Thirteen years after B.C. politicians first started talking about it, actual liquefied natural gas was produced this week off the province’s north coast.
Once the cornerstone of former BC Liberal premier Christy Clark’s political agenda, the actual operation of LNG Canada in Kitimat officially began June 22 under BC NDP Premier David Eby.
“The potential of LNG is once in a generation,” Clark said in 2012.
She went on to infamously overplay the promise, suggesting the first of five facilities would be online by 2015 and the industry would go on to generate $1 trillion in GDP revenue to eventually eliminate the provincial debt. It didn’t happen.
The rationale, though, sounds familiar: To respond to global economic turmoil by diversifying B.C.’s trading partners and leaning into its natural resources advantages.
“B.C. has plenty of natural advantages, including abundant natural resources, and Canada's gateway to the fast-growing economies of Asia-Pacific, which is increasingly important,” Clark wrote in April 2013.
“My three main priorities are growing the economy, protecting the jobs families depend on, and securing a prosperous future for generations to come.”
Eby, once an LNG critic, has aggressively pursued natural resources and Asian trade markets after almost losing the last election. He has said it’s necessary to diversify trade in the wake of global uncertainty caused by U.S. tariff threats.
“This is a very significant project for our province,” Eby said Wednesday.
“It is an example of what we are focused on as a government, delivering for British Columbians clean reliable energy to power growth, fast tracking projects to get them done, and using the revenues from those projects to strengthen the services that families depend on.”
If you’d told the young, shaggy-haired David Eby who upset Clark in her riding in 2013 that he’d one day be quoting her almost verbatim in defence of an LNG plant, he’d probably have spit out his tofu at you.
Ah, but politics. It has a way of making people do and say strange things in pursuit of the almighty vote.
The real credit for LNG should probably go to the late John Horgan, who secured a final investment decision from the Shell-led LNG Canada consortium by offering more generous tax breaks in 2018, which will forgo $6 billion in government revenue over 40 years.
Horgan did that at great political risk, carefully navigating his minority government through a backlash from the BC Greens, whose support he needed to survive. At the time, Horgan said LNG could be made cleaner by using electricity from the Site C dam — another project started by the BC Liberals, pushed to completion by Horgan, and finessed past the Greens.
LNG Canada cost $40 billion to build, making it the largest and most expensive private project in Canadian history.
It’s the first large-scale LNG facility of its kind in Canada, and on its own will raise the nation’s GDP by 0.4 per cent.
Provincially, LNG Canada will employ more than 300 full-time workers and pump more than half a billion dollars annually into the provincial economy. It’s expected to export 14 million tonnes of supercooled B.C. natural gas to Asian markets this year, with the potential to double that in the future if the ownership group approves a Phase 2 expansion.
There’s two other LNG projects under construction, and two additional plants seriously proposed, meaning Clark’s promise of five facilities in B.C. may eventually come true.
Three premiers, Clark, Horgan and Eby — about as different as different can be — are all bound together by the LNG file. And all, eventually, singing from the same song sheet.
“Our government is focused on expanding and diversifying our access to the Asian markets and we are making significant capital investments to help get B.C goods to market,” one premier said in 2012, but you could just as easily attribute that to another in 2018 and a third in 2025.
Clark got LNG moving, Horgan got it over the finish line and Eby gets to reap the economic benefits.
Once dismissively derided as “a cloud of pixie dust” by the BC NDP, LNG may turn out to be just the political boon the Eby government desperately needs to kick-start an ailing provincial economy.
Rob Shaw has spent more than 17 years covering B.C. politics, now reporting for CHEK 蜜桃视频app and writing for The Orca/BIV. He is the co-author of the national bestselling book A Matter of Confidence, host of the weekly podcast Political Capital, and a regular guest on CBC Radio.
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