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Campbell cruises to victory in B.C. election
Gary Park For Petroleum News
For a solid month, the refrain from Gordon Campbell was unchanged.
“Ask yourself: Who is best able to lead us through troubled economic times?” said the premier of British Columbia.
The voters of the province, or the 41 percent who bothered to cast ballots May 12, apparently bought the message.
In what is described as the “status quo” election, Campbell’s Liberals are expected to occupy 49 of 85 seats in the provincial legislature and the New Democratic Party under leader Carole James will claim the balance of 36, almost a mirror image of the 2005 results.
Campbell, whose theme also hammered at James’s lack of business experience, clearly persuaded voters that he was best suited to pilot British Columbia through whatever storms lie ahead.
As a result, he became the first premier in 26 years to win three straight elections and will now lead British Columbia into the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver.
But any thoughts of reveling in the international spotlight will be secondary to the economic battles of trying to save — forget about turning around — a forestry industry, where thousands of jobs are disappearing in a wave of mill closures.
With the province’s economic mainstays (forests, mines and fisheries) in such trouble Campbell desperately needs the energy industry, despite criticism from some that his government has offered too many incentives to the industry.
Mandate for carbon tax The win also gives him a mandate to push ahead with his carbon tax on transportation and home heating fuels, which the NDP had pledged to eliminate, viewing the levy as an unfair penalty on more remote rural areas.
The Liberals also managed to fend off attacks on energy policies that have been portrayed as a sellout of publicly owned rivers and creeks to operators of private-sector electricity generation.
They rejected the NDP demand for a moratorium on Independent Power Projects, which BC Hydro has estimated could result in 1,144 micro-hydro projects on small streams around the province — a target some view as wildly ambitious, given that only 47 IPPs exist today.
Some citizens’ groups will continue their efforts to make a case that IPP power costs are substantially higher than if government-owned BC Hydro were to develop new generation, making a case that the profits will be widely dispersed to shareholders outside British Columbia.
Gas policies won’t change
What almost certainly won’t change are the policies for development of northeastern British Columbia’s shale and tight gas plays, which analysts suggest could see the province overtake Alberta within 10 years as Canada’s leading gas-producing province.
The election campaign failed to stir any debate over environmentally related petroleum issues, such as the prospect of tankers carrying crude oil from the port of Kitimat to Asia and the Lower 48 states, or the mothballed plans to explore and develop offshore oil and gas resources, or the future of pipeline projects across First Nations’ and ecologically sensitive lands. l
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