But my own view is that this debate is largely distracting. The challenge is to focus on what matters –– reducing inequality, enhancing well-being / quality of life, ending poverty, low unemployment and good jobs, hard caps on GHG emissions that lower steadily over time, and limitations on the extraction of natural resources to ensure sustainability and protect biodiversity. Perhaps the result will be slow or even zero GDP growth. Then again, perhaps the investments needed to accomplish the above tasks will be so large that GDP will continue to rise for another few decades. Ultimately, this is not the central problem. The key is that governments should no longer be judged on the basis of the GDP record under their watch, but rather, on the basis of how well they accomplish the higher-order tasks just mentioned.

Clearly, there is an ecological imperative with which progressive economists must fulsomely grapple. Ecological limits necessitate that we see a drop in material throughput, waste and emissions. But this may or may not result in a drop in GDP/ income growth.

If we are to rise to the challenge of climate change, we would expect to see a decline in consumption (less consumer spending on useless things, and a great deal of redistribution, with higher income households spending less and poor households spending more); and a decline in trade (as we replace GHG-generating trade with more local production). However, in all likelihood, the task will require a substantially larger role for government (as governments spend more on meeting our core needs together, and on GHG reduction measures such as building retrofits, public transit improvements, inter-city high speed rail, etc.); and likely an increase in investment (as the private sector spends on new technology and capital equipment that allows it to capture and lower emissions). The net result of these shifts may well be that GDP still remains positive (at least for a few decades), given the scope of the task at hand.

The point is that while GDP may still grow, we would see a dramatic shift within the component parts of the GDP equation. An analogous example would be the experience of many countries re-tooling their economies during WWII: societies saw large reductions, indeed rationing, of consumer goods, and a redirection of resources by government and the private sector. People certainly changed their priorities, virtually overnight. But overall GDP increased. The challenge of climate change will ultimately require a societal effort and re-direction of resources on a similar scale.

To state the obvious: fundamental to achieving this sustainable re-balancing of GDP is a great deal more re-distribution of income, higher taxation, and much more regulation/planning of the economy. What we cannot sustain is growing inequality, with some households spending dramatically more than they need, while others are barely making ends meet.

Those of us concerned about climate change, and anxious to mobilize public support for bold action, walk a difficult line. We have to be respectful of the psychology of this time, in which the public understandably wrestles with feelings of despair and searches for hope, even as many refuse to accept what the science is telling us. Facing the realities of climate change is scary for many, and fear-based messages alone can be paralyzing. The answer is not to gloss over the seriousness of the situation, however. Rather, the answer is to engage in what our communications director Shannon Daub calls “responsible truth-telling”. (For an excellent discussion of the balance between fear and hope in climate communication, see David Roberts’ excellent essay here.)

Understanding people’s need for hope is why our Climate Justice Project has sought to communicate that policy and technological solutions are plentiful and at hand. We have also endeavored to communicate that the task before us can be accomplished in stages.

In engagements with young people in particular, I like to introduce the notion that, “We are the U-turn Generation.” The concept is this: all of us who have the courage to look the science of global warming full-on wrestle with despair. A clear understanding of what the scientific studies are telling us is that wealthy industrialized societies must be carbon-zero by 2050. Even then, we will still face the challenge of pulling accumulated GHGs out of the atmosphere, in order to get global CO₂ parts per million (PPM) down to 350, if devastating ecological and social upheaval and harm is to be avoided. We are forced to live with the uncertainty of whether this Herculean global task can be accomplished. But for now, the task of this generation is the U-turn ­­– to change the direction of the path we are on – to see global emissions slow, and over the next 30-40 years, drop to zero.

An alternative analogy sometimes invoked when explaining global warming is that of a bathtub; GHG emissions are the water coming out of the faucet, while the accumulated water in the tub represents PPM of CO₂ that has built up in the atmosphere. While most of our policy attention tends to focus on turning down the tap, it is the PPM accumulated in our atmospheric tub that is truly at the root of the problem with respect to climate change.  Our task for now, however, is to turn off the tap; while it will fall to the next generation to figure out how to drain the bathtub. We can do no more, but we are obliged to do no less. Will it be enough? We do not know. It is the fate of this generation to live with this ambiguity. All we can do is rally to the task at hand, knowing that time is of the essence.

This week’s sorry report is another reminder that, for now at least, necessary bold action is not occurring. Even those leaders who understand the severity of the climate crisis currently deem needed action as politically unsellable. But perhaps only for a time. If this past year — marked by the Arab Spring and the fall arrival of the Occupy movement — has taught us anything, it is that we never know when historic moments come. And when they do, that which seemed politically impossible is suddenly in play. As the science of climate change becomes more evident and destructive weather events more apparent, the public demand for change will shift, and we may well see dramatic policy change at a pace that we cannot quite imagine today.

The urgent task is to prepare for these tipping points. To lay the policy groundwork. To seed the public discourse with bold ideas, in anticipation of these moments – and they are coming – when the seemingly impossible is suddenly inescapable.  There will be a transformation – a response to the climate crisis – and whether it occurs in a manner that is just and fair or unjust and repressive remains an open question. Past industrial revolutions have cast aside whole populations on the scrapheap of history. Another is coming. Our challenge is to ensure this one unfolds differently.

(This post is derived from a speech I gave at the annual meeting of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, which is viewable here.)

The government announced it was going to build two hospitals on Vancouver Island in Campbell River and in the Comox Valley.  Premier Clark then told the Campbell River Courier-Islander that:

It is going to be a P3,” she said. “We just haven’t announced it yet. So now we’ve announced it. We are planning it as a P3. We’ll see what happens, but that is our plan.

This will make about eight hospitals that BC has built as public private partnerships under the Liberal government.

But the same day as the Premier’s announcement the Public Accounts Committee in the UK came out with one more extremely critical report about the use of P3s.  In the UK P3s, the use of private funding for public projects like hospitals is called Private Finance Initiative or PFI.

The Chair of the Committee, The Rt. Hon Margaret Hodge MP, said:

Time and again my Committee has reported on problems with PFI, including the costly contracting process and the prospect of little risk being transferred but high returns being enjoyed by  investors. 30 year contracts are inflexible and don’t allow managers to alter priorities or change services that have become outdated. We have even seen evidence of excess profits being priced into projects from the start.

Hodge continued:

The Treasury review must find a private finance funding model that allows flexible delivery of public services and ends the era of investors receiving eye-wateringly high rewards while taking ever decreasing risks.

Private companies benefitting from taxpayer funded contracts must be transparent over the use of public money so that the public can be assured that value is being secured from the investment.

BC’s public private partnership program was based on the UK’s PFI program and has the same problems.  The difference is that here, things like details on profits and costs are withheld from the public.  In one example where cost information has been made public – Vancouver General Hospital’s Diamond Centre – the P3 cost vastly more than it would have to do the project publicly.

Citizens for Quality Health Care, a North Island group that obtained 19,000 names on a petition to get the two hospitals built, has expressed concerns about the use of a P3 for the project.  They want the hospital publicly funded and services publicly delivered.  A CQHC release stated:

CQHC remains committed to the position that there are many compelling reasons to ensure that these new hospitals are not P3s.

This stand is based first on the principle that health care in Canada must continue to be publicly funded and publicly delivered, and secondly on the wealth of experience of P3s in the UK, Canada and elsewhere that prove that P3s result in excessive cost, deterioration of care, and loss of control of decision-making.

Eye popping profits.  Little evidence risk is transferred.  Loss of public control.  Lack of flexibility.  Deterioration of care. So why are P3s a problem in the UK and not here?  The difference is just a matter of timing.  Eventually, BC’s government will be forced to release the information it has been hiding on costs and other issues. The fuse has been lit.  Who will be in government in BC when these P3s blow up?

The Alberta plan may prove to be the most ambitious to date. On April 11^th, the Alberta Progressive Conservatives issued a news release that read:

“A Progressive Conservative government is committed to strengthening supports for Albertans in their time of need. Our Plan for Poverty Reduction will focus on a 5-year plan to eliminate child poverty and a 10- year plan to reduce poverty. ‘This community-led initiative will result in equality of access to the economy, better health for the impoverished in our community, stronger families, safer communities and increased civic participation,’ says Premier Alison Redford. ‘The reason I created the Human Services Ministry was to bring all elements of social policy together under one ministry, which makes it possible to create a comprehensive model that will support our most vulnerable citizens.’”

One can’t help but compare and contrast this development with the situation in BC. Both Alison Redford and Christy Clark face a significant challenge from the political right (in the form of the Wildrose Party and BC Conservatives respectively). Christy Clark has been very consciously playing to her right flank, trying to win back conservative voters. She has not been publicly criticizing Conservative party policy, but rather, her mantra has been that “free market” supporters should not split the vote. One consequence of this strategy is that she stubbornly refuses to develop a provincial-level poverty reduction plan, despite a widespread desire for such action.

In contrast, Alison Redford sought to differentiate her party from Wildrose, and to carve out space in the political middle. The electoral promise to bring in a poverty reduction plan was one clear example of this strategy. In the end, it served her very well.

Notably, BC has recently announced that nine municipalities will pilot the development of community-level poverty reduction plans. As Trish Garner (coordinator of the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition) and health policy researcher Stephen Elliott-Buckley explain in an opinion piece here, this new approach contains a few positive elements, but it is a far cry from an actual plan. With no new policies or money, its impact will be marginal at best.

And so, for now, BC, despite having the highest poverty rates in the country, remains a holdout in developing a comprehensive response.

Climate change will shape BC in 2035, one way or another

We live on a different planet from the one our parents grew up on, says environmentalist Bill McKibben. Climate change from our rampant combustion of fossil fuels has pushed the world into a new era of bizarre weather anomalies.

In BC, warming has been greater that the global average, with costly consequences, including the pine beetle epidemic, downtime for ferries and highways, raging forest fires and flooding.

The big question is whether carbon emissions can be stabilized at some level by human collective action, or whether we will soon pass critical thresholds that will trigger a runaway climate change scenario.

Canada has recently thumbed its nose at global negotiations, in favour of digging ever deeper into the hole of extreme energy that is causing the problem. Even though climate costs are mounting – in Canada and especially in poorer and more vulnerable countries – the immense profits from our exports of coal, gas and oil dominate Canadian politics.

British Columbians in 2035 will be facing a variety of climate-related challenges to a decent quality of life. Food supplies from California will dry up; storms will be more devastating; animal and plant species will be threatened. Even if we are lucky, climate impacts in other parts of the world could lead millions to our shores.

High and growing inequality undermines trust in our fellow citizens, and threatens to erode the social foundation of this future. As federal and provincial governments tear page after page from the social contract, we are moving to a society where you are on your own.

Our current period of official denial cannot last much longer. It may, tragically, take another Katrina-scale disaster, or two or three, but sooner or later, the realities of climate change will catch up to Canadian and US politics.

BC should not get caught flat-footed, but instead the province needs to be proactive to address our share of carbon emission reductions. The good news is that in doing so we can seize new economic opportunities offered by the transition to green jobs and sustainable production. BC’s baby steps on climate action are a plus, and we have the smarts, the technology and institutions to re-write this story.

BC is ideally poised to show the rest of the world what a 21st century sustainable economy can look like. A wealthy part of the world, blessed with abundant resources, BC has a moral obligation to take a leadership role. But it’s also good economics — despite brash claims about job creation, mining and oil and gas only employ about 1% of BC’s workers. There are far more jobs to be had in green alternatives.

Putting climate action at the heart of BC’s industrial and employment strategy requires that BC rapidly shift off fossil fuels. By 2035 we could be very close to zero carbon. But that means having the political will to say no to the proposed Enbridge pipeline, to shale gas fracking and liquid natural gas terminals. And unlike the current “BC Jobs Plan”, it means aspiring to be more than a peddler of fossil fuels in global markets.

The great transition also requires we break out of a mindset based on individual green consumption towards collective action and structural changes.

First, public control over (largely renewable) electricity infrastructure is a vital advantage for BC in a shift to a zero-carbon future. Conservation and major efficiency gains are low hanging fruit, supplemented by district energy systems and small-scale renewables (like solar hot water systems). Retrofitting BC’s housing stock and commercial buildings will also support thousands of jobs.

Second, we must redesign urban spaces into “complete communities” where people do not have to travel very far to get to work or to meet day-to-day needs, making it possible to walk, bike and use high-quality public transit. These communities include a mix of housing types (including affordable housing options), decent jobs, public services and spaces, and commercial districts.

This way of designing communities levels the playing field for seniors, youth, people with disabilities, and low-income families so they can live and move easily, even if they are not able to drive or cannot afford a car. It also means families are not forced to choose between long commutes by car and even longer commutes by transit.

Building retrofits, public transit and so forth will not be cheap. But there is a logical and obvious revenue source to make it happen: a carbon tax. At $200 per tonne by 2020, this would close the gap between BC and European gas prices, and raise billions per year. A portion of the revenues should be transferred back to low- to middle-income households to ensure none are left behind.

Importantly, we face a political problem not a technological one. We will still have to deal with the fallout of climate change, but done well, a bright green future would go hand in hand with better health, stronger communities, and improved quality of life.

The document leaked late Tuesday afternoon, is the second confidential report in as many days to find its way out of government through back channels – a sign, perhaps, of the growing unease that some public servants in the ministry of forests, lands and natural resource operations have with some aspects of the “jobs” agenda of Pat Bell, minister of jobs, tourism and innovation.

Bell, MLA for Prince George-Mackenzie, and John Rustad, MLA in the nearby riding of Nechako Lakes, have been actively promoting a plan to ease or eliminate environmental constraints on logging activities so as to artificially extend logging rates in the interior of the province where several rural communities are heavily dependent on logging and milling jobs.

The driving force behind the move is that after 25 years of elevated logging rates in the central interior of the province in response to two outbreaks of mountain pine beetles that killed upwards of one billion mature lodgepole pine trees, the logging and milling industries are running out of trees to cut.

The growing scarcity of trees came sharply into focus in January when an explosion and ensuing fire at the Babine Forest Products sawmill in Burns Lake – the town’s largest employer –destroyed the mill, killing two workers and displacing 250 more.

In the immediate aftermath of the mill burning down, word rapidly spread that the mill would likely not reopen given the generally depleted nature of forests throughout the region. But Bell and Rustad claim to have found enough trees to provide Hampton Affiliates Ltd. – the owner of the aforementioned mill – with enough wood fibre to reinvest in a new facility.

The trouble is that to get at the wood, the government would essentially have to override previous forest planning processes that set limits on what could be logged in order to protect remnant patches of old-growth forest, important wildlife corridors that make it possible for important species like woodland caribou and moose to survive, other forests with high biological diversity values, and forests with high visual values, for example forests within sight of communities or in important scenic corridors.

Such a plan, the leaked Cabinet document makes clear, would likely place Cabinet in a difficult position with the office of the Chief Forester, one of the most important posts in the ministry of forests, lands and natural operations.

“This action to enable a higher short-term supply would be a deviation from Chief Forester policy and practice in timber supply management,” the Cabinet submission dated April 7 reads. “There is some risk that the independent Chief Forester of the day may not agree with this action, or of a legal challenge if he/she does.”

The same document then goes on to recommend that Cabinet consider introducing “extraordinary legislation” to artificially prop-up logging rates in the Lakes Timber Supply Area or TSA, thus providing the necessary “certainty” for Hampton to invest in a new Burns Lake mill.

“Under this option,” the leaked memo reads, “government would enact legislation to enable a set of specific actions to add certainty to the supply of timber for a new Babine Forest Products mill over a 15 year period.”

Such actions, the memo continues, would “suspend current Forest Act provisions for the Chief Forester to set the annual allowable cut and the Minister to make licence apportionment decisions in the Lakes TSA.” The legislation would then “vest these functions with the Lieutenant Governor in Council.” In other words the decision would simply be a political decision, driven by the provincial cabinet.

Bruce Fraser, former chair of British Columbia’s independent Forest Practices Board, expressed deep concern over the contents of the memo.

“The independent status of the Chief Forester is designed to ensure effective management of the forests,” Fraser said. He said that were such legislation to be introduced it would mean that professional and technical expertise within the ministry was superseded by short-term political considerations. “Once that door is open, you can allocate pretty much anything” to be logged. It becomes “the burn the furniture stage.”

A big unanswered question that arises from the leaked Cabinet document, is what the provincial government may yet be contemplating when it comes to the Chief Forester’s powers in three other large timber supply areas where the pine beetle has also been active. Those TSAs include that in Bell’s riding – the Prince George TSA – as well as the Quesnel and Williams Lake TSAs. Those three TSAs, along with the Lakes TSA, were all each subject to “mid-term timber supply” studies conducted by the Chief Forester and other ministry staff last year. The studies resulted from a directive issued by Pat Bell, who was then Forests Minister.

The results of that work were temporarily posted on a government website Tuesday morning and early afternoon before the government summarily removed them following questions about the document raised in the legislature by Independent MLA, Bob Simpson.

That document flagged that there was a serious problem brewing in all four TSAs due to years of elevated logging activities in response to the pine beetle outbreaks.

“Under current lumber market conditions,” the document read, “it is uneconomical to harvest dead pine located at long haul distances from the mills. Licencees [logging companies] have indicated that the economic supply of dead pine varies from 1.5 years in Quesnel to about 5 years in the Prince George TSA.”

The document went on to suggest that the depth of job losses and mill closures could be offset, somewhat, by relaxing virtually all constraints on logging forests that had been reserved from logging for environmental reasons.

But job losses would, nonetheless, occur and they would be formidable.

In the Lakes TSA, for example, relaxing the logging rules would mean that instead of local milling and logging jobs falling from 1,572 jobs in the days before the pine beetle outbreak to 434 jobs in the near future, the jobs would decline to 521 jobs instead – a difference of 87.

In the Prince George TSA, relaxing the logging rules would “maintain” an additional 1,915 jobs. But overall, the decline in milling and logging jobs would still fall dramatically from 13,371 jobs in the pre-beetle-attack years to 8,763 jobs in the near future.

In the Quesnel area, relaxed logging rules were estimated to “maintain” 377 more forest industry jobs. But again, the overall trend was down from 3,321 jobs in the pre-epidemic period to 2,092 jobs in the near future.

And in the Williams Lake area, relaxing the logging rules allegedly maintained 1,144 jobs than would otherwise be the case. But once again, the trend was down from 4,626 pre-epidemic jobs to an estimated 2,955 jobs.

In response to questions in the legislature by Opposition Leader Adrian Dix about the leaked Cabinet memo yesterday, Premier Christy Clark said that the document had not gone before Cabinet “in the form” that Dix and others had before them.

“But it does discuss many of the things that are under discussion in the community — things that need to be discussed, issues that we’ve talked about with the Steelworkers, with the First Nation, with community leaders and with people from across the province,” the Premier said. “These are discussions that we have to have, and it’s a much bigger issue than just in Burns Lake.”

Clark also said that the government would be “consulting the public about these issues.” Presumably, it is hoped, that will happen before a decision to “suspend” the Chief Forester’s authority is made.

The problem, however, is not so much the amount of time these processes take. The problem is that in the end they typically do not address the most fundamental question that major project developments entail — are these major projects in the general public interest? As tedious and detailed the impact assessments are, they do not meaningfully investigate whether, to what extent, and for whom the projects offer economic or other benefits. And they certainly don’t consider whether those benefits offset the risks of adverse impacts and other social and environmental costs the projects will inevitably give rise to.

The process itself has become a substitute for the sensible airing of a project’s benefits and costs. Proponents and their supporters in government just want to get through what they see as a bureaucratic hurdle, convinced that the economic benefits far outweigh whatever risks and costs the projects entail. The fact that there may be no net benefits, because of shortages of skilled workers (limiting the benefit of the job creation), major power requirements (imposing costs on existing ratepayers), exchange rate effects (hurting other industries), new public infrastructure and service requirements (paid for by taxpayers) does not matter. The assumption of benefits is a matter of faith, not the result of publicly-vetted, methodologically sound analysis.

Opponents may want to debate the issue of benefits versus costs, but typically are restricted in what they can raise or what the review panel will consider. For them the only option is to use the process to delay and ultimately stop projects they do not want to proceed,  where they are convinced that the adverse impacts and risks far outweigh whatever benefits the projects may entail.

As for the the bureaucrats managing the process — they just want to play by the legislated rules, satisfying all legal requirements with whatever tedium and redundancy is required to avoid court action. The goal is not so much to shed light as to avoid the darkness of even longer delays and ministerial wrath.

All in all it is a remarkable and frustrating waste of resources for a scandalously limited scope of inquiry. Details abound; meaningful analysis and insight are in short supply.

Change is needed, but not the change the feds brought in. The feds clearly just wanted to tilt the process game in their favour. Fewer formal reviews and shorter time frames mean quicker approvals.

Shorter time frames are good if and when they can be achieved. However,what is really required for the assessment of major projects is a broader scope of inquiry — one that explicitly addresses the question of the public interest. We need better, not shorter assessment processes.

In the name of “salvaging” economic value from forests attacked by mountain pine beetles, beginning with a smaller outbreak centered in the Williams Lake area in the 1980s and followed by the much larger beetle epidemic that erupted a decade ago, millions more trees have been logged than would otherwise have been the case.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the issue has known for years that this spelled trouble. A catastrophic “falldown” in future logging rates loomed because the industry was literally cutting out the ground from beneath its own feet. But the illusion of abundance was sustained as the beetle attacks spread and more timber became available on a one-time basis only to salvage log.

Well the day of reckoning is now very close at hand and the government’s response leaves a heck of a lot to be desired.

As revealed by Mark Hume in the Globe and Mail a couple of weeks ago, the government is so loathe to acknowledge the obvious – that what has gone on cannot be sustained – that it is seriously considering throwing out the last vestiges of responsible forest management in an attempt to buy a few more years of higher employment in an industry that must, inevitably, make the transition to a future in fewer trees, not more, are harvested.

So-called “reserves” of forest that would otherwise not have been logged – biologically rich remnant patches of old-growth trees, important forests for wildlife species, forests in visually stunning valleys or slopes near towns, economically more marginal tracts of trees, forests higher up on mountain slopes – are now all about to be placed on the chopping block. All in the name of buying a few more years of logging, which will in turn place an even higher burden on future generations.

The biggest proponent of this so-called plan turns out not to be the current Forests Minister, Steve Thomson, but his cabinet colleague Pat Bell, Minister of Jobs, Tourism and Innovation, and MLA for Prince George-Mackenzie.

Bell and John Rustad, who is the MLA for the nearby riding of Nechako Lakes, have both publicly declared that they have found a way to free up more trees for logging – trees that they say will go a long way to providing a basis for a new sawmill to be built in the community of Burns Lake. If built, a new mill would replace one that burned to the ground in January following an explosion that killed two mill workers and put 250 local residents out of work.

Earlier this month in an interview with Prince George Citizen reporter Mark Nielsen, Bell said he believes that opening forest reserves to logging would yield four million cubic metres of wood per year, which would be enough wood to keep “four fairly large sawmills, each employing about 500 people between people that work in the bush and the people in the mill.”

This may sound impressive. But the devil’s in the details. And it’s the details that Bell and Rustad are not talking much about.

The details are contained in a tightly guarded Ministry of Forests document that took a hard look at the so-called “mid-term timber supply” in four of the most heavily impacted forested areas in the province where pine beetles had attacked and where the provincial government had responded by approving big increases in logging rates.

A few days ago, Bob Simpson the Independent MLA for Cariboo North, publicly called for the release of the report. And yesterday a confidential draft of it was briefly posted on the web, before it was summarily removed a few hours later.

Simpson, like other MLAs in the interior, is keenly interested in what’s in the report that was prepared by officials in the provincial chief forester’s office. The forests around Simpson’s hometown, Quesnel, are more heavily weighed to lodgepole pine trees – which the pine beetles have fed on and killed – than are other tracts of interior forest.

When he saw a copy of the briefly posted document he was flabbergasted, as it seemed to undermine so much of what Bell and Rustad have contended.

In the first page of text, the report notes that “under current lumber market conditions” it is “uneconomical” for most logging companies to make money because of the increasingly longer distances that the companies must travel from their sawmills to find trees to log. The growing scarcity of economically viable wood to run through mills is becoming so acute the same report notes, that within 1.5 years in the case of Quesnel and five years in the case of Prince George local mills will be out of wood.

“All of this begs the question,” Simpson says. “Why are we beginning this discussion now when we’re looking at just one-and-a-half years of cut? In 2002, the growth curve for the mountain pine beetle went from normal background levels to straight up. At that point, everyone knew that we were going to lose the pine forest. And for 10 years, this government has done nothing. Now, they’ve put lipstick on a pig. They’re putting the forest at risk in order to avoid job losses. That’s what it looks like.”

In questions in the legislature yesterday, Simpson tried to draw Thomson out on what was in the report prepared by his staff. But on each occasion, it was Bell who answered questions. In response to one on what “options” the government was weighing in terms of relaxing the rules on what could and could not be logged, Bell said:

“There is a lot of work going on. It is in the broader mountain pine beetle region. We are likely a month or two away from having a broader public discussion. I think that dialogue is important, and it is a dialogue that we’ll be encouraging as we move into the summer months.”

If that dialogue does happen, however, it will be interesting to see the public’s reactions to the projections in the report. Because as the draft that briefly circulated on the web yesterday makes clear, even by escalating logging activities in forests that ought to be left alone given their great biological value, Bell and Rustad are not likely to succeed in staving off job losses. There is simply too much sawmilling capacity and too little remaining wood to delay what will likely translate into a number of mill closures in the very near future.

The report, which looked at available logs in the Lakes, Prince George, Quesnel and Williams Lake timber supply areas, offers a sobering look at what lies ahead.

The Lakes TSA, is particularly interesting in that regard as it would be the major source of logs for any new sawmill in Burns Lake. The report notes that “it is possible” to increase log supplies in the region by basically throwing all constraints out the window. But it buys few jobs while jeopardizing local moose and caribou populations and essentially finishing off the remaining old-growth forest.

“This increase is projected to maintain 87 more direct, indirect and induced person years of employment in Lakes TSA communities” the report claims. But this does not translate into increased jobs over time. In fact all it does is lessen the severity of future job losses and not by very much. As the same report notes relaxing the constrains simply means “potentially limiting the [jobs] decline from 1,572 pre-epidemic total jobs to 521 total jobs instead of 434.”

For 10 years of delayed economic pain, the same report notes, the region then must resign itself to 50 years – half a century – of logging rates at one quarter of the artificially propped up rates that Bell and Rustad publicly support.

Whoever in government decided to pull yesterday’s briefly posted on-line report, had good reason to believe that the public might find a lot to be concerned about with the proposed logging of forest reserves.

Anthony Britneff, who worked in several senior positions within the provincial Forest Service for nearly 40 years before retiring a couple of years ago, has been actively writing and critiquing forest policies since leaving the public service. He said Tuesday that he was alarmed at the report’s projections in large part because the numbers being used to estimate the number of trees that remain are highly suspect.

The Lakes TSA in particular, Britneff said, has some of the poorest, most out-of-date inventory data of any forested region in the province. In fact, the last robust inventory or counting of trees in the TSA took place before the pine beetle attack not after.

“As the Forest Practice Board and the Auditor General for British Columbia have already pointed out, one has to question the reliability of the information the government is using to mitigate timber supply falldown and to assess the viability of a new Babine Forest Products mill at Burns Lake,” Britneff said after reading the briefly posted timber supply report.

If there’s a silver lining, he says, it’s that mayors and local town councillors are skeptical of what they are hearing from the provincial government.

“Fortunately for forest-dependent communities, some local mayors and councillors are beginning to wake up to why the government in Victoria is preferring not to engage local communities and citizens in discussions about changes to their land-use plans,” he said.

What stood out most was the across-the-board call for higher taxes. Yes, you read that right. Respondents said they want the deficit reduced and are willing to see the GST restored to 7 per cent, higher taxes for corporations and high-income Canadians and an end to what they called “boutique” tax credits, such as children’s arts and fitness credits.

This isn’t a surprise to me. The tax cut experiment that our federal government has been running since the 1990s has failed miserably and Canadians are starting to take notice.

Tax cuts were supposed to create more and better-paying jobs and pay for themselves, but instead they’ve opened up a gaping hole in the public purse and created what economists call a structural deficit. Corporate profits are edging back to their record high pre-recession levels, executive compensation is on the rise but the good jobs haven’t materialized. Instead of investing in the economy, corporations are sitting on billions of dollars in cash.

Taxes are a way for all of us to pool our resources so that we can provide better, more accessible services than we could buy individually. Education, health care, care for our children and for our seniors — these are things that we all need and if we don’t pay for them together through taxes we will pay for them individually through user fees and ration services based on ability to pay.

This is why the vast majority of Canadians aren’t better off after over a decade of tax cuts. Tax cuts were supposed to leave us with more money in our pockets, but that feeling only lasted until we found out how much our next prescription costs, what the fees are for our parents’ seniors care home, and that we now need to pay for our children’s school field trip or sports team.

Canadians don’t want to live in a low tax society with frayed public services. What they want is to share prosperity more broadly and ensure that everyone has access to the basic necessities to give them a good start in life.

It’s time for our governments to take note. It’s time to put an end to our corporate tax giveaways and ask those who are benefiting from the recovery to contribute a little more to the common pot so we can rebuild and strengthen our communities in the aftermath of the recession.

As more and more raw, unprocessed logs leave British Columbia’s coast in ocean freighters bound for the far side of the world, a common refrain from some in our forest industry is that we have no choice.

Because workers in mills in China are paid so little, log buyers there can afford to pay more for our logs than domestic buyers pay. The result, we’re told, is that we have no alternative but to sell our logs overseas.

But there’s much to suggest that such a defeatist argument doesn’t hold water, and that the real problem is a lack of investment in mills here at home.

Take the Ladysmith sawmill, for example. On a recent bright, winter morning I found myself driving from Victoria up the southeast coast of Vancouver Island to the mill, where I met Arnold Bercov, president of Local 8 of the Pulp, Paper and Woodworkers of Canada.

In 2010, the mill owned by Western Forest Products was dangerously close to shutting its doors for good. It had been dormant at that point for more than two years due to the sharp decline in continental lumber demand triggered by the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the United States.

Relations between the union and its employer, moreover, were past the point of absurdity. Bercov recalls one conversation in which a senior company executive said: “Even if your members agree to be paid $1.50 an hour that mill is dead.” But the company eventually changed its tune when it realized what it would have to pay its workers in severance payouts in the event it closed the mill permanently. In September of that year, the mill re-opened with a skeletal staff of 17.

Today, 60 people work there on two shifts. They make rough-cut hemlock boards used to form concrete walls. Such boards are clearly not high-value lumber products, yet they are sufficient to generate a profit for WFP and to see the mill’s workers paid an average of $25 an hour. And oh, by the way, those boards sell into that market BC companies allegedly can’t compete in – China.

Further up-Island, the Harmac pulp mill with its 300 salaried and hourly employees is a beehive of activity – a far cry from 2008 when a bankruptcy trustee was close to selling the operation’s depreciating assets to a buyer intent on disassembling the mill’s machinery and shipping it to out-of-country buyers. Instead, the mill’s workers bought their way back to work in an employee-led acquisition of 25% of the mill’s assets.

Last year, Harmac’s board of directors approved payouts of $4,000 in dividends to each of the mill’s employees and shareholders; their reward for generating handsome profits selling market pulp to — you guessed it — China.

The mill’s shareholders aren’t, however, resting on their laurels.  They’re investing in a second steam turbine that will produce more than enough thermal electricity to meet the mill’s on-site power needs. The extra power will be sold to BC Hydro and feed into the Vancouver Island power grid. And something else is happening. The shareholders are actually contemplating building a sawmill on site.

That’s right, a company rescued by mill employees wants to reverse the disastrous, job-killing decisions of its predecessors — MacMillan Bloedel and later Weyerehaeuser — who, in an effort to placate corporate shareholders, split Harmac’s operations into its constituent parts. Those parts included two sawmills that were summarily shut down, sawmills that once made lots of lumber and sent their so-called “waste” in the form of wood chips and sawdust to the adjacent pulp mill for conversion into wood pulp.

With those sawmills closed, Harmac was forced to buy entire shipments of logs and turn them directly into wood chips without any of the logs first being run through a sawmill and a portion of them turned into lumber. It still does so today.

Meanwhile, within eyesight of Harmac and Ladsysmith, ocean freighters are loaded with hundreds of thousands of unprocessed logs each year.

And that’s just the beginning of missed economic opportunities. In some coastal logging operations in recent years, fully half of all the trees logged were left to rot on the ground.

This is environmental and economic lunacy. But it’s what the defeatists claim is inevitable.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The overarching problem in BC’s coastal forest industry today is a lack of investment. We could lower overall logging rates tomorrow while increasing forest industry employment. Here’s how:

• Place an escalating tax on raw log exports;
• Legislate an end to the rampant waste of public forest resources at industrial logging operations; and
• Require companies logging publicly owned forests to make minimum investments in existing or new mills.

The policy options are there. It’s time to stop waving the white flag of surrender.

Ben Parfitt is resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and author of Making the Case for a Carbon Focus and Green Jobs in BC’s Forest Industry.

While the media framing of the pipeline project has been jobs vs the environment, the harsh reality is that very few jobs are being created by the pipeline. We can bank on no more than 3,000 jobs per year for three years during the construction phase (Enbridge’s own numbers say 1,850 per year for three years laying the pipe, and if we assume that the steel and pipe will be manufactured in Canada that would be, generously, another 1,000 jobs for three years). Once complete, Enbridge estimates 217 direct jobs in pipeline operations. This is not really a surprise because the oil and gas industry is one of the most capital intensive in the world, employing less than 1% of Canadian workers.

Labour shortages in the construction sector imply that if the pipeline is not built the vast majority of workers would likely be working somewhere else. This is an important point because the modelling invoked by Enbridge essentially assumes that workers would otherwise be unemployed. There are other problems in Enbridge’s input-output modelling, some of which seem to be endemic problems with that kind of approach period, while others seem to be a mis-application of the modelling by Enbridge. Alas, I’m just going on what’s in Enbridge NEB application here, as I asked Enbridge for more detailed modelling results and they refused to provide them on confidentiality grounds. Overall, I had more faith in input-output models and was more willing to take the numbers at face value when I started writing the paper, but found the numbers just could not be justified.

Input-output models give gross figures but we need to net out alternative uses of funds. The report considers alternative investments of $5 billion, particularly in green economic development that would also reduce our GHG emissions and our reliance on fossil fuels. Spending $5 billion on public transit, building retrofits, renewable energy and so forth would generate many times more jobs than investing in the pipeline. A modest carbon tax of $10 a tonne applied nationally would generate $5 billion per year, every year, that would facilitate such investments.

Then there are the costs. 200-300 super-tankers up the inlet into Kitimat will have a negative impact on commercial and traditional fishing in the region even if there are no spills. The local Gitga’at First Nation gets 40% of its food supply from traditional sources. Fewer people will want to plan an eco-tourism adventure to Kitimat if the pipeline is built. So the pipeline must consider these impacts too, with some 18,000 regional jobs in potentially affected sectors in proximity to the pipeline route.

As for spills, the question is not if there will be a spill but when and how bad it is. Diluted bitumen is highly corrosive and breaks pipes. Enbridge alone has had more than 800 leaks in its pipeline network going back just over a decade. In the US, more than 5,000 spills going back to 1990. Spills are a just a cost of doing business from the company’s perspective.

While spills are more of a probabilistic thing, GHG emissions are not. The pipeline would facilitate 80-100 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, which is more than BC currently emits in total. If we put a price on those emissions of $50-200 per tonne, reflecting some recent estimates of the external costs of carbon emissions, we get a range of $4-20 billion in environmental costs just from GHG emissions. Given that the pipeline is anticipated to create about $4 billion per year in profits to the Enbridge shareholders and oil sands producers, these are odious profits that come at the expense of people in other countries and into the future.

Media postscript:

I was on CBC radio this morning talking about the report, and on CTV news last night:
http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20120320/bc_enbridge_pipeline_jobs_report_120320/20120320/?hub=BritishColumbiaHome

And Canadian Press did a great wire story on the report:
http://t.co/acTN0YP5

This train hit the tracks long before the current collective bargaining dispute. Its operator is an eight-year-old boy from North Vancouver, named Jeffrey Moore. With the support of his family, Jeffrey is driving a human rights case, initiated over a decade ago, which could impact public education in this province in a deeply positive way.

The facts of the case date back to the early 90s, when Jeffrey, a child with Dyslexia, started public elementary school in North Vancouver District 44. Due to his severe learning disability, it was recommended that Jeffrey attend a special program of intensive remediation, provided by the District since 1976, and necessary for him to learn effectively.

Intensive remediation at this early stage of Jeffrey’s life was absolutely critical. But just before his entrance into the program, it was cut.

Budget pressures. Financial crisis. No other option, said the District. Sorry.

Jeffrey should attend a private school, at his family’s expense, if he wants to get an education, said District staff.

None of our business, said the Ministry of Education, which had been underfunding the District for several years.

Apparently, BC’s public system of education that, by definition, is supposed to be for everyone, wasn’t for Jeffrey.

Seeing no other choice, Jeffrey’s family enrolled him in a private school that was able to accommodate his disability. They also filed a complaint, which made its way to the BC Human Rights Tribunal. The Moores alleged that the District and the Ministry discriminated against Jeffrey on the basis of his disability.

The Tribunal agreed, finding that the public education system should have accommodated Jeffrey’s learning needs. The Tribunal also found that the District and the Ministry had systemically discriminated against children with severe learning disabilities by cutting the intensive remediation program without ensuring that other sufficient programs remained available, and by disproportionately cutting core accommodations for children with severe learning disabilities in tight fiscal times. Although the District had been in a difficult financial position, there were a range of options available to save money. At the same time as it was cutting the intensive remediation program, the District had maintained popular, yet non-core, programs, to its financial detriment.

Additionally, the Tribunal found that the Ministry had systemically discriminated against children with severe learning disabilities by arbitrarily capping funding available to support them, and by failing to provide systemic oversight to ensure that the public education system was inclusive of all children, including those with disabilities.

In addition to ordering compensation for Jeffrey and his family, the Tribunal ordered the Ministry to fund students with severe learning disabilities appropriately, and to ensure that school districts implement suitable programs and services to meet their needs. The District was ordered to ensure that it had in place a range of services necessary for students like Jeffrey.

Unfortunately, the Tribunal’s decision was reversed by the BC Supreme Court and a majority of judges on the Court of Appeal. Next week, Jeffrey – now in his 20s – and his lawyers will ask the Supreme Court of Canada to restore the Tribunal’s decision.

If they’re successful, will it mean more funding and supports immediately for students with learning disabilities and their teachers in BC? It probably should; however, court decisions rarely result in this type of direct, tangible, systemic impact.

But, at the very least, a positive decision for Jeffrey should provide British Columbians with a tool for compelling government to design and implement public education in a way that is inclusive of, and accessible to, students with learning disabilities. It could also establish a precedent for holding government accountable for special education funding cuts and caps that are not reasonably necessary.

Moreover, beyond children with special needs and the public education system in BC, Jeffrey’s case at the Supreme Court of Canada could more broadly advance other efforts of people with disabilities across Canada seeking inclusive public services and accountable public institutions.

All aboard. Next stop: Ottawa.

As we were congratulating ourselves on getting to this improbable place — a jointly agreed and principled devolution of responsibilities and powers between the province and the region — Peter Cameron presciently said: it is a good agreement — it is just the funding and governance provisions I am worried about. So I am certain it is no surprise to Peter that Translink and the province are still trying to sort out funding and governance of the regional transportation authority.

The problem, and I believe Peter would agree, was not the provisions in themselves. They were based on clear, well-regarded principles — strongly supported in transportation planning circles throughout North America. The problem was that the parties would not honour them. The province, in the end, did not want to give up control. And neither the province nor the region (except for some uniquely courageous politicians like then head of MetroVancouver, George Puil) did not want to take responsibility for raising the funds that would be required to provide the services and infrastructure sorely needed.

So, despite the fact that all parties recognized the implementation of a vehicle levy, ideally based on distance travelled, was going to be the major new source of funds, regional and provincial politicians balked. At least one mayor who was on the negotiating committee arguing in closed meetings for an even larger vehicle levy than what we had planned, led a political charge against it when time came to implement it. And the province, first the NDP and then the Liberals that followed, refused to facilitate the collection or even just the enforcement of a vehicle levy. In the face of anti-tax political winds, they shamelessly abandoned the key component of the funding plan on which the agreement was based. It was easier to pretend other parties could pay for all the service and infrastructure that was needed (the feds being the local favourite) than taking political responsibility for what had to be done.

Also, perhaps not surprisingly, despite the clear intent of the agreement that the region would plan and prioritize what transportation infrastructure and service to provide, the province couldn’t resist imposing their pet projects on what was, without the vehicle levy, a severely underfunded regional authority. The NDP imposed the Millenium rapid transit line because it could be built before the 2001 election. The Liberals imposed the Canada Line because it could be built in time for the Olympics. Neither project was a regional priority, and neither was supported by a convincing business case.

When the governing TransLink board very properly challenged the priority and economics of what was being imposed, the province challenged and changed the governance. They could no longer accept even the facade of the devolution of responsibility to the region.

There were indeed reasons to worry about the funding and governance of Translink, but in retrospect more reason to worry about the politics of their implementation than the provisions themselves. And that is as true about any agreement that may be reached today as what we negotiated over ten years ago.

The incident occurred on August 19 of last year when a 35-year-old pipeline broke and spilled its poisonous contents onto a nearby property.

In three separate interviews with three different people who have knowledge of the incident and who spoke on an “information only” basis, it was confirmed that whatever was in the liquids that burst from the broken pipeline that day killed at least one cow and sickened other cattle.

The toxic spill occurred just outside the city limits of Fort St. John, near a liquids waste facility, which takes toxic liquids produced by the oil and gas industry and pressure pumps the untreated wastes deep underground for disposal.

Despite the spill involving toxic liquids that were being piped to the disposal well, and the disposal well itself being located close to residences that rely on wells for their drinking water, the OGC disclosed nothing publicly when the spill occurred. Six months later, it has yet to issue a press release on the spill or a single document relating to the incident. Furthermore, no documents will be released until, the OGC says, its “investigation is complete.”

One of the more curious things about the OGC’s reticence to speak about the event is that in the grand scheme of things this was a small spill. Just 20 cubic metres or roughly the equivalent of half a tanker truck’s contents was involved. Yet when first asked about the event in December, the OGC refused to divulge any details at all, and since that time has provided only three scant paragraphs worth of material. It won’t even release a copy of a report it filed with the local Ministry of Environment’s offices detailing what occurred and what it ordered the pipeline operator to do to clean up the spill and remediate the private landowner’s property.

Which quite naturally begs questions: Why the tight-lipped response? And what does such a response say about where the OGC sees its loyalties lying, as the Commission both approves oil and gas company activities and is tasked with ensuring public health and safety and protecting the environment?

A quite reasonable response to the first question is that there may be more going on than just a small spill. Or perhaps the OGC just wants to keep a lid on things given the mounting concerns residents inside and outside the region have with the amounts of water being contaminated by the gas industry in its water-and energy-intensive hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” operations.

Fracking involves the pumping of immense amounts of water deep underground at high pressure. The pumping opens cracks in the surrounding gas-bearing rock allowing the trapped gas to flow out. With more and more fracking activities underway in northeast B.C., there is increased potential for spills such as the one that occurred on August 19.

Here’s why.

After a gas well is fracked, much of the water pumped belowground returns to the surface. Such water is by then heavily contaminated with traces of gas, heavy metals, minerals, radiological compounds and chemicals. With up to 600 Olympic swimming pools worth of water used in fracking operations at well pads in northeast B.C., the wastewater that flows back to the surface quickly amounts to a lot of toxic material. If it cannot be reused it is typically destined for “deep well disposal”, meaning that it is pumped deep below the earth’s surface where, it is hoped, it stays.

Last August’s pipeline break involved a pipeline operated by Orefyn Energy Advisors Corp. The contents of whatever was in that pipeline were destined for a disposal well operated by the same company.

In response to written questions, the OGC’s manager of communications, Hardy Friedrich, disclosed in an email that “the pipeline, operated by Orefyn” was carrying “produced water”. Produced water is water that flows back up out of a gas well after it is drilled and that may or may not be associated with fracking. In this case, Freidrich wrote, the water originated from a “sweet” gas well. Sweet gas wells, as opposed to sour gas wells, produce gas that contains very little if any hydrogen sulphide or H2S, a potentially deadly neurotoxin that has killed or seriously injured gas industry workers in British Columbia and Alberta as well as residents and workers in many jurisdictions where sour gas wells are drilled and their gas leaks or escapes.

When the pipeline broke, Friedrich wrote, “approximately 20 cubic metres of produced water spilled onto private lands and the pipeline was shut in. Permit holders are required by law to contain and eliminate spills and remediate any land or body of water affected by the spillage.”

The OGC felt the spill was serious enough that it issued a directive to Orefyn. “General Order 2011-20” was issued on September 29, six weeks or so after the pipeline spill, and was signed by Lance Ollenberger, the OGC’s deputy commissioner of operations engineering. The order directed Orefyn to clean up the site where the cattle had been killed or sickened and to repair the pipeline. Since that time, undisclosed amounts of contaminated soil have apparently been hauled away from the property.

As for the pipeline itself, Friedrich reports that it is “inactive”. But the OGC remains firm that it will not release any written materials relating to the incident, including the order.

“Unfortunately, we are not able to release any records pertaining to this order at this time. Enforcement actions are still pending, therefore, according to Section 15 of the Freedom of Information Act, information on this order cannot be released until all items have been resolved and the order is closed.”

All of which is rather curious. When a truck carrying gasoline tipped over last April on the Island Highway outside of Victoria and disgorged its contents onto the road and subsequently into the adjacent Goldstream river, provincial Ministry of Environment and Ministry of Transportation officials had no qualms about speaking to the media and about disclosing what enforcement actions they were taking and that they contemplated. It mattered not one iota that the investigation was then only in its infancy.

The big difference between the Goldstream event and that outside of Fort St. John is that the former occurred on the doorstep of the provincial capitol, disrupted traffic on a busy stretch of road and could not have failed to come to the public’s attention, while the Orefyn pipeline spill occurred in a region of the province that is larger than all but 14 of the U.S. states south of the 49th parallel, and with a sparse population of just 60,000 or so.

But this hardly justifies withholding information. Especially in a region of the province where oil and hazardous goods spills are distressingly common and where there is good reason to believe that there is a heightened risk of more pipeline breaks and more spills in the years ahead given the intense ramp-up in natural gas industry water-use now underway.

In 2009, the Ministry of Environment’s Environmental Emergencies Program released what it called an “annual report”, covering spills in various regions of the province. Due to budgetary restraints it was the first such report released in several years. There has been no such report in the two years since. In it, the ministry noted that there were a total of 587 spills in the Fort St. John region during 2008. In just the first quarter of 2009, the ministry reported, 191 spills were recorded, a 28% increase over the year before. The compilation of regional statistics ended by noting that a further “30 reports came in during [the] first 20 days of April 2009, alone.”

Of note, the 2009 spills report predates the significant upsurge in fracking operations that now characterize gas well developments in northeast B.C. Such operations have already set global gas industry records for water usage and are certain to herald an increase in the volumes of toxic wastewater that must be moved either by truck and/or pipeline to injection wells for disposal.

All of which is of note when considering the question of whose interests – that of the general public, or the oil and gas industry – are served when the regulator withholds information on a small, but nonetheless deadly spill. More than six months after the spill occurred an allegedly ongoing investigation prevents the Oil and Gas Commission from disclosing further details about what happened that day and in the days after. With regard to this incident, at least, it appears that the interests of the OGC’s industry clients take precedence over that of the public.

With more toxic waste spills a certainty in the months and years ahead, such loyalty does not inspire confidence.

It notes that Finance Minister Falcon talks of fiscal prudence, but the budget’s failure to invest in the well-being of all children and youth will cost us dearly as inequities grow bigger and more children’s healthy development is undermined. 

As Iglika’s earlier post outlined, there is a false economy in this budget.  It maintains a high child and family poverty rate and withholds needed supports by continuing to underfund crucial child and youth-serving ministries (e.g. MCFD and Education), ignoring the short and long-term costs this creates. 

A budget that took children’s rights seriously would look a lot different.