Chris Sankey remembers the silence that followed the noise. As a former elected councillor for the Lax Kw’alaams Band, he watched the promised liquefied natural gas (LNG) boom vanish. It was a movie he had seen before, and the ending remained just as bitter. Sankey, now a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, has spent his career bridging the gap between industry and Indigenous communities. He knows that when projects fail, the cost is measured in more than just lost revenue.
A familiar pattern of loss
For many Northern and Indigenous communities, economic cycles feel less like a curve and more like a cliff. When the LNG projects stalled, the exodus began. Sankey noted the haunting similarity to previous industrial closures that scarred the region.
“It kind of reminded me of when the mill shut down,” Sankey said. The departure of major industry acts as a vacuum. It does not just remove jobs; it removes the reason for a town to exist. When the primary engine stops, the secondary gears seize up almost instantly. As an entrepreneur who built the Blackfish Group of Companies from the ground up, Sankey understands that stability is the foundation of community health.
The vanishing middle class
The tragedy of a failed boom is rarely limited to the site workers. When the opportunity evaporated, the local ecosystem collapsed. Small businesses that had scaled up to meet the demand found themselves with debt and no customers.
“When the LNG opportunity went away, so did lots of companies,” Sankey observed. Some businesses declared bankruptcy. Others simply locked their doors and moved south. This loss of local capacity creates a hole that is incredibly difficult to fill. Experience and local knowledge disappear in a single moving van. For Sankey, this isn’t just business; it’s a battle against the poverty he witnessed firsthand growing up on B.C.’s coast.
Beyond the balance sheet
The most profound impact of industrial flight is the “quiet” loss of essential services. A pipeliner or a welder rarely moves alone. They move with their families, taking a second set of skills with them.
Sankey pointed out that the loss ripples through schools and hospitals. “You lose that capacity… their wife could be a nurse or a teacher or a police officer,” he said. When a family packs up, the community loses a hockey coach, a healthcare provider, and a taxpayer. The social fabric thins out until it finally tears.
The true cost of delay
Economic development is often discussed in terms of GDP or provincial revenue. However, for those on the ground, it is about stability. Every stalled project represents more than lost profit. It represents a family that stayed together or a local school that kept its doors open.
“The impacts of what happened, you could see it come right down,” Sankey noted. He saw the decline in real-time. The empty storefronts and thinning classroom rosters are the true legacy of missed opportunities. For Northern communities, the cost of “no” is often measured in people, not just dollars. Economic reconciliation, in Sankey’s eyes, is the only path toward communal prosperity.
Ian Biana writes for the Resource Works Accelerate team and can be reached at [email protected].
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