The leaders of both the Liberal and Green parties were talking about climate change Saturday, but offered some very different approaches.
NDP Leader John Horgan was in Revelstoke Saturday visiting local businesses, while Green Party Leader Sonia Furstenau held a virtual meeting with three new Green candidates, who spoke of the need for stronger climate change policies and against B.C.’s nascent LNG industry.
Apart from putting out a news release on how the elimination of the PST for one year would reduce cell phone bills for British Columbians, the BC Liberals held no media events Saturday.
Horgan was in Revelstoke Saturday touring a bike shop and Tree Construction, which designs and builds passive houses.
Horgan made no new platform announcements, but talked about his government’s ongoing support for mass timber construction and engineered wood products, like cross-laminated timber, as a way to get the best value from B.C. dwindling timber supply, while lowering emissions in construction.
Horgan said the BC Liberals had no plan for when a surplus of dead wood from the Mountain pine beetle epidemic, which wiped out roughly have the annual allowable cut in B.C., ran out.
“The BC Liberal government didn’t put the effort in to prepare for when that wood was gone,” he said. “And instead it was all about more volume and not about more value.
“A re-elected John Horgan government will focus on more value, less volume.”
The NDP has implemented polices to reduce log exports, and appointed an NDP MLA, Ravi Kahlon, to lead an effort to promote more mass timber manufacturing and use in construction.
Mass timber is a much lower carbon approach to construction than steel and cement, which are both energy intensive, since wood sequesters carbon. The NDP government has been using its procurement powers to encourage more mass timber construction in public buildings.
Horgan pointed to the B.C. company, Structurlam, as an example of where his government wants to see the forest sector go.
“They’re exporting mass timber to the United States in huge volumes,” Horgan said. “That’s the type of volume we want to talk about – manufacturing jobs in British Columbia, sustaining our forestry now and into the future, and building with a focus on climate action.”
But in a virtual press conference Saturday, Green Leader Sonia Furstenau slammed the Horgan government on its climate action plan, saying that an LNG industry will frustrate its goals of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050.
She cited a recent Stand.earth report that estimates an LNG industry will mean B.C. will exceed its carbon budget by 160%.
Furstenau was joined by three new Green candidates, including a 17-year-old from Vancouver Island, Kate O’Connor, and a scientist specializing in energy and climate policies: Devyani Singh, who has a PhD in environmental finance and forestry resource management from the University of BC.
All three new candidates talked about concerns about climate change driving them into politics.
“I represent a generation that is done being ignored,” O’Connor said. “We’re stepping up and demanding that our future is protected. We don’t want to choke on forest fire smoke or see old growth trees logged into oblivion.
“The BC Greens are the only party with policies that match the urgency of the crisis we face.”
Horgan recently announced that an NDP government would adjust its climate action targets, with the goal for 2050 now being total carbon neutrality.
Furstenau said that target will be unachievable, thanks to B.C.’s nascent LNG industry. LNG Canada is investing $40 billion to develop an LNG plant in Kitimat, a new gas pipeline and upstream natural gas development.
“The NDP’s plan to build LNG Canada, which will be one of our country’s biggest point source of emissions, makes those targets unreachable without asking other sectors of our economy to make entirely unreasonable sacrifices,” Furstenau said.
The CleanBC Plan sets targets for reducing emissions and prescribes how to reach those targets. While the plan has accounted for 75% of the planned emissions reductions, it has yet to identify where the other 25% reduction would come from.
Fursteanau slammed the NDP for what she said was a $6 billion “fracking subsidy” that led the LNG Canada partners to sanction the project.
She referred to a suite of new and higher taxes for the LNG industry – including a new special LNG tax and higher rate for power -- that the previous Liberal government had planned. The NDP scrapped those taxes and decided, instead, to treat the LNG industry like any other heavy industry.
“The Liberals and the NDP voted in lockstep to greenlight this massive project that will put our climate targets out of reach,” Fursteanu said.
Asked what she would do about LNG Canada, if her party was once again in the position of supporting a minority government, Furstenau was unclear.
"We have to look at the situation we're in," she said, and then pointed to countries like New Zealand, where the current prime minister has pledged to move New Zealand's economy "beyond fossil fuels by 2030."
"That's the kind of urgency we need to see," Furstenau said.
Asked about Furstenau’s criticism, Horgan pointed out that the Green Party not only supported his government’s CleanBC plan, but helped create it.
“Our climate action plan was created with the Green Party caucus,” Horgan said. “We worked with BC Business Council to ensure that industrial emitters understood that we needed to reduce emissions in that sector.
“We put in place plans, with the Green Party caucus, to achieve those goals."
He added that carbon neutrality by 2050 will only be achieved through investing in innovation.
The Greens have not been able to raise a full slate of candidates for the fall election. There are 13 ridings in which there are no Green candidates – several of which are in rural ridings that are heavily dependent on industries like forestry, mining and oil and gas.
But fielding 74 candidates on short notice in a snap election that no one expected was “an extraordinary achievement,” Furstenau said.
The Greens, Liberals and NDP are expected to release their full platforms sometime next week.
