1995 Legislative Session: 4th Session, 35th Parliament
HANSARD
The following electronic version is for informational purposes only.
The printed version remains the official version.
(Hansard)
TUESDAY, APRIL 18, 1995
Afternoon Sitting
Volume 18, Number 24
[ Page 13413 ]
The House met at 2:05 p.m.
Prayers.
G. Farrell-Collins: I ask the House to welcome to the precincts a good friend of mine, Gord Zeilstra, who's here from Fort Langley-Aldergrove along with his parents, Art and Chris Zeilstra, from Kitchener, Ontario, who are in town for his graduation and here today for a visit. Would the House please make them welcome.
R. Chisholm: Today in the House we have Lisa Ryan and Colin Roberts from the city of Seattle, visiting Victoria and coming down to see the parliamentary system in action. Hopefully, we'll give them a good show. Would you make them most welcome.
D. Lovick: I would call this a contrary-to-what-you-might-expect introduction. I'd like to ask my colleagues in the chamber to join me in making welcome a member of the fourth estate. There is a reporter here from the Nanaimo Bulletin, exploring a day in the life of an MLA. I ask all my colleagues to please make Michael Munro most welcome.
G. Campbell: Today in the House we have 30 students from the grade 11 class at Prince of Wales Minischool in Vancouver. They are joined by Ms. Heather Spencer and Ms. Susan Jackson. I hope the House will make them welcome.
CROWN LEASEHOLDS AND ABORIGINAL TREATY NEGOTIATIONS
A. Warnke: My question today is to the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs. Recently a number of Crown leaseholders in the Fraser Lake area have become increasingly concerned that they are unable to convert their leases to fee simple due to a policy of B.C. Lands. The referred to the appropriate first nations for comment, to identify if any traditional aboriginal uses will be impacted by the application. The result of this policy is that many leaseholders are justly concerned that the improvements that they have made on their properties are in jeopardy of being lost.
The question is: in light of the minister's statement in the past -- and even that of the Premier -- that private property is not on the table, will the minister undertake to assure the people of the Fraser Lake area that they will not lose the right to purchase their leasehold lands?
Hon. J. Cashore: With regard to the question concerning Crown leaseholds, there's an element of this question that should appropriately go the Minister of Environment, Lands and Parks. Our ministry and our government have issued a Crown land referral policy. That policy should not result in undue delay but should result in fulfilling the obligations that we as a government have with regard to the Delgamuukw appeal requirements. That is the process underway when these items come up. With regard to the owners of Crown leaseholds, this is one of the issues where we are seeking to achieve certainty through this process.
The Speaker: Supplemental, hon. member.
A. Warnke: The residents of Fraser Lake are clearly looking for answers, yet they see the land claims process as being operated behind closed doors. A number of the NDP ministers have not answered letters. Even their own MLA, the member for Prince George-Omineca, has not raised this issue in the House. The information these residents have is from the local native bands, and it's not exactly what the residents want to hear. One such letter from the Carrier-Sekani Tribal Council states: "If any privately owned land is needed by the first nations communities as part of their economic base, this land would be acquired through negotiative purchases and/or land exchanges based on fair compensation." Could the minister clarify whether or not private land is on the negotiating table? Can he assure the residents of Fraser Lake -- and indeed, all British Columbians -- that they will not be used as bargaining chips in the negotiation of land claims?
Hon. J. Cashore: Private land is not on the table; that is a certainty. With reference to Crown leaseholds, the term "Crown" is within that definition, therefore this is Crown land. The hon. member knows that.
I wish to correct a point that the hon. member made. The hon. member said that negotiations are going on in secrecy. He knows this is not true, and he should acknowledge that as a result of the leadership of the Premier last September at the UBCM -- at first criticized by some first nations -- we now have six openness protocols to ensure that openness will be the standard in the negotiation of treaties. That is leadership.
VAUDREUIL SENTENCE REDUCTION
J. Dalton: My question is for the Attorney General. Verna Vaudreuil has had her sentence reduced from ten to four years for the manslaughter of her five-year-old son. That means Mrs. Vaudreuil will now be eligible for parole after only 18 months for the abuse and death of her child. Will the Attorney General commit to appealing this decision to the Supreme Court of Canada?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: No. I won't use this forum to make that commitment.
The Speaker: The hon. member has a supplemental.
J. Dalton: Without question, the reduction of this sentence sends a very dangerous signal that this government does not take child abuse seriously. I will ask the Attorney General again: will he instruct his staff to ensure that Mrs. Vaudreuil receives a sentence appropriate to the crime she committed?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: Unlike the member, I intend to make no comment whatsover in respect of the B.C. appeal court decision at this point during the appeal period.
TIME FRAME IN ABORIGINAL TREATY NEGOTIATIONS
L. Fox: My question this afternoon is to the Minister of Environment, Lands and Parks. Unlike the Liberal opposition, I've taken some time to research the issue.
[ Page 13414 ]
The effect of the interim protection measures agreement on the residents of Fraser Lake and other recreational land leaseholders, as well as on agricultural lease applications, has been that it has given veto power to the native bands. Can the minister assure the people in my constituency and, for that matter, across the province, that there is going to be a time frame placed on the length of time the native bands have in the consultative process?
[2:15]
Hon. M. Sihota: I thank the hon. member for the question. As the hon. member knows, we are obliged under the provisions of the Delgamuukw decision to engage in consultation and to make reasonable efforts in terms of fulfilling that obligation with regard to consultation. We will do precisely what we are legally obliged to do as a result of the decisions of the courts, and that does take its time. I do have a lot of sympathy for your constituents, who certainly have written to me about it. I took the opportunity last week when I was in Prince George to talk to my staff about it and pressed upon them my concern that this is an issue that I would like to see attended to and clarified within the context of that court decision.
The Speaker: Supplemental, hon. member.
L. Fox: The fact of the matter is that many bands do not have the ability to even explore all the recommendations that are placed before them. Through that lack of administrative time, they are holding up applications on such things as recreational lots, agricultural land leases, and so forth. In fact, I have written to 540 leaseholders out of the Prince George region and I wait to place before you the answers, which will show substantial concern by those residents about this policy and the lack of the native bands' ability to deal with it. Can the minister give us some assurance that he is looking at a realistic time frame that would give some comfort to those taxpayers?
Hon. M. Sihota: We are looking at time frames, I can assure you of that. I appreciate that there is substantive concern in that part of the province in regard to this issue. As a result of it, we are placing additional resources to deal with the issue.
Let me also say that we do have obligations under these court decisions. As a result of those obligations, native bands don't necessarily have the requisite resources to deal with the implications of those court decisions, also. So there is some juggling that goes on. But I do appreciate the concerns that are expressed by your constituents. That's why we're prepared to look at providing more defined time lines than we have in the past so as to allay those concerns on the part of your constituents. I wish to thank you for the question.
BAIL FOR SUSPECT IN VIOLENT CRIME
K. Jones: My question is to the Attorney General. Last September Trevor McCallum was brutally and deliberately shot dead in the parking lot of a Victoria doughnut shop. We now understand that the alleged murderer has been released on a paltry $1,000 bail. How can the Attorney General claim to be protecting the people of British Columbia when potentially dangerous and violent people like this individual are released on bail that is an absolute joke?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: The member should know -- although it seems that he doesn't -- that it's the courts that make those decisions.
The Speaker: Supplemental, hon. member.
K. Jones: The Attorney General has short answers but absolutely no substance in his answers.
Interjections.
The Speaker: Order, please. Please proceed with your question, hon. member.
K. Jones: In a letter, the mother of the murder victim, Burness McCallum, asked how a person who has murdered an innocent bystander in a premeditated kill excursion can walk freely on the streets of our country.
My question is to the Attorney General. Why have you allowed this potentially dangerous individual back out on the street, with the possibility that he may reoffend?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: I thought I had already answered that question.
NANAIMO COMMONWEALTH HOLDING SOCIETY
G. Farrell-Collins: Within a few weeks the forensic auditor, Mr. Parks, who has been assigned the job of examining the books of the Nanaimo Commonwealth Holding Society, is due to submit his report to the Minister of Finance. Unfortunately, after the Rigaux fiasco in the Ministry of Social Services, British Columbians no longer trust the NDP government to make sure that those reports are released unaltered.
Will the Premier commit to this House today that he will instruct that Mr. Parks's terms of reference be such that the report Mr. Parks tables will not go to the Minister of Finance but rather to the Speaker, and be tabled immediately in this House?
Hon. M. Harcourt: I see that the Easter weekend didn't do much to the politics of smear coming from the opposition. Instead of this House being able to concentrate on the issues that are important to ordinary working people -- jobs and job creation, where we are leading the country.... Forty percent of the new jobs came from British Columbia in the last three years. We're going to protect medicare against Liberals on that side of the House and in Ottawa. That's what we're here to do.
Mr. Parks was appointed to prepare a report, which will be tabled by Mr. Parks and which will not be touched by any member of the government. We have said that from the beginning. The slurs coming from that side of the House against our integrity are wearing very, very thin on the working people of this province, who are fair-minded people. Instead of this politics of smear continually from the opposition....
The Speaker: Supplemental, hon. member.
G. Farrell-Collins: Unfortunately, it's been the New Democratic Party, and this Premier in particular, who have been smearing the province of British Columbia all over the
[ Page 13415 ]
place with their misappropriations of funds in Nanaimo. They made a laughingstock of British Columbia. Will the Premier commit, contrary to what Mr. Parks's terms of reference are, to making it clear today that that report will come to this House before it touches the hands of any one of his ministers?
VIDEO LOTTERY TERMINALS
D. Mitchell: I'm pleased to have a chance to ask the first question of the new Minister of Government Services. Could the minister inform the House as to whether or not he has discovered that the video lottery terminal file is on his desk?
Hon. U. Dosanjh: I did, thank you.
The Speaker: Hon. member, supplemental.
D. Mitchell: Now that the minister is a seasoned veteran at question period, I'd like to ask the minister if he can advise us how long it's going to take him to answer some serious questions on the video lottery terminal issue that he, as a private member, expressed such strong and adamant positions against -- against the positions taken by his predecessor. Could he tell us how long it's going to take him to answer some serious questions on the VLT issue?
Hon. U. Dosanjh: As soon as the hon. member asks me one, I'll answer it.
LINKS BETWEEN PREMIER'S OFFICE AND U.S. POLITICAL ADVISERS
W. Hurd: A question to the Premier. The Premier has admitted that U.S. spin doctor Karl Struble was paid under a contract disguised as a retainer to provide strategic political advice to his office as well as to government ministries. Could the Premier tell members of this House what steps he has taken within his office to ensure that Mr. Struble will not be engaged by this government under another deceptive contractual arrangement?
Hon. M. Harcourt: Aside from probably costing the taxpayers more money than any calls that went from British Columbia to Washington, with the misuse of the various procedures that we've set up through freedom-of-information and conflict....
I understand -- and I'm going to check the Blues -- that I and members of this government were just accused by the Opposition House Leader of misappropriating funds. Hon. Speaker, I would ask the hon. member to withdraw that remark and those implications against members of this House, myself in particular.
The Speaker: Hon. members, the bell terminates question period. However, the hon. Premier sought to have inappropriate remarks withdrawn by the hon. member for Surrey-White Rock, and I would ask the hon. member if he is inclined to accommodate the request.
W. Hurd: Mr. Speaker, you identified the member for Surrey-White Rock as having uttered inappropriate remarks, and I wanted a clarification on what those remarks might be.
The Speaker: I'm sorry, that was my mistake. The hon. Opposition House Leader.
G. Farrell-Collins: Thank you, hon. Speaker. I think if the Premier checks the Blues he'll realize that I smeared his party and not him personally.
Interjections.
The Speaker: Order, hon. members. As a matter of parliamentary decorum and good practice, all hon. members know that we try to respond at the time to a request to withdraw, and should it be found in due course that there is other evidence to the contrary, we will deal with that. But as a matter of decorum, if the member would simply withdraw in the event that he was inappropriate, this would be appreciated.
G. Farrell-Collins: Well, hon. Speaker, the fundraising arm of the New Democratic Party was convicted of a criminal offence, and I have no intent of withdrawing that. I won't deny it even if the Premier will.
The Speaker: The hon. member is then telling the House that he has no intention of withdrawing?
G. Farrell-Collins: That's correct.
Interjections.
The Speaker: Order, please.
It is with regret that I will have to ask the hon. member.... If he is absolutely certain he does not wish to withdraw, then he knows that the procedure is that a member vacates the chamber for the remainder of the day.
G. Farrell-Collins left the chamber.
C. Serwa: On a point of order, hon. Speaker, we're getting onto very thin ice here. In the matter of debate, all through, many things are said by government members and opposition members with reflection on party -- not vitriolic personal remarks directed against individuals, but against parties. That's part of the nature of the politics in this forum. I stand here very concerned as to where this is leading us.
The Speaker: Thank you, hon. member.
Hon. members, I think the concern raised by the hon. member is well taken. However, it is not the place of the Chair to determine whether a remark is intentionally inappropriate or not. It is a practice and custom of the House simply to respect the honour of every member and therefore to comply. If a member refuses to comply, there is no other course for the member than to vacate himself for the remainder of the day.
Hon. J. MacPhail: I'd like to table copies of an interim report and recommendations from the independent inquiry into child protection headed up by Judge Thomas Gove.
The Speaker: I have the pleasure to table the report and accompanying documentation of the commissioner of conflict of interest regarding the matter of applications by the hon. Leader of the Third Party and Mr. Kim Emerson, a private citizen, respecting an alleged contravention of provisions of
[ Page 13416 ]
the Members' Conflict of Interest Act by the hon. Premier. Copies of the report and an opportunity to review accompanying documents will be provided in the usual way through the Clerk's office.
Hon. G. Clark: I call Committee of Supply A for the purposes of debating the estimates of the Ministry of Small Business, Tourism and Culture. In the House today I call second reading of Bill 7.
[2:30]
J. Doyle: Hon. Speaker, I'd like leave to make an introduction.
Leave granted.
J. Doyle: In the gallery today from Golden, in the riding of Columbia River-Revelstoke, I'm pleased to introduce Mr. Bud Stuart. Bud runs a shoe store in Golden. I'm very, very pleased that Bud is here today. I'd like the members to make him welcome to Victoria.
COLUMBIA BASIN TRUST ACT
(second reading continued)
C. Evans: Hon. Speaker, I would like to advise the House that I'll be the government's designated speaker on this bill. As I understand it, that just means that if what I have to say takes a little too long, it becomes legitimate.
I'm really pleased to stand here and to enter into the debate on the creation of the Columbia River trust. As a matter of fact, I can't imagine any better job that might someday have been mine. I want to make the point that underlying everything I have to say -- in fact, underlying everything that everybody has to say about this issue -- it should always be remembered that we did this. I'll get to it further on in my remarks, but I'm of the opinion that the government of the day -- this government, these MLAs -- are probably the only people who would ever have created the Columbia River trust. The process this government went through to get to this day is the only process that could ever have created, thought up, come to an accord, a consensus, on the existence of a trust.
But I want to start back a long time ago. I want to suggest to the opposition party and the third party and the independents -- the growing fourth party in this room -- that the purpose of this debate, the reason I want to take you back in history, the function of all this talk, is really to help you to decide how you're going to vote, because in a couple of days, maybe even this afternoon, the most historic moment in 30 years for about a quarter of a million people is going to come to a vote here. We've had our differences about whether you agree with the Columbia River trust, whether you agree with the accord the government has come to with the region. Of course, that's necessary; that's natural. Democracy says that, in our wisdom, we'll pay people wages and give you guys researchers and staff to oppose the government. That way all these folks are guaranteed there's legitimate discourse; there's somebody out there to say this is right and this is wrong. But after the debate is over, eventually each of you, as individuals and as members of a party, just like each of us, has to actually decide if you are for it or against it. Then all the people outside get to see if you are for it or against it.
The neat thing about politics is that it survives us all. People will remember if you are for it or against it, long after you don't work here and I don't work here. People are going to write it down in books: are you for it or against it? And people are going to read it long after none of us work here. I know that, because they are already reading about the last time there was a moment like this in Canadian history.
School kids are already reading how we got the Columbia River Treaty. So it's safe to assume, hon. members, that you're going to go down in history -- this afternoon, maybe tomorrow -- when you actually say "I'm for it" or "I'm against it." I hope you hear my remarks, as kindly as I can make them, even though I might get to a part later on where I'm the tiniest bit grumpy about what some of you have said. But as kindly as I can make them, I want my remarks to sort of gently ease you toward deciding that all that opposition stuff and government stuff, and all the things that we do to one another and say about one another, is going to fall away at the moment where you go down in history as supporting these people in this land, or being against it.
For myself, the long road to get here started about 20 years ago. I was a regional district director in the Regional District of Central Kootenay and, as all members who have been part of municipal government know, one of the things you have to do when you're part of municipal government is try to find the money to do what the people you represent want. Some people in Slocan Park asked me for a ball diamond. I thought that should be easy; I would just go get the money and give it to the recreation commission. The recreation commission would clear the land, plant the grass, and we'd have a ballpark. As it turned out, I couldn't raise the money to get the people of Slocan Park a ballpark. It was my first foray.
Members might think it's silly, now that we're all working here in the Legislature and vote on budgets with hundreds of millions of dollars, and we itemize them right down to how much so-and-so gets for their job. Members might think it's silly, but when I was first in politics I didn't quite understand where the money for ballparks comes from. Maybe some of you who never were part of regional districts or municipalities don't know, but there's a legal function called recreation commission. Everybody pays taxes, and there are so many dollars that go into recreation from your area. It turned out that the area I represented -- area H in the Regional District of Central Kootenay, the Slocan Valley -- didn't have enough money; it wasn't worth enough to pay enough taxes to build the ball diamond. So I went to the administrator of the regional district, and I said: "How can this be? We're living in this incredibly modern industrial society. We've got sawmills, houses, farms and dams."
And he said: "Stop right there. You've got farms, houses and sawmills; that's all true. But the dams don't pay any taxes, so you've got to forget about that part."
I said: "What are the dams worth?"
He said: "I can't really tell you, because part of the thing they decided not to do when they decided not to pay taxes was not to assess what they're worth. But I could guess. B.C. Hydro says they're worth so much, and in round figures, the
[ Page 13417 ]
one that was within the area that was trying to raise the money to build the ball diamond was worth half a billion dollars."
I said: "Well, if what we have for industry is concrete and turbines, how come concrete and turbines don't pay taxes?"
He went to his filing cabinet and got out a pile of paper about this thick, and a couple of books. He put them on my lap, and said: "If you want to understand the relationship of your ball field to B.C. Hydro, you had better start with the Columbia River Treaty. You had better do your homework and understand, because the people you'd be taking on don't live here. They've got way more money and power than you do; they've got lawyers working for them the likes of which you've never met. At least you'd better read all this paperwork."
Well, six months later, when I'd read right to the bottom of the pile, I realized that my generation of residents -- in fact, my generation of politicians -- didn't understand what the older generation had lived through just ten and 15 years earlier. We were living in this transformed ecosystem where the largest industrial user of the land had basically no employees, paid no taxes and served no function, and we drove right past those concrete edifices every day and we didn't think about it. I didn't think about it until I tried to build a ball diamond and realized that my neighbours didn't have enough money to pay enough taxes to build the ball diamond, and this huge, half-a-billion-dollar thing at the bottom of the valley didn't have to pay anything.
The administrator said to me: "You know, sometime if you truck off to Vancouver and you make a really good presentation and hold out your hand, B.C. Hydro will put a few thousand dollars in your cap, and you can come back and say, 'I couldn't get any money but I got a donation, a grant from the good corporate citizens, B.C. Hydro; as long as we put up an eight-foot sign that says, 'B.C. Hydro built this ball diamond,' they'll give us the money'." But structurally or legally in a long-term way, we have no right to anything.
In the bottom of that pile of paper, I found a promise from the people who worked in this place exactly 30 years ago that when the dams were built, we would all be rolling in money. In fact, they believed in this building so much....
We have a bit of a strange situation in the Kootenays: the towns of Creston and Kaslo are separated by a lake, and to get across the lake, you have to ride what we call the world's longest free ferry. It really makes no sense that the towns of Creston and Kaslo would be in the same school district, but 30 years ago when they were making up the school districts, the people who worked in this building said to the people in Kaslo and Creston: "Hey, we have a good idea. We'll put Creston in with Kaslo, then when we build the Duncan Dam, you can tax the Duncan Dam and that will pay for schools in Creston." So we got this bizarre school district with a whacking big lake in the middle. Then, right after they got the dam built, they all came back down here to work, not in open session -- not where you and I can actually have this conversation, not where anybody could see -- but in the cabinet chamber. With nobody taking any notes, they passed an order-in-council that said: "No, we've changed our minds; they won't pay any taxes."
I realized that in order for our generation -- your generation and mine -- to understand the issue, we were going to have to put it right up front to every citizen in the Kootenays. I proposed to the regional district that we have a referendum. We've got a whole political party over here -- sort of in the middle of the room -- running around saying Canada should be run by referendum and the people should decide what should happen.
Well, 20 years ago we had such a vote in the Regional District of Central Kootenay. We figured it would look pretty dumb to put on the ballot: "Should B. C. Hydro pay taxes to build ball diamonds?" So it said: "Should B. C. Hydro pay a hospital tax like you do -- yes or no?" I guess it won't surprise anybody here to know that something like 98 percent of the people said they think that this industry should pay taxes just like every other industry.
In my naivety and my youth, I thought we were home-free. We had a referendum and everybody said that B.C. Hydro should pay back into the region. So we trucked off to Victoria and came down here and said to the Social Credit people of the day.... By the way, it wasn't me. We had enough sense to send somebody else to go talk to the Social Credit cabinet minister, somebody maybe a bit more acceptable than me.
We came here and we said: "Okay. We had a referendum, and 98 percent of the people said Hydro should participate in the society." And they said: "So what?" The people of the Kootenays said that. You'll never in your wildest dreams get the real people -- the people who pay the bill, the people who are the population, the people who vote, the members who fill up this room.... I'm speaking about the people in Vancouver. You'll never get the people in Vancouver to agree that their hydro rates should go up so you can have some kind of economic relationship with their electrical company. "In your dreams," the cabinet ministers of Social Credit said. So I thought: "Well now, there's a challenge. I'll just truck on over to the big smoke and tell my story and see if I can't convince those people."
[2:45]
In those days I was a cat operator, and I didn't have any money. We had a rule at the regional district that we wouldn't pay regional directors to attend any other function as delegations. I couldn't really get the day off work, because I needed the money. But the regional district -- people of all political parties -- felt so strongly. They agreed they couldn't pay me to go to Vancouver City Council to make my case, so they paid a cat operator off the street to drive for me so I could go to Vancouver City Council. They put a little ad in the paper: "Cat operator wanted. One day's wages." They paid the guy.
Away I went to make the case that people in Vancouver should pay 1 percent, 2 percent, maybe 3 percent more on their hydro bill to deal with the devastation that they had left behind 30 years ago. When I got to Vancouver City Council, boy, was that ever an education in Left and Right dysfunctional politics. The Vancouver City Council of those days, you might recall, was represented by people like Mr. Puil and Mr. Rankin and the people who agreed with Mr. Puil and the people who agreed with Mr. Rankin. It was pretty well split right down the middle, and these people liked to argue. They thought arguing was like an indoor sport. This is what they did as a way of life and as a way of resolving issues.
[ Page 13418 ]
The council was headed by an individual all of you are familiar with. He works right over there. Mike Harcourt was at that time the sort of sane middle person who broke the ties and deadlocks and attempted to manage Vancouver City Council. Mr. Harcourt, whom I had never met....
The Speaker: Order, hon. member.
C. Evans: Oh, sorry. Got it.
The Speaker: Please proceed.
C. Evans: The present Premier, the then mayor, granted me a hearing with the council at about 1 o'clock in the afternoon. We drove all night long, slept four hours in Hope, came in in the morning and sat and watched council.
At about 11 o'clock they got into a battle about whether or not there should be a drinking fountain in a park. There were ideological reasons why there should be -- because the poor people use the park, and they should have access to water. And there were ideological reasons why there shouldn't be -- because it attracts the riffraff and the junkies and all that. They battled this out for a good three hours, while I sat waiting to have my hearing on the subject of B.C. Hydro. They missed their lunch hour, and then when it got to be about 2 o'clock, the then mayor, now Premier, said: "Oh. Well, we've resolved that, but there's this fellow from the Kootenays here, and he's come for something about a referendum. He thinks.... Well listen, members. We've missed our lunch. Let's just vote to support the people of the Kootenays; Hydro should pay taxes in the Kootenays, because I think that's fair." Even in those days the Premier was a person of fair perspective. So the Left and the Right, they all said: "Yes, let's get to lunch." And they all raised their hands, and it was unanimous that Hydro should pay taxes in the Kootenays.
I was incensed. I went down there to have a good fight -- a scrap -- and tell a story, not just to have everybody raise their hands.
So I went off into the lunchroom, and I said: "Mr. Mayor, that's not what I wanted. That's not why they sent me here and paid the wages of that other person. They want you to get it -- to understand. They want me to tell you that you built this town on the backs of what you took and that making it right is going to cost you something. So when you decide, the people in Victoria will listen." The then mayor said: "You know, if you say all that stuff, you might lose the vote. You just won. Go home and tell them you won." I said: "Well, I think it's going to be a bigger fight than what's happening right here. I want these people to understand."
So we went back into the room after lunch, and the then mayor said: "You know what? The strangest thing just happened. This delegate from the Kootenays, who just won, wants to tell you a story to see if he can't manage to lose." So they let me. Then I stood up and told them about all the people who were flooded out and burned out and of the institutions, edifices and dams that were built, some as drone dams for America, some as electricity-producing dams to feed Vancouver. I explained to them that we didn't get any jobs out of it. The job-to-investment ratio on a hydro dam is worse than anything else you can do. The day you finish building it, it takes almost nobody to run it. And I explained to them that Hydro didn't pay any taxes and that if Hydro was going to pay taxes, their power bill would have to rise.
That inspired a debate. I'm happy to say that Vancouver City Council didn't split exactly Left and Right; it split sort of Left and Right. Mr. Rankin again was on one side and Mr. Puil again was -- am I allowed to say their names? -- on the other side, but the folks in the middle believed what I had to say. It came out, four to two, that the people of Vancouver thought B.C. Hydro should pay taxes or a contribution in some respect in the Kootenays.
For the second time I thought that we had just had the battle and that now those folks in Victoria -- the previous government, the Social Credit people, the people in whose cabinet the Leader of the Third Party used to sit -- were going to listen to the people of the Kootenays. For the second time we sent our most respectable delegation to Victoria. And for the second time they said: "Not on your life."
A couple of years later, those same people, the Social Credit government, decided to close a whole bunch of institutions and lay off a whole bunch of people in the Nelson area. Among the institutions they closed was the university in Nelson. A couple of hundred students got on buses and went down to Vancouver to a demonstration and to Victoria, and they stood in front of this very building about 13 years ago.
They didn't have placards saying: "Save our University." They had lightbulbs. They walked down the street out there with unlit lightbulbs in their hands. Nobody here could get it. The people went out and said: "We thought it was a university. What's the deal? Why are you packing around lightbulbs?" The students said: "If we can't go to school, we think we should turn out the lights, because without us you can't have this." The microphone and the lights wouldn't work, it would be too cold to work in here, and there'd be no Hansard. You couldn't run the richest culture on the planet if the people out there decided to unplug the system.
Of course, it didn't help. The university stayed shut. But it did do what has always had to be done, which is that it kept the issue alive. One more time, another generation raised the issue and said: "It matters to us."
In 1986 I was a candidate for public office. We tried to raise, from the New Democrat side, the Columbia River Treaty as an issue in that election, just as every NDP politician in southeastern British Columbia had done for decades and as the CCF had done before them. What was the Social Credit's response? The response of that party, in which the Leader of the Third Party sat in cabinet, was that it was a non-issue.
In 1991 I was a candidate for public office, running with the NDP in the Kootenays. One more time, we raised the Columbia River Treaty as an issue for the public to consider in the election. This time people started wanting to talk about it. Even members of right-wing parties started wanting to talk about it. And why was that? Was it because they just read a stack of papers? Did they just go down to the library one day and take them all out? No, it was a little more crass than that. It was because people who worked in this building started to figure out that 30 years was up; now they had to negotiate what the next 30 years was worth and what they wanted to do with all that money.
The hon. member for Esquimalt-Metchosin came to Castlegar during that election. We were having a meeting of people supporting the candidate in Castlegar and me. They asked the member for Esquimalt-Metchosin what he thought should happen to the downstream benefits when they were
[ Page 13419 ]
renegotiated from the United States. He gave the right answer, which was the mandate for that election; he gave the answer that led to us sitting here in this room. It's really hard for a politician to say; I always have trouble with it myself. He said: "I don't know. I think that's a Kootenay issue, a Columbia Basin issue. It's you folks who have had the experience, and it's you folks who kept the issue alive. Why don't you tell us what we should do with the downstream benefits?"
An Hon. Member: Did you hear that?
C. Evans: They don't hear much.
The next thing that happened, for the first time in history that I know of, was that all the seats in southeastern British Columbia were won by one party. All five MLAs from Valemount east and south came from the same political party. And what was the second half of the miracle? That party became the government.
Before I ever came to this town to stand in this place and tell this story, I figured that I really wanted to go and see where the president of B.C. Hydro worked. I thought it was the honourable thing to do. If you're about to tilt at somebody, it would be in good taste to go to them first and say: "Okay, here I am. My reason for living is to change our relationship, yours and mine." So I got the address out of a book, and I went to Vancouver. I took a bus downtown and went to this huge building and looked at the front. The office of the president was at the top; I rode up about 30 floors. I had an appointment with the president of B.C. Hydro.
Hon Speaker, the only thing I really want to tell you about that meeting, because it's the only part that I remember as being really relevant, was that that person's office was bigger than the square footage of any house I ever lived in. As you walked from the reception area to where you had your conversation, which overlooked the bay and the whole town, the lights came on in front of you and went off behind you. I said: "My name is Corky Evans, and I just got elected. I'm here to mess with you." And he said: "I know who you are. We've been following what you've had to say for years."
The next thing I did was to come over here and meet with the ministers responsible for negotiating the downstream benefits, and I asked them what was happening and where the negotiations were at. One country, Canada, was negotiating with another country, the United States -- or I believe they were negotiating -- the dollar value of half the increased power created in another country, the United States, for 15 million acre-feet of storage in the Columbia River Basin. Amazing to tell, there were no negotiations. There was no negotiating committee, and there had been no meetings.
[3:00]
I hope everybody working over here understands that the people now working over there -- who used to be government over here, including those who have been criticizing the deal that was made with the United States and the accord with the people in the basin -- had no negotiations in progress. Why was that? Because the right wing was going to do the same thing to the people of B.C. this time that they did 30 years ago. They were going to go down across the border and say: "Yessir, whatever you say. Cut me the cheque, because I want the money up front to go use it politically, to get myself elected or to get power. I don't want to bother with negotiations. The people of the Kootenays won't matter. They'll probably always vote wrong anyway. Nobody else understands the water-level issue. Nobody else cares, so just cut me a cheque." That was the negotiating tactic of the previous government -- if you can call it a tactic.
Negotiations began in two places at once. The ministers of the Crown sent negotiators to the United States to begin to have a conversation with those people about what the next 30 years of the Columbia River Treaty would be worth. Meanwhile, a parallel process began in Castlegar. Two ministers of the Crown, for the first time ever, came from this building and from this government to Castlegar, and they sat down with the representatives of the regional districts from all of southeastern B.C. This was three years ago. They said to those people: "Okay. We are now entering into negotiations with the United States, so let's talk about what the deal is here in the Kootenays. What would you people like? What do you want to say to us?"
Nothing like that had ever happened before. This government did it: it walked up to the door voluntarily, not being prodded or shoved or coerced, and it opened the door and said to the people in the region: "Let's have a conversation." The people of the region said an amazing thing, because when government comes to you and asks you what you want, most people out there would say they want swimming pools, highways -- the sky's the limit on what they want.
The people of the region shocked all of us. They said: "No deal. We don't want to go into a room and make a deal with you. As municipal leaders, we represent 250,000 people, and what those people want first is a conversation, not a deal. We got a deal last time. This time, we want to tell you what it cost."
This idea about having a conversation instead of a deal scared the living daylights out of a whole lot of people in this town who have worked here for a really long time. To the credit of the ministers responsible, the conversation happened. Two and a half years ago we held the first symposium in Castlegar, B.C. It was like the constituent assembly when so many Canadians said they wanted to discuss what they wanted for a constitution. It wasn't made up of just those of us who get elected or those people who are elected municipally; it was made up of all kinds of people. Over 300 invitations were sent out, and then the regional districts went from town to town and said: "Okay, we're going to have a conversation with the province. Who would you like to send from your village?" The people chose; they went to the symposium and talked for two days.
When the talk was over, we said three general things: (1) it must never happen again -- even if there is no entitlement or no change in our relationship with Hydro or the province, this must never happen again anywhere to any people; (2) if we do negotiate an entitlement it must last forever, because the reservoirs and the impact will last forever -- this is not about a payoff. And the third thing they said was that whatever we accomplish when we're through with conversation, there needs to be a body in place here, made up of people from here, that will manage this entitlement; we need to have some form of trust.
As I've tried to explain in the stories, over the 30 years -- time after time -- the elected people who came to work here then forgot about what they were talking about there. And the people in Castlegar said: "This time, you have to create a body that meets here, works here and is made up of people from
[ Page 13420 ]
here before we talk about any accord, entitlement or deal." For the next six months representatives of the cabinet ministers negotiated with representatives of the regional districts about what this trust would look like.
During that time, another miracle happened -- at least, something I've never experienced before. The Ktunaxa-Kinbasket Tribal Council voluntarily decided to put up money to join the negotiating team with the five regional districts, who had each put up money for staff, lawyers and travel expenses. We began in the next six months to negotiate not just with those governments representing the municipalities and regional districts but also with the five bands who, through their tribal council, put forward two representatives. We, the province, were now negotiating with all the people in the region. After six months of discussion over what a trust and an entitlement would look like, the government came to the conclusion of its negotiations with the United States.
I want to digress just a bit and talk about those negotiations. Last time, 30 years ago, when Social Credit was the government -- Social Credit, which was an amalgam of Liberals and Conservatives and other kinds of people -- the right wing was the government. They went down to the United States and cut a deal for $254 million for 30 years. They gave them a cheque and they went home. When the value of electricity went up because of the Gulf War and changes in our economy, the people of British Columbia couldn't do a thing about it. They had sold -- literally down the river -- 30 years of storage to the Americans. This government negotiated a completely different kind of deal. This deal says that the people of British Columbia, through their government, at any moment for the next 30 years, can decide to accept cash in lieu of electricity, or electricity. If the value of electricity goes up high enough and we need the power, we can take the power. If we have enough power from our own projects, we can sell it and take cash. The last government negotiated an upfront payment. Why? So they could put everybody to work on the eve of an election, spread the money around and be returned to power. This government negotiated payments over 30 years -- long after there's an election, long after this government.
Once those decisions were made, the Premier announced in Vancouver, simultaneously with the Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources in Nakusp, an accord with the people of the Kootenays, which said that approximately one-third of the downstream benefits would be shared by the people and the land. We didn't know what form that third would take; we didn't know what form the trust would take. So we agreed there would be a second constituent assembly -- a second symposium -- and this time we'd hold it over the mountains in Cranbrook. At the second symposium, the Minister of Employment and Investment suggested to the citizens in the room that instead of taking cash, they take an entitlement in the form of hydroelectric capacity -- the ability to generate electricity. We had been negotiating this very option with representatives from all the regional districts in the tribal council for six months. The chairperson of the Columbia River Treaty Committee in the region just stood up in Kaslo and said that for eight years the region had been talking about hydro-generating capacity as a form of entitlement.
I want to make this point, because the Leader of the Opposition and some of his cohorts have been standing here in recent weeks saying this is a bad bill and a bad deal, because the people of the region didn't choose it. I want to know if there's anybody sitting on the other side who has even understood the issue for eight years. Is there anybody over there who's been talking about it for even six months? Do you think that the Leader of the Opposition even knew six months ago where the region was?
When the minister stood up in Cranbrook and said, "What do you think about instead of cash, you take electrical entitlement -- the ability to make electricity?" there were 200, 300 or 400 people in the room. I would say the reaction was pretty much to be stunned, because the idea that a government would say to them, "We have the power, we control the dams, we own the dams and we'll give them to you," had never occurred to most of the people in the room. You'd have to admit that a senior level of government coming to a community and saying, "We believe in cooperative ownership, community ownership and entitlement of people...." It's not an experience we've had a lot of practice with. It's not something that the parties who sit over there -- who have primarily governed in here -- have ever said to anybody. I'd say the people were stunned, because they realized that the rhetorical debate between us as a region and the big bad province and the big bad United States and the big bad Hydro was over, and now we were actually going to have to consider taking responsibility, actually becoming players at the table. In this job, politics, the easiest way to keep your job is to identify who to hate, who to blame, and to get people everywhere agreeing that all the ills of their lives are because Joe's doing it to them or Hydro's doing it to them -- the province. We were actually going to have to consider becoming the kind of government -- a government that generates wealth -- that we had been attributing all of our travail to for three decades.
[3:15]
Over the next few months, conversations were intense; conversations between people working here and people working for the Columbia River Treaty Committee happened daily. Negotiations were intense; negotiations were weekly. What we came up with was a package the likes of which I don't think anybody in this room has ever seen or heard. The provincial government would agree to transfer one-half of the existing electrical capacity -- the capacity to generate electricity in future at the Waneta Dam, the Brilliant Dam and the Keenleyside Dam -- to the region.
In order to do that, we have to have a group in the region to receive it; we have to have a level of governance to empower. This bill, which I'm hoping each one of you folks is going to stand up in a few hours and vote for, is the bill to create the level of governance to receive the entitlement.
The region said they didn't elect us to go into big-time debt. The province agreed to transfer $25 million a year for ten years to the region for the down payment on the turbines to engage in electrical generation. The people of the region said: "It'll take us ten years to go through the construction process and begin to have a return on investment. How will the trust exist in the meantime? And what will the economic benefits be in Golden, Sparwood, Fernie, Creston, Nakusp -- those towns at some distance from the construction projects involved?" The province said: "We will transfer $45 million to the region in the short run for investment in economic diversification and environmental mitigation in those regions." The region said: "What about our administrative costs until the trust is making money?" The province agreed to transfer $2 million until the debt is repaid and the income begins. The region said: "This is a risky investment. What if there is a
[ Page 13421 ]
worldwide depression? What if the aluminum industry goes down?" As some hon. members know, the American market and the British Columbia market for electricity are both largely determined by aluminum production -- our largest user. The province agreed to backstop the sale of the electricity. The people in the region said: "We're just people who do jobs; we're just people who are elected. We need somebody to tell us if this is a good deal economically or not." They sent the deal to two sets of lawyers and accountants independent of the government -- bet you five bucks none of them even vote for the government -- for an independent analysis of whether this was a good deal or a risky deal. Both of those groups of accountants said to the region: "It's a dream."
I don't think anybody but this government would have done this deal. But I want to make it absolutely clear that this is not about making anybody rich. What will happen with the money that's transferred to the region? For starters, about 10,000 jobs will be created to put the turbines in the dams. The people who work here on the electoral agenda.... The way it's always worked, in our experience, is whoop, somebody gets elected, and there's large unemployment while the government claws back all the money; then whoop, there's a megaproject just before there's an election. The people of the region and the government have decided that the boom-and-bust cycle was part of the problem. It is a solution to nothing. So we have agreed to a timetable that will phase these jobs in over a decade, not a timetable useful to the government but a timetable useful to people.
When the jobs are done they will generate electricity. What will the electricity be used for? I submit that the first need of the region to have electricity -- the reason the people at the symposium and their delegates chose this option -- is that without electricity there's no seat at the table. You don't get to negotiate lake levels, dust and storage patterns with the United States or with B.C. Hydro if you don't have the ante, and the ante isn't money.
When the Leader of the Opposition stood up in this House and said, "It's a bad deal; the government should have given the people money and let the people decide what to do with the money," what he was saying to the people who live there is: "We should have bought them off again." This way, the people of the region get power and can actually negotiate with the people of Vancouver, his constituency. He's saying to buy them off the way his group has always done and the way his government would have done. The people would go out, buy themselves a whack of swimming pools and pave a bunch of roads. "Then we'll control their ecosystem forever, the way we always did." That is the position of the party that sits over there. That's the position of their leader. If it's not, let them walk through the door before the end of debate and take it back. The people chose electricity in order to empower themselves against the nature of that kind of avariciousness and control.
Will it work? I don't have a clue. I want to say here in Hansard, on TV and in front of these people and all of you: this is as risky as the day they created medicare. This is as risky as saying: "I've got an idea. Let's go out and start a ferry company, because the people have an island and a mainland, and they'd better have some ferries." This is a risky notion, to take this much money, concrete, water and dams and put it in the hands of a level of government that you're just about to vote on, not one that you've watched for 40 years. It is a risky deal. It would be a whole lot safer to give it to B.C. Hydro and just let the next 30 years look like that last 30 years. We would be, in the eyes of some, more responsible to do the safest thing.
I think it will work. When a whole bunch of people get together -- different nationalities, Indian people, non-Indian people, East Kootenays, West Kootenays, north, south, people who do all kinds of different things for a living -- and not in one generation but in three or four, our grandparents, parents, us and our kids and the college kids outside eight or ten years ago, generation after generation.... They say: "We have to fix it. It's broken." Then the two sides get together and negotiate for three years on the nature of what "fix" is. This group of people who work here in the Legislature says: " 'Fix' is not getting us re-elected with a megaproject." And the other group of people from the region says: " 'Fix' is not making us rich today." Then it's got the elements of the goodwill that it takes to make it work.
The other thing it's going to need to make it work in the long run is an end to parochialism. Members know that I haven't been here every day since the session started. I've been travelling from town to town, talking with people about the nature of the accord. I went to Nakusp the other day, and there were more than a hundred people in the room. There had been an editorial in the newspaper before I got there, and it said: "It's a bad deal. We didn't get anything. We can't hold in our hand the golf course we got, or the swimming pool, the paved roads or the factory." Well, it didn't quite say that, but they were words to that effect.
So I stood up, and there were a hundred people in the room asking: "Corky, the newspaper says it's a bad deal. What did we get?" And I have to try to say: "You didn't get anything to hold in your hand, because we didn't negotiate something to hold in your hand. The nature of the 'broken' was the absence of control or of a say, with the power being 400 miles away on an island. The nature of the 'fix' was to set up and empower the trust and to solve the problems of the future in the future yourselves." They asked: "What will we get ten years from now?" I had to say, and I'm proud to say it here: "I don't know if you'll get anything then, either."
The reason is that it costs half a million bucks a year just to keep the kokanee salmon alive in Kootenay Lake alone. It costs half a million bucks a year to keep the swans alive in the Creston Valley wildlife management area, and on and on. When it's the last three-day weekend of summer, and the kids are going swimming at Siringa and in Nakusp, it costs a million dollars a foot to hold the water in the lake. You have to pay the United States a million dollars a foot for the deal the people who worked here 30 years ago made, and there's no way to take it back. We can't take down the dam, and we can't rip up the deal.
It may be that because the Ktunaxa-Kinbasket people and the regional districts are working together, they might decide a most startling thing. There are whispers beginning. There are people actually saying: "Maybe we want to use the money to put the salmon back in the river." Imagine that. There's a river that hasn't seen a salmon for decades, and people are saying: "Maybe instead of a lake level right outside my village hall, or my swimming pool, or something, maybe I'd like to spend that money seeing if the very science that put these dams here couldn't work with the United States and bring the salmon back up some day." I don't know what the nature of the people's dream will be.
[ Page 13422 ]
I want to close this speech by saying that nobody else would have done this deal besides this government. There is not another government in this country, and there hasn't been another government in this province, with the nerve to walk through these doors and offer the people an accord while having to say: "We don't know how the future will look." Politicians believe in surety, in being able to say the deal is this in black and white: "I made it; I know it; I'll pass the law." That's what politicians do. This accord or this trust you're about to vote on asks if we believe that a bunch of people out there on the land can decide for themselves what is the best thing to do in decades to come to mitigate the decisions the people in here made.
D. Mitchell: I'm pleased to enter the debate on Bill 7, the Columbia Basin Trust Act. I'm delighted to follow the member for Nelson-Creston as well, who I think spoke eloquently to the bill. He's one of the more energetic members of the House; he's obviously working hard for his constituents. Which MLA in this House wouldn't like to be in the position, like the hon. member for Nelson-Creston, to be talking about investing hundreds of millions, perhaps $1 billion, into the region they represent in this Legislature. In this debate we should talk about whether or not the government, through Bill 7, is doing the right thing, not only doing things right. We should talk about whether or not the member for Nelson-Creston, who speaks so eloquently to this bill, is talking about doing the right thing or about trying to satisfy the needs of his constituents, his region of the province, perhaps at the expense of other regions of the province. I hope that's not the case.
When we look at Bill 7.... We're here to debate in second reading the principle of Bill 7. I think the hon. member who preceded me took some latitude with that, but he was also quite eloquent in giving some background and some history and context to why we are here debating Bill 7 today.
[3:30]
The explanatory note for Bill 7 is very brief, but it might be useful just to read it into the record. It says:
"This Bill creates the Columbia Basin Trust to manage that portion of the downstream benefits available to the Province from the Columbia River Treaty that is to be allocated by the government to the Columbia River region for the economic, environmental and social benefit of the region."
That's how the government seeks to briefly explain the purpose of this bill. If that's all the bill is doing, I daresay it should pass unanimously in this House -- if it's going to satisfy the purpose in principle explained in that explanatory note. But I think the bill goes beyond that.
[D. Lovick in the chair.]
On face value it seems to be a good idea, but it also.... If you take a look at the contents of the bill and at the process that led up to the tabling of the bill in this House by the Minister of Employment and Investment, I think there are some concerns that need to be flagged. There are some concerns that need to be put on the record during the second reading debate.
The bill seeks to create a trust, or a regional corporation, as the bill describes it -- a quasi-Crown corporation, as the minister who tabled the bill in the House describes it. He also said that this quasi-Crown corporation will have "unprecedented autonomy." Those are his words. Given this government's record of providing such poor accountability for Crown corporations, I would think they should be embarrassed about bragging about creating yet another quasi-Crown corporation with yet unprecedented autonomy. I think that's got to be some cause for concern. Of course, when we get into committee stage on this bill, we'll have a chance to question the minister as to what he meant in terms of the unprecedented autonomy of this quasi-Crown corporation.
When we take a closer look at the bill, I think some aspects of it are quite laudable; I think I described that in the explanatory note. But a number of other elements of the bill are cause for serious concern. I'll give you just one example. When we look at the preamble to this bill.... Not every bill that comes before this assembly has a preamble; some special bills do. A preamble is a statement of principle, a statement of vision. Typically we don't find partisan politics included in the preamble to a bill. When we see the very first statement of the preamble saying, "Whereas the desires of the people of the Columbia Basin were not adequately considered in the original negotiations of the Columbia River Treaty," we have to ask: according to whom? Why is it appropriate to be putting a political statement right into the preamble of a piece of legislation?
That's a cause for some concern, and it makes me suspicious of the government's partisan motivations in bringing this bill forward. We've had statements from various ministers or various government speakers in this debate in second reading talking about the need for justice for the people of the region. We've heard about the devastation and trauma caused by the construction of dams pursuant to the Columbia River Treaty. I think we have to ask some questions: what are they talking about when they make these statements? Is it possible that they are exaggerating the negative effects of the Columbia River Treaty? Is it also possible that, likewise, they are minimizing the benefits of that treaty to the region? Could they be trying to do so for political purposes? These are questions that I think beg to be asked, hon. Speaker.
Government members have spoken nobly about righting historical wrongs. Well, you can't do that without first understanding history. Earlier in this debate the Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources accused me of concentrating too much on the past. But how can you right historical wrongs unless you understand your history first?
Just as important, we should ask whether it's possible or whether we can afford to right every so-called historical wrong. What kind of a precedent are we making when we make such an effort? Are we making victims out of selected groups of our fellow citizens so that we can force all taxpayers, in turn, to make reparations? Those are some of the questions and larger concerns that I think we have to address when we deal with Bill 7, the Columbia Basin Trust Act.
The government seems to like to create victims so that they can then glorify them and even pretend to save them after that. This victimhood philosophy is very dangerous. It's dangerous because it divides the province into special interests, each one of them having been victimized in some way, shape or form. The NDP then comes riding to their salvation with the taxpayer's purse. If you're a member of a so-called disadvantaged group, fear not. The government will first declare you a victim, then offer to pay you off and then hope that they can count on your vote, by the way, in the next election. I call it victimization; some might call it pork-
[ Page 13423 ]
barrelling of the crudest form. We're creating a province of victims and it's unhealthy. Let's face it: we can't right every historical wrong; we simply can't afford to -- sometimes a collective apology is all we can afford.
It is true that by today's standards some of the policies and actions of past governments don't make the grade. That's judging the past by today's standards. Is that fair? It's folly to judge the past by today's standards. Unless we truly understand the motivations and goals of previous generations of policy-makers, today's initiatives will be based upon a very poor and partisan motivation.
The Columbia River Treaty, which this bill is a response to, is a very good case in point. From the time of the Second World War, both the Canadian and American governments were studying the possibility of a cooperative approach on the Columbia River. What they were trying to do was to deal with the Columbia River, which flows on both sides of the Canadian-United States border. The object of the various studies and discussions by engineers, policy-makers and a number of other technical personnel was to maximize the flood control and hydroelectric energy generation of the Columbia River on both sides of the border. After years and years of dialogue, an important international agreement was finally concluded in 1964: the Columbia River Treaty. It's amazing in retrospect to realize that this treaty between two countries, Canada and the United States, was shaped in such a large part by the wishes of the province of British Columbia.
Perhaps the best single volume written on the subject was by Prof. Neil Swainson, formerly of the University of Victoria, just recently retired. He wrote a book, which I would recommend to all members who aren't familiar with it, called Conflict Over the Columbia: The Canadian Background to an Historic Treaty. Describing British Columbia's role in the negotiation of that treaty, I can tell you what Professor Swainson said and I quote from page 315 of the text: "In conjunction with the sheer staying power of Mr. Bennett" -- and he's referring to former Premier W.A.C. Bennett -- "the result was that two national governments came to realize that the wishes of this province would have to be agreed to substantially if any agreement was to be reached." That's Prof. Neil Swainson referring to the fact that it was unprecedented that a province would exert such influence over a major international treaty between two countries.
But the wishes of W.A.C. Bennett prevailed. What were those wishes? I think it's important to understand them because they've been misinterpreted in this debate. First of all, the Columbia River Treaty was part of W.A.C. Bennett's famous "two-rivers" policy. It wasn't only the Columbia River that was going to be developed, that was going to maximize flood control and that was going to generate hydroelectricity. It was also the Peace River. The Columbia and Peace rivers had to be developed simultaneously, according to the government of the day, according to the Premier of the day. They had to be developed simultaneously, and W.A.C. Bennett had a grand vision why: he wanted to develop the interior and the northern part of British Columbia's wealth. He wanted to develop them simultaneously. He wanted to make available inexpensive hydroelectricity to encourage industry and to encourage development that would benefit all British Columbians.
There was another major wish of the government of the day. That related to the development and creation of a new Crown corporation, the B.C. Hydro and Power Authority -- B.C. Hydro, as we know it today. The formation of B.C. Hydro was part of this whole debate that took place back in the early 1960s. At the time, a major power utility that was privately owned really dictated power development in the province, and that was B.C. Electric. A free enterprise government led by W.A.C. Bennett expropriated that private utility because it was serving as an obstacle to the development of the province, the interior and northern parts of the province in particular. So we have to understand the creation of B.C. Hydro as part of this two-rivers policy.
There were many who disagreed with that vision, principally the NDP, who were the political opposition of the day. What would they wish today? We should ask that. Would they wish that we roll back the hands of time? Would they wish that the Columbia and Peace developments had not proceeded at all and that we hadn't opened up the interior and northern parts of our province? Would they wish that the province was still controlled by a Vancouver-based private utility, which perhaps today would still be holding back the interior and north from development? I don't think so. At the time of the Columbia River Treaty, the NDP opposed it, and they opposed almost every aspect of the two-rivers policy. They attempted to throw sands in the gears of the project, but they failed. They said the Columbia River Treaty was a sellout of our birthright -- a sellout of our birthright to the Americans. They said it was a giveaway of our water resources. They were wrong; that was untrue. Of course, this was back in the days when the NDP had a strong and vicious streak of anti-Americanism. I don't know if you can remember that, because, of course, that was a long time ago. Who could have predicted back then that today the NDP, the same party that was so strongly and viciously anti-American, would actually be run by and controlled by advertising and public relations firms from Washington, D.C.? Who could have believed that at the time?
But times have changed. Times have changed; we've come a long way. But we haven't come very far in understanding the key feature of the Columbia River Treaty, which is the downstream benefits. The downstream benefits have been referred to in the debate by members of the government, and members of the Liberal opposition in particular, in a way that I think really demonstrates a lack of understanding of history and a lack of understanding of the term "downstream benefits." It's an important concept, but they should understand it before they bandy the term about. I think that the member for Nelson-Creston, who spoke before me in this debate, understands the concept quite well. While he didn't address the concept of downstream benefits in his speech today, earlier, on March 31, at the start of this session, he delivered a private member's statement in this chamber in which he addressed this issue. He offered a very good definition of those downstream benefits and what they are and what they represent. Just to set the record straight, I'd like to offer my definition of the downstream benefits, because it's important in this debate to have this on the record and no one has addressed this specifically yet. The downstream benefits are actually made up of the American-developed power on their side of the border, half of which belongs to British Columbia. Half of the power generated on the American side of the Columbia River is owned by British Columbia. That's part of the negotiating achievement of the Columbia River Treaty.
[ Page 13424 ]
It's an amazing negotiating achievement in many respects. At the time, W.A.C. Bennett's government presold those downstream benefits for the first 30 years. We can second-guess that today. At the time, in 1964, no one could forecast energy prices; no one could have expected the oil crisis in the Gulf; no one could have expected OPEC and have anticipated all of those changes. But at the time, those downstream benefits were presold for 30 years, for the first half of the treaty, for a purpose: to fund all the developments on the Canadian side of the border, in both the Columbia watershed and in the Peace as well. That turned out to be not a bad deal considering inflation, which has run its course since then. W.A.C. Bennett's government presold that power to the Americans. We used the cash proceeds from the sale to build the dams on our side of the border, and the Columbia and Peace projects went ahead.
This was part of the two-rivers policy. These two developments were tied together; they went ahead simultaneously. For the next 30 years of the treaty, as the member for Nelson-Creston pointed out accurately, in British Columbia we have the option to either tell the Americans to give us our power, because we own it -- to deliver it to British Columbia because we own it -- or sell it again. Maybe this time it wouldn't be prudent -- I don't think it would be, and the government has recognized that, to their credit -- to engage in any long-term sales. We all know how faulty and how dangerous it is to predict energy markets over long periods of time. So we've learned our lesson. Nevertheless, those downstream benefits are owned by us here in British Columbia and we have the option; we have the upper hand; we have the lever with the Americans this time.
Either way, over the last half of the treaty those downstream benefits are worth billions of dollars to us. It's a unique benefit. If we had left it up to Ottawa at the time, to allow the federal government to negotiate the Columbia River Treaty with the Americans, our federal representatives would have settled for far less, and that's important to recognize. The federal government would have settled for far less. The Columbia River Treaty would have been of much less benefit to us than it is today, and it is a greater benefit to us today because British Columbia played a key part in those negotiations. It was a shrewd negotiating achievement directed by the government of a former Premier by the name of W.A.C. Bennett.
[3:45]
Those downstream benefits are a provincial legacy, because they are an asset owned by all British Columbians. In fact, W.A.C. Bennett was adamant that no future government should ever use this asset to fund the pet political projects of the day. All the people of British Columbia own the downstream benefits, and they should be used for the benefit of all British Columbians. Over the years there has been a good deal of discussion and debate about what those downstream benefits should be used for. In the last parliament, one member of this House -- a private member at the time whose name was Grace McCarthy -- made a suggestion and she introduced a private member's bill in this chamber that unfortunately the government of the day didn't see fit to embrace. I think it would have been a good idea to invest all of the downstream benefits into a fund whereby all young British Columbians would be able to receive scholarships to fund their post-secondary education and training. It was a bold and unique proposal, but it was in the spirit of W.A.C. Bennett, who argued vociferously that those benefits are a resource of all British Columbia and should be used for the benefit of British Columbia families.
Even earlier, in the previous parliament, a former Minister of Energy in this House, the late Jack Davis, once proposed that the downstream benefits should be used to pay off the provincial debt. I can tell you there was a time -- back when the Hon. Jack Davis made that proposal -- when the downstream benefits would have eliminated the entire provincial debt of this province. We couldn't do that today. The provincial debt has mushroomed, particularly in the last few years under this government. To the credit of the NDP government, they have made a commitment that most of the downstream benefits will go to pay down our provincial debt. I think that's important.
However, this bill doesn't deal with that at all. Bill 7, the Columbia Basin Trust Act, doesn't even address that issue. This is a commitment that's been made by the Premier outside this House. Without legislation or a specific guarantee, I don't know if we can feel comfortable that this government -- or, indeed, any future government -- will live up to such a commitment. I think we require a legislative guarantee that those downstream benefits can only be used for debt retirement, and that such a law should not be amendable -- should not be repealable -- without the unanimous consent of this assembly. That's the kind of guarantee we need to offer taxpayers. That's the kind of guarantee we need to ensure that those downstream benefits -- a provincial resource, a provincial legacy -- are not tampered with by any future government.
The NDP government hasn't quite earmarked all of the downstream benefits to debt reduction, because that is what we are here debating. Bill 7, the Columbia Basin Trust Act, says that an initial portion of those benefits should be directed to a new corporation that will spend many millions of dollars from this legacy in the Columbia-Kootenay region. In fact, it's part of a billion-dollar strategy in energy infrastructure that the government has proudly announced. It's investing in new hydroelectric generating facilities at the three dams in the region: Waneta, Brilliant and Keenleyside. We have to ask: is this a good idea? Even the member for Nelson-Creston questioned it. He said he wasn't sure if it was a good idea; he couldn't give us any guarantee. So we have to ask, and we have to seek an answer: is this actually a good use of those downstream benefits? Is it a proper use of a provincial resource that's owned by all British Columbians, not just the residents of the Columbia-Kootenay region?
Members may be interested to know that during the negotiations on the Columbia River Treaty, Premier W.A.C. Bennett wanted to establish a special endowment for the people of the communities of the Kootenays. He actually strove to achieve that during the negotiations with the Americans, but he failed. The negotiators at the table weren't able to achieve that goal. The former Premier regretted this later on in life when I recorded some reminiscences with him for a biography I was writing. He expressed that regret to me. Nevertheless, he failed. It adds to the argument that an investment in the region may be appropriate and have some symbolic value as well. There is a case for some compensatory investment in the region; there's no doubt about that. We have to ask, though: is the NDP government bending over backwards -- unnecessarily, in my view -- to justify such a move?
[ Page 13425 ]
The government talks about the lack of justice and supposed environmental trauma caused in the region by flooding after the dams were constructed. Could it be that they're exaggerating this in order to justify a partisan effort?
Almost a decade after the treaty, a book was written by J.W. Wilson called People in the Way: The Human Aspects of the Columbia River Project. It's a good book; I recommend it to hon. members. Professor Wilson had a unique perspective on the treaty because he was a participant in the original project. He was responsible for the resettlement planning and was later appointed as an independent investigator of the project's effects on displaced people. His book, People in the Way, is very sympathetic to the people who were in the way of the so-called progress being made at the time. It's based in large part upon a survey of people who were moved, whose property was expropriated at the time, who were displaced by the treaty. He did a detailed survey of all of them in 1970. He wrote this book and it was published in 1973.
What does Professor Wilson say about the legal expropriation process and whether or not people were treated in a humane fashion or received fair compensation? I'd like to read a very brief excerpt from page 146 of People in the Way. This will tell you what Prof. J.W. Wilson said:
"A number of the displaced people have said that their compensation was far from generous. Their feeling is a fact. What is also a fact is Hydro's feelings to the contrary. The Authority always accepted the inevitability of some error, but is convinced of the generosity of its compensation program in general. Is there any way of adjudicating between these opposite views? Short of a study by a royal commission, no. For such evidence as there is does not present a clear picture."
Professor Wilson does go on on page 147 to quote another academic by the name of Donald Waterfield, who had been highly critical of the Columbia River Treaty. In fact, he was one of the leading opponents of the Columbia River Treaty and its effects on both sides of the border. He was certainly no apologist for B.C. Hydro. Donald Waterfield says: "Inevitably, in so many awards" -- he's talking about the awards of compensation for the expropriation of properties -- "there must be some peculiar ones. My impression now is that, with a few exceptions, all the small people were well paid. But the middling ones had to fight for what they got." He has also said: "Hydro leaned over backwards to be generous in most cases." That's Donald Waterfield quoted from People in the Way by J.W. Wilson.
I read from these books and these studies on the Columbia River Treaty and its impact on people to make a point, which is that one has to question why the government would want to exaggerate the supposed injustices done to residents of the Kootenays. Why is there no discussion of the benefits of the Columbia River Treaty: the employment that was generated for an entire generation of engineers and construction workers on the dam projects, the development that expanded opportunities not only for residents of the Columbia-Kootenay region but for all British Columbians, and the inexpensive hydroelectric power now available to us as British Columbians? Why has no one even made any mention of the benefits of the treaty? Why do we talk only about the supposed injustices?
I think there's probably a reason for that. Even more curious is why we have not talked about the Peace River. As I mentioned, the Columbia River Treaty would not have proceeded if we didn't also have simultaneous development of the Peace River. That was the two-rivers policy. Yet the government has made no mention -- certainly not in Bill 7 or elsewhere -- of doing justice to the people of the Peace. Surely, if there's an argument to be made that we should be setting up a local trust for the residents of the Columbia-Kootenay region consequent to the Columbia River Treaty, a similar argument must also be made that the residents of the Peace should also be entitled to some kind of justice.
I think the leader of the Reform Party actually made a good point in this debate earlier on when he asked the question about the people of McKenzie who live on a large man-made lake, Lake Williston. Shouldn't they be eligible for a fair share of the benefits? I think that's a good point, and logically, it would follow. But the government has made no mention of that. We have to ask why: is the government showing regional favouritism and seeking to divide the province? Shame on them, if that's the case. Could it be because the provincial constituencies in the Columbia-Kootenay region are currently represented by members of one party, the NDP, whereas up in the Peace region opposition members represent those constituencies? Is that why the government is not directing any of the benefits to the Peace? Could it be crass politics? I hope not, hon. Speaker, but it makes one suspicious.
Even more surprising, and even more lamentable, has been the curious, unusual position taken by the Liberal opposition on this bill and generally on this matter. I'm sad to say that my friends in the Liberal caucus don't seem to understand the issue or the concept of downstream benefits. They have no understanding of the background to the Columbia River Treaty at all. That's evident by the comments they've made in this debate.
Tragically, I think they're playing crass politics with this issue. The leader of the Liberal opposition has gone so far as to say that he would direct more, perhaps all, of the downstream benefits to residents of the Kootenays. In fact, he's indicated that he believes that direct payments should be made to all residents of the Kootenays. Now, not only do such incredible assertions demonstrate a woeful lack of any understanding of the history and background of this issue but they also show a highly irresponsible approach to public spending on the part of the Liberal opposition. What we have here, I think, is a case of a Vancouver political boss trying to outbribe the current government for the votes of the rural residents of the Kootenays. I can only hope and pray that such a crass and cynical approach will fail, and fail miserably.
There are a number of important questions that Bill 7 raises. Many of them will have to wait until committee stage, but I'd like to flag just a few. With Bill 7, the Columbia Basin Trust Act, are we in fact setting up a new Crown corporation? It's called a regional corporation, a quasi-Crown corporation with unprecedented autonomy, according to the Minister of Employment and Investment; but it's unclear what the status of this trust is actually going to be. We're going to have to establish that in the committee stage, I suppose, because we've had no answer to that question.
Are we setting up a new power utility with this act? Is that what we're actually doing? Can the new power generated by the three dams on our side of the border be sold to whomever? Why isn't B.C. Hydro, our publicly-owned hydro utility, being given the opportunity to do this? If we're setting up a new major utility, why not sell shares to the public? We all know how successful and how profitable power utilities
[ Page 13426 ]
are, so why not let the people invest? We're also allowing this new corporation to borrow money, and my understanding is we're going to be going another half a billion dollars into debt with this bill. Is that a good idea, hon. Speaker?
Finally, is this bill just a recognition of the regional nature of the British Columbia economy? If it is, I can support it because I think that's a good idea. There's no doubt that our natural resources are owned by all of us as citizens. Our constitution says that the province owns them: our forests, our mineral wealth, our energy resources and our water -- our most valuable natural resource -- are owned by all British Columbians. The government may have got this right, but we need to understand it a bit better. In my constituency I'd like to see some of the benefits of resource development go directly back to communities like Squamish and Pemberton. The BC Forest Renewal Act last year indicated that it believed in that philosophy. Bill 7, the Columbia Basin Trust Act, seems to be a step in the right direction. I'm not sure if I can accurately see it that way. We have a lot of concerns about the bill -- I do, personally. But I think the bill tries to do some laudable things, and maybe in the committee stage we'll get some answers to these important questions.
Deputy Speaker: I thank the member for his comments and now recognize the member for Okanagan West...Okanagan East. Member, I must apologize; I've done that to you a number of times and I can't seem to get it straight. My apologies.
J. Tyabji: That's okay, hon. Speaker; that happens frequently.
I'm happy to get up and debate Bill 7. First of all, I guess I should say that with respect to the concept behind Bill 7, it is not a new concept. The first time I heard about the Columbia River basin trust concept was when I was in the Kootenays in the summer and fall of 1992 during the Charlottetown accord. At that time, because the Columbia downstream benefits were being discussed as something that was pending and coming out in the next year, there was a lot of discussion about what should be done with them. The then leader of the Liberal Party, who is now the leader of the Alliance, said very clearly at that time that there should be a regional development fund created out of the totality of the downstream benefits. But the idea of the fund was that it would be there for economic diversification, which would be determined by the people who live in that area.
[4:00]
I've heard many comments today, including those of the member for Nelson-Creston, who was the designated speaker for the government. What I find interesting is that when we sit in this chamber and hear what's represented in a bill, we often have very little idea of what discussions have occurred in the regions. At the first of the town hall meetings that the provincial government set up in conjunction with some of the local people in the Kootenays, we had a member of the Alliance Party attend as somebody who would oversee and try to keep some accountability in the process. It was very interesting with respect to what came out of that process and out of our member's participation. It gives a very, very different perspective on the debate today. I would have to say that the debate today bears no resemblance to the debate that's occurring in the Kootenays right now.
What is the debate in the Kootenays? Once we get past the concept -- and, as I say, the Alliance Party stands for that concept; it is one that the Alliance leader has been espousing since 1987 -- it is about regional diversification of the economy. Diversification is a key word. What has the provincial NDP government decided to do with the downstream benefits? Through Bill 7, they will not only be setting up a Crown corporation or a trust fund; they have already decided, through the memorandum they signed with the people of the area, to start developing three more hydro projects.
Who decided that? Who decided to expand on those hydro projects? I think it's interesting that the member for Nelson-Creston, who, on the one hand, when he was talking about the original setting up of the dams and the Columbia River Treaty system, said that they didn't get any jobs out of it.... Well, if they didn't get any jobs out of it, then.... He then went on in his speech to say that the expansion of the existing projects that this government is planning to do through the new trust fund is going to result in 10,000 jobs. You can't have it both ways; either you don't get any jobs out of it or you get 10,000 jobs. I happen to believe that he was correct in saying, as he did originally, that they didn't get any jobs out of it.
In this current new proposal for expansion of the three existing dams and the implementation of the turbines, there will be no long-term jobs. It will be exactly as the member for Nelson-Creston portrayed it: once the construction is done, the dams will run themselves. Who is going to be ultimately responsible for that? Is that going to be something that the people of the region will have any control over? Once this $1 billion is put into the trust fund, to what extent will local people have any input in the spending of that money?
We have seen, through the memo that was signed by the provincial government with the people of that region and announced by the Premier, that they will have absolutely no input. Even though we have Bill 7 in front of us and it sounds fine, we know that Bill 7 actually followed the memo, and that the ink was well dried on that memo to develop and expand the three existing dam projects before Bill 7 was conceived, written and brought to this chamber.
What does that memo say? The memorandum of understanding on the Columbia Basin accord, which was announced by the Premier in the Kootenays, says: "The province desires to develop long-term, meaningful employment opportunities and to foster investment in British Columbia." How do we do that by expanding on existing dams?
We know that the environmental impacts of the current Arrow Lakes system and the dams that were put in place in the Kootenays are going to be long term. In fact, what they did when they flooded the lower valleys was wipe out what I think was considered to be the second-most-productive agricultural land in the province, in terms of a region. So what did the people of the Kootenays get in exchange for that -- in exchange for losing their agricultural base, losing the ability to have a pristine environment and, in effect, creating a new microclimate for the Arrow Lakes area? In exchange for losing all of that, they got nothing. They received virtually no benefits.
For this government to come in now and say that they are being benevolent, beneficent, magnanimous and generous -- and all the long words that we've heard used in this debate -- is dishonest. Because there is nothing generous about taking
[ Page 13427 ]
money that's in one fund, which is the province's, putting it into a trust fund, and the province then deciding exactly how it will be spent. Setting up some sort of locally controlled regional board where the province has prescribed how that board will be constituted, and that that board will, in effect, only act as window dressing for decisions already being made by the province, is just a dishonest process. It's a fraudulent process. It's clearly a process that will see us into well after the next election, because in Bill 7 it says that it could be up to two years before this board will actually have any say. Before this board was even in legislation, what the board was going to be mandated to deal with had already been decided by the province.
I'd like to put on record one of the letters that we received from one of the local representatives of government. It's interesting that when he wrote this -- it was prior to one of the public processes -- the numbers he used in his letter actually were higher than those projected by some of the people who were concerned. His letter is headlined: "Sold Down the River Again." He talks about the public process as it has occurred in the Kootenays and how uneasy the people of the Kootenays are with the way the government is dealing with all these things. The first thing he talks about is: "No. 1, the government ignores the public input anyway. CORE and New Directions in health care." Anyone who has spent any time in the Kootenays knows that both CORE and the regional health councils have been an unmitigated disaster. "No. 2, the negotiations are behind closed doors." We know that this memorandum of understanding was delivered already signed, and that was prior to the bill being brought up. "No. 3, no mandate was ever given to the Columbia River Treaty Commission." That's true. The commission that was struck by this government has no mandate.
He mentions the Kinbasket Tribal Council. What's interesting is that after the Columbia downstream benefits were accrued, the local tribal council arbitrarily changed their boundaries so that all of a sudden they had jurisdiction over the dams.
Interjection.
J. Tyabji: The Minister of Employment and Investment is saying "So?" -- with the implication that that's probably a good thing. His government might not have a problem with the local aboriginal band arbitrarily changing their boundaries. But we can see what's happening here: we've got B.C. Hydro, an extremely powerful corporation that the people in the Kootenays have long been frustrated with because they have no accountability, they don't pay any taxes, and they're primarily located outside of the area; and we have the aboriginal bands. What do we know about aboriginal bands? We know that their power, their authority and their jurisdiction are going to increase. It's going to increase through another closed-door process called the aboriginal treaty negotiation process. That process is fraudulent, but it will be giving them more power. And the power that they will have will now affect the people of the Kootenays in a much more important way, in a much more substantial way, because they will have jurisdiction over the dams.
We know that there will be this puppet organization put together by the NDP -- in fact, maybe not even by the NDP but by the government that replaces the NDP; certainly it will be constituted by the NDP -- and that there will be a board which will have virtually no power. How do we know that it will have no power?
I should finish this. In the letter, No. 4 is: "The Kemano project was axed against the recommendation of the BCUC. No. 5, there's an election coming up soon." So here we see that some of the local representatives.... This is a member of the regional district who says that there is absolutely no due process in the Kootenays and no way for people to have a say in something prior to it being announced or dumped on them.
Where's the environmental impact assessment of this? Where is the after-the-fact environmental impact assessment of what happened before? To what extent will these three new enlarged projects have any impact on the bulk water diversion and large-scale water flushing that, through B.C. Hydro, is currently going on in and having devastating environmental impacts on the Kootenays?
One thing that came out of that April 10 meeting, where we had Alliance members present, was that the government and the five sitting MLAs presented this as: "This is a done deal; this is the best you're going to get. We really don't want to open this up again, because you're not going to do any better with the Liberal Party or the Reform Party." Those are disgraceful tactics, to come into a public meeting with something already done and say, "Well, you'd better like it, because you don't have any better choices," and then use fear tactics. Those are not the kind of tactics that should be used for good government.
But the central point is: how do we know that there will be absolutely no real monitoring or accountability? How do we know that Bill 7 means nothing significant to the people of the Kootenays? Well, we know because one line in Bill 7 is the most significant line of the bill, I believe, and we haven't talked about it yet in this debate.
That line says: "Section 5 of the Offence Act does not apply to this Act or to the regulations." That in itself might not seem like a big deal -- section 5, big deal: one section of a big act. But we have to look at the Offence Act. What is it? What is section 5? Section 5 of the Offence Act says: "A person who contravenes an enactment by doing an act that it forbids, or omitting to do an act that it requires to be done, commits an offence against the enactment." So in that line Bill 7 says that if section 5 of the Offence Act does not apply, you can break any provision of Bill 7 and do not commit an offence. Or on the other hand, you don't have to do anything that Bill 7 says you have to do; you don't commit an offence. We should have done our homework on this debate before we started it, because that line wipes out any of this airy-fairy warm and fuzzy feeling that we've had through this debate.
That line in Bill 7 shows us that this government is moving forward in bad faith. This government has no intention to hold B.C. Hydro accountable or to hold B.C. Hydro to whatever long-term plans its puppet board sets up for the Kootenays. Even though in Bill 7 they talk about the Columbia Basin management plan, we know that we won't even see a plan like that for two and a half years at least. And in that time, all the important decisions will already have been taken, either through B.C. Hydro, through order-in-council or through this government after the session is over, when nobody can talk about it anymore.
[ Page 13428 ]
It's no wonder the people of the Kootenays feel sold out and disenfranchised. The last thing they needed was an expansion of the existing dams. How about economic diversification? How about trying to invest in the community outside of the hydro projects?
How do we know -- and we'll be canvassing this later in the session -- that this trust is going to do anything to prevent the large-scale water flushing that through B.C. Hydro has occurred in the past? This government might be looking at this as a very lucrative deal for the government. B.C. Hydro must be delighted to have access to this kind of capital. B.C. Hydro must be delighted that the government is prepared to give them low-interest financing for capital investment in the Kootenays. They must be just thrilled; I can't imagine that they wouldn't be very happy with Bill 7.
Do you know why else B.C. Hydro would be very happy? Do you know why else this bill is making sure the people of the Kootenays have no provision in law for any kind of accountability? Because of another few lines at the end of the act. The end of the act mentions three sections of the Company Act that will apply to the corporation or corporations. What are those three lines? Are they the lines that talk about taxation or about money accruing to the local area? No, they're not.
The most significant of those three lines is about section 152 of the Company Act, which talks about indemnification. Do you know what that says? It says there's no liability. Of the three tiny little sections of the enormous Company Act that apply, the one that strikes me as the most important is that no one is going to be liable for anything they do. It's a large section of the act, and I won't read it, but it's amazing that it is saving harmless people who may go out and devastate the environment in the Kootenays. It's a trapdoor.
So what do we have? We have no ability under the Offence Act to charge anybody, we have a trapdoor for anyone who might be held liable, we have a piece of paper that's worthless and we have negotiations in bad faith with the people of the Kootenays. Deals that have long since been decided are presented as if they're doing them a favour. We have no movement forward in terms of local control or any kind of accountable process for the people who live there. I'll be looking forward to the committee stage of this debate.
In terms of local representatives who feel like they've been sold down the river again, they're right; they have been. The only thing we can say is that based on the level of debate that has occurred in the House so far by Liberal and Reform Party members, perhaps they're better off with the NDP. I'm not sure it's something they should be celebrating, because even though there might be $1 billion going into the Kootenays, it's all going to be going into capital investments in projects that have not been things that the people of the Kootenays have been happy with in the past. There is no demonstration that any of the new power that will be generated is for domestic consumption anyway. It's going to be sold off, probably to the our southern neighbours, with incredible profits for B.C. Hydro.
[4:15]
I don't know why the people of the Kootenays should be happy with this deal. I certainly think it's a bad deal. The Alliance is strongly opposed to the way it has been structured. The concept of putting the downstream benefits into a local trust fund for local decision-making on economic diversification was a good concept. It was a concept that the leader of the Alliance has been advancing for several years. This is not the way to do it. I would urge the government to reconsider. I hope things have not proceeded so far that they cannot amend this act or amend the process so the people who live there can have some input.
J. Doyle: I'm pleased to speak in second reading on Bill 7, the Columbia Basin Trust Act. This is good news for Columbia Basin residents -- finally, after 30 years. This government's agreement with Cominco protected 700 jobs in Kimberley, in my riding, and also hundreds of jobs in Trail. It allowed the province to set up the Columbia River basin power corporation. It allowed the province to add generating ability at the Brilliant and Waneta Dams. We promised to right the terrible wrongs of the Columbia Basin, and we have done that -- another promise kept.
Past Socred governments devastated our best lands. Our largest export in these past 30 years has been the youth living in the Columbia Basin. Those have been the effects of this Columbia River deal, which we have lived with for 30 years. Never mind the effects on our forests, the thousands of jobs we lost when our best valleys were flooded, the small communities that were wiped out and the agricultural lands that were flooded. Parts of the year they're just dust bowls. What was left of the fisheries was wiped out.
What did all this happen for? So we could have cheap power for the rest of the province -- those in different ridings in the Vancouver area -- and for the United States; that's what we got. What did Columbia Basin residents get? I will remind you: they got shafted. W.A.C. Bennett promised serene lakes. What did we get? Right now in some areas of the Columbia Basin, it's 20 miles from your boat dock to the water. Some serene lake, Mr. Bennett. This was a sellout, plain and simple.
This is a government that I am proud to be part of. We held symposiums in Castlegar and Cranbrook. The people finally had a chance, after 30 years, to tell their story. As we know, there were no public hearings when those dams were built. Things happened. They got a couple of dollars and had to leave town -- that was it. We worked with the communities, the locally elected people and our native councils. We have an agreement to add power generation to the Brilliant and Waneta Dams. For the past 30 years, Keenleyside has been just to provide flood control for Uncle Sam, our American friend south of the border. That has been a disgraceful thorn in the side of residents of the Columbia Basin. Now, thanks to this agreement, we are finally going to have generating power.
We've got $1 billion in total with this agreement. This money will be spent in the basin. There's $77 million that will be spent not in the areas where the dams are going to be built but in the rest of the basin. One use that I'm going to be working for is to use some of that money to assist in getting natural gas. Most of my riding doesn't have natural gas. While people in the rest of the province have had cheap power compliments of us, they've also had natural gas. That is something that I will be working for. All work on the dams will be done under the allied hydro agreement.
I know that the opposition doesn't like unions. We will provide good-paying jobs for the residents of the basin. For the opposition's thoughts on unions, let's look at the pittance
[ Page 13429 ]
they pay their constituency assistants. This shows their belief about unions and decent-paying jobs. Let's look at their stance on fair wages and the minimum wage; they look out for the average people.
The trust will have ten elected local representatives, two native council representatives, plus six provincial appointees, for a total of 18 residents. The only way any one of those 18 people can be part of this trust is if they reside in the Columbia Basin. In the past, that was not true. The people that made the decisions that affected our valleys and our homes and our communities and our economies and our youth lived in Vancouver, Victoria, the United States -- everywhere but in the Columbia Basin.
We as government have also set up the compensation fund in the last three years. That's the fishery enhancement fund. About $5 million per year is going into that fund to assist in getting some fish back into the Columbia River.
What is the Liberal stand on this Columbia Basin Trust? The Liberal leader was up in Castlegar on St. Patrick's Day, March 17. What does he seem to know about this agreement? I would say he doesn't know much about it. Let's quote one paper, the Castlegar Sun. They said that it seemed like he was firing SCUD missiles, and you know how successful they were. The Liberal leader has at least three plans: (1) all the money to the Kootenays; (2) all the money to debt reduction; or (3) all the money all across the province -- a different song sheet in different locations of the province. We have all heard of people speaking out of both sides of their mouth; I would say the Liberal leader has done a good job of speaking out of at least three.
The other day, on April 11, the Okanagan West member was speaking on Bill 7. I would like to quote from Hansard part of what he said:
"...we have dams such as Mica and Revelstoke, which occupy areas that were not inhabited by a number of people; it did not destroy low-level farmland. The reality is that a lot of areas in the Arrow Lakes are reservoirs, and they go up and down with respect to the flow. Nevertheless, they weren't intensively cultivated areas, and they weren't the best farmlands in the province. But we've lost them, and we've lost some homesites, and I understand that. Again, as I've said, growth and development have some costs, but they have great benefits as well."
To the member for Okanagan West, I say shame. We can see why there's one member of your party left here. To the other opposition parties that agree with you, I say shame to them too.
The Reform leader -- who, as we all know, was elected as a Socred -- until the last month or so agreed totally with the hon. member whom I quoted from Hansard. But suddenly he sees now that this government has consulted the people in the Columbia Basin, and so now he's somewhat onside.
Let us remember that if the Socreds, Reformers or Liberals -- whatever they want to call themselves over there -- had been in office, this agreement would never have been in place. One or two of them have seen the error of their ways, when they saw that we finally have a good agreement in place to bring something back to the people who live in the Columbia Basin. I say we've had our cows milked long enough and given the cream away long enough. This is a good deal, and it's about time.
I am very pleased to support the second reading of Bill 7.
Deputy Speaker: The hon. member for Delta South.
F. Gingell: I'm pleased to have this opportunity to speak to Bill 7, because there are some important issues involved here.
One of the pleasures of listening to portions of this debate, which I have done, was to listen to the member for West Vancouver-Garibaldi, who I thought gave us a most interesting dissertation on some history. I will miss the member for West Vancouver-Garibaldi in the thirty-sixth parliament, but I certainly hope another historian is elected. As we all know, if we don't learn what has happened from the mistakes of the past, we're bound to repeat them. I wish that our friend across the aisle, the Minister of Employment and Investment, could take that bon mot to heart.
I would like to get one thing into Hansard. I believe that the downstream benefits, rather than as described by the member for West Vancouver-Garibaldi.... Rather than being 50 percent of the power that is generated in the American dams, it is 50 percent of the increase in the power that comes about because of the flood control and control of water flows. I appreciate that that's a very difficult matter to measure, and one that is subject to a great deal of interpretation and argument. I understand, I guess, why the province has sold the rights to those in excess of 950 megawatts for the sum of $250 million.
Interjection.
F. Gingell: Half of it.
We all know that none of this comes into play until 1998, when the first agreement expires and the new agreements start, so what on earth the Minister of Finance was doing including $250 million in this year's budget is beyond my understanding.
Exactly 20 days ago, the Minister of Finance promised me I would receive copies of letters given by various individuals who were asked for an opinion on whether the $250 million, which appears in this year's budget as revenue from the downstream benefits, is properly revenue of this year. I am still waiting. I go into the office every single day and ask if my letters are ready yet, and I don't get them. I wonder why.
In fact, I wonder why the Minister of Finance had to go and get an opinion on an issue like downstream benefits from the Columbia River and what year they properly applied to. If they're not income of 1995-96 -- and at the moment I'm convinced that they're not; I haven't had the privilege of seeing the documents -- instead of supposedly having a $114 million surplus in this year's budget, we'd have a $136 million deficit. If you add that to the $337 million which is the net expenditure after revenue from the Transportation Financing Authority, we would be showing a deficit this year of $473 million, which -- until I am proven wrong -- I suggest to members of this House and to you, Mr. Speaker, and to all the people of British Columbia, is the correct number. I guess that's all beside the point in dealing with Bill 7.
Bill 7 does remind me a little of history, because I think we had the Minister of Employment and Investment acting like a Pierpont Morgan, a Fisk or a Huntington of the nineteenth century as he went about the province spending other people's money to build major megaprojects. Although when one looks at Bill 7 and the Columbia River Basin Trust, one thinks perhaps in a more modern genre of his making a deal we can't refuse: "If you don't take this, members of the Columbia Basin communities, you don't get anything."
[ Page 13430 ]
So what is this? I appreciate, and I know you appreciate, Mr. Speaker -- even if all the members of the government benches do not appreciate -- that the Liberal Party, the official opposition, supports a major allocation of these funds to the Columbia River Basin communities.
[4:30]
Interjection.
F. Gingell: We have said that from the very start. What do we want those funds to be used for? We want them to be used for investment and to create jobs. There is nothing that is more important in this province than well-paid, family-supporting jobs. Does this do that? Are the Waneta, Brilliant and Keenleyside Dams good investments to make to create jobs? The answer to that is no. The minister knows as well as I -- as well as anybody -- that megapower projects have the least job creation ability of any industrial major investment -- the very, very least. It's an important lesson that I am sure he would have learned at the feet of his guru at Simon Fraser University, now the Deputy Minister of Environment, Lands and Parks.
I was very fortunate in that I got a copy of the KPMG draft-for-discussion project report. One of the advantages of getting hold of a draft is that you've got it before the government gets it. You never know, something might happen to it in being typed. And what does this report say? It says some very important things. Let's first of all deal with the issue of job creation. It says:
"Based on the report and other information, the B.C. Energy Council" -- the council of this government's own making, with their own favourite lawyer as its chief commissioner -- "set up for the purpose of considering these issues in its energy strategy for British Columbia says: 'Energy projects have long been looked to as a means of triggering economic development, but careful analysis shows that the number of jobs created in energy projects is low compared to other uses of equal amounts of money. For example, almost no investment produces fewer jobs per million dollars of investment than a large hydro dam.' "
The last word in that sentence is dam, and I think that's a good adjective. Would it be an adjective? Maybe the Minister of Education can correct me, but it's a pretty damning evaluation of this project that I see being pushed by the Minister of Employment and Investment.
There are a whole series of questions to do with generating units on the Keenlyside, Brilliant and Waneta Dams that deal with environmental issues that have not yet been dealt with that perhaps will make it uneconomic. All that should certainly have been canvassed and clearly dealt with before they made their decisions. There are issues to do with sturgeon spawning in the Columbia River, and there have been no estimates of the cost of dealing with the mitigation of that problem.
When we produce electricity in British Columbia, whether it be through hydro, co-gen, gas turbines or coal-fired turbines, the object of the exercise is to produce electricity at the least cost. All of our standards of living will rise if we recognize that the economics of power generation are paramount. The report that KPMG has produced indicates particularly that the cost of generating power at Keenlyside suggests that it will not be competitive under current market conditions.
I am really pleased that this province and this government finally seem to have opened the door for independent power producers. Before we know what they can do and before we know what the cost of that power is, I see this government creating three major hydro-generating projects which we will be forced to use. If the cost is higher, and if it becomes important -- as I'm sure it will -- that the Columbia Basin Trust organization receives some revenue, the price of the power to the consumers is going to be pushed up. That is another form of hidden taxation.
If they're going to interfere in the market, it is clearly government's job to ensure that the services that they provide, whether it be for automobile insurance or for electricity, be least-cost. If it isn't least-cost, it's a form of taxation. If they put in hydro-generating units and that power has to be paid for at a higher price, the rest of the taxpayers of British Columbia will be paying those costs. Industries will be less competitive than they would otherwise be, and we will, in effect, be pouring a portion of the resource over the spillway.
In principle, we support the issue of resources from these downstream benefits going to the Columbia River Basin communities, but it's important for the communities to make the decisions as to the type of investments and the way those funds should be spent. It is not appropriate for us to be making them in Victoria. They understand the issues better. I'm sure they will make wiser decisions, because they would not make the decision on their own to invest in these three hydro projects. With all sincerity, I beg that the minister reconsider this proposed investment, have the risks properly measured from an environmental viewpoint and have a clear understanding of the costs of the resulting energy. With that, Mr. Speaker, I thank you for this opportunity to speak in this debate.
Deputy Speaker: I thank the member for his comment and recognize now the Minister of Employment and Investment, whose comments will close debate.
Hon. G. Clark: I will speak briefly to close debate. I'll try to clarify some of the remarks and incorrect assumptions of the previous speaker, but I'd like to go back a bit in history, if I could, to close this debate.
It's important for members to know that when the dams on the Columbia were constructed as part of the two-rivers policy of W.A.C. Bennett.... The member correctly noted that the member for West Vancouver-Garibaldi has talked in some detail about the history, so I won't go into great detail except to say that some 2,000 people were forcibly removed from their homes, and their farms and homes were flooded. The people of the day had great faith that government would listen to their concerns. They weren't listened to, because in those days -- not that long ago, really -- progress was measured, in some ways, by this kind of rough justice. The province needed this development; the province needed this power to develop. Therefore if people got in the way, that was too bad; there was a bigger public interest at stake. In fact, there's an excellent book by a former professor of mine, called People In the Way, which talks about the relocation of people from those communities.
I think it was a tragic day, albeit one which we benefit from, in many respects, in Victoria, Vancouver and the lower mainland in terms of the power and that asset of the people of B.C. But the price was paid by the people of the Columbia
[ Page 13431 ]
Basin. For a long time, members of our party, the NDP, campaigned for justice in the Kootenays and in the Columbia Basin. From time to time issues were prominent or they waned as people got on with their lives, as they have to, to make a living and to feed their family. This debate was always there, simmering in the Kootenays -- sometimes at a higher temperature, sometimes at a lower temperature. Then, near the last election campaign.... There has also been another debate around Hydro paying taxes on the dams, which we're also actively engaged in looking at. This debate was sort of bubbling away there.
Then it became apparent that the Columbia River Treaty was up for renegotiation. The member who spoke is one of the few people who may recognize that the treaty isn't up yet. It comes up in phases, starting in 1998. But 1998 is not very far away, so the Premier asked me, through the Crown corporations secretariat, the Ministry of Energy and B.C. Hydro, to pursue discussions around the renegotiation of the Columbia River Treaty, because in 1998 power starts being returned to the province as per the agreement. It was returned to a place in British Columbia just south of Oliver, which meant that Bonneville Power Administration had to construct a transmission line to the border, which was not just very costly but environmentally tricky in the United States and took all kinds of hearings. We had to construct a transmission line as well, and all that had to happen very quickly. We entered into discussions with the Americans to say: "You have to construct this transmission line, and it's going to cost you $100 million or $150 million. We have to construct a transmission line. You have to start immediately."
[The Speaker in the chair.]
We had some negotiation room to discuss whether we wanted that power, because frankly, if we were to take back the power in British Columbia, it would be at Blaine, where the population base and the consumption is, not in the middle of the Okanagan, and we had to discuss how we would use that power. So we started into discussions with the Americans around the entitlement, and how it would be returned to British Columbia. At the same time -- and, of course, this was just after our election, and every riding in the region elected a government member -- the members of the government party said that now was the time was for justice that had been talked about for 30 years.
While the minister, on behalf of the government, is starting to negotiate with the Americans on what to do with the entitlement, our party has also had some longstanding political commitments about redress and justice for the Kootenays. At one time, the Premier said that a share of the benefits should go into the Kootenays. It wasn't clear what those benefits would be, because the benefits could be power or we could resell them in the United States. We started a two-track process of discussion with our MLAs and the Kootenays, and a series of symposiums around how you would deal with this justice question.
We had a technical committee chaired by Marvin Shaffer, as well as Marc Eliesen, at the time, and the Ministry of Energy officials and other B.C. Hydro officials. The lead negotiator was Marvin Shaffer. Ken Peterson was a consultant at the time, and there were many B.C. Hydro staff and Energy ministry staff. This was a big and very technical negotiation. We started to get a feel for the fact that because the Americans didn't want to build a transmission line here, and because we didn't want to build a transmission line and have the power returned there, we had lots to talk about. It also became clear that this was a very valuable resource, particularly in the United States, where there's a real need for power and for capacity, which is a unique quality of hydroelectric power we could negotiate with.
At the same time, not only did our MLAs get involved in the Kootenays, but the people of the Kootenays also started talking about it through their elected regional districts and councils, because we were quite consciously raising expectations as a government and as members about a share of any expected benefits going into the Kootenays. They formed the Columbia River Treaty Committee, comprising all the regional districts and the representatives they chose, to sit down and start talking to government.
We entered into one of the most exciting and exhaustive consultation processes in the Kootenays, or anywhere in B.C., that we've ever seen. "Symposia," they called them; there were a series of symposia. There were meetings, and there were negotiations. There was discussion and intense debate, and there were members who said, "We want cash," which appears to be the Liberal position, although it changes all the time. "Give us cash; pay us off," they said.
[4:45]
Other and more thoughtful people said: "No, that's not what we want. We want justice. We want a legacy we can deal with. We want to deal with reservoir levels, which are worth millions of dollars to B.C. Hydro if they were to forgo their right to draw down reservoirs. We want to talk about tourism opportunities that have been forgone because of destruction of the natural wildlife and heritage we had. We want to talk about jobs. We want to talk about lasting jobs for our children, so they don't have to move to Vancouver to get jobs but can stay in the Kootenays and work. We want to talk about other things."
At the same time as that was happening, we concluded a deal with the United States, one that I think was a very creative and flexible deal. It says we are going to resell the power to the United States, not as a block but over time as it becomes available, in a flexible arrangement where for the first time in B.C. history we have access to the California market through Bonneville. Or we can take it back if we need it -- and we could take it back through Blaine, where we would need it. We had negotiated it so they could save some money through the construction of the transmission, and they ended up paying most of that in some way to us.
This is why the member who spoke before me is wrong. We presold, if you will, a small piece of the capacity for $240 million -- which is now $255 million in Canadian dollars. In December 1995 the payment is due; the cash is due. They receive it later, but we presold it. Why did we presell it? Because the value of capacity was extremely valuable. Just to put it in context, members know that we've announced that we want to build the fifth unit at Revelstoke Dam. The fifth unit creates no energy, only capacity -- a huge amount of capacity -- at a very cheap price. The price at which we sold the capacity to the United States was twice what it will cost us to provide that capacity at Revelstoke. So we received, if you will.... If we sold the entire capacity at Revelstoke right now, up front, we would make a 200 percent rate of return, instantly. There's no risk; we could just sell it right now, up
[ Page 13432 ]
front. We're not doing that because we are hoping that capacity will rise and that we can blend it with energy and make more money. But we sold a small piece of the capacity, the downstream benefits, up front in 1995, with payment due on December 1, 1995.
Interjection.
Hon. G. Clark: It's income in 1995. And not only is it income in 1995, but the auditor general said that if we wanted to, we could book the whole amount -- the $6 billion, depending on your assumptions; $5 billion or $6 billion net value -- as a net present value of $1.5 billion. We could book that as a financial asset and take it at $140 million a year. We could do that right now for every year; we could actually put it in as a financial asset. But we have not chosen to do that. Instead, we have chosen that they remain -- keep this flexible arrangement where when we get cash, it's cash in. When we sell it, we get it; when we don't sell it, we can use it for our own use or we can sell it to the United States.
We have negotiated a very good deal for British Columbia, and I think all objective observers would agree that the technical work done by that committee is outstanding. We have a good arrangement with the United States. We make money on it as a province: $6 billion over 30 years. We make money now: $250 million flows as a result of our sale of some capacity at a very opportune time in the market.
And then at the same time that the Kootenays were going through this discussion about what share there would be -- and we were going through that discussion as a government, because we wanted to make a commitment to the Kootenays.... There are all kinds of competing interests. The members of the Liberal Party, notwithstanding their commitment today.... The leader of the Liberal Party said at one point that it should all go to debt reduction -- $6 billion. Then he said at one point that it should all go to the Kootenays. I've got the quotes. Now he's saying that maybe a share of it should go to the Kootenays, but they should decide what to invest in; I think that's their current position.
They should decide what to invest in. When we were negotiating with them, though.... For eight years there has been a lot of discussion about hydroelectric power. The reason it makes sense for them to engage in construction of hydroelectric power is that if they want, they can trade off lake levels in Koocanusa Lake or the Columbia River for power. They can sell B.C. Hydro the power required to keep reservoir levels higher, if they want. It's an expensive proposition, in some cases, for them to do that, but that's their choice now. They are a player; they have a piece of the power game. They're going to own three power generation facilities. Then they can discuss their future, and they can discuss water management in the region, which we also negotiated with them. We also negotiated a seat at the international table for the Columbia Basin Trust, so that not just B.C. Hydro acts as the agent of the province. They have a say in the water management in their region.
When we discussed with them how they would invest a fairly large amount of money.... If you don't want to just give cash -- if you say, "We want to invest in something which is going to make money for the region" -- then the market will tell you that if there's something where someone can invest several hundreds of millions of dollars and make money, then it would have already been done. If there is a $300 million or $400 million project in the Kootenays that you can invest in and make a 12 or 15 percent rate of return, theoretically someone would have already made that investment. So there are all kinds of opportunities for investment to make money; there are all kinds of opportunities which make sense, and the Kootenay people want to do that -- boat-launching ramps, tourism facilities, things which help to lever small business jobs, and others. We negotiated $45 million that they can invest in capital assets in the region to create jobs in any way they see fit.
But if you want to invest a large amount of money, not in New York bond agencies or in the bank but in an asset or a going concern in the Kootenays which is going to return money to you -- the Kootenays or the agency, the trust -- for generations to come, what would you do? Well, it just so happened that B.C. Hydro owned the Keenleyside Dam and Columbia Power, because of another creative arrangement of this administration, which purchased the expansion rights to Waneta and Brilliant dams on the condition that the money we gave to Cominco for those rights gets invested back in to save the smelter in Trail. So Cominco's doing that.
We now hold these assets, valued at $54 million, I think, for financial valuation purposes. Those are very valuable expansion rights -- very inexpensive power. So we had Columbia Power holding those expansion rights and B.C. Hydro holding Keenleyside. All three of those projects would be built at some point by the government of B.C., through B.C. Hydro in all likelihood.
We said to the people of the Kootenays and the CRTC, months before I made my much-alluded-to presentation in Cranbrook: "Here are three hydro assets in the Kootenays. They are investment opportunities; it will cost about a billion dollars to invest in them. They create energy that you can then trade if you want. You can make money, so you have an income stream for some 30 years or more. And you can trade it against lake levels if you want." After much discussion they said yes, provided there's other revenue to be invested in other things in parts of the region, which also happened.
It's important to recognize that there aren't $500 million or $1 billion of investments you could make and make a decent rate of return, otherwise the private sector would have done them. In this case, these were owned by the States and the government of B.C. And they can make an attractive rate of return.
Why are the members opposite wrong, when the member before me said that the people would end up subsidizing this because it's expensive power? The difference is the rate of return. The market for power is going to be a free market for power. We've established competitive, independent power production; but if you value Keenleyside, Waneta or Brilliant as 100 percent debt-financed, then you get a price for that power.
If, on the other hand, the equity players are prepared to take the risk that it may be higher or lower, then the price of power goes up and down accordingly, with the market. Under this model, Keenleyside, Waneta and Brilliant can be competitive with any power produced -- private, public or imported. All that's required is to ensure that your equity is protected. And that is ensured by both West Kootenay Power and Powerex, who both say -- of course, at a 1 or 2 percent rate of return -- that that power will always be among the cheapest in the world.
[ Page 13433 ]
If, on the other hand, you get an 8 or 9 percent rate of return on your equity, which will give you roughly 3-cent-per-kilowatt-hour power and is a more likely scenario -- yes, the rate of return if you invested half a billion dollars in New York might be 12 or 13 percent -- this will make a lesser rate of return than if invested in New York. But it will make a positive rate of return. And it will create jobs now -- 4,000 jobs over ten years in the construction.
But most importantly, it means an income stream, albeit a lesser rate of return. It will be about 8 percent probably, maybe 10 or 12, depending on the price of power; it will be an 8 percent rate of return, by most conservative estimates. That will give income they can then use to reinvest in other assets and other facilities for economic development in the region. Importantly, it will give them control over energy resources, which they can trade, if they want, for more input and power into management of water levels in the Kootenays.
So this is a good deal. This is a good deal for the Kootenays and for the people of British Columbia. We get three power projects expedited, which would happen anyway. The price of that power will be competitive worldwide.
There is a risk on the equity portion. The people of the Kootenays have said: "We're prepared to take that risk, because we know we're guaranteed to make some money on that investment. We think the price will go up." I think the price will be higher in the future, certainly for capacity, but those are risks in the marketplace. This corporation won't take any risk, because obviously we're going to guarantee a floor price which makes a positive rate of return, essentially through West Kootenay and Powerex.
In addition to that, they have $45 million to invest in much-needed community facilities which will enhance other job creation opportunities. If they want, they could do cogeneration opportunities as well, in a joint venture with their $45 million in capital assets and, of course, $2 million a year to operate the Columbia Basin Trust -- democratically elected, controlled in the region and real power, not phony. It's not something the government of B.C. is sort of giving them, but real power by statute to control their destiny, to really deal with the justice question and the jobs question.
I repeat that this is all about justice and jobs: long overdue justice for the region, a real seat at the table; real negotiations; real ability to trade off water levels if they want, real access to deal with water management in the region; real power benefits after the dams are up and running, which they can sell in the United States, Alberta, B.C., or trade off with B.C. Hydro for other parts in negotiations; and real jobs now in construction, thousands of jobs over a ten-year period in three major power projects.
I can't think of other things you could invest in in the region that would give you all these ingredients: real jobs now, jobs throughout the region with the other investment powers this agency has through the $45 million which I know they will invest in parts of the region other than the parts benefiting most by short-term construction jobs, and then some money now over the next few years until the power projects start making a return and revenue for the region which they can then further reinvest in the region.
This is a historic bill. This is a bill which deals with historic justice creatively, gives local control, makes sure there's a significant investment in the Kootenays because of that history and gives them the real power to make a difference in their lives. It creates jobs in a region which has significantly suffered from higher unemployment than the rest of British Columbia -- short-term jobs now and future jobs.
[5:00]
I think all members should support this legislation. It's been a long time coming. There has been lots of debate in the region, a lot of grass-roots discussion, in addition to lots of fine technical work in negotiations with the Americans, coming together in a very creative bill here before the House.
I'm disappointed that the Leader of the Opposition has changed his position three or four times. I'm not sure what it is today. I know it would probably be more popular to mail a cheque for several thousand dollars to everybody in the Kootenays, but that would not give the lasting legacy, the lasting benefits that the people of the Kootenays said they wanted and that we wanted to provide. That might be cheap politics. That might be what the Liberals say in terms of: "Let's just give them cash; let's buy them off." This has higher risk because we are investing in three hydroelectric assets. They may not be in favour of any power projects in British Columbia except private ones or something. They may not want this. This is higher risk, but this provides tangible benefits to the people of the Kootenays. I think the opposition should think very carefully before they oppose this historic legislation. I urge them to support this bill.
The Speaker: There being no further speakers, the question is second reading of Bill 7.
Motion approved.
Bill 7, Columbia Basin Trust Act, read a second time and referred to a Committee of the Whole House for consideration at the next sitting of the House after today.
Hon. G. Clark: Hon. Speaker, I call second reading of Bill 10.
MOUNTAIN RESORT ASSOCIATIONS ACT
(second reading)
Hon. G. Clark: The skiing industry is growing in British Columbia, with millions of dollars in new investment and new jobs being created every year. Today the ski industry employs more than 6,000 British Columbians. A significant amount of the growth is coming from international visitors and investors. Whistler has once again been voted one of the best resorts in North America by North American ski magazines, ski organizations and skiers. I remind hon. members that Whistler was an invention of the previous NDP administration. Sometimes people forget that this magnificent facility, this magnificent mountain, might well have been logged off, might well have just had a mine or something on it, or they would have dammed it or something. But the last NDP government had the foresight to say that Whistler had the potential to be a world-class destination resort, generating jobs in British Columbia. I'm very proud, of course -- and I think all British Columbians are -- of the success now at Whistler.
[ Page 13434 ]
What this legislation does is level the playing field for mountain resort communities outside Whistler and allow those communities to share in the success of Whistler. What this bill does is create, potentially, more Whistlers in British Columbia. It will extend the same local governance, service provision and resort association benefits enjoyed by Whistler to other resort communities and developers. This legislation, unique in North America, will further enhance B.C.'s international reputation as the only area on the continent where mountain resorts can still be developed. The new act will allow other mountain resorts access to the benefits that have been given to Whistler under the existing Resort Municipality of Whistler Act.
As a result of passage of this act, mountain resort local governments will more easily be able to provide specialized amenities and community services, such as recreation facilities to rapidly growing mountain resort communities. In addition, the act will allow for the creation of special resort associations and will enable the municipalities and regional districts to create business improvement areas that can support resort growth and rural community development. Mountain resort business improvement areas could operate in more built-up resort areas where the creation of a mountain resort association may not yet be necessary.
These resort associations will not replace local government in providing local government-type services to residents, such as roads and sewers. Associations will carry on activities that will focus on enhancing the resort nature of the community, including central reservations booking and resort marketing. Associations will have powers similar to those already provided to the very successful Whistler Resort Association.
This act is the result of extensive consultations, both inside and outside government and with resort communities and industry representatives. There are many safeguards contained in the act. Applicants for special mountain resort area designation must be bona fides in the mountain resort business or be in a very advanced state of planning -- so not every ski hill in British Columbia is eligible to become a special mountain resort area. Furthermore, the designated minister will obtain the approval of local government with jurisdiction for the areas where a mountain resort is planned. Area landowners must show at least the same level of support for organizing a resort association in a mountain resort area as they would for organizing local improvement areas under the Municipal Act. The thresholds are high: at least two-thirds of the landowners in the area must sign a petition in favour of the mountain resort association, and the value of the properties of those in favour must be at least one-half of the value of the property of all the landowners in the area. Sun Peaks, near Kamloops, is the most recent example of where this legislation will benefit British Columbia.
In summary, the legislation creates a menu of opportunities for resort communities and resort developers to advance their plans. This act will enhance B.C.'s ability to create jobs and investment and maintain our resort communities. The government has a jobs and investment strategy. It has many facets to it, investing in infrastructure that leads to other private sector development is key, and partnerships with the private sector are key. I can list many of our initiatives designed to promote jobs and investment in B.C. Any visitor to B.C. who looks at this province.... They look at the tourism industry, and they just look in wonder at the opportunities we have.
I've talked about convention centres. I won't talk about them in this legislation, but if you look at the convention business, if you look at the spectacular beauty of British Columbia, of Vancouver, if you look at its position on the Pacific Rim, you can't help but be optimistic about the job-creating potential of this industry. When you look at the Whistler model and this world-class resort that has developed there, and at other world-class facilities like Sun Peaks and other opportunities yet to be developed, you can see very quickly that we have a comparative advantage in ski hills in British Columbia. We have a competitive advantage with anywhere in the world because of our tourism potential, our spectacular beauty and our spectacular topography.
This legislation is designed to allow the Whistler model to be applied to these other potentially world-class destination resorts, and to create thousands of jobs in the process. As I said, tourism is very close to our number one industry in terms of creating jobs. The ski industry creates 6,000 direct jobs and many thousand more indirect jobs. If you look at the potential over the next decade, you can see a doubling or tripling of the number of good jobs being created by this very clean industry in British Columbia. We think this legislation can be a catalyst, certainly for Sun Peaks but also for other communities: Big White, Mount Washington and other exciting ski hill developments in British Columbia, which we think can really take off with this legislation.
There are literally hundreds of millions of dollars of private sector capital lined up. They come to see me as the minister responsible for investment. They look at the opportunities here, and they're just waiting to invest that private sector money from all around the world in these job-creating activities, creating world-class destination resorts in British Columbia. As a result of that consultation, I believe this legislation will enable the province to create thousands of jobs in this sector.
The Whistler model has worked. In a relatively short time period this area has become the premier ski area in North America. This act will help extend the Whistler success to other corners of the province. It won't all happen overnight. Whistler obviously has a dramatic advantage, but we believe that very shortly other developments will be taking place. They may not rival Whistler, but will certainly rival other destination resorts around the world.
The development of ski areas and mountain resorts is important to the continuing economic diversification in many regions of British Columbia. I am confident that we will benefit from millions of dollars invested in the creation of thousands of new jobs throughout British Columbia once the legislation is implemented. I urge all members to support this job-creating piece of legislation.
D. Mitchell: I'd like to compliment the minister on his comments on second reading of this bill. He certainly didn't sound like he was reading from the text of Karl Marx. In fact, he actually sounded a little bit like a capitalist.
Before I make a few remarks on Bill 10, I'd like to say that it's curious the Government House Leader forgot, or maybe declined, to call a vote on the last bill. Bill 7 was an important piece of legislation. We didn't have a vote on second reading,
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so I guess we'll have a vote on that on third reading to see where we stand. Maybe that will be better, after we've gone though committee stage. The minister might be able to get a little more support if he answers a few questions in committee stage.
On this bill my only concern is that the minister is calling it for debate in second reading after only introducing it for first reading in the House on April 3; that's a two-week period of time. But we did have a long Easter weekend during that two-week period. There hasn't exactly been a lot of time for consultation with the industry, or with people in....
Interjection.
D. Mitchell: The Minister of Education is from Kamloops -- he is going to benefit from this because of the Sun Peaks development in Kamloops -- and thinks there has been lots of time. I know there has been some consultation, including consultation with Al Raine and Nancy Greene Raine from Whistler, constituents of mine who are now in Kamloops working on the Sun Peaks development. I know that they and a number of other people have been consulted. I wonder if the minister, just for the benefit of members of the House -- perhaps when we get to committee stage or maybe when he closes debate on second reading -- might give us an indication of who in fact has been consulted -- whether or not the industry, broadly speaking, has been consulted.
As we know, ski operators make an important contribution to the economy of British Columbia -- to the tourism industry the minister has spoken of so highly in his second reading comments. The industry is an important one, and the minister says he wants to create more Whistlers in British Columbia. I'm not sure that anyone could really duplicate the tremendous, astonishing success of the resort municipality of Whistler. Having said that, if the minister wants to try to repeat that success, repeat that formula, he's certainly not going to be creating socialist communities in the province if the Whistler model is used. Nevertheless, it's not a bad idea. Whistler and the Sea to Sky corridor, which Whistler is in, now brings in something in excess of 10 percent of the tourism revenue of British Columbia. It's phenomenal. If we can duplicate that, then I think the government deserves support for this kind of legislation, which is to develop mountain resort associations.
There are a few questions, though, that I think we need to understand. Before I go into the questions.... Because the bill has been brought forward for second reading fairly soon after its introduction, I hope the minister might make a commitment to wait at least a week or ten days to allow some comment to come in from concerned members of the public and from the industry before we go into the clause-by-clause review in committee stage.
The resort association legislation is supported by a number of people in the industry. The proposal to use other vehicles than are currently available to help out with establishing mountain resort communities is innovative and in some respects has gone even further than I expected the government to go. The proposal to permit these vehicles is innovative. While the legislation enables mountain resort municipalities, resort associations and improvement districts to be established, the full implementation of the resort municipality or improvement district function is not really very clear in the bill. I think it does need to be clarified somewhat, and perhaps we can get to that in committee stage.
The other issue that I would like to bring to the attention of members is that normal borrowing and financing options have been removed from mountain resort vehicles. It's appropriate that we get answers to such questions as how the government plans to provide resort infrastructure for mountain resort associations. Will it be through provincial funding vehicles, the municipal financing authority or what other vehicles? In most cases, the developer would provide the resort infrastructure at its sole cost.
When we start thinking about sewer treatment facilities and the normal community infrastructure that is going to be required as resort communities grow -- schools, health care facilities and other kinds of amenities that we would expect in any of the communities we live in -- then I think we should try to address that in this legislation as well. The minister says that he wants to replicate the Whistler experience. Of course, Whistler is a travel destination resort of the highest calibre: the number one ski resort on the continent of North America. But Whistler is also a community. It's not just a resort; it's a community.
As these mountain resort communities grow and develop, the needs of any community, the needs that we take for granted -- swimming pools, playgrounds for our children, day care centres, schools, health care facilities and other infrastructure.... How can we guarantee that those mountain resort communities will have access to them? The Whistler experience tells us that when growth takes place very, very quickly in a resort community, visitors benefit from the tremendous experience that we can offer here, but we also have to give some special consideration to the people who live in that kind of resort community, so they will have the benefits that we all take for granted as part of the good life here in British Columbia.
[5:15]
We can learn from the Whistler experience. Whistler has grown up very, very fast, and many of the residents of Whistler would like to see more attention given to it as a community, not just a destination resort. Sometimes it appears to be choking on its own growth. We don't want to replicate that aspect of the Whistler experience; we want to ameliorate that. Hopefully, the Sun Peaks development in Kamloops, which is proceeding very well, will be extremely successful. Hopefully, we will be able to learn from the Whistler experience so as not to repeat some of the mistakes that were made there. Hopefully, we can ensure that the benefits, not only to tourists and visitors to Kamloops but to residents of the new community that will grow up around the Sun Peaks resort.... Those residents will have all the amenities that we take for granted here in British Columbia today.
It would be nice to see the improvement district concept work. It would be nice to see improvement districts take over services that are sometimes regarded as just a nuisance or a headache for other government agencies, whether it be the Ministry of Transportation and Highways or the Ministry of Education or other ministries that provide the services to most British Columbians but who don't know how to interact with these resort municipalities. I think if we take a look at the example, and the model that the minister has referred to, of the resort municipality of Whistler, we can learn from that experience as well.
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Many of the specific questions I have I think I can raise during committee stage. I hope we don't move to committee stage too quickly on this bill. We need to be able to have some public input from people in Kamloops, Whistler, the Kootenays and other areas that are likely to be affected by the Mountain Resort Associations Act being introduced here -- people in the Okanagan and in northern British Columbia as well, who may benefit from the establishment of these unique resort communities but who have not yet had a chance to be in contact with their MLAs to talk about some of the concerns they have about the interaction between local government, municipalities, regional districts and these new, unique creatures that are going to be established under Bill 10.
So with those few comments, and with the hope that the minister will be able to comment on some of these questions when he closes debate on second reading, I'll take my seat and indicate that I intend to support this bill in principle. Thank you.
F. Jackson: I'm glad to stand in my place and speak in favour of Bill 10 today. I have the translation services already in operation at my back.
This is a very important piece of legislation for my constituency in particular and the province in general. Tod Mountain has been in operation for quite a number of years, with varied success -- up and down. Even with the ups and downs, it is quite apparent that the area has tremendous potential. The potential is now being realized thanks to the investment of Nippon Cable and the Sun Peaks development.
What we have is the makings of not just a ski hill but a complete community, largely ski-based but with the potential for golf -- a nine-hole course will probably be completed this year -- trail riding and snowmobiling from fall into winter. But all of this is dependent on providing a base structure to make it work.
This legislation, although it goes further than what is required of Sun Peaks at the moment, is going to provide what is needed through the business improvement district and the local improvement for sewer, water and other infrastructure. We have had input for this from the community. We've certainly had input on it from Sun Peaks.
The member for West Vancouver-Garibaldi mentioned his constituents, Al Raine and Nancy Greene Raine, and I would argue that at the moment, they are my constituents. And considering that Nancy Greene Raine is now a Blazers fan, I think she is going to end up as either the Minister of Education's constituent or mine. They are very well settled there because they, too, see the potential at Sun Peaks.
I spoke to Mr. Raine earlier this afternoon about this bill, and he expressed appreciation for it. He pointed out that it will, in fact, help Sun Peaks achieve what they want. But he also pointed out that other communities in the province -- in the Okanagan, particularly -- will benefit greatly from what's in this bill.
For Sun Peaks the possibilities there are tremendous. The quality of the skiing experience has improved over the last two years to where it's almost unrecognizable. The new lodge, compared to the old equipment shed, is a wonder to be in. There is somewhere around $30 million invested so far, with probably another $30 million plus to come. Whatever else comes with it -- the golfers, the trail riders, the snowmobilers and probably some people who just want to make this a bedroom community for themselves and for Kamloops, which is a possibility -- we're probably looking at a new small city.
The member for West Vancouver-Garibaldi suggested that there may be some problems and that we should look at Whistler. Considering the involvement of Al Raine and Nancy Greene Raine in Whistler, I think they're certainly aware of the problems and they'll be doing their best to dodge most of them. However, in a growing community these problems are going to exist, but considering the input already available and the possibility for whatever public processes -- through their regional district, through their improvement district and through their business association -- I think that this development at Sun Peaks is going to make this piece of legislation well worthwhile.
When I was first approached not long after we were elected, when Nippon Cable Co. Ltd. purchased the property, they could already see some of the problems they were running into. That is why this legislation is going to be very useful for them. All in all, with quite a high number of young people employed both in summer and in winter, the possibilities for permanent, year-round employment are excellent. I think that ten years down the road -- I don't know whether we'll be in another Whistler, and I don't know that we'd really want to get into another Whistler; I think we'll cut the cloth to suit -- we'll have an addition to the province's economy and to the tourism industry, which I'm quite sure the minister is going to really appreciate. We'll have a very welcome addition to the community in Kamloops and the surrounding area, and a quality ski experience for the people of the province and for tourists coming into the province. This bill is not just a development tool; it's a social tool, a recreational tool, which will make Kamloops a better place to visit -- if it can possibly get better. Certainly for skiers and people in the ski industry, I think this bill will go a long way to making us that much more attractive. I am glad to be here to speak in favour of it. Having said that, perhaps I'll reserve the rest of my remarks for the committee stage.
C. Serwa: It's a pleasure for me to rise and speak to Bill 10, the Mountain Resort Associations Act. I've got a fair background in the ski industry. I was co-developer of Big White Mountain. Our first year of operation was 1964, although we started work on the mountain in 1962. Over and above that, along with my partner, Doug Mervyn, we were also partners in a firm called Doppelmayr Lifts. Nippon Cable, which you're going to hear a great deal about, is the Doppelmayr agent in Japan, and we're very pleased that the firm of Doppelmayr Lifts was instrumental in getting Nippon Cable interested in British Columbia. They built the Harvest golf course in Kelowna, which is a beautiful golf course. It's in its second year of operation. Obviously they've changed the face of and the outlook for Tod Mountain and renamed it Sun Peaks. For years we recognized that that particular mountain was not developed with the base facilities in the right location, and it negated the potential of Tod Mountain. And truly, Tod has the potential to achieve a standard of greatness in the province.
This particular bill, with its objectives, is very real and very important. It is certainly going to be very useful, especially to new areas like Sun Peaks with its potential for development. One of the major challenges for areas outside of Whistler.... When we talk about Whistler, I have to chide the enthusiastic minister for indicating that Whistler was the
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product of the former NDP government. It was not the product of that government. The first year of Whistler's actual operation -- and it was promoted by Franz Wilhelmson -- was in 1965, which was quite a number of years prior to '73-75, the thousand dark days of British Columbia history. So we'll take that away from the minister.
Nevertheless, that particular community has had a great deal of capital infusion from the province. Not only has it had a large local market -- obviously the Vancouver skiers are a large, strong and enthusiastic local market -- but the capital that flowed into Whistler's sewer and water development, for example, was a tremendous asset to that growing community and certainly enhanced the opportunity for development.
I see the potential in this bill for resort communities being organized in municipalities as a very good opportunity. We have environmental concerns, and we obviously have a finite quantity of money for long-term investment. In the case of Big White in Kelowna, with the amount of investment that has gone in there, there's probably 3,000 to 3,500 beds in that community at the present time. All of that infrastructure had to have been financed internally, with the lift company providing the necessary leadership and the type of financing; and it has not been a level playing field for the development.
The Okanagan ski areas -- and I'd include Tod Mountain or Sun Peaks in Kamloops -- have earned an enviable place in the British Columbia ski industry for the quality of the snow and the type of growth and development. Silver Star and Apex to the south of us are also undergoing excellent expansion. One of the things we have going for us in the interior is not only reliable snowfalls but good-quality snow. We attract a great many British Columbia ski tourists and a number of people from the United States, and obviously the international market is starting to become stronger and stronger. I think the Sun Peaks development will enhance that.
It's not difficult to support the bill, and I'm very pleased.... I will compliment the minister and the government on the fact that there has been substantial consultation within the industry, with all the ski areas and all the members of the Canada West Ski Areas Association. That's certainly a feather in the cap. I think the legislation has generally met the requirements of the ski industry, and I'm thankful for that.
[5:30]
There are some concerns expressed by the industry, but I don't know how you could alleviate those particular concerns. The legislation, as it's put forward, certainly facilitates the incorporation of this structure and of relatively new ski areas. It makes it a little more difficult for the established ski areas -- and again I'm thinking of Big White -- to form this type of situation because of the tendency not to want to organize. They feel it would be less expensive as far as the taxation load goes. That probably is a real concern over a number of areas, but I think it will have to be surmounted.
The positive side is that everyone who owns a condominium or a private chalet -- or certainly the lift company -- will have their opportunities enhanced with this piece of legislation. There is no question in my mind that the promotion of quality infrastructure has very positive environmental implications and solid growth opportunities for the industry.
There are many challenges, of course, to mountain resorts. Whistler is somewhat unique, with a very low base elevation. Tod, with it's vertical.... I think they're approaching 4,000 feet -- that's the vertical of Tod Mountain, or Sun Peaks -- so they have a base elevation which is not too difficult. Big White is at about 5,500 feet, and you're getting into a different type of climate, a different type of terrain and substantial overhead costs with the development of infrastructure. Again, organizing into the municipality will hopefully qualify these types of areas for funding assistance for long-term infrastructure development through the mechanism of provincial government grants, which go out to all municipalities. That's very good and very positive.
The challenges of developing year-round utilization of the facility is quite another matter. Lower-elevation resorts, such as Whistler, have an enhanced opportunity. In the Smithers area and certainly on Vancouver Island we have a large number of various areas that have good-quality accommodations, but there has not been adequate utilization of the facilities. The Minister of Tourism has worked closely with the ski areas, but the challenge still remains to find summer utilization. Golf courses are one means of utilizing them. The promotion of the concept of small conventions that can be held utilizing the facilities of an area is another good market area. You can get a group together, with the convention, first and foremost, contained in a very nice type of setting.
As Canadians mature, I think we will spend more and more time simply walking, as our European cousins do: not for the sake of getting somewhere or to go hunting or fishing but simply hiking for the sake of hiking. In all of our alpine areas that are readily accessed by chairlifts -- whether at Big White or Silver Star or Tod Mountain or Sun Peaks or Whistler -- there is a tremendous amount of very interesting and unusual hiking terrain that has an enormous amount of potential. There is a great deal of beauty there. I would hope that this type of promotion enhances the opportunity to utilize all the facilities over a longer period of time.
Nevertheless, the industry has been very economic. Big White paid dividends from, and including, the very first year of operation, when Doug and I owned and operated the mountain. We're very proud of that fact. And we're very proud of the fact that, on average, we were looking at a five-and-a-half-to-six-month ski season, which, again, was very economic. The enhanced use of facilities owned by the lift corporation, and accommodation facilities owned by private individuals to utilize year round -- or certainly as a winter and a summer opportunity, and I think those would be the high opportunities -- is certainly worthwhile. For two years we operated until the May 24 weekend; and then we found, after travelling to the Doppelmayr factory in Austria, that the European areas shut down at the end of Easter. In the change of the season, the spring and the fall, there was very little activity in the world-famous resorts in Austria, for example. But the high seasons were obviously the summer season and the winter season. So we hope to obtain that in British Columbia.
I am very, very pleased to support the philosophy and the principles in this particular piece of legislation. I compliment the government for what I believe has been, for once, an accurate portrayal of fairly excellent, quality consultation with members in the industry.
Hon. A. Charbonneau: I rise to support Bill 10 and to take note of my hon. colleague's comments. I'm sure that when he has retired from politics, he may be able to get some investment in at Sun Peaks -- the new resort, the new class of the interior.
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Tourism and recreation is of course a sunrise industry in British Columbia. It won't happen just by itself. It's got to have the helping hand of government from time to time, and this is one of those occasions.
The ski industry can thrive and is thriving. It's important not only to British Columbia, for the obvious reasons of international visits, international expenditures and the internally generated economic activity, but also to the interior. And being specific this time around, it's very important to my riding -- to Kamloops and the region of Kamloops. Why? Not only does it provide us with some new and excellent recreation opportunities but it's going to provide long-term jobs based on long-term investment. That, of course, also means revenue to the public purse, which is something we should all celebrate, particularly with respect to the revenue that comes from either out-of-province or out-of-country pockets. Whistler has, of course, been a great success. This act is going to make it possible to replicate Whistler, perhaps on a different scale, in a number of regions of the province. That's nothing but good news for both the province and those regions.
With respect to the genesis of this bill, the new owners of what was then Tod Mountain first approached my colleague from Kamloops-North Thompson and me several years back to advise us of their plans and to determine whether or not we would lend them the support they felt they needed. We were impressed by the quality of the representatives of Nippon Cable. It was quite clear from the outset that this was a group that understood business and that meant business. We were pleased to provide the support.
After completing their initial purchase and starting the investments, they also approached us to get support for legislation protecting some of their rights and giving them some of the certainty they needed. My hon. friend the member for Kamloops-North Thompson and I were pleased to give them that support. We have lobbied for them. We've lobbied the Minister of Municipal Affairs to move this legislation along. We did so because the request was reasonable. Any investors need to minimize the exposure and the uncertainty related to investment. They also want to maximize control of the factors related to business, and that is certainly to have some say with respect to local levies related to the operation of the business, to making improvements related to the resort aspects of such a location and also to assisting with the marketing plans. So for all of those reasons legislation was desirable, and I'm pleased to see that their persistent lobbying has led to the success that I believe is embodied in this bill. There has been quite wide consultation with the industry.
What has happened up at Sun Peaks since the new owners came along? What has happened over the past couple of years? I'll tell you: nearly $50 million of committed, long-term investment. There are things that are underway: new lifts, new hills and slopes developed, new runs and new lodges. We've now got some hotels underway, and condos and private detached dwellings. There's a golf course underway that we'll be opening the first nine holes of this summer. We're very proud of the fact that Al Raine and Nancy Greene Raine have now moved to our community to be a big part of the Sun Peaks development. We have also attracted some offshore money. We've got investors from Germany interested in constructing an on-site pension, a small ski facility and hotel, that many of us are looking forward to visiting as soon as they get it completed for some of the other amenities that it will provide.
This will be truly a world-class and year-round resort. We'll be able to offer those recreational activities that so many people are searching for these days, and that goes beyond just downhill or cross-country skiing; it extends to hiking, mountain-biking and other biking. There's the golf course, of course. There's excellent fishing nearby. The ski lifts will be operating through the summer on the weekends in order to take people to the alpine meadows for hiking.
All of that is great, but what it means, and the really important thing for Kamloops and area, is the jobs -- jobs, jobs, jobs -- that this represents. There will be 300 to 500 in terms of the major construction period; it will not be a project whereby the construction is suddenly complete, but in the intensive period that started last year and will extend another three to five years, there will be 300 to 500 jobs. Then there will be not only the long-term jobs on the hill but the spinoff jobs that will occur in Kamloops as a result of visits to the city, purchases, time that tourists spend there and additional lodging opportunities in Kamloops.
All told, Bill 10, the Mountain Resort Associations Act, is nothing but good news. It is going to provide and encourage the kind of major long-term investment that we all like to see. It's going to help the regions of British Columbia, starting off with the Kamloops region -- and that's fine with the member for Kamloops-North Thompson and me. It's going to create an investment climate with respect to the ski industry and the year-round resort industry that will in turn lead to many, many additional investments throughout the Okanagan, in the Kootenays and in other parts of this great province. Hence we're going to see those benefits roll through, the opportunities for recreation roll through and the opportunities for jobs, jobs, jobs roll through the whole province.
With that, I will conclude my remarks in firm support of this bill.
[5:45]
W. Hurd: As a member of the opposition, I am pleased to rise in my place today to support Bill 10, the Mountain Resort Associations Act. I can't help but think that Bill 10, however, represents a reverse takeover by the Minister of Employment and Investment from the Minister of Environment, Lands and Parks. I know that in the past, ski hill operators voiced some concern about the approach that was made through the Ministry of Environment, Lands and Parks -- particularly the Ministry of Lands. I know that Al and Nancy Greene Raine were particularly hard done by in a venture that they were proposing with the previous administration. I'm pleased to see that they're active in Kamloops and are pursuing an opportunity with the new Sun Peaks development.
I should also mention that anything the government does to enhance the security of those types of investments is certainly welcomed by this side of the House. I know that vast resources are required to bring a ski hill into active production in the province. The previous speaker, the Minister of Education, made reference to investments in ski lift technology and in the new infrastructure that comes with these types of developments. Clearly, this type of long-term investment requires a great deal more security than would normally be the case for other types of recreation ventures.
The only concern I would raise is in connection with a situation that occurred at Apex, where, as we know, there was a blockade of the main road to the ski hill development that
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resulted in considerable loss of revenue to that operator. As we know, most processes of government are supposedly without prejudice to the land claims issue. As these developments proceed, as applications come in for mountain resort associations, one hopes that some accommodation can be reached with some of the first nations who are affected, because one hopes that we won't see a repeat of the kind of blockade and loss of investor confidence that occurred at Apex.
With those few words, the opposition is pleased to support Bill 10. It's one of the more enlightened pieces of legislation we've seen come out of the government. Coming as it does after the debate on Bill 7, the Columbia Basin Trust Act, it's a pleasure for the opposition to support, in principle, Bill 10.
L. Fox: I too have the privilege of standing before you and giving support in principle to Bill 10. When one looks over the document that makes so many references to having to comply with the Municipal Act, one must wonder why the minister of everything, the Employment and Investment minister, is putting this initiative forward and not the Municipal Affairs minister. Is it because we are going to see B.C. 21 dollars, which are borrowed dollars, float into these initiatives at the expense of other taxpayers? That question and many others will certainly be asked during committee stage. The bill itself begs many questions around the cooperation of municipalities, regional districts and these local improvement areas -- or these business areas. I look forward to that debate to clarify many of the concerns that have been identified to me, particularly by municipal people. But with those few words, I'm pleased at second reading stage to be able to support the bill.
The Speaker: Thank you, hon. member. The minister closes debate.
Hon. G. Clark: I'm delighted to see this rare, tripartite -- or more than that, whatever number of parties there is now -- support for this legislation, because this legislation is about jobs. That's why it's under the Ministry of Employment and Investment. It's part of our comparative and competitive advantage to create jobs in British Columbia through the development of ski hills in British Columbia. If you look at the Whistler example, it's a wonderful example of the last NDP government's initiative to create jobs in the tourism industry, and it has now, of course, taken off.
This initiative is about jobs; it's a key part of the government's economic strategy. I'm delighted that the opposition parties are, for a change, voting in favour of jobs instead of opposing all the good job creation pieces of legislation that we've brought forward, including the last one, the Columbia Basin Trust.
So with that, I move second reading.
Motion approved.
Bill 10, Mountain Resort Associations Act, read a second time and referred to a Committee of the Whole House for consideration at the next sitting of the House after today.
Committee of Supply A, having reported progress, was granted leave to sit again.
Hon. G. Clark moved adjournment of the House.
Motion approved.
The Speaker: I remind members that there are official photographs tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock, and I hope that all members will be present. With that, the House now stands adjourned until 2 p.m. tomorrow.
The House adjourned at 5:51 p.m.
The House in Committee of Supply A; D. Schreck in the chair.
The committee met at 2:45 p.m.
ESTIMATES: MINISTRY OF SMALL BUSINESS, TOURISM AND CULTURE
On vote 51: minister's office, $356,000.
Hon. B. Barlee: It is my pleasure to present for the consideration of this Legislature the estimates of the Ministry of Small Business, Tourism and Culture.
Last year I introduced the ministry's first budget, and I didn't have to do much defending, partly because we were a new ministry. I did have to talk about each sector individually. This year I can present the entire ministry as a whole, because last year's accomplishments have really brought us together. The results of my ministry...
C. Tanner: Did you bring a trumpet with you?
Hon. B. Barlee: I may do that later on.
C. Tanner: You certainly need a violin.
Hon. B. Barlee: It will take a little while.
The Chair: Hon. members, through the chair.
Hon. B. Barlee: Sorry, hon. Chair. We tend to digress occasionally.
The Chair: So early, however.
Hon. B. Barlee: I believe we've reaped significant benefits from having the three dynamic sectors under one roof. I think you will see the results. I think the results are satisfactory, and that may be an understatement. The reason for placing small business, tourism and culture in one ministry is clear. I think it is good government, and it is a logical decision.
One in nine jobs in British Columbia are tourism-related. More than 12,000 businesses in 1990 were dependent upon the tourism industry. That figure has grown significantly since that time. Business owners in our province sell tourism products locally and on the international marketplace. Many of these items are produced by our aboriginal population or
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possess a significant cultural component. When travellers visit British Columbia, they spend money in all nine of the individual tourist regions. The money they spend on small businesses is fuelling our provincial economy, and it does that significantly.
Small business also generates one-third of British Columbia business revenue. In our province, essentially, small business is big business. This province's cultural attractions bring visitors here. Last year 25.6 million people stayed overnight. But culture and heritage are also major selling points. When one looks around, our film industry is putting British Columbia on the big screen, our writers are putting B.C. in print and our performers are travelling internationally, promoting this province's wealth of talent. Our artists truly are, I think, one of British Columbia's greatest resources. All British Columbians are the driving force behind each and every one of our achievements. This budget speaks to them, and it does respond to their needs.
Every eight minutes a new job is created in the province. My ministry does support entrepreneurship, and I think we do a good job of it. British Columbians put our framework to work. We have been solid contributors to this province's success, and I am pleased about the new budget. We'll continue building the framework that creates jobs and ensures prosperity. We are attempting to do it in every region, and I think we are succeeding.
In 1994, employment in B.C. grew at a rate of 4 percent; the Canadian average was 2 percent. So we are fractionally more than double the Canadian average. When you look at the growth potential of the ministry, you can see why the numbers add up. One of the keys is that 420,000 British Columbians work in small businesses employing less than 20 employees. Tourism-related businesses employ another 186,000 people and culture employs 47,000 or 48,000 British Columbians. Altogether that's about 650,000 people, and all these sectors are growing.
Look at small business. Small business in Canada made net employment gains of 8 percent last year. Large corporations in Canada actually lost jobs. In British Columbia, small businesses created 90 percent of the new jobs, except in the lower mainland, where the figure was 88 percent.
Our retail sales increased by almost 10 percent last year and are up fractionally more than that this year. Business incorporations were up 12.3 percent. If I remember correctly -- and it is not written here -- I believe there were slightly over 20,000 new incorporated businesses in the province in 1994.
As far as tourism is concerned, last year our government made an investment by giving the Tourism division of my ministry a significant budget increase. Tourism revenue increased by 8 percent over 1993. Visitor volumes were up nearly 5 percent. In total, the tourism industry realized an all-time record of almost $6.3 billion in revenue.
Room revenue is an accurate indicator of the tourism trend. It showed double-digit growth for the first time since 1990. It increased by almost 12 percent.
I think it was a wise investment by our government. I think it's safe to say we're well on our way to making tourism a $9.9 billion industry by 1999. Actually we're on target to about.... If we continue at the growth rate we're doing now, it will be about $11.2 billion.
Culture is another important ingredient. It is growing at about twice the growth rate of the general labour force. Performing arts have an audience equal to 41 percent of the population. That's the third-highest standing in the country.
British Columbia has the highest museum visitation rate in Canada: 45 percent of British Columbia's population go to museums each year. The Ministry of Small Business, Tourism and Culture is creating jobs and supporting economic growth.
My staff -- I can say this, I think, without any difficulty -- work on the front lines. They're offering skills and face-to-face instruction to thousands of British Columbians through hundreds of workshops, seminars and conferences.
Women, aboriginals and our youth, who are sometimes vulnerable, are getting the training they need to become employed. Whether they're marketing a retail business, a destination or a painting, the techniques they learn at our seminars help them promote themselves and their individual businesses. This is what strengthening the economy on the front lines is all about.
Now let's look at some of the achievements. In small business, 179 seminars were held in the province's five regions. They focused on a wide variety of topics -- anything from women in business to the Internet, to marketing and to bed-and-breakfasts. These seminars served close to 6,000 business people and entrepreneurs.
Our small business development program for aboriginal women accommodated more than twice as many participants as originally expected. More than 650 first nations women attended. We also have 24 REDOs -- regional economic development officers -- across the province, who provide training and skills to all British Columbians.
We're gearing our programs to the specific needs of different groups, and British Columbians are paying us back by creating new businesses. Some of the stats here are rather interesting: 33 percent of businesses in British Columbia are started by women. And, I might add, they are somewhat more successful than men. We take a chance once in a while. They don't take many chances, and they do their research very well. So our business people take time to plan and research, and my ministry is showing them how. Let's look at the youth. We held seven young entrepreneurs conferences this year. We served 700 people; that's about 100 per conference.
We funded 55 aboriginal economic development projects in 1994. Our aboriginal communities traditionally have -- and this is quite staggering -- anywhere from a 60 percent to a 90 percent unemployment rate. It's a costly UI rate, so we're working to change this. Through our aboriginal arts project, more than 26 native artists with extraordinary talent learned hands-on marketing techniques and applied them abroad or in other parts of North America. They talked directly to potential buyers, to museum curators and to established artists in Seattle, for instance. There, our artists exchanged knowledge and exchanged culture, but they also secured significant sales and found new markets for their products.
The enhanced community tourism employment and training program gave 136 trainees from the income assistance area the skills they needed to secure tourism-related employment. Four months after completing this program, there was a 70 percent success rate, so that's quite important, and I think it's the direction to go. Providing hands-on experience does make sense. We're creating a better business climate in British
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Columbia, and the results, I think, are results you can see. British Columbia's economy has created 139,000 new jobs since 1991. That is definitely the highest rate in Canada, and we continue to do that, actually. British Columbia is an economic success because our government is innovative and we are, I think, following an original strategy that is successful. We're finding new ways, different ways and better ways of getting the job done.
One example of cost-effective marketing in tourism is the rolling billboards that were put in place last year. These transport trucks display scenes of British Columbia and our new wordmark. We're making a great impression. It costs about $3.12 per truck per day. It's cheap. It is an effective program. Millions of North Americans see these breathtaking views or images; the numbers are probably around 16 million per year. We placed a toll-free number on the trucks so potential visitors can inquire, and we're getting all sorts of calls. We're also getting more travellers. In fact, the truck drivers, who are Teamsters, were fielding so many questions from prospective travellers, they phoned back home to get brochures and maps. The Teamsters are now handing them out free in various parts of North America, mainly in the California, Washington and Oregon markets. We knew it would be very effective; we didn't think it would be quite as effective as it is.
I would also like to acknowledge the work of the transport companies. They have been very supportive. They're outstanding corporate citizens. Not necessarily named in order, they are: Byers Transportation Systems, Kootenay Dairy Transport and Zenith Transport. I think all of us know, regardless of our politics, the pride British Columbians have in this province. There's no doubt at all that it helps our programs. The loyalty of the British Columbian is really quite remarkable.
In 1993 we had a commitment, a White Paper, to small business. The discussion paper asked entrepreneurs across the province what they wanted. More than 1,000 of them responded -- in detail, by the way. We took the time to listen, and we took the time to answer. They asked for a number of things. Number one, they asked for more training, so each year we host the B.C. Creative Arts Show. The show introduces 250 home-based business owners to the wholesale market. It also generates more than $1 million annually into that economy.
Two, our business people said they needed to learn how to use technology, so we began a pilot program to help them use the Internet. Every day more than 20 million people worldwide access the system and provide business information and services -- and that is growing, by the way, every day. We have linked our dynamic sectors by building technological bridges, and these bridges are bringing our business people in contact with world markets.
Our entrepreneurs also wanted greater access to capital, always an ongoing concern, so with our equity capital programs, small businesses involved in manufacturing, research and development, as well as tourism, were able to raise about $30 million for more than 1,200 separate investors. We have also continued supporting one of the most successful initiatives, the Working Opportunity Fund -- WOF. It has raised close to $75 million since 1992. To date, the Working Opportunity Fund has invested $9.4 million in 11 British Columbia businesses.
We are diversifying the economy and encouraging growth in the value-added marketing sector. We began a pilot for microlending circles in Prince George for aboriginal entrepreneurs. This innovative project required less than $7,500 to begin its pilot project. Each member of a four- to six-person lending group or circle receives up to $1,000, but the entire circle is responsible for repaying the loan. If one of those individuals defaults, the other members must compensate for that loss.
Number four, our business owners have asked for more business information, so we struck a partnership with the federal government to provide one-stop shopping. Provincial and federal business information is now available through the new Canada-British Columbia Business Service Centre in Vancouver. The centre averages 100 calls per day and 2,000 drop-in visits per month. Actually, that is possibly low, if I remember correctly. It may be significantly more than that. We also created the small business startup kit so our entrepreneurs can plan for their future success. We included additional ministry publications so our business people can get off on the right start.
Business owners told us to address the issue of regulatory and paper burden, always a problem in small business. Regulatory form was a major workshop topic at the January 18-20 Premier's summit on a strong and secure economy for British Columbia. In his opening and closing remarks, the Premier made a commitment to follow-up action on summit discussions.
So my ministry is looking forward to follow-up. We're working while we wait; we're updating our regulations so entrepreneurs can find out what regulations affect them specifically. Our business people have told us to cut back the number of fees, licences and taxes. In 1993 government eliminated the corporation capital tax for 2,000 small businesses and reduced the tax for another 1,500 small businesses. Our government is continuing its three-year tax freeze. I think that's good news for small business.
As far as the promotion of world-class cultural events, through last year's funding British Columbia became one of the four cities in North America to exhibit Empires Beyond the Great Wall: The Heritage of Genghis Khan. Every day more than 2,000 people are viewing this wonderful presentation of ancient Chinese history. In fact, we have set our goal per day at 3,500; last Thursday, we had 5,300. The placed was literally jammed. By the way, our gift shop sold out of items under $30 during the event's opening week. We assumed there was going to be a reasonable response; the response was much beyond our expectations. So I'm proud of the work that my staff has done in bringing this marvellous exhibit to British Columbia.
[3:00]
I think British Columbia is known as a beacon of culture, reaching out to the rest of North America, and certainly to the rest of Canada. Through our innovation, my ministry is helping this province maintain its key position in a changing world marketplace, which is changing very abruptly. So we made investments in the future, and these investments enable our three sectors to help keep pace with a changing global society.
During the Commonwealth Games, British Columbia became the first place in the world to make the results of an international sporting event instantly available on the Internet. We also placed B.C. travel information on the system, and
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gave visitors a chance to begin their visits to this province on the information highway. We used telecommunications technology to link a Victoria business showcase called Business B.C. to our regions. Through this state-of-the-art innovation, business people across the province learned how to supply government ministries and Crown corporations with the services and goods that we need. It's teamwork, and I think it's good business -- not much doubt about it.
British Columbia is also among the four busiest film production centres in all of North America. We're putting our province on the big screen so people around the world can experience the beauty we have to offer. Actually, it's a window into British Columbia; it's an important window. In 1994, 85 feature and television productions came out of the province. This activity employed somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 people. With new funding we'll continue to invest in long-term strategies to address a changing global environment. I think we can do that quite successfully.
Government agents. Strategic directions are giving our government agents new relevance in the new economy. Each year our GAs collect about $1.2 billion in revenue -- that's up significantly this year, by the way. Our GAs serve 2.9 million people directly each year, and another further one million through sub-issuers. They also deliver 50 different programs and services on behalf of client ministries. We have government agents in 60 towns in the province, by the way. We've already introduced cost-effective technological changes to assist government agents with their heavy workload. For example, we are installing smart personal computers in government agent offices to replace outdated stand-alone terminals. Transactions that took four days to complete now take a few minutes. We'll continue implementing commonsense practices.
Through government agent technology renewal, we will continue responding to the public demand by evaluating regional server pilot projects in Nanaimo and Duncan. The Duncan pilot is cost-shared with our partner agency, the motor vehicle branch.
We are also establishing kiosks to give clients a one-stop shopping advantage. This is really a cost-effective practice in the United States where they are installed. Fifty-eight percent of transactions occur outside regular office hours. So once the initiative is complete, 24-hour access will be a bonus to our customers and client ministries and also to my staff. Also, construction of a kiosk costs 10 percent less than a new government agent's office.
We are evaluating a pilot project with the Ministry of Finance which enabled customers at government agent offices in New Westminster, Golden, Dease Lake, Oliver and Valemount to pay for their transactions with a debit card. Our government agents need more time to plan, meet with community groups and smooth out complex procedures. My ministry is making it possible by providing easy technological solutions to relieve them of routine transactions which are very time-consuming. In return, our GAs are making their services more valuable to their clients. Organizations that don't compete will certainly diminish. My ministry is making sure that this doesn't happen to the government agents. By working together, I think we're going in the right direction.
We've started capital investments in heritage with mining and transportation themes, and we are reinstituting the Stop of Interest sign program all across the province. Our special projects include the Hedley Mascot mine ruins near Princeton, Alexandra Bridge, Greenwood's historic downtown, the Beaverdell mine works, the SS Moyie, the SS Sicamous, the historic Kettle Valley steam train line, Sandon, and so on. A total of 17 projects were funded in the amount of $1.1 million -- a modest but significant commitment. Also, our new Heritage Conservation Act was implemented last summer. It is creating a new era of heritage conservation.
For those of us who are keen on human history, considerable progress has been made on a new heritage highway sign series. It is essentially a revision of the immensely popular highway Stop of Interest program created several decades ago -- if I remember correctly, somewhere around 1958. Isn't that right? I think it was that early...
K. Jones: W.A.C. Bennett.
Hon. B. Barlee: I was there, sure.
So we're changing the informational content, an emphasis....
K. Jones: You must have been quite young then.
Hon. B. Barlee: Oh yes.
It's an emphasis to keep pace with the expanding knowledge and public attitudes about our history.
Our ministry is also responsible for heritage properties across the province. Some notable examples are Barkerville, Fort Steele, Kilby General Store Museum and the five major sites in Victoria. We had a banner year last year with more than 350,000 visitors to these various facilities. The B.C. Heritage Trust continues to work hard and to reorganize its programs in the face of change. The heritage legacy program is up and running and will be raising money from private individuals and corporations as a way of supporting heritage initiatives.
I've taken some time on this because, as you know, I'm not the only one in this room who cares about history. I think it's extremely important for the province.
I would now like to take this opportunity to discuss briefly my ministry's future plans. I want to put the ministry's success in a larger framework, which outlines the prosperity that lies ahead for British Columbians and their children.
Small business is quite important. Our province, as we all know, is very vast and each one of its regions has a unique set of outstanding strengths and resources. Every community in the province is equally significant and essential to our province's success and to the future. The ministry will work to build up our tremendous wealth and tap into the potential. We'll do it by continuing to reach out to British Columbians -- the backbone of all our cities and towns, and certainly of the province. We will double the number of workshops and seminars in several regions, partly because of the vast growth in small business. We will strengthen the way we do business by gearing our conferences specifically to the needs of our people.
Communities are, of course, evolving all the time. The face of government is also changing. My ministry is ensuring we both move in the same direction. We will implement the community investment pilot program which gives British
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Columbians the opportunity to raise capital and to expand local businesses. We will increase partnerships with the private sector, municipalities and other levels of government to provide business training. We will work with all sectors -- business, labour, first nations groups -- to address the regulatory reform. We will be, and are, acting on it.
A committee will be meeting over the next few months to determine the key recommendations on how regulatory reform can assist British Columbia's competitiveness. My ministry will also continue to support the development of aboriginal economies and initiatives. Our small business program for aboriginal women will offer in-depth training and basic business skills by providing mentoring assistance to more than 50 women. Often my ministry acts as a liaison between experienced business people and those just starting out. We will continue to bring people together. We will continue to link the communities. Above all, my staff will ensure jobs and prosperity through the various regions of British Columbia, including investment in forestry-based communities. Long-term economic growth depends directly on sound environmental practices. My ministry is looking forward to a future that preserves what has made our province great: our tremendous natural resources. My ministry will continue to work with individuals and community organizations to put these development plans into action, but we will do it in an overall framework of forest renewal and proper land use. My ministry does set priorities. My staff are setting goals, and I know you can believe me when I say we're going to meet them.
In tourism, we have -- I think all of us know -- terrific economic wealth and rich natural resources in the province. We're finding that many people from around the world want to experience super, natural British Columbia. So it's no wonder that my tourism division has such an outstanding reputation. Last year our initiatives helped generate $6.3 billion for the tourism industry -- our best year ever.
Despite our success, there is room for improvement. We can capitalize further on tourism potential. Consider this: British Columbians represent 67 percent of all our travellers, a number which we think will grow. If you don't take my word for it, in 1994 our regional market volume increased by 4.4 percent. So more British Columbians did travel. Still, for every five dollars a resident spends on a vacation, three of those dollars are spent out of province. My ministry's goal for the upcoming year is to get British Columbians to make a sound travel investment by spending more time and more money in British Columbia. A number of people are changing over. They're not taking their holidays out of the province; they're taking their holidays in the province. We want to encourage that. We will make a few minor adjustments in consumer behaviour, like encouraging residents to take one more trip per year in British Columbia. This will produce some major changes. One more trip per year by those British Columbians travelling in British Columbia will mean another billion dollars into our local economy.
Plus, we have a whole new market to target. Last year British Columbia's population grew by 2.5 percent. That's about double the Canadian average. With more people moving here, we have an entirely new group that has not yet experienced super, natural British Columbia.
The tourism division will also increase our strategic partnerships with the private sector. We will work with the new Canadian Tourism Commission, the federal government, to get the best possible results with the available funding. These partnerships are essential. Government must remain relevant as we come close to the twenty-first century. In doing so, we will be able to reach our goal of creating an additional 65,000 jobs in tourism in British Columbia by the year 2000. The innovation and marketing abilities of my tourism division proves that we can't be headed anywhere except toward success.
Culture is also a very important part. I believe that the future for British Columbia's cultural industries is just as bright as it is for tourism. This year my ministry was given an extra $4 million to diversify and strengthen artistic and cultural pursuits -- this in the face of continuing tight budget controls on many other government programs.
Our government has worked hard to decrease the deficit. We have made progress, I believe, and by the end of 1996 there will be no deficit. With this goal in sight, our government can focus on cultural improvements. New funding will lead to job creation, economic diversity, prosperity and the acknowledgment of the creative skills of our people.
This economic and social wealth will be shared by all British Columbians, young and old, rich and poor. Culture really knows no age limits, and I'm sure most of you know that. There are a number of cultural workers and volunteers in B.C. who are represented by our youth. British Columbia's young people will find new employment. They will gain experience, and they will get new skills. Our artists and cultural industries will get long-deserved recognition. We will also build confidence in our province and pride in the fact that British Columbia is a wealthy and really unique.... It's more than unique. It's a grand province to live in.
[3:15]
We cannot afford to neglect one of British Columbia's most vital sectors, especially at a time when federal cutbacks have threatened them. Since 1990 we have lost one-third of our touring production audience in 60 communities and 85 school districts across the province. The largest part of this new funding will go toward a direct investment in our arts and in our artists: $2.5 million will extend support for the programs already put in place by our government. Funding will be aimed at achieving personal cultural achievements. Our reputation for providing support to individual artists can be summed up on one word: up to this point I think the word is "embarrassing." We are trying to cure that.
The Chair: Hon. minister, I regret that your time has expired. Unless there is an intervening speaker, I will not be allowed to allow you to conclude your remarks.
The Chair recognizes the hon. member for Saanich North and the Islands, who has said, "Let him continue," I believe.
C. Tanner: Yes, Mr. Chairman.
The Chair: Thank you, hon. member.
Hon. B. Barlee: I thank my critic for Saanich North and the Islands very much. I only have about another minute and a half.
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In the past, only one in five artists applying for government grants received money. We are changing this gradually; I think we will do better to recognize their efforts. We also will designate more than $250,000 in awards to recognize outstanding contributions to the arts and to culture.
A separate initiative will promote books and magazines written in B.C., films and videos produced in B.C., and music recorded in B.C. We will showcase our wealth of talent at trade shows and through other initiatives, but we will not stop there. We will spend more marketing our cultural products. We have earmarked $400,000 to help this sector reach its audience both at home and abroad. We are going to promote province-made goods; I think this is a good investment. We have also set aside $800,000 to develop profit centres, such as gift shops. We will give loans to qualifying cultural industries, other than film, for working capital.
Many of you have a background in business. You understand that startup capital is important for any new venture, whether that venture is based on marketing, a new invention or a new song. Our creators are going to find new support. British Columbians will, I think, discover new cultural products.
All of you know how successful my ministry has been with our marketing initiatives. Throughout this debate I have used words like initiate, create and promote. These are also proactive words for a proactive government. The Ministry of Small Business, Tourism and Culture is creating a better business climate that can be enjoyed by everyone in the province. We are strengthening large and small communities through countless initiatives and programs...
K. Jones: Who wrote that -- Struble?
Hon. B. Barlee: No, he didn't, actually.
...that attract visitors and preserve history and natural riches, as well as increase provincial wealth. That's one of the targets.
Job creation and employment opportunity is a B.C. reality, with 29,000 new jobs created in this province just last month. My ministry is part of this success, and we will continue to play a key role in the future of this province.
C. Tanner: By agreement, we're going to discuss Tourism and Culture today. The Small Business critic is not here. He'll be here tomorrow, hopefully.
It's always a pleasure to listen to the Minister of Tourism. I never know whether he's written the speech and is so impressed with it that he makes asides all the way through, or whether it's completely new to him and to his own amazement he says: "That's true" and "Yes, I think that's probably exaggerated a little bit, but I think we can do this." It is always an experience to listen to the minister.
It would be nice if he gave credit where credit is due to things like the American dollar. It would be nice if he gave credit to the fact that we have 100,000 new people coming in in spite of this government, not because of them. It would be nice if he gave credit to the fact that the programs he's now boasting about.... And the amount of money he's now putting back into the budget is the same amount of money that we had in the budget in 1989.
It would be nice if he gave credit to the industry itself. I didn't hear him once mention COTA and the good people who work there. I didn't hear him once mention the fact that he has been talking to the industry, as I have been talking to the industry -- and they're getting a different story from him than they're getting from me. I'm telling them the truth and he's telling them a bunch of baloney.
It would be nice if this member, instead of coming into this chamber and blowing his own horn or playing a violin or whatever he does, and making the accompanying remarks that he makes throughout his speech, actually faced facts. The fact is that this province has done well in tourism the past year not because of him, not because of his department, but because the American dollar is now worth so much more than our dollar -- thanks in part to his government, because they spend money so radically that the dollar is not as strong as it used to be. Americans are pouring over the border because they say they can spend money here and they enjoy what they find. Fortunately, at last, the prices of hotels in British Columbia are now a little lower than the world market, and we are a reasonable purchase compared to anywhere else in the world. But the fact of the matter is that what's pushing tourism in this province today is the weakness of the Canadian dollar.
To his credit, this member has done some good things. The relationship, generally speaking, between the tourist industry and government is better since he's taken over. Generally speaking, he speaks their language better than his predecessor, and the predecessor before that. Generally speaking, they are discussing the things that are important to the tourist industry and not to his department, which is an improvement. But they still have a long distance to go.
One thing he has done, which I am very pleased about, and for which he deserves full credit, as does the federal government, is the artificial reef program which we now have in this province -- thanks, quite frankly, to the Minister of Tourism, to the federal Minister of Tourism and to the Prime Minister, who, by coincidence, is sort of interested in it. I appreciate, as do the people in the diving industry, his efforts on that part, and the success has been illustrated in that we're going to drop the next artificial reef in my constituency. The next three are going to be dropped up and down the Island, and we will create in this province a diving industry which will be next to none. It will be one of the best in the world, and it will attract a great number of tourist dollars. The minister deserves credit for that. I am able to find something to say to his credit.
N. Lortie: I think you should sit down now.
C. Tanner: I'd be happy to. Do you want to call the vote?
I think the other thing you can say is that there is some feeling in the industry -- as far as the back-country leases and the back-country operators are concerned -- that this minister, I think, has tried to address some of those problems, although he hasn't found an answer. I think the answer is difficult to find in the circumstances of the land claims and the treaty negotiations, but the fact of the matter is that he has made an attempt to allay some of their fears, although he hasn't been as successful as he might have been. The land claims considerations are serious to all of us, and I think the minister has played his part to help find a solution to those problems.
In my view, though, he is guilty of one of the worst faults that this department has concerned itself with in the past year, and that is that it continues to think that it as a department
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and they as a government can market tourism. They should get out of the marketing business altogether and hand it over to the people who know about marketing -- and it isn't the members of your ministry, Mr. Minister; it's the members of the industry. You should be spending your dollars with them in a tourism authority. They should be making the decisions, they should be doing the marketing, and they should be taking the responsibility for it, too. I think you've failed miserably in that respect.
I don't think you've done nearly the job that needs to be done on B.C. tourism. I think there's a tremendous potential here, because the same dollar that's helping bring Americans in is keeping Canadians inside British Columbia -- hopefully. It might be an interesting question to ask the minister where he took his holiday this year, if he took one. I'm afraid to admit that I didn't take mine in Canada, but I think somebody should have been telling me it was in my best interest to do so. I didn't see anything from this government saying that. I think it's important that we should be promoting that with every intent that we can possibly bring to the subject.
I think the minister mentioned that he's got $400,000 devoted to that this year; I don't think it's nearly enough. I don't think this minister or his department has had nearly enough presence in the United States, although we've done well with Americans coming in. I think we could have done better. To my knowledge, there hasn't been much replacement of those offices that were closed two and a half years ago in the States. I think that is our biggest foreign market, and we should be working on it. I don't think Americans at the border get the treatment they deserve. I don't think it's necessarily this minister's problem; I think it's a federal problem. But I think there should be more cooperation between the two areas in making it more feasible to bring Americans in. They should be able to use their dollars more easily, and they should not be concerned -- harassed, almost -- by the GST problem that every American has if he wants to recover his investment in this province.
Generally speaking, there is a small improvement in the department. This minister has helped the industry a little bit. He hasn't done nearly enough. What it really needs is a party that is fundamentally committed to tourism, rather than a party that pretends to be. The minister is the only member of that government that I know who has any background at all to talk with any common sense -- or any sense, business sense -- with regard to the subject. I would say they're fortunate to have him, for the simple reason that I think when he sits at the cabinet table, he probably does bring some common sense, and maybe a little business sense, to a party and a cabinet that don't have a clue, generally speaking. After all, it's taken them three and a half years to realize they've got to invest money in tourism to get something back again.
I will have a lot of specific questions, but in the meantime my colleague from Surrey-Cloverdale wants to ask some questions. After that, I will address specific questions to the minister.
K. Jones: I will just follow up on the great words of my colleague from Saanich North and the Islands, who is probably one of the greatest advocates of tourism and culture in the province of British Columbia today. I think there's none finer in working to build this lovely province. I think that's what we're all here for. We're very much interested in maximizing the potential of this province. In that area, I'd like to ask the minister if he could give us some indication as to what his ministry or this government has done to promote the U.S. day trips into Canada, particularly into the lower mainland. There's an opportunity for Americans to spend $200 (U.S.) -- almost $300 (Canadian) -- in Canada on a day trip, duty-free. That message does not seem to be well known in Seattle, Mount Vernon, Everett, Port Angeles or Bellingham. It is certainly not being worked with our local business people in Surrey, White Rock, Langley or even Vancouver. There is no coordination of an effort similar to what the U.S. did in their efforts to promote the previous trips such as the Bellis Fair and Seattle trips -- the Seattle hotel association trips -- that were promoted in our marketplace a few years back, at the beginning of this government's term. What has the minister been doing? What has this government been doing to really make that coordinated effort that the people of British Columbia -- and the business people of British Columbia -- need to bring those tourist dollars from the United States?
Hon. B. Barlee: We've addressed that in a number of different ways. For instance, last year there were almost 250,000 more visitors from the United States -- 237,000, to be precise -- into British Columbia. We led all provinces in U.S. growth in percentage, which is the only way you can judge it. We led it by far. The Conference Board of Canada said that our tourism growth was the best in the country, and the Conference Board of Canada is certainly not social democrat. A distant second was Alberta. We came up $472 million over the year before; Alberta came up about $200 million. We do this by a number of different areas. For instance, as I mentioned before very briefly, we use rolling billboards. We use a fair exchange program. We distributed 20,000 decals to various businesses in all of British Columbia.
If you go on the ferry now, you'll see that the Americans get a fair exchange for their dollar. They are allowed to take 4 to 5 percent off that 40 percent. Prior to that time, businesses were being very rough in some instances on their American visitors. We don't want that kind of ambassador going back to the United States.
Our generic advertising is slow, but it does work. There's a difference between a government doing advertising and a private company doing advertising. The individual who has an ongoing tourism operation would advertise for his own operation. The difference with the government is we do generic advertising. That's why we have to get into markets like California, with 32 million people. We're using a number of different methods to crack those markets. By all measurements we have vastly exceeded the other provinces, including all the Liberal provinces, all the Conservative provinces and the other New Democratic Party provinces. There's really no comparison. If anybody wants to compare our record to the other provinces, please be my guest.
[3:30]
K. Jones: Thank you, minister, for your great answer, but you didn't answer the question I asked. You talked about everything else but. What did you, your ministry or your government do to promote the $200 (U.S.) tax-free advantage that is available to people coming here on a day trip?
Hon. B. Barlee: The average person in the United States, we found out, is very concerned with what they get for their dollar, but they haven't figured it out. For instance, the federal
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government stated that last year -- as I was discussing with my ADM of Tourism -- they advertise widely in the States: "We'll stretch your dollar." Well, the Americans didn't want their dollar stretched. It wasn't made of rubber; it wasn't going to snap back and hit them in the mouth. They don't like people fooling with their dollar. So we said: "No, no. Rod, we have to do it differently."
At that time, every American dollar that came into B.C. yielded them $1.40. That's easy to figure out mathematically. I said: "Spend a week in British Columbia. The first two days are free." They understood that with perfect clarity. So they flocked into British Columbia much more than any other province. That is one of the methods we used to attract the American visitor.
K. Jones: I'll try it again. Hon. minister, we're talking about day trips, not three-day trips. As far as my community is concerned, it has not had any cooperation from your government or your ministry to help to promote the day-trip advantage that we have of $200 (U.S.) duty-free. It has not been promoted in the adjoining border areas right down to Seattle, which we have the advantage of utilizing. The people from Victoria would be advantaged if the people in Port Angeles and Puget Sound, Tacoma and Seattle were made aware of this advantage. They could come up on a day trip on the ferry and take advantage of these opportunities. We have no concerted effort to take advantage; we are not moving quickly enough in responding to the initiatives and opportunities that are there. We have done well, but it's in spite of the fact that we haven't taken advantage of the best opportunities that are available.
Hon. B. Barlee: There are always opportunities available, no doubt about that at all. I talk with chambers all the time. For instance, that $472 million benefited every small business person in British Columbia. The Crown got $70 million of that increase last year, and the other $402 million circulated through various businesses in British Columbia. Use a 2.5 percent multiplier, and you've got an extra billion dollars circulating in the province. That certainly affects every small business. So we keep in contact with them. In the tourism industry, like every other business, everyone has different ideas. We think we're going in the right direction. We think that $472 million was a significant gain. I think it will be more than that this year. We'll be close to $6.8 billion to $6.9 billion if all that long-term strategy works, and I think it will.
K. Jones: The minister just doesn't get it. He doesn't understand that there's an opportunity for utilizing the money that's already available out there. The opportunities that you are saying you're spending in promotion.... What I get from the responses to my questions is that the minister, his ministry and the government have not spent a single cent in this area and have done nothing in promoting the day trips. Therefore I have to assume that there's really nothing more to ask on that question, regarding getting a response from you.
I will ask one other question that you can possibly answer, if you wish to reply to that further. I'll just add this other one. Could the minister tell us why the government is taking 4 percent to 5 percent off the exchange? Why is it necessary? Why are the ferries charging that as an extra charge? Why not give them the full amount?
Hon. B. Barlee: Mainly it's because the banks charge about 4 percent. They do me, and they charge most businesses about 4 percent. Maybe they do not charge some of the corporate offices. But generally speaking, the banks do charge a service charge.
K. Jones: Hon. minister, what support has been given to the creation of destination golfing in British Columbia? In particular, we have the world-class golfing opportunities in Surrey -- such as the Northview golf complex, where hopefully we will have the new home of future Professional Golfers' Association's tournaments in Greater Vancouver. In addition, we've got the Hazelmere and Peace Portal championship courses, and now the new Morgan Creek golf course that's nearly ready for use this summer. We have so many great golf courses in addition to those ones, both in the Surrey area and throughout the lower mainland. What have you been doing to promote this opportunity to bring golfers from all over the world into this area in order to take advantage of the finest golf courses anywhere?
Hon. B. Barlee: There's no doubt that British Columbia has world-class golf courses. We provide various moneys through our Partners in Tourism program. For instance, the southwestern corner of British Columbia gets $630,000, and they decide their priorities for that $630,000. If they want to spend some of that on promoting the various golf courses in the lower mainland, that's great. So every region in the province participates in the Partners in Tourism program, and it's a shared program. It has worked quite well, actually. They have a significant say in where those funds go.
K. Jones: It's good that the ministry has been able to designate some funds to tourism in the local community areas, but they're really oriented toward meeting the needs of their local regions. They have a lot of need for the promotion within that area.
What I'm talking about is something of a much broader area, and that is putting British Columbia on the golfing destination map for people from all over the world. This is something the government should be taking a major role in coordinating. I'm not talking about spending a lot of money on it, but just in the coordinating and promotion of this opportunity.
[F. Garden in the chair.]
Hon. B. Barlee: We have developed some marketing packages with the golf associations. They ran a program in the interior of British Columbia last year which was quite successful. They came to that conclusion themselves. We have a variety of different areas we should acknowledge. My critic acknowledged that certainly the wrecks are important on Vancouver Island, and indeed they are. Golfing is important in the greater Vancouver area, adventure tourism is important in the Rockies, and so on. We have probably 100 different areas we could go into, and doing those requires a strategic outlook. We have priorities. We number the priorities right down. We have a shared partnership program, Partners in Tourism, with those various regions. Then they decide what their priorities are. We are willing partners in that.
K. Jones: Hon. minister, if this cooperation is there, then why is a major golf course in the Pitt Lake area facing financial difficulties -- recognizing that this facility was specifically
[ Page 13447 ]
oriented towards the overseas market -- and having some difficulty in being able to get that type of promotion? It would very much benefit from the coordinated efforts of the entire government in promoting a destination for golfers. People in other parts of the world are willing to pay a lot of money to come and golf here -- an opportunity that we're not really taking the best advantage of.
Hon. B. Barlee: The member mentioned one specific golf course, and it really isn't our responsibility to promote one specific golf course. Last year we did have a campaign with the B.C. Golf Association. We also produced a golfing guide. The program I mentioned in the interior of British Columbia was the Partners in Tourism B.C. campaign, which had a focus on golf in the Okanagan and the Kootenays. That was at the top of their priority list. He should join that local association and make his point there.
K. Jones: I'd also like to ask the minister what work is being doing by the ministry in promoting other activities that are major draws to our areas, such as the Cloverdale Rodeo and Exhibition and the Glaciers double-A baseball opening up this year, which will be Canada's only team in this international league. What are you doing to showcase the opportunities that are provided by these good draws? What's being done to promote the softball facilities -- probably the finest -- that were put together under the auspices of Softball B.C. in Softball City in South Surrey? It's a major complex. What has been done by the ministry or by the government to promote all these programs that are dealing with the international tourist market?
Hon. B. Barlee: Again I say that our job is not to pick out specific areas and specific events; our job is generic advertising at large. That specific-event job runs down to our Partners in Tourism. That's why that program is so effective. But it doesn't work for everybody. The Partners in Tourism in the southwestern corner decide what their priorities are, and if it does not include Softball City or something else, well, that's too bad. Those individuals should make their mark. They should work on their colleagues in that industry to make sure that they're higher on the priority list.
We have literally thousands and thousands of events. We could promote the Williams Lake Stampede. We could promote the Chilako Stampede. But it's not our specific job. We do that by drawing people into the area. We wouldn't have the money, first of all, to promote those events that may be very important to that particular community. Our job is generic. That specific job we leave to our Partners in Tourism, and that's the way it should work. They're more qualified to judge locally what their best draws are.
K. Jones: Hon. minister, you've indicated this Partners in Tourism quite often. How much money have you got for the lower mainland for instance?
Hon. B. Barlee: Our share in the lower mainland is between $600,000 and $700,000, if I remember correctly.
C. Tanner: That's last year.
Hon. B. Barlee: Yes.
K. Jones: That's the same amount that's given to Sport B.C. to handle the operations of their headquarters building. I think that's the same amount that you're looking at. Do you really think that's adequate?
Hon. B. Barlee: Well, what is adequate? Adequate is several million dollars in each area. That may be adequate; it may not work well. What we tend to do is use pilot projects, and examine them very, very closely to see if they do work. I mentioned, for instance, about a dozen special projects. Those special projects are pilot projects. We look at the cost factor and how many people they're drawing in. At Hedley Mascot we're going to spend $587,000. We spent some last year, about $190,000 this year and $190,000 next year. That $587,000 is a lot of taxpayers' money. How will it do?
K. Jones: Is that year-round?
Hon. B. Barlee: No, it won't be. It will be about six or seven months.
What about that $587,000? According to McGinn Engineering, it will draw in probably -- well, they say 40,000 to 80,000, so let's take the middle figure -- 60,000 people per summer. They will come from Japan, Germany and the U.K. They'll leave behind $2 million. In 50 years, the buildings are still there. We've invested half a million dollars and get $100 million back. That's not bad.
[3:45]
K. Jones: That's really what we're talking about. To those members who were saying: "Spend, spend, spend" -- really, in this area, you spend a little bit and you get a lot of money back. That's really what the factor is. There's a good ratio of benefit to this. You have to think about what you're saying when you make the comment: "Spend, spend, spend." Your own minister disagrees, with the concern that that would be a factor of spending. This is realistic investment with an immediate return.
Hon. minister, is that Hedley Mascot project within your riding?
Hon. B. Barlee: The Hedley Mascot project is right in my riding, but on the western edge. You know, I looked at that very closely, and I said: "I have to be very careful." When I had the Kettle Valley Railway, which comes through my riding, I said: "No, I don't think I'd better promote Kettle Valley except in another riding." Which I did. Sandon, of course, is in another riding. So out of those 12 projects, that's true, there is one in my riding. But I can cover that very well, and I'll tell you how. I was down through Colorado, Nevada and Idaho -- all that old mining country. This is....
K. Jones: Touring ghost towns?
Hon. B. Barlee: No, actually I was down there on Ag, Fish and Food. I paid half my way, too. That was years ago. I looked at the mining ruins in those marvellous states, and they're really quite remarkable. Nothing touched the Hedley Mascot ruin; nothing touched it. So I don't mind defending it at all. It will make us money hand over fist.
In fact, I received some comments from one of the locals, a guy named Ken Bird. He had a small business there. He
[ Page 13448 ]
said: "Bill, I read you're spending $587,000 on this project." I said: "You're darned right. I am, Ken. I can defend it." I had a picture of the Hedley Mascot with me, as it happened, and I showed him the picture. He said: "Well, it's pretty impressive." I said: "Not only that, this will bring some 60,000 people by your door starting in the spring of 1996. Those 60,000 people will leave a lot of money in the valley." So it's a good investment, and that's all it is.
K. Jones: Does this mean the government is now in the mining business, and they're actually going to reopen those mines and get the gold out of the original mine? I think that's what we would like to see.
I want to touch on another aspect we've had some difficulty with, hon. minister, and that's the question of highway signage for tourist interest areas and sports interest areas. We seem to have some difficulty getting the appropriate notice for people coming from all over the lower mainland and British Columbia, people from other parts of the world and certainly from the United States. They are not being given adequate signage on the major highways coming in to find such things as Softball City, the Cloverdale Rodeo, baseball and the major golf courses. Are we going to make some really quick improvements and put some signage up on these highways so that people can find these facilities? Surely we're going to need to put up some signs very quickly to lead people to the new PGA tournament centre in Northview, if they're going to be able to find the place. Are you going to put something into this year's budget for that?
Hon. B. Barlee: We have some signs going in across the lower part of British Columbia, up to the Cariboo, and a few in the far north, but they are historical signs. This requires very close scrutiny, and I'll tell you why. If you put too many signs out on the highway, they lose their effectiveness, as all of us know. In the United States, they have virtually none. They have a good system of maps, which we're working on right now. We have one coming out this year.
It's a very cautious operation. I have talked to the Minister of Highways, who is very open-minded about it, but she also realizes that you can have too many signs. Where do you draw the line when everyone thinks that their particular resort or particular area deserves more signs than the area ten miles down the road?.
It's a slow process. It's a tentative process in many respects, because you don't want to damage what you already have. I noticed when I went through the state of Washington, and in Idaho and Colorado -- this was the trip I made for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food -- that they used signs sparingly in very few areas, yet their tourism programs, especially in Idaho, were remarkably good.
K. Jones: With regard to signage, what is the minister's position on billboard signs?
Hon. B. Barlee: I am not very fond of billboard signs. In general, I don't think they work that well, unless they're on wheels and they're already travelling on the highways. There are better and cheaper ways of advertising than the stationary billboard, and they're much more effective.
K. Jones: Does the government have a policy with regard to billboard signs along highways?
Hon. B. Barlee: The billboards you see outside the lower mainland are exclusively on Indian reserves. They're allowed to govern these themselves and have for the last 30 or 40 years that I can recall. There are no billboard signs on the highway at large because the government does not allow this.
K. Jones: As you say, the government doesn't allow billboard signs on other than aboriginal lands. Why is it that the government advertises on aboriginal land with their various promotions, such as the Victoria Line, using aboriginal land billboard signs? Last year we had Commonwealth Games advertising on the aboriginal land billboards. Isn't this a conflict? Why are you saying that it's okay for people, including the government, to advertise on aboriginal lands, but it's against government policy to do so elsewhere?
Hon. B. Barlee: I think I addressed that before. Too many signs would ruin the effectiveness of a billboard. Therefore the government, along with every other advertiser, will take advantage of the signs on various Indian reserves, or parts of Indian reserves, in various parts of the province.
If we had a steady stream of advertising, such as Burma-Shave in the 1940s, it would lose its effectiveness.
K. Jones: I have two other questions. With regard to back-country problems occurring between skiers and snowmobilers, what is the ministry doing to rectify that problem?
Hon. B. Barlee: We're in contact with the ministry in charge -- Environment, Lands and Parks -- and we're making representations for places like Jumbo Pass, and so on.
K. Jones: What type of representation is the minister making in this regard? How is he going to bring -- for the satisfaction of the back-country skiers and the cross-country skiers -- a feeling of security, safety and freedom from the noise that comes with snowmobilers whipping around and really making a lot of noise while they are trying to get out in the pristine wilderness areas?
Hon. B. Barlee: We work closely with a number of government agencies, including Environment, Parks and Lands, so that all interests are taken into account when we develop policies for the use of Crown lands.
K. Jones: One last question with regard to WOF. I noticed that the minister put an endorsement line -- actually a whole paragraph and picture -- in the WOF brochure when they came out with their RRSP promotion.
C. Tanner: His picture?
K. Jones: Yes. Does this mean that the minister is endorsing the WOF program? Is this now a government program? Has WOF become governmentalized also?
Hon. B. Barlee: We give some tax credits to the Working Opportunity Fund, and it has brought in, I think, $75 million. We have very carefully spent about $9.4 million on nine different projects, I believe.
C. Tanner: First of all, with regard to the ferries charging 4 or 5 percent for American dollars, that is absolute nonsense.
[ Page 13449 ]
The bank charges you 1.5 percent. You can put it in an American account and use it to make American purchases. There are lots of very simple answers to it. You should be giving the Americans full value for their dollar. They do so in the businesses with which I used to be associated, and most reputable businesses do so. It is not a good example that the ferries are setting. The minister should be talking to the B.C. Ferry Corporation and telling it to give full value for the American dollar. Maybe you would like to comment.
Hon. B. Barlee: Part of what the member says is correct. There are businesses that give full value. There are businesses in Victoria who give 10 percent. There are businesses in Victoria who give zero, and that is why we initiated the policy, which, I think, is not perfect, but certainly addresses a problem that we were facing. We were having people go back as very poor ambassadors to British Columbia. I can think of a case in Victoria last summer where they gave a $50 bill and were given nothing in change at all. I am going to have to write back and give them a cheque out of my own pocket, which I don't like doing because this particular establishment took advantage of an individual who didn't know any better. I think that program, which is a fair exchange program, is the first one in Canada that has been effective.
I think it varies with the business. Some businesses are charged 4 percent; huge corporations are usually charged 1.25 to 1.5 percent. It is true that we could go right down to that, but I think if we have about a 4 percent margin, that's not too bad. I wouldn't complain.
C. Tanner: I radically disagree with the minister on this, because what he's talking about is setting an example. There were 21 million visitors last year on the ferries, of which five million might have been Americans.
Hon. B. Barlee: Way out, way out.
C. Tanner: Even if it's more than that, the fact of the matter is that you, as a government functionary, should be setting an example -- and so should B.C. Ferry Corporation -- by giving the maximum you possibly can, not what you can get away with. The fact that some crook in Victoria didn't give any exchange, or that some sharpie gave them only 10 percent or something like that, is not the example you should be setting. The example you should be setting is saying: "Look, industry, this is what we give. You should be following our example." You should be proudly doing it, because I think it will pay off handsomely. I am really quite concerned that the minister would think that 4 percent is sufficient. It is not. You are ripping them off. If small businesses can do it in my community, B.C. Ferries can certainly do it, because you are talking about a lot more dollars.
[4:00]
Anyway, with the sort of money you are talking about, you can make a very good deal with the bank, even if you do pay some exchange. I think you should absorb it. You should be setting the example, and you should be talking to the president of B.C. Ferry Corporation and saying: "Look. When people visit our province -- particularly when they are on the ferries and on our government operations, which we are so proud of and which are covered in our colours and waving our flag -- they should be getting the very best deal, not the worst deal and not a moderate one."
Hon. B. Barlee: As it happened, I boarded the ferry about 20 hours ago. The first thing I looked at when I went to have smorgasbord was how much they were paying on the U.S. dollar. They were paying 34 percent. The U.S. dollar went down dramatically vis-a-vis the Canadian dollar yesterday. I think it was 73.19, so they're taking a whole cent and a quarter off those individuals for handling the money. Really, I cannot find a lot of flaws there.
C. Tanner: I'm not going to flog this to death, but the fact of the matter is that the minister himself said it was 4 percent that they were taking. There was a change yesterday, and they just haven't caught up with the change. But the fact of the matter is that they should be current. They should be giving full value for the American dollar and setting an example, not trying to rip them off for 4 percent.
You mentioned, hon. minister, the fact that we have regions in the province. The constant complaints I hear are twofold as far as the allocation of funds to the regions go. One is that you come too late. The regions have to make plans in the fall, and they don't get their allocations until the spring. I know you have budgetary considerations, but I would like to think that you were using your imagination in some way or other to give some sort of commitment, because those people.... Actually, what they do is stick their necks out, take a chance, make the commitments and hope you come through. Generally speaking, you do. That has been their experience. But if you could make those commitments earlier in the year, even before this process, I think it would be better. That's number one.
Number two is that everybody in our industry -- your industry, if you like -- likes to make five-year plans. You hear this every year. If they could make five-year plans, they would be doing a lot better job than they are doing now because they need those sorts of commitments, too. Have you done anything? Have you been able to do anything in those two areas?
Hon. B. Barlee: That's a very moot point, no doubt about it at all. What the member is probably referring to is formula funding for tourism. When we discussed that with the federal government -- they gave the ministry in British Columbia credit for it publicly, by the way -- they said there should be 1 percent formula funding on the growth in the tourism industry. That gives you a certain amount of money that you can count on every year. In other words, if they make $100 million more federally, they will get $1 million more for tourism. If they make $1 billion more, they get $10 million more. That's the more logical way to go; it's the more businesslike way to go. I am, I think, slowly working towards that.
As the member admitted, we have been successful in the last two budgets in getting more funding, which we have designated for specific areas in the ministry. Last year we got $5 million for tourism. That $5 million turned into $472 million, which was $94 to $1, which is a good rate of return. But formula funding is my preferred route. I would think that will eventually come about, and I hope it will come about fairly soon.
C. Tanner: Is the minister being coy or does he have something in his pocket that he's going to pull out sometime before the next election and say: "Look what we've done for you, industry"? Is that the name of the game or hasn't he yet
[ Page 13450 ]
checked with his deputy to find out what the formula is? Perhaps the minister doesn't know what the formula is. Has he made the allocations for this year to the tourist districts?
Hon. B. Barlee: We have a set amount of money we allocate to the various nine regions in British Columbia. Ordinarily there's a fifty-fifty arrangement. We have changed that slightly. If their plan is superb, they will get a little more. If it isn't very good, they may get a little less. We have to look it over very closely. We probably have something like 120 different publications in British Columbia.
Both of us know something about the book trade. Some of them are great, and some of them really are not very professional. We have to look at those. We want them all to have the same wordmark, which we have now in Tourism British Columbia, and see that they are effective. I've looked over some over the weekend, and the ones I looked at.... I hate to be critical, but they weren't very good. So we have to kind of analyze those. Remember that most of my managers in Tourism.... We have four managers. There's one for British Columbia, one for North America as a whole, one for Europe and one for the near East, Asia-Pacific. All those managers are from the private sector. I think only one of them comes under the government, but the rest we hired from the private sector. They have good experience in the tourism industry. So I rely upon their good judgment to look at these and prioritize what they think are very, very fine brochures and advertising schemes, and then we will have to grade those.
C. Tanner: Mr. Chairman, I've got a great suggestion for the minister. He used to write books. I think he should go back to doing that and leave the expertise that is lacking on his part to.... Let him go back and do what he knows he's good at, and leave the tourist association and the tourist industry alone and let them get on with it, having given them some money to make it work better. You didn't answer my question, Mr. Minister. Have you made the allocations yet this year? If not, why not, and when do you intend to make them?
Hon. B. Barlee: Yes, I have the recommendations from 1991-92, 1992-93, 1993-94 and 1994-95, and in the last three years they have been exactly the same as they were the year before. There isn't one district that has changed one iota. That doesn't mean it won't change slightly this year, because it will.
C. Tanner: Upwards or downwards?
Hon. B. Barlee: If an area does an extremely good job on their marketing strategy, I think they would be rewarded slightly for that.
C. Tanner: I take it, then, that those decisions on the merits of their application will be made by your four managers. Then the question that begs to be asked is: where did those four managers come from? I know they came from private industry. We managed without them for three years. Why do we need them now -- to make decisions on this?
Hon. B. Barlee: Yes, certainly I'll be glad to answer that question. Three years ago our income from tourism was $5.3 billion; now it's $6.3 billion. There's been a slight increase of a billion dollars, which I think is fairly effective management. I think it's fairly effective advertising, and according to all the other think tanks in Canada, we lead the country. When the federal government wants to know about tourism, they come to see us. They ask the other provinces, as well.
We have two people sitting at the table with the federal government, and they've been very, very cooperative with us. I just met the major player the other day, and they have given us public credit for running an extremely effective tourism program. Those are not my words; those are words from one of the federal players who is a big player in the tourism industry.
C. Tanner: The minister has increased his staff this year by eight. Are four of those eight the four managers?
Hon. B. Barlee: Let me tell you about staff increases. The province that was second in Canada in increase in tourism revenue was Alberta. They've since changed that, by the way. On the February 15, almost two months ago, they had 130 people in Tourism. They raised $3.3 billion with 130 people. We had 70 people in Tourism and raised $6.3 billion. We're three and a half times as effective as Ralph Klein's tourism ministry in Alberta. I really can't ask for much more. There's no jurisdiction in the country that even comes close. You can go back to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and all the rest of them, and you can't come close as far as leanness in the Tourism ministry is concerned. Dollar per dollar, we're three and a half times as effective as the next closest ministry in Canada.
C. Tanner: Mr. Chairman, I think the minister takes credit where credit is not due. He didn't answer my question, as usual. He's so busy blowing his trumpet that maybe he doesn't hear the question. I asked you if those four new managers are part of the eight new people. If they are, who are the other four?
Hon. B. Barlee: Yes, those four are part of the eight new people, and the other four are spread throughout the ministry -- I don't know specifically which part. I should know, with 70-odd people, but I don't know which part of the ministry the other four are in. I think one is in advertising and marketing, and the other four are the managers.
C. Tanner: What sort of salary would one of those managers be making?
Hon. B. Barlee: I would assume that it's a typical government rate, how they are categorized. We can find that figure for you. I haven't got it at my fingertips. But I think they're worth every penny.
C. Tanner: Could we talk now about the relationship of the department with COTA? I know you've been having ongoing discussions with them. For the benefit of those members who don't know, COTA is the Council of Tourism Associations, and in my view, it's a very important organization in this province for the promotion of tourism. I think we were the last province to have this sort of organization.
My question to the minister is: what is their relationship with him? And is the bill that he has introduced his answer to what they were asking for?
[ Page 13451 ]
Hon. B. Barlee: First of all, in respect to the business managers, they get about 50 percent less than managers in the private sector in the same position of authority. They get $65,000 a year.
As far as COTA is concerned, the hon. member is right. COTA is very, very important. We have ongoing discussions with COTA, and of course, Pat Corbett is the president -- and a very good one, I might add. We will be briefing them again tomorrow. They have mentioned in some of their letters that they have had recognition from this government and that we should keep in close contact with them.
Usually when I go into the Cariboo or some other area, one of my business managers is there. You know, you hear from the public that the bureaucracy doesn't work well. Well, that's sure a surprise to me because I'm very impressed with the bureaucracy that I have. I have 800-odd employees, and if the public knew how hard they worked, they would probably say they are being underpaid. I frankly think they are.
C. Tanner: Mr. Chairman, the minister has been in government too long. He's forgotten how he used to have to scrape and scrimp to make a living as a publisher and as a goldminer, and particularly as a distributor of books. He might think the public service is underpaid. I think they are overpaid, quite frankly, compared to most businesses that I have to deal with and businesses that I know anything about.
Mr. Minister, you told me that you have ongoing conversations. Where are you with regard to their request that you set up an independent tourist authority?
Hon. B. Barlee: Let me first of all tell you exactly what the COTA president did say. This is from the Vernon Morning Star of four days ago:
" 'Minister Barlee and his staff of 68 have done an exemplary job of the tourism industry under very constraining circumstances,' said Pat Corbett, COTA president. 'We feel that the minister and staff of the Ministry of Tourism have come to understand the value of tourism and its incredible economic potential and are doing as much as they possibly can...' However, Corbett believes that government funding of the ministry is not enough."
That's typical of the industry.
C. Tanner: You know, Mr. Chairman, this is really humorous. For three and a half years I have been battling this minister and his predecessor saying: "Put a buck in, and you're going to get ten out." He's now boasting about all the money he gets out, and he's taking credit for something. When he's finally got the budget up to where it was in 1989 -- would you believe? -- he's standing up and boasting about it. He's got the industry so confused that they think they've got something good going for them, when all they've got is what they had five years ago. Come on, let's play it straight. The chairman of COTA knows full well that he's got to butter up the minister, because the minister has got the purse strings. They need each other, but he needs you more than you need him, and that's an unfortunate occurrence.
[4:15]
You didn't answer my question. What have you done, Mr. Minister, with your department to establish an independent tourist authority like the COTA organization was asking you for a few months ago?
Hon. B. Barlee: What we've done is this: we have cooperated very fully with the federal government and their Canadian Tourism Commission, the CTC. We have two people on the board, which is unusual for a province. When I look at that area.... For instance, Pat Corbett's business went up dramatically in January and February. I think we're doing a fairly good job. Then I look across the road to a Best Western hotel, the 108 Hotel which lost money 27 years in a row. I can tell you that because their CEO told me. They made so much money last year that they're adding 20 rooms plus a conference centre, and that's after 27 straight years of losses. Well, not bad.
Their German market came up dramatically -- 13.1, it says. But that isn't the real figure because it did not take into account all the Germans landing at Calgary, jumping into their vans and coming over into the Cariboo.
So I think most people in the industry realize that we're doing a good job. All of them would like a tourism authority. Of course, we understand that and we know why. But what I think the member may miss is this: if the industry were to drive that, the major players in the industry tend to drive a program that benefits their own particular sector. This is not government's job. Government's job is to get people into the province so that it affects every sector.
There are a lot of small players out there haven't got the money to advertise for their own particular sector. We both know that; we've both been in private business. At first blush, it looks like a good idea. A close examination indicates that maybe it isn't quite as good an idea. It is government's basic responsibility to increase that tourism traffic. Once they get into the province, it's their responsibility to hold them there and get them to their particular location.
[D. Schreck in the chair.]
C. Tanner: If the minister believes what he just said, could he explain to me why Australia, Britain, New Brunswick, Ontario and Saskatchewan -- particularly Saskatchewan, which follows the same misguided philosophy that the member does -- have put in tourist authorities? And why is it that Britain and Australia, particularly, have been so successful with tourist authorities when the industry is running their own promotion and doing their own merchandising? They're better at it than the government is. Why is the minister refusing to do the same thing for the industry here as has happened in those provinces and those countries?
Hon. B. Barlee: I think Saskatchewan under Roy Romanow has done an excellent job, but their tourism ministry and their income are about that much compared to ours. There's really no comparison between Saskatchewan's tourism authority and what we're doing in British Columbia. And as far as the Australian authority is concerned, that's on the back of the film industry in Australia, as you well know, and is based upon formula funding. The Australians are working at about 1 to 1.5 percent.
I agree with that, and I think formula funding should go into the ministry because the ministry plays no favourites. We do not play favourites; we cannot play favourites. For every dollar we get, we get $94 back. If we were doing a poor job -- if we were getting $10 back -- I'd say yes, it probably belongs elsewhere. But we think that this year the $1 we get will probably bring back $115.
[ Page 13452 ]
Australia runs a very, very good operation, no doubt about that at all. I just read one of the major magazines for singles in the United States, and the top three areas in the world for tourists to go to are: Ireland first, Great Britain second and British Columbia third. Now it's going to take us awhile to overcome Great Britain, but we're working on it.
C. Tanner: Perhaps the minister would like to comment a little more on Saskatchewan, because irrespective of the relative size of the two industries here and in Saskatchewan.... The member has just left, so I can tell you I don't blame people for not wanting to go to Saskatchewan, since he's from there. I wouldn't have said that when he was here, though.
However, all that aside, the fact of the matter is that they are the most recent jurisdiction to put in a tourist authority. My reading of what they've done is that they have given more opportunity to the industry in Saskatchewan to promote itself. You're saying that because of the size of it, it's easier to do, but I don't think that's the reason. I think the reason is that you don't want to let go. You don't believe the philosophy that the industry can better regulate and merchandise itself than you can.
Hon. B. Barlee: We have significant consultation and discussion with the industry at large. They are always there. We have -- I don't know -- 16 to 20 people on the board, and they have significant input. We have the potential to go out of sight in tourism. Frankly, the dramatic growth we're envisioning -- 9.9 percent in '99; which will probably be 11.2 percent in '99 -- may be very conservative. This is a $4 trillion business worldwide. It grows at -- what? -- $150 billion year.
I'm not negating Saskatchewan's attempt to get their tourism industry off the ground, but tourism is a very, very small player in Saskatchewan. We would rather go the route of Partners in Tourism with the major players, each district in a fifty-fifty partnership, and then, as Pat Corbett mentioned in his letter, consult with them significantly when there are major decisions. We do go along cooperatively. We go along cooperatively with the federal government as well. The federal government, essentially, is looking to us very, very closely for ideas.
C. Tanner: The minister isn't answering the question. He's avoiding the question that I'm asking. He's very good at this. He's very good at telling little stories, and I guess it's from writing books and spending his time looking for lost gold and stuff like that. He had nothing else to do but daydream. You're daydreaming now, Mr. Minister, because you're not answering the question. Are you philosophically committed to a tourist authority run by the industry itself with formula funding from the government?
Hon. B. Barlee: Well, there are two entirely different ideas there. I like formula funding; I think formula funding is the way to go. I am not convinced from what I've seen in the other areas, despite Australia's success, that a set-aside industry controlling the funds will work as advantageously as it could.
C. Tanner: The minister keeps referring to consultation, and I don't disagree that you've had some consultation. However, when you get down to the nitty-gritty, when you get down to the time when you're going to give some money, you're not consulting. You're dictating. You've frankly admitted that you're looking at periodicals and journals and manuscripts, and saying: "Look, this is good and that's bad." You're making the decision. I don't think you're competent to do so, Mr. Minister -- not you personally, but I don't think the ministry is. I think the industry is, and I think the industry would do a better job.
As you admitted, Ireland, and Great Britain in general, is a tourist area bar none, and they've had a tourist authority since 1968. The three countries that make up Great Britain had their own separate tourist authorities in 1968. Admittedly, their criteria aren't quite the same as the ones I have in mind, and they're not quite the same as what ones Saskatchewan is proposing or New Brunswick has. But the fact of the matter is that the industry knows better than you do, sir -- and than your ministry does, sir -- as to how to best promote their own industry. I think you would be doing a much better job if you followed that course of action.
Hon. B. Barlee: Well, if that were the case, why didn't those areas with the tourism authority lead the country in tourism growth last year? Certainly, they didn't. We led it by far. Alberta was a distant second. We'll continue to lead it by far. The Conference Board of Canada said we'll lead the country in 1995 as well, so the proof, essentially, is in the pudding. How are my managers doing? How is the ministry doing? It's doing very well, and those areas that have a tourism authority don't grow at the rate we're growing. So when you look at the end result, the end result is very good regardless of one's priorities or biases.
C. Tanner: The minister knows full well that it's a lucky coincidence that he happened to arrive on the scene at the same time that the industry in British Columbia boomed, the Canadian dollar hit the skids, an awful lot more people wanted to come to British Columbia and many British Columbians didn't go abroad or out of the country because it was too damned expensive. That's why you're doing so well.
Admittedly, the same thing is true in Saskatchewan. But after all, Mr. Minister, you've visited Saskatchewan. So have I. That speaks for itself, surely. Other than the decent side of Alberta that is adjacent to our province.... Come on, Mr. Minister, what is there to go and see? We have something special in this province, and to make the comparison in volume and in success between the Prairies and us is just not a fair comparison.
You might make the comparison between us and New Brunswick, for example, on a dollar-to-dollar basis, and you might also throw in the 100,000 extra people who spend money in tourist areas when they come here. In spite of the fact that they spend money in British Columbia and in spite of the fact that you aren't promoting it sufficiently, although I understand you're going to now....
I guess we philosophically disagree with each other as to how to best promote tourism. I think you're wrong; I think the results could have been even better. I think they're going to be good next year. But I have two questions. You've increased the budget this year by $5 million. Could you tell me in broad terms how you're going to spend that extra $5 million and where you're going to spend it?
[ Page 13453 ]
Hon. B. Barlee: Broken down, I think quite accurately.... The tourism summer employment program, which employs a lot of young people in kind of a vulnerable position, has been very effective. We spend $1.5 million on that.
In tourism marketing: on Vacation B.C., which the member mentioned and we think is very important, we lose about $4.9 billion a year. We make more than that in tourism, but we lose $4.9 billion out of the province. So we're putting $1.25 million right back into that. Then, of course, we're getting another $4 million for culture, which will go into various aspects of the cultural world. So those are the main projects there.
C. Tanner: Besides the $4 million going into culture, my understanding by reading the budget is that you're putting about $5 million back into B.C. and you've accounted for approximately $3 million. What's the other $2 million?
Hon. B. Barlee: The other part of that goes into the Pavilion Corporation.
C. Tanner: I'm a little taken aback that you had such difficulty. It's such an obvious question, it would seem to me. I thought you'd have had the answer before I'd even sat down. It makes me worried, for a man who likes to throw figures around so much and loves statistics, that something as basic as a $5 million increase in the budget was so hard to find. There are three of you sitting there trying to work it out, and here I am all by myself. I mean, this is hardly fair, Mr. Chairman. Anyway, let's just talk about the $2 million in the Pavilion Corporation. What are you doing with that?
Hon. B. Barlee: That's their usual grant.
[4:30]
C. Tanner: What are you doing with marketing B.C.? It's $1.25 million. What exactly is the program? Is it TV? Is it a periodical? What do you have in mind? Or are you going to allow the industry to do it for itself this time?
Hon. B. Barlee: As I said before, this will be a joint venture with industry all across the province.
C. Tanner: What's the ratio -- 1 to 3, 1 to 4 or 1 to 1?
Hon. B. Barlee: I foreshadowed that before, hon. Chair. In some cases it will be 1 to 1, in some cases it will be slightly more, in others slightly less.
C. Tanner: Mr. Chairman, the reason I asked the question is that the minister made a big point last year, if he recalls, of saying that you were getting as much as 1 to 4. You were getting the industry, you were getting the group, you were getting the area and getting the government in there. What do you anticipate this year? Has that not been as successful as you anticipated last year?
Hon. B. Barlee: I think it has been very successful. Tourism operates as a buffer to small business, as the member well knows. A lot of that tourism money spreads through small business. I just received a StatsCan paper, which I find very interesting. It shows how effective it is. The third-highest increase in retail sales is in Saskatchewan, an NDP province. The second-highest is Ontario at 10.3; that's an NDP province. The highest is British Columbia at 12.5. Of the other provinces, some are in the minus: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, P.E.I. It's really quite astonishing. We cooperate with industry. We look very closely at their strategies, and we consult with them, sometimes at considerable length. If we think it is effective, we reward them. It's the same in private business.
C. Tanner: It really is a strange phenomenon we see here. Other than one quote from an obscure newspaper by one person in one comparatively small industry, business doesn't like your government. It doesn't like it in Saskatchewan; it doesn't like it in Ontario. Why is it, Mr. Chairman, that the minister is trying to convince me that they like him here?
I think they are stuck with your government; I don't think they like you. I think they are stuck with you as minister, Frankly, I think they do like you -- I can tell you that. From what I hear, you are not a bad chap at all. You are trying hard, anyway. It's just that you're very ineffective. But congratulations and keep trying. How do you employ those students who you take on for summer employment? Where do you get them from? How do you choose them? Does industry choose them? Do you choose them? Are they university students?
Hon. B. Barlee: These are people who have, in most instances, not held down a long-term job. They run into that in the 18-29-year-old bracket. About 83 percent are young women, and we found that the program is extremely effective. I may have some other details here. It doesn't say how many are women, but it is 83 percent -- about 400 positions. If they return, they get $7.50 an hour, and if they are new, they get $7 per hour. Benefits are paid in addition to the hourly wage.
What it really does is inaugurate a lot of young people who have never been in the tourism world or the business world, and it prepares them, I think, quite adequately for that world.
C. Tanner: Are they being used primarily in information centres and the ones on the highway by the chambers of commerce, etc.?
Hon. B. Barlee: Yes, that is correct.
C. Tanner: I don't have any more generalized questions on tourism. I said, we're going to be talking about small business when my friend is here. I have one specific question, though, from an organization called the.... I guess you could call it the nautical industry of British Columbia. I think the minister has received some requests for funding from them. What they're contending is that in spite of what the minister said about giving some funding to golfing organizations through the various districts in the province, the fact is that the government does sponsor certain industries. The boating industry feels they have been neglected, but by their own admission it was partly their own fault, because they haven't been able to get together. Now all facets of the industry have gotten together, and they're making a representation to the government for some funding. Can the minister indicate to this member whether or not you have received an application, and are you considering it?
Hon. B. Barlee: Actually, I just read one of the letters before I came up here. One of them asked for $1.5 million,
[ Page 13454 ]
which is really not realistic, and some of them asked for other funding. We think the nautical industry is important. It's part of the package in British Columbia, and as the member himself recognized, we have done some work towards the sunken wrecks in various parts of the province. They are all part and parcel of their tourism association, I would assume. Again, every part of that tourism association of the nine different areas in British Columbia....There are certain sectors that would like virtually all the funding, and it simply doesn't work that way. It's a partnership program, and they have to make their case with their co-investing business people.
C. Tanner: To correct myself, the organization is called the B.C. Marine Tourism Marketing Council. I think they've only just found their feet in the last few months. I was very impressed with some of the statistics they gave me, and I'm going to quickly brief the minister, if he would bear with me for a minute. There are an estimated 30 businesses offering overnight fishing charters. About 300 operators offer day charters. There are 165 privately owned marinas, but they feel there is an ability for them to get together and promote themselves with the help of the government. Over 70 businesses are offering power cruising in British Columbia. Sail cruising, bare-boat or skippered cruising: there are 50 operators in British Columbia. Wildlife viewing, which appeals to me because nothing gets lost and people have an opportunity to see our wildlife, is one of the attractions here, and there are over 50 operators of wildlife tours. Scuba diving, which we talked about previously, has 20 operators in British Columbia. There are 15 kayaking businesses now and, I suspect, a lot more to come. I notice now the absence of wild-water kayaking. So there's a large industry there, which has finally got its act together and is coming to the government asking: "Can you help us"? Is there anything you can do outside of the regions?
Hon. B. Barlee: Certainly there are some players in that sector who do their own advertising, and very effectively. Bob Wright is one. But he's probably the major player in that whole sector. I would say to any group of business people in the tourism business -- and it's certainly a marvellous industry -- that they should get together, go to their meetings and simply priorize or prioritize, whichever word you prefer, their area of interest. That's what is done in every other sector in the province, and it's done quite effectively. There are certain players who probably have more of an impact on their sector than other players. Well, that's part of it, and we realize that. But there are so many areas in British Columbia that are growing, not just the nautical sector. Close-adventure tourism is growing dramatically. Wild-river rafting is growing. Old West rendezvous are growing. Well, of course, but I could point out probably 15 or 20 different areas where there is significant growth. We cannot particularly pick and choose. They have to get together with their colleagues in that particular sector and make sure that their area is prioritized.
C. Tanner: Mr. Chairman, the minister mentioned during the conversation on the previous question from the member for Surrey-Cloverdale that, in effect, last year or the year before, the industry was interested in and helped promote a golf tour. I think you currently do something in the skiing industry and in some of the mountain resort areas. I know you've been doing something in whitewater rafting. Don't you feel that this particular industry is a very important one to British Columbia and that it's an area we should be paying more attention to?
Hon. B. Barlee: The hon. member realizes that when we did promote that golfing tour in the Okanagan-Kootenay area, that golfing tour was essentially, if I remember correctly, set down by the Okanagan-Similkameen Tourist Association. They considered that a high priority. So it eventually comes back to the Partners in Tourism program. If they consider it a very high priority, they will prioritize it. That's why that program has been set up: to listen to the industry. If they make a mistake, everybody suffers. But we have kept that funding intact. Frankly, my feedback from the industry has been that they're quite happy.
C. Tanner: I'm not saying that the industry isn't happy. I'm saying that finally, like COTA, the associations have gotten together and that you're addressing that concern and the industry as a whole in that way. I'm not sure about the golfing industry, but it sounds to me like there's some sort of mutual arrangement among all the golfing facilities in the province. There certainly is a mutual arrangement among all the ski-touring operators, because this is an off-season item and the ministry promotes it. It seems to me that you now should be looking at those marine industries as a group, over and above what they're doing in their own districts, and giving them some seed money. I haven't heard the minister say he's considering that.
Hon. B. Barlee: Certainly that's important. The member points out some salient points. We have given them money -- for instance, for a marine guide, which they didn't have before. That came from my ministry, which is a step in the right direction. If they make the point with their colleagues that the member is trying to make, they will be successful. We devote a certain amount of funding to each area. If they are an extremely large player, certainly they would have a significant impact in their sector, which in this area would probably be Vancouver Island -- one of the nine sectors.
C. Tanner: Obviously one of the advantages of living on an island is that there is a lot of marine activity, and it is of particular interest to members in my constituency. Frankly, that's where they came from. But when I look over the group as a whole, they come from all over the province, and there is interior as well as coastal activity taking place. I have been unable to elicit from the minister any assurance that he will talk to them or that he'll fund them. Let me assure the minister that I believe these people have a very good cause, and I will follow it up with his ministry and his officials and with him, hopefully. I hope to find him as conversant, as reliable and as helpful as he was in the artificial reef case, where everybody has benefited by his good graces.
Maybe it's time now to turn to the cultural side of your budget. Perhaps we should start by you telling me what you're going to spend the $4 million on. If it gives you any problem, perhaps I can help you, because I've read the paper.
Hon. B. Barlee: I could go back to my opening comments and state the various areas we are going to be devoting that $4 million to. Some of it will go individual artists, some will go to the publishing firms; some will go to the publishing firms, some will go to writers and some will go to travelling troupes.
[ Page 13455 ]
I think we've gone over it very, very carefully in consultation with the cultural community, as well. It's simply an increase from $20.5 million to $24.5 million -- about a 20 percent increase -- which was a departure from most other jurisdictions in Canada.
The federal government, for instance, cut funding to the publishers of British Columbia -- you and I know the publishing industry -- by 55 percent. So we will be picking up a little bit of the slack in that -- not a lot of it, because of course we couldn't pick up all of it. We will be trying to ease the burden on the publishing industry. I think the publishing industry provides a window into British Columbia, as our writers do.
Our publishers will be getting something, our writers will be getting something and various troupes in different parts of the artistic community will be getting a little bit of a helping hand.
C. Tanner: It's with some hesitation that I start talking about the publishing industry. I might be accused of conflict of interest, but I might as well jump in with both feet.
I don't think, quite frankly, that the federal government or the provincial government should be giving money to publishers -- I never have. I think we should be giving money to authors to help them over the difficult times they have. I think publishers should be left to do the best they can, and if they don't make it, they should be gone.
I think there are far too many publishers in Canada. I think the industry is peopled by members who have lived on handouts from all levels of government, and I don't think it's done the industry, the authors or the publishing industry much good, because they've learned to live on subsidies. So I'm not that upset that the federal government cut the publishing industry in British Columbia or anywhere else in Canada by 55 percent. I've said the same thing fairly consistently for three years, so if I've stuck my neck out again today, so be it.
[4:45]
That leads me to my question. You mentioned that you are giving money to artists. Can the minister be a bit more specific? What sort of money can writers in this province expect for the contribution they make to our cultural betterment?
Incidentally, let me say at the same time that I congratulate the minister for spending this money. I think this government spends money frivolously. In this case I think you are spending it wisely. I've said so in the House and I say so here. Just like money in tourism is well invested, I think money in culture is well invested. It comes back manyfold to the benefit of all British Columbians. Specifically, how much money are you spending on artists and, in particular, on writers?
Hon. B. Barlee: We're going over that in consultation with our board and looking at all aspects of it. I can't give you an exact figure and probably won't be able to give you an exact figure until two weeks down the road. I'll be glad to provide it then.
As far as the publishing industry is concerned, I disagree in some respects with the member. I'll tell you why. I can think of various books I have read in the last year or two. One is published by Douglas and McIntyre, Chiefly Feasts. That could not make money. It is a marvellous, marvellous book, in this case on the Kwakiutl nation. It's full colour, top-rate paper and hard cover, and certainly they could not hope to break even on that book. It does give a window into British Columbia and that part of British Columbia's past which I think is very important.
C. Tanner: Let's agree to disagree, Mr. Minister. I've been involved in the industry for 25 years. I've watched it and so have you. We've watched a lot of people get fat on it and not produce a hell of a lot of decent literature. I've seen a lot of people who learn to take the easy road rather than the tough road of selling a product for what it's worth.
You weren't very specific. You're unable, I take it, to break down those figures right now, so it leads me to the conclusion that you must have gone to Treasury Board or gone to your fellow colleagues in cabinet and convinced them, on the strength of your own personality, that we've got to throw $4 million extra of hard-earned dollars at the cultural sector of British Columbia without even knowing how you're going to spend it. Is that true, Mr. Minister?
Hon. B. Barlee: What we did is we drew a quick comparison with the other jurisdictions across Canada and found we were second from last. We said: "Well, we have a very vibrant cultural community. Many people do very well in it, and some will never do well in it."
You and I were both publishers, and both did very well. I did not get a hand with my publishing firms, and I still have two of them, thank God. But other people who elect to publish books that do not have general appeal.... I don't think they should be priced out of the marketplace because of that. I think there is a responsibility to the Crown -- to a degree, not a great deal -- to provide a different sort of avenue for people who don't read the books that you and I may prefer. So I think there is room for some intervention by the Crown.
Certainly, when I look at the other provinces -- New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, P.E.I. and all those Liberal provinces -- they actually provided more per capita than we did. So we said, "Well, maybe this isn't quite fair; we have a good community and we should look very, very analytically at that $4 million," which is what we're doing now. We're not making quick decisions. We're making decisions in consultation with the industry and with people who've been in the business, in many instances, for 30 or 40 years.
I think that's the route to go, and I'd be quite willing to provide those details to the member -- but not at the present time, because we have not made all of the decisions. They have not been set in stone.
C. Tanner: I've got to congratulate the minister again for going to Liberal provinces to find out how to run his ministry. I can't suggest a better example than those Liberal provinces. They've been around a long time. Since you're just here today and gone tomorrow, you might as well make the most of it while you can, and learn what you can, because it's going to be another 20 years before you get the opportunity again. In the meantime, you can gain some good insight into how to spend some of your money from some of the provinces.
I think the minister better pull himself up a little short, though, and think about the promises that his government made when they ran for office four years ago, when they were going to do all sorts of things for the cultural industry. They've done nothing until now. It's taken them four years to find the
[ Page 13456 ]
courage do the right thing by the cultural industries of this province -- finally. It's about time. I think it probably has something to do with the fact that you're getting near the end of your tenure, and you need to buy back those friends that you lost because you didn't fulfil your promises to them before.
Apart from the authors and actual artists, what else are you spending that money on, in general terms? You obviously haven't made the detailed decisions yet, but can you give me some more generalities as to how you're spending the same amount of money as you spent last year, in general terms, and how much extra money you have and what you're spending it on besides the ones that we've already talked about?
Hon. B. Barlee: The operating grants to 230 arts organizations are $9.8 million. Community arts development, which includes 90 community arts councils and 1,200 member organizations, comes to $1.075 million. Art awards to individuals, except for scholarships, comes to $1.45 million; B.C. Festival of the Arts comes to $900,000. Various touring programs in 60 communities, including artists in schools, come to $760,000. The arts stabilization initiative comes to $250,000. We have other cultural funding in B.C. Film at $4.5 million, and other cultural industries -- these are industries at large -- at $2.145 million. Administration, by the way, is the lowest in the country. The average in the country is about 15 percent. We run at 5.5 percent -- tight again.
C. Tanner: I can't believe how you blow your own trumpet, Mr. Minister. Whatever you do, you've got the best of this, you've got the finest of that, you're having the greatest results. Give some credit to the fact that the market out there is responsible for some of it. You didn't do it all, it might come as a surprise to you. You've done better than your predecessor. You're learning slowly, usually by looking at Liberal governments in other parts of the country. But give a little credit where it's due. I mean, I'm giving you credit for some of the things you do. I think you should give the industry and the artists and those people out there some credit as well.
I am not knocking the program, but why are we allocating money through your ministry that's going to be used in schools? How did that come about? I've always thought it strange. Frankly, I think we should be spending more money in schools for this type of thing. Why does it come out of your budget and not out of the Education budget?
Hon. B. Barlee: This is basically to send various types of artists into the schools -- generally in the lower grades, but not always -- to represent a particular artistic point of view. I don't think that hurts. I think it is not a lot of money; it's some money.
As far as comparing with other regions, it is true Canada Council's administrative overhead is only 20 percent, and ours is 5.5 percent. So there's a fairly good comparison there. As far as the other Liberal jurisdictions across the country, New Brunswick has not done very well. They are minus 2.6 percent in retail sales. P.E.I. is minus 2.6 percent. Nova Scotia is minus 6.4 percent, but Newfoundland has come up 0.7 percent.
C. Tanner: I love the way you mix apples and oranges. I thought we were talking about what is going on in the culture industry. You are talking about retail sales now. Mr. Chairman, maybe you could direct the minister to sort of stay on the subject, and we could come to some sort of logical conclusion if he would just follow where I am going. It would be nice if he could come with me, and maybe we could come to a conclusion at the end, Mr. Minister.
The question I asked is: why does that money appear in your budget rather than in the Education budget? You didn't answer. You were talking about the retail sales somewhere else. Also, when you are making the grants, in actual fact I don't think the ministry itself makes the grants. They sort of guide them, and the committees make most of the grants, don't they?
Hon. B. Barlee: Yes, it is true that the committees do make.... They give most of the advice for making the grants from various sectors of the cultural community. As far as us providing for the artists to come into the schools, I think that does not properly belong under the Ministry of Education but more properly under the Culture ministry.
C. Tanner: When those committees are making grants, are you following the procedure of previous years, where there is a conditional amount raised by those organizations before the grants are made, or are they all unconditional grants?
Hon. B. Barlee: Yes, that is correct.
C. Tanner: I notice that we are pushing 5 o'clock, and maybe we should adjourn for the day. If the minister wants to -- I don't know whether we have done this in the past -- but if the minister is so inclined and wants to pass two-thirds of his budget, I would be happy to oblige him. Mr. Chairman, I don't know whether it's done or if that's the system, but I'd be happy to see him.... I have enough answers, believe it or not, through all the barrage of spiel and horn-blowing. I found enough answers that I am satisfied that the minister is doing not too bad a job.
The Chair: Hon. members, the custom in the Legislature is to debate all aspects of a ministry under the title of the office of the minister, and nothing precludes the members from continuing that custom and going on to other matters the next time this committee sits. Once the members are ready to adjourn for the day, it being almost a year since we have graced this room, one of the members may move the appropriate motion, which is that the committee rise, report progress and ask leave to sit again.
S. O'Neill: I move that the committee rise, report progress and ask leave to sit again.
Motion approved.
The committee rose at 4:58 p.m.
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