Opinion: John Horgan’s pending retirement provides opening to challenge his trade-offs on environmental issues. Author of the article:
Vaughn Palmer Publishing date:
Jul 04, 2022 • 15 hours ago •
VICTORIA — While potential candidates for the NDP leadership decide whether to run, a call has already gone out for the party to choose a “climate champion” to succeed Premier John Horgan.
Now is the time for progressives to organize and elect a climate champion, who understands the crises we’re in and will step up to lead us through the challenges in a way that both meets the scale of the emergency and lifts people up,” says Ashley Zarbatany, elected chairwoman of the party’s standing committee on the economy and the environment.
“What should the new B.C. NDP leader do when they become premier?” continued the weekend posting on her Twitter account. “Declare a state of emergency and establish a climate secretariat in the premier’s office with a mandate for cross-ministerial action and an all-government approach to addressing the crisis.”
Zarbatany didn’t suggest she would run herself. Nor did she nominate anyone else to take up the cause.
But her postings, coming as they did from an NDP climate activist, signalled that Horgan’s pending retirement provides an opening to challenge his trade-offs on environmental issues.
Zarbatany, in her call for action, said the new leader should:
• “Protect all remaining old growth forests. Ban fracking.
• “Provide a just transition for workers and communities out of the oil-and-gas industry.
• “Respect the rights of the hereditary Wet’suwet’en chiefs to say ‘no’ to the Coastal GasLink pipeline through their land.
All four calls are at odds with stands Horgan has taken as premier.
• The NDP government has deferred logging in a sizable portion of the province’s remaining old growth. But the government also deferred to First Nations the fate of old growth within their traditional territories, at places like Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island.
• The NDP government tightened the regulations on the use of fracking — injecting water and chemicals to release natural gas from shale rock. Yet fracking remains the dominant process for most natural gas production in B.C.
Far from phasing out natural gas production, the Horgan government approved the development of an LNG industry, based in Kitimat, on terms more favourable than those offered by the previous B.C. Liberal government. Horgan also supports construction of the Coastal GasLink (CGL) feeder pipeline for the Kitimat LNG terminal.
As premier, he was able to keep a lid on the internal opposition to his stands on those issues.
For the most part, that is.
However, at the NDP annual convention last December, the critics did manage to put through a motion siding with the opponents of the CGL pipeline, albeit in a roundabout way. The motion cited allegations that the RCMP used “excessive force” in arresting protesters opposing construction of the pipeline through Wet’suwet’en territory. It committed the B.C. NDP to “denounce the use of improper force at this or any other protest.”
Another passage noted how the NDP government’s review of the B.C. Police Act provided an opening to strengthen oversight of the RCMP, which is funded by the province.
“The B.C. NDP will call on the provincial government to ensure that all alleged incidents of improper force by police are independently investigated,” the motion declared.
Adding her voice to the debate was Zarbatany. The same convention elected to her current post as chairwoman of the party’s standing committee on the economy and the environment. She supported the criticism of the police but also declared on social media that the motion didn’t go far enough.
“This resolution doesn’t address the heart of this issue, which is that our government is not only culpable for its role in deploying RCMP resources for this raid but has repeatedly violated the rights of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary leadership to say no to pipelines on their unceded territories,” said Zarbatany.
She faulted the government for “hypocritically” enshrining the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into law “with a time stamp” that exempted previously approved projects like Coastal GasLink from the obligation to obtain free, prior and informed consent from Indigenous people.
“Our government knows this,” Zarbatany continued, “but instead has obfuscated its role, engaged in classic divide and conquer colonial tactics, spread misinformation, and exploited people’s vulnerable situations, which they caused in the first place through chronic underfunding and genocidal policies.”
Not content with accusing the government of complicity, hypocrisy, obfuscation and promoting genocidal policies in dealing with Indigenous people, she also blasted it for pursuing “Christy Clark’s LNG pipeline.”
She accused party power brokers of blocking motions that would have added the LNG debate to the convention agenda.
“Members have tried to bring forward LNG debate for over two years, but we’ve been blocked every time,” wrote Zarbatany. “Now we’re losing some of our best activists over this issue, alienating an entire generation of young people who are relying on us to address the climate emergency.”
Not an entire generation of young people: many of them will have other concerns, from child care to affordable housing to the cost of living to the crisis in health care.
Still, some of the younger New Democrats — and older ones too — will be looking for a less compromising stance than Horgan’s on environmental issues.
The leadership race provides a chance to raise matters like old growth and fracking and LNG that were stifled at party conventions in recent years. It remains to be seen whether any candidate will seize the opening, and how far they will go.