On Monday, Sept. 14, at the Vancouver Club, something happened at our Get It Done B.C. conference that people were still talking about after the microphones were turned off.
The panel was called From City Hall to Parliament Hill. Global BC’s Jason Pires was moderating. Onstage were Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West, B.C. Green leader Emily Lowan and Skeena-Bulkley Valley MP Ellis Ross.
And sitting in the audience was former premier Christy Clark.
This became relevant rather quickly.
Lowan, who is days away from turning 26, was making the case that British Columbia keeps recycling yesterday’s economic ideas – particularly LNG – rather than summoning the ambition to build a new green industrial economy.
Then she invoked the Clark years.
Christy Clark jumped to her feet.
Now we had a show.
It got better.
Sitting beside Lowan was Brad West, former United Steelworkers staffer, famously unburdened by an excessive desire to please everybody, who proceeded to do something that a younger Brad West might have considered medically impossible.
He defended Christy Clark.
“If you told a younger Brad West that he would be on stage defending Christy Clark…”
The room got the joke.
But West was serious.
He argued that Clark deserved credit for her “vision and tenacity” on LNG and suggested the finest evidence for her position could be found in the government that succeeded her.
“Something happens when you go from opposition to government,” he said. “You have to be based in the real world.”
And then, because this was Brad West:
“You’re not afforded the ability to live in la la land anymore.”
Watching West and Lowan go at it, something else occurred to me.
Brad was born in 1985. He is 41.
Emily is about to turn 26.
I come from the ragged tail end of the baby boom.
From where I sit, these are both young people.
So forget the comfortable story in which old resource-development dinosaurs defend the economy they created while an enlightened new generation demands something different.
That wasn’t what was happening on our stage.
This was the younger generation arguing with itself.
And the argument was about prosperity.
Lowan’s basic questions are good ones.
Who owns British Columbia’s resources?
Who benefits?
Who carries the costs?
How much value stays here?
Are we putting too much faith in industries whose best years may eventually be behind them and too little effort into creating the industries that come next?
She summed up her position with a terrific line:
“I’m not a no person. I just don’t like what you’re proposing.”
Every project developer in British Columbia may wish to have that embroidered on a cushion.
Still, fair enough.
A province should interrogate its economic assumptions.
It should worry about ownership, environmental effects and whether communities receive an adequate share of the value generated around them.
It should also be looking relentlessly for the next great industry.
The trouble came when Lowan reached for evidence.
Take groceries.
Asked about her use of the word “oligarch,” she pointed to Jim Pattison and argued that after decades of acquisitions “the vast majority of our food supply is controlled by one individual and one corporation.”
Jim Pattison is unquestionably a very large businessman.
He owns a lot of grocery stores.
But the vast majority of British Columbia’s food supply?
Really?
Loblaw exists. Sobeys exists. Walmart exists. Costco exists. Independents exist.
Pattison is a major competitor in a concentrated grocery business. That is quite different from saying one man controls the vast majority of what British Columbians eat.
Then there was geothermal.
Lowan offered it as one of the “critical planks” of the green industrial strategy British Columbia should be pursuing.
I like geothermal.
Lots of people like geothermal.
British Columbians have liked geothermal so much that determined developers, governments and geoscientists have been trying for decades to turn our underground heat into commercial electricity.
The current score is: zero operating geothermal power plants in British Columbia.
That does not mean geothermal will never work here. The Tu Deh-Kah project near Fort Nelson may yet become the first, and I hope it does.
But there is an important distinction between an attractive technology and an industry capable of carrying a meaningful share of a provincial economy.
Then came Kitimat.
Lowan told the room that the community had experienced “156 times the asthma rate” of other parts of the Northern Health region and connected the problem to LNG Canada’s flaring.
That is an extraordinary claim.
Extraordinary claims need unusually good evidence.
I have not found it.
There have certainly been complaints about flaring in Kitimat, and those concerns should be investigated rather than waved away. But the larger point remains: if you are going to make a dramatic health claim from a conference stage, the evidentiary standard has to be correspondingly high.
There is a pattern here that matters.
Lowan is asking questions that deserve serious answers.
But if you are going to overturn the economic model of a province, the standard of evidence cannot become more relaxed simply because the proposed replacement is greener.
That was where Brad West kept dragging the conversation.
Back to the stubbornly tangible.
Jobs.
Wages.
Mortgages.
Families.
West talked about the men and women he knew through the United Steelworkers and what a well-paid resource job actually meant in somebody’s life: benefits, pensions, security and the dignity of being able to support a family.
Then he confronted one of the favourite words of modern public policy: transition.
We are forever going to “transition” workers.
Fine.
West had three questions.
Where are the jobs?
What do they do?
What do they pay?
There it is.
The Brad West Test.
It is wonderfully unsophisticated.
No modelling assumptions. No 47-page strategy. No coloured arrows pointing toward 2050.
Show me the job.
Tell me where it is.
Tell me what it pays.
That is not hostility toward the future.
It is a demand that the future submit to evidence.
And the test should apply equally to everything.
LNG should have to pass it.
Mining should have to pass it.
Forestry should have to pass it.
Solar should have to pass it.
Geothermal should have to pass it.
Whatever comes next should have to pass it.
How much capital is committed?
When does construction begin?
How many people will actually work there?
What will they earn?
Who buys the product?
How much public subsidy is required?
How much value stays in British Columbia?
What are the genuine environmental and community costs?
And does the proposition survive contact with reality after the press release has been folded up and put away?
This is why I hesitate to describe what happened at the Vancouver Club as a left-right argument.
It was more useful than that.
Lowan was asking whether we are building the right future.
West was asking whether the future being promised can actually be built.
At 25, Lowan is articulating ideas that could be highly influential when her generation begins occupying most of the important desks in this province.
At 41, West is hardly Methuselah himself. Yet he sounds almost old-fashioned when he talks about wages, industrial land, investment and the indignity of telling somebody who has lost a good job not to worry because another one will eventually materialize.
To this boomer, they both belong to the younger generation.
And I found their disagreement strangely encouraging.
Because this is the argument their generation ought to be having.
Not development versus no development.
Not environment versus economy.
Not yesterday versus tomorrow.
The harder question is what kind of prosperity can actually withstand scrutiny.
Lowan is right about one thing that shouldn’t be controversial: past success does not entitle any industry to permanent protection from competition, technology or changing markets.
West is right about something equally important: calling something “the economy of the future” does not cause the economy of the future to spring into existence.
Eventually somebody has to invest.
Somebody has to get a permit.
Somebody has to build something.
Somebody has to buy what comes out the other end.
And somebody has to collect a paycheque.
Which brings us back to Christy Clark.
Lowan invoked her as the embodiment of an economic strategy B.C. should be moving beyond.
West, to his own apparent amusement, defended her.
And Clark herself was right there in the Vancouver Club to leap to her feet and join the moment.
A former premier, a 41-year-old mayor and a soon-to-be-26-year-old party leader, all colliding over what sort of province British Columbia is going to become.
You couldn’t have scripted it much better.
And for someone from my generation, there was something rather enjoyable about watching the next ones fight it out.
My only suggestion is that everybody bring their evidence.
The future is too important to build on vibes.
Stewart Muir is the president and CEO of Resource Works.
Resource Works News
The Brad West test
On Monday, Sept. 14, at the Vancouver Club, something happened at our Get It Done B.C. conference that people were still talking about after the microphones were turned off.
The panel was called From City Hall to Parliament Hill. Global BC’s Jason Pires was moderating. Onstage were Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West, B.C. Green leader Emily Lowan and Skeena-Bulkley Valley MP Ellis Ross.
And sitting in the audience was former premier Christy Clark.
This became relevant rather quickly.
Lowan, who is days away from turning 26, was making the case that British Columbia keeps recycling yesterday’s economic ideas – particularly LNG – rather than summoning the ambition to build a new green industrial economy.
Then she invoked the Clark years.
Christy Clark jumped to her feet.
Now we had a show.
It got better.
Sitting beside Lowan was Brad West, former United Steelworkers staffer, famously unburdened by an excessive desire to please everybody, who proceeded to do something that a younger Brad West might have considered medically impossible.
He defended Christy Clark.
“If you told a younger Brad West that he would be on stage defending Christy Clark…”
The room got the joke.
But West was serious.
He argued that Clark deserved credit for her “vision and tenacity” on LNG and suggested the finest evidence for her position could be found in the government that succeeded her.
“Something happens when you go from opposition to government,” he said. “You have to be based in the real world.”
And then, because this was Brad West:
“You’re not afforded the ability to live in la la land anymore.”
Watching West and Lowan go at it, something else occurred to me.
Brad was born in 1985. He is 41.
Emily is about to turn 26.
I come from the ragged tail end of the baby boom.
From where I sit, these are both young people.
So forget the comfortable story in which old resource-development dinosaurs defend the economy they created while an enlightened new generation demands something different.
That wasn’t what was happening on our stage.
This was the younger generation arguing with itself.
And the argument was about prosperity.
Lowan’s basic questions are good ones.
Who owns British Columbia’s resources?
Who benefits?
Who carries the costs?
How much value stays here?
Are we putting too much faith in industries whose best years may eventually be behind them and too little effort into creating the industries that come next?
She summed up her position with a terrific line:
“I’m not a no person. I just don’t like what you’re proposing.”
Every project developer in British Columbia may wish to have that embroidered on a cushion.
Still, fair enough.
A province should interrogate its economic assumptions.
It should worry about ownership, environmental effects and whether communities receive an adequate share of the value generated around them.
It should also be looking relentlessly for the next great industry.
The trouble came when Lowan reached for evidence.
Take groceries.
Asked about her use of the word “oligarch,” she pointed to Jim Pattison and argued that after decades of acquisitions “the vast majority of our food supply is controlled by one individual and one corporation.”
Jim Pattison is unquestionably a very large businessman.
He owns a lot of grocery stores.
But the vast majority of British Columbia’s food supply?
Really?
Loblaw exists. Sobeys exists. Walmart exists. Costco exists. Independents exist.
Pattison is a major competitor in a concentrated grocery business. That is quite different from saying one man controls the vast majority of what British Columbians eat.
Then there was geothermal.
Lowan offered it as one of the “critical planks” of the green industrial strategy British Columbia should be pursuing.
I like geothermal.
Lots of people like geothermal.
British Columbians have liked geothermal so much that determined developers, governments and geoscientists have been trying for decades to turn our underground heat into commercial electricity.
The current score is: zero operating geothermal power plants in British Columbia.
That does not mean geothermal will never work here. The Tu Deh-Kah project near Fort Nelson may yet become the first, and I hope it does.
But there is an important distinction between an attractive technology and an industry capable of carrying a meaningful share of a provincial economy.
Then came Kitimat.
Lowan told the room that the community had experienced “156 times the asthma rate” of other parts of the Northern Health region and connected the problem to LNG Canada’s flaring.
That is an extraordinary claim.
Extraordinary claims need unusually good evidence.
I have not found it.
There have certainly been complaints about flaring in Kitimat, and those concerns should be investigated rather than waved away. But the larger point remains: if you are going to make a dramatic health claim from a conference stage, the evidentiary standard has to be correspondingly high.
There is a pattern here that matters.
Lowan is asking questions that deserve serious answers.
But if you are going to overturn the economic model of a province, the standard of evidence cannot become more relaxed simply because the proposed replacement is greener.
That was where Brad West kept dragging the conversation.
Back to the stubbornly tangible.
Jobs.
Wages.
Mortgages.
Families.
West talked about the men and women he knew through the United Steelworkers and what a well-paid resource job actually meant in somebody’s life: benefits, pensions, security and the dignity of being able to support a family.
Then he confronted one of the favourite words of modern public policy: transition.
We are forever going to “transition” workers.
Fine.
West had three questions.
Where are the jobs?
What do they do?
What do they pay?
There it is.
The Brad West Test.
It is wonderfully unsophisticated.
No modelling assumptions. No 47-page strategy. No coloured arrows pointing toward 2050.
Show me the job.
Tell me where it is.
Tell me what it pays.
That is not hostility toward the future.
It is a demand that the future submit to evidence.
And the test should apply equally to everything.
LNG should have to pass it.
Mining should have to pass it.
Forestry should have to pass it.
Solar should have to pass it.
Geothermal should have to pass it.
Whatever comes next should have to pass it.
How much capital is committed?
When does construction begin?
How many people will actually work there?
What will they earn?
Who buys the product?
How much public subsidy is required?
How much value stays in British Columbia?
What are the genuine environmental and community costs?
And does the proposition survive contact with reality after the press release has been folded up and put away?
This is why I hesitate to describe what happened at the Vancouver Club as a left-right argument.
It was more useful than that.
Lowan was asking whether we are building the right future.
West was asking whether the future being promised can actually be built.
At 25, Lowan is articulating ideas that could be highly influential when her generation begins occupying most of the important desks in this province.
At 41, West is hardly Methuselah himself. Yet he sounds almost old-fashioned when he talks about wages, industrial land, investment and the indignity of telling somebody who has lost a good job not to worry because another one will eventually materialize.
To this boomer, they both belong to the younger generation.
And I found their disagreement strangely encouraging.
Because this is the argument their generation ought to be having.
Not development versus no development.
Not environment versus economy.
Not yesterday versus tomorrow.
The harder question is what kind of prosperity can actually withstand scrutiny.
Lowan is right about one thing that shouldn’t be controversial: past success does not entitle any industry to permanent protection from competition, technology or changing markets.
West is right about something equally important: calling something “the economy of the future” does not cause the economy of the future to spring into existence.
Eventually somebody has to invest.
Somebody has to get a permit.
Somebody has to build something.
Somebody has to buy what comes out the other end.
And somebody has to collect a paycheque.
Which brings us back to Christy Clark.
Lowan invoked her as the embodiment of an economic strategy B.C. should be moving beyond.
West, to his own apparent amusement, defended her.
And Clark herself was right there in the Vancouver Club to leap to her feet and join the moment.
A former premier, a 41-year-old mayor and a soon-to-be-26-year-old party leader, all colliding over what sort of province British Columbia is going to become.
You couldn’t have scripted it much better.
And for someone from my generation, there was something rather enjoyable about watching the next ones fight it out.
My only suggestion is that everybody bring their evidence.
The future is too important to build on vibes.
Stewart Muir is the president and CEO of Resource Works.
Resource Works News
Get the latest news with the Resource Works newsletter.
Shaping the Peace: Balancing Energy, Environment, and Equity in Northeast BC's Peace River Region
Help Us Get Things Done
Related News
What British Columbia’s budget tells us about resources and Reconciliation
Forestry infographics
Richard Prokopanko: a call for accurate information on natural resources