NDP, Tories offer opposing visions for resource economy
OTTAWA — Even before NDP Leader Tom Mulcai run veiled his party’s energy policy Wednesday, his adversaries pounced on the plan that seeks to reverse Conservative changes to the environmental assessment process and resurrect the popular home retrofit program.
In what’s shaping up to be a battle between two opposing visions for Canada’s resource economy, both Mulcair and Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver addressed business leaders on the subject at opposite ends of the country.
Mulcair laid out his party’s vision for a “sustainable, balanced and prosperous energy future” in a speech before the Economic Club of Canada in Ottawa. He framed his plan as an alternative “development model” to that of the Conservatives which is to “let mostly foreign companies come in and buy up whatever they can and leave a huge mess that’s going to be paid for by future generations.”
Oliver told the Vancouver Board of Trade that the NDP plan to strengthen the environmental assessment regime by overturning cabinet’s ability to unilaterally ignore the outcome of an as- sessment would effectively “kill” a number of the province’s liquefied natural gas projects. “We are in a global race to get our (liquefied natural gas) to markets but the opportunity is perishable,” he said. “An NDP overhaul is a recipe for instability and uncertainty at the very moment when businesses are deciding whether to make multibillion-dollar investments in the B.C. natural gas sector.”
Both Oliver and the Liberals also questioned Mulcair’s logic. If his plan is to let regulators decide the fate of energy projects, then he should support the Keystone XL pipeline, which was approved by Canada’s National Energy Board (NEB) three years ago.
Mulcair has vehemently opposed the $5.3-billion link between Alberta’s oilsands and the U.S. Gulf Coast that still awaits U.S. approval. But on Wednesday, he insisted there’s no contradiction here.
“Based on our approach to sustainable development, we would have never sent it to the NEB. We would have insisted that we keep those jobs in Canada,” he said, while taking a stab at Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s promise to support the middle class. “People who claim that they are in favour of middle-class jobs are going to have a lot of difficulty explaining why they are actually in favour of exporting 40,000 middle-class jobs to the United States.”
In his speech Wednesday, Mulcair promised one of his first “official acts” if elected prime minister in 2015 would be to attend a major international climate change conference in Paris.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been known to skip climate change conferences, and it was just after the UN summit in Durban in December 2011 that then-environment minister Peter Kent announced Canada was pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.