The essence of this lobby group’s proposal is that the government should develop an export policy for green energy targeting up to 17000 MW of exports by 2016, an amount greater than the size of BC Hydro’e entire existing hydroelectric system. Then it wants to target for more than double that amount of exports by 2036. And the legacy they offer if this is done:

• secure supply of renewable energy
• substantial reductions in climate change impacts
• the elimination of B.C. tax-supported debt within 15 years or less and eventually even the elimination of the provincial sales tax (or presumably the provincial component of the impending HST).

The promised legacies are, of course, nonsense. Committing all that energy potential to export won’t enhance B.C.’s security of supply.  It is the export of privately-developed, privately-owned power this group wants government to promote. BC Hydro couldn’t use that power itself when the power is committed to export; it would  just be the conduit making the development and exports happen.

Nor will the export sales substantially reduce climate change impacts. It will be the greenhouse gas targets adopted in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere that will determine how much GHG emissions will be reduced and potential climate change impacts avoided. Greater green energy exports from B.C. may affect how U.S. targets are met, but they certainly won’t determine what those targets are.

As for the elimination of B.C.’s tax-supported debt — that is so fanciful one hardly knows what to say. The facts are exactly the opposite. The export plan BC Citizens want the government to implement would be a financial disaster.

The key element of the plan is that BC Hydro or its trading subsidiary Powerex would buy all of the power IPPs can develop in the province (after streamlined environmental review), paying high enough prices so the projects could be financed, built and profitably operated. BC Hydro would then provide all the back-up, shaping, and transmission services needed to be able to sell the power to export customers and receive whatever price it could negotiate.

Notwithstanding the heroic (but grossly incomplete and fundamentally flawed) numbers put forward by BC Citizens, there is no reason to believe BC Hydro could do this at a profit, let alone the multi-billion dollar annual profit BC Citizens suggest.  The amount BC Hydro would have to pay the IPPs to develop all of these green energy resources, plus the transmission and other costs it would incur and alternative trading opportunities it would forego would in all likelihood greatly exceed the amount it could get from the export sales, even with whatever renewable and other green energy credits it could secure.

Maybe BC Citizens just got the sign wrong. Silly mistake — it would be a loss of billions, not a gain that BC could expect.

BC Citizens reasonably ask the question: if we export lumber, non-renewable minerals and metals, why shouldn’t we export green energy. That however is not the issue here. The issue is why should government force BC Hydro to buy power it doesn’t need (in extraordinarily excessive amounts), supply all of the services the IPP sellers don’t have, and take all of the market risk of exports.

If the numbers are so good, why don’t the IPPs buy the services they need and export the power themselvers. After all, that is what the forest and mining firms do, and pretty well everyone else who exports goods or services from B.C.

BC Citizens aren’t looking for an energy export policy that is in the broad public interest. They are looking for a government handout of breathtaking proportions, covered by the green umbrella that apparently can make even the most outlandish proposals seemingly more palatable.

IPPs already have a lot with the costly policies in the BC Energy Plan. What their lobby group is telling us in this report is that they want more — a lot more!

On March 4^th the government issued a press release with the Orwellian headline, “Province Protects Services for Low Income Clients.” A backgrounder attached to the release, however, makes clear that there is no protection from the government for people on assistance.  The backgrounder states the government will:

• Reduce regular dental visits from twice to one a year
• Cut dental X-rays from annual to once every two years
• Slash their budget for funeral services for people on assistance by nearly half
• Eliminate payments for contraceptive devices, pre-made foot orthotics, diagnostic testing devices (such as glucometers), optical, dental or extended therapies including chiropractic and physiotherapy.
• Cut supports that were supposed to help people transition from assistance to other programs
• Cut shelter allowances for people with disabilities and people aged 60 to 64.
• Assistance recipients used to be eligible for nutritional supplements if they had a serious symptom.  Now they will need two symptoms to get the supplements.

The government complains in its press release that the cost of social assistance has gone up by $19.8 million a month over the last year.  These cuts will save $10 million this year and $15 million next year. 

What the government doesn’t say is that the cost of social assistance has gone up because people can’t find work and for many their EI payments have run out.  Yet these are also the people who the government says must pay the price for the recession.  For a government that has cut taxes year after year there is no sense of sharing the burden. 

I don’t consider myself that out of the ordinary, but without pre-made orthotics, chiropractic support and physiotherapy, I wouldn’t be walking around.  I am lucky enough to have those services, but I guess the government doesn’t care that much if people on assistance can walk – just as long as they can continue to cut taxes.

Gordon Campbell told the CBC “There are a number of initiatives that are undertaken in the budget to make sure that we continue to put low-income people on the top of the list.”  Apparently it is a hit list.

As a young woman in Canada, I have not felt discriminated against. Throughout my university career, my gender didn’t seem to matter and professors encouraged me to pursue a PhD and the life of an academic as much as any of my male fellow students. Growing up in Bulgaria was a different story – my own mother stopped me from going to a physics-based high school program at home because she felt that physics in not for women (those were her words). As an electrical engineer herself, she obviously had experienced discrimination and wanted to prevent me from going down that same road.

In Canada, however, I didn’t get any of that. Maybe it’s because I live in Vancouver, but what I hear Canadians tell their girls is that they can grow up to become anything they aspire to — rocket scientists, surgeons or presidents. Many of the young women I meet feel similarly – they feel that they are free to make choices and say they are as much in control of their career paths as their male friends.

Yet, when we look at the numbers, women are not growing up to be rocket scientists, surgeons or presidents. Nurses, teachers and social workers is more like it. Women are woefully underrepresented in “non-traditional” occupations such as high-level management and natural sciences. Even in the public sector, where women make up the majority of the workforce, they’re less likely to hold senior management jobs than men.

Yes, there are some women in leadership positions in areas that were previously closed to our gender in politics, business and academia. But they are few and far between.

So, if young women feel that gender is irrelevant for economic success, then why are women’s average annual earnings for full-time, full-year work in 2007 only 71 .4% of men’s? Why are average hourly wages so different: in January 2010, women got paid on average $20.59 per hour, compared to men’s $24.49? Why do women continue to be overrepresented in low-wage jobs? Over 60% of minimum wage workers are women and the proportion of workers earning under $10 per hour is similar.

It would seem that something happens somewhere along the line between school, when the sky’s the limit, and the demands of real life which pushes women into traditional sectors. The older I get, the more convinced I become that this something is children. Or rather, that it’s the outdated family policy that we have in Canada (and the US) that forces women to choose between motherhood and career or economic success.

Recent studies from the US show that in corporate America, childless women’s earnings are on par with men’s, and the earning discrepancies appear when women start having children. Research by Statistics Canada shows that having children is associated with an earnings loss that persists throughout a woman’s working career. At any given age, women with one child earned about 9% on average than childless women, while those with two children earner 12% less, and those with three or more children earned 20% less. The earning gap was larger for women with higher education than for those who only had high school diplomas. Curiously, this parental penalty does not seem to apply to men – men with children earn more on average than childless men.

The more I dig into the research, the more it seems that women with children earn less because they end up taking years away from work. And the reason that they are often forced to do so is that women remain the primary caregivers for children and we lack the social supports to allow women to work and care at the same time. Changing this would require a concerted effort by governments and the private sector.

What governments have control over is Canada’s family policy, and it is sorely in need of change to catch up to social realities of the 21st century – many women with children work, whether by choice or by necessity, and we need to put in place adequate programs to support these women and their families.

Providing accessible childcare that families can afford is an obvious one. Improving parental leave provisions is another way to improve many women’s lives. Statistics Canada quotes a recent survey showing that 40% of new parents could not take the entire parental leave because their family’s financial situation required them to go back to work. Increasing benefit amounts to reflect costs of living would be a great start.

Employers will also have to adapt, and we’ve already started to see some of that. More and more employers allow flexible working hours, opportunities to work from home and an increased availability of part time work. These are all changes that make it possible for women to care for children without having to completely withdraw from the workforce for years at a time.

Some companies are even in the business of raising awareness that women have not achieved nearly equal representation on the top of organizations both in the private sector and in government. McKinsey & Company is probably the largest and best-known professional services firm that is calling attention to the shortage of women in leadership positions in America’s businesses. Their reports, Women Matter and Women Matter 2, demonstrate some important relationships between the presence of women in corporate leadership roles and the financial performance of organizations and explore why that may be the case. This is a good start, but more work needs to be done.

The need to support women to work and to care would only become more pressing as the population ages and we start to experience labour force shortages. We need the women to fully participate in the labour market, as workers and as decision-makers. Changing family policy and making workplaces more flexible is the way to do it.

So go ahead and continue telling the girls that the sky’s the limit, but let’s also make sure that it’s really true.

Happy international women’s day to all.

Instead, the budget better resembles the Olympic flame, whose massive size and burning cauldrons made a fitting monument to the oil and gas industry, a testament to our brazen capacity to burn fossil fuels. Subsidies to the oil and gas industry remained untouched in the budget, and in fact royalties from the sector are half of levels in previous years, in part due to royalty reductions from last August’s “oil and gas stimulus package” (like they really needed it). In addition, the budget’s transportation investment plan, 86% of provincial funds go to roads and bridges, including favoured projects like the Gateway highway expansion program and the “oil and gas rural road improvement program”.

There was some expectation that the government would announce a plan for the BC carbon tax, which hits $30 a tonne in July 2012, then hits a wall. If I was a business in BC, I would want to know the outlook post-2012 and what this meant for capital investments in the near term. But there was silence on that front, nor any expansion of the tax to cover major sectors not currently covered by the tax, including aluminum, cement, lime, and (you knew this was coming) much of the oil and gas industry.

From a climate justice perspective, more troubling is the failure to improve the low-income carbon tax credit, which more than offset the carbon tax for the bottom 40% of income earners in year one (starting July 1, 2008), and was roughly neutral in year two (July 1, 2009). The growth of the credit is not keeping up with the growth in the carbon tax, and will make the overall regime regressive as of July 1, 2010 – thus placing a greater burden on low-income folks who have done the least to contribute to the problem in the first place.

Since its inception, the carbon tax and revenue recycling regime was regressive at the top, meaning the top 20% of income earners get back more in tax cuts than they pay in carbon tax. The government’s unwavering commitment to use carbon tax revenues to fund personal and corporate tax cuts that are not needed and will have essentially no economic impact also deprives action on things that really would change behaviour, like improvements to service for public transit (the latter being a fascinating experiment and positive outcome of the Olympics). True, the government has put in funds for the Evergreen line, but hamstrung Translink’s ability to raise funds to actually get the project off the ground.

So overall, we need some regime change on the climate front if BC is to live up to its rhetoric and awards from environmental groups.

The budget does breath some new life into LiveSmart, a program for energy efficiency upgrades that ran out of money last year when it was oversubscribed. Too successful for its own good, the program withered. The budget provides new money of $35 million over three years, which is better than nothing but rather small. It is a lost opportunity given that unemployment rates are double what they were a year ago, and this work develops green jobs. There are some flaws in the program that still need to be fixed; for example, it encourages use of natural gas furnaces and hot water heaters that produce the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide when used.

In addition, the budget commits $100 million over three years to vaguely defined “climate action and clean energy”, which is linked to an upcoming Clean Energy Act to be tabled this sitting that has many concerned about the province running roughshod over local interests to ramp up private power production for export to the US (perhaps in conjunction with a new deal signed by Campbell and Schwartzenegger during the Olympics). The budget states that this money will be used to support investments (read: subsidize private sector) in biofuel production, new electricity generation and “infrastructure to support cleaner transportation choices”. While some of this may be a useful contribution, we will have to wait for more details when the new legislation is tabled.

This budget says “steady as she goes,” but it’s not clear where we’re going, and whether the budget does enough to respond to the challenges that may be ahead. The risks for the BC economy are serious: the US economy remains very weak, as does central Canada’s. The Winter Games are over, and in Olympics past this has meant a drop in economic activity. And even though many feel we are in recovery territory, rising GDP coming out of a recession is typically accompanied by rising unemployment for at least another year. There doesn’t seem to be a clear economic development plan to provide jobs for people who lost theirs during the global recession.

The budget’s priority is to show a reduced deficit for 2010/11, funded by a smattering of spending cuts that will not help the province’s overall economic situation. This drop in the deficit by $1.2 billion (from $2.65 billion in 2009/10 to $1.4 billion in 2010/11) is partially offset by increased capital spending. So, a check mark for accelerated capital projects that push the total envelope to $5.4 billion in 2010/11 for taxpayer-supported projects (up from $4 billion in 2009/10). There is a drop in other (self-sustaining capital projects), but an overall increase in total capital spending to $8.2 billion. Not all of this is well spent, such as $390 million this year for the BC Place roof upgrade.

The budget heralds a return to conservative budgeting practices, with numbers set out in a way that ensures the government will outperform the targets. Barring a major economic collapse, BC will rebalance the budget sooner than the stated 2013/14. For example, the budget estimates a deficit of $145 million in 2012/13, peanuts relative to more than $40 billion in revenues. But if resource royalties bounce back (as higher commodity prices seem to indicate) the shift back to surplus could happen even further ahead of schedule.

A number of ministries saw budget cuts, led by the Ministry of Forests and Range, with a one-year cut of 35% (a drop from just over $1 billion in 2009/10 to $641 million in 2010/11, and this is on top of previous cuts. This will hurt in smaller communities around the province. Other ministries received cuts that were small by comparison, typically in the tens of millions of dollars. Translated into public sector jobs, there is a continuation in the reduction in full-time equivalents (FTEs) from a peak of 36,277 workers to 32,000 by 2012/13.

The government introduced a few new spending measures, and health care gets a 4.7% increase above 2009/10, but we remain low compared to other provinces in terms of health care per capita. For regional health services this means an extra $396 million on the heels of a $360 budget shortfall last year. The new budget does not leave health authorities much room for enhancing seniors’ services or revitalizing support for mental health and addictions programs and other preventive initiatives that would improve the health of British Columbians and reduce long-term health care costs.

That health care is the big winner on the spending side confirms how popular the program is, but also sets up a narrative that health care increases are eating up everyone else’s share of spending. To show this, the budget makes a commitment to put all HST revenues to health care, yet another budget gimmick that those in the lock-up saw straight through: this is nothing new for BC, as the old PST was properly named the Social Services tax, brought in to fund health care decades ago.

BC families hit hard by the recession will see little from this year’s budget. The new property tax deferral measure applies to homeowners only, leaving out a large number of families with children who are priced out of the housing market.

In addition, the tax deferral measure will just add to the already high levels of household debt in this province, a two-edged sword. Fundamentally, BC families do not need yet another source of credit. They need jobs that pay living wages, they need affordable housing, high quality accessible early childhood education and care programs for their young children, and enhanced opportunities for their school-aged kids to participate in arts and culture as well as sports programs.

There is nothing in this budget to address child poverty, which is currently the highest in the country and has been so for six years running. Clearly, existing initiatives to support families with children are inadequate, and the budget does not address this gap. Similarly lacking is money to house the homeless or build new social housing. In fact, the Estimates show cuts in the Ministry of Housing and Social Development’s employment and housing initiatives.

The increased funding for community sports and the arts, $60 million over three years, is more than welcome, but it falls far short of filling the enormous gap left by the cuts to discretionary grants in last year’s budgets, much of which went to funding similar activities.

Funding increases in education and social services are small, barely keeping up with inflation and the increased downloaded costs. There are some additional funds for full-day kindergarten, and an additional $26 million over three years on child care subsidies for low and middle income families, but no new operating funding to enhance the accessibility of child care spaces.

The budget announces additional ministry cuts to the tune of $320 million over the next three years. This comes on top of previous cuts announced last year – a total of $3.3 billion over three years in “administrative and other savings.” BC’s public service is already the leanest in the country as this recent CCPA brief shows and it is wishful thinking to assume that these cuts can be made without compromising much-needed public services.

The fear-mongering around our provincial debt and deficits is making a return with groups like the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation arguing that debt is getting out of control (for example, here).

However, the facts simply do not support their assertions. Yes, we have a budget deficit, but this is exactly what one should expect on the heels of a global recession that hit BC harder than our last downturn in the 1990s. Leading economists around the world agree that governments must spend in order to boost the economy and help families weather the economic storm even when this means running temporary budget deficits.

So the revelant question isn’t whether or not to run a deficit, but how big the deficits should be.

And how is BC’s budget deficit doing? CIBC’s calculations show that BC has one of the smallest deficits in Canada, relative to the size of our provincial economy (GDP) (see Chart 6 in this recent report). That’s despite the fact that we were one of the provinces hardest hit by the recession.

Note that these calculations were done before Alberta’s 2010 budget was released on February 9 and thus may underestimated Alberta’s budget deficit.

The chart shows clearly that everywhere except for Ontario, provincial deficits as a share of GDP are less than half the size of the federal deficit (3.7%).

What about provincial debt? The recent temporary increases are far from unaffordable. In fact, of all Canadian provinces, we’re among the best-positioned to borrow now in order to continue stimulating our economy and meeting human needs.

Source: TD Economics. 2010. "Government Budget Balances and Net Debt" (Feb.23).

These facts won’t surprise regular readers of this blog, as I’ve written about them before. But as we prepare for what is rumoured to be another round of so called “restraint” (aka cuts), it’s more important then ever to go back to the facts.

At this stage, there is absolutely no need to panic about the size of BC’s deficits or the provincial debt. For more info on what we should worry about instead, check out CCPA’s Budget 2010 advance warning and my recent op-ed in the Vancouver Sun, A post-Olympics vision is needed for BC.

I would feel better about that benefit-cost assessment if government at any level had been willing to fess up to the costs. But that accounting is yet to be done. I would also find it more compelling if the economic arguments put forward to justify the Games were not so patently false. The Games, much like our own Liberal and U.S. Republican tax cuts, do not pay for themselves. There are positive impacts and enduring infrastructure from the Olympics, but there is no credible evidence that they have a value anywhere what they cost.

I know economics really is a dismal science, and not much of a science at that, but if there is one thing that it teaches us is that there are opportunity costs. A dollar (or several billion as the case may be) invested for one thing cannot be invested elsewhere.

Street parties are great. Crazy booming business even if limited in time and space can be pretty good too. But in the end what do we have. And what could we have had if we committed anywhere near the same resources to something else. That is the question we have yet to seriously address.

It’s too late for us. You can’t undo what has been spent and done. But you certainly can help those in other countries make more informed choices, especially those in poorer countries that can less easily mask their mistakes.

The CCPA just released a short report on the size of the public sector, which presents the latest data in easy-to-read graphical form that would allow you to do just that.

BC’s Shrinking Public Sector, authored by yours truly, examines public sector employment and spending trends over time and compares BC to other Canadian provinces. The facts point to a gradual erosion of our public sector over the past 20 years, which is surprisingly little known outside of public policy circles.

Have a look at the report here and let me know what you think.

Yet economic forecasting is a notoriously difficult business. Just a year ago, we saw BC’s economic growth forecasts revised downwards after nearly every Statistics Canada news release, as the real economy indicators – unemployment rate, retail spending, housing starts – posted disappointing results monthly. You’d think that the recent economic volatility would make us more cautious as we read about the latest forecast issued by a bank or economic consultancy. Apparently not.

The mainstream media is in the habit of reporting every new forecast enthusiastically, hailing the strong recovery that is in the cards for BC. There is no context provided, no questions asked. How does the latest forecast compares to the previous forecast issued by the particular outfit last month or last year? How does it compare to other economists’ forecasts? These things don’t seem to be pertinent to the story being told.

This morning, for example, the Vancouver Sun ran a decent size article on the Conference Board of Canada’s latest quarterly provincial economic forecast. Optimism streamed from every line, starting with the introductory sentence:

Olympic spinoffs and an improved outlook for forestry and manufacturing will make British Columbia the leader in economic growth among Canadian provinces in 2010, says the Conference Board of Canada.

B.C. will post growth of 3.7 per cent over the year…

Sure, 3.7% sounds like a high number and at the heels of negative growth for 2009 it’s nothing short of impressive. But in the end of January, those same economists were forecasting 4.1% growth (that’s the number they provided to the Ministry of Finance as members of the BC Economic Forecast Council).

Wait a second. This means that their current 3.7% forecast is actually a decline from what we thought was going to happen just over a month ago. Shouldn’t we be asking why the downward revision instead of celebrating?

Ignoring the hard questions won’t make the problem go away. As we approach the 2010 BC budget release, we need to take a realistic look at BC’s economic prospects and recognize that while our economy (GDP) is no longer contracting, we are still far from our pre-recession levels of employment or economic output. This will be a long, slow recovery and British Columbians will be better served by a government that recognizes this.

Over the last two years, we’ve seen the province and city make some important moves on the homelessness front. Frances Bula has a good summary of them on her blog (and the comments after her piece are very insightful too).

Most of the activity, however, as been aimed at reducing visible street homelessness (through opening new shelters), and defensive moves aimed at protecting the existing stock of low-income housing (through the provincial government’s purchases of SRO hotels). In contrast, we’ve seen very little and very slow action with respect to actually increasing the supply of new social housing.

Today saw the formal launch of Pivot’s Red Tent campaign, and the establishment of a tent city, both drawing attention to the need for more action on new social housing, and for a federal housing strategy.  We’ll see what the international media makes of all this.

Which still leaves the larger question of whether the Games will produce long-term economic benefits. Much of this hinges on whether the 2010 Olympics will produce a sustained increase in tourism.

Back in 2003, a government-commissioned economic impact report by InterVistas predicted a big boost to tourism leading up to the Games. But as a more recent economic impact study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers found, that did not transpire.

There will likely be a small economic boost during the Games themselves. Of course thousands of tourists, athletes and journalists have arrived, and their spending is an economic benefit. But mitigating this, thousands of local residents have chosen to flee the province, figuring now would be a good time to get out of town, and the departure of their local spending will be an economic loss. Hard to say what the net impact will be, but there will be clear winners and losers (some hotels and restaurants will be winners, while the local grocery store may see a loss).

But will there by a long-term increase in tourism? Hard to say. Depends somewhat on the weather (showing the world what this place looks like in February is always a crapshoot). If someone is a globe-trotting ski tourist, they were already well aware of Whistler long before the bid was won, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see real gains on that front.

The Games may produce a marginal increase in tourism for a few years. But in the longer term, I can’t stop wondering this – in a world wrestling with climate change and peak oil, are people really going to be traveling like this, or will rising oil prices make the cost of air travel prohibitive? I suspect the days of destination ski travel and global tourism as we’ve seen it in recent decades are numbered. Consequently, as a province and country, we need to start putting our economic development eggs in something other than the trade and tourism basket.

You might also want to check out CCPA Research Associate Jim Stanford’s post on The Progressive Economics Forum, which includes his Globe and Mail column on the topic.

Instead, the government seems to be trying to harness as much optimism as possible by frequently invoking the Olympic spirit and all it’s supposed to represent.

However, behind all the talk of “embrac[ing] new solutions for this new century” and “lead[ing] change for our children’s advantage,” there is very little in the government’s stated “new agenda” that is actually new or innovative. The ideas of streamlining environmental assessment, the Pacific Gateway strategy, the push for clean energy development, P3s, the talk of healthcare reform focused on “choice” and “innovation,” the full-day kindergarten for five-year-olds – these have all been introduced in earlier throne speeches.

Perhaps the only new announcement this year is the government’s stated intention to “modernize” the K-12 education system, although we are left wondering what exactly this may entail.

What is missing from the pre-Olympics throne speech is the kind of big, bold ideas that would truly “reach beyond what is imaginable today to what we want for tomorrow.”

Producing clean energy is great, but we need a lot more than that to meet the provincial target of 33% reduction in GHG emissions by 2020, let alone seriously tackle climate change.

Similarly, job creation is an admirable goal, especially at the tail-end of a deep recession, but in a province that has the highest poverty levels in Canada and the greatest inequality between rich and poor, the government needs to go further to ensure that prosperity is shared by all.

If we act with clear vision and concerted effort now, in 2030, people will look back to this decade as we look to the 1960s today.

I certainly approve of our government taking a long-term view and striving to leave a positive legacy. But what exactly do the 1960s represent?

Yes, they were a time of large-scale physical infrastructure development (for hydro energy generation, in particular), but they were also the time when the social infrastructure of this country was being built – when universal public health care and the Canada Pension Plan were introduced. Let’s make sure that the 2010s are similarly remembered as a time when we continued investing in quality public services that moved us closer to a socially, economically and environmentally just BC.

Those contradictions were highlighted by the approval the other day of a new EnCana natural gas facility in BC’s Northeast that will add over 2 million tonnes of CO2 per year to BC’s inventory when fully built out. From the Tyee’s coverage:

The province’s effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions is on course to suffer a 2.17 megatonne-per-year setback, after an environmental assessment (EA) certificate was approved for the $800-million Cabin Gas Plant last Thursday (Jan. 28). The green light to the EnCana-led project signals the onset of a shale gas boom in the million-acre Horn River Basin north of Fort Nelson.

… The carbon dioxide implications get larger when considering the end uses of the gas. The initial volumes of gas produced daily at the plant would add up to 7.9 million tonnes of emissions each year when combusted. At full production, that downstream emissions rise to nearly 16 million tonnes — nearly 25 per cent of B.C. emissions, based on a 2007 baseline. Much of the gas will be exported to the United States.

Campbell’s retort is that natural gas is “actually a bridging technology that allows us to move to the new cleaner energies.” There is something to this argument, and it might even be true if we were able to guarantee that coal-fired power would be shut down in place of natural gas generated power. But no such guarantees are evident in this deal. All emissions will be additional to current emissions.

And not only that, the much-lauded carbon tax does not even apply to most of the emissions from oil and gas development, as it does not cover the flaring and venting of gas, or pipeline leaks.

This further goes to show that there is no political will in Canada to say no to the oil and gas industry. At some point we will have to confront the, er, inconvenient truth that the only bona fide sustainable path forward is to not get our energy out of the ground, or if we do to mandate that the emissions must be buried (sequestered) after combustion. That is, we need a moratorium on new oil and gas projects unless they implement carbon capture and storage (CCS).

So the question for my friends in the environmental movement: is now a good time to revoke that award to Premier Campbell, and replace it with one of the more notorious Copenhagen awards, the Fossil of the Day?

Walking away from the area, I couldn’t help but wonder: will this stuff stick around after all the tourists are gone? And then it struck me. This isn’t really about revitalizing public spaces in Vancouver. Instead, it’s about showing off to the hundreds of thousands of tourists who are expected to flood Vancouver during the Olympics. It’s about creating an image of the Vancouver that we’d like the world to think we live in, the Vancouver we hope they’d love to come back to, spend their money in or even invest in. (After all, the Olympics wasn’t supposed to be all about sports – advertising our city in order to boost tourism was always considered an important aspect.)

Apparently, I’m not the only one struggling with these issues. Miro Cernetig wrote a thoughtful piece for the Vancouver Sun recently sharing similar concerns about the future of BC Arts after the Olympics.

It [the Cultural Olympiad] is all planting the seeds for a cultural legacy. But will it all evaporate after the Games leave town?

Possibly so.

As most people know, when the world economy hit the rocks last year, the provincial government took the scalpel to arts funding, cutting some grants by 90 per cent. The bean counters in Victoria deemed the deep cuts a fast way to lighten the deficit.

At the moment, the bureaucrats in finance seem to be continuing with that strategy.

Mr Cernetig is right – things aren’t looking bright for Arts funding in BC. As I have reported on this blog, the BC government cut Arts funding considerably in 2009, first in the February Budget then in the September Budget Update.

With a deficit looming close to $3b for this fiscal year and $2b for the next, the Minister of Finance is likely looking for places to trim spending, but Arts should not be on the chopping block. Instead, he should heed the recommendations of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services who unanimously recommended that funding for the Arts be restored to 2008/09 levels in their report to Parliament (see recommendation 26 here). As Mr Cernetig explains:

The facts are clear. Arts groups are not the drain on the treasury as some might suggest. They generate economic activity. In fact, it might not only be wise to restore funding, it’s probably smart to increase arts spending, as many provinces are doing in these tough times.

There’s still time to tell our Premier, the Minister of Finance and your MLA that British Columbians care about the Arts and want to see them properly funded on a regular basis, and not only when mega events are happening in town. Check out creativitycounts.ca for some nifty arts advocacy tools put together by the Alliance for Arts and Culture.

The fashionable electoral reform idea this year is to give corporations a real say. It’s time for individual citizens to share their electoral democracy with corporations to give meaning to those old legal rulings that said corporations are people too.

Of course, many were shocked at the Jan. 21st decision by the U.S. Supreme Court which said corporate entities have full First Amendment free speech rights, thereby trashing decades of U.S. legislation to limit election advertising spending by corporation and unions. There are now no limits on the amounts corporations can spend on political advertising in the U.S.

But did you know Gordon Campbell and the B.C. government are looking at the option of one-upping the Supremes  by giving corporations the right to vote?

It’s true.

Last October, the Premier announced the creation of a joint task force with the Union of B.C. Municipalities to review the rules for local government elections. The terms of reference for the task force direct them to examine giving corporations the right to vote in B.C. municipal elections. The committee is to report out in May and changes to legislation are expected not long after.

It seems corporations in B.C. feel they have inadequate influence on government decision-making, particularly about taxes. All that tax cutting and tax shifting of the last twenty years is apparently not enough.

Industrial ratepayers  in forest communities and commercial ratepayers in Vancouver have recently been pushing hard for homeowners to pay a greater percentage of municipal taxes. Starting in July, forest companies operating in six B.C. communities simply refused to pay their full tax bills and arbitrarily sent in cheques for only a quarter of what they had been legally assessed. The B.C. Supreme Court has ordered Catalyst Paper to pay in full, but the company is appealing and communities with Catalyst mills are feeling the crunch. Port Alberni is now planning to increase taxes for homeowners by 23.6%, while also reducing and contracting out services.

Corporations once had the right to vote in B.C. local elections, but that was eliminated by the Barrett government in 1973, restored by the Bennett government in 1976 and eliminated altogether again by the Harcourt government in 1993.

Today, there is no corporate voting in any other province and indeed – according to the task force discussion paper – the only place in the world which has it now is “The City”, that small portion of greater London which is home to much of the British financial sector.

The discussion paper also raises the amazing prospect that if B.C. does give corporations the right to vote, non-discrimination clauses in trade agreements like NAFTA and TILMA may make it impossible to restrict that right to B.C. corporations only. There’s every chance the trade agreements will force us to open up voting to foreign corporations doing business in B.C., as well.

Old fashioned ideas like “one human being, one vote” may soon be behind us. If this goes ahead, we can look forward to corporations finally having effective input and full equality with human beings.

It’s time for a refresher on all this. I think I’ll take another look at Joel Bakan’s outstanding video “The Corporation“.