As a ferry approaches the shore, a cluster of houses is seen among the trees

Michele Babchuk Meets With Cortes Island Voters

Recording by Bryan McKinnon; Broadcast and text by Roy L Hales.

NDP incumbent Michele Babchuk came to Cortes Island Saturday, October 12, in the second in a series of meet the candidate events organized by FOCI’s Climate Action Committee. 

There is not room to unpack close to two hours of fact filled conversation into this half hour, but the full podcast is at the bottom of this page and here are some highlights.  

Advertisement outside Mansons Hall – Courtesy Michele Babchuk for North Island Facebook page

Babchuk began by giving an overview of her career: “I’ve lived in Campbell River for 20 years, with my wonderful husband of 37 years, my two kids, and my  three grandkids. I started off in the school board in 2005,  moved to Municipal Politics in 2014,  became the chair of the Strathcona Regional District in 2016, and then made the jump to MLA in 2020, in the last provincial election.  In between there, I had the opportunity to work on the Hill in Ottawa for the Member of Parliament for this area, in Jack Layton’s caucus.  My little claim to fame is I have either been elected or staff at every level of government. So, we joke that I am polylingual – because we know that they don’t all speak the same language.”  

“It’s no secret to people on Cortes that BC still has some issues that we’ve got to sort out.  We have housing issues and we’ve got some education inequity issues,  affordability issues. We’re turning the corner and starting to get some of those going, but we’ve got a long way to go.” 

BC’s Emissions

One of the most controversial components of her talk was about BC’s emissions.

Babchuk claimed, “The only province in Canada that’s dropped emissions by 5 percent is B C, the other ones are going up.  So, we are working across Canada to try and work with these governments to make sure that what we’re doing here is pushed through. We can’t do it all by ourselves,  we’re not going to change the climate crisis within BC alone. We are very much front of the pack.” 

Barry Saxifrage, who’d recently written an article on this subject for the National Observer,  responded,  “My understanding is that BC is one of the worst emitters.  Emissions are up 26 percent from 1990, they’re up higher than in Canada overall, and all the eastern provinces have cut emissions, Ontario, all of them.”

“The NDP just puts out this stuff that I just don’t think is accurate.” 

Michele Babchuk: “Well there is absolutely no way in God’s green earth that Ontario is beating us in our emissions.”

Unfortunately this segment of the audio was very choppy and unclear.

When Cortes Currents fact checked Michele’s claims against CleanBC’s 2023 Climate Change Accountability Report, they seemed accurate. However the graphs were usually framed in complex terms like ‘Net GHG Intensity of BC’s Economy’ or ‘Net GHG Emissions per capita.’

 A totally different picture emerged using the straightforward CO2 emissions statistics from Environment and Natural Resources Canada.

In 1990, Ontario’s  emissions were 178.4 megatonnes. In 2017, the year the NDP were elected in BC, they were 158.4. That’s a drop of 20 megatonnes. This particular chart goes up to 2022, at which point Ontario’s emissions had dropped another 1.4 megatonnes. 

In 1990, BC’s emissions were 51.1 megatonnes. By the time the NDP took power, in 2017, they had reached 62.8 megatonnes. That is an increase of 11.7 megatonnes. Under the NDP they reached a peak of 65 megatonnes in 2018, dropped during COVID and were back to 64.3 megatonnes by 2022. That is an increase of another 1.5 megatonnes since the NDP took power. 

Ontario may have more people and cars than BC, but its emissions appear to be dropping and, as of 2022, ours are rising. 

LNG

The next controversial point was BC’s development of LNG. Someone asked if new projects were being accepted.  

Michele Babchuk: “They could be, but that’s not something that is front and centre here. We have people that have been in the pipeline for a long time. We are not accepting anybody new into that, but the people that are already there are having to go through that rigour, the environmental rigour, the Indigenous rigour, the local rigour, to be able to  hit those clean BC targets, but that CleanBC platform was done in conjunction with the Green Party.”  

The Green party expressed its opposition to developing LNG on numerous occasions. On March 22 2018, for example, Green party leader Andrew Weaver told the press “If you are going to add 8 to 10 megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions and you are going to meet our targets, then all other aspects of the economy must make up the difference. What that means is by 2030 all other aspects of our economy, other than LNG Canada, would have to cut emissions by 50 per cent.”  

However he was not willing to take the NDP government down over this issue. 

Michele Babchuk: “I see  a transition to a clean future that LNG is going to have to commit to. Those are businesses, and once those goalposts are  set in place, they’ll have to decide whether or not they can fit within those guidelines. If they can’t,  then they won’t be doing it.”

Two Understandings about LNG

Barry Saxifrage: “My understanding is that the permits allow LNG Canada 1 and 2 to burn gas and not to fit under the targets. BC said, okay, anything in the future has to be fit within our targets It has to be electrified and everything else, but that doesn’t apply to LNG Canada 1 and 2, which alone would have enough emissions to blow our budget. It doesn’t apply to wood fibre. They say they’re going to do electric, but they don’t have to if BC Hydro can’t do it and I think it also doesn’t apply to Tilbury 2, which is the one that Fortis is doing down in the Fraser.”  

Michele Babchuk: “That’s not my understanding.” 

Barry Saxifrage : “The Pembina Institute just did a big report called Squaring the Circle that  showed the emissions busting our budget. They also said we would need five projects the size of Site C dam developed to have enough electricity to fit the LNG that’s already permitted under our cap. BC Hydro doesn’t have a plan that I know of, maybe they do have a plan to produce five Site C’s.” 

Michele Babchuk: “Site C is something that I hope we never duplicate, to be truthful, but we are looking at renewable energy.  The Ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation just put out a call for power that has exceeded any expectation that we ever thought.  On Vancouver Island and on these small islands, I was told the other day there is actually 12 proposals that have been put forward with wind, tidal,  I’m trying to remember what the other one was.  I don’t think it was solar. It might be in run of the river. The alternative is listening to Mr. Rustad talk about wanting to put nuclear plants  here.” 

Barry Saxifrage: “I guess my question is,  are the BC NDP favouring building these five Site C dams worth of electricity and committing to delivering them to fracking fields and to the coast for the LNG, or are they  going to allow natural gas? We either bust our budget or we create this massive amount of new electricity that is  going to have to be subsidized for LNG that has already been permitted.” 

Mike Moore questioned the idea of spending billions of dollars on what is supposedly transitional infrastructure. 

“You’re building massive infrastructure to support the LNG. Nobody’s going to turn their back on that infrastructure. Once it’s in place, we’re done with it? We’re going to walk away from it? – now that does not happen.  It’s locking us into it for a very long time.”  

“With the Prince Rupert LNG, that’s just almost shovel ready, because the environmental permits are just about to expire, that’s being  pushed ahead when we know actually that is going to be environmentally terrible. I don’t know why the government is bending over backwards to allow that to happen. What if the electricity that was going to be produced to support the LNG industry was used to electrify the province, so that we had electric ranges, electric cars and electric heating instead of gas ranges, cars and heating.”

“The Federal government through BC Hydro offers a  $5,000 rebate on heat pumps. Well, Fortis turns around and offers $10,000 for a dual system, gas and electric heat pump.” 

“They are a very aggressive  company.  The amount of lobbying they do, as you’ve probably heard, at the Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM), at all sorts of conferences where people like yourself or our regional directors go – they’ve got the ear.  We can’t get the ear, not unless we get arrested for standing outside and protesting.  But they have the money, they’ve got the ear, and it’s just not right.”

Michele Babchuk: “I’ve got a party on one side that’s saying, “Unleash them. Take all the regulation off them. Let’s go. We’ll let the LNG companies do whatever we want.”  And we’ve got the Greens that are saying (LNG companies should do) absolutely nothing.  What we’re doing  is right down the centre, to try and make it so that we are building a green economy that works. We’re holding them to account right now and we have been for the last four years. We will continue to do that.”

Mike Moore: “BC Ferries is a private corporation, but under governmental regulation. Why are the Salish class ferries and the Spirit class ferries that are LNG powered acting as big billboards for Fortis BC? They’ve got huge advertising on there. It’s that constant and insidious picking away at our elected officials, at the public, the messaging that the big corporations, the big fossil fuel corporations are able to put out  that chips away  at the collective psyche and allows Vancouver to reverse their decision on not allowing LNG hookups and new builds.” 

Carrie Saxifrage: “When I was advocating for electric ferries,  BC Ferries said, ‘we can use renewable natural gas.’ Now the renewable natural gas is also in the final step of the zero carbon step code that will be allowed so that at our highest level of climate safety building regulations there will still be natural gas infrastructure.  That is like a license to call it renewable from some other jurisdiction. What’s coming into people’s homes isn’t actually renewable natural gas. Then there’s the statements by the International Energy Agency (IEA) that any biofuels, any renewable natural gas, because they’re a molecular fuel that can be carried, are going to go towards transportation, toward aviation and shipping.”

Michele Babchuk: “We’re in a political discussion, not in an energy discussion.  I’m telling you right now that if we go one way or the other, we’re going to be in a world of hurt.” 

Carrie Saxifrage:  “We’re also in a climate crisis and we’re turning corners that we can’t turn back around and I don’t see that urgency in our government.  You said, the Greens want to get rid of fossil fuels, and that would be so expensive because of the contracts and the lawsuits, but what about the point where not doing anything is more expensive than the lawsuits,  the broken contracts and everything that would be required.” 

Michele Babchuk: “I don’t have the answer to that, Carrie, I’m not in that ministry, but I have to think that’s already been taken into consideration.”

Forestry

“We see the same thing in the forest industry. Years ago, forest tenure was given away, it’s a private managed forest lands, not something I would have voted for back in the day because I believe that forest should be in the public realm. We’re trying to get back there with community forests.  We’re watching tenures change. We’re watching the Vancouver Island land use plan now being done. We’ve seen a reduction in the AAC (Annual Allowable Cut), which is great.”

“We’re also seeing really fantastic progress through the Forest Landscape Plan, and first one in BC is in the North Island: the Forest Landscape Plan, the Gwa’ni Forest Landscape Plan, with the Namgis, Western Forest Products,  Port McNeill, Port Hardy, Port Alice, everybody’s on. They’ve almost mapped every tree  in that tenure. They’ve mapped all the eco sensitive areas. They’ve mapped animals, they’ve mapped everything. It’s absolutely stunning and it’s taking forever  and that’s making some of the loggers really unhappy. It’s holding up all the permits, but when it’s done, it’s going to be done  and everybody’s going to be involved and you’re not cutting in that riparian area and you’re not cutting over there. We’ll allow you to take second growth over here. It’s a community, collaborative piece  that we can do.” 

Maureen Williams was a Director of the Cortes Community Forest Cooperative for five years.

“I’m really concerned about the state of forestry in BC because we’re in a real pickle,” she exclaimed.

“We do have a wonderful community forest here, but they’re cutting a lot less than their AAC. The only reason that they’re doing a great job is because they’re working so carefully to manage the forest. It’s a model  for other forestry practices throughout the province, or it should be.”  

“What I see happening and what I’ve heard from the Minister of Forests is that the AACs are so carefully developed and calculated and they’re exactly the sustainable level of forestry that can happen in each individual area and he would like to come here and talk to our community forest about helping us reach our AAC.”

When the Green candidate was here, she talked a few times about filtering a lot of things, including forestry, through a filter of wellness. The paradigm shift that needed to happen in her mind was that we needed to think about the forest not as a profit making machine, but as a resource for us to help us weather climate change in a less horrible way than we’re going to have to. And so in order to do that, we can’t have AACs. Instead, all of our parameters need to be based on forest wellness. We need to hold  the forestry companies accountable for what they’re doing and make sure that what they’re doing is leaving a healthy forest that will generate old growth for the future or any growth for the future and a biodiverse and carbon dense soil.” 

“There needs to be some other model of how we measure what the forestry practices are doing, and not think of it just as how can the government make more money out of these forests, or how can we get them to log up to their age, which is no longer unallowable, it’s considered a target.” 

Michele Babchuk: “We are moving to that, and that’s why we’re watching companies now, like Interfor, that are selling off all of their tenure, because we are moving to that, and we’re recognizing the value of a tree. We’re watching nations who are looking at economic values of the forests that they’re purchasing from Interfor right in regenerative and  reforestation priorities and mandates. We’re looking at carbon capture. We’re looking at carbon credit.  They’re looking at all of these pieces, to move these forward.  It’s not just about extraction anymore. It’s not about extraction at all. We have the ability to do forest restoration that will actually build an economy as well. That’s part of  the transformative forestry piece that we have.”

Maureen Williams: “Less thinking about restoration, which does not happen at this time. Even our small community forest is required to do things like plant only merchantable timber. They’re not allowed to plant trees that make sense for the area and that would improve the health of the forest. They’re required to plant fir and cedar and that’s it. There’s nothing else they’re allowed to plant. Then they’re required to make sure that those trees grow faster and they have to cut down anything interfering with the growth of marketable product. So I’m not talking about reforesting in the sense of tree planters going out and growing a mono-crop of fir trees. It has to be a total paradigm shift. I’m happy to hear that, that you’re working on that, but I really think  it’s bigger than what you’re imagining.”

Housing

Michele Babchuk: “We’re also seeing some really big changes in housing.”

“We just watched Mr. Eby say we’re going to do a 60/40 piece where they’re actually getting a mortgage on the 60 percent and the province is going to hold the 40 percent until they sell their house and the equity gets paid back, or after 25 years. So this is helping people move from rental situations into a housing situation, which is something that we heard loud and clear.  They didn’t want to rent forever.”  

“One of the things we’re hearing from the opposition party, Mr. Rustad, is that government shouldn’t be involved in affordable housing.  That’s why we’re in the mess we’re in, because they weren’t involved in affordable housing and they left it all to market.  When you have speculators in those bigger areas that can buy a house and sit on it for years, that erodes the simple supply and demand and prices go up.” 

“With COVID and all of the supply chain stuff, housing has just become so unaffordable even the developers are having a hard time building market rentals that people can afford. So we are going to invest in affordable housing.” 

 Babchuk said that up until now urban houses had a marked advantage when it came to applying for BC housing grants ‘because they could build houses so much cheaper in the city.’  

Michele Babchuk: “On remote islands, and on the main island north of Sayward, the price per square foot for a build on a house goes up $125 a square foot. So we weren’t fitting in to that box . So, myself and 12 other rural MLAs went to the Premier and said, ‘We’re having a little bit of a problem with this because the framework is great, and the money that’s put aside is great, but we’re not fitting into this because the regulation is wonky.” 

 “He said, ‘well, what do we do?’” 

“We said, ‘we want a rural caucus inside of our big caucus and we want to be able to take a look at this legislation and regulation that’s coming down prior to it going, so that we have the ability to access it.’” 

“And he said,  ‘done.’”  

“So we have been working as a rural caucus. You’ll see some of the initiatives that have come out in our platform on that around better access to health care,  travel assistance programs for health care, and more. BC Housing is now taking that into consideration and when he says 300,000 homes over 10 years, that’s for all of BC.”

Rainbow Ridge

Rainbow Ridge is the big affordable housing project on Cortes Island. 

Michele Babchuk: “I’m hoping that we get that Rainbow Ridge up and going. The issue with Rainbow Ridge was not that it wasn’t fitting into BC Housing’s piece so much, it’s that we couldn’t figure out how to get through all of the red tape with Island Health. They don’t want  communal water systems. They want a full build out, which adds a huge amount of money onto those projects. The cost is just prohibitive at that particular point. So we need to figure out a way with Island Health, to be able to come to an agreement on how we can do it safely, but in a way that’s sustainable for Cortes Island.” 

 “I’ve been working with the regional district here on Cortes, and also Sadhu (President of the Cortes Community Housing Society) to try and push that forward. We’ve been able to connect indirectly with BC Housing. So hopefully that’ll come to fruition.” 

There was some discussion about communities that were opposed to increased densification. 

Michele Babchuk: “We have a few communities that are coming out against that, but I will tell you that most of them  are for political reasons, not because they don’t believe that density needs to happen and that we need to build more houses. The other issue that we heard at UBCM is around infrastructure. So we’ve got a lot of rural and remote communities that have old, antiquated infrastructure that we know is going to have to be fixed pretty soon.”

“That’s why we’ve just announced, in the platform, the local infrastructure investment fund and that’s going to be totally attached to Housing Development starts.  What we heard at UBCM for the last four years, is local municipalities are having problems with groups that are for lack of a better word NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard). So ‘I don’t want you to build a duplex there because my single family lot is here’. Communities were agreeing, ‘yes, we need to build housing, we need more density,’ but they were having these struggles with these huge contingents of people that were showing up.”

“Communities said, ‘it would be great if the government would give us a road map.’  Minister Kellan  in the Housing Ministry gave them a road map. 90 percent of the municipalities right now are saying, ‘cool, good,  you’ve taken that out of our hands and we can now move forward.’”

Health Care

“I am here today to talk to you about what we’ve done in healthcare.  We don’t really have a resource problem in healthcare.  There’s  a lot of the provincial budget that’s going to healthcare. We have a human resources problem in healthcare,  and we don’t have the people there to be able to facilitate the services  that we need.  In the last year, we’ve been able to hire 800 new doctors into British Columbia and 6,300 nurses.  We’ve done that through a lot of different dealings. One of the biggest ones is removing the barriers out of the colleges of Physicians and Surgeons and the College of Nurses. So that if people are coming across Canada,  they’re getting into the system a lot quicker. We’ve made some agreements where if you’re one of the countries that we recognize your credentials, they’ll be fast tracked in, so two weeks, three weeks, to get them in. Those are places like Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.” 

“We also have doctors that are coming in from areas that don’t quite fit  the regulatory requirements that those colleges are handing out and we don’t want to erode the level of service that we have.  With doctors, we’ve created a special category called Associate Physicians, so they can actually work in the system,  but be underneath somebody that is credentialed with those colleges.”

“We also have a ‘patient connect portal’ that in the last six months has connected 240,000 British Columbians to a doctor and we will connect another 160,000 people within the next six months.” 

“We’ve also committed to hiring 900 new BC home care and community support workers. In my rural caucus, we’re trying to figure out how we incentivize to make sure that we get them here. Also, ‘end of life care’ where people don’t want to go to Campbell River for hospice, they want to stay in community with their family.  You have a beautiful network of people on Cortes that are making that happen. We’re seeing some results there,  but we still have a lot to do.” 

“One of the things that had been discussed through local government and the province  is talking to the ferry system because the ferries are only mandated on the water. What we do need is linkage for Cortes through to Campbell River, so that people can have a choice of whether or not they wish to take their car and there’s some sort of transportation hub that goes from here to the ferry, lets you walk on the ferry, and then there’s some sort of transportation system that allows you to get from Heriot Bay to Quathiaski Cove. We are working on  that transportation piece.”

Disparity of Wealth

Ralph Garrison added, “There’s an incredible disparity of wealth,  not only in British Columbia, but Canada, the US, all over the world and it seems like it underlies so many problems . We have mansions being built for second or third homes, and we watch the yachts go by that are huge and spewing emissions like crazy. Yet we have people who are working in the $20 an hour range. It seems like it really needs to be dealt with and it really needs governments to deal with it. I would like you to deal with it.”

Michele Babchuk: “No, if I had as much power as people think I did, I’d be dangerous but  you’re right, the erosion of the middle class has been happening for half a century. In BC we have the speculation and vacancy tax specifically pointed at the most wealthy. I would imagine the new finance minister is going to take a look at how we do taxation as well.”

“We are now at a stage where we have the highest minimum wage in Canada. We’re working on making sure that people can go home when they’re sick, and they don’t have to lose pay.” 

“Will we ever get back to what that middle class used to look like when  the suburbs  started to pop up and, and middle class Canada was there. I would hope so, because they really facilitated community and now we’ve lost that community.” 

“You guys do it great here. Small communities, rural communities do community fantastic. I think I’ve talked to some of you before about the culture on Cortes and your not-for-profit sector.” 

Why Vote NDP?

“The biggest piece, I think, on Cortes, is we are in a climate crisis and we are seeing those events come faster and just more brutal and the impacts on communities are just  devastating. We’re putting a lot of money into emergency management to be able to mitigate those.” 

“Once again, on the other side, we have  a party who thinks that climate science is a lie, doesn’t think we should be fighting climate change. He said he believes it’s real, but we shouldn’t do anything about it.  My message to you is that the only party that’s going to be able to stop that  is the BC NDP. I know that you have some concerns around LNG, and I know that you don’t think it’s happening fast enough, but we have done a lot of work.”

“Those big polluters are paying their fair share plus into our system. We’ve also now cut all of the deep well royalty credits. We are making them clean up all those orphan wells.  Everything that they do has to fit within the CleanBC plan.”

Links of Interest:

Correction: The Cortes resident speaking about forestry was Maureen Williams, not Carrie Saxifrage as initially identified in this article.

Top image credit: On the ferry approaching Whaletown on Cortes Isand- courtesy Michele Babchuk for North Island Facebook page

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