British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell’s dream of having an offshore oil and gas industry “up and running, environmentally sound and booming with job creation” by 2010 has been jolted back to reality.
Environmental and aboriginal opposition accompanied by threats of court action, a lack of enthusiasm among the leaseholders and a looming B.C. election have conspired to scuttle hopes of lifting a 33-year moratorium.
In addition, spokesman for Canada’s Industry Minister David Emerson, who represents a British Columbia constituency in the House of Commons, said the federal government has no current plans to end the exploration ban.
Regardless of the offshore’s potential riches, which some wild-eyed optimists have pushed as high as 19.4 billion barrels of oil and 489 trillion cubic feet of gas, the British Columbia government has been unable to generate a groundswell of public support for opening up the offshore region.
A federal public review panel, headed by former National Energy Board chairman Roland Priddle, said two months ago that 75 percent of the submissions it received opposed removing the moratorium.
Although the 75 percent figure had no scientific basis, former Newfoundland premier Brian Peckford, who works as a consultant on Vancouver Island, said it seemed “quite certain — there will be no real offshore activity for many, many years to come.
“The 75 percent of participants who favored keeping the moratorium means that the (Canadian and B.C.) governments will be hard pressed to do anything that contradicts the will of a substantial majority.”
Government lags opposition
He said the British Columbia government’s best strategy would be to start now to develop an employment strategy aimed at possible exploration, noting that it took 18 years from the time of discovery to bring Newfoundland’s offshore Hibernia oil field into production.
The panel finding infuriated B.C. Energy Minister Richard Neufeld who said it was “not a very good report … to be perfectly frank, it should have been slid into a shredder.”
But the British Columbia government is lagging behind its opposition in several areas.
It has yet to present a regulatory framework to show that exploration and development can occur safely and effectively.
Neither has it made any evident headway in resolving aboriginal land claims with the Haida of the Queen Charlotte area.
Now the Campbell government, facing a growing swell of opposition, goes to the polls in May unwilling to risk losing even more ground over the offshore, despite its argument that any kind of industrial activity in northwestern British Columbia will help a struggling economy.
Neufeld has indirectly conceded the election concerns. He said earlier this month that although the offshore issue will not be shelved, there is little prospect of preliminary exploration, such as seismic testing, taking place in Queen Charlotte basin before 2010.
