B.C. Premier John Horgan’s announcement Thursday regarding liquified natural gas (LNG) came as a surprise to many people.
It has probably disappointed many of the people who voted in favour of the NDP and who took Horgan’s and the NDP’s denunciation of the Liberal’s LNG plans as some kind of forever opposition.
The NDP has decided there is a future for LNG in the province. Thursday’s announcement certainly indicates that the NDP will go even further than the Liberals in terms of tax breaks to ensure that at least one project, the Canada LNG project, will go ahead.
That project is pretty close to a final investment decision, one that could be worth $40 billion. We won’t know that until the end of the year when the consortium makes the final decision. The NDP government won’t stand in the way – in fact, it would bend over backwards to have an LNG industry, or at least one big plant – in the province.
And I don’t blame them for that. In opposition, you oppose and in government, you govern. And in this case, the opportunities and revenue are too great for the government to walk away.
Having said this, I’m surprised by Andrew Weaver and the Green Party. All along, the Greens have said that certain things were no-gos. Remember the Site C dam, which the NDP government approved in December? Weaver called the proposed $10.7-billion project “fiscally reckless,” and said the NDP should have stopped it.
But in a year-end interview, Weaver said that despite the Site C decision, the Greens have no plans to stop supporting the minority NDP government.
As you might expect, Andrew Weaver doesn’t support the new LNG regime. But in a news conference Thursday, Weaver said the plan breaks the confidence and supply agreement that the Greens and the NDP signed last summer after the election, allowing the NDP to form government.
Weaver also said he doesn’t see any way the NDP government can meet legislated climate reduction targets while this LNG Canada facility gets operating, if it indeed gets the go-ahead this year.
“If you are going to add eight to 10 megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions and you are going to meet our targets, then all other aspects of the economy must make up the difference,” Weaver said.
Yet he’s not going to bring down Horgan and the NDP – which I think simply underscores and reinforces that Weaver is pretty much a toothless tiger. He’s the boy that cried wolf, over and over and over again. He has no intention of upsetting the apple cart, no matter what the NDP does.
In a lot of ways, Weaver has been embarrassed by the NDP. The Green Party has been shown the NDP’s true colours on Site C and LNG. And colour is not green – it’s yellow.
If I was thinking about being a Green voter – whenever the next election’s held – I would think very seriously about what we’ve seen from Andrew Weaver and Co., all within less than a year into this coalition government.
Jon McComb hosts the Jon McComb show on Global News Radio 980 CKNW.