Stop treating BC’s Interior like a colony
KAMLOOPS — Premier Clark’s plan for job growth in B.C.’s Interior is a failure. Her plan to extract liquefied natural gas from the Interior evaporated. She is sending more raw logs out of the Interior than any other government according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Clark treats B.C.’s Interior like a colony of Victoria: drill for natural gas and sell it overseas with no regard to the contamination of water or earthquakes that fracking causes; send raw logs — and the jobs that go with them — elsewhere instead of restoring those jobs in the Interior.
The Interior-as-colony mentality didn’t always exist. Before 2003, the government made sure jobs stayed in the communities where trees were logged. That meant sawmill workers could earn good wages where they lived. Once logging companies were free of that obligation, they shut down mills. Since 1997, 100 mills have closed and 22,400 jobs have been lost.
That loss of jobs means a transfer of wealth out of the Interior. By my calculation, the loss of the above jobs amounts to $1.5 billion.