British Columbia

When labour leader Jim Sinclair turned up at the legislature last week for release of the workforce plan for the liquefied natural gas industry, I teased him that he’s being seen around the halls of government more often than when the New Democratic Party was in power. Sinclair, the longtime president of the B.C. Federation of Labour, took it with good humour, reminding me of the joke about his predecessor Ken Georgetti — that he had an actual seat at the cabinet table in the NDP government.

Leaders of a small native camp in central B.C. that is blocking the right-of-way of a proposed gas pipeline say they won’t be moving any time soon, even if a court orders them to. Freda Huson and her husband, Dini Ze Toghestiy, who are both Wet’suwet’en members, said they have been dug in so long on the Pacific Trail Pipeline Project route that they consider the camp their home now. In Vancouver over the weekend to attend “training workshops” for anti-pipeline protesters, Ms.

Indigenous Nations and allies of British Columbia unite to say No Pipelines! This weekend, Christy Clark’s worst nightmare converged on unceded Coast Salish Territory, Vancouver. After her surprise election, won on promises of a natural gas and resource extraction bonanza, her political future is staked to her claims of 100,000 jobs and $100 billion in royalties.

As Kinder Morgan's oilsands pipeline expansion lumbers towards public hearings, the National Energy Board's announcement yesterday of who can participate, and how, is stirring debate in the province. Four hundred applicants, including the cities of Vancouver, Burnaby and New Westminster, were granted intervenor status, allowing them to directly question the proponent and submit expert testimony and evidence when hearings begin in Jan. 2015. Of more than 2,000 applicants seeking to weigh in, 468 were outrightly rejected.

The B.C. Liberal government won’t win any forecasting awards for its predictions on natural-gas revenues. Two years ago, the province estimated that royalties from this fuel would reach $846 million in this fiscal year. In Finance Minister Mike de Jong’s recent budget, that was cut nearly in half, to $441 million. Three years ago, the spring budget pegged revenues from natural-gas royalties at $447 million. As that fiscal year ended, that figure was reduced to $367 million.

Since 2008, Warner Naziel has gone by his traditional name, Toghestiy. It means “man who sits beside the water”.  As one of the hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, he takes neither tradition nor his duties lightly. On November 20, 2012, Toghestiy did what his ancestors would have done to people not welcome in their territory. Confronting surveyors for a gas pipeline planned in Northern B.C, he handed them an eagle feather in accordance with Wet’suwet’en law.

B.C. Premier Christy Clark was a partner in a lobbying firm that was contracted by Enbridge and lobbied the federal government on the company's behalf, according to documents obtained by The Vancouver Observer. The Premier's spokesperson, however, stated that Enbridge was no longer a client of the firm by the time she joined the company.  In a 2008 

A little-known bill that will drastically alter the management of B.C. parks became law this week, creating controversy among the province's most prominent environmental and conservation organizations.

With a deeply unpopular $6.5 billion Northern Gateway project at risk, Enbridge is betting heavily on ads and a door-to-door corporate campaign to sway residents in a small northern coastal B.C. community to "vote yes" for its oil sands pipeline project.  "It’s mind boggling how they’re pouring so much into [the Enbridge campaign]...