CKNW Editorial
for June 29, 2001

I think that the provincial government is going to be forced to explore, and if explorations prove fruitful, drill and transmit oil and natural gas from our offshore potential.

Why do I say that?

Because lumber is getting to be an ever more unreliable source of revenue and mining is almost non existent. No matter how successful the new government is in promotion new industry to BC it will not make up for the lost future revenues the government hopes for.

It’s not that the forest industry is sunset industry … but there are very serious short, medium and long term difficulties.

First off we have the huge beetle infestation which no one should underrate as a threat. There is ever increasing competition and uncertain markets. There is the harm done to the industry by Greenpeace and others with their overseas propaganda. But most of all, there is the ever present threat of native land claims. It’s all very well to say that we should settle the claims and end our trouble but that’s easier said than done. Capital, especially foreign capital, has better places to invest than in a province where ownership of resources might not be settled for 25 years or more.

The mining situation is even worse. Several mines have closed in the past decade and nothing is opening. Prospecting, the lifeblood of that industry, is almost non existent. And the blame can only be laid at the NDP’s doorstep because they started the grief in 1972 but of more relevance, did not clean up the situation after the Bill Bennett and Vander Zalm Socreds had not only failed to make it better but in fact made it worse. In short, the British Columbia government is going to need a lot of money it won’t get from traditional resource contributors.

There are a number of problems associated with opening up our petroleum resources not least of which are environmental. It’s easy to be glib and say that the techniques for offshore drilling make it no threat to the environment but we have seen a huge oil rig go down off Brazil and they’re having problems off the coast of California as we speak. And there is the question as to how we get the petroleum to market and where that market will be. Presumably natural gas would be sent by pipeline but what about the oil? Would it all go by tanker? If it’s to go by pipeline the market would be the United States and one cannot assume that would happen – at least not in the immediate future. The price of oil is dropping and we have to be very sure of our figures and projections before we open up offshore oil and gas fields.

It’s true that the Bush administration is after Alberta oil and seems to have an endless appetite but we must remember that the US government, despite the misgivings of many, are going to open up Alaska oil. Over the past few years the United States has done a number of things – it has reduced it’s consumption greatly and it has expanded its domestic sources. We must make sure that we don’t invest a lot of expectations in a project that simply might not have a profitable market.

On another environmental question I see that sea lice have become a big problem with at least one group of fish farms yet we’re told that the Campbell government is going to encourage them.

We have experience to go on – Norway, Scotland and Ireland. And the experience has been disastrous. Somehow the fish farm industry has been able to con governments world wide into believing that they pose no threat to the environment. Yet quite apart from disease, escapement and pollution from fish waste – which are bad enough problems we have the clear evidence of the lice problems associated with penned fish. Read any fishing literature from the United Kingdom or Ireland and the evidence is overwhelming that farmed fish create a huge and fatal lice problem for native fish.

How does this anything but clean industry get away with it?

Because they have managed to have the onus of proof reversed. Somehow, instead of it being incumbent on the industry to prove it is safe it is on concerned people to show that it isn’t. The industry uses the old tobacco technique by getting scientists they employ to say "there is no scientific proof of any connection between farmed fish and lice" even though there was no problem with lice before the farmed fish appear and a very big one after they did.

You will remember the case put by both the fish farmers and some Department of Fisheries scientists. The fish cannot escape. Oh, they escaped did they? Well they cannot survive. They in fact are surviving? Not to worry, they can never take hold in local rivers and displace our native salmon. You say that they have done so and smolts have been located in River estuaries? Never mind, if it gets to be too big a problem we’ll destroy them.

This has been a mass seduction of government and the public by an industry that bills itself as a clean one but which in fact is an environmental nightmare.

But it would be so unlike Canadian governments to look ay experience elsewhere and profit from that experience. The industry, in an aura of lessened revenues from other natural resources, has mesmerized governments into believing their story.

I’ve said it before and say it again – never argue the fish issue from the point of money alone … for you can’t win against the dam builders and fish farmers. We can only win if we want to save our own salmon for their own sake.

I fear, however, that the war is lost. The Nechako sockeye which we thought we’d saved when we killed the Kemano Completion Program are as much at risk now as they ever were. They’ll be destroyed and after that there will be no reason not to dam the Fraser above Lytton. And as the fish farms deplete salmon on the coast they will be able to say, there’s no point stopping us because there are no natural salmon to worry about.

It is truly to weep.