Hansard — Thursday, April 3, 2008 a.m.

The following electronic version is for informational purposes only.
The printed version remains the official version.

Official Report of

DEBATES OF THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY


CONTENTS

	Routine Proceedings
		Page


Point of Privilege (continued)		10855
	Hon. R. Thorpe

Second Reading of Bills		10855
	Utilities Commission Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 15) (continued)
	C. Trevena
	G. Gentner
	H. Lali
	N. Simons
	D. Routley
	B. Lekstrom

Proceedings in the Douglas Fir Room

Committee of Supply		10869
	Estimates: Ministry of Transportation (continued)
	G. Coons
	R. Fleming
	Hon. K. Falcon
	D. Cubberley

Hon. R. Thorpe: I rise to respond to a point of privilege made by the member for Cariboo South in this House on April 1, 2008. Let me say without reservation that the statements by the member for Cariboo South are without question wrong, and his allegations unfounded.

First of all, the member states that his allegations are the result of the estimates debate of March 11, 2008. The member wrongly suggests that I knowingly misled the House.

Shortly after 10:10 a.m. on March 11, 2008, the member for Cariboo South began asking me questions related to the B.C. Assessment office in Williams Lake. With each question asked, I conferred with the chief executive officer of B.C. Assessment and, with advice, provided an answer to the member's questions to the best of my ability. At no time did I, nor did staff, ever attempt to knowingly mislead the member.

In addition to the various questions asked, the member and I had further exchanges. In the review of Hansard of March 11, 2008, the record clearly shows that just before 10:20 a.m. on the 11th, the member for Cariboo South made the following statement: "Is the minister willing to review the situation in the Williams Lake office?"

At approximately 10:20 a.m. I replied to the member with the following statement:

Mr. Speaker, I believe that the above clearly demonstrates my commitment to work with the member and not to knowingly mislead anyone in the House. I further offer you a quote from the member for Cariboo South, made right after my statement noted above:

Mr. Speaker, I ask: does that statement from the member for Cariboo South sound like he has been knowingly misled? I can assure you, Mr. Speaker, and this House that I have not misled and will not knowingly mislead this House, and I believe my comments and those from the member for Cariboo South clearly demonstrate that the member was not knowingly misled and that his allegations are clearly unfounded.

Hon. M. de Jong: In this chamber I call continued second reading debate on Bill 15, Utilities Commission Amendment Act, 2008, and in Committee A, Committee of Supply, for the information of members, the continuing estimates of the Ministry of Transportation.

C. Trevena: I would like to continue with my remarks on Bill 15, the Utilities Commission Amendment Act, which I was quite vociferously opposing yesterday afternoon at the end of the session which we have and would like to continue to vociferously oppose.

One of the issues that I was wanting to move on to when we called adjournment of the debate was that of the concept of smart meters. While smart meters are obviously…. It's useful to have meters for electricity. We all have meters for electricity. As my colleague the member for Malahat–Juan de Fuca mentioned here, we have them outside the house, and we can watch them go around very fast sometimes and slow other times.

To have smart meters put inside every house at a cost of almost $1 billion doesn't really seem to be very smart to me when we are talking about energy conservation. We are urging people to conserve energy. Surely a billion dollars would be better spent looking at retrofitting of people's homes, looking at ways of making sure that people were not expending energy and were able to save energy.

If we're talking about smart meters, it's not so long ago that we had the coin-in-the-slot meters. When I had an apartment — what would be called a bachelor, a bedsit, in England — when I first started out, you would put your coin in the meter, and you knew how much electricity you were using because the lights would go out when you ran out of money. I don't think anybody wants to go back to that.

Instead of installing new meters, instead of going to everybody's home and installing new meters and urging people to look at the energy that they conserve in that way, maybe that billion dollars would be better spent on grants, on assistance and on enabling people to

make sure that they could save energy rather than watch how much energy they're using and panic about how much energy they're using. That would be a much better use, I believe, of our taxpayers' money.

I really wanted to go back to this whole idea of energy security and the environment — part 3 of the bill — which, as I was talking about yesterday, I am concerned about. The whole idea that the government is using about sustainability…. The Ministry of Environment was talking about this. The Ministry of Environment was talking about the need for change and the fact that this was really going to be a great way to go forward for the people of B.C. and a really good environmental initiative.

Sadly, this use of independent power producers is really not going to be sustainable for the production of electricity, at least the way members on this side of the House believe that sustainability should be addressed. I mean, our definition of sustainability is much more global, I believe, than the members opposite. The government side's view of sustainability comes down very much to dollars and cents. It comes down to economic terms. We come down to how much money we can save.

Our definition of sustainability is much broader. It looks at environmental sustainability, social sustainability. It looks at the commons, looks at making sure that we have a fair transition. The government's view of sustainability is one that is sustainable for profits.

What we're seeing here, when we look at energy security in the environment, really doesn't address some very basic issues that we as a province need to be looking at — that we as a society need to be looking at when we are talking about environmental change, when we're talking about climate change. When we are looking forward — as the Minister of Environment said, he wants to look forward — we've got to be much wider. We've got to be looking at protecting the ecosystem. We've got to be looking at protecting the commons. We've got to be looking at making sure that this is fair and just.

This bill does not do any of that. It does not reflect the true essence of what sustainability is about. Instead, it goes to basic fear instincts. That's one of the other aspects that troubles me about this bill. The linking A to B to C is that we have energy security. We have the environment. We have the fear that if we don't go through this path, we are not going to be able to produce enough energy. According to this logic, if we don't go through this path and have independent power producers producing energy instead of B.C. Hydro producing energy, we're not going to have enough energy.

The government is creating a sense of fear around the energy self-sufficiency argument. It is not dealing with the issues of environmental concerns. It is just flagging environmental concerns — but without addressing the real issues of the desire for change. It is again looking at the issues of environmental concerns and giving the solution that: "Well, we will do it through independent power producers. We will make sure that our independent power producers have a greenwashed effect, and everything's going to be fine." The dots just don't connect. They don't really make sense in the greater whole of what we really need.

I find that, when we are talking about something that is as essential for us as our power and our electricity, our utilities, to base arguments on fear and on specious facts, exploiting people's want for change and saying that what is really happening here is going to be good for the environment, when it is essentially good for certain companies' pocketbooks, is really being…

C. Trevena: Thank you. The member for Columbia River–Revelstoke gave me the word. It is being disingenuous.

C. Trevena: We have here a bill that doesn't address the issues that really need addressing, and that's one of the troubles. It is a bill that could be directive. We now have it as legislation. We have a bill that the government side is arguing is part of a greater climate change initiative, which it isn't, and we have a bill that is going to be taking away, piece by piece, our B.C. Hydro from us, from all the people of B.C., now and in the future.

That is why I'm opposing Bill 15, the Utilities Commission Amendment Act, and will continue to oppose it, and I'm very pleased that colleagues on this side of the House will vociferously oppose this bill.

G. Gentner: Looking up at the gallery, particularly with the sun that has arisen this morning…. It's beautiful outside. I look across. There are members donning a daffodil this morning, indicating the need to acknowledge Cancer Awareness Month, to understand what's happening with major epidemic proportions in our province.

I bring it to your attention because it is utilities like B.C. Hydro, with surpluses and money that's able to find its way to general revenue and filter its way to benefiting British Columbians with medical expertise and research…. This is a utility that has been a major asset to the province of British Columbia, and we have to acknowledge that here today. This bill in particular, I believe, is part and parcel of the dismantling of this major, important utility.

What this bill….When you read between the lines, this is piracy. This is part and parcel of the lack of regulatory authority to sell out our rivers, sell out our water, our power and our resources. I've said it before. We have become the hollow province, a hollow government that believes in P3s as a sure thing to all our…. A solution, outsourcing. It's hollow because the Liberal government has privatized to the point that there will be no tangible content left in this province.

The French are free enterprise, but they would call this savage capitalism. There's no end to this. It's just privatize, privatize, privatize. The Utilities Commission Amendment Act allows that even further.

When you look at the bill and you look at the notion of the sweeping powers now — the Minister of Energy and Mines and cabinet will be able to oversee the regulatory authority of Hydro and other utilities; it's inferred — I think we are in jeopardy here with transparency and accountability — all those wonderful things that the Utilities Commission provides the citizens of British Columbia.

This is a means to an end. This is a means to a long-term project of this government, to incrementally privatize everything it possibly can, from resources to water. If it could, it would privatize the air we breathe.

G. Gentner: The member opposite can laugh and sneer. She's donning a daffodil, commemorating the need to look at the important acknowledgment of cancer.

But when you look at the cumulative airshed, the air quality up in the Fraser Valley that is part of the respiratory diseases, etc., and you look at how this Utilities Commission will be allowed sweeping powers to administer, to actually increase or decrease the ambient air quality in the airshed…. It will be done with such things as cogeneration. I'll talk about it in a few minutes.

These are the little things in this bill, the Utilities Commission Amendment Act, that we have got to raise to the attention of all British Columbians, for it's their health that could be impacted.

We seem to forget that there is a connection between the environment, energy, economy and our health. It's all interconnected. This has health implications. When we talk about the need or the reason of this bill…. It's one of a long series of trends we've seen from this government. We've seen how they've attempted to deregulate or dismantle B.C. Rail and the scandal that's happening because of that. We're now seeing the incremental destruction and decapitation of B.C. Hydro.

They've done it with removal of the transmission systems — namely, that of B.C. Transmission lines — and that was an attempt to eventually separate the marketing procedures, therefore, from the transmission and the power through grids down to the States. We've seen the Vancouver Convention Centre Expansion Project — another Crown corporation that this government has woefully managed.

We've seen, of course, roof collapse — another Crown corporation. Now we're talking here about our Utilities Commission, which is a Crown agency. B.C. Place had a roof collapse. You've seen the ICBC scandal erupting once again. Here's another Crown corporation. There is a classic example of why we have a B.C. Utilities Commission which looks at some of the rates of ICBC. It's doing so because of the privatization of ICBC — namely, that of the premium rates that private insurers now can involve itself in, in the marketplace.

Of course, we've seen another Crown corporation, the B.C. Lottery Corporation — major scandal with the retailers, fraud, etc…. The members opposite couldn't even run a peanut stand.

When you look at the examples of how they've run our Crown corporations into the ground…. B.C. Hydro is one, and the mechanism to regulate it, the Utilities Commission…. We are in dear trouble in this province.

Now, we see a need here to change the B.C. Utilities Commission. The importance of the Utilities Commission is, basically, to regulate hydroelectricity, the gas and other utilities, and its ability to look at the costs and benefits to British Columbians. That is the purpose and the mandate of the BCUC. Unfortunately, with the sweeping powers that are going to be afforded to the minister now, we are going to be denied a full inquiry as to the costs and benefits.

I've been involved in some of the long, enduring and sometimes, I admit, boring hearings of the B.C. Utilities Commission, but it is probably a stellar example of why we have a consultative approach in this province, why we have to have public hearings and why we have to listen to everybody, whether it's an intervener or whether it's a common citizen.

I'll give you an example. I've spent many a time listening to the concerns of Delta residents — that of the overhead transmission lines running through an area of Tsawwassen. It was an incredible process to actually listen to it and to have the Utilities Commission listen to all those facts and to register it.

It was also interesting that the Minister of Energy and Mines, before the last election, promised the people of Delta that there would be no such increase in the voltage going through their neighbourhoods. It's also interesting that, no matter, a few months after the election the BCTC was back at it again to bulldoze and continue their mandate — what they believe was a beneficial mandate — to increase the transmission lines through residential areas.

There is a difference that separates us from those on the other side, which is that this is the government's amendment to the Utilities Commission. On this side, we presented — yours truly presented — a private member's bill. It was an amendment to the Utilities Commission. It was a matter of opening up the process.

What this government's doing is it's skewing and taking away transparencies from the Utilities Commission. We introduced a bill whereby we would open it up even further. We came forward with a bill that would look seriously at the precautionary principle.

The precautionary principle was that before a transmission line, for example, would go through a playground or a school or residential area, we would err on the side of caution before we would take that next step. It would be an even more stringent evaluation of those impacts to the residents and people and the environment. It would be somewhat rigorous. But on the precautionary principle, we had other options we could have looked at. There are your other rights-of-way through Delta that wouldn't have impacted residential areas, but the government has refused to go along in that direction.

We on this side are on record as having an open, transparent process. We would certainly welcome the government to about-face its particular direction here

and seriously consider our private member's bill that was introduced last session.

The curious thing about all this is that we have a bill that's introduced by the Minister of Energy and Mines, and yet this jurisdiction, the Utilities Commission, falls under, I believe, the Attorney General. Again, why is it that the Attorney General hasn't stood up here and introduced this bill? Why is that?

G. Gentner: Yeah. Maybe we are lucky. Maybe we are tired of stonewalling. We're tired of being denied. Maybe we are lucky. Maybe we're going to get some real answers from the minister opposite. Maybe that's why it's all it is. But I don't think that's the reason.

I think it's because the Utilities Commission has been politicized. It is now in the hands of the Attorney General. That jurisprudence, that quasi-judicial influence and tradition of the Utilities Commission, I think, is a thing of the past.

So I think that when you look at how it works and what has been happening here, the B.C. Utilities Commission is going down the way of the dodo bird, just like all the other Crown corporations and all the other Crown agencies we've seen put forward by this government.

We need more power. We believe in power for the people, but this government believes in power for the powerful. It believes in power to the power-producing powerful people, power to the money-grabbing power producers themselves. It's power for profit before people.

Let's quickly look at the Utilities Commission. I know there's been a lot of talk about the needs of hydro and what the Minister of Energy is proposing, but let's really take a closer look at the Utilities Commission because, after all, that's what this is supposed to be about. It's supposed to be about the amendment to the Utilities Commission.

I have to ask the question right away: where is the regulatory authority of the independent power producers within the B.C. Utilities Commission? When you look at the act itself and its definitions, a public utility means: "a person or person's lessee…who owns or operates in British Columbia, equipment or facilities for (a) the production, generation, storage, transmission, sale, delivery or provision of electricity, natural gas, steam or any other agent for the production of light, heat, cold or power to or for the public or a corporation for compensation…." That is the definition.

You look at the utilities commissions in the States. They do have to, indeed, involve themselves with the private corporations, because they are the utilities that provide it. But where in this bill do we provide strong regulatory authorities over independent power producers in the Utilities Commissions Amendment Act? This is not here. It's not here for a reason. It's not here because that's not the intent.

This government believes in deregulation. It doesn't believe in regulating corporations who have a run of the river. It's a gold mine. Instead they'd rather try and overregulate B.C. Hydro, put a damper on its activities, take away its resource and development and make sure it doesn't expand and deliver goods for the people of British Columbia.

Now, I want to talk about…. British Columbia Utilities Commission is an independent regulatory agency of the provincial government that operates and ministers the Utilities Commission Act. Yet the government created a whole ministry, when it was first elected, on deregulation. We had these core reviews. It totally went against the grain of independent regulatory agencies. It completely decided to go in a different vein, and here we are today.

It's continuing along with that line. The commission's primary responsibility is the regulation of energy utilities under its jurisdiction to ensure that the rates charged for energy are fair. It regulates ICBC and gas but doesn't regulate IPPs. Interesting. We're slowly moving away to private utilities. We can talk about utilities in the past being a monopoly owned by the province, but we're seeing oligopolies now run…. That's what they're going to be.

We know what General Electric has bought in here, for good reason. Didn't W.A.C. Bennett nationalize a private energy corporation — B.C. Electric? Oh, sure, he did that because he saw there were some problems here. He nationalized it. He was a socialist. W.A.C. Bennett was a socialist. He was nationalizing our energy supply in this province because he was worried. The free enterprise system was not working. It was gouging people. He used forethought. He was a creative thinker. But this government wants to dismantle it.

The commission's responsibility is to regulate energy. It's also there to provide safe, adequate and secure service to their customers. Now, where are the IPPs in this one? Why aren't they regulated? They're not regulated through this at all anymore. I'll talk about why that is in a few seconds.

The commission's regulatory jurisdiction is defined in the utilities act and in part 7 of the Pipeline Act. The commission regulates electric utilities, gas utilities, steam heat and intraprovincial pipelines in British Columbia.

I'm just wondering. Are the IPPs safe? I don't believe they provide adequate service to the people of British Columbia. To make sure of that, they should be regulated accordingly under the Utilities Commission Act. But not according to this government.

Let's look at some of the other major functions that we take for granted that the Utilities Commission does. It provides, among many things, a historical legacy of documents that are also available on line. It's a wealth of information, of precedents, on how things are regulated, rates and how projects are derived.

Unfortunately, if the minister is going to gain this whole new authority to interfere — because that's what it's going to be now — how much legitimate documentation will be available? How far and how thorough will the jurisdiction of the Utilities Commission go today after this bill is created? Hopefully, there will be some answers available to that when we get to committee stage,

The information is on line, but it also creates precedents that are available to all. The commission generally receives many kinds of complaints. These are complaints filed against regulated utilities by other utilities, individuals or groups. So this is the power of the utilities corporation.

I have to ask, though: isn't it interesting that we don't regulate independent power producers but they are interveners under the Utilities Commission? Just like municipal governments, they are interveners. Isn't that a flip? Isn't that interesting? Private profit-makers, who are slowly grabbing control of the electrical grid of British Columbia and the power production of British Columbia, are the interveners in the Utilities Commission. They're not regulated, but they can certainly intervene. This is the direction we are going.

The commission receives complaints from utility customers who are unable to resolve disputes with their respective utilities without assistance. There's no resolve here, and none when it comes down to the IPPs.

It deals with complaints. It looks at the practices and the procedure. It looks at power line extensions. It looks at easements, right-of-way maintenance, meter readings and estimates. The question is: how much of this is applicable now to the IPPs? We're going to see that the minister is going to have the ability to interfere with the information that is going to be produced to the apparently quasi-judicial Utilities Commission. But when it comes down to the IPPs…. Many do have easements; they do have right-of-ways.

Where are we heading with this? It's an incremental, deregulated, profit-making scheme for independent power producers. It's not here to serve the people of British Columbia.

The Utilities Commission also maintains a database of interested individuals and organizations who have asked to receive information from the commission. The database contains names, telephone numbers, fax numbers and addresses. It indicates the types of…. Everything you would ever want to know about what's actually happening with your electrical power grid system.

That data now — if I have it correct, and I believe the minister has these sweeping powers — could be intervened. It doesn't have to. It could be a project that could be halted and stopped. The environmental groups, independent power producers, are among the group of general regulators, and there are a few dedicated individuals who regularly intervene as active participants or observers.

How much will that be interfered with now — the ability to make a legitimate argument before the commission and actually maybe even defend B.C. Hydro? Those questions have got to be answered.

As a consumer of electricity or natural gas, you may have concerns about the rates that you pay for these commodities, the reliability of utility services or the efficiency with which the energy is supplied to consume. You may feel strongly enough that you want to get involved in the regulatory proceedings for the purpose of expressing your concerns.

That transparency is in jeopardy. That transparency, that opportunity, is going to be amended through this act by a careless government that's going to give draconian powers to the Minister of Energy and Mines.

There are many reasons why energy, electricity and natural gas should be regulated. There's a component, namely that of vertical integration, that is a simple firm responsible for several aspects of the industry, from generation to customer billing, but that's now all going to change.

We're going from public agency regulation to private ownership, and there's no regulation, no strong regulation on the influence of how once publicly owned electricity utilities are going to be controlled by a few privately owned, oligolopic power producers.

I talked at the beginning, relative to our rivers, on the impacts, the rates regulated. They're not necessarily going to be regulated for or by our ratepayers. They're going to be regulated for IPPs.

Again, there's nothing in this Utilities Commission Amendment Act that will regulate the functions of IPPs. I have to repeat it. They are interveners under the utilities act. They're not regulated, not the same way we would try and regulate B.C. Hydro. Or now B.C. Hydro is going to be dismantled.

Also, we've had a look at the function of what they, the government, have done with Hydro, with its assets. One third, almost one-half of all the employees have been privatized through Accenture. That was an interesting function that was created by the government in its drive to privatize.

When you go for rate increases and you ask the Utilities Commission for a certain rate, they can put everything into a parcel and analyze it and say that those rates are artificially or legitimately justified. It could be seen that some of the privatization and the Accenture profit-making could drive those rates, and it could be that the Utilities Commission could ferret that out. But with these amendments and the sweeping powers that the minister is going to derive, it's now very much questionable.

In other states south of the line, their utilities commissions really opened up the debate on the Accenture deal. But it was also, interestingly enough, utilities commissions that opened the whole debate on the Enron scandal. This transparency, and it came forward like never before….

We can see the same thing here, relative to what happened with Alcan. This was a backroom deal held in secrecy. There was a competitive action. There is a competitive advantage with Alcan. The plan was exposed, in part, through the proceedings of the B.C. Utilities Commission.

At the time, the Premier's rationale to give our power and streams away to Alcan was really a 1,400 percent profit for Alcan. It was top secret. But in order to allow…. Of course, it was the Utilities Commission that basically put an end to this.

I think this Utilities Commission Amendment Act is a gag order to disconnect that information, to do the rational thinking of where those rates shall be, the rational evaluation of the projects and to hold whether or not there's some truth. That side didn't like what the Utilities Commission said.

B.C. Hydro doesn't need Alcan, and it was reiterated through the BCUC. It explained it. You know, B.C. Hydro would be stunningly self-sufficient into the far future if it were put back together again, not privatized — allowed reasonable development and given the chance to involve new ideas. Hydro appears to have fallen into mistakes that made it look as if the deal might not have been so bad after all, but the mistakes were easy to spot. It was the B.C. Utilities Commission that spotted them.

How did the mistakes come to happen? Did B.C. Hydro expect the commission to rubber-stamp it? The government thought the Utilities Commission was going to rubber-stamp this deal, but the Utilities Commission — this quasi-judicial system that we have set up in this province — ferreted it out.

B.C. Hydro was tired of having its throat cut on behalf of the Premier's corporate friends. But could it be that the people of B.C. Hydro knew all along? The BCUC will not rubber-stamp, and that is why there are amendments to this act. We know that there's a minister who will rubber-stamp.

We look at the controversial $2 billion sweetheart deal between B.C. Hydro and Alcan, and it was quashed. It was quashed by the Utilities Commission, which ruled it too expensive for the 1.6 million hydro customers who would have paid for it.

The commission said that Hydro should have agreed to an electricity sales contract paying Alcan with its 50-year Kemano hydro station near Kitimat — the same rate offered to new power developers. It said no.

As a utility commission, it still has some shred of integrity to expose fraud, to expose inaccuracies to rates — that rates are derived by private profit-makers. But this notion of deregulation — this disease — has now found its way into the Utilities Commission.

You look at different commissions Stateside. You know, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is not always my best friend, but they were the ones that released two Enron memorandums describing company plans to inflate energy prices during the California energy crisis of 2000. The practices were considered so outrageous that an attorney with the California Public Utilities Commission dubbed them a smoking-gun memo. The whole Enron business was let out of the bag because they had a utility commission that had the ability to do so.

You know, it's unfortunate that the Minister of Small Business has left…. No, he hasn't left; he's still there somewhere. The role of that ministry years ago was to deregulate under the core reviews — deregulate, deregulate, deregulate. Many of those people who were involved in that process of deregulation have slowly found their way into the IPPs. They have found a way in order to use the system to get the water licences. And where did they go?

G. Gentner: I have the red light. I thank you, hon. Speaker. I see there is a red light, and I see that the electricity of British Columbia is still effective enough to turn me off.

H. Lali: I see that for the first time, I have created unanimity in this House. Members on both sides of the House missed my absence in the last few days. And who said I didn't have friends on both sides of the House? That's great. It's great to be missed and to be applauded upon my return.

H. Lali: I think the members opposite and the Deputy Premier are correct in stating that the enthusiasm for my coming back is going to be short-lived, because they know exactly what I'm going to do. It's a great beginning, a rebeginning. I'm glad to take my place in this debate taking place in this great assembly of the people of British Columbia.

I stand here to oppose Bill 15, the B.C. Utilities Commission Amendment Act. I'll outline my reasons why I'm standing here opposing that. This is all about B.C. Hydro. It's all about the future of B.C. Hydro and what this bill actually intends to do under the guise of putting something forward under the B.C. Utilities Commission Amendment Act.

I want to begin by talking about B.C. Hydro, the generation of electricity in this province and what it has meant historically in this province. During the old days of the Social Credit….

I see there are actually three members of the old Social Credit Party that are still represented in this House, and one of them is the minister.

H. Lali: "Thank goodness," says the former member of the Social Credit, who started out as a Social Crediter and jumped ship to become a Reformer. When he saw his political future going up in flames, he jumped ship over to the Liberals. And he says: "Thank goodness." But there are two other of his colleagues.

I recall those days after 1991 when that member across the way, the minister responsible for energy, used to stand up in this House and speak of how proud he was of Social Credit and the traditions of the Social Credit.

Now, I may have differed — and I know other members of my party in the past may have differed —

with the Social Credit on a number of policy issues, but I can honestly tell you one thing. Whether we as New Democrats differed from the Social Credit in terms of some of the policies that were put forward or how they were going to go about doing the business in the province…. I can tell you this thing: both the New Democrats and the Social Credit were always on the same page when it came to looking after the public interest and the good of British Columbians, especially those people who live in rural British Columbia.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about this lot on the other side of the House that formed government. They don't care about the public interest or the interests of people in rural British Columbia and those people who are best served where the hydroelectricity generation takes place, which is up in the mountains of British Columbia, which are located in rural B.C.

That member across the way, who is the Minister of Energy now, once used to stand on this side of the House when he was in opposition and sing the tunes of Social Credit and how proud he was of the traditions of that Social Credit Party and on all of those items that were put forward on behalf of the public interest, on behalf of the people of British Columbia, by W.A.C. Bennett in those days, in the '50s and the '60s.

But the same cannot be said about that party there — the Liberal party, the governing party — and the positions that same hon. member is taking now, which are totally contrary to the positions of his once proud Social Credit Party. It just isn't the same.

You will recall, hon. Speaker, that it was the Social Credit Party under W.A.C. Bennett which actually nationalized the generation of electricity in this province and the distribution of that power. It wasn't a New Democratic Party that did that. It was the Social Credit. It was W.A.C. Bennett who did that. Why?

He did that because he knew that the public interest would be best served if the generation and distribution of electrical power in this province were under the purview of the public, which would be the government of British Columbia, who would own those facilities on behalf of the people of British Columbia. That was their tradition. That was the history, and it has served this province for almost five generations, five decades. It has served very, very well.

When you also look at what has happened historically also…. Because it was public power, generated by the public, our rates have historically been amongst the lowest in North America in terms of consumers. If you look at the 1990s, we were able to capitalize on that to make sure that our rates were kept historically low, the lowest in Canada, and have a hydro rate freeze for a number of years. Actually, a rebate was given back to the people of British Columbia as a dividend because that power generation and the distribution was owned publicly. It was owned by the people of British Columbia.

What we've seen now, also historically, is that at certain times of the day B.C. Hydro buys power from neighbouring provinces, and in other parts of the day it sells power to those same provinces and also to the United States. It all depends on the usage. The people in particular jurisdictions who are using higher amounts of electricity — at a certain part of the day we sell it to them. And at certain parts of the day we in British Columbia do, so we buy power.

We have never had an energy shortage — and I'll get to that — in the last number of years. We don't.

But I want to talk about this so-called Liberal energy plan. In 2002 the Environmental Assessment Act was actually amended by the Liberal government to make it easier for private power developers to have their projects approved quickly. There was no environmental reason to change the act. There was no outcry — hue and cry — from the people of British Columbia that they wanted to have the Environmental Assessment Act watered down or that it wasn't working. There was no other reason than to get government out of the way of private power developers so that they could have a near unfettered access to our resource in this province.

But it was done under the guise of trying to streamline and to also get rid of red tape and hurdles out of the way of business and to improve the environment, so to speak. Those were all guises that were put forward by this government. The real reason was to make it easier and quicker for private power developers to get access to our resource in this province so that they didn't have to be held accountable to the people of British Columbia.

Also since 2002, what this Liberal Premier and what this Liberal government have done…. They have taken B.C. Hydro, one of the finest examples of a public corporation anywhere in North America…. What this government has done since 2002 has transformed B.C. Hydro from a net generator of power to a net purchaser of power — a deliberate policy on the part of this government to do that. Deliberate — there was no need, no necessity. They did it specifically and deliberately to serve a political purpose of their own, and I'll get to that in a minute as well.

The real purpose is the privatization of B.C. Hydro. They want to cut it up and sell it up to the private entities in its member parts. That's what they want to do.

They also want to make it easier for private power production in this province to come in — which they already are — and then actually sell the contracts to them on a long-term basis. What you've got in this province right now — I've got a bit of an older figure; it's actually more than the figure than I'm going to give you — are 495 private power applications that are on the table or in the process or on the ground in some form or another since this government decided that they were going to privatize British Columbia hydroelectrical power in this province.

You know, they talk about how we're going to have a net energy shortage or that there's a crisis looming. That's the guise that they're trying to go under.

The minister talks about an impending energy crisis. There is no impending energy crisis. If there is a crisis, it's purely manufactured by this Liberal government to serve a political purpose. They want B.C. Hydro out of the business of hydro generation in this province.

Ever since the days of W.A.C. Bennett, B.C. Hydro has been able to plan, design, engineer, finance, build and own and operate hydroelectricity-generating facilities in this province for almost five decades, until this Liberal government came along. They were able to do it at a lesser cost than the private entities in this province would have been able to. They were able to do it in a financially responsible manner.

They were also able to do it by keeping rates for British Columbians historically low and way below the average in North America, because we, the people of British Columbia, not only owned B.C. Hydro but also the ability to actually generate the electricity that we consume in this province. It has been well managed for all of those years.

Former Social Credit Premier Bill Vander Zalm is totally against what this particular Liberal Premier is doing to B.C. Hydro in this province. He's not a New Democrat. He's not a social democrat. He's a free-enterpriser, and he is totally against what this government is doing in terms of dismantling and privatizing B.C. Hydro in this province.

What you've got…. You know, it's the old theory in this province, and this is what the Liberals believe in: if there isn't a crisis, then create one. Once you've created the crisis, then put forward your own solution. It's happened with B.C. Ferries, which were privatized. What have we seen since it went privatized? Our rates have gone up. Our rates have gone up under this Liberal government with what they've done with B.C. Ferries.

Same thing they're doing with B.C. Hydro. Our rates have been increasing since this Liberal government took office seven years ago. For seven years in a row, we've seen hydro rates increase with what this Liberal government is doing. Now, with all these IPPs, or independent power production facilities — they're actually private power production facilities that are coming on board — our debt is increasing.

B.C. Hydro traditionally has had a great credit rating. They were able to actually borrow money at lower rates and keep the cost of construction down and, hence, keep our rates down for the future. But these private entities — they're much smaller than B.C. Hydro are — when they individually go out to borrow money, they borrow it at a much higher cost, only to then turn around and have this Liberal government buy power back from these private producers at double the rate of what B.C. Hydro was able to produce.

That's what's happening, and that's why our rates are going up. It's all because the Liberals are trying to serve their own political needs. You can see it's like…. Vultures can smell death for miles and miles and miles away. You could live in a locality and never see a vulture your entire life, but as soon as they smell death, you see them circling up there.

That's what's happening with this Liberal government as they are killing B.C. Hydro little by little by little, dismantling B.C. Hydro. You get all these private entities lining up at the Liberal doors, at the Liberal coffers, to go in there to eat up the spoils, hon. Speaker. That is what is happening.

What they're doing is…. The Liberals are rewarding their friends. This isn't about good public policy. This is all about election financing for the Liberal Party, for the Liberal Premier, the Liberal Energy Minister and the Liberal MLAs sitting across the way. It's all about election financing. It has nothing to do with public policy. It's got nothing to do with actually managing the purse on behalf of the people of British Columbia. It's all about managing their personal, political futures so they can get those private power production entities paying for their election bills, as they have done.

It's payback time. They've paid for their elections in 2001. Those private entities, those private production facilities, they paid for their elections in 2005. It's payback time, and they're getting it by the bucketfuls.

Who's paying for all of this? It's the people of British Columbia, as their rates are going up, as they no longer will be owning their own hydroelectricity dams and power-generating facilities. It'll be the private entities, those people who put the Liberals in office by paying for their election bills. It's payback time, and nothing less than that.

Really, when it comes down to it, does the Premier care about the people of British Columbia? He doesn't, just like everything else. He said he's caring for the heartlands. It's the "hurtlands," hon. Speaker. He's pulling the guts out of rural British Columbia. Forestry is dying because of this deliberate dismantling of forest policy by this government and not putting anything in place. It's the people of rural B.C. who are suffering. The same thing is happening with hydroelectricity generation. The same thing is happening because they're deliberately dismantling it. They don't care.

They think they can win an election in urban and suburban British Columbia alone. You know, to heck with the people of rural B.C. They don't have to serve their interests, because if they did, that Energy Minister from a seat in rural British Columbia would actually show some compassion to the people of British Columbia, would actually turn around and stand up for his own constituents and say: "No, we're not going to privatize B.C. Hydro."

But he's not going to do that, because he wants to serve his own political interests for the future. He doesn't want to leave cabinet and say to the Premier: "I'm not going to go along with your privatization plan. I'm going to stand up for the people who put me into this place as an MLA." He doesn't want to do that, because he doesn't want to be shifted out of cabinet. In order to go against the Premier, he would have to resign from cabinet. He's not going to do that, because he's putting his political future before that of the public interest in this province and standing up for British Columbia and B.C. Hydro.

He's not going to do that. Why? Because he doesn't care, just like the Liberal Premier and the Liberal cabinet and the MLAs across the way on the other side of the bench. They don't care. They just don't care.

H. Lali: You can hear the heckling coming from across the way. You can hear the heckling. They don't like it. Why? Because the truth hurts, and they know it.

These contracts, these 3Ps, are so expensive, these long-term contracts. The other thing about these contracts is the way they've got them set up. Once those contracts are over, those private power production facilities do not have to sell the power to B.C. Hydro anymore. They can turn around and sell it to Alberta or to the United States all they want, and that's when we'll have an energy crisis.

We will have an energy crisis in 25 to 30 to 40 years down the road, when those energy contracts are going to end. That Minister of Energy across the way is amongst the people sitting there who are directly responsible for that sellout of British Columbia.

H. Lali: I will go out those doors any day and say the same things, hon. Member, as I'm saying here, because I am not afraid to stand up on behalf of the people of British Columbia, unlike the cowardice that is shown by that side of the House. Any time of the day that you want to debate me, I am ready, hon. Member. I am ready to do it, because I am not afraid to stand up on behalf of the people who put me in this place — unlike you. You don't care about the people of Peace River North. You don't have the guts enough to tell the Premier: "I am not going to implement that plan." That's what's going on.

H. Lali: Hon. Speaker, you know, the truth really does hurt, because if the Liberal Party and the Liberal Premier and this Liberal Energy Minister actually cared about British Columbians and the future of power in this province, they should actually be standing up and solidifying and backing up and making B.C. Hydro stronger than it is rather than weakening it, dismantling it, cutting it up and selling it off to their friends and insiders — if they actually really cared.

If they actually cared about energy generation in this province, what they ought to be doing is they should be saying: "We're going to do what W.A.C. Bennett did." That former Social Credit MLA who sits as a Liberal Energy Minister now, if he really cared and was proud of his past and was proud of the Social Credit Party, he would listen to the words of W.A.C. Bennett.

It was W.A.C. Bennett, a right-wing free-enterpriser, who said: "It will be the public who will plan, design, engineer, finance, build and operate the hydroelectricity-generating facilities in this province." He did it because he knew what was right. He did it because he cared about the people of British Columbia. He cared about the residents of Peace River South and Peace River North. He cared about the people who lived in the hinterlands, and that's why he did it.

What we have seen under this Liberal government, whether you look at any particular sector that is related not only to all of the British Columbia but, specifically, to rural British Columbia, is that this government has not only systematically dismantled everything that was there, but they're doing it in a way that they are systematically abandoning the people of rural British Columbia.

Whether they live up in the north in the Peace River country or out on the north coast country, or whether they live in the Kootenays, the Cariboo, or in my neck of the woods in the Thompson-Okanagan and the Nicola, they're systematically abandoning the hopes and the desires of the people of rural British Columbia.

B.C. Hydro is an icon in the way the public actually looks after not only the financing of it but in how a corporation ought to be run — that is, under the purview of the public purse. All Bill 15 does is make it even easier for the friends of the Premier, who financed the election campaigns of Liberal MLAs across the way, to get access to our resources in this province. It is that transparent. All you have to do to get favours out of this Liberal government is to finance their election campaigns. That's exactly what has been happening.

I proudly stand on this side of the House to vote against Bill 15 and to vote against the privatization of B.C. Hydro.

N. Simons: My apologies to those in the gallery who will not be treated to the wonderful and powerful and passionate words of my colleague, although I will do my best to convey the same feelings I have about this bill and what it does to the British Columbian public and the public interest.

What essentially this bill does is it allows the B.C. energy plan, as flawed as it is, to become more rooted in the public policy of British Columbia. What I worry about with that prospect is that in the past we have relied on and we have been proud to have in our possession, as stewards of this province, the control and the ownership over our waterways — over our streams and over our rivers. We have used that wealth and what was naturally here in British Columbia to the benefit of British Columbians.

That is something where we have not only managed the resource; we have also benefited greatly from the resource — not just from the power that it generates but also from the wealth that we create here so that we can provide people in our communities, wherever they

are, with the kinds of services that we as British Columbians expect. We expect to be able to look after the children. We expect to be able to look after the seniors. We expect to look after the environment in a way that is sustainable for future generations.

Unfortunately, what Bill 15 does is it takes another chip out of that structure, another wedge between the wealth of British Columbians and their ability to keep that wealth in the future.

So what we have is private interests taking over what has been publicly managed resources, private interests whose benefit is entirely in the profits that they generate, where British Columbians will fail to generate that same kind of revenue. We will not have the same ability to provide the services that we expect in this province. Unfortunately, that is the end result of this privatization scheme. Whether or not it will be felt by us is not the issue. We know that it will be felt by our children and our children's children.

I consider this legislation and this whole ideology of privatization of the public wealth as dangerous policy. It's not benign, and it's sold in a way that's supposed to make us feel good, but it is exactly contrary to how it is being sold. It is about giving away what we have — for decades, and in some places generations — looked to for the future benefit. We have to consider ourselves as temporary occupiers of this place. We need to look for the benefit of the generations to come. What this does is it eliminates our ability to say that this is our wealth and that this is how we share our wealth.

When it's all in private hands, we see the deals that are made around this province — the deals between those with very deep pockets and very strong interests in taking the most value out of our land. The private industry that does that does not invest back into our communities in the same way that we as the public are able to do, as we are expected to do in this House. We were elected to do that in this House. The 79 of us, Members of the Legislative Assembly, are supposed to be in this House to think for the future, not for the next election cycle.

What is clear to so many British Columbians is that there is a direct relationship between this government's public policy and where they get their ability to run the party. I find that troubling. I find that problematic. I find that it does make government shortsighted in its approach if it's, in fact, interested in only the election cycle and not in the future ability of this province to sustain the quality of life and our ability to help others sustain a quality of life that we have in the past.

This is not a personal battle; this is an ideological issue. Simply put, it's a debate between whether or not British Columbians should have ownership and stewardship responsibilities over our natural resources or if we are willing to say to whoever the highest bidder is: "You come and manage it, and we're going to become less and less involved in how you do that. We'll have less and less authority and power in how you operate, and in 30 short years — in some cases a shorter period of time and in some cases longer — we will be required to purchase what you have borrowed from British Columbians at a price set on the world market."

Now, we have ways of balancing our interests and the interests of others and finding ways that our policy meets the needs of British Columbians. The short-term gains that communities are receiving for short-term projects and short-term jobs need to be seen as that. There may be situations where there is a desperate need that has been created by successive governments in not addressing issues of the past, which put people in positions of being accepting of changes that occur in their communities.

We know that we need to be forward-thinking and progressive in our energy policy. Yet at the same time, we also need to be able to manage that energy policy. Bills like Bill 15 just chip, erode and melt away those structures and those firm foundations that we've put into legislation for decades. The people that were here before enshrined certain regulations and regimes that we have seen to work for the needs of the people then and the needs of the people now.

This is, I think, a sad commentary, that it is not understood by as many people as it needs to be, unfortunately. I think that the interest and knowledge is growing with the Pitt River controversy. Suddenly people were looking around and saying: "What's going on there? What was going on there?" We were about to agree to something that would have been contrary to what we believe in British Columbia as the more important value — the values of the natural resource protection in that place.

We put covenants on our land to protect it, not to be overturned a few years later by private interests with a lot of money. That's not why we protect parks. We protect parks for the future, not just temporarily so that the next person who wants to get a lot of money out of it can come along and do so from scratch. That's not why we protect parks. We protect parks, and we need to be more conscious of doing that kind of thing.

Now, I'm a bit troubled by the fact that so much interest was generated at the Pitt River situation, because there are hundreds of those all across the province that need public scrutiny. The particular example that recently occurred was a wonderful expression of public will.

I would like to do my part as a member of the Legislative Assembly to inform the public that this is also something that is happening in various degrees, in various stages, all throughout the province. Private industry is going to be taking over the stewardship, ownership and use of our water for their benefit, at our cost, in the future — not just now but in the future as well.

It's a complicated subject. I understand that. What makes it even more complicated is that it's been done in increments. It's been done in such a way that we haven't realized the impact of it until maybe it's too late. But if I'm standing here, I have to say it's not too late for me to say that I believe this is wrong-headed policy. I believe that it keeps us going down in the wrong direction because of people who believe so

In this case we have known as British Columbians, as Canadians, that this is green energy. Make it Canadian green energy. Make it British Columbian green energy, not foreign corporations' or private interests' green. It should be the green of our province.

I don't quite know how it is that representatives…. All 79 members of the Legislative Assembly should be hearing from our communities or representing what we know to be the interest of British Columbians. We don't need to hear from every single constituent, because there's a certain trust put in us that we will guard their public interest.

There's some cynicism. It's not all cynicism. There are a lot of people who vote and say: "I put my trust in your judgment to consider the policies that are put before you in the Legislative Assembly. Use your judgment." My judgment is on behalf of them, whether they're paying attention right now or not.

They paid attention in the Pitt River scandal, and they are going to have to pay attention and help me along the way as we try and maintain the ownership that we have had for generations over our resources so that we can steward them, so that we can benefit from them and so that we can set a public policy agenda that meets our values as British Columbians, as Canadians.

This is something that all British Columbians, I believe, are going to feel with passion when they realize that, in fact, it is what we own that is being sold to private interests.

So not just for now but for the future, I think this kind of policy that chips away at our ability to benefit is just bad legislation. It should not be proceeding down that ill-advised path.

I think that what British Columbians will recognize, I hope, from this debate is that public policy is set here. Public policy is sometimes set in regulations, sometimes in legislation, and sometimes the two go together. In this particular case the public policy was set by government using illusory concepts to make it sound good in a way described yesterday as somewhat Orwellian — that good was bad, and war was peace.

I think we need to recognize that we all want to make sure that we have a sustainable plan. When it's not a sustainable plan but called a sustainable plan, we all suffer.

With respect to the need to maintain our authority, our control over our own rivers, I find that there's a contradiction between the public interest and the public policy that's being put before us. When I think about the first nations and the Sunshine Coast and Powell River area, there are hundreds of applications for private diversion river plans. They are in positions where they are going to have to assess each one of those applications without having been provided with the necessary resources to be able to do the job even sometimes to their own satisfaction.

They understand that there are cumulative impacts of these projects. Who is looking carefully at the cumulative impact that these independent power companies have? We have each project assessed individually. What we don't want to try and picture…. I've heard a chief of a first nation say, "We expect spiderwebs over our territory" — the transmission lines that aren't being contemplated, the hundreds and hundreds of kilometres of transmission lines that need to be built.

The cumulative impact of this policy is not being considered and can't be considered by this government under these regulations, under this legislation. When that's not even considered or factored in, I think the public interest is not being properly served. We need to make sure that the decisions that are made in our communities and in our regions are not made out of desperation or out of a need to deal with current crises that this government is not able to deal with now.

If you contemplate the fact that we get revenue from our previous policies that kept British Columbia, through B.C. Hydro, as owners…. If you were able to generate revenue from that, you can provide services to our communities that allow our communities to function and allow our communities and our infrastructure to be maintained — our hospitals. That is how we do this.

When we reduce our ability to benefit as British Columbians…. It's not just the fact that we shouldn't be selling our rivers. It's the fact that we should be benefiting from them when they are used as power-generating facilities or have power-generation capacity. We should be using that for our own benefit. We should be using that to make up for the gaps that have been created due to restrictions that government has placed on spending for social services and for programs that are needed in our community.

We see the need. There's no denial that we have a crisis in homelessness. We're the worst in the country when it comes to child poverty. We need to make sure that if we have the capacity as British Columbians to generate revenue in a way that is sustainable to pay for those programs, one would think that that would be the way to do it.

It's not going to happen, simply because we're giving away rights to rivers to private companies. G.E. is a major shareholder. Their public interest does not include towns and communities and villages and cities across British Columbia. Their interest is simply in profit.

What we benefit from when we have the interest in that particular resource is that we have our own interests. We can protect our own interests. We can support and strengthen and shore up the services which we have been promoting and providing for our communities for generation after generation.

That is essentially what is at stake here with Bill 15. Bill 15 is just another way of shoring up their flawed energy plan. Unfortunately, it takes away the breadth of decision-making ability from the Utilities Commission. That's supposed to be an independent body. When you reduce the rules that they operate under, it loses its independence. It's not about whether they can make a decision on their own. Yeah, they can make decisions,

but you just take away their options, and suddenly, there's a little bit of external interference that, I would say, brings into question how much authority they really would have.

So that's an issue that, I think, we need to discuss at some point. Perhaps we'll have that opportunity in greater length. I hope, at that point, that the minister responsible will be able to address those issues.

I'm not so confident that he's going to be able to address the overall ill-advised plans that really just allow British Columbians to lose all ownership and jurisdiction over our own resources. I mean, you see patterns emerging here with our giveaway of forest lands, and this is another example of that. It reduces our ability to provide services to our communities. It reduces our ability to say that we can steward the land according to our own standards. We'll be left to the unfortunate whims of those who don't have an interest in our concerns.

So I find that troubling. I find that problematic. I think the legislation is yet another stealthy way of promoting the privatization of agenda, and I don't know how anyone can see it in another way.

Some people say, though, that in a way it's a good thing, and I strongly disagree. I think it's a bad idea for British Columbians, and I think that anyone who understands the values of Canadians and British Columbians knows that we do try to steward our wealth in a way that we can benefit and that we can be in a good position to help others benefit.

I think that's sometimes lost in this whole thing. It's like it's about being the best place on earth but not at the exclusion of trying to help others. I think that the arrogance that's often shown by this government — this cabinet, in particular — that promotes this idea of it's all for us, and when it's us, it's them…. I'm not part of that us.

I think most British Columbians will feel that they're not going to benefit when they know that their own resource is going to the friends of government. I don't think that they're going to look at their leadership and say: "Well, why did you sell our rivers when we could have kept them and paid for our own services?" They'll say: "Because our friends helped us get elected, and we can sit back in our chairs in the Legislature and yawn and pretend to be disinterested."

That will be our legacy for British Columbians. People who are unable to see beyond the election cycle will do what they can to make sure that British Columbians are separated from their wealth.

It does nobody any good to try and belittle this debate or demean it as something less important than it really is. It is a debate about how much we're allowing our future to be rented out now, just to be sold a few years down the line. You know, we're renting it now. We still own it now, but we're renting it now. But in 30 years, we won't. It's rent to own. They've got their hands in, and they're going to get their hands in deeper. It's like, when their hands are in, there's no room for ours. And when there's no more room for ours, we've got no control.

I find that troubling. I find that troubling because it doesn't reflect the values of the people that I represent, in large part. It doesn't represent the interests of our future generations, who I also represent. I think, on that basis alone, we should say that this government's plan should fail.

D. Routley: I rise to speak to Bill 15 and in opposition to its passing. I note the title, Bill 15, Utilities Commission Amendment Act. I think that it would be more properly intituled: Bill 15, the B.C. Liberal private river diversion act, because that's exactly what this is. It's continuing a campaign of the B.C. Liberal privatization of the commonwealth of British Columbia.

This act removes the ability of B.C. Hydro to generate new power. This act is built on the B.C. Liberal myth that self-sufficiency cannot be attained through B.C. Hydro. This act is built on the myth and the ignorance of the fact that our B.C. Hydro, as it stands today, is a great source of wealth in revenue to this province and a great source of sovereignty determination. It's ours. My daughter, only 20 years old, will vote for less. She comes to voting age at a time when her vote has been fractioned, diminished and reduced by the campaign of privatization of this B.C. Liberal government.

We have a great system with B.C. Hydro, or at least we had. I don't know if the viewers out there, the audience, the people of B.C. realize it, but what we do in B.C. is let the lakes, the reservoirs behind those dams, fill up, fill up all night long, when power is at its lowest price. During that time, yes, we import power at a very low price. Then after those reservoirs have filled up all night long or during the rainy season, we open up those dams and we generate more electricity when power is at its peak price. That is a good use of market forces in the interests of British Columbians.

This bill is an intervention into that free market mechanism that has benefited British Columbians for generations. Every year this province makes a half-billion-dollar profit selling power at its highest price and buying power at its lowest price. That is a good deal for the people of British Columbia. But this government, the B.C. Liberal government, steps in and changes all that in the interests of those who have backed them.

They create, through public policy, an artificial gold rush on our rivers. They intervene in a marketplace in a desperate attempt to prop up a phony gold rush on our rivers. The myth is built on more than just this self-sufficiency piece. It's built on this supposed green run-of-the-river presumption. All German shepherds are dogs, but not all dogs are German shepherds.

It may very well be that there are benign and beneficial run-of-the-river projects that could be brought forward to the benefit of British Columbians — and would be much more to their benefit should they be brought forward by B.C. Hydro in the public interest. But instead, all is good in the B.C. Liberal universe. All is good; it's okay. Everyone is green; everyone is good. Just pick one. It's an auction. Stake a claim.

All you have to do is click your way through an Internet site and you can own a river in B.C. Is that the legacy we've been sent here to steward and marshal and defend? Is that the legacy that my daughter of 20 should inherit — with her first vote so liquidated and so fractioned by these measures: the loss of B.C. Rail, the privatization of B.C. Hydro and the loss of public control over our forests?

It's a pattern, and this is another piece of that pattern. This is another piece of a pattern that sees the B.C. Liberal government in the most arrogant way, in the most conceited way, appoint themselves the generation which will oversee the liquidation of the common wealth of British Columbia built up over generations. Those rivers that have flowed for millions of years now will be diverted through pipes into turbines. If the B.C. Liberals have their way, there will be transmission lines running through sensitive areas and access roads punched through parks.

That's the future. What we have is a former Socred member now sitting as the B.C. Liberal Minister of Energy — the member for Peace River North. And the green paint flakes off his government and him in the heat of the exposure to the truth of this matter.

The B.C. Liberal history of denial of these issues shows through that flaking green paint. We remember that they were the ones who abolished the Environment Ministry when they came to power. We remember them denying climate change. We remember them abusing the forests of this province by reducing standards to points that haven't been seen in my lifetime.

That's the legacy of this government to the people of B.C. and my daughter. It is one of dilution. It is one of dissolved futures, dissolved value, liquidated assets. It's a Ritchie Bros. auctioneering paradise, this B.C. Liberal approach to British Columbia's management.

They have abused the birthright of this province. They have broken the social contract between us and our resources, and they have embarked on an auction of that value with their friends getting first viewing and first dibs. Why would the B.C. Liberals…?

D. Routley: Oh, yes. "Socialism," the member for Peace River North, the former Socred, says, "is…." The definition of that, for these members, is public interest. Things like public education, public health, public oversight over tree farm licences, public ownership of rivers, public ownership of Crown lands and Crown forests. That's all somehow to this government a little too Red for them.

But the B.C. Liberals have to be asked a question. Why would the B.C. Liberals sell our rivers? Why would the B.C. Liberals give away our jobs in the form of raw logs, exacting the fewest jobs per cubic metre of any developed nation? Why would that be done? Why would they break promises and sell B.C. Rail? Why would they sell our B.C. Ferry Corp. and see our rates…?

Deputy Speaker: Member, could I remind you that the topic of this bill is the B.C. Utilities Commission. Please stay on track.

D. Routley: Madam Speaker, it's one more piece in the pattern of the questions that I'm asking.

Why would they let our ferry fares soar over 100 percent in a privatization scheme? Why would they break our forest industry? Because they have opened the door of the common wealth treasury to their friends and supporters.

This bill represents another piece in the big B.C. Liberal giveaway, and this is the big B.C. Liberal payoff to those who have backed them. This is payback time. It represents the conceit of public policy directed against the people.

We come here, and we possess the trust of the people to use the tools of democracy to defend their interests and to defend the public interests of British Columbia. But instead, this B.C. Liberal government has systematically and in a patterned way turned the tools of government and public policy against the people of B.C.

You can use a hammer to build a house or you can use a hammer to tear it down. The B.C. Liberals, by privatizing the common wealth of this province, are using that hammer to tear down that house that was built over generations in British Columbia which stands on a foundation of common wealth.

What about the concept of public wealth? What a notion — that public services and institutions represent a wealth that we all possess, that this House belongs to my constituents and that this House should have a role in determining the future of British Columbia. What about this notion of public wealth? What about the notion that these rivers should remain public, should remain in public service, not serving the profit-making interests of corporations that paid for the election of the B.C. Liberal party? What about that?

It's a very sad day, because the B.C. Liberals are building debt as they sell off our assets. The B.C. Liberals are transferring that common wealth at the same time that they take on debt in the name of my daughter.

It's unfortunate that the government that had the two record deficits in the history of this province and that continues to build the debt at a rate of 5.2 percent — more than double the rate of inflation — can do nothing but further auction off the wealth of this province, selling off the stock of the store to pay the rent. You're not doing anything for the future. You're running on the credit card of my daughter. This government is liquidating her future.

I guess I grew up with a fairly naive notion that the wealth of this province and the resources of this province would serve us. I sort of believe, as many of my constituents believe, that in fact the splendour and wealth of B.C. and its resources would serve us.

But this government, through their policies like this one — privatizing rivers, giving away resources, giving away raw logs and our jobs…. It's a pattern, and it adds up to loss for British Columbians. It adds up to a

loss of future wealth, and it adds up to a loss of future choice and determination.

There is a conflict between the word and deed of the B.C. Liberals. There is an arrogance to their action and a conceit to their policy. It's an auctioning of the future, and it's a dilution of common wealth. We see all around us those things that were supported by that wealth — our schools and our hospitals — being closed, downgraded and diluted, because these former Socreds have abandoned the notion that B.C. ought to work for us.

They've signed on to agreements that have guaranteed that things like our value-added industries in the forest industry are given away as well — just like this — so that, in the future when we ask the question, "Why Ikea? Why not 'BCea'?" there won't be an answer, because the resources won't be ours anymore. We won't be able to make the choices. Instead, we see this liquidation. Instead, we see a government prepare to give up…. Instead, we see a government prepared to secure its own future by trading off the future of British Columbia.

This bill removes the power, the option of B.C. Hydro generating new power. This bill moves our public utility to being a private purchaser of power. This bill guarantees that we will be obligated to buy power for 30 years at many times the market rate.

It is a market intervention. It is a market intervention meant to prop up a false gold rush planted in the rivers of British Columbia by this government. Go ahead. People of B.C., go ahead. Go to their website. Click your way through. Buy a river. Buy the rights to the water. Buy the future of British Columbia.

These guys, these people — the B.C. Liberal government — will guarantee your profit. These free marketeers will guarantee the profit of their supporters. That is what this bill empowers. It empowers the scheme to liquidate public control over our rivers.

If there are green run of the river…. Just as I said: all German shepherds are dogs, but not all dogs are German shepherds. This government just opened the map wide open, and we see the result.

What will it take if you're wrong, Minister? What would it take for us to backtrack once these steps are taken — if they're wrong?

Ideology of no sort should be applied as purely and as determinedly as this government has done. They have insisted, whether it makes sense or not, that there will be privatization. It makes great sense to buy your car yourself, but it doesn't make much sense to buy the road yourself. This province has always benefited by a balance between public and private, but this government doesn't like that. They've put their thumb on the scale of that balance. They've said: "No, public is bad. There should be no public wealth."

Public wealth is a concept that is toxic to the B.C. Liberal government. Instead, that notion of public wealth must be stamped out, must be liquidated, and that liquidation must benefit their supporters. It's clear. Go look at the list of their supporters. Go look at the list.

The largest donors benefit from their privatization of TFL controls. Their biggest donors benefit from this bill. Those are the people being paid off. Those are the people this government is working for — not for the people of B.C., not for my daughter, not for the future that would include her and would give her a say over the management of these resources. That is alien to the ideology of the B.C. Liberals, so it will be stopped.

Again, the green paint flakes off in the heat of exposure to the truth, when we look at the history and the pattern. We look at the promises: "We won't privatize B.C. Rail." What did they do? They privatized B.C. Rail and now our rivers.

Can anyone in B.C. imagine a deeper attack on that common wealth? Can anyone imagine a deeper and more significant attack on the self-determination and the future benefit of British Columbians? I hope not, because this government would definitely employ whatever idea would take them further down that path.

We have already seen the loss of so much that is supported by the resources that this government is giving away, from rivers to forests to water. We see the loss of our schools. We see the privatization of public property throughout this province. We see the sale of the future. We see the sale of the future in misguided public policy, and all of those elements that used to be supported by these services and these resources are going.

We are losing our schools; we are losing our hospitals. Our highways are in disrepair. Why? Because a priority of this government — as they reward oil companies and gas companies and claim to be green — is to sell off our resources, auction off our rivers and reward their friends. More and more of the future of British Columbia is liquidated.

Caught in that conflict between word and deed, of B.C. Liberal promise versus action, British Columbians can only wonder what it will take to bring sense to this government and have them step back from this plan, which would see us auction off our choice and would see my daughter and future generations of British Columbians lose their oversight, lose the power of their vote and lose their input into the management of the resources of this great province.

It's an outcome that none of us should be able to live with. We have seen the true colour as that green paint is flaked off. We have been reminded of the denial of climate change by policies like this. We have been reminded of the abolition of the Environment Ministry, one of the first acts of this B.C. Liberal government.

Now with an environmental label applied over the bumper of the same old Socred car, we see the further dilution and auctioning of our province. It doesn't matter at what cost. We'll pay many times the market rate for electricity in order to achieve this goal, in order to seed this artificial gold rush, in order to seed the mine for their friends who need to do nothing more than jump onto a website and click their way through to guaranteed

profits off the backs of my daughter and future generations and through the abuse and sale of our rivers and our choice.

When this bill further guarantees the implementation of policies that have consistently shown a pattern of being against the public interest, then British Columbians shake their heads in wonderment at how a government that claims this green exterior can have such an unfortunate interior that is in complete contradiction to all of the words, all of the lofty words.

You can't just say it in a throne speech. You have to do it. You have to show through public policy that these things matter. You can't, on the one hand, claim to be environmental and then engineer this gold rush on B.C.'s resources.

You can't do that any more than you can claim to be a carbon-cutting government that cuts neighbourhood schools and forces us to drive our children to schools outside their neighbourhoods at the same time you cut their transportation.

Somehow, words need to equal actions. Somehow, words need to equal deeds. Somehow, we need to be accountable to the people of B.C.

The vacant words ring hollow to the people of the Pitt River area. They saw the truth that indeed not all dogs are German shepherds, and they stopped the government's plans. There is a way to stop these plans. It's called political action, and it works.

We on this side oppose this bill. We oppose the run-of-the-river gold rush engineered by B.C. Liberal policy. We beg the government to finally see the light, that there is value in defending the common wealth for all of us, and that there is value in restoring the power of my daughter's vote.

If they did see that, they would withdraw this bill and retreat from this plan to privatize the resources of this province to guarantee the profit to their friends. They would return some choice and power to my daughter and future generations by reinvesting in the common wealth.

B. Lekstrom: I rise today to speak in support of Bill 15. I take a great deal of pride in making sure that I go through each and every piece of legislation that is presented in this House, and I listen with great interest to both sides. I listened to the opposition speak about this bill, and I thought I'd actually read the wrong bill, so I had to double-check.

I kept hearing about IPPs, a bill that wasn't in the public interest, and that the world was possibly going to come to an end should this go through. But I want to point out something. This bill, I heard, was against the public interest. I do note the hour, Mr. Speaker. This bill, if you think it is against the public interest….

The opposition is saying that they are against…. I want to read just a couple of lines here. The "'government's energy objectives' means the following objectives of the government" — and, really, what that is, is for British Columbia:

Those are good things. If that is against the public interest, I would be somewhat scared to see what was in the public interest, in their eyes.

That's what this bill is about. It's about the Utilities Commission Amendment Act, not about the B.C. Hydro Act, not about the independent power producer's act, but the Utilities Commission Act.

I do have much more to say, but noting the hour, I would like to reserve my right to continue to speak and move adjournment of debate.

Committee of Supply (Section A), having reported progress, was granted leave to sit again.

G. Coons: Just to confirm what's going on today, we brought in some people to answer some questions

from a few members, and then we're going to work with ferries for the morning and probably go till about four to 4:30. Then that should be it — okay?

R. Fleming: I just want to say welcome to the staff from B.C. Transit who have been able to join us this morning. I wanted to focus some questions to the minister on the proposed Douglas Street busway corridor, the RapidBus project that was a component of the provincial transit plan announcement in January and has a history, I think, a little longer than that in the community in Victoria, at least in a draft stage.

I guess just to begin some of the questions this morning, I wanted to ask the minister about the feasibility study that was conducted for this project and whether, in addition to the technical feasibility study, there has been a business case also done for this project. Could the minister describe whether the busway was considered in comparative terms to other transit options along that corridor.

Hon. K. Falcon: Member, just before I get to the answer, I want to have an opportunity to introduce the staff that joined me today. My assistant deputy minister, Sheila Taylor, and my deputy minister, John Dyble, are joining me today.

I've also got several representatives from B.C. Transit joining me here today. I want to first of all take this opportunity, for the first time, to introduce the new CEO of B.C. Transit, Manuel Achadinha. And of course, the two very hard-working VPs of B.C. Transit, who have been workhorses in getting some exceptional work done at B.C. Transit, Ron Drolet and Tony Sharp, are also with me, for the benefit of the member opposite.

The member is talking about the Douglas corridor, the three-kilometre section where the Victoria transit commission is working in cooperation with the city of Victoria and B.C. Transit to create a busway through that corridor. As I said to the member, we're in the early stages of working with them in this project.

There will be a business case developed for the entire RapidBus proposal that was announced by the Premier and myself two months ago. Of course, that was only two months ago, but what it did do was set out a budget of $1.2 billion for nine RapidBus routes, one of which will of course be the Victoria RapidBus, which, for the benefit of the viewers out there, will connect the regions of the Western Communities into the downtown core, right into the peninsula, with a line also going out to the University of Victoria.

Now, the city of Victoria deserves an enormous amount of credit, and so does the CRD, because they have been working for quite some time on a transit strategy. As the member opposite would know, the CRD has a regional transportation strategy for the region. The city of Victoria has been working on their own to make sure that they do their bit to create a busway through the three-kilometre section of the Douglas corridor, and of course, B.C. Transit has been working actively with them.

I want to take my hat off and recognize the work that's been done by the transit commission and by the city of Victoria. They are showing great leadership in this regard, and I want to recognize and applaud the efforts.

They have also, in cooperation with B.C. Transit, invested significant dollars, about $3 million, to make sure that they've got the signalization along that corridor which will work and allow the RapidBus to proceed — the kind of signalization platform that will allow the buses, of course, to change the lights as they're going through, etc. So there's been a tremendous amount of leadership by the city of Victoria, and we think that that is very important to recognize.

Although we're in the very early stages of working on the business case, because of course the entire route is 57 kilometres…. This is a three-kilometre section. Fortunately, the city, through their own leadership, in cooperation with the transit commission, has been making a lot of efforts to start to lay out what it will look like through the downtown core, how this rapid busway will work through the downtown core.

One thing I can tell the member — and for the benefit of some of the folks out there, particularly small business that may have some legitimate concerns — is that anytime you talk about change, there's going to be uncertainty around that. One thing I can really, I think, say to the folks out there that will give some comfort is that this is not a new experiment.

There are dozens of examples of RapidBus corridors and busway corridors through cities throughout the world, and the evidence in any of those communities that you want to look at that have gone this route is that they have been very favourably received and have had favourable results for the commercial interests along those street busways.

So I guess the answer is that this is an initiative that the city of Victoria has led. They deserve a lot of credit for that. We are working with them on that, and we will be doing more work as we develop a business case for the entire RapidBus corridor — the 57 kilometres from the Western Communities right down to the peninsula and, of course, out to the university.

R. Fleming: I wanted to ask the minister about the business case for the commitment he just outlined, the plan as he just outlined and the parameters.

There has been a lot of discussion in the Greater Victoria community before pursuing this project, which…. The city engineering departments of the various municipalities — Victoria, Saanich and others that would potentially be in the plan — have not contemplated where it applies to them.

But before they would commit to this option, the question and the discussion in this community has been around looking at other options, whether it's more conventional HOV lanes along the Douglas corridor and other places that would be bus priority lanes and that would be in connection with the queue jumpers

that have been installed along the Douglas corridor, or whether it's a rail-based system in Victoria.

The minister's response through the media and other sources, through letters to the Capital Region, has been to insist at all times that he's open to LRT and other options, but that in advance of serious consideration, he would need to see a business case developed. I think that has been put to the CRD and other bodies to develop that. That's fair enough. But what I want to understand is whether the same business case has been insisted upon and, indeed, conducted for the RapidBus system that is proposed on the Douglas corridor today.

Hon. K. Falcon: As I said to the member, it was just over two months ago that the Premier and I announced the $14 billion provincial transit plan, the most ambitious transit expansion ever in the history of the province of British Columbia by a long shot. As part of that plan we put aside $1.2 billion for nine RapidBus lines, one of which will be in the Greater Victoria area to connect the Western Communities with the downtown and, of course, out to UVic.

Having said that, the city of Victoria, through their own leadership and as part of their OCP, has plans for a busway through the Douglas corridor. They deserve, I think, an enormous amount of credit for the leadership they've been showing and the work they've been doing. Now, the member will be pleased to know that as part of the planning for the busway that will go through that three-kilometre section of what will ultimately form part of the overall route, they have done the planning. The scope of the work at this point actually envisions and the design work allows for it to be converted in the future to a light rapid transit system of whatever sort ultimately would be selected.

That is exactly the kind of visionary foresight that they ought to be applauded for, and I do applaud them for that. I think that is enormously visionary. What they have always done, and the city of Victoria has tried to do, is make sure that the work they do on this corridor will be work that will connect very well and very smoothly with the rest of the region and be consistent with the regional transportation strategy that was put into place by the CRD.

In terms of the member's talk about a business case, again, as I said to the member yesterday, this is very early stages. The city of Victoria has always had a vision for what they want to do with their very obviously small but important three-kilometre section through the downtown core, but this is a 57-kilometre section in total for the entire RapidBus, and we are in very, very early stages.

Fortunately, as I've said, the Regional Transit Commission and Victoria have been showing great leadership on the three-kilometre section through Victoria. B.C. Transit has been working very closely with them, because it's entirely consistent with the plans that the province has in place. I know that the city was very pleased when they heard about the transit plan, because that tied in perfectly to the leadership they've already been showing in this regard for the section that they're responsible for.

The member should know, in fact, that there was a great article on the front page of the Times Colonist that talked about the fact that there's a public meeting tonight that we are asking the public to attend, all interested stakeholders. I understand there will be strong delegations from the business community, from the cycling community and from others that are involved.

Let me just say this. At the end of the day, leadership means taking positions. Leadership means saying that you either support or don't support initiatives that are underway. I want the record to show that I am in total support of what the city is trying to achieve here and what the regional transit commission is trying to achieve.

What they are doing is showing vision and leadership. It is confirmed by experiences, dozens of examples around the world, where these kinds of busways have been very effective and have the ability to literally triple the volume of people that are capable of coming through the corridor. That ultimately is, I think, a very good result for the community.

I would be interested in knowing whether the member opposite shares the vision of the city of Vancouver and the regional transit commission and what they're trying to do. I think that more of us in leadership positions can stand up and say: "This is the right thing to do. We support the effort to increase public transit options, and we support the efforts to get people out of their cars and into a transit system that favours the public transit system in a very real way and gives people those real options to get out of their cars."

I think I would encourage the member to join with me in supporting the leadership that's been shown by the city in the hopes that we can actually get to a point where we do have — the member will know; I know the member has been studying this — the city making sure that there are going to be cycling paths as part of this process. I know that the member knows that they have designed it in such a way to make sure that it will allow for light rail and light rapid transit in the future. That's the whole point of the work that they've been doing thus far.

I think it's visionary, I think it's leadership, and I think it deserves our support. It has our support. I would hope that the member opposite will join and echo that support — with, of course, the proviso that we all put in place, and that is that we want to make sure it gets done right.

That's why the public consultative process is so important, and that's why I encourage any members of the public who have the opportunity to be watching us this morning and who live in the area to please make an effort to attend the public meeting and bring forward your input. It will be welcome.

R. Fleming: I know the minister has said a couple of times in his long response there…. He referred to the city of Vancouver leading this process, and I know that he meant to say Victoria. Although, I must say, when

the provincial transit plan was initially brought down, people did think it was a Lower Mainland transit plan and that Victoria was left out for any serious consideration, let alone any serious investment in that plan.

I want to get back to who's driving this process here. While the minister correctly talks about some vision being provided from the regional district and from various municipalities to have rapid transit technology as we grow as a region, to grow smarter and in a more compact way and to live up to the land uses contemplated in our regional growth strategy…. He's quite correct. The travel choices strategy does come from the CRD.

I was involved in developing that plan. My colleague from Saanich South was as well, so I'm very familiar with that. But let's be clear, and I want the minister to put this on the record. This is coming from B.C. Transit. This is under his direction through the Ministry of Transportation. The very meeting being held tonight is being held under those auspices. The decision to date and the service plan very clearly says that they hope to break ground in 12 months on a technology that apparently has already been chosen.

I think what I want to ask here today is mainly about how that was arrived at. What we don't want is to consider one option in isolation of others — light rail transit, for example, along that corridor, which had a feasibility study done in 1996. That was 12 years ago. It was a positive evaluation. It was a very technical, detailed observation, but it wasn't a business case. We acknowledge that.

We want to make sure that several options are considered fully, that a proper cost-benefit analysis is being done, that the investment today is going to be the right one but, most importantly, as part of that proper cost-benefit analysis, that we're actually focusing on ridership numbers. We need to achieve emissions reductions. I know the minister feels, probably more than anyone else in cabinet, pressure to contribute to those targeted reductions that are now written in law, and the burden does fall to his ministry. I think that when it comes to Greater Victoria and what technology we're going to invest in and which has the most potential, that has to be foremost in our decision-making process.

I want to ask him again. He's saying that something is being put out there today, but you know, you can't put out something that has not had any homework behind it. Tonight I think there will be ridership benefits. I would hope that there is some data that has been collected. I want to ask him about whether he is open-minded still and whether he will commit tonight, if the view of the public is that we want to consider not just a busway but other options for the Douglas Street corridor that will achieve the greatest benefit for the greatest amount of people.

My question to the minister is: what is the business case that B.C. Transit has been using to come up with ridership figures? Is he committed to do what he has been willing to do with the Tri-Cities area and commit to support a business case for light rail technology? I think that's what Greater Victoria wants to see. They don't want to consider a busway system in isolation of other options. It would be improper for any decision-maker to channel what they're doing into just one option without studying and doing a proper comparative analysis to other technologies.

Hon. K. Falcon: The member covered off a number of areas there. I think perhaps the member should know that the commitment we made as a government was very straightforward. We said that we wanted British Columbia to join the ranks of the leading cities of the world — the Parises, the Londons, the Hong Kongs — in terms of the percentage of the population that utilizes public transit on a regular basis.

That means we need to get from a modal share of 12 percent in, for example, the Greater Vancouver area, and we need to add another 10 percent on top of that. In the Victoria area, where we're currently at about 7 percent, we've got to add another 5 percent on top of that by 2030, if that's what we ultimately want to get to.

The member can talk about rapid transit, and he can talk about how he thinks it's all centred in the Lower Mainland. But I would hope that when the member talks about business cases…. I'm always encouraged when the NDP talk about business cases because that certainly wasn't a hallmark of their administration in the 1990s, when they moved forward with projects without any business cases. We know what the result of that was. So I think that this is certainly a good change of direction.

But the member would know that, if we are to achieve those levels, when you've got a population of two million people that happen to reside in the Lower Mainland, that is obviously where you need to spend a significant amount of money, because that is where you've got to move a lot of people.

Now, the member might want to argue that you shouldn't do that, and you should spend that money in other parts of the province where the population is much lower, where you haven't got the kind of density that you do in the Lower Mainland. I would have to say to the member that, if that's his argument, it would be an argument that would not be supported by anyone anywhere in the world that is involved in transportation planning.

The challenge for Greater Victoria is that you've got a combined population of about 367,000 people spread out over a large area. So the question becomes: how do you best serve those people? The CRD actually came out with a plan. The member said that he was involved in the creation of that plan. The member should know that, in the CRD zone plan, they contemplated light rail transit as an option. But that option was not to be realized — even within their own plan that the member apparently was involved in drafting — until the 2025 period.

It was always contemplated that the RapidBus would be the ideal way to start to create what I call the culture of ridership, the culture of rapid transit–type ridership, which is exactly what RapidBus does. I think

that the member needs to do his homework on the efficiency and efficacy of rapid bus systems. They are very, very effective.

I've used the example of Ottawa and the system they have there, which I believe they call metro valley, which moves more people than the Millennium line moves in the Lower Mainland each day. The Millennium line moves 70,000 people, yet in Ottawa, the rapid bus system moves more. It can be a very, very effective way to move people.

So when the member talks about a business case, well, I can guarantee this member that this government on every major project in which we're going to be involving a significant amount of funds will be requiring a business case. Of course we will. That's what we always do. That's why, with a $1.2 billion commitment….

Hon. K. Falcon: So with a $1.2 billion investment to nine rapid bus lines throughout the province of British Columbia, in each and every one of those cases, we will naturally in the preparation of those cases do the kind of homework that we always do on projects.

Of course, we've got, as I mentioned to the members opposite, over 24 just in the P3 projects. We've done over 24 projects, representing over $8 billion in value in the province of British Columbia, that we've committed and delivered on schedule and on budget. I think that's a positive thing. So we will apply the same standard here.

You know, the member talks about how B.C. Transit is driving this process. Well, that's simply wrong, and the member should know that. The fact that the member doesn't know that is, frankly, a little concerning. It's the Victoria transit commission that is driving this process and holding the public meeting tonight — a transit commission that is chaired, as the member should well know, by the good mayor of Sidney, Don Amos, and who has on the board Alan Lowe,the mayor of Victoria, and Frank Leonard, the mayor of Saanich, amongst others. They are the ones that are driving and holding this public meeting, as they should.

But so often you will always hear this talk about: "Well, what about looking at this?" The city of Victoria has this as part of their official community plan. They deserve credit for the leadership they are showing in saying that this busway is very important for the future of their city. They recognize how important this three-kilometre section is going to be for hooking up with the rest of the regional network, as defined and as laid out in the CRD vision that was laid out by the region.

The very fact that they're going to the public and saying: "Here's what we're planning. We would like to have your input. We're designing it in such a way as to allow for the easy transformation into a rapid transit or light rail corridor…." But what they are essentially doing is they are securing the corridor. They are saying: "We want to secure this corridor as a corridor that can be utilized initially, perhaps, as a busway corridor, a rapid bus corridor, easily convertible into a light rail corridor." That is worthy of support. It has my support, and it has the province's support, because it's leadership.

I want to say right here and now that the Victoria transit commission that is showing the leadership in this regard, led by the mayors of the region, deserves a heck of a lot of credit. I can tell you as the Minister of Transportation that anytime you undertake any kind of a project, you will always have concerns. That's very normal. It's very normal, and you have to make sure you listen to those concerns.

You have to have the appropriate public hearings so that people can express their concerns. You've got to make the changes you can make to try and deal with those concerns as best you can. But you never lose sight of the underlying vision, and the underlying vision is that the city of Victoria and the region want to do their bit to get us to a point where we can double the ridership here in the Greater Victoria area.

The member can talk about light rail all he wants, and he can ignore what the recommendations of the CRD in their own regional plan said, which is that is something we ought to be looking at. But it is going to be something that they even recognized is likely going to be further out in terms of when it will be realized.

The work that B.C. Transit has done in the past and previous studies has shown that you can achieve the best results most immediately by first of all preserving the corridor and then working on the corridor as a rapid bus corridor, which will then be easily convertible into a light rail corridor when you've got the population densities, the ridership, and you've created the culture of ridership as a result of the rapid bus that's been put in place.

This is a minister and a government that supports the leadership of the city of Victoria, that supports the leadership of the Victoria transit commission, supports them driving this, as they are doing, giving them whatever support and advice we can through B.C. Transit, which we are doing, and in some cases partially funding, as part of the $3 million investment that the city of Victoria and B.C. Transit are making in the signalization foundation platform that they've put in place along the Douglas corridor — that three kilometres — so that it is ready and available for the kind of rapid bus that will provide tremendous benefits.

As I said before to the member, we will together…. Even though the city of Victoria has been showing great leadership — it is moving quickly to at least secure the area they're responsible for, that three-kilometre

section of Douglas corridor — we will work with them, and we have been working with them, and we will prepare, on the entire 57-kilometre corridor, a business case that shows exactly why the $1.2 billion that we've set aside for nine rapid bus lines is going to make sense.

We will do our homework. We will have our business case, and we will work with the communities to make sure they've got a first-class transit system, as they will have in the Greater Victoria region.

D. Cubberley: I appreciate having the opportunity to carry on the line of questioning. I just want to make a couple of statements first.

The first statement is that the issue isn't about the Douglas Street corridor and whether that's the right corridor for rapid transit. Clearly, it is the right corridor, and it's identified in the growth strategy, in the transportation plan and in the city of Victoria's documents as being the corridor for rapid transit. I can even elucidate how that happened.

Prior to any of those documents being in place, back in the '90s there was a desire on the part of the city of Victoria to get the tail end of the CN corridor, the abandoned right-of-way that is now part of the Dockside lands, to be folded into future development possibilities in that area.

In return for agreeing to do that, the provincial minister responsible at the time, who happened to be the hon. Andrew Petter, reached an agreement with the city of Victoria — that in return for the province allowing that land to be folded in, the city would agree to identify the Douglas Street corridor for future rapid transit use. So the linkage was created back then, and the city went through OCP amendments to actually put that into print and to create that as part of the city's future.

So there's no debate, really significant debate, on this side of the House or in the region about that corridor. That's the corridor where it's going. Nor is there a debate about the desirability of going to rapid transit. It's very, very desirable, and I think we're on entirely the same page.

Where the concerns arise…. The busway plan is a plan that was put in place in an incremental first step — kind of, this is where we might aspire to go — back in the days when the travel choices strategy was being evolved, and Transit was looking at what it might do next to evolve the existing bus system into a form of rapid transit. It was simply supposed that that would be the next step, because it would be the first kind of step in the direction of rapid transit.

Fair enough. The challenge we face is that we've never been in a situation as a region where we've had the ability to say what we should be trying to do in light of a set of regional goals that we've now established — towards more compact land use, towards densification around now identified regional centres — and, in particular, had no chance to have that discussion around how we would reduce our carbon emissions in this region in order to meet targets that have been now made part of law by 2020 — that we will have a one-third reduction.

We've never sat down as a region and said, including the transit commission, how we will work backwards from that goal that we now share and envision a transit system that will allow us to get there.

Now, I didn't disagree with anything the minister had to say about a business case for a transit system. I think it's a very good way to go, but the concern that I have and that we have at this point in time is that we appear to be precommitted to an option that was in place prior to the targets ever being set.

From where I'm standing, I don't see this necessarily as a problem. I would see us as having an opportunity not to park rapid transit but to take a step back from it and to say: "Okay, let's put together a business case for a rapid transit system, and let's use the opportunity we have now, with a provincial commitment, to go to rapid transit to evaluate what the best system would be."

That would give us a chance to sort it through, rather than simply proceeding with the plan that was more or less there on the shelf prior to these targets ever being put in place, and say: "Well, we might try and accelerate that plan." It makes a lot of us quite uncomfortable to go down that path and to think that the shovels might be in the ground before the business case is developed and that we would start to commit ourselves to a system, which if we looked at it more closely, we might not do in this manner.

There are some other concerns, and they're real concerns. Transit has said, in response to things that it has heard — the regional transit commission and B.C. Transit — that it's heard the concern from the public that we don't want to see a rapid bus system foreclose the LRT option. Transit has said: "Well, we'll design it so it's LRT-compatible so that it can be easily converted to LRT."

Part of the problem with this…. I appreciate the openness, and I appreciate the fact that people are now thinking about that linkage. But it isn't that simple. We have done enough work with people who are operators of light rail transit systems to know that in order to design another system to be compatible with light rail transit, you'd actually have to know the technology you were going to choose. You'd have to know the exact type of train and car that you were going to use in order to be able to create platforms that could be converted to it.

There are also serious issues, which I'm not technically skilled enough to know the implications of, and frankly, it's part of the reason for wanting other eyes to have a look at all of this — whether a centre median–passenger loading system is what you would design if you were designing an LRT system for this corridor.

I'm not saying that it's not, but I would say that it's not the typical profile I have seen in a downtown area for a light rail transit system. It's another reason that I think we should be looking at the opportunity to take a pause here and say we're going to develop that business case and we're going to do it on a comparative basis. We'll compare bus rapid transit with something else and work it through — work through the technical evaluation and come up at the end with: "This does

make sense to do now in this way, and here's how we can achieve full technical compatibility for a future light rail transit system."

I just throw that out because I do think there is an opportunity, and there's a lot riding on it. If we believe — and I do, personally, believe — that the sense of urgency that government has conveyed about contracting our carbon footprint is in fact what we should be thinking about, then I personally think that we need to be considering what's the best option for that.

If a technical analysis and a business case show that bus rapid transit is the smartest investment to begin with and the one to take us out to a particular horizon before something else, that would put the region, I think, in a position, if it saw that, to fully get behind it. That would calm the waters. It would create consensus around what we're doing. It would be a very useful thing to do.

It would also — and I think the minister has made this case — be the best way to go about making a judgment about something as important as a rapid transit system. So I put that out, and I'm just interested to hear the response.

Hon. K. Falcon: I thank the member for Saanich South for his comments. As always, I think the member is constructive and thoughtful in the comments that he makes.

I think the thing that I would say is, having travelled…. Everywhere I've travelled in my capacity as Minister of Transportation, I've tried to learn something. I've tried to learn about what systems work where and why they work well.

For example, when I was in London…. You look at the tube system that moves four million people a day, but you also recognize that you've got a population in the Greater London area of somewhere in the range of nine million people.

For the members of the viewing audience, this is a very, very important point and something that the Premier and government have been really trying to get across — that is, that you can really spend a lot of money on transit in areas where, frankly, there are just very few people.

It is a big challenge. When people talk about a business case — and they're right to talk about a business case — what that really means, without trying to sound like a fancy-pants business person, is that we have dollars that the taxpayers give us. It's not government money. These are the taxpayers' dollars, which they give us through the taxes they pay. Then we have the responsibility of figuring out how we take those scarce taxpayer dollars and make investments which will maximize the benefit of those investments and achieve the best possible result we can for the dollars that we have available.

Now, you could always…. I get this from my own community, so I'm going to speak about my community, because I don't want to sort of make it seem like I'm picking on Victoria or Kelowna or any other areas. But, you know, I'll get people that say to me: "Heck, why don't you just run SkyTrain right down over the Port Mann Bridge and right out to Abbotsford? Jeez, it's so stupid. How come government can't figure that out?" And blah, blah, blah, blah.

What I usually say to them is: "Well, we could do that, if you don't mind us putting your money to the stupidest possible use to get some of the worst possible results."

People are usually a little shocked, because politicians don't usually talk like that. But I say that because it's true. You could spend $12 billion and you could run that line down the middle of the Trans-Canada Highway. Frankly, there's no population along that corridor. It's very sparse and spread out over a large area.

One of the things that we try to do, hopefully, is make good planning decisions — so that the extension of the SkyTrain we're talking about in that area, for example, will actually go to Guildford, which is a growing area, and then start to head south and along the Fraser Highway, to try and tie into where these cities have their growth plans.

In the communities of Abbotsford and Chilliwack, we also remind them that when you have 200,000 people, combined population in the area, it's pretty expensive to think about running and spending billions and billions of dollars to run a rapid transit system out to.

That may not be what they want to hear, but it is the truth. I intend to continue to speak the truth, at least as far as good transit planning goes. What we say to those communities — the mayors are all good people; they're all friends of mine — is: "Listen. We'll do our bit, and you have to do yours." The first thing we have to do is to build a culture of public transit ridership, and — let's be honest — certainly in those communities, in Abbotsford and Chilliwack, it doesn't exist. To make it exist, you've got to provide a service that will actually get people out of their cars.

That's why in those communities we're talking about a RapidBus option, frankly, which will get them from those sparsely spread-out population bases and start to create a ridership culture. It doesn't happen overnight. But as that ridership culture grows, you create those corridors, the population grows and the communities start to change their urban forms, hopefully, around the areas where you've created these RapidBus corridors.

That's where you start to see the possibilities start to grow, to say: hey, now it starts to make sense to look at the investment in the rapid transit, the light rail or whatever option you're going to do. You now have a change in urban form, you're starting to see the density, and you're starting to build in the ridership that you're going to need to feed the massive investment you're going to make.

In the Greater Victoria area, to be perfectly candid, it's the same thing. The Western Communities are growing rapidly, but we're still talking about a combined population of about 367,000 people in the Greater Victoria area. We have to say to ourselves: how do we best create a culture of ridership? How do we draw people out of their cars, the ones that are currently driving right now, and get them into a really effective transit system?

Now, we can talk about, say, "Well, let's just go right to the rapid transit idea," even though it is going to cost a huge amount of dollars to service a very spread-out sparse population and deal with it. You could do it that way, but what I will say to the member is — this is to the other member, not to the member for Saanich South — that it would be a very, very difficult business case to prove out.

What we have said, and what the previous plans have all informed us about, is that the way to start out would be to start with a RapidBus system. Now, I think the member is right. The member for Saanich South correctly points out that, yes, those were plans that were made in the past and that maybe now and in the future we ought to look at different things.

But I think it's important to point out that, of the $1.2 billion RapidBus program, part of that is also technology, and the technology will be a central feature of what we look at as part of the RapidBus network. The technology that is going to help inform our decision will be technology that will help us achieve government's commitment to reduce greenhouse gases by 33 percent by 2020. For example, hydrogen fuel cell buses would certainly be one of the options that would be looked at, and all of the range of the very clean-burning, low greenhouse gas or zero greenhouse gas emitters will be part of the panoply of options that will be looked at as part of the business case.

What we are really talking about here today, I think — and the question started with the three-kilometre Douglas corridor — is what I think is so central to this. What the city of Victoria and what the Victoria transit commission are doing is that they're saying: let's preserve this corridor. Now, the member for Saanich South talked about some level of detail. I'll be very candid with the member. He actually knows more about it than I do, that level of detail, but what I do know is that it's exactly the kind of thing they want to discuss at the public hearing that they're going to be holding tonight. That's the kind of information that they want to hear.

What we have found in the Ministry of Transportation on projects that we've been involved with…. The Gateway is a really good example where you have all these people with lots of very legitimate questions and very legitimate concerns. They come out to these meetings with those concerns and questions, and they ask those questions. They get addressed, and in many cases, if they're not addressed by the answers, it informs the proponents and the folks, in the case of a project like ours, in the Ministry of Transportation on the concerns raised.

Then we work to try and deal with those concerns, and often we can fix the concerns — sometimes not all of them but in many cases a lot of them. Really, that's what the Victoria transit commission is trying to do tonight.

The commitment that I will give to the member for Saanich South is that this government is committed to making sure that these RapidBus projects go ahead, that we utilize as part of the business case the very latest and best technologies that will provide the best possible outcomes in terms of greenhouse gases.

At the same time, as we get these systems in place, we will be challenging the communities, to say: "We need the communities to look at how they grow their communities, and we need to look at how we can change the urban form to create more density." The more densities that we can create, the more ridership we can create, then the stronger the case gets for a quicker, earlier conversion to a rapid transit type of technology. That's how you really make the business case for those kinds of technologies.

I am looking forward to the Victoria transit commission public meeting. As I say, I think it's important to applaud the leadership that they're showing. I can assure the member opposite that as we work to prepare the business case for the entire 57-kilometre RapidBus line, we will be looking very carefully at all aspects, not just of the design and making sure that the design allows for the easy conversion to a future rapid transit corridor but also the technologies that will be utilized when we put together the RapidBus line to ensure that we have the latest and best.

The final thing I'll say is that the other thing that'll be different is what we want to do as part of RapidBus. As I said earlier, as we speak, it's being implemented around the world. It is a very effective way — the evidence is overwhelming — to move people and develop a ridership culture if it's done properly. But we also want to, where we can, create stations around the RapidBus that have the look and feel of rapid transit so that you've got the same sense of security, where you can pay coming through the gates; and so that when the RapidBus pulls up, you just get on, and you don't have to wait and pay while you're getting on, etc. All of those kinds of attributes are also part of the business case we put together.

At the end of the day, we are really trying to provide the most efficient way to move people and the most efficient and effective way to bring about a culture of public transit ridership. That's what we're trying to do as part of the $1.2 billion commitment to nine new RapidBus lines.

R. Fleming: There's been a lot said this morning in those long answers. I think the issue here that has constrained full consideration in Greater Victoria is that, basically, what was announced in January was a plan with some nice graphics and some pictures but without the planning behind it. I think the minister has all but admitted that this morning — that there is much work to be done.

He has alternated between saying that we are on a path to build 57 kilometres' worth of busways in this region and, at other points in his remarks, that he remains open to other options and that no consideration of any project would be conducted by his government without a business case behind it.

You know, in some of the examples he cited…. It would be inappropriate and unproductive to draw a comparison between technologies or examples such as London and Paris, but what this region does aspire to can be seen in some related examples — places like

Lyon, France; or closer, in the Pacific Northwest region, Portland, which in 1986 embarked on LRT technology; or even Boulder, Colorado, which has a different type of bus system but has a population much more like ours.

I think the point to make to the minister…. I know he knows this region. I give him credit. I know he knows this region to a large degree. But to simply look at the population and not do a careful analysis and comparison of what options there could be, without looking at the geographic particularities of this area…. I mean, we are surrounded by 270 degrees of water here. We have a north-south orientation in this region. So take those population numbers, but appreciate, as the regional growth strategy does, that there are nodes along that way, between the Western Communities and downtown. That is the major transportation corridor.

There already is contemplation in that regional growth strategy at Town and Country and at other areas for massive densification. I think that in order to achieve that, what we are looking at, all of these things have to be on the table. To plan your community, to achieve densities, to have land uses, relies on the appropriate technology for our transit system.

If the minister could make a comment here today, which I think he has elsewhere in the public realm, to commit — he'll read the comments tonight at the public hearing — to looking at other options before proceeding to a three-kilometre stretch of busway, and to do the proper homework, as he calls it, on all options, including light rail; the cost-benefit analysis; and most importantly, the ridership gain and benefit potential for transit in conjunction with more efficient compact land use.

All of those things have to be part of a proper and fulsome analysis and evaluation. I would like to hear him commit today — instead of dismissing and insisting that it's only busway and busway only — that as a result of hearings like tonight's and other parts of public feedback to what has been presented to date, he will consider other options.

Hon. K. Falcon: You know, the member, frankly, is not giving credit where credit is due. I can't make any commitments regarding the public hearing that the Victoria transit commission is having, because it's the Victoria transit commission that's driving this process.

Actually, all I can say is that I applaud them and the leadership that they and the mayor of Victoria, Alan Lowe, are showing — and the city of Victoria.

I thought that the member for Saanich South actually informed me of information that I was unaware of, and I appreciate it. It was back in the days of Andrew Petter that that sort of bargain or deal or whatever was cut. It sounds like a heck of a good bargain, if you ask me, and it made a lot of sense. So it sounds like they're trying to act on the initiatives and the vision that were put together a long time ago.

No, I'm not going to interfere in the process they have underway. I think the process is working. I think it's founded on a leadership basis. What I can say to the member, though, is that the member talks about a transit plan with pictures and a brochure and all this. I recognize that, really, it's not surprising in the world today that there's skepticism sometimes. But I think the member would at least give government credit that on projects we've said we were going to do, we have been characterized by the fact that we've done them.

I've listened to the skepticism on the other side on many major projects that I am currently building right now that they didn't think were ever going to get built, including Gateway, Kicking Horse, Sea to Sky Highway, the Canada line, and all of them are under construction — billions of dollars' worth of projects.

I think the difference is that we can really show in a very concrete way that when we say we're going to do something, it gets done. And when I say that I am personally, on behalf of government and my colleagues, going to have something happen, I can pretty much tell you that I will move heaven and earth to make sure that it happens — and of course that we do it right.

So the decision and the process that we're working on in terms of a RapidBus were not something that was pulled out of thin air. The transit plan itself was not something that was pulled out of thin air. This was a document that was informed by a lot of work that has been done by the CRD, by the Victoria transit commission, by B.C. Transit, by TransLink in the Lower Mainland. That really was the foundational basis on which we put together and drafted the plan.

It was really predicated upon what everyone's sort of aspirations were for how we can create the best possible ridership and investment that we can throughout the province of British Columbia to help us effectively double the amount of ridership that we've got in the public transit system.

So as I say, it is something that was predicated on a foundation of a lot of work that's been done historically, and there is nothing wrong with people saying: "Yes, but we think we should go to this technology or that technology." But all I have ever tried to do is to try and make sure I'm informed by the work that has been done, that I don't ignore a lot of the work that's been done by people that have thought about this a lot longer than I have, that have spent a lot more time and money thinking about these kinds of issues. And that's what we will continue to do as we go forward.

I would hope that the member will attend the public hearing tonight, as members of the public will. They will be able to inform themselves on what the city of Victoria and the Victoria transit commission are planning in terms of preserving that corridor for RapidBus and then a future rapid transit along that corridor. I think it's a positive thing, and I appreciate the members asking the questions.

R. Fleming: I just want to ask the minister about the current status of the B-line busway in Richmond and whether he can tell me if it's functioning currently.

Hon. K. Falcon: I apologize for taking some time there, but as you know, that was a TransLink initiative, so I'm not as familiar with it. I'm just trying to talk to my staff to try and build on my recollection, at least, of what the situation was there.

The B-line busway was a busway that was put in place by TransLink along No. 3 Road. The day it opened it was an extraordinary success, far beyond what they had ever anticipated. The ridership….

Hon. K. Falcon: Well, you shouldn't be driving. You should be taking the bus, Member.

Hon. K. Falcon: Oh well, no wonder it was a disaster. He was the bus driver. I certainly can appreciate that.

Hon. K. Falcon: Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that it was a great success, and the Coast Mountain Bus had to add a number of additional assets to it almost immediately because of the ridership that resulted.

What happened, in fact, is that they were planning, just as we talked about in this project, that in the future it would become a rapid transit line. Now, they were thinking out 12 to 15 years, but as a result of the leadership of the Premier in bringing together the federal government, the airport authority…. It took, I think, only four or five years since the busway was put in place that the construction of the Canada line started on the No. 3 corridor, construction which continues today on schedule and on budget — something that we're all extraordinarily proud of.

That is all I know about the bus line, for the benefit of the member for Victoria-Hillside.

G. Coons: Thank you, Minister and staff, for coming in and allowing some questions.

G. Coons: We'll continue from where we left off yesterday. I'd like to start with just a comment that. In your comments in your action to date with the Auditor General's report, you're meeting with the ferry advisory committee chairs, which I think is a real positive step for ongoing dialogue with ferry users. As the minister knows and has heard through the hundreds, if not thousands, of e-mails and letters and the protests that are going on in communities…. Meeting with ferry advisory committee chairs, I think after about four years, indicates the minister realizes that he's responsible for our ferry system. He's responsible for our marine highway and the best interests of those that depend on it as their vital link.

But when we look at the ferry advisory committee chairs, on their website…. I'm sure the commissioner and his staff have been monitoring the new website that the chairs have put out and their concerns with fares and with what's happening in communities.

When we start looking at some of the fares, we're looking at Denman-Hornby up 130 percent since 2003. This is by 2011, so in another three years, fares on Campbell River–Quadra, 125 percent; Powell River–Texada, 110 percent. Skyrocketing fares — unacceptable to coastal communities. It's negatively affecting them, as the minister has heard.

I believe, and I think most people in ferry-dependent communities and in British Columbia believe that the cornerstone of ferry policy should be the public interest and not corporate profit margin. An affordable transportation option must be considered.

Along the way, when we start looking at the meetings I went to…. As I said to the minister earlier, on the tour were 30 communities: Quadra, Cortes, Gabriola, Denman, Hornby, Courtenay, Gibsons, Powell River, Bowen Island, Pender, Mayne, Galiano, Masset, Tlell, Port Clements, Queen Charlotte, Sandspit, Skidegate, Old Massett, Prince Rupert, Bella Bella, Bella Coola, Klemtu, Victoria, Chemainus, Saltspring, Texada. Included in the tour, Alert Bay, Sointula and Port McNeill.

It was a pretty intensive tour of going out and listening. I believe that the ferry advisory chairs and people in communities believe that the infrastructure for our ferries should be shared by all British Columbians — the same as bridges. The same as we pay for our bridges, the Sea to Sky Highway, the Bennett bridge. We all share in the cost for that provincially, and it shouldn't be downloaded on to those in ferry-dependent communities who rely on it as their vital link and essential service.

The ferry advisory committee chairs are asking the minister to take a lead role so that communities don't turn into ghost towns. The latest press release looks at the highlights, the ups and downs, of the new ferry math with the new April 1 increase. They're trying to figure out where it will end. This is the second fare hike in five months — 11 percent it's gone up in five months. They're predicting triple-digit figures for most of the minor routes by 2011. On their website they've got ferry traffic. They've got the graphs of ferry traffic down, passengers down and fares continually going up, and they call it an unsustainable trend.

As I said, I am pleased that the minister has agreed to give ferry-dependent communities a voice. They actually

presented a proposal to the minister for a sustainable ferry service, and in that proposal they talk about the crisis and a serious situation.

I was wondering if the minister considered any of the proposals from the ferry advisory committee chairs to develop a ferry-dependent community strategy that would look at the long-term viability. If they would adjust the service fee contributions for the second performance term, the same as the northern routes…. Would they adjust the rate of inflation for the provincial service fee? The contract needs to be flexible, and a consultation protocol….

I'm sure the minister was approached by the ferry advisory committee chairs, and I'm wondering if he is going to take the lead role and adopt the proposals that the ferry advisory committee chairs gave to him.

Hon. K. Falcon: Look, the first thing I'll say is that I recognize that the fuel increases and the increase in fares — largely driven by the fuel surcharges that are trying to deal with a world in which we've seen oil in the last five years go from $35 a barrel to over $100 a barrel — have a real and no doubt a significant impact on ferry-dependent communities. I don't want for a second to try to pretend that that's not the case. It is real.

What I always say, what I've said in public and what I've said before, is that what we have to do is look at the fact that, in the midst of seeing oil prices go from $35 a barrel to over $100 a barrel and the challenges that creates, we still have a ferry system that up to this point has invested almost $850 million in new capital to improve their vessels and their terminals — retrofitting vessels, buying new vessels and capital spending to really try to improve on an asset that was in horrible condition when we had to inherit it as a government in 2001 and, as I said earlier, where the average age of the vessels was 42 years old.

We've got a ferry corporation which over the next 15 years has a planned capital expenditure program of $2.4 billion to continue to replace and/or completely renovate and retrofit the ferries in their fleet to provide the best possible service.

Now, Member, it's fair for you to point out the fact that there have been significant increases driven by fuel, and that's true. But I think we should remember that in the period from 1991 to 1999 we saw ferry fares increase on average by 70 percent. The difference is that there was no investment in terminals. There was virtually no investment in the fleet. Debt was racked up 1,800 percent. Effectively, we bankrupted a Crown corporation.

What we're trying to do today in moving forward is to have a corporation that is financially sustainable and that is free of political interference, which was the hallmark of the problems they faced last time.

I think if we objectively look at the evidence of how B.C. Ferries is doing today, they do customer satisfaction surveys on a regular basis and score very highly. There is labour stability at B.C. Ferries, something that was notably absent in the '90s where they used to have complete shutdowns of the ferry system — horrible union-management relations. While those relations today can still be tense at times, there is no question in my mind that there is a definite improvement in the relationship between labour and management on the B.C. ferries.

I have personally met, on a number of occasions, with the president of the union, Jackie Miller — someone whom I have high regard for. I think that if the member opposite even spoke to the president of the union, she would tell the member that they prefer the current structure in terms of how the effect is and how their employees enjoy it compared to what it used to be like when it was a government-run system.

In fact, I'll go further. I was at a ferry terminal some months back, taking a ferry over to the Sunshine Coast, and one of the fellows, who I've never met before, came down from one of the towers because he saw me sitting in the lineup. He came over and just said: "Listen, I'm going to be retiring soon. I wanted you to know that I've worked here for 35 years, and it's never been better working for the ferry corporation than it is today. I just wanted you to know that and how much we appreciate it."

Now, having said all that, that doesn't take away the essential point that the member made — that it is a challenge. But I think it's also important to recognize that this government each and every year increases the amount of subsidy we provide to the ferry system to deliver that essential service throughout the province of British Columbia.

It's $130 million a year plus another $20 million a year to keep prices low or subsidize the fares for seniors, for students that are travelling on school business, for those with medical difficulties that require the use of the ferries. That's $150 million a year, each and every year, from the province of British Columbia to the B.C. ferry system. In a seven-year period that's over $1 billion — every seven years.

Now, I occasionally hear a chorus of voices that says that somehow the province isn't doing enough for ferry-dependent communities. I defy the member or any of the voices that say that to find any part of the province of British Columbia where you have that kind of ongoing, sustained funding each and every year to support their transportation network, because you won't find it.

In the Islands Trust region alone we spend $55 million a year for 25,000 people — $55 million a year, taxpayer dollars, to subsidize the cost of providing the service for 25,000 people. I don't think that that's something that should be easily dismissed.

I totally respect the fact that in an environment with those kinds of fuel pressures, it is not a fun thing. I have no doubt that that's a big challenge for those communities.

The member likes to talk about percentages, but he also knows that in many cases the increases might be $2 or $3. I know that $2 or $3 is still a lot of money, but I think that the member also needs to have some perspective.

In addition to the $130 million a year, plus the additional $20 million a year that the province provides to

subsidize services for seniors, those with medical issues, students, etc., we also provided — as the member would know — $7 million to help with fuel costs on the northern routes and the minor routes last year. We contributed an additional $7 million for the fuel deferral account to try and help defray future increases on the northern and minor routes. That, I believe, was also a significant commitment.

The member also knows — this member, the member for North Coast, in particular knows — that the province is also committing an additional $35 million every single year to bring into effect the new Northern Adventure, which is now operating on the north coast, and the new Northern Expedition, which will be operating, I believe, later this year on the north coast, and then ultimately even more additional dollars as a third vessel comes into play.

Our commitment to the ferry corporation is very, very substantial. I have publicly said to the folks out there that have been, in many cases, very upset that the fares have gone up as a result of the fuel pressures….

I have apologized for the situation that we find ourselves in, in the world today, with those kinds of fuel increases, but I've also pointed out the enormous amount of taxpayer money investment that comes from every part of the province, Member. You know that. It comes from the small northern rural communities and Prince George. Every part of the province is contributing towards that $150 million to keep the prices as affordable as we can for members of ferry-dependent communities. I recognize that it is still a challenge for many of these small communities, and I don't want to take away from that reality at all.

G. Coons: I guess my question was: is the minister going to adopt any of the proposals that the ferry advisory committee chairs put to him for sustainable ferry service?

Hon. K. Falcon: The short answer is yes. My staff meets with the ferry advisory committee chairs. I actually met with them too, last year, to listen to them. We're always interested in their opinions. They have talked very eloquently about the impacts, as they see it, to their communities as a result of the fuel pressures and what those are doing in terms of fares.

I take issue with some of the characterization that the member has used in terms of ridership being down. That's not the case. I've got the actual ridership numbers here, which I will read into the record for the member.

Since B.C. Ferries was put into its new structure as an independent authority in '03, the passenger volume in the '03-04 year was 21.37 million, and the vehicle traffic was 9.35 million. In '06-07, the latest years that we have the full traffic information available here, the passenger count was 21.66 million, and the vehicle count was 9.61 million. It's actually gone up slightly, not down.

It's worth noting, for the benefit of the member, I think…. This is very important. Under the old model, which the members of the opposition are constantly clamouring for us to return to — the Crown corporation, political interference model — if you look at the numbers from '95-96 to 2003, when we moved it into an independent authority free from political interference and independently regulated by the independent ferries commissioner, the passenger numbers in '95-96 were 11.9 million and in 2003 were 10.8 million. They actually went down under the old model that the members opposite have been arguing for us to go back to.

At least in this debate I'm going to be fairly frank and blunt about the reality of what the ferry system was like in the '90s and what it is like today. Remember that the numbers that I read into the record in terms of the increase in passenger and traffic volume include the period in which the Queen of the North sank, with the impact that that had on ridership and passenger volume, particularly to the member's own communities. In spite of the sinking of the Queen of the North, the passenger and the vehicle numbers are up from '03-04 — I read those into the record — and they declined in the mid-'90s right up until the point where it became an independent authority.

You had an old Crown corporation model that effectively saw horrible misallocations of capital spending as a result of political interference. You had a very demoralized staff. You had fractious labour relations, including complete shutdowns of the system. You had fares go up 70 percent during the decade of the '90s with virtually no investment in the terminals or the vessels, and you had declining ridership. That's the record, on the record, of what took place.

Today you've got a situation, as I mentioned earlier to the member, where we've seen investment thus far from '03, since it became a new model, of almost $850 million in new capital investment: significant terminal upgrades, brand-new vessels in some cases, completely retrofitted vessels in other cases. We've seen a long-term labour agreement and labour stability.

We've seen a very good and, I think, improving working relationship with the ferry employees, who are very proud. I want to acknowledge for the record that they do an excellent job each and every day — and in a slight digression that I hope the member will grant me — particularly the members of the Queen of the North, who I don't think have ever been properly saluted for the outstanding efforts that they showed in the midst of a crisis. None of us can even imagine how terrifying that must have been. I think they acquitted themselves very well, given what was going on.

I did want to get that on the record. I apologize, Member, but I know that the member would echo that comment. He's nodding to confirm that.

We now have this new model, and we now have labour stability. We've got massive investment in terminals and fleet, and we've got independent regulation. But we have a challenge, and it's a very real challenge. The challenge is that you've got oil prices that have gone from $35 a barrel five years ago, when the new independent authority was put in place, to over $100 a barrel today,

and that has had a real impact. It hasn't impacted ridership in terms of the ridership or traffic volume yet. In fact, that has gone up. But I have no doubt that it has a real impact on people. I always say that we shouldn't pretend it doesn't.

The question, then, goes back to is the government doing enough for it. What I would say to that is that we increased the amount we subsidize every year to where today it is over $150 million. Over a seven-year period that represents over $1 billion every seven years that the province is putting into the system to try and subsidize, and keep as affordable as we can, the fares for ferry-dependent communities.

I am proud of that commitment. I'm proud of the work that's been done on the ferry system. I don't for a second believe it's perfect nor, and I will echo the member….

I apologize, Member, because I'm taking long, and that's not fair to the member. But I wanted to get this on the record, because I do think it's important to put it all in perspective so that when we make the debate, we balance what was going on to what's going on today.

I don't doubt that it's a challenge. We are very strongly committed. We will continue to increase our financial commitment to the B.C. ferry corporation. We will continue to do what we can to try and defray ferry fuel increases. We will continue to work with the ferry advisory committee chairs and the ferry-dependent communities.

I recognize that if I went around to any ferry-dependent community and said, "Would you rather not pay as big an increase?" they would all unanimously say yes. The member is totally right about that. In all my years in politics I have not yet discovered a way that if you say to people, "Would you like to pay less for government services?" they're not going to stand up and say: "Yes, we sure would."

I don't in any way doubt what the member is saying. All I'm trying to say is that I think that we're making a very strong commitment to the ferry system. I'm proud of the work that has been done.

G. Coons: I asked a simple question about whether or not the minister was going to follow the proposals or adopt any of the proposals. He started off by saying yes, but I guess the real answer is no. I guess that's again just the doublespeak coming from the minister.

When the minister looks at traffic — and yes, that was what B.C. Ferries put out — that traffic has gone up. But the ferry advisory committee chairs…. Mind you, as the minister knows, these are the chairs of the minor routes. They asked B.C. Ferries to separate the major routes from the minor routes.

On the new webpage that the ferry advisory committee chairs put out and on their press release on March 31 entitled "Brushing up on Their Math," they say: "There's more math to come. As ferry fares are heading skyward" — this is right from their press release — "ferry traffic is steadily slumping. Through 2007 traffic on the minor routes fell by more than 45,000 passengers and 28,000 vehicles. This unintended consequence of fare hikes is creating complications for B.C. Ferries and stress on communities. Traffic declines will mean even greater fares in the long run."

I would suggest that, yes, the minister can talk about traffic going up, but when he separates the major routes from the minor routes, there's a significant impact. I suggest that perhaps the staff look at the graphs that were put together. There are nice graphs on the webpage that look at passenger and vehicle traffic going down and fares going up. I think, as we move forward on that, that the minister perhaps should confirm that we're dealing with the minor routes and not including the major routes in that.

I'll ask one more time, and I'm noticing the time: is the minister going to consider any of the proposals put forward by the ferry advisory committee chairs?

Hon. K. Falcon: I think the member is very right, actually, to talk about minor routes and major routes and splitting them off and the difference, etc., and I'll take that. But one of the points I was trying to make in my previous comment was that, unfortunately, there's been a history of fares increasing even on the minor routes in previous decades too.

The member, I believe, had mentioned the Powell River–Texada route. I can't remember if he mentioned it here or if that was in a previous time that we were talking, perhaps in the House. But to give the member an idea, from 1991 to 2001 those fares increased by 92.3 percent. That's $9.75 for a round trip. By March 31, 2012 — so from 2003 to 2012 — those fares also increased a substantial amount, 81 percent — okay? I don't want to pretend that it's not a significant increase. It's actually less percentage in terms of what it increased during the '90s, but it's still an increase.

I think the issue then becomes: is the government doing enough? Some $130 million a year is going out of taxpayer dollars from right across the province. The folks in Dawson Creek and Prince George and in rural communities throughout the province, including the Lower Mainland and the Island, are all contributing tax dollars towards trying to keep the fares as affordable as possible in an environment where we've seen the price of oil, as I mentioned earlier, go from $35 to over $100 a barrel. That is a challenge.

But $130 million a year is a huge ongoing annual subsidy for the minor routes and for the northern routes. It is a huge subsidy, and it doesn't even include the $20 million a year, as I said, that goes to subsidize seniors and students, etc. We will continue with a strong financial commitment towards the ferry system.

I have to also be honest with the public, because I don't ever want to be in a situation where we try to paint a picture that's rosier than it deserves to be or is more pessimistic than it really is. What I am saying is that I think that the combination of the massive investment the ferry corporation is making — in their facilities, in their vessels, in their staff, in trying to make sure they provide a better quality of service for the folks that use it — is significant, and it has a cost. The fact that they're trying to deal in an environment

I think we are doing a lot to try and deal with that. We increase our subsidy to the ferry corporation every year. We increase our subsidy to the northern routes by tens of millions of dollars each and every year to make sure that they've got the best possible vessels to help service their routes.

It is still a problem. It is a challenge with the fuel increases, and I acknowledge that. The member is right to bring it to our attention. All I do is try to wrap it around a little bit of perspective in terms of what it used to be like and what it's like today.

Having said that, and thanking the critic for his questions and looking forward to coming back after the break, I move that the committee rise, report progress and ask leave to sit again.

Hansard Services publishes transcripts both in print and on the Internet.
Chamber debates are broadcast on television and webcast on the Internet.
Question Period podcasts are available on the Internet.