials with the new Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations. Some of those proposals include diversions out of Williston Reservoir and have resulted in behind-door negotiations between gas companies and BC Hydro over what price the companies should pay for water from the province’s largest reservoir, which is the source of much of BC’s  hydroelectric power.

To date, both the Oil and Gas Commission and the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations have failed to consult in any kind of meaningful way with members of the public generally or First Nations specifically about the hundreds of short-term water use permits granted to natural gas companies or the dozens of long-term water licences sought by the industry.

“Public policies are driving the rapid expansion of BC’s unconventional gas sector, particularly in shale formations in the Peace Region,” Huntington, Independent MLA for Delta South, said in endorsing the call for the appointment of the special legislative committee to review the development of the province’s unconventional gas reserves. “It is incumbent on the government to ensure it fully understands the cumulative impacts associated with developing this resource.”

Both Huntington and Simpson expressed concerns that with prices for natural gas currently low that the provincial government may offer even more inducements to the gas industry in order to artificially prop up developments. This year alone, the province expects to hand $172-million to the gas sector in royalty rebates and infrastructure credits. In return, it expects to collect the equivalent of about $1 million per day – or $365 million – this year in net royalty payments from the industry. It’s not clear how much of the subsidies or the royalties will be attributed to natural gas produced from wells that were hydraulically fractured, although about one half of the gas currently produced involves use of the controversial stimulation technique that has been linked to methane contamination of household tap water, dangerous and potentially lethal leaks of gas laced with hydrogen sulphide and known as sour gas, and badly polluted waterways.

“The rapid expansion of this industry, and the potential for it to continue to expand with the aid of incremental government assistance, has led to serious public policy questions being raised by more and more individuals and organizations,” Simpson, Independent MLA for Cariboo North, said.

Huntington and Simpson cite a range of public concerns as influencing their decision to call for the appointment of a special committee of the legislature including:

• Economists asking if we are developing gas resources at the wrong time in the market cycle.
• Peace River residents in the Northern Health Authority calling for a public inquiry into the health and safety implications of oil and gas development.
• The amount of fresh water used in hydraulic fracturing operations and the disposal of the large amounts of toxic wastewater subsequently produced.
• The significant additional carbon emissions associated with the industry.
• Failure to address First Nations rights and title issues.
• Other jurisdictions such as Quebec and New York State taking a more precautionary approach to unconventional gas developments (both effectively have moratoriums in place pending further study).

In years past the BC Government has appointed special committees of the legislature to address high-profile issues. Notably in 2005, the government appointed committees to examine both the province’s aquaculture industry and prospects for electoral reform. Such committees are bi-partisan in make-up, have powers to call witnesses, can request or commission reports, and can travel to different regions of the province to hold meetings and assess public opinion. Their proceedings are also recorded and become part of the public record.

With a growing number of people – particularly those residents living in the heart of the province’s gas-development zone – saying its time to take a sober look at what escalated unconventional gas developments may mean for public health and safety, the environment and economy alike, appointing such a committee makes imminent sense.

Evidently not, as outlined by two scientists in a sobering critique of provincial government forest policy (or the lack thereof) published in today’s Vancouver Sun.

Penned by Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest science at the University of British Columbia, and Kathy Lewis, a professor of ecosystem science and management at the University of Northern British Columbia, the critique notes that with the scrapping of the Forest Practices Code and its replacement with the Forest and Range Practices Act in 2002, British Columbia moved into a “results-based” world where “professional reliance” was supposed to safeguard the public interest.

The top-down, highly prescriptive Code, was replaced with an open-ended, virtually impossible to enforce set of objectives with the responsibility for meeting such objectives transferred from industry and government to individual forest professionals “purportedly with tough penalties for non-compliance.”

Nine years later, however, Simard and Lewis note that the about-face in government forest policy has failed to deliver innovative and effective forest stewardship on public or Crown lands in the province, which constitute 94 per cent of B.C.’s entire land base – a land base shared with numerous small, geographically dispersed First Nations’ communities that bear an even greater burden than most as a result of the deepening forest health crisis.

A “vast sea of clear-cuts” has spread across much of the landscape, making our forests far less able to store and moderate water flows or store carbon.

“Salvage” logging of dead pine trees attacked by mountain pine beetles has wiped out droves of younger, living trees with dire ecological and economic consequences, particularly forests that were subject to “small scale salvage” operations. Under such operations, the provincial government induced companies to do additional logging by waiving their reforestation obligations. It is now estimated that well in excess of 200,000 hectares and probably in excess of 300,000 hectares of small scale salvage lands are inadequately reforested following logging, with the number likely growing.

An over-reliance on planting single-species of trees – particularly lodgepole pine – on logged sites appears to have set the stage for a future forest health crisis as disturbingly large numbers of the planted trees die as a result of insect attacks and disease outbreaks.

And, last but not least, the area of insufficiently reforested land in the province continues to expand thanks to sharp declines in tree-planting budgets, forest fires and insect attacks.

“Results-based management and professional reliance,” Simard and Lewis note, “are only effective when backed up by strong and efficient forest laws, policies and operating rules. In British Columbia, forest laws and practices are deregulated and weak. Therefore, we are failing to meet our own stewardship goals.”

Not surprising given their commitment to sound science underpinning how we manage public forests on the public’s behalf, Simard and Lewis lament the pronounced budgetary and staff cuts in the provincial Forest Service. The cuts have resulted in a precipitous drop-off in funding for critically important forest research and inventory efforts both inside and outside government – cuts that have seriously compromised efforts to restore our future forests to a state of health, especially in light of climate change.

They end their critique by urging readers to demand that the provincial government enact new forest policies and laws “that will ultimately increase the resilience of B.C.’s environment and economy.”

It’s a call to action we’d be wise to heed.

Dr. Glenn, who is the Dean of the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute, began by saying that, “Economists, writers, and researchers are beginning to discover…what we have known for decades: that the events and environment surrounding pre-conception, pregnancy, birth, and early infancy set the template out of which we live our lives.”

“The time is right,” she added, for a shift in the paradigm.”

Recent coverage such as on prenatal health in “Time” magazine, and epigenetics in “Newsweek”, symbolize this profound change in consciousness.

Some of the specific insights that Dr. Glenn mentioned included:

*  “Early experiences determine brain architecture.”
*  “By the sixth prenatal month, most of the 100 billion neurons found in the adult brain are already there.”

She also highlighted the most important point of all: preventing trauma in the first place.  For instance, she noted that a father’s supportive involvement during pregnancy can reduce infant mortality.

Dr. Glenn also quoted Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman, who points out that every dollar invested “in the very young” not only saves lives and prevents illness, but it will also save from $4-17 dollars in future social costs.

Heckman has written:

“Recent research demonstrates important differences in the family environments and investments of advantaged and disadvantaged children. Gaps in cognitive stimulation, affection, punishment, and other parental investments for children from families of different socioeconomic status open up early.” (Read the full article here.)

My presentation at the Congress overlapped with Dr. Glenn’s focus, beginning with the current state of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy, and how the emerging consensus supports his long-held contention about just how fragile we are while in the womb.

I pointed out how Janov believes that too many children have been emotionally damaged from an early age, and that one element of healing is to re-connect with the buried memories.

The second part of my talk discussed how to PREVENT hurting children in the first place.  In short, research has shown that providing optimal conditions for pregnant women, such as low stress, adequate nutrition, and quality pre-natal care could prevent children from suffering from a host of intellectual, emotional, and physical illnesses.

In addition, around 500,000 women die each year in childbirth.  Adam Jones (UBC Okanagan) has pointed out that most of those mothers could be saved for the cost of – six fighter jets.

Canada, for instance, could set an example for the world by forgoing the unnecessary purchase of the F-35 fighter jets, save the lives of countless women, and still have money left over for vital domestic needs.

Providing optimal conditions for mothers and their children would cost only a tiny fraction of what the world spends on advertising, or the Olympics, or the military.

This Paradigm Shift can’t happen too soon.

But in one important respect, Roundtable members got it right. BC’s First Nations remain largely on the outside looking in when it comes to the province’s forest industry. Cut off from lands and resources to which they lay claim, First Nations are the first to be affected by forest activities and almost always the last to benefit, if they benefit at all.

Beginning in 2003, the Roundtable notes, the province attempted to rectify this lamentable imbalance by awarding forest tenures and some forest revenues to individual First Nations. Well intentioned though its efforts were, they fell well short of the mark. “First Nation tenures should be increased in size and their term expanded, similar to what is done with Community Forest Agreements,” the Roundtable reported. “In addition, revenue-sharing formulas should be revised so there is a direct correlation between forest harvesting activity and revenue received by First Nations.”

I myself came to much the same conclusion in January 2007, when the CCPA published True Partners. The research offered a critical, independent assessment of the province’s “new relationship” with First Nations on the forestry front. Based on dozens of interviews with First Nations leaders and aboriginal foresters, it found that the province’s efforts frequently failed to deliver anything approaching economically viable opportunities.

It is highly unlikely that the Roundtable’s recommendations would have packed the punch they did without the forceful presence of Dave Porter of the Kaska Dene Nation and Chief Lynda Price of the Ulkatcho First Nation. But at the same time, it must be said, the province appears to have felt compelled to ensure that First Nation representatives were part of the process. Not only that, but following the Roundtable’s report, BC Forests Minister Pat Bell was quick to respond that in his view there could ultimately be a doubling of First Nation forest tenures to 20 per cent of the total forest holdings in the province.

Bell’s projections were the immediate subject of comment by Vaughn Palmer and other leading media commentators. Expect more of it in the months ahead as the Forests Minister or his successor in the post-election period wrestles with the next big – and frankly very messy – issue: Where, exactly, will the timber to address longstanding First Nations’ grievances come from? And if it comes from the very corporations that have lobbied successfully for language in the same Roundtable report calling for greater clarity around what they will be compensated in the event that their “rights” to Crown timber are affected, how much more will the public be out of pocket?

Stay tuned for interesting times ahead.