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.
