The B.C. Liberals’ Speech from the Throne on Tuesday (Aug. 25) didn’t carry a lot of good news for ordinary British Columbians. But then, in these tough economic times, that’s to be expected.
The Sea to Sky corridor’s bread-and-butter industry, tourism, has most certainly not fared well with recent pronouncements from the Liberals. To wit, the harmonized sales tax (HST), while it may well be good for B.C. business as a whole, is a mixed bag that will hurt some sectors while helping others, and tourism is most certainly in the latter category. What’s more, while the decision to absorb the Crown corporation Tourism B.C. into the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and the Arts is expected to save money over the long haul, the transition period — with the change coming less than six months before the biggest tourism-related event in the province’s history — can’t be good for the industry in the short term.
As for the throne speech itself, the item of most immediate concern to Whistler — especially the resort municipality’s new environmental services manager, whomever that may be — is this one: “Government will act to outlaw the international export of British Columbia’s garbage and landfill waste.”
Whistler, of course, has been exporting its garbage to the massive Rabanco landfill near the south-central Washington town of Roosevelt for the past three-plus years, ever since it closed its own landfill to make way for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic athletes’ village. All along, exporting Whistler’s garbage by truck and rail has been viewed as a temporary solution until a more permanent one can be found — the best option being an upgrade of the District of Squamish landfill to allow it to accept all of the Sea to Sky corridor’s waste. That initiative has been moving along — but slowly. The waste-related reference in the throne speech has put corridor officials on notice that the status quo won’t cut it much longer.
We take heart in the government’s statements of support for two environmental initiatives: the Climate Action Plan and the new Species At Risk Task Force. Perhaps the latter will lead to real, on-the-ground action to curtail logging in recognized patches of northern spotted owl habitat, some of them in our region, giving the owl a fighting chance of survival in the wild, not just through a captive breeding program.
While we support the phase-out of the Burrard Thermal power plant as part of a strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in B.C., it’s difficult to avoid being cynical about the throne-speech statements with regard to the recent, critical B.C. Utilities Commission (BCUC) assessment of the government’s long-term energy acquisition plan. Statements indicating that the BCUC “will receive specific direction” with regard to Burrard Thermal and that a new Green Energy Advisory Task Force will be appointed “to complement the work of the BCUC’s long-term transmission requirement review” sound ominously like government-speak for “my way or the highway.” We sincerely hope our suspicions on the issue is proven wrong, but given the Campbell government’s actions surrounding energy development to date, we’re not holding our breath.
Conversely, we’re encouraged by the government’s promise to introduce legislation restricting the use of cell phones while driving — an issue about which we editorialized a few weeks ago. As we wrote back then, such legislation should have teeth, making the use of either hand-held and hands-free devices while driving an offence and as a primary offence, not just one to be enforced when drivers are stopped for some other alleged infraction. Only then will such a law accomplish the government’s goal of creating “a safer driving and pedestrian environment for all.”
