Fort St. John was exactly the right place for this conversation.
On April 21, Stewart Muir, president and chief executive of Resource Works, delivered the closing keynote at the Creating Energy Conference, hosted by the Fort St. John and District Chamber of Commerce at the Pomeroy Hotel and Conference Centre. The session was called Shaping the Peace, and built on the Resource Works report of the same name.
The case for the Northeast
The argument at its core was blunt: the South Coast writes the policy, the Northeast pays the bill. Northeast BC makes up only one per cent of BC’s population, yet produces 93 per cent of the province’s natural gas and over 30 per cent of its hydroelectric power.
The Montney alone holds 449 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas — 145 years of domestic supply, and the fuel behind Canada’s entire Pacific LNG strategy. Natural resources and related processing anchor roughly 45 per cent of BC’s international export base. Without a fortified resource sector, the math of the provincial economy simply fails.
The backbone of British Columbia
The Shaping the Peace report is the backbone of that talk. That is an extraordinary contribution — and one that rarely gets its due in policy discussions further south.
Muir has said that “without the Peace Region, there is no credible path to a low-carbon, high-prosperity future for British Columbia. Producer regions carry the heaviest burdens; they deserve policies that match their contribution.”
Muir walked the audience through the invisible connection between hinterland royalties and urban standards of living — including a $13.3-billion provincial deficit that signals a squandered advantage. He addressed the shift from Indigenous consultation to equity ownership, pointing to projects like Cedar LNG, Coastal GasLink and Red Chris as examples of what that looks like in practice. And he laid out the interdependent machine — critical minerals, clean hydroelectricity, natural gas — that global decarbonisation actually requires.
He closed on the worker at the centre: the driller in Fort St. John, the miner at Highland Valley, the faller in Quesnel, the tugboat operator at Kitimat. Policy decisions that eliminate these livelihoods without realistic alternatives, Muir argued, are not progressive. They are cruel.
Energy is not in transition. It is in demand.
Is your organisation interested in hearing our perspective? Drop us a line at [email protected].
Ian Biana writes for the Resource Works Accelerate team and can be reached at [email protected].
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