Letter to the Editor

Many people know about the one-trick pony.  His circus trainer thinks that if he can get the pony to perform its trick faster and faster, the audience won’t realize that nothing new is happening.  The B.C. Liberals seem to be operating the same way.  They seem to be saying, we have to grow the economy; let’s let the big corporations plunder our children’s and grandchildren’s share of the resources faster and faster.

So, fellow voters, when our B.C. natural resources are gone, what are our grandchildren going to do for jobs, hijack freighters in the Northwest Passage, like the Somalis are stuck doing (since the big foreign trawlers wiped out the East African fishery)?  Besides, it’s unlikely the B.C. Liberals can increase government revenue by letting the resource companies flood the B.C. market with more natural gas production than they have pipeline capacity to deliver to foreign markets.

Flooding the B.C. natural gas market will just reduce local gas prices, and reduce the price-dependent royalties the government collects.  Take a look at what has happened in Alberta, when their government let the big Tar Sands companies flood the local market with more crude than they could deliver.  The companies drove the Alberta heavy crude price down by $30 dollars a barrel before putting it into the pipeline, then jacked the price back up at the Texas end, put the $30 dollars a barrel in their pockets without having to pay full royalties, and laughed their butts off at the bush-leaguers in Edmonton.

We don’t have to look much past our own rock-bottom natural gas prices to realize the same thing can happen here, if our government allows natural gas production to continue to exceed delivery capacity.  Besides, if our government really wants to grow our B.C. economy, product innovation is a better, more sustainable way to go than selling our raw resources faster and faster, cheaper and cheaper.

Innovative products mean value-added businesses in B.C., paying good wages to B.C. workers. Here is a hint. High quality products earn more money than raw resources, to help pay for delivery to market, and encourage businesses to support ongoing skill development of their workers.

I am reading Niall Ferguson’s 2011 book Civilization.  It explains how a bunch of tiny European kingdoms managed to walk in and take over much older and more powerful civilizations in China and the Middle East.

The leaders and bureaucracies, of those older civilizations, in China and Turkey, were stuck in their old ways and actually punished innovative behavior. As a result, after the 1500s, little European kingdoms (like England, France, Germany, Portugal, and Spain), using the advances of the Scientific Revolution, sped hundreds of years ahead of the Chinese and Turks, industrially and militarily.  Those European empires were able to take over most of the world between 1500 and 1900.  Turkey and China were so stuck in the past that they didn’t even start trying to catch up until the 1900s.  Is a stuck-in-the-past resource-extraction economy what we want for our children? Or, should we elect a new government that believes in industrial innovation for our children’s future. It appears that Bill Bennett and the B.C. Liberals are struck in a resource-give-away box, encouraging industries to export our natural resources faster and faster.

Can you think outside that box, Norma Blissett?

Frank Hastings,

Cranbrook

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