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Whew! It has been a very busy last couple of weeks as this issue re-heats up again. The Wilderness Committee is engaged in a major outreach campaign to have a permanent legislated ban on coastal oil and gas development enacted on BC's coast. Luckily, the results of the federal public input panel released on Friday also provides a legislated ban as one of the options for the government to undertake. Note that 75% of people who spoke up and wrote-in to the public input process were in favour of maintaining the moratorium, not "over 60%" as we had originally tallied (ie. the results are significantly better than we expected!). Also note the sore loser mentality of the BC Liberal government and other pro-oil lobbyists, who are trying very hard to discredit the public input process by claiming it didn't weight the importance of each respondent (ie. they want the opinion of selected mayors in Port McNeill and Port Hardy to count more than everyone else's opinions, including the environmental movement with its hundreds of thousands of members...) and didn't include new technical or scientific information (note: it was a public input panel, not a science panel - which already happened, which the oily proponents are well aware of...).
- Ken Wu, WCWC Victoria
Energy Minister shrugs off opposition to offshore oil
Study showing massive opposition contains nothing new, he says
Victoria Times Colonist, November 20, 2004
By Jeff Rud
A pair of federally commissioned reports that reflect heavy
opposition to offshore oil and gas exploration in B.C. drew criticism
Friday from the provincial government.
B.C. Energy and Mines Minister Richard Neufeld dismissed the
so-called Priddle report, a year-long consultation of British Columbians
on the issue. That report showed 75 per cent of submissions to a federal
panel were against lifting a 32-year federal moratorium on offshore oil
and gas exploration on B.C's coast.
"As far as I'm concerned, it's not a very good report," Neufeld
said.
"It doesn't tell us anything that we didn't already know. If I
was the federal government, I'd be pretty disappointed about taking
almost a year to come up with nothing."
Headed by former National Energy Board chairman Roland Priddle,
the Offshore Oil and Gas Public Review Panel sought opinions from
British Columbians during 10 different public meetings and through
e-mails, letters and petitions over the last year, drawing a total of
3,540 responses.
Its report was unveiled Friday along with a First Nations
consultation panel report, delivered by Cheryl Brooks, which showed 100
per cent opposition to offshore exploration by about 70 First Nations.
The two reports will now be studied by federal National
Resources Minister John Efford, who will also take into account a
scientific report by the Royal Society of Canada.
Former Environment Minister David Anderson says it would be a
"contemptuous" and "outrageous violation of public trust" for the
government to lift the moratorium.
"They have chosen a route of canvassing public opinion," said
the Victoria MP. "They could have avoided it. They could have done other
things. But they have chosen that route, they can't now pretend it
doesn't count."
The Priddle report's findings were not warmly received by a B.C.
government firmly committed to starting offshore oil and gas exploration
by 2010. Seventy-five per cent of submissions to the panel were against
lifting the moratorium while only 23 per cent were in favour.
However, Priddle himself stressed that the report's numbers
can't simply be taken at face value. All submissions were given equal
weight, counted as just one opinion, whether they came from a single
uninformed e-mailer, or a detailed presentation by the provincial or a
municipal government, he said.
"You must look behind those numbers," Priddle said. "We simply
felt that we could not arrive at what would be a sensible and broadly
acceptable weighting, so we fell back simply on a headcount. That was
the best we could do. That's the big picture. Those are important
numbers. They are correct numbers. But in using them you must understand
how they were arrived at."
Neufeld said he isn't sure what the federal government will do with
this report. He is scheduled to meet with Efford in Ottawa next week.
"I do know that our own work that we have done with both aboriginal
and non-aboriginal communities along the coast is totally different than
what might be portrayed in the Priddle report, meaning that people are
quite willing to look at the processes and see what can happen as long
as they're involved in ways of making it happen." Neufeld said. "We know
that also when we do polling, people generally support off-shore oil and
gas as long as it's done. in an environmentally sound and scientifically
safe manner.
"We stick with that position. We'll continue to work with the folks
in the First Nations and non-First Nations community along the coast and
through the province of British Columbia to move this file forward."
The panel's report made no critical analysis of the submissions.
But Priddle said views on the moratorium issue are "strongly held and
there was a degree of exaggeration on both sides.
Brooks said there was no polarization on the issue when it came to
First Nations. About 70 tribal governments were consulted by her process
and none were in favour of lifting the ban.
However, if the moratorium was lifted, Brooks said First Nations
groups believe they should be "privy to a revenue-sharing agreement."
They should also have a real and legitimate role in the management and
regulation of the resource and be permitted to incorporate traditional
ecological knowledge, she said.
Environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Western
Wilderness Committee, were pleased with the panel's report. The Western
Wilderness Committee called for the government to now enshrine the
moratorium in legislation, one of the recommendations suggested by the
panel.
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