This past Wednesday, residents in British Columbia got further confirmation that whatever a politician may say about affordability for citizens, they’re not actually very serious about it.
Last week, Vancouver city council voted to keep the ban on natural gas heating on new builds in the city. Mayor Ken Sim and his ABC Vancouver party had vowed to review the ban, and indeed, he voted for its reversal. However, despite holding 8 of the 11 seats on council, the ban stayed in place as ABC councillors Rebecca Bligh, Peter Meiszner and Lisa Dominato decided limiting consumer choice was a good idea. Whatever the “A Better City” party stands for, it’s clear that to these three, “better” doesn’t mean “more affordable.”
Prior to the B.C. provincial election, Premier David Eby made incredible reversals on many policies, but perhaps none so more than his commitment to eliminate the carbon tax if Ottawa dropped the requirement. Only weeks earlier, he had been calling BC Conservative John Rustad a climate denier for suggesting the tax needed to go for affordability reasons. The fact is that removing the carbon tax on natural gas heating in B.C. homes would reduce bills for families by about $330 this winter alone and it became a political imperative for Eby’s survival to drop the tax.
However, cutting the carbon tax only leads to more affordable heating if the option of natural gas is available. With their natural gas ban for new builds, Vancouver city council took this option away. The province, under Eby, is moving in this direction as well by making the B.C. building code even more restrictive and focused on climate change initiatives, rather than affordability. This is the dangerous path British Columbia now finds itself on. We must ask if our premier and the NDP are actually delivering affordability — or if they are simply going to take options away and drive an electrification agenda, despite the evident costs and harms to families.
I have said many times that while pure green or total electrification may be a laudable long-term goal, it simply is not a realistic solution right now. In B.C. we have the enormous Site C dam which will finish coming online next year. At full power, it will add 1.1 gigawatts to the grid. Yet, a 2019 study from the University of Victoria estimated the province’s demand for electricity would rise to 37 gigawatts if all its vehicles were electric by 2055, which is double B.C.’s current maximum output.
So, are the NDP and Vancouver city council screaming from the rooftops that we need even more equivalent projects at a cost of $20 billion each to reach our goals? No, of course not. They just stick their heads in the sand as the cost of energy rises.
B.C. already can’t supply all the electricity we require. In the last 12 months, 25 per cent of B.C.’s electrical power was imported. Much of this importing came from Alberta or the United States and was created by burning fossil fuels. The mind reels at the disconnect B.C. politicians can have as they smugly ban natural gas heating to meet self-imposed net-zero targets, all the while financially hurting B.C. families and importing electricity made by burning the same gas they apparently so despise.
If the NDP or Vancouver city council were serious about any of the affordability pledges they are making to families, they would get truly serious about energy and energy security. We are going to need all of it. There is no path to future prosperity without massive amounts of energy to support our province. If you doubt this, look at the situation Germany has put itself in as it tetters on the brink of deindustrialization due to high energy costs.
The removal of consumer choice and banning of energy sources — preferred moves of the B.C. NDP and municipal councils like that of Vancouver — have the unique characteristic of harming citizens while achieving nothing in terms of a greener economy. B.C. can be both a massive producer of natural gas and hydropower, with natural gas revenues flowing to government coffers while reliable hydropower keeps our costs low.
Energy abundance, however, is only achievable if politicians get their heads out of the fantasy world of an instant transition to green energy. Right now, they are only hurting the citizens they claim to care about and our future provincial prosperity.
National Post