Earth Matters

I’ve been hearing a lot of rhetoric about the choice between the economy and the environment. Most environmentalists will talk about their emotional connection with nature and how we should care about preserving it, attempting to move people emotionally to care about the environment. The idea behind this is sound – people are more likely to look after things they have an emotional connection to, so if you can create an emotional tie to the environment, people are more likely to care about looking after it.

These environmentalists are then dismissed by the ‘realist’ and ‘rational’ economists who talk about how it’s much more important to have jobs, jobs, jobs, which will generally get linked to natural resource extraction and expansion. The ‘realists’ would love to have time to care for the environment like all the emotional hippies, but they’re too busy doing the ‘real work’ of building the economy.

And thus the stalemate continues and it all looks like a zero sum game. Except it isn’t.

While I am not taking one particular political party's side on this, I was disappointed to see such strong backlash against Adrian Dix for coming out against Kinder Morgan’s proposed new Trans Mountain pipeline. British Columbians have some tough conversations on the horizon about the costs and benefits of new resource development, and emotional arguments that polarize the issue aren’t helpful.

As a Vancouver-based business owner and a proud member of the real estate sector, I want to make sure that any new resource extraction proposal doesn’t risk our already thriving local economy. Take, for example, my industry. People might poke fun at Vancouver’s expensive coffee shops and condos but these, along with other similar building projects, are huge job creators. The property development sector is directly and indirectly responsible for over 220,000 jobs in BC and there are over 14,000 people working in real estate in the Lower Mainland alone. Compare that to the 50 permanent jobs that a new Trans Mountain pipeline would create in BC and things come into perspective a little.

In April 2010, the largest accidental marine oil spill in history occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and approximately 4.9 billion barrels of oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico over the three months that followed.

Although this is certainly a worst-case scenario, the experience of the Gulf states can be instructive when trying to get a picture of the costs and benefits of expanded tanker traffic in BC’s coastal waters. Both the Gulf states and southern BC have highly populated coastal areas and a thriving tourism industry that is a significant regional job creator (127,000 people are employed in tourism in BC, the vast majority in and around Vancouver).

On the eve of the provincial election, it’s a good time to review the election issues including salmon farming in BC. Is this industry good for the province, or is it a threat to the BC's coastal economy?

The Norwegian salmon feedlot industry using BC waters to grow their Atlantic salmon only exists because this impact largely occurs underwater, out of sight from everyone, except the very few scientists studying it.

For over 20 years, a stream of unfavourable headlines has chronicled the development of salmon feedlots in BC with thousands of people in protest telling the industry to stop.  And what is this fuss all about?  Why hasn’t the controversy died out?

So what was the plan?