Premier’s allies return fire at LNG critic

Disgruntled. Irrelevant. Misinformed. Those are the words Premier Christy Clark’s Liberals are slinging at Martyn Brown these days after he dared to criticize Clark’s sweet tax-and-royalty deal with the LNG industry.

You can understand why Clark and company would be feeling sensitive. Brown used to be the most powerful bureaucrat in the Liberal government, back when Gordon Campbell was premier.

But now Brown, who was Campbell’s chief of staff, is out of government. And he’s keeping himself busy by slicing and dicing Clark’s extraordinary deal with the liquefied natural gas sector.

The deal locks in rock-bottom taxand-royalty rates for 25 years as Clark drives to deliver at least one of her promised LNG plants before the next election.

“We got suckered,” Brown said, insisting Clark got played for a fool by big multinational energy companies that knew she was exposed politically on her lofty LNG promises.

“They had her over a barrel,” said Brown, adding his old boss Campbell would never have signed such a “giveaway” deal.

But now the Clark government is fighting back.

“I don’t give him more than a grain of salt,” Natural Gas Minister Rich Coleman said Monday about his former colleague. “He’s just disgruntled and he wants to take a shot at our government. As far as his relevance to my file, he’s frankly irrelevant.”

The Liberals point out that Clark fired Brown when she became premier. Then Brown wrote a book wrongly predicting she would lose the last election.

But Brown says he’s not bitter. He’s just furious the government is “selling out our resources for a song,” and to a corrupt foreign government to boot.

Brown points out that Petronas, the giant energy company behind a proposed $36-billion LNG operation near Prince Rupert, is wholly owned by the government of Malaysia.

The company provides 45-percent of Malaysia’s operating budget. Now the Malaysian prime minister is engulfed in a massive corruption scandal involving allegations of bribery.

“These are not people who need any gifts from B.C. taxpayers,” Brown said.

But Coleman called Petronas a “globally respected corporation” that’s not connected to the political scandal rocking the Malaysian government.

“He doesn’t know the companies,” Coleman said about Brown’s attacks. “He doesn’t know the business. He doesn’t know the work that’s been done in the two to three years it took to get to this point. He’s coming from an uninformed position.”

Still, Brown’s criticisms certainly don’t help Christy Clark sell her LNG deal to the public.

But the Liberals hope that if she can deliver an actual signed and sealed LNG plant before the next election, Brown’s assaults won’t matter anyway.