"There is no shortage of low-paid jobs. It's the well-paying sectors like natural resources, agricultural products, and manufacturing that are declining"

I hope you won't mind the change, in fact I am sure you won't.  In the coming months leading up to the provincial general election next May, I am opening up the Conservative Thoughts blog to my friends who like me are small 'c' conservatives with a social conscience.

 

Scott Anderson, BC Conservative
candidate for Vernon - Monashee

Today I am delighted to present the talk given by Vernon - Monashee BC Conservative candidate Scott Anderson -- this was to party members in Kamloops at a function they held a week and a half ago.

Will Rogers once said that if even 10% of what politicians promised came true, none of us would want to go to Heaven because it would be too much fun here.  What he meant of course is that politicians have a reputation for telling people what they want to hear instead of telling them the truth.

Looking at British Columbian politics today we can see why politicians have such a bad reputations. 

I'm going to use the Northern Gateway pipeline as an example, but I'd like each of you to think of it as representative of something much bigger - the way we do business in this province. 

Christy Clark has been blowing hot and cold about the pipeline depending on which group is making the most noise, and Liberal MLAs have been running around like headless chickens trying to figure out what direction Clark is going in each day.  The latest news is that Clark is refusing to even meet with pipeline officials, but tomorrow she may be having tea with them! 

The NDP, for its part, is against the pipeline but won't come out and say it - instead they are going to bury it in red tape with yet another redundant  "environmental review." As you know, the federal government is conducting a months-long, multimillion dollar environmental review.  But the NDP's second review will ask the same questions, get the same answers, cost millions of our dollars, and it's all just for show because they've already said they're against the pipeline.

What the two parties have in common is that neither one is being upfront with us. 

The BC Conservatives aim to change that way of doing business.  We WILL tell you where we stand.  If everything we know so far holds true, we ARE for the pipeline.  If there truly are 4,100 person-years of direct on-site work, and a total of 35,000 person-years of work throughout the province, then - with the proper environmental controls in place - we would be fools NOT to go ahead with the pipeline. 

Let's talk about economic realities in Canada for a moment.  The Canadian Energy Research Institute estimates that there the oil sands will generate $2.1 trillion in economic benefits over the next 25 years and about 905,000 jobs by 2035.

Here's what Marc Joiner, a partner at Deloitte has to say about the oil sands:

 “The oil sands are going to be the economic engine for the country for the foreseeable future, for the next 25 to 30 years, and it is akin to the impact of building the national railway in the 1880s."

What does this have to do with BC?  Well, there's a catch.  The International Energy Agency recently estimated that the United States would be the world's biggest oil producer by 2017.  Even right now there's an oil supply glut in the US, which is one reason Canadian oil is getting almost $30 less per barrel than world prices for its oil in the US.

That means we need new markets for our oil.  Those new markets are in Asia.  That's reality. 

So let's not kid ourselves - after all is said and done, there will be a pipeline.  If it's not in BC, it'll be in the Yukon, where the Premier has already said he'll support it, or in the northern US.  We can either say yes to the economic benefits or we can let someone else benefit.

I want those benefits to come to BC.

We have to stop saying no to economic growth and start saying yes to carefully managed projects that will bring highly paid, highly skilled jobs back to BC. 

Now what about environmental concerns?  To hear some people talk about it, the Northern Gateway Pipeline is like a giant garden hose just waiting to spew bitumen all over the landscape. 

There are over 700,000 thousand kilometers of pipeline in Canada today, and of them all, the Northern Gateway pipeline has the distinction of being the most modern, most scrutinized, most environmentally regulated pipeline in the history of this nation. 

It has layers of fail-safes built in, including pressure monitoring, isolation valves that shut automatically, and even permanent human monitoring.  The initial application to the National Energy Board is 20,000 pages long and involves over a decade of detailed and exhaustive study covering engineering, and environmental assessments.  There is nothing slipshod or unstudied about this pipeline. 

But as a party that holds the environment as one of its top priorities, even that's not enough.  We will insist on extremely stringent environmental guidelines, and strictly enforce them.

So will the pipeline destroy northern BC?  Is it a disaster just waiting to happen?  Of course not.  If I had a wall map of BC here on the wall, and I took a human hair and stretched it across the map from left to right, that's the physical footprint we're talking about.  That doesn't mean we can thread it between the trees and leave no footprint of any kind, but with careful stewardship we can minimize the damage we cause.

And it's important to understand something else.  All talk of so-called "green jobs" aside, Asia is going to get its oil from somewhere.  If not from here, it will get it from Africa or the Middle East where there are no environmental controls at all.  So people who are concerned about the earth's environment should thank their lucky stars that Canada - with our strict environmental controls - is destined to become one of the world's leading producers of energy.

But just because the Northern Gateway pipeline isn't going to destroy the north, does that mean it's a good idea?

After all, the pipeline is not going to solve all of BC's economic problems by itself.  While it will bring hundreds of jobs to BC, by itself it's no cure for our jobs problem.

But it is a start.  It's a start to the kind of economic develop we need in this province. 

A recent report - Hungercount 2012 by Food Banks Canada, points out that food bank use in BC is up over 23% since 2008.  Much more worrying is the fact that most of that increase is by middle class families - not just the homeless and drug users.

That's not just a jobs problem - that's a social problem.

I was talking to a restaurant owner in Vernon a few days ago and he told me that many of his regular customers would live here and work in Alberta.  He said that started changing about 6 months ago when they began to pick up and move to Alberta. Now he says that about one family a week is moving away.  They're gone and they won't be back.

That was in Vernon, but I know you have the same issues here.  How many here know of people who have moved to Alberta or are planning to in the near future?  And this is not just an abstract to me either.  My own 25 year old son is moving to Alberta after seven years of trying desperately to find a decent paying job here. 

Take a walk around the downtown core and count the empty storefronts.  We have a serious problem here in the Interior.  This province is being hollowed out.  When Premier Clark announced her Jobs Plan last fall unemployment was at 6.7%, but in May it hit 7.4%, and now it's worse.  The lion's share of that unemployment is right here in the Interior.

Food Banks Canada identified the problem:

"There is no shortage of low-paid jobs. It's the well-paying sectors like natural resources, agricultural products, and manufacturing that are declining."

Now, what are the other parties solutions?  Vague references to green jobs and more skills training.  Recently Carol James of the NDP said in an editorial that the NDP's poverty reduction plan involves affordable housing, education, and skills training.  Skills training is important, of course, but it's only part of the answer.

My local Liberal MLA pointed at increasing the minimum wage as a step toward solving the problem. 

Those solutions are not poverty reduction at all - They simply make poverty slightly more bearable. 

That's not the answer.

What's missing from these plans?  Actual high paying jobs.  You can have all the training in the world, but without a job, what good is it?  My daughter wants to be an astronaut.  She's got the grades and the drive and the ambition to do it too.  But she can go to school for 400 years and earn 50 doctorates, but without an astronaut job available, it won't do her a whit of good.

Yes we need education.  Yes we need skills training.  Yes we need to help the poor.  But let's not build our vision around poverty. 

Let's build it around a strong economy and high paying jobs.

The Northern Gateway Project won't save our economy single-handedly, but represent a change in the way we've been looking at our economy.

We have the potential of a great economic future for our kids.  The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development recently pegged Canada among the world’s leading economic lights over the next 50 years - in large part because of our natural resources.

I believe we have to stop looking at resource development as a bad thing and start looking at it as a necessary thing.  Yes there are challenges, but we should start looking at them as challenges to be solved rather than reasons not to try.    That's something we always tell our kids when they say "I can't."  There's a difference between something that's hard to do and something that's impossible.  Let's start to adopt that

It's time to stop saying no to economic growth and start saying yes to carefully managed projects that will bring highly paid, highly skilled jobs back to BC.

We have to stop dreaming of magical jobs conjured up by tax-and-spend parties because they sound great at election time but never seem to appear.  We have to stop strangling development in red tape and alarmist rhetoric.  We have to start thinking outside the box and start moving forward into the 21st century. 

The British Columbia Conservatives are the party of realistic change.  We'll bring integrity back into politics, we'll bring common sense back into politics, and we'll bring economic growth back to BC so our kids don't have to leave the province to find work.  We need to move forward, not backwards, we need to embrace change, not hide from it.

With your help, that's exactly what we're going to do.

Again ... the words of Vernon - Monashee BC Conservative party candidate Scott Anderson.  As always now, the floor is open to you.