In the House
Doug responding to John Rustad’s Private Member’s Statement, “Investing in the North’
Thank you to my colleague from Nechako Lakes for introducing a very important topic for northern B.C. and for B.C. in general. I will get to his question about how we can work together. I do have a couple of suggestions about that.
Much of what the member talked about deals with non-renewable resources: the mining and natural gas sector — again, also on the forestry part, but minerals and oil and gas. We must begin to act like we own these resources, that we’re in the driver’s seat — we as the public — and that it’s the public resource, instead of acting like we have to give it away or get rid of it as quickly as we can. Investment is a key to this, but we are, to a certain degree, in the driver’s seat.
I want to talk a bit about inequality that has to do…. We have this great abundance of natural resources in the north, and yet the B.C. Statistics report just from last month talked about a growing inequality in Canada. B.C. was second only to Alberta in terms of income inequality among the provinces. B.C. had the highest income gap among the provinces in 2009 when comparing the lowest 20 percent of earners to the highest 20 percent. We have this amazing abundance of natural resource wealth, yet people in the north are experiencing more and more of an inequality gap.
We know it’s not just about economic justice. Issues of economic justice are linked to social justice and environmental justice. We need investment in the north. I think the member has done a good job of pointing that out.
We’re losing out on opportunities, though, and a couple of areas that we need to do some more work on are in First Nations consultation, especially…. It’s not just me saying this. The vice-president, Byng Giraud, of Imperial Metals pointed this out — that there needs to be a better framework around First Nations consultation so that there’s more certainty around the investment atmosphere.
As well, we need to do a better job of environmental assessment robustness. There’s a lack of public confidence in the environmental assessment process. That’s a result of topics like Prosperity mine, where we had two different processes showing two different results. The provincial process approved the mine. The federal process, which was able to consider more facts, said that it wasn’t in the best interests to have that mine go forward. We’re talking about efficiencies in environmental assessment processes. We’re all for efficiencies, but cutting corners will only lead to unnecessary delays.
I want to also talk about social justice. The Ombudsman’s report pointed out the inadequacies of reinvestment in the seniors health care system — some horrific stories there about our care in the north compared to other parts of the province.
In training — I know the member opposite was in favour and was part of the Finance Committee report recommending an engineering school for UNBC, and we haven’t seen anything on that — if we want to see the benefits accrue, mostly to the people in the north, of this great development that’s at our doorstep, then we have to put training into institutions like Northwest Community College’s School of Exploration and Mining, which subsists on a year-to-year basis with no core funding, or in their trades program, which received a cut this year.
We don’t want to see the fly-in, fly-out. I know the member on the opposite side does not want to see that kind of scenario in the northwest, where the people taking the jobs come in from elsewhere and the locals don’t have the best opportunity to acquire those jobs.
I’d like to finish off by talking about reinvestment. David Baxter, the economist with the Urban Futures Institute, talked about 70 percent of the new income in this province generated from non-urban areas. That’s the kind of notion that we need to embrace and say: we need a bit more reinvestment in our communities depending on that income generated by these resources.
Greg Halseth, a professor at UNBC, talks about the investment bank and that if you keep withdrawing and withdrawing, the bank will go broke. These are communities that he is talking about in the north. We need to reinvest in those communities. Resource revenue-sharing might be an avenue to do that. There are other mechanisms as well.
Finally, we had the Auditor General’s report on forestry last week saying that reforestation is not keeping up with the growing inventory of land in the need of restocking. When we look at that, we say: the future is bright, but we don’t want to be left behind again.
The people of the north do not want to be left behind again. An example of that is in the forestry sector and how we got left behind when all of the revenues that flowed out of the north were not properly reinvested in the last 11 years back into the north. Again, it’s a matter of focus and a matter of investment. Thank you very much for allowing me to respond to the member opposite in this debate.