How BC’s New Economic Plan Gets It All Wrong

Nov. 25, 2025

Premier David Eby is calling “Look West,” the British Columbia government’s new economic strategy, a plan to attract $20 billion in investment from the federal government and private sector.

Up close, it looks more like a public relations brochure than a serious and detailed plan.

While part of Look West envisions new industries, details are scant and it’s not totally clear how much of a financial commitment the B.C. government itself is putting on the table.

Instead, Look West is mostly about doubling down as a petro-state through liquefied natural gas and mining export projects in northern B.C. While ostensibly aimed at breaking free of the United States, a couple of the biggest projects are, ironically, U.S.-owned.

If successful, Look West will create some short-term construction jobs in projects that pose huge environmental challenges and increased costs for British Columbians.

Look West also overlooks real improvements like expanding child care and addressing the low-wage service sector that would actually make a profound difference in the B.C. economy and people’s lives.

Northern LNG and mining development

For its entire history, B.C. has been about extracting its abundant resources for export to distant markets. This mindset is deeply entrenched in Victoria, so when it comes to economic growth, the answer is usually more extraction. For the last 15 years, the big obsession has been new industrial development of LNG — massive refrigerators that enable gas exports by ship to Asia, rather than landlocked pipeline routes to the United States or Alberta.

Only one plant, LNG Canada in Kitimat, has emerged out of the frenzy, but its arrival was particularly timely. LNG Canada shipped its first cargo at the end of June, just months after the second Donald Trump administration started a global trade war. While B.C.’s gas exports have been unaffected by Trump’s tariffs, the new terminal in Kitimat reduces dependence on the United States.

LNG is thus now front and centre in Canada’s response to the Trump trade war. The federal and B.C. governments have each committed $200 million to the Cedar LNG facility, under construction in Kitimat, while a smaller Woodfibre LNG project in Squamish, just outside Metro Vancouver, is also in progress.

A couple of their north coast megaprojects, LNG Canada Phase 2 and Ksi Lisims LNG, were assigned to the federal government’s new Major Projects Office for fast-tracking, although the delay is not regulatory hurdles but a final investment decision by the proponents.

The overarching economic challenge facing a company looking to invest $10 billion to $20 billion in an LNG terminal that will take several years to build is guessing what the market is going to look like in a decade. Ksi Lisims also needs a new gas pipeline constructed to bring gas from B.C.’s northeast to the coast. All of this could be subject to cost overruns.

To move forward, LNG projects need to line up dedicated buyers on long-term contracts. They cannot just build and hope to sell on the spot market, because liquefying gas into LNG is expensive and spot market prices in recent years have often been below break-even cost. Meanwhile, demand in Asia and Europe is shifting to renewables that are cheaper than LNG. And on the supply side, other new LNG facilities are under construction around the world.

This mix of supply and demand and trends does not bode well for LNG projects in B.C. in spite of our proximity to Asia. A recent report on Ksi Lisims LNG by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis concluded:

“After factoring key infrastructure challenges, inflation and the potential for delays and cost overruns, it becomes highly unlikely that the project can be delivered within the budget estimates initially put forward by its proponents. Further compounding these challenges are broader industry headwinds: an impending global LNG supply glut, potential domestic gas price volatility and inflationary trade actions that threaten to disrupt global supply chains.”

Amid the shaky economics of LNG projects, a big concern is that B.C. and federal governments will provide more subsidies in order to induce final investment decisions, as was the case for LNG Canada Phase 1. These could include tax breaks, weaker environmental rules and cheap (subsidized) electricity.

LNG is very capital intensive, meaning thousands of jobs are created during construction but few are needed once complete. LNG Canada Phase 1 now employs fewer than 200 workers.

Yet LNG megaprojects have significant environmental and climate impacts, including contamination and disturbances from gas fracking and huge emissions of greenhouse gases. All of this has led to opposition from some northern First Nations.

Finally, the scale of these projects means British Columbians will also face higher gas and electricity costs if they go ahead (I document this in more detail in “Painting Itself into a Corner.”)

Mining is also central to the Look West plan, rebranded as “critical minerals” to emphasize ingredients that can feed into global technology and renewable energy supply chains. But these are still mining projects with large environmental impacts, from smaller leaks of contaminants into streams and lakes to the potential of full-blown tailings dam failures. B.C. experienced such a major dam failure disaster at Mount Polley in 2014, with 25 billion litres of contaminated materials spilled.

The Red Chris mine expansion is being fast-tracked for regulatory approval in B.C., and it also appears on the federal major projects list (although it needs no federal approvals).

Opened in 2015, Red Chris is a copper and gold mine nearing the end of its life as an open-pit mine. An expansion would add 13 years to the mine’s life through a procedure called “block cave mining,” which involves digging far underneath mineral deposits. Exploratory work using this technique led to three miners being trapped below the surface this summer.

Three other mining projects have been put forward by the B.C. government on its list of 18 resource projects, ostensibly to reduce reliance on the United States. Yet Red Chris is 70 per cent owned by a U.S. corporation, Newmont. The Ksi Lisims LNG project flags Nisg̱a’a Nation as partners but is in fact owned by Texas-based Western LNG. These projects are not exactly breaking free of the grip of the United States.

New LNG and mining projects will require a major boost to BC Hydro’s generation and transmission capacity. To fast-track development, the government is exempting a planned $6-billion North Coast Transmission Line from environmental assessment and review by the BC Utilities Commission. The federal government also added the transmission line to its list of major projects and is kicking in a loan of $139 million through the Canada Infrastructure Bank.

On the plus side, new BC Hydro calls for power have engaged First Nations as equity partners. But it’s unfortunate that this is in the service of LNG rather than decarbonizing the B.C. economy.

BC Hydro recently submitted a draft Integrated Resource Plan (its electricity supply and demand framework) that does not fully address how the utility will meet potentially soaring demand from LNG and mining operations, much less energy-hungry data centres for artificial intelligence.

Other industrial policy measures lack support

The remainder of the Look West plan outlines aspirational goals for the development of a handful of other sectors. These have some promising possibilities, but it’s not clear exactly what the B.C. government is doing to make them happen. A few paragraphs are dedicated to each of shipbuilding, aerospace, artificial intelligence and quantum computing and life sciences, but details around action are few.

For shipbuilding and aerospace, B.C. is banking on new federal money tied to the expansion of the defence industry, as confirmed in the federal budget earlier this month. For shipbuilding, B.C. hopes to land 35 per cent of federal defence vessel contracts.

Ironically, the B.C. government has spent most of 2025 defending the award of a BC Ferries shipbuilding contract to China. The government missed a great opportunity to invest directly in the B.C. shipbuilding industry, while keeping labour income and jobs in the local economy. Look West names Seaspan as a strategic partner for its federal defence contracts, while a year ago the company was complaining publicly about the bid process used by BC Ferries.

Artificial intelligence hype also makes its way into the plan. However, it appears that the core commitment is a “process to enable electricity infrastructure to support the AI sector.” This looks like another giant demand on BC Hydro’s electricity supplies in competition with LNG, mining and other domestic needs. Even supposedly “clean” electricity generation projects have an environmental footprint, and we also need to consider the cumulative impacts of all this development, as well as what that energy is being used for.

Unfortunately, green industrial development through climate action and energy transition also fail to make an appearance in the Look West plan.

If anything, the B.C. government is backing away from actions like its CleanBC program. It also could have extended efforts to innovate around zero waste and a circular economy, as envisioned in the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ “A Zero Waste Agenda for B.C.” report.

But the B.C. government agenda is more about maximizing throughput than about adding value (“doubling throughput” to non-U.S. markets through B.C. ports is a stated objective).

Investing in people

A final tranche of the Look West plan includes some measures aimed at skilled trades development. The numbers seem rather small, however. The plan’s commitment to “double investment in trades training to $214 million annually by 2028-29” is three years away and undersized, while compromised by a competing goal to “maximize access to external talent.”

And this modest bump in skills training by 2028-29 is the only part of the plan that makes new financial commitments toward its lofty objectives.

Herein lie many lost opportunities. If broad-based prosperity is the objective, the biggest gains in society are to elevate the standard of living of service sector workers, from food delivery and ride-hailing to all of the other low-wage work that makes it extremely difficult for people to get by in an expensive province.

And yet low-wage workers are nowhere to be seen in this economic blueprint, which is largely aimed at a part of the province where only two per cent of British Columbians live.

Child care is another area overlooked by the B.C. government’s plan. Child care is good for the B.C. economy because it enables B.C. parents to more fully participate in the labour market, and making high-quality investments in children boosts our long-term productivity. While B.C. made some early progress in expanding $10-a-day child-care spaces starting in 2018, progress has since been stunted. There are not enough spaces, and only about 10 per cent of them are available at $10 a day.

As feminist economist Marjorie Griffin Cohen commented, “The care economy is a critical part of the overall economy and treating it as an also-ran in economic planning is unwise.”

Lacking such a comprehensive vision, B.C.’s economic plan is heavy on big industrial jobs for men, while downplaying the province’s care economy where jobs and unpaid work are largely performed by women.

While B.C. is known for its good looks, this economic plan is not a pretty picture. It does not appear to have been the result of any kind of broader public engagement process and largely serves as a public relations exercise for resource extraction projects that double down on fossil fuels at a time when we need to ditch them.

[Top photo: ‘Look West’ is mostly about doubling down as a petro-state through LNG and mining export projects in northern BC, writes Marc Lee. The photo shows an LNG tanker docked in Kitimat. Photo via LNG Canada.]