Editor:
“Cash for Access” sounds like any legitimate transaction – like buying a ticket for the roller coaster at the PNE. However, the $5.2 million in political donations from the energy industry to B.C. political parties from 2008 to 2015 (92 per cent of which went to the Liberals) smells like LNG, and looks like corruption.
Political pillow talk between the LNG industry and our Liberal government is a relationship cultivated through frequent contact. The top 10 lobbying firms, according to a report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, reported close to 20,000 lobbying contacts with B.C. public office holders between 2010 and 2016 – which adds up to a lot of access and opportunities for salacious whisperings in the darkened corners of Victoria’s posh lounges.
One citizen, one vote sounds so ridiculously naïve.
Then there are the subsidies.
A recently published report from the Sierra Club pulls the covers off another layer of creepy bedbugs living off of the public’s mattress. “If you factor in future lost royalty revenue because of subsidies allocated in 2016, the natural gas sector actually cost the B.C. government, and therefore B.C. taxpayers, a million dollars per day in fiscal year 2016,” says the report.
Add the $9 billion we will be paying off over 70 years for the Site C dam that is being built to supply the energy needs for the LNG industry and you have an incredibly expanding white elephant that will travel from the present and into the future to inflate our and our great grandchildren’s Hydro payments.
In 2013 we were promised a trillion-dollar windfall from LNG and this is the consolation prize in 2017.
Get money out of politics in B.C. or stop calling ourselves a democracy.
Pay the penalty for construction costs, let the Peace Valley grow food for a million people and leave the LNG myth buried in the ground.
Neil Bryson, Halfmoon Bay
