Premier mends fences with business

Call it Premier John Horgan’s first damage-control tour.

With his agriculture minister taking fire in Victoria for sending a threatening letter to a Vancouver Island salmon farm, Horgan headed north last weekend to prove he’s not against rural resource projects.

First he went to Kitimat, where he visited Rio Tinto’s $4.8-billion aluminum smelter upgrade.

“It’s a truly spectacular outcome,” Horgan gushed. “It’s a foundational industry in Kitimat that’s going to keep that city thriving.”

It doesn’t hurt that the smelter is a union project built by workers represented by unions allied with the NDP. He also met with representatives of two proposed liquefied natural-gas projects: Kitimat LNG and LNG Canada.

“They are still very actively looking to final investment decisions,” Horgan said, noting the LNG projects are supported by local First Nations. “The Haisla Nation leadership could not speak highly enough of both proponents of those two LNG facilities.”

Wait a minute! Is this the same John Horgan who heaped scorn on ex-premier Christy Clark for pursuing a “fantasy” LNG industry? Now, here he is beating the LNG drum himself.

Horgan also visited a propane export terminal under construction in Prince Rupert, another conspicuous show of support for a big fossil fuel project.

Horgan’s message: His new NDP government isn’t opposed to every big natural-resource project in the province, even though he’s gone to court to fight the Kinder Morgan oil pipeline and is threatening to scrap the Liberals’ Site C dam.

All of this is in response to the Liberals’ relentless attacks on the NDP as enemies of business, especially in the province’s resource-dependent rural regions.

It also comes as Agriculture Minister Lana Popham faced another day of sustained attacks in the legislature for her handling of the controversial fish-farming file. Popham has been on the hot seat after sending a letter to a Vancouver Island salmon farm threatening to cancel its operating tenure. The farm is opposed by First Nations activists.

Popham then gave a series of confusing answers about a review of a fish farming research lab in her own ministry. The lab has also been targeted by environmentalists opposed to fish farming.

Horgan, who has now called in his own deputy minister to take over the review, accused the Liberals of blowing the whole thing out of proportion.

“The official Opposition has blown it up like an atomic bomb,” he said.

But Horgan also knows the damaging Popham controversy just reinforces the notion that his government is hostile to resource industries. Watch for him to make more conspicuous visits to big industrial projects.

But damage-control photo-ops at projects approved earlier by the Liberals are one thing. Getting new projects approved on his own watch would be more reassuring to a business sector nervously watching this new government.