Former B.C. premier praises NDP for LNG
VICTORIA Former Liberal B.C. premier Christy Clark, who fought for seven years to bring a liquefied natural gas industry to British Columbia, praised her successor John Horgan Tuesday for securing a final investment decision on the LNG Canada project.
Clark said the announcement of the $40-billion LNG Canada terminal in Kitimat and its corresponding pipeline transcends politics, deserves widespread praise, and is the highlight of her political career.
“I don’t want to be critical of anybody here, I want to just celebrate,” Clark told Postmedia News on Tuesday. “This is the largest private sector investment in Canadian history, and if all the NDP did was not stop it, that’s a lot because there was a lot of pressure on them to do that.”
The consortium of companies behind LNG Canada, led by Royal Dutch Shell, announced a start to construction at a press conference on Tuesday. It is estimated the project will create 10,000 jobs and generate $23 billion in revenue for the B.C. government over 40 years.
Clark spent much of her premiership working to develop LNG regulations and encourage companies like Shell and Petronas to invest in B.C., but was defeated in 2017 before any projects were actually approved.
“My greatest disappointment of the election was coming home and thinking LNG is not going to happen because the NDP have voted against our LNG bills,” she said.
However, instead of scrapping her LNG plan, the NDP built upon it by adding $5.4 billion in additional tax breaks. Horgan has also pushed back against his power-sharing B.C. Greens partners by insisting B.C.’s climate change targets can still be met even with LNG’s added pollution.
“They could have changed the climate plan, or had a moratorium on fracking, there were a 100 different things they could have done to stop it, and they didn’t,” said Clark. “I’m sure lots of their supporters are not happy about this.”
Clark said she doesn’t regret promising in the 2013 election that LNG could generate enough revenue to wipe out B.C.’s debt.
Nor, she said, is she upset that LNG Canada came online under the NDP because the end goal is to improve the economic prospects for Aboriginal and northern communities.
“When you are done your political career — and I’m totally done — you look back at the legacies you left and the things that you did that made the biggest difference,” she said. “I’ve never seen a great leader say, ‘You know my biggest regret is I didn’t get credit for something that I did.’ What they say is, ‘My greatest happiness comes from the legacy I left.’ That’s how I feel. So let’s share the credit here.”
The bipartisan spirit extended Tuesday to Horgan acknowledging at the LNG Canada press conference the work done by Liberals such as former LNG minister Rich Coleman and former Haisla chief councillor Ellis Ross, who is now the Liberal MLA for Skeena where the terminal will be located.
Since leaving politics, Clark works as an adviser to law firm Bennett Jones and sits on the board of Shaw Communications. “I think the B.C. Liberals probably feel they did the bulk of the work, which is true,” she said. “But who cares? It got done.”