This very long piece is the last of a four-part series on B.C.’s climate action plan. Part One addressed B.C.’s GHG reduction targets. Part Two addressed how that plan is at risk of being co-opted by Big Oil. Part Three took a closer look at the B.C. Climate Leadership Team’s recommendations for the carbon tax. This analysis explores how the oil and gas industry, and especially the LNG industry, might financially benefit from hidden subsidies recommended by that advisory body.

Like so many other governments around the world, British Columbia’s Liberal government led by Premier Christy Clark has been duped by the barons of Big Oil.

Beguiled by the petroleum industry’s promises of new investment and jobs, the Clark government has repeatedly proved itself a patsy in acceding to the LNG industry’s every demand.

In the process, it has subjugated B.C.’s global-leading 2008 climate action plan to its misguided vision for the unchecked exploitation of non-renewable natural gas.

It has broken its own law, in failing to meet B.C.’s legislated targets for provincial greenhouse gas reductions.

And it has tugged its forelock, at every turn, to meet each new industry demand for special treatment and locked-in subsidies and tax concessions that are fully underwritten by B.C. taxpayers.

This analysis explores how that taxpayer-subsidized boon to Big Oil stands to be further entrenched under the recommendations for updating B.C.’s climate action plan last fall by the government’s handpicked Climate Leadership Team (CLT).

The Ludicrous Foundation of B.C.’s Climate Avoidance Plan 

As I have explained in previous installments, B.C.’s greenhouse gas reduction plan is woefully off-track. The CLT has suggested a plan to help remedy that situation, mainly through a long-term commitment to a 12-fold increase in B.C.’s carbon tax.

Several other recommended measures that I address below are largely aimed at subsidizing B.C.’s worst carbon polluters, to help them offset the added carbon emissions they hope to impose upon B.C. in the name of economic development.

Underlying that project is the Clark government’s abiding obsession with LNG as B.C.’s principal driver of new resource development.

It intends to further aggravate B.C.’s GHG emissions challenges with a forthcoming climate “action” plan — more accurately, a climate action avoidance plan — that is sure to be tailor-made for the province’s largest industrial polluters.

Whenever that plan is released, it will be grounded in a vision for a massive expansion in fossil fuel development.

More drilling rigs and roads. More scars on our land base. More fracking and seismic instability. More water waste and groundwater poisoning. More pipelines. More energy burned in B.C. to produce still more non-renewable energy destined to be burned in far-flung places. And many, many times more greenhouse gas emissions.

All to “liberate” the “dream” of building plants on B.C.’s Pacific coast that will liquefy natural gas by chilling it to -160°C and ship it halfway around the world to China and other countries.

All in a rush to profit from that product that other countries are now struggling to sell because there is already far too much of it on the market.

It is to be a climate action plan aimed at largely undoing the anticipated damage from a new LNG industry that may never ultimately materialize in British Columbia, ironically, because it is so demonstrably unnecessary — a victim of its own global rapacity and redundancy.

It is an industry that is struggling to cope with the falling price of a product it wants to wish upon our choking world.

A product that has been devalued by the global glut of LNG that it has created from overproduction and from the world’s suddenly serious attempts to reduce its dependency on fossil fuels.

A product that at least one study from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives shows will be devastating for B.C.’s environment and may well increase global GHG emissions over at least the next fifty years, compared to even building state-of-the-art coal plants.

Indeed, it is an industry that should have no future in B.C. if we are truly concerned about shifting to a low-carbon economy, about mitigating avoidable greenhouse gas emissions, and about seriously combating global warming.

That should be the central, unwavering message from British Columbia’s environmental community and from all those who should know better.

Which makes it all the harder to fathom why the environmentalists and academics who served on the CLT ever agreed to embrace a climate action plan that is innately dedicated to advancing the Premier’s LNG vision and to offsetting its negative impacts largely at taxpayers’ expense.

Accepting that vision for increased carbon emissions as the starting point for renewed climate action plan will make it even more challenging and more costly to meet British Columbia’s legislated GHG reduction targets.

This is the fundamental point that compromised the CLT’s mandate and mission, which it failed to articulate and which must be soundly rejected.

The most rational response to any problem is to first address it by doing less of the thing that is the problem, not the opposite.

You wouldn’t council a drug addict to take even more drugs as a way to kick their habit.

You wouldn’t advise a person mired in debt to max out their credit cards and to apply for new ones as a path to reducing their spending.

You wouldn’t urge someone who is drowning to keep gulping the stuff that is sinking them as they dog paddle their way back to safety.

So why on Earth would anyone think that the way to solve our global warming crisis is to intensify fossil fuel developments in Canada that we can readily live without and that will only compound the problem they are creating?

How crazy must we be to think that the best way to lower greenhouse gas emissions that are threatening our planet’s very existence is to launch a new carbon-intensive industry in B.C. that we don’t have, don’t need and can’t afford?

Nuttier still is planning to do that when the bottom has fallen out of the global LNG market, leaving exporting countries like Australia holding the bag for that industry’s environmental and social costs, with virtually nothing of worth for taxpayers to show for it.

Carbon emissions are the problem we want to solve.

It makes no sense to invite more of them, only to have to offset them, as we also try to eliminate the ones we are already producing at a rate that exceeds our efforts to reduce them.

Yet that is precisely what the CLT plan struggles to achieve, largely by transferring the risks and costs of the most onerous climate actions that would be required to follow that nonsensical course, from the largest industrial polluters, to B.C. taxpayers and families.

We need to reject that plan to further subsidize B.C.’s worst carbon polluters, and instead, make them more accountable for the actions and costs that will flow from eliminating their unwanted emissions.

This much is evident.

The well-meaning members of the CLT who care deeply about reducing British Columbia’s greenhouse gas emissions got outplayed by their government and industry colleagues.

The LNG representatives and advocates who sat on the CLT well understood that its “consensus” recommendations to increase and expand the carbon tax would never be adopted by the B.C. Liberal government.

They signed onto that package not for what it purports to demand in terms of right-pricing carbon; but rather, for what it might help to legitimize in further subsidizing their industries’ obligations to reduce their emission intensity levels, if not their actual emission outputs.

They signed onto it knowing that it would be “cherry-picked” by the Clark government, notwithstanding the CLT’s contention that its recommendations must be accepted a total indivisible package.

They signed onto it hoping that at least some of the hidden subsidies, regulatory concessions, risk avoidance measures and tax relief policies that stand to benefit their industries would be embraced by the government.

In short, they signed onto to that CLT “consensus package” because of what it does not demand. And also because of the enormous “wriggle room” for climate action avoidance that it provides, through its lack of specificity and through its lip service to future policy reviews and business relief measures in the interests of “global competitiveness.”

The Clark government will not support all of the measures that the CLT has recommended to most benefit B.C.’s largest carbon polluters. Yet the CLT’s report provides it with plenty of new ammunition to double down on its failing LNG vision with new mitigation measures that will principally mitigate industries’ costs of paying for their own carbon pollution.

Revisiting the B.C. Liberals’ LNG Subsidy Plan

The CLT suggested several actions that would especially benefit the LNG industry, the oil and gas industry, and more broadly, carbon intensive industries.

To appreciate the scope of those suggested hidden subsidies for LNG in particular, it helps to know a little about the incredibly generous tax arrangements that the Clark government has already extended to those huge firms, in furtherance of its LNG strategy.

Key among those is the infrastructure royalty credit program, which was introduced in 2004 by the Campbell administration to encourage natural gas exploration and development.

For a great analysis of the true hidden cost of that program, check out this piece from blogger Norman Farrell, who has written extensively on the subject.

The royalty credit program grants companies deductions from the royalties they would otherwise have to pay on the natural gas they extract. It is a well-hidden subsidy that is really a tax expenditure and that has poured billions into the pockets of the oil and gas industry over the last 12 years.

It was arguably a defensible trade-off for government back in the days when that royalty credit was at least partially offset by the billions of dollars in natural gas revenues that that industry returned to the provincial treasury from its investments.

But today, it is harder than ever to justify.

The Clark government recently approved yet another $120-million in tax breaks to 10 energy companies under that program, ostensibly, to “buy” ongoing industry investment in British Columbia’s northeastern region.

Yet the province is only expecting to collect $128 million in natural gas royalties this year — almost a dollar-for-dollar subsidy.

It was exactly a year ago, in the dead of summer that the Clark government pushed through its Liquefied Natural Gas Act Projects Agreement Act over the objections of the opposition.

That Act paved the way for the government to enter into the Petronas precedent, a 25-year, ironclad sweetheart deal aimed at landing the proposed Pacific NorthWest LNG project in Prince Rupert. (See my critiques in the Georgia Straight here.)

It also allowed the government to enter into similar project agreements with other LNG consortiums, without the requirement for legislative debate and approval.

The Petronas precedent set the floor for LNG subsidies in B.C. It guaranteed Pacific Northwest LNG ridiculously low corporate income tax rates, ongoing LNG tax credits and taxpayer-backed indemnities that would all be locked-in until for 25 years.

Initially the government planned to set the LNG industry’s tax on net income at seven per cent. When the industry balked, the government caved like a cheap campstool. It cut that rate in half, to 3.5 per cent, until at least 2037, when it may rise to five per cent.

To further sweeten the pot, the tax on net operating income from liquefaction activities, which is applicable for companies that technically don’t have a net income, was set at a mere 1.5 per cent.

That tax is not even payable until there is a zero balance in any LNG plant’s net operating loss account and its capital investment account.

Plus, any tax that the companies pay at the 1.5 per cent rate on their net operating income is only notionally payable in the short run. Their supposed tax “contributions” are actually set aside and accrued in a tax pool that can be later used to reduce the amount of income tax payable at the 3.5 per cent rate, after an LNG facility’s net operating loss account and its capital investment account are reduced to zero.

On top of that sweetheart deal, the Petronas precedent guaranteed that the current Natural Gas Tax Credit will also be locked-in for 25 years.

That tax credit, which reduces the amount of corporate income tax that LNG plants would otherwise have to pay from 11 per cent to as little as eight percent, will be increased next January.

The amount they will be able to deduct for the cost of any natural gas delivered to their facilities will rise from 0.5 per cent to three percent. And that tax credit can also be carried forward from previous years to reduce those companies’ corporate income taxes in future years.

Think of that.

Those oil and gas behemoths have now been guaranteed a special 25-year tax freeze, at rock-bottom tax rates, and a 25-year tax credit that will be six times higher next January than it is today.

It is an outrageous sell-out to the world’s richest oil companies that provides them a 25-year contractual tax benefit and tax certainty that no other industry or individual enjoys.

And it doesn’t stop there.

As I explained in my last analysis on the carbon tax, the gas industry is now also benefiting from the Clark government’s repeal of its predecessor’s Cap-and-Trade Act.

Instead of being obliged to reduce its carbon emissions under annually declining hard caps on emissions levels, the LNG industry is now subject to a new Greenhouse Gas Industrial Reporting and Control Act that only obliges it to meet prescribed carbon intensity levels.

Under the new regime, B.C.’s LNG companies can pollute without limit.

They are allowed to emit 0.16 tonnes of carbon dioxide for every tonne of LNG exported, without penalty. Beyond that threshold, theoretically, the companies must either purchase market-based emissions offsets or pay into a technology fund at the rate of $25 per tonne.

But the government will actually subsidize that penalty by as much 100 per cent for LNG plants that barely exceed the new intensity benchmark. That subsidy declines to “only” 50 per cent of the penalty that would otherwise be applicable for those who emit 0.23 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

Given that almost all of the proposed LNG plants plan to produce C02 emissions that vastly exceed the allowable emissions intensity benchmark, it is yet another whopping gift to polluters. It makes a mockery of the government’s claim that B.C. will have the “cleanest LNG industry in the world.”

And here’s the capper.

The Petronas precedent also gave those Asian state-oil monopolies a special 25-year indemnity that is underwritten by B.C. taxpayers.

That indemnity will save them harmless from any so-called “discriminatory events.”

It assured the LNG industry that any companies covered under such project agreements would not have to face any industry-specific carbon taxes or any new industry-specific GHG reduction initiatives for at least 25 years.

If any future government changes those locked-in tax rates and benefits at a cost to those companies that is greater than $25 million in any year, or more than $50 million over five years, they will be entitled to full compensation, courtesy of B.C. taxpayers.

Similarly, any changes in government policy that impose new rules or tougher standards specific to the LNG industry, which entail higher costs relating to carbon taxes or to greenhouse gas emissions and reporting requirements, will be fully compensable above that threshold.

And the Petronas precedent further stipulated that if any other LNG project got an even sweeter deal from the government, the Pacific Northwest LNG project would get that too.

In essence, the Clark government was so desperate to land a major LNG deal, it contractually signed away British Columbia’s ability to control its own tax regime, carbon pricing and climate action strategies in specific regard to that industry.

All of it amounts to a new license to profit from uncapped carbon pollution, as it also essentially prevents governments and taxpayers from properly taxing the natural gas industry for their profits and for their pollution.

To my knowledge, the Pacific Northwest LNG project is the only project thus far formally covered by an agreement authorized under the new Act.

But the concessions granted in the Petronas precedent and by the new emissions intensity regime are potentially a major additional problem for rebalancing B.C.’s climate action plan.

They will make it that much more difficult and potentially costly for taxpayers to make the LNG industry fully pay for its carbon emissions and for its incremental emission reduction measures under any serious climate action plan.

The last thing we should be doing is tying government’s hands in how it can use its available policy measures to put more onus on industrial carbon polluters to clean up their act and to pay disproportionately more for their disproportionately high carbon emissions.

If anything, we should be revisiting the carbon tax to create differential carbon tax rates that escalate with the type and usage of fossil fuels covered by its carbon tax, similar to Norway.

We should be putting more financial pressure, not less, on B.C.’s most carbon-intensive industries to expedite the mitigation measures necessary to dramatically cut their emissions that represent such a huge proportion of B.C.’s emissions inventory.

As I suggested in my last installment, a cap-and-trade system should also be embraced to do that at the lowest possible cost, as was originally envisioned in the 2008 climate action plan.

It should be implemented in tandem with a revised carbon tax that is gradually increased over time, in a politically sensitive way that will achieve the CLT’s end goal in that regard.

And the carbon tax should also differentially adjusted to oblige B.C.’s largest polluters to pay for their process emissions and for any other emissions that are not adequately captured within a globally integrated cap-and-trade system.

We should not be exempting the LNG sector or other carbon-intensive industries from any industry-specific carbon taxes or mandatory emissions reductions requirements. Rather, we should be requiring them to bear the full brunt of the cost of their carbon pollution as we also put new standards in place to drive them more quickly to adopt cleaner technologies.

In doing that, we must remain vigilant not to devise climate action strategies that would actually further subsidize those major polluters at taxpayers’ expense.

Unfortunately, many of the CLT’s recommendations would move us in the opposite direction.

Let me now turn to some of the uncosted hidden subsidies that would be effectively extended to the LNG sector and to other carbon-intensive industries under the CLT’s recommendations.

Hidden Subsidy #1: A Potentially Lower Carbon Tax for “Trade-Exposed” Sectors

The heart of the CLT’s plan is to increase B.C.’s carbon tax by $10 per year, from 2018 to at least 2050. That would raise the cost of the carbon tax from $30 a tonne to $360 a tonne.

But here’s the catch. The largest industrial polluters — that is, the “emission-intensive, trade-exposed sectors” — might not have to pay that under the CLT’s recommendations.

The following quotes from its report are instructive:

“Establish targeted and transparent mechanisms for emission-intensive, trade-exposed sectors that mitigate the competitiveness issues created for those sectors if B.C.’s carbon pricing is materially greater than jurisdictions with which they compete, provided that such mechanisms are structured in a manner that does not adversely impact the price signal to reduce emissions. These adjustments should remain in place until such time that carbon pricing and regulatory policy equivalency with other jurisdictions is achieved.”

“The scheduled annual increases in the carbon tax and the competitiveness adjustments for emission-intensive, trade-exposed sectors should be reviewed by the Province, with the support of a Climate Leadership Team, every five years, or more often where warranted, taking into consideration GHG reductions, economic competitiveness, carbon pricing and regulatory policy in other jurisdictions, and impacts on vulnerable communities.”

In other words, the CLT has thrown open the door to exempting B.C.’s worst carbon polluters from some or all of the carbon tax increases that would apply to all other British Columbians.

Its vision for carbon tax hikes is an open question for the “emission-intensive, trade-exposed sectors,” subject to future review and competitiveness considerations that are sure to mean those industries will enjoy breaks on their carbon taxes, while everyone else has to pay ever higher carbon taxes whether they like it or not.

For the LNG industry, it means that not only will it not be subject to a specifically targeted carbon tax to properly price its inordinately high carbon emissions. But it might not even have to pay the level of carbon tax this is generally applicable to individuals, families and small businesses.

Hidden Subsidy #2: A Lower Sales Tax That Will Disproportionately Benefit Large Emitters

As the CLT noted, “natural gas production accounts for 16 per cent of the province’s greenhouse gas emissions and is the largest industrial sector.” If the LNG vision ever comes to fruition, that proportion will grow by leaps and bounds, potentially doubling B.C.’s overall emission levels.

The CLT recommends many measures to address that fact, including new targets for reducing process and fugitive emissions and lots of lip service to adopting “best practices” and unspecified new regulatory standards and policies.

Its most specific recommendations are all hidden subsidies to that sector and to other industrial polluters that would cost B.C. taxpayers an unquantified bundle.

The CLT wants to lower the provincial sales tax from seven per cent to six per cent.

The biggest beneficiaries of that initiative, by far, would be B.C.’s largest corporations, typically in the natural resource sector.

They would get millions of dollars in annual tax relief, whereas most middle class families would receive a few hundred dollars a year in benefits.

The sales tax is a regressive tax that imposes the same dollar-for-dollar burden on anything subject to it, regardless of buyers’ different incomes.

A cut in the sales tax rate would most benefit those who buy the most, be they high-income wage earners or large corporations.

A middle income earner who spends even $40,000 a year on items that are subject to the sales tax — a fairly high amount — would save $400 a year on a one per cent sales tax cut.

A wealthy individual who makes ten times that amount would save ten times that amount. A large natural resource company that spends exponentially more would save exponentially more.

The CLT explained its rationale as follows:

“B.C. is competing with a number of new suppliers for a limited market. Our recommendations to reduce the PST (generally by one basis point and entirely on electricity rates) and make available transitional support for emissions-intensive, trade-exposed sectors are intended to address this reality — particularly if B.C.’s climate policy materially exceeds the stringency of our competitors.”

I noted in my last installment how the recycled money from the revenue-neutral carbon tax is already disproportionately benefiting business rather than individuals.

This recommendation from the CLT would further exacerbate that disparity, with the biggest benefits — by far — going to B.C.’s largest companies: the large natural resource companies that are B.C.’s biggest carbon polluters.

Hidden Subsidy #3: The Elimination of Sales Tax on Electricity for Industry

The CLT also recommended eliminating the PST on electricity rates for industry, noting that it does not apply to electricity purchased by individuals.

It did not quantify how much that gift to industry would cost, but suffice it to say, it would be massive — at least tens of millions of dollars annually, if not more.

That would represent an enormous gift to B.C.’s largest industrial polluters — the oil and gas industry, the forest industry, the mining industry, the cement industry and others.

It would substantially reduce the amount of revenue that would otherwise be available for crucial services, like health care, education, child protection, public safety and other social services.

Like the proposed sales tax cut, which would be financed from incremental carbon tax revenues, that measure would represent a whopping tax subsidy to big business and to B.C.’s largest energy users, at the expense of the individuals and families who depend on the services funded by those tax dollars.

It is only fair and sensible to retain that sales tax on industrial electricity, given the inordinate pressure those energy-intensive sectors put on British Columbia’s electrical system.

Even without LNG the industrial sector is expected to account for the most growth of all key sectors in the next 10 years, mostly for mining, forestry, and oil and gas activity.

As the B.C. government gradually weans itself off of the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual “dividends” it obliges B.C. Hydro to contribute (including through deferred debt), it will need every penny of its existing sales tax revenue to offset those revenue losses.

Carbon intensive industries that are already buying electricity and paying sales tax on that energy will not produce one less molecule of carbon dioxide if that sales tax is eliminated. They will only make more profit at the expense of all other carbon taxpayers.

Hidden Subsidy #4: Risk-free, Cost-free Electrification for LNG Plants

Of all the suggestions made by the CLT, perhaps none would be so costly to taxpayers as its proposal to oblige B.C. Hydro to electrify the LNG industry.

Its recommendation on that point reads as follows:

“Instruct BC Hydro to develop a strategy (generation and transmission) to supply in a competitive, timely manner the clean electricity required to facilitate electrification of upstream natural gas, LNG, and associated infrastructure. Amongst other things, the strategy should enable BC Hydro to commit to supplying new industrial projects with clean electricity by project start up, if necessary through the use of temporary natural gas generation until transmission infrastructure is available.”

The CLT rightly points out that “LNG plants … can rely on clean electricity instead of natural gas for both the liquefaction process and their auxiliary demands” to reduce their emissions.

True enough. If we are to be saddled with an LNG industry that exponentially ramps up B.C.’s carbon emissions, it makes sense to minimize those additional GHGs by requiring LNG plants to adopt e-drives or other zero emission technologies.

But the ones who should bear the cost for that should be that industry and those companies — not B.C. taxpayers.

Instead, the CLT wants BC Hydro to bear the brunt of that cost.

It wants to transfer those incremental costs and risks associated with electrifying those proposed LNG plants to the rest of us. That’s wrong.

The CLT also wants BC Hydro to incur the added costs of generating the additional electricity capacity and the untold billions of dollars in new costs that would be required to build new transmission lines and to service the added debt of that infrastructure.

It wants to guarantee those LNG companies expedited construction schedules that would transfer the risks of building those transmission lines and of supplying them with the electricity they need in accordance with their project timelines to B.C. Hydro. And it further wants to guarantee them they will be able to buy their new power at “internationally comparable” rates.

The CLT’s report put it this way:

“If a proponent wants to use clean electricity instead of gas, they need to be confident that the electricity transmission and supply will be available on the timelines they are advancing their project…One aspect of providing electricity in a competitive, timely manner is ensuring that BC Hydro is able to commit to supply contracts that provide, on reasonable commercial terms used in other jurisdictions in similar circumstances, for damages in the event of failure to deliver new supply within agreed upon time frames and, in the case of LNG, for liquidated damages in the event of interrupted supply. In the event of any damages being payable by BC Hydro, the ratepayers should not bear the burden.” [Emphases added.]

That last line sounds reassuring on the surface. But if ratepayers “should not bear the burden,” and the LNG companies are not expected to bear those costs, it can only mean that the government will — meaning B.C. taxpayers.

Essentially, what the CLT is recommending is that all future LNG plants in B.C. should use so-called “outside the fence” power sourced from outside the plant, instead of the on-site “inside the fence” gas-fired power that is now typically contemplated for most projects.

The Northwest Institute for Bioregional Research rightly observed, “If ‘outside the fence’ power is sourced for LNG production, large upgrades to B.C.’s transmission and generating capacity will be needed. This could cost tens of billions of dollars, but could also generate significant income to First Nations, or crown corporations.”

I repeat, it could cost “tens of billions of dollars” that someone would have to pay, ostensibly, ratepayers, or taxpayers, if not the LNG companies.

Even without the added electrification requirements suggested by the Climate Leadership Team to power LNG plants with e-drive systems, BC Hydro anticipates that its load forecast from oil and gas will climb by almost five-fold over the next 10 years, if the Clark government’s LNG vision comes to pass.

As it stands, BC Hydro’s most recent integrated resource plan only contemplates having sufficient supply to meet an initial expected LNG load of 3,000 gigawatt hours per year, before applying its demand-side management measures.

It anticipates that demand from the LNG industry could be as much as 6,600 GWh/year, even without powering all of its proposed plants with e-drive systems.

BC Hydro also projects a mid load forecast for LNG peak demand at 360 megawatts — an amount equivalent to roughly one-third of the 1,100 MW that the $8.8 billion Site C project would create.

But that vastly underestimates the amount of power that would actually be required to power even a handful of LNG plants with e-drive systems.

For example, the proposed the Grassy Point LNG Project would alone require 1,000 MW of power. The now indefinitely delayed LNG Canada Project would require 1200 MW and a new 500 kV line from Prince George to Terrace. And the Pacific Northwest LNG Project would require at least another 700 MW of electrical energy

And those are just three of the 20 proposed LNG projects that are at least theoretically on the drawing board in British Columbia. Many of those other projects — like the proposed Kitsault Energy Project, the Canada Stewart Energy Project and the Nisga’a LNG Project — are in very remote areas that would be incredibly expensive to power via the BC Hydro grid.

If the LNG “dream” ever comes true, even without the added pressure from e-drive plants and their associated transmission, BC Hydro estimated that the oil and gas sector will consume almost double the electricity consumed by the pulp and paper sector, and much more than even the energy-intensive mining industry.

The cheapest form of energy savings is conservation. The biggest projected driver for new electricity demand is natural gas development, including LNG.

The CLT’s proposal would serve the goal of reducing emissions from LNG plants. But it would place untold new power demands on BC Hydro that would put upward pressure on Hydro rates that would otherwise be avoidable.

Bear in mind, the new Northwest Transmission Line (NWTL) along Highway 37 alone cost $716 million, up from an original budget of $395 million, when Premier Clark came to power.

A major reason for its budget increases related to expedited construction schedules, to meet timelines mandated to supply power from the new Forrest Kerr run-of-river power project and other smaller energy projects to the new Red Chris mine and other new mines in that wild and remote area of B.C.

The much shorter Iskut Extension that extended that 287 kV transmission line from Bob Quinn Substation to the mine, was also over budget. Its cost increased from $180 million to $209 million, because building new transmission lines in that part of northern B.C. are no small feat.

As Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer recently pointed out, the budgets for four recent transmission projects, including the NWTL rose from a combined $1.4 billion to over $1.9 billion, for a collective over-run of $516 million or 36 per cent.

On top of all of those cost considerations, the requirements for consulting and accommodating First Nations’ constitutionally protected rights is a further cost challenge. Especially if commitments are made to deliver fully compensable power rights to LNG companies within their projects’ designated timelines.

In the interest of providing clean, cheap, reliable electricity to power LNG plants that would reduce their GHG pollution, the costs of properly respecting Aboriginal rights and title could be astronomical.

No one really knows how high they might be, but the CLT was altogether silent on that point, which represents another aspect of the hidden subsidy for power its industry representatives succeeded in advancing in its recommendations.

The fact is, the CLT’s recommendations for powering LNG plants could have dramatically adverse unintended consequences for taxpayers and the environment alike.

Mostly, however, they would stick taxpayers and BC Hydro with the lion’s share of costs and risks for making e-drive LNG plants more economical for the large oil companies that stand to profit from them.

If those costs and risks were properly factored into the government’s LNG vision, it would significantly alter its cost-benefit bottom line.

Yet in the absence of e-drive LNG plants, British Columbians will be left holding the bag for much of the cost and sacrifice needed to offset the added emissions those gas-fired plants will entail.

Either way, most B.C. taxpayers and most B.C. families will lose.

Hidden Subsidy #5: A Five-year Minimal Carbon Tax Holiday for Process Emissions

The CLT recommended expanding “coverage of the current carbon tax to apply to all greenhouse gas emission sources in B.C. after five years, starting with measurable GHG emissions covered by the current reporting regulation.”

Essentially it is proposing to let the oil and gas industry off the hook for paying carbon taxes on their methane process and fugitive emissions for at least five more years, until 2021 at the earliest. While it also envisions that the carbon tax will also go up for everyone else by another $40/tonne over that period.

In the meantime, it hopes the natural gas industry will voluntarily act to cut its process emissions by some 40 per cent, assisted by further subsidies from the forthcoming green infrastructure tax credit.

But there is no guarantee that will happen. And the only hard action recommended by the CLT to address fugitive and vented methane emissions to require “industry through regulation to implement leak detection and repair programs in line with best practices in North America.”

Why that has not already been required is beyond me.

Ditto for the CLT’s suggestion that the industry “develop best practices for methane reduction, including transparent reporting, through a collaborative initiative involving the provincial government, industry, and other stakeholders with expertise in this area…and seek alignment with Canada and other provincial jurisdictions in this regard.”

The Pembina Institute and others are right to maintain that we should not wait until 2021 to act on reducing deadly methane emissions with an earlier imposition of the carbon tax and other measures.

Yet the CLT’s most important recommendation in respect of addressing fugitive and vented emissions is this one:

“Providing that at the time of the first five year review of the Climate Leadership Plan, a new reduction goal for fugitive and vented methane emissions should be established and a determination made whether future reductions in fugitive and venting methane emissions are best achieved through expanding the coverage of the carbon tax to such emissions…[or through] a continuation on a voluntary basis of the best practices developed above for methane reduction (provided the industry has reached the 40 per cent methane reduction goal within five years), or such best practices developed for methane being mandated by regulation at that time (with such regulations to be reviewed every five years thereafter).”

In other words, under that recommendation, even after another five years’ carbon tax holiday on those emissions, it might well be that the industry will continue to be exempt from paying carbon taxes on those uncaptured process emissions.

Stunning.

Once again, the environmentalists and academics on the CLT got completely snookered by the industry representatives and the government mouthpieces that succeeded in rendering its carbon tax commitment almost meaningless for B.C.’s largest carbon polluters.

No wonder the oil industry representatives on the CLT signed onto that almost meaningless “commitment.”

Conclusion

All of these are only a handful of the effective subsidies to carbon emitters that were tacitly recommended by the CLT, mostly for the benefit of Big Oil.

It is unfortunate that the CLT offered so little in the way of specific “bullet-proof” recommendations for reducing B.C.’s carbon emissions.

British Columbians must now await the government’s Climate Action 2.0 to ascertain what more it will actually do to meet its legislated GHG reduction targets, besides buying itself more time, as suggested by the CLT, which failed to prescribe new provincial interim targets before 2030.

Hopefully it will be as detailed and progressive as Ontario’s truly excellent new climate action plan.

Just as that province’s first climate action plan largely borrowed from many of the measures adopted in B.C.’s 2008 plan, British Columbia would now be well advised to use Ontario’s new blueprint as the key resource it is for advancing climate action.

In a future article I will suggest a number of hard measures that B.C. could take to help meet its targets in the oil and gas sector and in other sectors I did not address in this analysis.

The fact is, the CLT’s recommendations for emissions reductions from buildings, forestry, agriculture, transportation and other sectors are pretty much all as vague as they are aspirational.

The good news is that, by and large, they do not overtly suggest anywhere near the level of hidden subsidies that I have highlighted above in regard to the LNG and natural gas sector. It’s just that they say so little of substance to advance the mission that the CLT was given.

The bottom line is this: the only sensible way to responsibly address British Columbia’s growing greenhouse gas emissions is to stop unecessarily adding to them in the first place.

Instead of digging ourselves ever deeper in the hole by inviting an LNG industry that British Columbians will also be expected to subsidize in addressing its added emissions, we should just say, “enough.”

We do not need that industry and do not want its added carbon pollution.

Enough. It is time to develop a serious climate action plan that embraces a low-carbon economy and that duly ensures its largest carbon polluters pay their full share of the cost of reducing those emissions.

Martyn Brown was former B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell’s long-serving chief of staff and a key architect of B.C.’s climate action plan and clean energy plan. He was the top strategic advisor to three provincial party leaders, and a former deputy minister of tourism, trade, and investment in British Columbia. A frequent contributor to the Georgia Straight, Brown is also the author of the eBook Towards a New Government in British Columbia. Contact Brown at towardsanewgovernment@gmail.com.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This is the third of a four-part series on B.C.’s climate action plan. Be advised, it is a very long read, more like a short book of six chapters. Part One of this series addresses B.C.’s GHG reduction targets. Part Two addresses how that plan is at risk of being co-opted by Big Oil. Part Three takes a closer look at the B.C. Climate Leadership Team’s recommendations for the carbon tax. And Part Four focuses on how the oil and gas industry stands to profit from that advisory team’s proposed climate action plan.

British Columbia’s Climate Leadership Team (CLT) has offered a strategy aimed at achieving several new emissions reduction targets.

It proposes to do that by “right pricing” carbon with an ever-increasing and expanded carbon tax; by mitigating some of that tax’s competitive and consumer impacts; by supplementing that rising tax with additional (mostly unspecified) measures to further reduce emissions; and by regularly reviewing those three elements.

As such, its roadmap to carbon reductions is largely an updated carbon tax plan.

Six of its 32 recommendations (#4-8, 29, 31) relate to raising, extending, reallocating and reviewing the carbon tax over the next 32 years, and to integrating B.C.’s carbon tax with other province’s approaches to carbon pricing.

The importance of carbon pricing in any credible climate action plan cannot be overstated.

Equally important is getting the politics right and ensuring that however we act to price carbon, including through the carbon tax, those measures work as intended and are fair to everyone.

That is the subject of this analysis.

A Brief History of the Carbon Tax

At least as far back as the late eighties, governments have known that a carbon price signal is the single most important action they can take to influence investment, production and consumption decisions that will fundamentally drive the needed shift to a low-carbon economy.

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has long stressed the value and importance of carbon pricing, as it has also led the world’s efforts to quantify, stem and lower global greenhouse gas emissions.

Canada’s National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy reinforced that point in its 2007 report, Getting to 2050: Canada’s Transition to a Low-emission Future.

It stressed, “the policy package required to achieve deep long-term reductions must place a price on carbon emissions, and needs to be complemented by other policies, such as regulations for certain sectors that may not respond to a pricing mechanism.”

It also explained the options for carbon pricing.

“The choice of the preferred emission price policy involves considering either a tax on emissions, a cap-and-trade system or a combination of the two. A GHG emissions tax imposes a price on each unit of CO2e [carbon dioxide equivalent] emitted by a source, whereas a cap-and-trade system is a regulatory program under which government sets a limit on the volume of GHG emissions, distributes permits for allowable emissions and enables firms to buy and sell the permits after the initial distribution. Both options are market-based in that they transfer abatement decisions to emitters, and both will signal that GHG emissions have a monetary value, stimulating actions that will lead to emission reductions.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s former Conservative government was not enamoured with its own advisors’ position, or with other urgings for climate action.

So it basically killed the Round Table altogether in 2013. Yet its arguments for carbon pricing are even more critical today than they were a decade ago, including in British Columbia.

Despite all of the actions taken over the last nine years since B.C.’s 2007 Throne Speech commitment to fight climate change, with bold targets and a comprehensive plan, the province’s net greenhouse gas emissions are once again on the rise.

And those GHG emissions are going to escalate exponentially under the government’s vision for carbon-intensive growth, fueled by natural gas development and LNG exports.

As the principal author of that 2007 Speech from the Throne, and of all of the Campbell administration’s 12 throne speeches from 2001 through 2010, I had more than a minor hand in shaping B.C.’s climate action commitments.

These words I wrote in the 2008 Throne Speech further laid that imperative on the line:

“Waiting for others to act is not a solution –— it compounds the problem. Taking refuge in the status quo because others refuse to change is not an answer. It’s avoiding responsibility and being generationally selfish. The argument that British Columbia’s mitigation efforts are, in global terms, too miniscule to matter misses the point.

Every molecule of carbon dioxide released into our atmosphere by human activities matters. It hangs there for decades or even centuries, and adds to the accumulated burden of global warming on our planet. The benefit of our actions is not negated by the actions of others who add to the problem. They are cumulatively beneficial, globally significant and scientifically discernible. They contribute to the efforts being taken by growing legions of people around the world who are acting today to prevent the problem from becoming even worse.

We cannot be paralyzed into inaction by the scale of the task at hand. Rather, we will act now to make a real difference, and to encourage behavioural changes that will drive sustainable growth as a global imperative. Market forces can play a positive role in this regard.”

B.C.’s carbon tax was introduced by premier Gordon Campbell’s B.C. Liberal government, in the 2008 provincial budget. It was to be guided by the following three basic principles:

1. All carbon tax revenue would be recycled through tax reductions and not used to fund government programs, a principle assured in legislation that would also require annual reporting of how that funding is allocated.
2. The tax rate would start low and increase gradually, to provide individuals and businesses time to adjust, to respect decisions made prior to the announcement of the tax, and to provide rate certainty for at least the first five years.
3. Low income individuals and families would be protected via a refundable Climate Action Tax Credit that would ensure that those with lower incomes are compensated for the tax, and that most are financially better off.

This piece from the David Suzuki Foundation provides a good primer on B.C.’s carbon tax and a bit more about its history.

The carbon tax was always intended to work in tandem with a cap-and-trade system, to make B.C. a global leader on climate action.

It was phased-in over five years, with annual increases of $5 per tonne, which raised its initial rate of $10 per tonne to $30 per tonne as of 2012.

That rate has been frozen ever since by B.C. Premier Christy Clark, who came to power in 2011. Her government has made it clear that it will not lift that freeze until at least 2018, a year after the next provincial election.

As the government said following its last review of the carbon tax, in the 2013 post-election Budget Update, “When other jurisdictions, especially those within North America, introduce similar carbon taxes or carbon pricing, government may again review and consider changes to the carbon tax.”

Perhaps Canada’s First Ministers will shock us all by coming to some sort of common agreement on that front, following the forthcoming report from their Working Group on Carbon Pricing Mechanisms and their commitments, in furtherance of their Vancouver Declaration.

The danger of the government’s politically expedient decision to freeze the carbon tax for at least six years has been noted by Clark’s own Environment Minister.

Her ministry’s 2014 Climate Action Report stated the obvious: “Some policies lose effectiveness over time if they are not updated. For example, the carbon tax impact effectively diminishes if the rate remains unchanged, as inflation dampens the price signal.”

The carbon tax drives down greenhouse gas emissions by raising the cost of carbon pollution, which makes renewable energy and energy efficiency options increasingly more affordable relative to fossil fuels.

That drives innovations in technologies, production, heating and transportation and anything dependent on the combustion of carbon-intensive, non-renewable fossil fuels.

It drives behavioural changes that rightly encourage people and companies to reduce their carbon footprints through increased energy conservation, efficiency, fuel-switching and carbon neutral choices.

The problem with the carbon tax is that it does not necessarily lead to a decrease in emissions if its rate increases can also be profitably accommodated through higher consumer prices for the end products that contain those embedded emissions.

If any industry can simply incorporate its carbon tax costs into the products it produces, and still sell them for a profit, they may not feel too pressured to use less energy, cleaner sources of energy, or cleaner technologies that lower emissions.

Same for consumers. If we don’t feel the cost of our carbon emissions, the financial incentive to change our lifestyles and to make cleaner choices will not motivate us to action.

Which is why the price of the carbon tax has to continually go up over time to be most effective.

Because even with a carbon tax, if it is not high enough to drive new low-carbon behavioural shifts and cleaner production processes, emissions will not go down; they will go up.

The carbon tax does not directly limit or reduce emissions, as cap-and-trade systems do. It only provides a price signal aimed at indirectly encouraging a low-carbon economy in individual’s and industry’s financial self-interest.

That problem is further aggravated by the fact that the current carbon tax does not even apply to industrial process emissions, including so-called “fugitive” emissions from non-combustion sources. It only covers about 66 per cent of industrial emissions in British Columbia.

The Climate Leadership Team does not propose to extend the carbon tax to those emissions for another five years, opting instead for a number of mostly voluntary measures to somehow achieve a 40 per cent reduction in methane emissions by 2021.

The Pembina Institute rightly argues that is too long to wait. Too bad its representative on the CLT was not successful in convincing his colleagues on that point.

Leaving any sector or any such huge source of carbon emissions exempt from the carbon tax does nothing to help its perceived fairness or its GHG reduction mission.

The oil and gas industry has already had eight years to make a serious commitment to reducing its untaxed emissions. Ditto for landfills, the cement industry and other key sources for those types of emissions.

The original climate action plan vowed to eliminate all routine flaring at oil and gas producing wells and production facilities by 2016 with an interim goal to reduce flaring by half (50 per cent) by 2011.

We are not there yet.

It also sought to “facilitate and foster innovation in sequestration …[including] market oriented requirements with a graduated schedule. In consultation with stakeholders, a timetable will be developed along with increasing requirements for sequestration.”

We are not there yet.

We need to get there, fast, as we also need to dramatically reduce fugitive emissions from oil and gas pipelines.

These sorts of glaring flaws in the current carbon tax pose a significant challenge for B.C.’s updated climate action plan.

It is folly to rely on shaky carbon modeling, aimed at quantifying how the carbon tax will actually perform over the next several decades, to reassure us that we will actually meet our GHG reduction objectives.

We need to supplement the carbon tax with other strategies that impose hard, measurable, incrementally lower caps on carbon emissions.

So as not to bet our last dollar — or the health of our planet — on any one government’s vision for an escalating carbon tax that only indirectly lowers emissions.

We surely should commit ourselves to fully using the tool that the carbon tax provides to help achieve its intended purpose, which means gradually raising its price.

Indeed, we must use every available tool at our disposal to have any credible hope of achieving B.C.’s target of an 80 per cent reduction in GHGs by 2050.

And we can’t afford to pretend that politics won’t play a critical part in the success of that endeavour. It already has and it always will.

In the final analysis, any climate action plan will only succeed if it is also a politically astute economic plan that is sustainable in every respect — environmentally, fiscally, socially, economically and politically.

The Politics of Carbon Pricing

Most British Columbians support the carbon tax because they know it is a responsible tax shift.

They understand that is intended to tax something that we don’t want — carbon pollution — to generate revenue for things we do want — be it other tax cuts or new public investments in public infrastructure, critically important public services, or environmentally sustainable technologies.

In short, the carbon tax is a very good policy tool to “do the right thing.”

Still, it’s a tax. And increased taxes are always a hard sell.

Any proposal to increase them, each and every year, for as far as the eye can see, is not bound to be very politically popular, to put it charitably.

Even if those tax hikes are supposedly “revenue-neutral.” Or if the politicians who want to impose them also suggest that those revenues will fund other tax cuts or new investments that people might want.

The imagined pain of tax hikes is always more palpable than its promised relief.

Particularly if the latter demands trusting politicians to keep their word. Especially if they are in no position to make promises on behalf of their successors.

The Climate Leadership Team wants to increase carbon tax by $10 per year until 2050, starting in 2018.

Count me among the decided minority of taxpayers who would support that plan. Indeed, I do.

But I sure wouldn’t want to bank on that as the pivotal feature of a politically viable plan to cut B.C.’s greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent. Even though I agree that the only way we will ever reach that goal is by dramatically increasing the price of carbon pollution, as the CLT suggests.

As eminently sensible as its proposal surely is, on so many levels, I would be utterly shocked if either the B.C. Liberals or the NDP will ever embrace it.

The Green Party, maybe. It doesn’t really hope to form the next provincial government, even if it succeeds in its quest to hold the balance of power in a minority government. But the two legitimate contenders for power? I think the CLT is dreaming in Technicolor.

To make such a far-reaching commitment on the carbon tax would be tantamount to political suicide. If either party unilaterally supported such an increase, its opponent would have a field day at their expense.

And that would very likely do more harm than good to the vital goal of carbon pricing, to the crucial role of the carbon tax in particular, and to the ultimate success of the urgently needed plan to dramatically reduce B.C.’s carbon emissions.

Any plan to raise the carbon tax must be politically sensitive and realistic.

It is hard to imagine any government that would be willing to hitch its political wagon to a carbon tax that would increase from today’s level of $30 per tonne to $360 per tonne over for the next three-and-a-half decades.

Not unless they have a death wish.

Moreover, it is probably not even constitutionally viable for any government to so bind its successors.

The most that any government could therefore really do is propose that those future governments follow its lead, by sticking to a plan for such annual carbon tax increases over the next 34 years.

A laudable vision, I agree, but not one that is likely to succeed as articulated, in political reality.

The only thing we can predict with certainty is that future governments will have very different plans.

Some might want to freeze, lower or (heaven forbid) even repeal the carbon tax. Others might want to increase it by more or less than $10 a tonne in any given year, or add to the list of exemptions that the Clark government has created and invited.

In fact, as much as it makes sense to price carbon with such predictable annual increments that steadily ratchet up the cost of unwanted greenhouse gas emissions, making that bold commitment would probably backfire.

There are simply too many voters and vested interests that would be easily mobilized by any party that promised to stop a proposed 12-fold increase in the carbon tax, dead in its tracks.

Those of us who are deeply supportive of a gradually escalating carbon tax that will succeed in its central role in driving B.C. ever closer to a low-carbon economy need to be politically smart.

We would be shooting our own mission in the foot if we inadvertently provoke a broad backlash that could irreparably harm today’s widely-supported carbon tax. It could wind up killing that mode of carbon pricing altogether.

Just ask Australia, where a similar taxpayers’ revolt resulted in the repeal of its nascent carbon pricing system. And it was only even applicable to large emitters, not to individuals or families.

There is a fine line between what is environmentally and/or socially desirable and what is politically prudent and possible.

In any case, in the most likely event that neither the B.C. Liberals nor the NDP dares to publicly support the CLT’s carbon tax plan, a fallback plan is essential for climate action.

This poses a significant problem for any government that only relies on a carbon tax as it chosen means for carbon pricing.

What About Cap-and-Trade?

Tax hikes always need social license for their long-term success, which is hard to achieve decades in advance, no matter how much the politicians might try to convince their constituents that they will be “revenue-neutral.”

It is why the chief alternative to a carbon tax — a cap-and-trade system — is so much more politically palatable.

That is the means for carbon pricing that Ontario, Quebec and California have embraced, which British Columbia had also intended to adopt in combination with its carbon tax.

In fact, B.C. was the first Canadian jurisdiction to join the Western Climate Initiative, in partnership with seven U.S. states, back in 2007.

In that same year it also joined the International Carbon Action Partnership, together with 14 other national and subnational governments from North America and Europe.

Both of those partnership initiatives were — and still are — aimed at creating a truly global emissions trading network that is integrated with the European Union Emissions Trading System, which is far the world’s largest cap-and-trade system.

The Campbell government was also the first government in Canada to pass a Cap-and-trade Act that authorized hard caps on emissions levels. It provided a legislative basis for B.C. to supplement its carbon tax with a cap-and-trade system.

Essentially, the Clark government walked away from all of those initiatives aimed at putting hard caps on carbon emissions and at partnering with others in cap-and-trade systems.

Its Greenhouse Gas Industrial Reporting and Control Act repealed the Cap-and-trade Act, to mimic the previous Alberta government’s approach, which was properly assailed in this article published by DeSmog Canada.

The NDP government that replaced that Conservative administration over a year ago has now embraced a carbon tax, similar to British Columbia’s, in force and design. Its initial rate of $20/tonne, to be imposed next January, will be increased to $30/tonne in 2018, making it the same as B.C.’s rate.

That move by the Clark government to do away with hard caps on regulated emissions that might have lowered overall absolute emissions, year over year, was a huge step backwards for B.C. climate reduction plan.

Instead, in its zeal to appease the LNG industry, the Clark government adopted “emission intensity” benchmarks, which it brags are the “cleanest in the world.”

Under its new policy, B.C.’s liquefaction terminals would be permitted to emit 0.16 tonnes of carbon dioxide for every tonne of LNG exported, without penalty.

Theoretically, companies that emit above that level would be subject to a penalty. They might pay $25 per tonne that would be paid into a technology fund, which will ultimately go back to their industry. Or they would have to buy offsets.

Here’s the catch.

The government has also announced plans to subsidize that penalty by as much 100 per cent, for any plants that have emission levels just above the new intensity benchmark.

That subsidy from taxpayers to the LNG companies drops on a sliding scale to 50 per cent of the penalty that would otherwise be applicable at 0.23 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

And that’s not even the half of it, as I will explain in my next installment. The Clark government has extended unprecedented tax concessions to the LNG industry that will be locked-in for 25 years and underwritten by B.C. taxpayers.

Any changes in those guaranteed tax rates, tax credits or to the carbon tax that is specifically applicable to the LNG sector will be fully compensable by B.C. taxpayers for at least the next 25 years.

If any subsequent LNG plant gets a more favourable tax deal than the Pacific Northwest LNG proposal, headed by Malaysian state-oil giant Petronas, that project will get it too.

Bottom line of that sweetheart scheme is that B.C. taxpayers will be obliged to shell out potentially tens of millions of dollars to subsidize LNG companies’ rightful penalties on their uncapped emissions. And they get to make billions in profits.

At the same time, the government has exempted those LNG plants from having to account for their upstream natural gas production emissions from fracking, processing and pipelines.

The emissions from those LNG plants, as defined, only account for 30 per cent of the natural gas industry’s GHG emissions in British Columbia.

To make matters worse, the Clark government has simply redefined any gas-fired energy used to drive those LNG plants as “clean power.”

That flatly contradicts the Campbell government’s definition of clean, renewable power, which underpinned its clean energy plan and laws. It is anathema to the CLT’s vision for 100 per cent renewable power, as opposed to the 93 per cent renewable power portfolio requirement that exists today, as a result of the 2008 climate action and clean energy plans.

As Clean Energy Canada has rightly argued, the government has a long, long way to go before it can credibly claim that B.C.’s LNG industry will be even close to the “cleanest in the word.”

Those standards for regulating the amount of carbon that is allowable per unit of LNG only deal with the intensity of those carbon emissions.

Reducing emissions intensities is a necessary step to reducing the overall volume of emissions produced. But in itself, it does nothing to stop that total volume of carbon pollution from increasing along with higher production levels.

The government’s approach will allow carbon emissions to dramatically increase, despite those efficiency gains in the emissions intensity levels.

It is yet another sop to Big Oil that has co-opted B.C.’s climate action plan for the sake of liberating new investments in fossil fuel developments and higher profits for those companies.

By comparison, a cap-and-trade system works very differently, most importantly, by ensuring that overall net carbon emissions go down, not up.

That system purports to let the market decide how much the price of carbon should be, as regulated emitters buy, sell or bank their needed or unused emissions allowances, to meet the hard caps that governments impose upon them for their allowable emission levels.

A huge downside of such cap-and-trade systems is that they only cover a portion of any jurisdictions’ carbon emissions. Mostly those from large, regulated industrial sectors. So it is not a total solution and should be employed with a carbon tax to capture those emissions from the rest of the economy.

Those cap-and-trade systems don’t much affect individual behaviour or the vast amount of carbon emissions that are created by individuals, families and small businesses that are not subject to those emission caps.

Plus, those cap-and-trade systems do not provide much certainty or predictability to the industries and sectors they regulate about the costs of those carbon prices, as emissions caps go down and as the cost of meeting those ever lower emission thresholds goes up.

The environmental upside of that system is that it provides more certainty in regulating and reducing absolute emissions levels in each regulated sector.

The political upside of that system is that no government has to quantify its escalating price of carbon, let alone decades into the future.

The politicians don’t have to set the price for carbon, or even impose a carbon price on the voters, per se.

Instead, they can simply tell their constituents that the “free market will decide” the price on carbon that is necessary to achieve the absolute reductions in emissions levels that are mandated by government for each regulated sector.

Whether such emissions trading systems actually work as intended is another question. Especially if they are embraced without also having some type of carbon tax in place.

The European experience in that regard is not very encouraging, to say the least, as Greenpeace has highlighted in its excellent prescription for putting the EU’s Emission Trading System back on track.

It has been open to all sorts of abuses that have allowed large emitters to meet their legal obligations without yet adopting the types of measures that are essential for ensuring that they actually reduce their own emissions.

The very elements of cap-and-trade that are intended to give those emitters flexibility in meeting their emissions caps are in some cases legally used as license for them to pollute.

Emissions allowances are typically initially allocated either by grants from government to industrial emitters, by auctions that sell those allowances to the highest bidders, or a combination of both.

Too many allowances have been granted for free or for next to nothing, which has reduced the price of their associated carbon emissions, as it has also subsidized corporate polluters.

Those allowances are also usually “bankable,” to be sold or used by those who hold them as they see fit, when most opportune. It’s not unlike trading stocks. The price impacts of how and when those allowances are offered for sale are wildly unpredictable.

Large polluters can meet their declining caps on emissions by buying allowances from others who don’t need them, because they acted to cut their own emissions.

In essence, the price of carbon was not in itself sufficient to force them to cut their emissions as envisioned, to the extent that they could achieve those reductions and still have so many surplus emissions allowances left over, to sell or use at a later date.

The Slippery Slope of Carbon Offsets

Emissions trading systems allow polluters to claim credit for reducing their own emissions, even when they have not. That is equally true of the Clark government’s new emission intensity benchmarks for LNG plants, which can be met through most of the same mechanisms.

To meet their legislated emissions caps or intensity standards, the regulated sectors can buy others’ unused emissions allowances or they can buy carbon “off-sets.”

Such offsets provide emissions credits for theoretically offsetting an equivalent amount of emissions through new green investments.

Typically they are investments in energy efficiency, carbon sequestration, fuel switching or GHG destruction that facilitate net new reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that would not otherwise occur.

Indeed, that was what the now defunct Pacific Carbon Trust was set up to facilitate, to help B.C.’s public sector entities meet their new legal obligations to be “carbon neutral” — which they have been since 2010. Another first in North America.

That commitment to carbon neutrality has also been supported by 96 per cent of all local governments in B.C.

At least 182 of those local government signed onto the B.C. Climate Action Charter that was initiated in 2007, as yet another part of the initial climate action plan, which among other things, obliged those institutions to be carbon neutral in respect of their operations by 2012.

They, too, use offsets to help them meet that self-imposed requirement.

Those offsets are only potentially credible if they are additional, verifiable and conform to stringent international standards and jurisdictional regulations.

But the reality is, they are very much open to abuse, and they are extremely hard to confirm, especially in countries that specialize in creating offset projects that look great on paper, but are essentially fraudulent upon closer inspection.

Even in B.C., the history with offset purchases is sketchy at best.

Many of those reinvestments in British Columbia effectively amounted to gifts to industries — the forest industry and the alternative power industry especially — that gave them money for projects that many believe they would undertaken anyway.

As well, public-sector organizations that were obliged to buy offsets from the Pacific Carbon Trust at a rate of $25 per tonne to meet their legal obligations for carbon-neutrality sometimes paid over twice what the Trust has been charged for those carbon credits.

Still, offsets are an integral part of any emissions trading system and with the right safeguards, they certainly can and do serve to reduce the planet’s overall greenhouse gas pressures.

As with so many debatable climate action areas, the CLT plan calls for “a review of the current offset policy to determine if changes are required to support the new Climate Leadership Plan.”

How bold. Not.

The prelude to that almost meaningless recommendation points to its real purpose: “The province could expand the use of offsets beyond the Carbon Neutral Government Program to specific industrial sectors, or use them to help meet provincial carbon reduction targets.”

It is further aimed at allowing greater provincial use of offsets, including from investments in jurisdictions outside of B.C., which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and is common in cap-and-trade systems.

But as the CLC also noted, “given concerns about the credibility of offsets from some jurisdictions outside of B.C. and their ability to ensure greenhouse gas reductions, any external offsets considered should meet or exceed the standards set in B.C.”

Good luck with enforcing that.

Although to be fair, B.C. has a lot of home-grown expertise in that area, including some great companies that are helping the B.C. government to develop and assert its leadership role in shaping North American offset policies and standards.

Virtually everyone accepts that the only way that we will hope to meet our GHG reduction targets is if we “properly price” carbon by continually raising the tax penalty on greenhouse gas emissions, as we also act to mitigate those emissions in every other conceivable way.

Carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems have different strengths and benefits that should be fully utilized, if only to help offset their respective weaknesses.

Towards a Fairer and More Effective Form of Carbon Pricing

To my mind, there is no point in getting bogged down in a political argument about how much the price of carbon will be obliged to rise over the next 34 years. Whether it is through a carbon tax, a cap-and-trade system, or a combination of both, as I would advocate.

Such a debate would only most hurt the party that most wants to responsibly fight and adapt to climate change. It would help to re-elect the Clark government, which I submit, has shown it does not care a fig about that imperative.

In that sense, it would be counterproductive to its cause.

In any case, as the Climate Leadership Team basically also acknowledged, British Columbia’s carbon prices cannot be too far out of synch with the price that other jurisdictions are imposing on carbon through other systems, like cap-and-trade.

The key is to keep B.C. on the leading edge, slightly ahead of its competitors on carbon pricing, attuned to the global free market realities and to the domestic political realities of the capacity to sustain carbon tax increases.

To that end, B.C.’s Opposition parties would be wise to focus on ‘right pricing’ carbon with firm commitments for the next four-year term in government, instead of prescribing annual increases to the carbon tax over the next 34 years that they are beyond their ability to control.

They should commit to raising the carbon tax by $10 a year — or maybe even by $15 per year — over each of the next four years, starting in 2017, a year earlier than the CLT called for.

And they should commit to integrating the carbon tax with a cap-and-trade system that also imposes hard emissions caps on large industrial polluters, to ensure they cannot simply pay to pollute for profit without restriction, as the current carbon pricing regime allows.

We must remain vigilant not to allow B.C.’s heaviest carbon polluters to transfer their risks and costs to other taxpayers, especially to individuals and families.

That is what is now happening and it is a key weakness in the CLT’s plan, as I argued in the second installment of this series. I will have much more to say about that problem in the next and final installment.

Having said that, it is important to put the CLT’s recommendation on the carbon tax in perspective, especially for voters who might be too easily swayed by those who promise to freeze the carbon tax or minimize its increases in the near term.

It is equally important to obtain voters’ buy-in for the ways in which any incremental carbon tax revenue will be recycled, either through additional tax cuts, as is now legally required, or through new public investments.

To that end, we would be wise to take our cue from what has politically worked in other jurisdictions.

At least 15 jurisdictions have introduced some form of direct carbon tax, as this short publication from the World Bank points out.

In Canadian-equivalent dollars, Denmark’s carbon tax is about $45 a tonne and Finland’s carbon tax is over $50 a tonne.

Switzerland’s carbon tax is almost $89 per tonne. Norway charges up to $90 per tonne, depending on the type and usage of fossil fuels covered by its carbon tax.

Like that country, Sweden has had a carbon tax since 1991 that has increased over time and now stands at about $219 CAD a tonne.

You can bet that it will easily exceed the CLT’s target of $360 a tonne in 34 years’ time, even with the exemptions that are creeping in, under the European Union Emissions Trading System.

The world hasn’t ended for any of those countries, many of which are large energy producers. Their economies have not collapsed.

Sweden’s example, in particular, shows that the CLT’s vision for a carbon tax is completely doable, if it is not derailed by politics born of its zeal for “proving” the unprovable and of a debate about timelines and long-distant tax hikes that undermines its own purpose.

Just last year Sweden announced that it is also intent on being one of the first nations in the world to become fossil-fuel free.

So it can be done, if we are smart about how we “right price” carbon in British Columbia.

The CLT’s plan for an annual $10/tonne increase in the carbon tax from 2018 to 2050 would mean that it would rise from today’s level of $30 per tonne, to $360 per tonne by 2050 — a 12-fold increase.

Simple multiplication suggests that that increased carbon tax would mean that the price of gasoline would rise from the 6.67 cents per litre now charged for that tax, to about 80 cents per litre over those 33 years.

That should not be too hard to absorb over those next three-plus decades.

After all, in joining the International Zero-Emission Vehicle Alliance last December,

the Clark government also signed onto to a pledge “to make all passenger vehicle sales in our jurisdictions Zero Emission Vehicles as fast as possible, and no later than 2050.” (Emphasis added.)

If we achieved that goal, through fully electric vehicles, the carbon tax basically would not even apply to most people’s cars or trucks, or even to many buses and other public transit vehicles.

The CLT plan offers some suggestions to help encourage electric vehicles, but much more needs to be done.

As well, the incremental demand that those electric vehicles will impose on British Columbia’s electrical system has not been properly quantified by anyone.

That plan also makes recommendations to encourage fuel switching, to help buses, large and medium-duty trucks convert to less carbon intensive fuels, like compressed natural gas.

While that might make sense as a bridging strategy, we should not be investing a lot of money in infrastructure aimed at perpetuating fossil fuel dependency, even from non-renewable natural gas.

Which brings me to home heating.

Under the CLC’s plan, the carbon tax on that energy would go up from the current rate of about $1.49 per gigajoule to about $17.88 per gigajoule in 2050.

Considering a typical home in Vancouver uses about 60-90 gigajoules of natural gas, that cost would be considerable. That annual carbon tax bill would rise from around $89-$134 currently, to about $1,072-$1,609 by 2050 — just for the carbon tax, not including the price of the natural gas itself.

You can see how that escalating tax might motivate most families to seek lower carbon transportation and heating alternatives.

The CLT vision calls for all sorts of targets and unspecified best practices to make buildings more energy efficient and to reduce “built sector” emissions by 50 per cent.

Those are all great goals to pursue, but the CLT plan says little about how to achieve them.

Suffice it to say, there are many ways we can rebalance that carbon price burden, to lay more of it where it properly belongs: at the feet of the heavy industrial emitters who should be obliged to pay the full freight of their carbon pollution.

Rethinking the “Revenue-Neutral” Carbon Tax

Most British Columbians do not really believe the current carbon tax is actually revenue-neutral, even though the government’s annual accounting treatments purport to prove otherwise.

Nevertheless, it’s all there on page 58 of the 2016 Budget and Fiscal Plan, for anyone who cares to look.

This year, the government expects to collect $1.2 billion in carbon tax and it plans to return $1.7 billion in tax relief. In other words, it is budgeting to return $500 million more in tax breaks than it projects it will collect in carbon tax revenue.

As such, the carbon tax scheme is not just revenue-neutral, it’s revenue-negative.

The law requires the province to at least pay back in tax cuts an amount equivalent to what it receives from the carbon tax.

Because it cannot be sure what either that amount of carbon tax revenue will be, or what the cost of its associated tax relief measures will be, the province always budgets to return more than it takes in.

Plus, the cost of that tax relief attributed to offsetting the carbon tax has tended to outpace the growth of that revenue over time. Hence the widening gap between carbon tax revenues and carbon tax relief expenditures.

The problem is, precious few taxpayers feel that they are breaking even on the carbon tax that they pay.

That is partly due to the fact that most people tend to vastly overestimate what the carbon tax is costing them.

But it is mostly due to the reality that most taxpayers and businesses actually do pay more in carbon taxes than they get back in discernible tax breaks.

Then again, some families more than break even on the exchange — typically, those on lower incomes and those who live in rural and Northern areas, as counterintuitive as that may seem.

In fact, of the $601 million in total tax relief for individual and families that will be funded this year from carbon tax revenues, almost half — $278 million — will be dedicated to those beneficiaries.

That includes $195 million for the low income climate action tax credit of $115.50 per adult, plus $34.50 per child. And it includes $83 million for the Northern and rural home owner benefit of up to $200, which is only available to people living outside of the Capital, Greater Vancouver and Fraser Valley Regional Districts.

Most of the balance of that $601 million in personal carbon tax-related relief goes towards funding the five per cent reduction in personal income tax rates that was extended when the carbon tax was launched, eight years ago.

Few people remember that tax cut or perhaps even notice it, especially those with modest incomes.

When you look at how the carbon tax revenues are reallocated back into taxpayers’ pockets, the benefits they provide are not as material to most individuals and businesses as the highly visible costs that confront them at every turn.

This is one reason why the CLT recommended using some of the incremental revenue from a higher carbon tax to lower the provincial sales tax from 7 per cent to 6 per cent.

I think that would be a big mistake. Sales tax cuts are regressive, insofar as they most benefit those who spend the most — namely, people with large incomes.

Cutting that tax by a point won’t do much to help those with lower incomes, many of whom are already receiving a low income carbon tax credit.

As the David Suzuki Foundation has said, that should be increased and indexed to the rate of any future carbon tax hikes, to maintain its effective support for those on low incomes.

Given the heavy weighting in favour of tax relief for businesses, the last thing we should be doing is devoting an even larger share of an ever-larger amount of carbon tax revenue back to businesses.

Especially not the oil and gas industry.

Yet that, too, is something the CLT recommends to help those emissions hogs remain globally “competitive” and to help them offset their costs of reducing their emissions.

It proposes to eliminate the sales tax on electricity for industry, just as it was previously eliminated for households.

That would represent a massive tax transfer to industry, especially to B.C.’s heaviest carbon emitters, in the hope of encouraging them to switch from fossil fuels to renewable electricity.

I will address that issue a greater length in my next piece, but for now it is enough to note that whatever its intended benefits, that recommendation would be yet one more needless subsidy to business that will make public acceptance of any future carbon tax increases that much harder to swallow.

It would represent another hidden subsidy to some of B.C.’s worst carbon polluters that is only contemplated to help attract more carbon-intensive investment. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

If anything, as carbon taxes go up, as they should and must, proportionately more of that revenue should be reinvested to mitigate cost pressures on families.

At least some of it should be used to invest in carbon reducing social “goods,” such as public transit, LiveSmart BC programs, targeted tax relief, affordable “green” housing, and more.

The CLT plan acknowledges those needs, but it also proposes all sorts of new measures that are mostly aimed at further subsidizing businesses, including the oil and gas industry.

As it is, the Clark government has already badly distorted the very notion of a revenue-neutral carbon tax by using that revenue for so many tax cuts and subsidies that should properly be funded from General Revenue, if at all.

In fact, of the $1.7 billion in tax relief attributable to the revenue-neutral carbon tax scheme, over $1.1 billion is dedicated to business — almost twice the amount going to individuals.

And that gap is projected to grow wider, not smaller, over the next three years.

Fully one-third of the $1.2 billion generated in carbon tax revenue this year will go towards subsidizing the film industry — $400 million for film incentive and production services tax credits.

Another $150 million of that carbon tax revenue is also now ostensibly funding the scientific research and experimental development tax credit. And a further $45 million is going towards the interactive digital media tax credit.

All of those tax credits have increased under the Clark government. They all used to be funded from General Revenue, not from the carbon tax.

The five per cent reduction in their personal income taxes that was extended with carbon tax revenue way back in 2008 has not been increased in all that time.

Before any cuts are made to the sales tax from carbon tax revenue, it would be much fairer to reduce income taxes for middle-income earners, adding a high-income surtax to offset those benefits for B.C. wealthiest individuals.

Truth is, the initial five per cent income tax is barely discernible in most middle class families’ take-home pay. They only see it once a year, at tax filing time, which is perhaps one of the reasons that the CLT is suggesting a more highly and constantly visible sales tax cut at some point down the road.

The low income climate action tax credit and the Northern and rural home owner benefit have also not changed in years, and they only apply to a relatively small subset of individual taxpayers. Most taxpayers don’t receive or feel those tax relief benefits.

Other tiny tax credits funded from the carbon tax were mostly cheap political ploys introduced by the Clark government to curry favour with their targeted constituencies.

They include a children’s fitness tax credit, a children’s arts credit, a training tax credit, a B.C. seniors’ home renovation tax credit and even a small business venture capital tax credit.

All arguably enough worthy measures, and all ones that were or should otherwise be funded from General Revenue, or from the LiveSmart BC program — not from the carbon tax.

Again, their reach and their actual tax benefits are so small, almost no one knows they even exist.

So it is not surprising that most taxpayers do not see the connection between the carbon taxes they pay and the tax relief or other social benefits they receive.

That needs to change — dramatically — as part of any plan to raise the carbon tax.

The government should end the carbon tax exemption it put in place two years ago for coloured gasoline and coloured diesel fuel that is used for farm purposes, including for on-farm equipment and for eligible farm trucks on the highway.

It should end the Greenhouse Carbon Tax Program that provides greenhouse growers a grant equal to 80 per cent of the carbon tax paid on their purchases of natural gas and propane burned for heating and CO2 production within their greenhouses.

The Clark government opened the door to the slippery slope of carbon tax exemptions that arbitrarily exempt some sources of carbon emissions from that tax on pollution that only works if its charged on all measurable emissions, across the board.

Tax exemptions are always a mug’s game that is politically manipulated for mostly political gain. We should avoid them like the plague in respect of the carbon tax, which is all about taxing all carbon pollution as if it matters.

In future, we should be rethinking the revenue-neutral carbon tax to use some of that money, as the CLT suggests, for public investments in carbon-reducing infrastructure, technology, facilities and behavioural incentives.

This is the approach that Alberta has chosen for its new carbon tax. It makes sense to more dedicate carbon tax revenue to the thing it is supposed to encourage — lower GHGs.

If governments hope to maintain and build broad public support for any carbon tax, they would be well-advised to clearly demonstrate that linkage with every penny it collect from that tax on carbon emissions.

People very much want and need major improvements in public and rapid transit. They want more pedestrian and bicycle-friendly communities. They want more green spaces, with more trees that clean the air as they sequester carbon.

They want much more help in making their personal transitions to more energy efficient homes, to electric and hybrid vehicles, and to cleaner, more sustainable consumer products that contain less packaging.

They want to make smart choices that will help to heat their homes and run their appliances using truly renewable sources of electricity and renewable biogas that helps to eliminate methane emissions.

Those are only a fraction of the most obvious targets for needed public investment that might be supported by using at least some of B.C.’s carbon tax for carbon-reducing priorities that taxpayers want.

They offer the types of benefits that more people would actually see and feel, which might make them more amenable to paying gradually higher carbon tax rates.

They are the types of investments that can really make a difference in helping taxpayers to make smarter choices that can truly save them money, net of the carbon tax.

Finally, we should consider imposing differential carbon tax rates, as Norway has done, that impose a heavier proportional carbon tax burden on carbon-intensive industries and activities that demand a distinctly more onerous price signal to achieve the carbon tax’s intended purposes.

Far from charging the oil and gas industry less, we should be charging it more, especially in the absence of cap-and-trade, which might achieve the same end at a lower cost, by dint of absolutely limiting and decreasing those related carbon emissions.

Martyn Brown was former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell’s long-serving chief of staff and a key architect of B.C.’s climate action plan and clean energy plan. He was the top strategic advisor to three provincial party leaders, and a former deputy minister of tourism, trade, and investment in British Columbia. A frequent contributor to the Georgia Straight, Brown is also the author of the ebook Towards a New Government in British Columbia. Contact Brown at towardsanewgovernment@gmail.com.

Image: Province of B.C./Flickr

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By Martyn Brown for the Georgia Straight.

"Harvest." Such a beautiful, bucolic word.

Imagery abounds.

Golden fields of swaying wheat. Lush green vineyards of plump, perfect grapes. Acres of apples, all red and delicious.

Harvest: so suggestive of humans in harmony with the Earth.

So redolent of life.

So much more super and natural than, I don’t know — slaughter? — the word that more accurately describes British Columbia’s annual grizzly bear trophy hunt.

Actually, even that word isn’t quite accurate, for it connotes the killing of animals for food.

Grizzly bears — like black bears, cougars, wolves, lynxes, bobcats, and wolverines — are legally "harvested" without any expectation that their meat will be eaten by people.

They are mostly shot by trophy hunters whose twisted sense of vanity drives them to take those animals’ lives not for food, but for the perverse pride of killing something so magnificent, so fearsome, and so elusive.

As far as I am aware, we don’t seem to have a word in the English language to even accurately describe the wanton slaying of wild animals that is tantamount to the word we use to describe the premeditated taking of human life — namely, murder.

We don’t have a special word for that special form of state-sanctioned killing that is about the "sport" and the "fun" of finding those animals where they live and consciously ending their existence from a safe distance, with a high-powered rifle or hunting bow.

In our hearts, most of us know that the grisly business of trophy hunting is not right. Rather, it demeans us, as the planet’s apex species.

Indeed, a Insights West survey conducted last fall determined that 91 percent of British Columbians and 84 percent of Albertans are opposed to hunting animals for sport (i.e. trophy hunting).

It is a sentiment widely shared by so many people around the world, whom we hope will visit our province, six years after we made our Olympic appeal, "You gotta be here."

In making that pitch, we never told those potential visitors that the "here" we want them to "be" is a place that quietly embraces the recreational killing of the very iconic species we profiled with such pride in defining ourselves to the world.

The images of those lifeless carcasses that are so boastfully displayed on so many guide outfitters’ websites don’t quite jive with the picture that we want to globally project of "Super, Natural British Columbia."

You might say, they’re "off-brand." And sickening.

There is nothing super or natural about the sight of a killer, proudly kneeling over a dead nine-foot grizzly that only moments before was so majestically roaming this Earth.

You certainly won’t find those images on Destination B.C.’s home page, which currently features a striking picture of a grizzly bear alive in its natural habitat, but nowhere even references hunting in its list of activities of Things To Do in British Columbia.

Screenshot of Hello B.C.'s tourism homepage.

You won’t even find them in the Cariboo Chilcotin Coast Tourism Association’s main promotional brochure, one of several tourism regions that are so rightly keen to talk about their wildlife and eco-tourism, but about their grizzly hunts, not so much.

It features a gorgeous shot of a swimming grizzly on the front cover, but nary a shot of a shot grizzly, nor a specific reference to grizzly bears in its two-paragraph reference to hunting.

The business of death, celebrated as sport, is fundamentally incompatible with the celebration of life that lies at the core of British Columbia’s destination tourism identity.

Guide Outfitters Promote Killing Bears

Indeed, the grizzly trophy hunt is British Columbia’s great shame; it is a death sport that both the tourism industry and the pro-hunting B.C. government agree is best quietly encouraged without widely advertising its odious, bloody truth.

The B.C. guide outfitting industry has no such compunctions.

It proudly proclaims that it attracts more than 5,000 hunters annually, who spend more daily per capita than any other visitors. It is pleased to tell us that those guide outfitters support 2,000 jobs in B.C. and generate about $116 million in revenue each year.

The government is also quick to point out in its less visible forums that the resident and non-resident hunting industry contributes some $350 million annually to the province. It is an industry that generates over $7.3 million in license fees, including $2 million from non-resident hunters and $5.3 million from resident hunters, and a further $2.25 million in surcharges that fund conservation projects.

Photo of a trophy hunt in Kwatna estuary, B.C. Photo: Hunting B.C.

The total economic contribution of the grizzly bear hunt is estimated to be as much as $7.5 million. That includes $4.8 million from resident hunters and a further $2.7 million from nonresident hunters, who each typically pay one of B.C.’s 245 guide outfitters $13,000 to $27,000 to stalk and perhaps "bag" a grizzly.　

That $7.5 million economic value is peanuts in the context of our $255-billion provincial economy.

A 2010 report by the David Suzuki Foundation found that of the nearly 11,000 grizzly bears killed by humans between 1977 and 2009, some 87 per cent — or 9,484 — were legally killed by hunters.

To hunt a grizzly bear in B.C., resident hunters must first win a lottery. They must be among the more than 3,000 applicants who are authorized each year under the Limited Entry Hunt system to shoot a grizzly.

In 2014, hunters "harvested" 267 grizzly bears, a number that has remained relatively consistent over the last 20 years, as you can read here and here.

In addition, some 40 percent of the total grizzly bear population that the province targets for trophy killing are allocated to guide outfitters.　

Most of their clients are nonresidents, who are typically obliged to hire those experts in fulfilling their immortal quests to snuff out those rare and truly awesome animals’ lives.

Without trophy hunting, the defenders of that practice maintain, our entire wildlife population would soon suffer from all sorts of adverse impacts. It’s all about "conservation," don’t you know?

In essence, we must kill those animals to stop them and others from dying from starvation, or from adverse human impacts, or from over predation. Or so the argument goes.

We need more hunters, the province maintains. That is largely why it launched a hunter recruitment strategy that it boasts was successful in increasing the number of resident hunters by over 24 per cent, from 82,000 "only 10 years ago" to more than than 102,000 today. Yippee.

Have no fear, the authorities assure us, it’s all carefully controlled and managed to keep species’ populations in balance, through the rigours of applied science and sound stewardship.

Perhaps.　

We will learn next spring if that’s true in respect of grizzly bears, when B.C.’s auditor general releases the results of her current review into whether or not the government is effectively managing that particular species’ population.

91% of BC and 84% of AB residents opposed to trophy hunting https://t.co/lTXCmvBxPW @christyclarkbc #bcpoli pic.twitter.com/YfIrT5fQ7V

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) July 6, 2016

Government Estimates Come Under Fire

To say that the science of grizzly bear management is sketchy is an understatement, as so many scientific reviews have determined.

The province assures us that there are still about 15,000 grizzlies living in British Columbia — less than half the number that once roamed the land. Yet the fact is, it does not know what the true number of that population really is, since its estimates are based on so many fluid and assumed variables.

One study from 2013 estimated that the actual mortality of grizzly bears might be as much as 70 percent higher than the levels predicted by the province’s scientific management models.

Another study published in 2014 highlighted how grizzly bear populations are unexpectedly inhabiting so many more islands than the government had thought in one area on B.C.’s Central Coast. The population data is different, depending on how it is obtained and calculated, and it is anything but an exact science.

How can the government be so confident that its numbers are correct? It can’t. And it knows it, as I strongly suspect B.C.’s auditor general, Carol Bellringer, will find — hopefully, in advance of the provincial election.

Approximately 35 per cent of British Columbia is closed to grizzly hunting. Yet some 13.4 per cent of British Columbia’s grizzly bear habit falls in provincial parks and protected areas that are typically open to hunting for people’s "use and enjoyment," unlike the national park spaces where hunting is strictly prohibited. How crazy is that?

The good news is that the province’s recent Great Bear Rainforest Order has now extended the area where grizzly bears will be protected throughout most of that gigantic 6.4-million-hectare area that lies along B.C.’s north and central coast.

But the numbers of grizzlies that will be saved by that measure won’t do much to offset the hundreds more that are slaughtered each year in other regions, despite the best efforts to stop it by groups like Pacific Wild, the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, the David Suzuki Foundation, Western Wildlife Outreach and others.

Screenshot of a Raincoast Conservation Foundation Instagram post detailing their grizzly tracking program. Photo: Raincoast Conservation.

It is a sad indictment of our public apathy about the grizzly trophy-hunt that groups like Pacific Wild now consider it a win when the government bows to their pressure not to triple that hunt in the Peace region.

In making that announcement, the government acted like it was doing us all a favour, in an abundance of caution and concern for protecting that region’s grizzly bear population, even though it was also quick to assure us that it could have sustained such an increase in human-caused mortality.

I can’t help but wonder how quickly we might mobilize public pressure to end grizzly trophy hunting, as Green Party leader Andrew Weaver has proposed, if we somehow managed to press the B.C. celebrities who pitched the 2010 "You Gotta Be Here" campaign back into service.

In my experience, petitions signed by even tens of thousands of citizens make worthy and important statements, but they mostly fall on deaf ears. They are barely even reported. Which is demoralizing and discouraging, to say the least, for those who work so hard to get those petitions signed and tabled in the legislature or in Parliament.

Fact is, the grizzly bear trophy hunt will only be stopped when the politicians who now support it are sufficiently politically embarrassed into doing the right thing. Like the campaigns of yesteryear that were successful in stopping the unfettered assaults on B.C.’s old-growth forests, it will take a considerable international appeal.

There are simply too many voices at the Christy Clark cabinet table and in the B.C. Liberal caucus who are resolutely committed to drowning out the voices of reason that want to end the barbaric practice of killing grizzlies solely for the sake of seeing them dead.

There are too many vocal hunters, guide outfitters and rural voters who John Horgan dares not enrage by vowing to reimpose the moratorium on grizzly bear hunting that Ujjal Dosanjh’s NDP government had introduced on the eve of the 2001 provincial election.

Buying up guide outfitter licences with public or private funds to incrementally retire their allocated grizzly quotas can’t hurt. But it’s not the answer.

To stop the grizzly trophy hunt, British Columbians will need to do much more to mobilize public pressure on the politicians.

One potential effective strategy in that regard would be to start by mobilizing public pressure on B.C.’s tourism industry to live up to its Super, Natural British Columbia brand. It should not be allowed to sit on its hands and do nothing when it could reap so much more economic benefit from acting to protect grizzly bears.

A 2014 study, Economic Impact of Bear Viewing and Bear Hunting in the Great Bear Rainforest of British Columbia, determined that bear viewing in that region generates 12 times more visitor spending and 11 times more direct revenue for government than bear hunting.

It also generates almost 28 times more employment, with 60 times more people engaged in bear viewing in that region than in bear hunting.

Plus, more people than ever are coming to B.C. for its living wildlife experiences, including to see something so beautiful and precious as a grizzly bear, whereas trophy hunting is declining as a tourism draw.

If it takes giving that industry a black eye for its tacit support of a practice that it is too ashamed and embarrassed to even promote as a globally desired tourism activity, so be it.

Hope springs eternal that the likes of Michael J. Fox, Steve Nash, Ryan Reynolds, Kim Cattrall, Eric McCormack and Sarah McLachlan might once again step up to the plate, to send the world yet another timely message.

And that message is this: if you want to stop B.C.’s grizzly trophy-hunt, you gotta be here — loud and proud — to make the B.C. government bow to the wishes of the 91 per cent of British Columbians who say they don’t support it.

Martyn Brown was former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell’s long-serving chief of staff, the top strategic advisor to three provincial party leaders, and a former deputy minister of tourism, trade, and investment in British Columbia. He is the author of the ebook Towards a New Government in British Columbia. Contact Brown at towardsanewgovernment@gmail.com.

Image: Grizzly bear in B.C.'s Khutzeymateen Sanctuary. Photo: Heather & Mike/Flickr

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.