Orders of the Day

Hon. M. Farnworth: I call continued second reading debate on Bill 4, Budget Measures Implementation Act.

[R. Chouhan in the chair.]

Second Reading of Bills

BILL 4 — BUDGET MEASURES
IMPLEMENTATION ACT, 2020

(continued)

M. de Jong: Before the break we were talking, and I was referring to the provisions of Bill 4 and the various taxation statutes it purports to amend. I was making the argument and the observation that asking the House to lend support to a piece of legislation dealing with taxation instruments that affect the bulk of the revenues government receives over the course of a fiscal year, without the benefit of up-to-date information about the extent to which those revenues have been impacted by the onset of the pandemic and are expected and forecast to continue to impact the receipt of revenues, is unfair but also irresponsible.

[1:35 p.m.]

I referred to the reference in the bill to the Carbon Tax Act, the Employer Health Tax Act, the Income Tax Act and the likely prospect for revenues in those areas to drop. Now, in some instances, there will already be in the possession of the government information confirming what the impact of the pandemic has been for months past. There will certainly be information and advice relating to the range of impact anticipated going forward. The government and the Finance Minister thus far have purposely chosen to withhold that information.

Again, I’ll make this case and this observation. When the House convened for a day-long session in March at what we now would refer to as the onset of the pandemic, the minister and the government asked for and received great licence to alter the spending side of the budget that had been tabled just a few weeks prior to that and secured approval from the House to expand spending into some all-important areas with skeletal information.

I think the minister endeavoured to provide what she could by way of information and assured the House there would be an opportunity to review the decisions that would be made with respect to those significant changes.

The House, as I have mentioned, responded by granting that authority, realizing several things — realizing that for the fiscal year ahead, something that governments in British Columbia have sought to achieve would not be achieved. We would be spending more operationally on programs and supports for people than the government has at its disposal based on the revenues being received. I think the public understands that. I think the public accepts that. The opposition certainly accepted that.

We are now nearly four months further down the road, and legislation that would otherwise have been debated very close to the tabling of the budget is back before the House in dramatically different circumstances. Now, while the government is comfortable and likes to talk about its spending initiatives, it and the minister have been very, very hesitant to share information about the revenue side. Like any organization….

I mentioned earlier and described the scene of a family looking to the year ahead and making decisions about what it was going to spend and, in certain circumstances, what it was going to borrow. There is surely a correlation between the answers to those two questions and what it has at its disposal revenue-wise — what it’s going to earn, what that family is going to earn. But the government doesn’t want us to know that.

The minister has said: “I’ll be providing a quarterly update in September.” Well, that’s fine. That, to be fair, equates with the regular budgetary cycle. But these are very irregular times. The change has been swift and dramatic, and the circumstances have changed accordingly. I think it behooves the minister and the government to return the trust to the House and the people of B.C. that she received from the House and the people in B.C. when she sought authority to dramatically amend the spending side of her budget back in March.

[1:40 p.m.]

I’ve heard the minister say: “I’ll talk about that on July 14.” She hasn’t provided much in the way of detail about what she intends to disclose then. I know that she has data about what the impact has been on retail sales. I know that she has data on what that has translated into with respect to the provincial sales tax, which is another piece of legislation dealt with in Bill 4 before the House. But she is asking this chamber to vote on this legislation. I don’t know if she intends to disclose that data on July 14. I would hope she would. I can’t imagine any reason for her not to.

Deputy Speaker: Thank you, Member.

M. de Jong: Oh, I think I have been granted licence to continue on behalf of the opposition.

Deputy Speaker: Okay, your licence is granted then. Carry on.

M. de Jong: Thank you very much.

She’s provided us with no assurance that she will disclose that information, even though it is fundamentally relevant to the question before the House and the interest that British Columbians will have.

Just before the break, I was talking about the Insurance Premium Tax Act which, in the minister’s budget, is anticipated to account for $660 million in revenue in the coming year. I made some observations about what has happened to insurance rates, particularly involving the strata title world and the condominium sector. That, ironically, may be an area where revenue to government goes up. That is problematic for an entirely different set of reasons, given the crisis that is confronting so many residents of condominiums.

I know that the minister has updated forecasts and information relating to the Insurance Premium Tax Act. Why won’t she share that information? Why won’t she show the trust in British Columbians and the House that the House and British Columbians gave to the government back in March?

Bill 4 touches upon the Logging Tax Act and the Mineral Tax Act. In the four months that have passed since Bill 4 was tabled, areas that were already suffering negatively, the resource sector, have since also been impacted dramatically by the COVID pandemic. They’ve also been impacted by softwood, by international trade disputes, by market access issues related to COVID, and that, undoubtedly, has altered the revenues.

Again, in table 1.3 of the minister’s budget, she has provided numbers, as Finance Ministers always do, for what the anticipated revenues will be. They have changed. The minister and the government have updated information and forecasts about how they have changed.

Bill 4 talks about the Motor Fuel Tax Act. The budget that the minister presented in February, to which Bill 4 directly applies, forecast for the year 2021: $1.024 billion in motor fuel tax revenue. That will not happen. It’s the ultimate good-news, bad-news story. The good news is the price of fuel went down. The bad news is no one can drive anywhere. We all saw that phenomenon.

[1:45 p.m.]

It has had undoubtedly profound impacts on the revenue that government will receive. I think British Columbians understand that. I certainly do. I will say again, so that the minister is under no illusions, that the crisis that has befallen, that has led to this dramatic change, the pandemic, isn’t the fault of this government — or any government in Canada, for that matter. But it has impacted those governments. All I am asking, and all I think British Columbians deserve, is honesty from the government about the nature of those impacts, because it influences the decisions that we have to make, going forward.

In the case of the motor fuel tax, this is not entirely speculative. The minister today knows what happened to revenue from motor fuel tax in the months of March, April and likely May. She gets briefed on that. I expect she gets briefed on it, if not daily, then certainly weekly. To say, “I will provide a full update through the regular course of the budget cycle in September,” doesn’t cut it, is unfair and, in my view, irresponsible.

What is the impact? What has the impact been with respect to the Motor Fuel Tax Act thus far? What are the minister’s officials telling her, those very able and capable people within the treasury branch who brief the minister on a daily basis? What are they telling her about the likely impact on revenues to government from motor fuel tax going forward through the rest of the fiscal year?

If the Finance Minister has some argument for why disclosing that information is problematic or why it’s none of the people’s business or why there are other interests that are best served by not disclosing that information, given the dramatic change in circumstances that we are facing, then she should make that argument. But thus far, she has been silent. Thus far, she has said nothing.

Bill 4 includes amendments to the Property Transfer Tax Act. In the minister’s budget at page 28, she makes the point. She says, on behalf of the government, that the government anticipates, for the fiscal year ’20-21, receiving $1.586 billion in property transfer tax revenue. Most assuredly, that has changed. Most assuredly, it has gone down.

How much has it gone down? The Minister of Finance won’t know for certain how much it has gone down until after the end of the fiscal year. I grant you that. But she has a good idea, certainly a better idea than anyone in this House and anyone else in British Columbia, about how much it has gone down thus far from when she made her budget, and she is refusing to tell people. If I’m wrong, if she can point to somewhere where she has provided that information, then I’ll stand up and withdraw that remark. But I don’t think she has. I don’t think she has been very specific at all about what she intends to say on these matters on July 14.

[1:50 p.m.]

If her response in closing this debate is “I’m going to tell you all of that on July 14,” then why are we debating this bill now? Then why aren’t we waiting until July 14, when we can have this information? I’m not certain, again, what interest would be compromised by delaying the debate on this bill until after that information has been disclosed to the public and to this House.

Then the big one that I mentioned, and it is…. There are significant provisions of Bill 4 dealing with the provincial sales tax and the Provincial Sales Tax Act. According to the minister’s budget tabled in February, the government is relying on that taxation instrument to receive $7.9 billion in revenue. That number has gone down. Most assuredly, it has gone down.

The minister has been briefed on what took place with respect to retail sales in March and April. She should share that information because that will directly influence the number. She has been provided with advice, and it’s likely a range. No one can know for certain that instead of $7.9 billion…. She has been provided with a reduced forecast for the balance of the fiscal year — and likely a range. Thus far, the government’s and her approach to this has been to say to British Columbians: “Well, you’ll just have to wait and see, and I’ll get around to telling you about that in September.” I don’t think that’s good enough. If we’re in this together, then we should be sharing the information we have together.

Retail sales have declined for reasons we all understand. How much have they declined? What is the forecast impact on government revenues going forward? Although we now inhabit a time when I think people are accepting of the notion that government will spend more than it receives in revenue, and I think people are accepting of that, they are not, I believe, prepared to give the government a blank cheque and say: “Well, you just spend whatever you want.”

There is still, surely, a link between how much we are going to borrow, because that’s how we’ll do this. Well, I guess, in the case of the government, how much are we going to borrow; how much are taxes going to increase, in the case of this government; and what are the revenues going to be to government in the balance of the fiscal year?

I don’t think these are unreasonable requests to make of the government and the minister — that they would be forthright in bringing legislation before the House, in seeking passage of legislation to enact a budget that the minister herself has acknowledged is no longer in keeping with the economic circumstances that the province is confronted by and use that argument to justify asking for and receiving from the House the licence to spend far in excess of what this budget allows for originally.

[1:55 p.m.]

In that same spirit, I believe it is entirely appropriate, reasonable and essential that the minister show similar good intentions, similar forthrightness by disclosing to British Columbians the details of where we are at — the genuine impact this pandemic is having with respect to the revenues that she and the government forecast receiving.

There are other instruments available, by the way, to the government. I mentioned in my earlier remarks the era several decades ago when numbers and budget schedules were manipulated for blatantly political purposes. We have in this province happily made, particularly over the last two decades, significant changes to prevent that from occurring.

One of the mechanisms that was developed to shine a brighter light of transparency on the budgeting process was the creation of the Economic Forecast Council. The Minister of Finance, like Finance Ministers before her, touts the advice and, quite appropriately so, says: “I am building a budget and the budget forecasts and particularly the revenue forecasts around the advice I receive from the Economic Forecast Council.” These eminent economists from across Canada who gather and provide not always a consensus but a range of views about what is happening with the economy.

Has the Finance Minister consulted the forecast council? She’s not obliged to do that legislatively. She is obliged to do so with respect to the preparation of the budget. But in these extraordinary times, where she and her budget, the government’s budget, rely on forecasts that are now entirely out of date, entirely inaccurate — and the forecast council authors would acknowledge that openly — has she reached out to them and said: “What are your new numbers?”

If she has done that, is she prepared to share that information with the public? If she hasn’t done that, why for heaven’s sake not? In this extraordinary time, armed with this instrument that has served the province so well, hasn’t she made use of it to solicit the views of the forecast council to say: “What are your predictions for retail sales going forward, given what we know about the state of the economy today”?

It would certainly provide, I think, British Columbians with a greater measure of confidence to know that they were being given an accurate set of facts about the state of the fiscal situation in British Columbia — a greater degree of confidence than they can have now, armed only with the assurance from the government and the Finance Minister that goes something like: “Well, just trust us.”

I am, as I have said now repeatedly in the course of this, not just understanding but accepting and supportive of the proposition that there will be times in the life of a country, the life of, in our case, a province, where extraordinary events descend upon us that require government to take extraordinary measures and where it will fall to government to absorb a greater share of the impact. That will translate into spending more than the government receives in revenues.

[2:00 p.m.]

That is, obviously, the classic definition of a deficit. We are in one of those times. There is no argument.

We are, I am going to say, armed better than most jurisdictions in Canada to address and provide that support, and there is a reason for that. As I’ve listened to the Finance Minister talk about the strength of British Columbia, talk about the strength of our economy, talk about the strength of provincial books, which are now serving us well, I have waited — I didn’t expect to hear it; nor do I think I have — for acknowledgment of the reasons we enjoy that strength. Governments previous to this one took steps to ensure that when that rainy day arrived, our debt had been reduced — in the case of our operating debt, virtually eliminated.

I guess I would not be honest if I didn’t say I was disappointed when I heard the Finance Minister say back in February, on the day she tabled the budget, that the days of hoarding budgetary surpluses are over. I was disappointed to hear her say that. I wonder if today she regrets having said it, because no one hoards budgetary surpluses; they pay down debt.

It is that debt room that the Finance Minister and the government happily can draw upon today. I’ll say that again. It is that debt room, which accrued because previous governments paid down debt, virtually eliminated the operating debt, that we can now draw upon on this rainy day. And it’s not just a rainy day; it’s a monsoon. But it’s probably asking too much for any acknowledgment that the strength we enjoy and our ability to respond to this circumstance were enhanced because of those measures and those steps.

Today British Columbians, I think, are accepting of the proposition that the government will need to spend more than it receives in revenue. But they are entitled to know how much it’s going to spend, and they are entitled to know how much in revenue it expects to receive. The government and the minister refuse to provide the latter information yet asked this House to breathe life, through Bill 4, into a budget that she acknowledges is now completely inaccurate and completely out of date.

As I said, I think that’s irresponsible. I think that’s unfortunate. I think it’s disrespectful to British Columbians. So for all of those reasons, I am troubled by the government’s attempt now to seek passage and support for Bill 4.

The minister, at some point during the course of the debate, will have an opportunity to respond to some of my concerns if she chooses to. If she stands here and says to the member for Abbotsford West: “Well, that’s all well and good, but I’m going to disclose all on July 14. I’m going to tell British Columbians what is happening to revenue, what is happening to retail sales, what our updated forecasts are and what that translates into, into reduced provincial sales tax revenue.

[2:05 p.m.]

“I am going to tell British Columbians what happened through the months of March, April and May with respect to the sale of motor fuel and the impact that had on revenue to government from the motor fuel tax. I am going to tell British Columbians what our forecasts are, given the escalating unemployment situation, to revenue from personal income tax. I am going to tell British Columbians what our forecasts are with respect to revenue from the employer health tax, because if you’re not an employee, you’ve got no employer to pay the health tax.

“I am going to tell British Columbians all of those things to the best of the ability, because I have been briefed on it, and I will share that information. I trust British Columbians enough to share that information with them….”

If the minister says that in response to my commentary, I will be gratified. I will be very pleased. But thus far, she and the Premier and her colleagues have steadfastly refused to disclose that information or be specific at all about what information, what updates they will provide, short of saying, “Well, there will be a first quarter update in September after this House has adjourned, after Bill 4 has been voted upon, after the spending estimates have been debated over the course of the next five or six weeks.”

So for those reasons, I have unburdened myself in terms of my concerns and trouble. I thank the House for its patience and listen with interest to those that follow.

B. Stewart: I definitely found that very interesting — especially the member for Abbotsford West, having had this portfolio and been in government for some time. I think that there was a lot of sage advice there for all of us as well as the government.

I want to rise today to continue the conversation on Bill 4, the Budget Measures Implementation Act. This bill is an important part of the budget process, and it put into law the changes that the government is making to taxes in British Columbia.

Reflecting on this bill in light of the pandemic impacts, many of our previously held assumptions have led us to a whole new line of questioning that we will be exploring in the committee stage of this bill. We are now in a period where we need to put an urgent focus on economic recovery. So we proceed in our examination of this bill, and we will be using that lens.

Our fiscal and economic position has completely changed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The financial picture that the Finance Minister laid out for us in February no longer accurately reflects the state of the province’s finances. Therefore, we do need to look at an updated look at our fiscal position. Frankly, going into estimates starting this Thursday, it behooves me that the government is not preparing to share that information with British Columbians or this House.

We live in a different world than we did in February, and we need to see exactly what the impact has had on our finances. What are the…? Nobody can see the future, but we know that we look at these things with a view to a growing economy and expanded tax revenue.

Frankly, I think that the member for Abbotsford West has laid it out very succinctly — that the idea is of having a nest egg. I can’t believe that I remember those remarks, back when the budget was introduced, about hoarding. Gone are the days of hoarding. I’m thinking: “Here we are, and we just recently gave an extension or a spending of $5 billion just to deal with this crisis, which is more than the surplus we turned over in May of 2017.”

The Finance Minister has told British Columbians that you will have this information on July 14. But what will that entail? We’re asking for a fiscal update, not just the figures on the debt. We don’t know if we will get the full picture on July 14. Frankly, the public deserves to have that information.

[2:10 p.m.]

We unconditionally supported this government’s necessity to spend emergency funds, $5 billion, on March 23. We would expect, in return, that there would be some transparency so that we can help work with the government in a transparent manner to help build the economic recovery that everybody knows and the public is demanding.

I know it is extremely tough on businesses throughout British Columbia, especially in areas of tourism events that are hosted through­out the Lower Mainland, but certainly in the Kelowna area. We lost the Memorial Cup. The whole activity cost the city and the local hockey team that was hosting it significant resources, with no opportunity to recover from that. How we are going to recover is what we need to build a plan for.

In order to best serve this province and debate the legislation before us, the House needs to be able to take an accurate look at our finances — but not only that. The people of B.C. deserve to know the truth about the budget and where we stand. The Finance Minister is getting regular financial updates, and she said so herself. “I’m getting regular daily updates. I’m getting updates where the numbers are going.” This was just in a scrum a day ago.

There’s no reason why this information [audio interrupted] especially in light of the massive sacrifices that people across the province have made to fight the pandemic. British Columbians deserve to know exactly how much government revenues have gone down and spending has gone up. We need to know where the money has been committed and spent, the size of the deficit and the debt-to-revenue ratio. All of these things allow us to understand where we are as a province. We hope that the Finance Minister will give us a clearer look at where we stand so that we have a better idea of how to move forward into a recovery.

Now, all of this brings us to the piece of legislation before us today. This year, the Budget Measures Implementation Act amends a number of statutes to allow the implementation of four more new and increased taxes announced in the budget. These taxes bring to this government a total of 23 new and increased taxes since coming to power. I think that probably deserves mentioning — when you slowly pull the thread and bring out a few taxes each time you bring a budget document out. But here we have one of the most egregious taxes, which I think most employers, and probably employees, feel the impact of because of the cost to their employment. It’s the employer health tax.

Added also was the Victoria gas tax; the Vancouver gas tax; the Airbnb tax; luxury vehicle tax on vehicles over $55,000; tobacco tax increased three times; the property transfer tax surcharge, another 2 percent on the 3 percent charge; the foreign buyer tax, now up 5 percent at 20 percent.

I just wrote the Finance Minister on a particular constituent of mine, Mr. McCormick, who, in Westbank, just lost his house about two weeks ago because of the fact…. As somebody that arrived from outside of the country, invested in 2017 in a contract to be completed before the deadline to have it complete, April 30, and due to forest fires and other unforeseen circumstances was unable to complete, he now has had to pay $63,000 of tax on a home and couldn’t afford it.

The additional school tax on homes over $3 million and $4 million. The speculation tax. What more could I say about a tax that was unforeseen. I know members in both the city of West Kelowna and Kelowna directly impacted by this question of whether this has been helpful in terms of creating more housing supply.

I go back to some of the incremental taxes that the government has brought in that just nibble away at the affordability issue on homes. Photo radar. The carbon tax, which has gone up not only from being revenue-neutral…. We’ve had a $5-per-year increase in 2018, 2019, and this year it was suspended temporarily. But that $15 a tonne, plus the previous amount, is going into general revenue, along with the surplus that we were able to put together to make certain that the government had the resources necessary to pay for all of its responsibilities.

[2:15 p.m.]

Parking sales tax. The development cost charges. These are obviously in Vancouver or the Lower Mainland. Property tax for TransLink. Cannabis tax. Income tax up 2.1 percent on incomes over $150,000. Corporate tax has now been increased to 12 percent. The ICBC unlisted driver premium. ICBC learner premium. The B.C. Hydro crisis fund. Pre-trip ride-share fees. The vaping PST. And now the sugary drinks tax, Netflix tax and new income tax bracket.

Well, Minister, all I can say is that this is like the emperor, British Columbians, having a new set of clothes. They’ve built a resilient, durable set of clothes, and here, after all of this, we’ve got the government pulling at the threads, to the point where British Columbians are completely naked. The emperor has no clothes.

I think that we as the official opposition have made no secret of our criticism of the government’s constant tax increases. The NDP, meanwhile, has continued to make it clear that the only source of revenue that they really care about is the pockets of hard-working taxpayers. That includes both businesses and people that have everyday day jobs.

Bill 4 is a continuation of enabling this trend. Despite record taxation by this government, they were still struggling to balance their budget when this bill was originally introduced.

So let’s get into those four new and increased taxes. Of course, we have some detailed questions on specific aspects, when we get to committee, but for now I’ll keep my comments to a high-level review.

It’s important to note that even before COVID-19 pandemic, without new taxes, Budget 2020 would have been in deficit. That budget, as you can see from the budget document that was presented, shows revenues that have climbed from, in 2017, a forecast of around $48.5 billion to, this year, $60.585 billion, topping out in 2022-23 at $64 billion. That’s a whopping 30 percent increase in the provincial taxation rates of revenue.

Now, it’s great that we’ve got an economy that was growing, and we need to get it back there. But I have to say that these tax increases…. There is a limit to what is possible for people and business. It’s important that what we try and do is to make these taxes work for everyday things, making life just about affordable for everybody in B.C.

Let’s talk about a prime example of this — the Netflix tax on digital services. Sounds innocuous enough, but this is going to add PST to Netflix, Disney and Spotify. This tax is also going to bring in about $11 million to provincial coffers and will end up costing consumers roughly $15 per year for the streaming service. But this is also going to be added to services like Zoom and many of the other services that we have become accustomed to — becoming a necessity for us to use during these challenging times. The boundaries of this tax are somewhat nebulous, so I look forward to hopefully getting greater clarity on what services this tax will apply to during the committee stage.

Another new tax of note is the soda tax. While we can support the idea behind the measures that encourage people to make healthier choices, we certainly have some questions about the implementation of this tax, which is set to bring in about $27 million in tax revenue in the coming year. In addition to the previously mentioned taxes, this bill also specifies heated tobacco as a separate class so that it will be included in the tax on vaping devices and substances that was introduced on January 1 of 2020.

As we move forward to the committee stage on this bill, we will be asking some key questions about how these various taxes will be implemented and the effects that they will have on British Columbians. But we do already know that the NDP government has raised taxation, the equivalent, right now to $3,000 per household. Total taxation increases will amount to almost $4,700 per household by 2022. What’s it going to be after we address the issues caused by this pandemic?

[2:20 p.m.]

I think what we have to remember is that we have to make certain we live within our means. The fact is that we just can’t afford to have everything and continue to tax at a relentless rate. That’s going to make life completely unaffordable in British Columbia and turn people off from creating businesses or wanting to live here.

These are huge increases in the expenses of B.C. families and are certainly not making life more affordable. We have gotten all too used to discussing tax increases with this minister, and I look forward to getting into these measures in more detail during the committee stage of this bill.

Now, these tax increases look quite different in light of the past few months, where we have seen the pandemic hit our economy hard, leading to hundreds of thousands of job losses, many business closures and, in response, a dramatic increase in government spending. We understand that much of the original budget for Budget ’20-21 has now completely changed and the assumptions that were made in February are not necessarily accurate or relevant now in June.

But while our world has changed and our economy has changed, the NDP haven’t. They didn’t have a plan to grow the economy at the start of the year, and they still don’t today. They’re still worrying about canvassing people about the economic recovery with a survey. I just find that that’s incredible in light of all the people that we have in British Columbia, the economists that were mentioned by the previous speaker — in terms of the Economic Forecast Council — and what ideas can be brought to bear to help with this.

I know that it’s important to survey British Columbians, but the time for action is now. This is worrying at this time when we need a clear plan to grow the economy and generate jobs more than ever. When we expected and hoped that they would finally lay out a clear economic plan for B.C., they instead unveiled a public survey, stalling it for another six weeks.

These next few months are going to be absolutely critical to our province’s economic recovery. With unemployment rates already nearing 14 percent and widespread concern about the second wave of infection this fall, there are serious concerns that this government is not poised to set us on a path for growth that we so desperately need. Increased taxes will not help us beat COVID-19 or bring economic prosperity back to our province.

The only way to get there is through true government transparency and letting us know where we stand, through careful, comprehensive planning to inspire job growth and economic creation. I sincerely hope that for the good of British Columbia, this government steps up and takes these much-needed steps.

S. Bond: Good afternoon to my colleagues in the Legislature. I am very pleased to be able to provide some remarks to a bill that I’m sure pretty much everyone in the House would agree is a very technical bill. In fact, it’s pages long, and what it does, in essence, is it brings to life, it breeds life into a budget, a budget that every government tables. This is the technical bill that brings to life the budget decisions and policy choices that a government has made.

I don’t know about my colleagues, but I know that from my own personal perspective, I have to admit it’s actually hard to remember the tabling of the budget, for a number of reasons but mostly because of the unprecedented circumstances that we are facing as a province, as a country, and, in fact, the entire world.

You know, one of the things that makes me incredibly proud is the fact that…. I don’t think there would be any disagreement in the Legislature today about some things, and one of those would certainly be the incredible resiliency and strength and determination that has been demonstrated by the people of British Columbia during these most difficult circumstances. When I stop to think about it, just months ago the phrase “flattening the curve” would have meant very little to most of us.

[2:25 p.m.]

I think that today we recognize that it was a rallying cry that was presented to us, as we worked together to protect our communities, our neighbours, our families and our friends from the effects of COVID-19. I think that as we watch the briefings every day and we see British Columbia’s outcomes, compared to those of the rest of Canada and the world, in fact, we’re doing pretty well. It took hard work, and it took a focus.

I have been personally very grateful to see the leadership provided and that sense of collaboration during what is a public health care crisis. I think all of us have recognized that the time to express our differences is not likely related to a health care crisis. I’m proud of the fact that people stood shoulder to shoulder, taking the advice of Dr. Henry and under the leadership of the Minister of Health and others, and paid attention to what was going on from a health care perspective. I think that matters.

I certainly recognize — all of us in the session today and throughout the next number of weeks…. We all recognize that we need to remain diligent. We need to pay attention to the ongoing health crisis. In fact, just yesterday — I don’t know what today’s numbers are — there was, tragically, another death in our province and 32 test-positive cases over the last 72 hours from yesterday.

But I think it’s also important that we recognize that we have to be as equally determined to deal with the devastating impacts that the response to COVID-19 has had on our economy. Yes, it is a health care crisis. But I can assure you that what we’re facing in the days ahead will impact health care outcomes as well, and that is an economic crisis.

Let’s just take a moment and think about what we know from an economic perspective. Part of the discussion…. I want to say thank you to my colleagues for their participation in the debate today and also for their very thoughtful and eloquent presentations. I felt like I could almost say ditto to the work that they have done and that they presented in the House.

We had a former Finance Minister, one who did an exceptional job for British Columbia. Yes, members of the opposite side — the government bench — can agree to disagree with that. But when you look at the position that the government inherited when our government became opposition, it was the envy of most of the provinces and territories in our country. So to hear from a former Finance Minister — to hear from my co-Finance critic and others of my colleagues — about why we are having a discussion about Bill 4 and why we disagree with the debate at this time is important.

Let me go through a few of the things that we know about the different place that British Columbia finds itself in than when the Finance Minister tabled her budget in what seems a lifetime ago. We do know some things, but we don’t know them because the government has laid out those facts for us. I have a great deal of regard for the government’s Finance Minister, and she and I have served in the House together for a very long time. I deeply respect that.

It’s also important, and has been noted by my colleagues, that the opposition gave the Finance Minister the opportunity to move ahead with a financial aid package, with initiatives that would be funded by $5 billion. It was granted. It was given in that very unique session that my colleague from Abbotsford mentioned. It was given without reservation, but it was given with an assumption that there would be complete disclosure of how that money would be spent, how it would be utilized and — not only that — about the efficiency and effectiveness of the programs that have been announced that are attached to those funding dollars.

[2:30 p.m.]

Just as we’ve seen in the last two days, we have a disagreement with the way the government is dealing with a particular file to deal with temporary layoffs. Those are reasonable and important discussion points. To have them dismissed or criticized by members of the government bench as we just don’t get it — it has absolutely nothing to do with that. Our job as the opposition is to raise issues that certainly have emerged during the last number of months, and there are a lot of them that have been raised since the budget was tabled.

Here’s what we know as of today. And we don’t know that because the government has laid out, in a transparent and thoughtful way for us, these details. We’ve had to glean them from reports that are being made by economists, organizations and others have a significant interest in making sure that British Columbia prospers once again, from an economic perspective.

[S. Gibson in the chair.]

Yes, the priority has been health care issues — we’ve worked alongside; we agree with that — but what we’re saying is that today we need to, in conjunction with remaining vigilant and paying attention to those directions on the health care side, we now need to turn additional attention to the economy.

Let’s look at what a recent report from the B.C. Business Council told us. The B.C. Business Council noted in their report that our economy is going to shrink by 7.8 percent in 2020. What’s interesting about that was that the business council had made a projection earlier in March and already they’ve revised that. I think the earlier number was 7.3 percent, in terms of the drop of economic growth, and it’s now projecting 7.8 percent.

While I’m sure we will hear enthusiastically from the Finance Minister and members of the government side: “Yes, but the provincial economy is expected to expand in 2021.” Certainly the B.C. Business council would concur with that assumption. But the expansion will be approximately 4.8 percent. If you stop and think about the significant downturn that we’ve experienced in British Columbia, it means that B.C. will be regaining just over half of the economic output that we lost in 2020.

That has significant impacts, not just in the short term but over the longer term. Those are the kinds of issues that we think we should have the ability to debate in a well-informed, thoughtful way in the Legislature. In order to do that, we need the Finance Minister to provide us with the information and provide British Columbians with the information and the briefing data that she is receiving. Here’s a staggering number, if you stop and think about this: the unemployment rate in British Columbia nearly tripled in three months, and the number of people working dropped by about 350,000 people in our province. If that doesn’t give us reason for concern, it should.

In the debate earlier today in question period, the point we wanted to make is that we want employers to have the ability to keep permanent jobs for British Columbians. That means that we need to act swiftly and pay attention to the kinds of issues that are significant and that are being brought forward by the very people who employ British Columbians. So 350,000 jobs have been impacted. The number of people working — individuals, family members — 350,000 people….

I think one of the quotes in the report from the B.C. Business Council that I was most impacted by was a statement. I want to quote it. This is what the report said: “For both Canada and British Columbia, the 2020 downturn is shaping up to be the deepest in 100 years.” I know that in the Legislature, the government likes to measure time in terms of how long we were government and how long we haven’t been government. But let’s be clear: we weren’t there over the last 100 years, and this is the deepest downturn — at least, that’s the expectation — in more than 100 years. That is an absolutely impactful statement. I think that all of us need to be paying attention to that.

What else do we know, and where are we as a result? Again, it’s not because we’ve been provided with specific briefing documents and had inside briefings. We work to try to get information so that we can look at where exactly British Columbia is today. Let’s talk about the labour force data. As I have just mentioned, 350,000 people in B.C. are out of work. Think about what that means on a day-to-day basis for our neighbours, for some of our family members.

[2:35 p.m.]

I can tell you, as a member of the opposition, that one thing we would agree with the Premier on is the fact that we should be doing everything imaginable to try to ensure that those people have the opportunity to go back to work in permanent positions. That’s the kind of debate that we raised in question period and will continue to raise in the days ahead.

The general unemployment rate currently stands at 13 percent. Thirteen percent — again, nearly tripling over that three-month period. And here’s a number that should cause all of us to want to think very carefully about where we’re at and how we’re going to reboot the economy and who are the people that have been most significantly impacted. The unemployment rate is up 30 percent for youth in our province. The very future of our province — 30 percent unemployment rate.

Let’s look at what the CFIB had to say. What did their business survey results show? This is as recent as June 22. In British Columbia today, only 50 percent of businesses are fully open. Eighteen percent of businesses are at above normal revenues — you think about that for a moment — and 29 percent of businesses are at or above normal staffing numbers.

Small businesses in British Columbia…. Again, that’s not the fault of the government. The former Finance Minister who spoke previous to me said that, and we’ve been clear about that. It’s not about whether or not it’s the government’s fault; it’s that we need to know the state of play in British Columbia. And British Columbians deserve to know that.

Those are incredibly challenging numbers: 18 percent of businesses — only 18 percent — are at or above normal revenues; 29 percent of businesses are at or above normal staffing. People are not working. They can’t provide for their families. They are not able to have those jobs that they had pre-COVID.

Here’s another statistic. So 33 percent of businesses will not be able to pay full July rent without additional supports. Certainly, my colleagues and I on the opposition side called for a long time…. We’ve sent a series of policy letters with suggestions to the government. One of them was about commercial rents and how absolutely critical it was that if we want to see small businesses continue to grow and thrive and survive in British Columbia, we needed to pay attention to commercial rents. What are we seeing now? That almost a third of businesses, small businesses, in British Columbia will not be able to pay their full July rent without additional supports.

Here’s another interesting fact. You know, when we start thinking about layering on costs…. In fact, what Bill 4 talks about is actually the layering on of additional taxes. I think we’re very concerned about those things. But 58 percent of businesses are finding it difficult to absorb or deal with the costs of PPE. Now, all of us, as MLAs and elected officials, have been required to look at our office space and how we serve British Columbians, and there have been additional costs. Well, businesses are finding it difficult to absorb those costs as well.

Let’s look at what the B.C. Business Council had to say. The B.C. Business Council estimates that at least 10 percent and perhaps as many as 15 percent of the 200,000 businesses with paid employees could be gone by late 2021. Now, if that doesn’t cause us to want to…. And what’s driving our questions and our thinking and our requests to government about this kind of information…. It should drive all of us to think of every single opportunity to find reasonable and responsible supports for small businesses across the province.

As we pointed out in question period for the last couple of days, the government received what could only be described as a scathing letter saying: “We need some help here.” So it’s not unreasonable to bring those concerns both directly to the Premier and to the Legislature. That’s our job.

[2:40 p.m.]

BCBC also expects, as I noted, the provincial economy to shrink by 7.8 percent, growing in 2021 but only bouncing back by about half of what our economic growth was pre-COVID.

B.C. hydro consumption. I’m sure there are people who will be smiling and thinking that it’s a good thing that electricity demand has seen its steepest drop since the 2008 recession. Demand is down 10 percent, and we expect that to continue, potentially reaching a drop of 12 percent by April of 2021. If you stop and think for a moment about why it’s that steep of a drop, it’s because the decline is linked to declines in commercial and light industrial activity — the very kinds of sectors we need to grow the economy and to provide jobs for British Columbians.

Let’s look at what Central 1 Credit Union had to say. B.C. posted a record retail sales drop in April. Sales fell 20.7 percent from March. At $5.62 billion, sales were the lowest since June of 2014, and we know that retail sales and consumer confidence have a significant role to play in the economic success of British Columbia.

It’s suggested that economic growth will not return to pre-COVID trends until mid-2021. Unemployment could rise significantly — and continue to. We’ve certainly heard about the impacts. I’m sure every MLA in the House has heard about the tourism and service sector impacts. The view, very likely accurate, is that that will continue, potentially, for the next two years — very dire circumstances for sectors and for the economic health of our province.

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. has national data. About 12 percent of homeowners have deferred mortgage payments, with the potential for that number to rise to 20 percent. Gross consumer debt is projected to rise to 130 percent of GDP in the fall of 2020, and there is a growing mortgage deferral cliff that looms in the fall, when some unemployed people will need to start paying their mortgages again.

It’s something that I’ve heard a great deal of concern about, and I’ve heard it from my colleagues as well. Deferral is certainly a tool that can be used, but the key part comes when people actually have to start paying it back again. I’m very deeply concerned for people who have taken advantage of those deferral tools and suddenly find themselves in the position of having to pay it back, and for how they’re going to manage those things.

Restaurants Canada. Well, I think all of us can imagine what those numbers look like. When you think about B.C. establishments, their revenue is expected to have declined by $2.9 billion over a three-month period. That is a drop of approximately 80 percent of their revenue. Four out of five restaurants have laid off workers since March 1 — again, a loss of jobs, a loss of revenue, a significant impact on our economy. Here’s another staggering change since the budget was introduced. Nearly 10 percent of restaurants have closed permanently, with another 18 percent prepared to close permanently if conditions continue.

These are devastating circumstances for families, for businesses and for government. Certainly, I can only imagine the challenges that the Finance Minister is facing. But just as we’ve faced a health care crisis, we need to be dealing with what is an economic crisis. I have every confidence that British Columbians, given proper information, given opportunities, given all of the kinds of tools that they require…. Just as we’ve seen that resiliency on the health care side, we have that potential in British Columbia. I’m confident of that, but we need to look to the future.

Let’s talk specifically about some of the pieces of Bill 4 now. I can tell you that as I reviewed my notes — I made them, I have to say, many months ago — there was one glaringly obvious conclusion. I’ve always been taught that it goes better with saying than without. The budget that was tabled in February has virtually no relevance to the economic realities that our province is facing today, yet the Legislature was recalled with the assumption that the debate will centre on what is now an irrelevant budget.

[2:45 p.m.]

Bill 4 introduces new taxes. You’ve heard my colleagues speak of them, but it’s worth repeating. This bill brings to life four new taxes, but it brings the total number of new or increased taxes and fees under the NDP government to 23. As we pointed out each and every time that we talked about the budget, the budget would have been in deficit, pre-COVID, without these four new taxes.

If you then stop to consider the long list of economic details that I and my colleagues have referenced in the House today, it is absolutely essential that the Finance Minister take the opportunity to provide as much information as she possibly can to the members of this House so that we can have a well-informed debate, as we’ve all mentioned. We need to do that as soon as we possibly can.

How quickly we have forgotten the Netflix tax. It’s a tax on digital services where PST will be added to streaming channels like Disney and Spotify. That tax would bring in $11 million in 2020. The government received approval to spend 5 billion additional dollars. One of these taxes alone — we’re talking about $11 million. Of the increased tax for people earning above $220,000, that would generate $216 million of revenue in 2020-2021, nowhere near the $5 billion that this government is either spending or has spent.

Of course, we have the sugary drinks tax and the vaping tax. I don’t know about the members in the House today, but somehow when we talk about the budget and we think about these measures, they pale by comparison to the economic realities that we are facing in British Columbia today. When it was tabled in February, we raised the alarm bells about the tax-and-spend approach of the government, but so much has happened since then.

While all of us agree that the government needed to take action to support British Columbians…. Hopefully, we’re not going to start reading tweets that say we don’t care about British Columbians and we didn’t think there needed to be action. Of course we did. We agreed unequivocally with the ability for the government to move ahead.

What we’re saying today is that British Columbians deserve and should expect transparency about the decisions that the government made in response to the pandemic. It’s not that we didn’t think government needed to act; of course it did. In fact, we provided additional suggestions. Our leader has sent a number of policy suggestions to the Premier and his team. I’m hoping they’ll still be considered. We, too, want to be part of how you think about the solutions for British Columbia. What we’re asking for today is the opportunity for transparent disclosure of how the $5 billion has been spent, will be spent. Has it been done efficiently, and is it working?

Bill 4, as noted, also introduces a host of other amendments, which of course will be part of committee stage. I can assure the minister that we will have lots of questions that will, hopefully, provide some more clarity about other sections. I think it’s fair to say that it is entirely reasonable to ask the Finance Minister to provide an update earlier than the one she promised for September, after the Legislature has ended its session.

These are extraordinary times, and that calls for as much transparency as possible. As we’ve heard from a previous Finance Minister and others, we know that the Minister of Finance is receiving regular, if not daily, updates and that it shouldn’t be difficult to provide the public and this Legislature with the specific details about the current economic status of our province.

[2:50 p.m.]

I have been so proud, and I know everyone in the House has been, of the efforts and sacrifices made by British Columbians as, together, we fight the pandemic. But now they deserve to know some very key information. My colleague from Abbotsford raised this in such a very thoughtful and well-laid-out argument. We need to understand both sides of the balance sheet. It is not just about spending; it is about revenue generation. Exactly how have government revenues been impacted?

Those are some of the key pieces of information that the Finance Minister will, hopefully, outline for the members of this House and for the people of British Columbia. The government has committed $5 billion of taxpayer money. It’s not our money. It’s not the government’s money. It belongs to taxpayers in British Columbia. That money is to provide programs and initiatives related to support as a result of COVID-19. But it is time for detailed information about what has been spent and what is yet to be spent to be provided not just to the public but to the House so we can have that debate.

Recently the official opposition did formally request, did ask, for a fiscal update to be provided that reflects the most current financial information that the government now has. That should be done now, not in September when the House has risen. So we were relieved to hear that the Finance Minister has now said that she will provide, that she is prepared to do, a fiscal update on July 14.

While that’s a step in the right direction, the question remains as to what will be included in that update. We certainly recognize that we’re three months into the fiscal year, but that doesn’t mitigate the need for British Columbians and members in this House to be given as much information as possible so that we can establish a baseline.

We need to be able to…. And the government needs to be able to demonstrate to us that they can explain exactly how that $5 billion is being spent. What else? The other thing that matters is: what is the success of the programs that have been announced?

As we reviewed Bill 4 months ago, we knew that the measures contained within it would create an additional tax burden for families in our province. So here’s a question for the Finance Minister: has she reconsidered her plan to add new taxes as families struggle as a result of COVID-19? So 350,000 people are out of work in our province. The world has changed dramatically. But it’s apparent to us that the NDP have not.

We have continuously held the government to account for the fact that they have no jobs plan, no plan to grow the economy. They didn’t when they tabled the now irrelevant budget, and they don’t today. We learned just last week that the government doesn’t have a plan for economic recovery. Instead, they’re going to do a survey.

British Columbians can’t afford to wait for this government to survey or monitor. They need to know exactly where we stand financially and what exactly the government is going to do to get our economy moving in the right direction as soon as possible.

Deputy Speaker: I believe this concludes the discussion of second reading of Bill 4, Budget Measures Implementation Act. I invite the Minister of Finance to close debate.

Hon. C. James: Thank you to the speakers who have spoken on the bill. So much to respond to. I’m not going to take time to respond to every piece, but I do want to touch on some of the common themes that I heard through the discussion because I think it’s important to put the facts on the table. I think it is important to make sure that accurate information is out there. I also believe it’s important that the public has an opportunity to have their say, and I’ll talk a little bit about that as well.

I want to start off with a plan for recovery for the economy in British Columbia. I think the most important statement…. The Premier has said this. I have said this. Certainly, Dr. Bonnie Henry and Minister Dix have said this. Our very best economic recovery plan is to make sure that we’re following the health orders, because one of the key areas to deal with economic recovery is consumer confidence and the public’s confidence.

[2:55 p.m.]

People can open all the businesses in the world, and if the public doesn’t feel confident in going back into those businesses because they don’t feel that safety guidelines are being followed, then we won’t see economic recovery. Business is in partnership with us around talking about this issue about building confidence, making sure we follow the orders. That’s why you see in our restart plan a very measured, careful approach to build that confidence in British Columbia, and that’s critical.

Let’s talk a little bit about the supports that are out there: $1.8 billion support for people and businesses, direct support to make sure that people have the support that they need; $1.7 billion, supports for critical services to make sure, again, that we have those quality services that people rely on; and then, yes — $1.5 billion put aside for economic recovery.

I think the Premier has said it best. We will never, on this side, apologize for listening to the public and giving them voice. In fact, I think that’s been obvious why there is a difference between the two sides during this discussion and debate at second reading. We do believe in respecting the public’s voice, respecting the voices of business, respecting the voices of not-for-profit, respecting the voices of labour and respecting the voices of Indigenous leaders in this province. We will continue to do that.

We’re coming out of COVID because we pulled together, because people work together, and we have that same opportunity with economic recovery. So the work continues. The benefits and supports continue on. But yes, there will be additional dollars that will be based on the values that matter to British Columbians — values like protecting our environment, doing our part on climate action, reconciliation with Indigenous people, equality and equity and making sure we address those pieces. Those matter to us as a government, they matter to the people of British Columbia, and they will be part of the economic recovery that we’re looking at.

There was a lot of discussion about information, what information is out there. Again, I have said this often, and I’ll say it again to the members. Two and a half months into the fiscal year we will be bringing forward — some chose to ignore it, but some members have mentioned it — an economic update on July 14 that will include the variety of indicators that are used always to look at the economy, everything from retail sales to exports, imports, natural resource dollars coming in, corporate taxes, personal taxes, employment numbers and housing.

Many of those, as the members will know well, are always a month and sometimes, in fact, two months behind. So it’s important to make sure we have a couple of months into the fiscal year to bring forward a variety of scenarios or to bring forward the scenario in place, subject to change, recognizing that we’re just in the restart process. That information will come forward, as I said, on July 14.

A number of members spoke about the $5 billion and being accountable for the $5 billion. I appreciate the fact that the Legislature came together across party lines to be able to put those dollars in place so that we could support the public and businesses in British Columbia. As I said that day when those dollars passed, we are accountable for every dollar of that $5 billion. The members know that. They know they have an opportunity here, in estimates, during this session to debate those dollars.

Each of the ministers who have individual programs will be responsible. I will be responsible for talking about the dollars and how they were divided into ministries. So the public does have their accountability and their opportunity for accountability through this session. That’s part of the reason that we’re here — to make sure that we’re held accountable. Those dollars, as I said, are continuing to flow when it comes to support.

There were a number of people who talked about surpluses and how important surpluses were. The former Finance Minister from the past government talked about the fact that surpluses for surpluses’ sake were a good thing. Well, in fact, we saw and British Columbians, for 16 years, lived through what happened when we had a government that thought surpluses for surpluses’ sake were important. The highest child poverty rate in the country right here in British Columbia. Doubling of tuition fees, doubling of MSP premiums. The challenges of people with diverse abilities who had a bus pass taken away. We saw huge speculation in the real estate market. We saw money laundering occurring in this province.

[3:00 p.m.]

That’s what happened when a government thought surpluses for surpluses’ sake were important. The people of this province struggled, and that’s why we’ve put key investments into our budgets over the last three years to be able to address that.

I heard one of the members say that the budget that was tabled in February didn’t matter. Well, in fact, that budget will be what each of the members in this Legislature is accountable for as ministers. The spending continues in important values that we put forward, that we believe are British Columbians’ values. That, again, is making sure we’re investing in things like climate action, CleanBC, child care and the critical nature of child care as an economic tool.

The member has talked about doing nothing for the economy. In fact, child care and housing are two critical pieces that are necessary for a healthy economy. Those are investments that are in this budget that we’re talking about in the Legislature.

The B.C. child opportunity benefit coming in the fall. The opportunity for a B.C. access grant for post-secondary students. Again, those will be critical and will help us as we look at economic recovery. They will be critical to getting people back into the workforce, getting people the kind of training that they need.

Over $20 billion in capital spending. Again, an investment we made before COVID that will help us and make sure we’re on a strong economic footing. It has been pointed out by international rating agencies and others that B.C. is very well positioned because of the investments that we put in there, because of the fiscal responsibility that was in place.

Taxes. I just want to mention for a moment…. A number of members mentioned the e-taxes that are in this bill. I think the members need to go back and take a look at the legislation that they brought in, in the past government. In fact, e-taxes were already in place. They just weren’t enforced. The government already put the PST in place to be able to be collected. That was already part of their past legislation. They just hadn’t enforced it. So I think, again, a little bit of listening might be helpful as we’re going through this process.

I look forward to the discussion in committee stage. I look forward to, as I said, the accountability that will be there, through estimates, for the $5 billion. I look forward to bringing…. Perhaps looking forward isn’t the right word, when we look at the challenges we’re going to face in the economic statement coming forward in July, but making sure that that information is there, because it is going to take all of us pulling together to be able to address the economic challenges that we face ahead.

With that, I move second reading of Bill 4, the Budget Measures Implementation Act, 2020.

Deputy Speaker: I am hearing “division” now. We’ll defer, under sessional order, consideration of that division to later on this afternoon here today.

Hon. M. Farnworth: I call second reading of Bill 6, Mines Amendment Act.

Deputy Speaker: I call now on the member for Kootenay East to speak to this Bill 6, Mines Act.

My apologies. I thought the House Leader was kicking this off.

Please invite the minister to speak to this.

BILL 6 — MINES AMENDMENT ACT, 2020

Hon. B. Ralston: I’m pleased to be able to introduce second reading and speak to it. I know my colleague will follow me, and I’m looking forward to his comments. Thank you very much.

The Mines Amendment Act, Bill 6, contains amendments that will build on the government’s ongoing efforts to strengthen mining regulation in British Columbia. These amendments will accomplish three things.

[3:05 p.m.]

First, they will establish a chief permitting officer, a position distinct from the chief inspector of mines, which will ensure the mine permitting process is efficient and effective. Responsibility for health, safety and its enforcement will continue to rest with the chief inspector of mines. Those two functions will be divided, and that’s the purpose for creating that new position.

This separation of roles and functions in the ministry allows for a more dedicated focus on permitting and competitiveness without compromising worker health and safety and the ability to hold the industry accountable. The separation of the permitting process from the enforcement side of the ministry also aligns the ministry with other regulators in British Columbia and best practice across Canada.

Secondly, building on recent improvements and results delivered by the ministry, these changes will further strengthen the government’s ability to hold mines accountable. These amendments will clarify offence provisions and increase the limitation period from three years to five years in both the Mines Act and the Environmental Management Act.

These changes will ensure the government has enough time to undertake complex investigations if they are warranted. The amendments will also strengthen the ministry’s authority to conduct an investigation, respond to environmental issues and ensure that mining companies meet both their environmental and regulatory obligations.

Thirdly, these amendments will formalize the creation of the ministry’s Mine Audits and Effectiveness Unit. That unit will ensure that mining regulation in British Columbia remains effective and aligned with global best practice. These amendments will bring into law the position of chief auditor, who will lead the audit unit independently of the ministry’s other regulatory functions. The chief auditor will report publicly on each audit and make recommendations for improvements.

Those are the comments I have on the bill.

I move second reading.

Deputy Speaker: Now we’re going to enter into debate.

I invite the member for Kootenay East to speak to this.

T. Shypitka: It’s great to be here virtually from the heart of the Kootenays and the southeast corner of the province.

Before I get into Bill 6, the Mines Amendment Act, 2020, and because this is my first time speaking since returning to the Legislature, I’d like to recognize the sacrifices we’ve all made during this unprecedented pandemic.

I first want to offer my sympathies to those families and friends who have lost loved ones. I also want to congratulate all British Columbians for doing their part in flattening the curve and adhering to our provincial health orders. We’ve all been very successful.

Finally, a recognition to all those businesses that are having a very difficult time right now and trying to hang on. Where I live, our tourism industry is hit especially hard. I want to give a big shout-out to our fishing guides, guide-outfitters, hoteliers, restaurateurs, coffee shops, pubs, gift shops, houseboat operators — the list goes on — and anyone else in the tourism towns of Fernie, Sparwood, Elkford and the entire south country. My heart is with you. We need to be kind to any visitors right now and be respectful of their own unique situations.

Another industry that is suffering, as well, is junior exploration companies, placer miners and operating mines.

As the minister knows, mining is one of the most important and storied industries we have here in B.C. For close to 150 years, mining has been the cornerstone of our economy, employing thousands and giving us billions in revenue in order to be spent on the things we need, such as education, infrastructure and health care.

[3:10 p.m.]

B.C. is very fortunate to have a bounty of natural resources that many countries and jurisdictions could only dream of. Our metals and minerals cover every corner of the province and give great opportunity to the small placer miner all the way through to the large multinational company competing on a world stage.

These metals and minerals are key in transitioning to a newer economy. Our metallurgical coal mines produce some of the world’s highest-grade steel for surgical tools, electric vehicles and wind turbines. Copper, gold, moly, silver and many other metals make up solar panels, electric wiring for computers and other uses in artificial intelligence and high technology. As a matter of fact, it is the high-tech sector that benefits from industries such as mining. Software and artificial intelligence are developed for uses in making mines more effective with less impact on our environment.

In order to benefit from this gift of nature, we as a province must face fierce competition across the globe. One thing that has set B.C. apart from almost all other jurisdictions is in the way we conduct business. B.C. has been identified internationally as a safe and reputable jurisdiction. We have high standards, a human rights record, top environmental standards and a major focus on worker safety, with great relationships with our unionized and non-unionized employers.

If some people knew of the atrocities of hard child labour and environmental damage that some jurisdictions put on their landscape, they would hold their hands up high to what we accomplish already here in British Columbia. You can do your mining in the Congo or the South Sudan and watch how workers without ventilation — many of them children — navigate their way down a rabbit hole mine shaft with little to no engineering. Or you can place yourself in B.C., with the best standards anywhere.

We need to be competitive, or we lose to those jurisdictions that have horrifying practices. In the three years that I have been critic for Energy and Mines, I’ve learned a lot about this valuable industry, and I have been honoured to meet the folks that make this industry as valuable as it is.

A miner is a unique person. You can spot them a mile away, for all of the right reasons. They are weather-worn, hands of leather, hard-working risk-takers with a twinkle in their eye on the prospects of a good prospect. The big find, the hidden treasure — that’s what they’re looking for. But above all, they are tenacious. In fact, it is their tenacity that really sets them apart from any other.

At any given time, this industry faces many barriers to business — global demand, commodity prices, interest rates, currency fluctuations, access issues, intense public scrutiny, protest demonstrations, social media attacks, geographical and geological challenges and many other things that are really out of their control. What is in our control is to help us to compete globally as our fiscal policy here in B.C.

The carbon tax, employer health tax, fuel tax — the list is endless — are hindering our competitiveness, according to the Ernst and Young report that was delivered to the Mining Jobs Task Force over a year ago. As a matter of fact, the number one hindrance to our competitiveness globally was our tax structure here in B.C. and, more directly, the ever-increasing carbon tax.

That said, what is perhaps the biggest obstacle for our mining industry are red tape and bureaucracy that bog things down. All that industry wants are clarity and certainty in order to be competitive. The amendment to the Mines Act that is in front of us now could severely challenge that.

The minister led off his first reading statement yesterday highlighting the terrible accident at Mount Polley. I am very well aware of the terrible accident that occurred from the tailings breach in 2014. We are constantly reminded with the same pictures over and over, and we never want to see another incident like this ever to happen again. I’m happy to report, however, that the reclamation efforts done thus far have been very successful.

Polley and Quesnel lakes, along with Hazelton Creek, have been restored to see aquatic and riparian areas being productive once again. Frogs, fish, wildlife and vegetation are bouncing back in great numbers. I would like to thank the teams of biologists and the workers that have made this possible. It’s truly amazing. Over $100 million has been spent, spent wisely, and it definitely shows.

The minister alludes to or has us believe that this legislation will prevent other accidents like Mount Polley in the future or that Mount Polley would have been avoided altogether if legislation like this was in place when the former government was in office.

[3:15 p.m.]

This is something I would like the minister to explain to us, and perhaps he will get his chance in committee stage. If this is in fact the case, I will be totally in support of this bill, because we need to prevent the preventable. However, I suspect that will not be what we hear.

As a matter of fact, it was an expert panel that determined that the dam failure happened because when the dam was designed and originally built, there were insufficient test holes drilled to find the unstable clay that eventually, in 2014, caused the dam to fail. Who was the regulator in charge of this mine and its design? What government signed off on the design of the Mount Polley tailings dam? It is the same government that is putting forward this legislation in front of us today.

After the Mount Polley incident, the Auditor General came out with a report. I believe there were 16 recommendations to which the former government responded — all except one, and that was to remove the compliance and enforcement out of the ministry. Our current government has not acted on that recommendation, as well, for good reason. That is because there is no jurisdiction in the world that I know of that removes compliance and enforcement out of the ministry that permits those same projects. So in actuality, this government has done nothing to further advance the Auditor General’s recommendations laid out in 2016.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, this is the government that brought us the über-regulator of engineering. I hope that the minister has considered the day when (1) the NDP’s chief mine inspector; (2) the NDP’s mine permitting officer; (3) the NDP’s chief mine auditor; and (4) the representative of the office of the superintendent of professional governance, who is responsible for the competence of our engineers and geoscientists, otherwise called…. The engineers call them the über-regulator. All four of them show up at a minesite simultaneously and declare that they are from the government and want to ensure that a planned tailings dam does not collapse 30 years from now.

Is this going to stop an NDP government from issuing a permit for a flawed tailings pond project design, as the NDP government actually did at Mount Polley some 30 years ago? I doubt it. But perhaps the minister would launch a forensic audit of how the NDP government of the day allowed that flawed design at Mount Polley to proceed and maybe bring criminal negligence charges against the guilty NDP government official or NDP minister involved so that justice can be finally achieved.

What does this amendment attempt to do? First, it establishes an audit unit and chief auditor for mining. The chief auditor’s authority extends to the regulatory framework for mining in British Columbia and the policies, programs, practices and actions to fulfil the objectives of that framework. Also, the audit unit is independent from permitting, compliance and enforcement divisions. The chief auditor may issue orders for immediate remedial action, work stoppages, mine closures. It formalizes the creation of the mine audits and effectiveness unit led by the chief auditor. It creates and separates the role of chief permitting officer from the chief inspector of mines.

Transitional provisions are established to amend the mining code to assign chief inspector powers to the chief permitting officer. It adds new enforcement powers for the chief inspector and his or her delegates and broadens the scope of orders to have mine owners produce independent engineering reports regarding incidents — we will discover what that means in committee stage, I’m sure — at their own expense.

It expands the compliance provisions under section 24 of the act, and it adds a couple offences. It all sounds very complicating and rigorous, and it is. This amendment shores up the separation of compliance, safety and enforcement from the permitting and authorizations within the ministry, and I could go along with that. However, what is glaringly missing is what this legislation will do for permitting and enabling mining to move quicker with more clarity and certainty.

What I’m afraid of what this amendment will do is fatten up the layers of bureaucracy and challenge certainty and clarity. For all that this amendment does. it’s what it doesn’t do that’s more revealing. There appears to be no economic or competitiveness component in the audit unit’s mandate.

[3:20 p.m.]

It is amazing that the government will claim this is somehow going to have a positive impact on permitting. It has absolutely nothing to do with permitting except it creates a new title, chief of permitting. We already have a chief of permitting. The position is known as chief inspector, and this setup has worked for over 100 years.

B.C. is being held up as a stellar mining jurisdiction all over the world. This is the creation of a brand-new layer of bureaucracy to add on top of the already complex bureaucracy. It creates a permitting chief, along with an auditor chief, on top of the already existing chief inspector.

Meanwhile, you have constituents trying to eke out a living in the mineral exploration business who are already heavily scrutinized when they apply for a simple permit to drill a hole in a dry rock. What do these hard-working folks get out of this new legislation? Hopefully not a lot of new bureaucracy and some new titles. The $20 million in resources that were allocated a couple of years ago to the ministry to assist with permitting and fast-tracking applications has seemed to have dried up and been diverted to more bureaucracy, regulation and bigger government.

It seems bizarre that more efforts are being put forward to enforcement and compliance when we haven’t seen a new mine coming to operation in the province since the government took over three years ago. The folks I talk to in the industry can’t see any new resources, more people to work on permitting, nothing tangible to move permits faster so that people can work, invest and pay taxes. I have talked to several mine operators, and they tell me the investment dollars are leaving the province due to the uncertainty and length of time it takes to get anything done.

Although we need regulation to hold us all accountable, it is the unnecessary regulation and legislation that needs to be trimmed and not fattened up, and I’m afraid that this amendment will do just that. As we enter phase 3 of economic recovery, now is the time to be less burdensome with bureaucracy and to leap ahead of our competitors with a smooth, seamless process that values our high environmental, health and safety standards.

In short, we support increasing safety in B.C. mines. Absolutely. However, we are increasingly concerned that while the economy is in such dire straits, the NDP continue to be focused on red tape, increased bureaucracy and regulation instead of helping industry thrive. For example, there are significant new powers contemplated through the creation of the chief auditor for mining. The chief auditor may issue orders for remedial actions, work stoppages and mine closures. We’ll have questions about how these powers are used by an independent office in the committee stage.

The money spent on separating compliance and enforce­ment and two separate divisions is supposed to help to foster new mines and exploration. We have not seen this. Instead, we haven’t seen any improvements to permitting. In fact, we continue to hear complaints of delays and inadequacies at front counter. Permits that traditionally took two to three months now take eight months or longer. Some exploration companies are losing entire seasons.

We need our mining industry to remain competitive if we are going to foster recovery and jobs and play a role in building clean energy technologies for now and into the future. We will be asking key questions at committee stage to ensure these changes are nimble and don’t add unnecessary red tape for one of B.C.’s vital industries.

I think a key quote came from the president of the Mining Association of British Columbia. That was a quote from last February, during budget. The quote was: “The mining industry is at a crossroads in B.C., and we are hoping to see a solution in this budget.” I think those comments are especially true now, as we try to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, and I hope for all our sakes that government is listening and all British Columbians can come out of the other side of this crisis stronger and more united than before.

To keep it short, for the love of our most-important industry — coming from a very biased mining critic, mind you — I cannot support further bureaucracy that will most definitely jeopardize the benefits that come from this tenacious industry. After all, we’re all in this together, and in British Columbia, it’s both yours and mine. Yeah, a little pun at the end.

R. Coleman: Thank you for the time this afternoon to speak about this particular bill, which brings in an audit function, a separate entity within Mining.

[3:25 p.m.]

I want to talk about mining to begin with for a little bit, then how we got here, and then how maybe there are questions about how effective this will or will not be as we go through that to see how this will have an impact in the future.

The B.C. mining industry has been pretty foundational to the fundamentals of British Columbia for a long time and a pretty key component of our economy. Some people would refer to it as a sunset industry; some actually call it the old economy. I would tell folks who would say that that they’re terribly misinformed.

If any one of you hold one of these — or have one of these, or an iPad or a computer — in this House, it does not function without mining. It is impossible because the components and the minerals that are in your phone are required to make that phone function. In British Columbia, we have copper, we have gold, we have coal, and we have a number of other elements in our mining sector.

I’ve had the honour of being in almost every mine in British Columbia, whether it be the Highland Valley Copper open-pit mine, one of the underground mines that I have been in, even the one up north of Campbell River that was on the edge of Strathcona Park. I’ve also had the opportunity to be in all kinds of other mines in B.C.

Every time I go see an industrial complex of any kind — whether it be mining, forestry or anything else — I’m always amazed at the innovation, the technology, the research and what goes into actually being successful at finding a mine, bringing it to market and then making the product come out in such a way that you can use it.

It’s been a pretty important part of B.C.’s history. Today close to 40,000 people in British Columbia rely on this sector for their livelihood. They’re some of the highest-paid family supporting jobs in British Columbia, very important to families, in small communities and large, and significantly important for revenue-sharing, jobs and training for a number of our First Nations communities who do revenue-share and have agreements with mining companies with regard to training and opportunities.

I have to say that I’m proud to say that our mining sector is actually part of the transition to a cleaner economy. Electric vehicles require mining. Alternative energy sources, like solar and wind, all need mined minerals to build. So although you look at the raw side, the small footprint of a mine on the environment and on the landscape, the reality is that it has a huge impact on the landscape of the world. Without it, a lot of the things we enjoy we wouldn’t have. That even includes things like clothing, draperies and blinds in a house. All of these things come out of products that are mined in British Columbia and other areas.

We’re now known, and have been known for a long time, as basically the centre, globally, for mineral exploration. When I say that, it’s not just exploration in British Columbia. There are more than 700 mining and mineral firms that are based in Vancouver alone, and they explore and look for mines and work in countries all over the world. Approximately one-third of B.C.-based businesses that supply materials and goods and services to the mining industry are located in 20 urban municipalities in Metro Vancouver.

Mining is a big deal in my community. The Knelson separator was developed by a gentleman, Mr. Knelson, many years ago. He was a contractor. He thought that with liquid moving and spinning, you could separate the other minerals out of a copper mine — like gold, particularly, and others — by having it be able to be a circular pattern. Today those are sold worldwide. He started by drilling the little holes by hand in the first one, and today those and others that are also built in my riding actually go into mining all over the world.

[R. Chouhan in the chair.]

The amount of money by which this affects the economy is around $1 billion. We have an opportunity, as we come out of this pandemic, following this, to be able to make sure that mining is part of our diversified economy. And we should build a diversified economy as we come out of the pandemic, not forgetting where our basis and fundamentals were, but looking at what other opportunities there are with our industries that could complement, other resources that could be valued, or other things that could come out of the resource in the future.

[3:30 p.m.]

A major part of our winning formula, for a long time in B.C., has been this industry. It started with the gold rush over 100 years ago. Shortly I will take two of my grandchildren to Barkerville to see that national historic town. I have an opportunity to give them a little bit of the history of British Columbia.

One reason we’re a global centre is because our province is rich in high-quality mineral exploration. We have high-quality education — people in engineering, geoscience and what have you. We actually make sure that we have invested in that expertise, in that scientific expertise to share globally so people can enjoy this industry elsewhere.

B.C. is actually Canada’s largest producer of copper, the largest exporter of metallurgical coal and is the only producer of molybdenum, all of them key projects. All of those are key minerals for everything from steel to, actually, your cellphone, which that would have the copper and molybdenum in it, and other products that are in everything you do every day.

It’s a well-earned reputation we have on a global scale. It is a stable place to do business, with the highest environmental standards in the world. B.C. is strategically located, as everybody knows, with the Pacific Gateway so that we can actually get the resources and the things to market. That makes us extremely competitive.

Mining, as we all know, is affected by something that really is the toughest part of the industry itself, and that is fluctuating commodity prices, which always pose a challenge to an industry where it’s very, very expensive to invest and build a mine. But it is a cyclical business which requires people, with investment globally and internationally and inside B.C., to take the risk and build the mine and the business and then be able to weather the markets. Copper could be down for two years, and it could come back for three. Mines can be in the position of closing because of world markets and then could actually be wanting to expand because of the change in them. That’s something that is difficult.

I must say, for British Columbia, our industry actually is pretty nimble, as far as being able to adapt and change and be able to deal with stuff going forward. In the past few years, gross revenues from B.C.’s mining industry rose from $7.7 billion to $8.7 billion in 2016.

In our province, metallurgical coal, as we all know, commands the lion’s share of B.C. mining revenues at about 40 percent. That is followed by copper at 25 percent; zinc at 12 percent; gold at 9 percent; silver at 8 percent; lead at 5 percent; and molybdenum, which is considered a pretty significant mineral, at 1 percent.

That means it contributes not just to the well-being of the people in the world, with regards to the cell phone and any other things that they may use, but it also contributes to the well-being of British Columbians, not just from the fact that the mines are here and the minerals are here, but for the contribution of the taxes paid by the mines, and the royalties, to help pay for education and health care in our province. It’s also to support families and communities across British Columbia, not just where the mine is but all across B.C., as technology goes up and jobs are created around them. This is important because in 2016, the last time I had numbers for, mining contributed about $650 million to the province of British Columbia’s dollars to operate on.

There are 10,000 British Columbia families that work directly in the mining industry, as I said, 40,000 indirect and direct jobs. And really, in the other studies that we’ve seen about the Canadian Mining Association equipment — because the technology we build here is exportable — and services, we found that for every direct mining position at a minesite, at least two indirect jobs are supported outside the mine.

Currently more than 1,100 businesses in B.C. provide supplies or services to mining operations in the province, which is pretty significant. The minister is from Surrey and I’m from Langley, and we know we have the Port Kells area that covers the border of our communities. There are a number of those companies that actually do those things and build those things for the mining industry and manufacture and hire people within our communities. In other words, it’s an important industry to Langley East and to Surrey but also to the rest of the province.

[3:35 p.m.]

Now, there’s a reason we’re here today. It’s a sad reason in many ways, because on August 4, 2014, there was a breach at the Mount Polley dam, the Mount Polley mine, of the tailings pond site. As the result of that, there was, first of all, this emotional feeling of: “My goodness. Is everybody okay?” When you saw the pictures and you saw the flow of the water down into the lake, you wondered: “What’s the environmental impact? What is this? What caused it? Do we know? How could we know? Should we have known?”

At that time…. When something like that happens, the first thing that happens, and it would happen whether it was this opposition — or the government that is now the former opposition — or back, dare I say, even to the days when I was opposition before…. The first thing that happens is that political opportunities are seized upon, usually showing up with lots of emotion in question period, where the criticism of the government isn’t your fault: “You should have done something, you should have known better, and what are you going to do about it?”

I have seen people field those questions, and I’ve actually asked those questions over the years, depending on whatever thing took place. But the reality was that we had a lot to learn coming out of the breach in 2014. When you were in opposition in the ’90s, you’d be saying, “Well, actually, you guys permitted that mine when you were government,” or now you were government, and it happened under your watch. It is really the least productive piece of the discussion in and around the Mount Polley mine situation and what it has led to today. The fact of the matter is that out of things like this often comes some good.

The first thing that happened was the minister — Minister Bennett at the time, who is no longer here in the House…. He was very much emotionally affected in the initial phase of the Mount Polley mine. First of all, he was the minister responsible, so it was landing on his desk — plus the Minister of Environment. He’s an outdoorsman. He really does like the outdoors. He has, for many years, been an avid person that fishes. He knew…. For him, it was: “My goodness. We’ve got to figure out what happened here.” And he immediately, as quickly as possible, got up into the area and into the community of Likely and to the First Nations and started to talk to them about this particular incident.

It wasn’t for the purpose of dumbing it down. It was for the purpose of trying to learn but also to allay the fears of the community and start to understand what had happened at Mount Polley and what would come out of it. So out of that came an independent expert engineering investigation, a review panel report. The chief inspector of mines did an investigation, and the conservation officer service also did an investigation. The CIM found, as did the panel, that the dam failed because the strength and location of the layer of clay underneath the dam was not taken into account in the design of the subsequent dam raises.

That’s an important statement around this, because if it was designed one way…. Maybe you didn’t drill down with your bore holes far enough to see where it was under the clay of the dam and the tailing pond. But the reality was that the tailing pond and dam were raised, based on an original engineering report, but obviously the increased water and packing in the dam had an underlying, under-surface effect on the geotechnical side of this particular thing.

Then there was, obviously — assisted by Environment Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans — the environmental issue, and the RCMP also took a look at the file. The government of the day accepted 26 recommendations of the panel. To date, 22 of the 26 recommendations made have been addressed, and I believe it’s now 25 out of 26. This legislation, I believe, is to try and meet the needs of one of the recommendations, which is the most complex one to do relative to what’s come out of the Mount Polley dam.

Out of that came, of course, some code reviews, significant updates to the tailing storage facility requirements, from the aspect of health, safety, reclamation code for mines in British Columbia. After those updates to the code and those things, international engineering geoscience environmental consulting firms were also taking in…. Klohn Crippen Berger completed a third-party comparison of mining legislation and guidelines in British Columbia, Montana and Alaska, finding B.C.’s requirements to be equal to or better than those in Montana or Alaska.

[3:40 p.m.]

Now, that was good news from the standpoint that we have standards, but we still had a failure. That meant we needed to continue to follow on the recommendations to enforce things even better — to make them better, not worse.

The changes to the health and safety portion of the code came into force in February 2017. With these updates, British Columbians can have the confidence that B.C. standards are good and world-class.

With all of these and other things that were implemented the previous two years and then going into 2017 and continuing into this government, I think that a lot of things in compliance and enforcement for mining today are way more robust and transparent than ever before. That’s because you need to learn from your mistakes. You learn from things that can happen with regard to it. I think the earth is always changing geotechnically, which consideredly means that our engineering firms and others need to look at these things to learn from them.

On January 30, 2015, the panel delivered its final report on its investigation. That report included 35,000 pages of documentation related to the panel’s investigation. Of course, the minister of the day and the Minister of Environment of the day were charged with making sure that those things were put into place.

While the breach may not have occurred had it not been undetected by geo and clustering layers of soil, as they call it, the consequences of the breach were made worse by other factors. Those factors were the expansion and the raising of that particular tailings pond, and that mine failed to basically understand, perhaps, what those things were.

That takes us through to a period of time where a number of the recommendations — I won’t go into all of them, because they’re extensive — have been implemented by successive governments, whether it be to improve corporate governance or implement the best technologies using a phased approach for existing tailing impoundments, for new tailings facilities and for closure of the ones that existed and are no longer being used — hence, the validation of safety regulations for all classes of those types of things.

It was also to implement things about mine and dam safety management, water balance management and mine emergency response plans so that they were updated in case they were weak at any point in time at any mine. An independent technical review board was put into place. Professional reliance was upgraded. All of these things took place in the period of time that was subsequent to Mount Polley.

Would those things, as a normal regulatory review process, have been accomplished? Some. But when you have a failure, you have a tendency to go look and do an entire scan of what you have out there for regulation and compliance. Actually, out of that comes, obviously, the fact that we’re here today.

The government is bringing in a piece of legislation that we will debate. I admit I read the legislation initially, and I thought okay, when I saw it yesterday. Then I started to have some questions with regard to it, which isn’t unusual for anybody that reads a piece of legislation. I’m sure as the legislation was developed — having been a minister, I would know — the minister probably had questions about the effectiveness and whether this is the right way to go or whatever. He will have that opportunity when we get to committee stage of this particular bill, so we can talk about it in more detail.

I must admit, to the policy of watching Mount Polley, the one thing I was struck with the most was the compassion of the ministers and the compassion of the MLA for Cariboo North, who still sits in this House, for their community, trying to make it stronger, to actually be there for them, to deal with the First Nations. It has led to a letter of agreement between the First Nations and the province of B.C. with regard to when to reopen. The environmental piece with the First Nations will be part of the environmental management of the mining in the future, and inspections.

All of those things come together in order for us to be able to be here today and continue to improve on an industry that’s been substantially important to British Columbia.

Now, as we go into this, we actually are setting up a separate entity within the ministry. I think one of the early recommendations with that would be separate from the ministry. But obviously, if it’s a separate statutory authority within the ministry, that’s more of an argument about semantics than it is anything else.

[3:45 p.m.]

The question will be: how does this new entity interact with the ability of a mine to actually find a core sample, do its environmental assessment — which, in British Columbia, will take you two to three years at a minimum — be able to finance the mine because you now have a sample that you can actually get to where you can get to a permitting place and provide this certainty so that these jobs can be created in the future successfully and seamlessly for the province and the people of British Columbia? It’s a big question.

The other challenge is that if you’ve ever been the minister of any resource ministry, the one thing you find early on in almost every ministry in government is that there are what we call statutory decision-makers. So we have the chief of mines, who has a statutory authority. Then they have mines inspectors or approval officers who have their own statutory authority — and not to be, frankly, questioned by a minister, influenced by a minister or the public. They are independent, and they have the ability to do their job independently because they’re a statutory officer.

As we go into a new auditor for the Ministry of Mines — this whole section, which will have people employed in it — a number of questions come to mind. The first one: will the audit include the ability for the auditor to look at the job being done by a statutory approving officer for a mine, whether they, in fact, have influenced that in any way or whether they have a personal bias as to what should be allowed on the land base outside their statutory powers? One surface mine I came across recently was where the approving officer also had a hobby, an interest, that conflicted with the very land they were trying to approve a mine on, and he made his decision.

Now, that I will discuss at some point with the Minister and the new Deputy Minister of Mines, because it’s something that needs to be discussed. But having said that, does the auditor have the ability to look at the performance of people that are actually approving mines because they’re working within the same industry in another statutory authority?

The other piece that struck me about this, though, was this. It’s going to be a big question. This auditor has the ability to go on any individual minesite in B.C., can walk on the site and do an inspection, hire all the experts that he or she requires to conduct that inspection or any geotechnical work, expertise, anything — whether it be a hydrologist or whether it be somebody that’s an engineering person with regards to geotechnical or structural issues. Some of the mining stuff is built, particularly in the shafts, and things are structurally engineered. So has the ability to go and hire those people to actually do that review.

The biggest question about that will be for the minister, as we go into committee stage. Can those same experts still work in other aspects of the mining industry? It’s not like there are a whole bunch of geoscientists out there — special engineers, geotechnical people that would understand a mine or a dam — in addition to what’s already out there today.

If I was, for instance, one of those experts and I did work for the auditor, does that exclude my ability from there on to do any other work with government in the Ministry of Mines? I would be conflicted out — would I not? — if I’ve done work for one statutory authority on one site, and I go do similar work for a client, being the Ministry of Mines, on the other site. That’s a big question. Where are you going to get the people if you want to do this job right?

Then, by extension, ask yourself the third question. If an engineer that worked on, let’s say, the Red Chris mine in northeastern British Columbia and had helped build that mine was asked by this auditor to go check out a mine in southeastern British Columbia on an audit with them, because they had worked in the private sector with that expertise, would they be conflicted out for working for this new entity as an auditor in another mining operation in British Columbia? Would there be presumed to be any conflicts of interest with regards to that? It’s a big question.

[3:50 p.m.]

I don’t know if you know much about mining, but I do know this. The holdings and ownership of mines are often diverse, and they’re often public companies. The holders of those stocks that might own that company, who are actually building a mine and funding it, have experts that are working for them. They can also be holders by institution. The stock can actually be held by institutional investors. For instance, in B.C., the provincial pension fund actually has resource investments in mining and other resources around the world to protect the pensions of the public service in B.C.

When you go to work for a company, are you excluded from doing work from either one of these entities? If you go to work for the one entity, are you excluded from doing work somewhere else in B.C. for the other entity, which is, let’s say, the Ministry of Mines, versus the auditing function within mining?

That is a big question, because the effectiveness of this is to be that we basically appoint someone in the public service to be the chief auditor of mining. That individual then has a mandate. And this is the mandate: to determine the effectiveness of the regulatory system for mining and protecting workers, the public and the environment. The chief auditor’s authority will extend to the regulatory framework for mining.

Input on the regulatory framework would come from this other entity, this statutory decision-maker — with regards to the regulatory framework for mining in B.C. — to the bureaucrat that is actually writing the regulation, who is now…. Write the regulation and be approved by orders-in-council. But then it can also be taken by another authority and changed — and change the framework.

It is independent, which is important for an auditor. To be independent from permitting, compliance and enforcement divisions. So if they’re independent, that’s fine. But for permitting and what have you, as they go through to do an audit, if they come across something that actually was not correct in their mind in permitting, compliance and enforcement, where is their authority going back and forth across the two streams?

There appears to be no economic competitiveness component in the audit unit, except…. Some of the material I have seen from the Ministry of Mines is that this is supposed to help streamline and improve and speed up the ability to get a mine in B.C., because it’ll help strengthen the public understanding and the permitting understanding of mining. And there’s nothing wrong with that if these two can cohesively work together and increasingly create jobs and economic development for British Columbia in this very important sector. But those would be questions.

The chief auditor may also issue orders. Now, the orders could be for immediate and remedial action, which means by expertise. He’s hired somebody to do a geotechnical review on a dam or a holding tailing pond or the structure of a mine or road construction. I would assume that anything to do with a mine, this auditor would be able to look at and put in remedial action.

Nothing wrong with that as long as that remedial action isn’t outside of the standards that have been established by the ministry as to what the level of construction of that road or that tailing pond or whatever has been approved by them with their expertise. And does the expertise clash? That’s why it’s going to be important to understand where the independence of that expertise is.

He can also issue orders for work stoppages, which any inspector, even in building a house or a building, can actually put a stop-work order for things that are for safety purposes and for mining closures.

It also creates a unit of mines, audits and effectiveness. It’s led by the auditor, and it follows the recommendations of the mineral jobs task force, which is also, by the way, followed by the Ministry of Mines with regard to how it operates on the land base. So there could be some crossover.

Also this is, you know…. As these new enforcement powers come in and his or her delegate upon these things have done, they may enter or go below the surface of a mine to cause required work to be performed. They’re going to need to have expertise to do that, because this individual won’t know everything about the construction and the operation of the mine. Then it expands compliance provisions under section 24 of the act, which is basically to include reclamation in the scope of the section and also makes compliance requirements constant, irrespective of the existence of orders from officers under the act. You could have one statutory authority making one order, and another making another.

[3:55 p.m.]

Lots of questions about the future of a very important industry in our province, recognizing where this came from and how important it was that we went through this process over this period of time to get things right.

I look forward to debate in second reading with the minister.

S. Furstenau: I’ve been listening with interest to the comments of my colleagues from the official opposition and also to the minister’s opening comments on this bill, Bill 6, the Mines Amendment Act.

I think I’m going to start with a story from 2016 about a quarry in the area where I was the area director at the time, regional director for the Cowichan Valley regional district in Shawnigan. There was a quarry operator that local residents had been monitoring the activities of at this site. They determined that this operator had been quarrying for some time outside of his Mines-permitted area on his property. They had drone footage of the site. They overlaid that on the permit documents, and it was very clearly outside of the permitted area for where he was allowed to be quarrying.

We approached the Ministry of Mines staff, and we set up a meeting, and we went down to the meeting. The response from Ministry of Mines at the time was: “Well, this can be solved. We will simply redraw the permitted area, and then the operator is in compliance with his permit.” We were a little bit gobsmacked at this — that the consequence to an operator of a quarry for operating outside of his permitted area was that the Ministry of Mines staff would simply redraw his permit and make him retroactively in compliance, despite the fact that he had been operating out of compliance.

This is not unlike the citizens who reach out to me regularly from the area of Kingburn, also in Shawnigan Lake, where a landowner has been essentially quarrying for nearly a decade without a mines permit. The process is now underway to get this person a mines permit, despite the fact that he has been operating without a permit for a great long time, extracting materials from what is essentially a quarry.

Both of these stories illustrate something very important, and this isn’t just limited to the Cowichan Valley regional district. I actually have people reach out to me all over the province with stories just like this. It speaks to that fundamental role that government, as regulator, is meant to be playing, which is to regulate an industry, to ensure that an industry is following the rules, just as we would expect to be regulated in our day-to-day lives.

If we are speeding, or if we are operating a vehicle under the influence of alcohol, we would absolutely anticipate that there would be consequences for that, because we’ve broken the rules. Yet what seems to be too much of a theme in the industry in this province is that rules kind of apply, but really the solution is, if you’ve broken the rules, we’re going to fix that for you.

That undermines public trust. It undermines public trust in government as a regulating body, it undermines public trust in the industry, and it causes citizens to question why it is that some industries get to break the rules, get to flout the rules, yet I, as a citizen, am expected to follow those rules. Both of the members from the official opposition have cited the Mount Polley example, the worst mining disaster in Canadian history. It was certainly very much a wake-up for those of us in Shawnigan who were engaged in trying to prevent a kind of disaster in our own community, to see how that played out.

[4:00 p.m.]

Both of the members from the opposition have talked about how unfortunate that situation was. But what’s interesting is that when they were in government and the recommendations came out from the Auditor General’s report on compliance and enforcement in the mining sector, the main recommendation, recommendation No. 1 from that report from the Auditor General was: “We recommend that the government of British Columbia create an integrated and independent compliance and enforce­ment unit for mining activities, with a mandate to ensure the protection of the environment.”

Today’s bill goes a long ways towards achieving that. However, the government’s response at the time — the former government — was that government does not support the need for reorganization of the ministries. Business as usual.

Another recommendation from the Auditor General’s report at the time was to recognize the role that professional reliance and overreliance on qualified professionals had played. Again, you know, this was a very significant part of what motivated me to run for office. I’m pleased that this government has brought in, as part of our confidence and supply agreement, pretty significant changes in professional reliance, including the superintendent of professional governance.

Listening to the comments of the official opposition, it made me think about the role of proper oversight and regulation of an industry. What I was hearing from them was that this is somehow a diminishment of that industry. But I would argue it actually isn’t. It’s a recognition that there is an agreement between government as a regulator and as the overseer of the public good, the public interest and the public resource that industry has access to. So it’s not a diminishment to have proper regulation and oversight of an industry. It’s a recognition that government plays a very important, very specific role in that oversight.

Members opposite also spoke about mining companies overseas and how we can look at Canada and B.C.’s mining industry as exemplars of good corporate activities. I had a couple of thoughts on that. One was that I really have a challenge with the kind of arguments around: “This sector is behaving very poorly in other countries. Therefore, we should give more leeway in our country because we’re at least not that bad, and therefore, we shouldn’t have proper oversight and regulation.”

In fact, that kind of race-to-the-bottom argument is very dangerous and very problematic. I’d also point out there are B.C.-based mining companies operating overseas that have some pretty significant concerns about human rights and environmental activities. In fact, there’s an article here, the headline being: “Canadian Mining Companies Will Now Face Human Rights Charges in Canadian Courts.” Those are mines operating in Guatemala and Africa, where there have been human rights abuses.

I actually do not accept the argument that because mining companies in other parts of the world may not be operating to the kind of standard that we would like to see, that therefore we don’t want to raise the standards here. We need to be global leaders. We need to be the most sustainable, the most environmentally responsible and the most socially responsible examples of how industry can work in the world. We don’t look at other parts of the world and say: “Well, at least we’re not as bad as that. Therefore, we don’t have to worry about this.”

The measures included in Bill 6, this Mines Amendment Act, appear to be a good step in advancing legislated requirements relating to accountability and transparency in the mining sector. Bill 6 seeks to formalize the organizational changes in legislation by formally separating specific authorities and decision-making powers under the Mines Act to ensure authorizations and permitting are separate from enforcement and auditing powers.

[4:05 p.m.]

Again, I think about…. As residents of Shawnigan, it would have been very good to be able to have another body to say: “We’re not satisfied with the actions here.” When somebody’s been operating out of compliance and the regulator says: “Well, we’ll just fix that for that person,” it would have been beneficial to have somebody else to seek oversight in that situation.

The act will enhance compliance and enforcement provisions and add a provision requiring that reclamation be performed in bankruptcy cases related to the Redwater decision.

Clearly, there’s a history, not only in the mining sector but in other resource sectors, where the reclamation and cleanup from a site is left to taxpayers. That is an unacceptable situation. On paper, these changes are good, but it’s hard not to be cynical, given our history — the rapidly worsening environmental degradation that we’ve seen here in B.C. and around the world and the cases that proved why we need to make many of these amendments.

In discussions about mining…. Just as in the comments that I heard from the members opposite, I’m often left feeling like a fundamental kind of forgetting seems to happen. Yes, we want to celebrate the glorious days of the past, the great boom-and-bust golden days of big mining towns, and go visit places like Barkerville, which I have visited with my family. We absolutely loved our time there, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t want to keep striving to do better. We know more now. We understand the impacts of environmental degradation. We understand the impacts of selenium in groundwater or the impacts of selenium on fish populations. We understand the impacts of air pollution.

With our growing knowledge, we want to continually strive for better, for more excellence. I worry that we forget, also, that these resources belong to every British Columbian. As such, the benefit — not just the cost, as has often been the case — should extend to every British Columbian. Of course, there are going to be costs associated with resource extraction, but when these costs are paid disproportionately by the public and the profits accumulate disproportionately with corporations, governments need to seriously re-evaluate their allegiance.

Again, the members opposite were talking about the need for competitiveness, yet just last year some subsidies to the mining industry, to the tune of about $15 million a year, were made permanent. These had recently been renewed year over year. They’re now permanent. I think we do quite a bit to encourage this industry in our province.

There was a trend of deregulation with the last government in this province, and we are still digging out of that hole. As stated in Dermod Travis’s final article, published just this month in the Times Colonist: “‘In 2001 there were…2,021 mine inspections. In the year after, the number dropped to 1,496, nearly 30 percent more than 2012, before reaching a 2004 decade low of 399 visits.’”

As we work to improve our laws and regulations, we are still faced with tremendous losses that could prove nearly impossible to fully recover — public trust, ecosystems, endangered species. For example, in March, Teck Resources said that it was baffled by the fish collapse downstream of their B.C. mine. Baffled. Contamination from Teck’s mines into the rivers of the Elk River watershed is a long-standing problem, well known to both the company and all levels of government. Scientists have been clear on what would happen to fish populations if they continued to pollute the water. Now it’s happening, and the company is baffled.

I asked this government about the problem a year ago and was told that they were working on a new water treatment facility. It doesn’t sound like it worked. Situations like this are not baffling; they’re negligent. The wilful destruction of this cutthroat trout population is an abdication of responsibility by both government and Teck Resources.

[4:10 p.m.]

Also from Dermod Travis’s final article, he quoted the seniors advocate, Isobel Mackenzie, who points out, importantly, that the government must always remember that we are not partners with industry. We are regulators. Our duty is not to competitiveness; it is to the people and the public interest of this province.

I applaud the government for bringing in this act, and I look forward to seeing the questions and debate at committee stage. I also recognize that this is one step and that this province has been long overdue, for a very long time, in reforming the Mines Act in British Columbia. I hope that there will be more work done on this front.

M. Morris: I appreciate the opportunity.

I listened to the previous speaker and looked at this legislation. I’m a little bit bewildered, I guess. Here we are suffering from some of the most economic tragedies that we’ve seen in Canada and across the world in decades, and this government sees fit, at this time, to introduce legislation that is going to increase the overall bureaucratic burden on industry in Canada, in British Columbia, and increase costs to an industry that’s already suffering from a downturn in the commodity prices.

Increased costs. I look at Mount Milligan, in my area there, pre-COVID, employing 450 people. It had a brilliant future. But as a result of increased costs — the employer health tax is one of them — they’ve gone from a mine life of about 20 years down to a mine life of nine years, just because of the increased costs that they have to bear here.

For the government to introduce this legislation at this particular time — rather than something that will help the industry, help people to get back to work, increase opportunities for industry itself — I think is shameful. This kind of legislation could have been introduced after COVID is over, after everybody is back to work again and industry is up and running. To look at this bill right now and spend the time on it and enable this legislation so that we can put a couple of inspectors and auditors to work and increase the costs to the industry itself, I think, is unnecessary at this time.

Mining is the backbone. Everything that we do relies on mining. Everything that we have in life depends on mining. It’s the minerals in the ground that make everything work for us.

We look at the thousands of kilometres of hard transmission lines that we have in the province. They’re aluminum because of the weight factor, but they’re supported by metal towers, thousands of metal towers that we have. The wires eventually get into our household, where copper wires displace the power throughout the residential areas and through industry.

Mount Milligan is a copper mine — gold, copper. B.C. is the biggest producer of copper in Canada and a gold producer as well.

To have this come along at this particular time could jeopardize…. It could be the breaking point for some of these companies that are already operating on thin margins, cause them to shut down and put more people out of work for a longer period of time and reduce the amount of taxes coming into government that help our social programs and whatnot carry on.

It’s that close. Every little bit, every little burden, that the government heaps upon industry at this particular time is pushing that particular industry that much closer to closing down. So I think they need to take a second look at that.

I heard the member before talking about safety of the mine and how negligent these mining companies are in operating. I’m not sure if she has ever put a hard hat, a safety vest and steel-toed boots on and gone into a mine to actually look at how they operate and see the importance that they put on complying with regulations, safety and all the other attributes that go into making a mine work in today’s society.

[4:15 p.m.]

I go back to my days when I first got out of high school. I travelled to a community called Lynn Lake, Manitoba. I’d never seen a mine before and had never been to that part of the world. I arrived on a train at about four o’clock in the morning. By eight o’clock in the morning, I had a job working over 3,000 feet underground.

It was a nickel mine, and there was a lot going on at the time. There’s a lot of engineering that goes into those sites. This was probably 40 or close to 50 years ago now. Technology and engineering have changed considerably since then, and society has benefited from the products that these mines generate for everybody.

Recently I helped a neighbour out. After I left the force and before I became a politician, I worked in Gibraltar mine, Endako Mines and a couple of other mines across the province here, installing industrial doors and doing a lot of the repairs.

Looking at the regulations under which they operate…. Everything that they do, of course, is regulated. There are inspectors, and there are inspectors for the inspectors. It’s a highly regulated industry, with a lot of people looking over their shoulders. The engineers are checked.

The situation at Mount Polley. My colleague from Langley East explained the situation there very well. There has been $100 million that has been put back into Mount Polley to restore the damage that was done there, but there’s still a lot of potential for that particular area.

The engineers do their best to make sure that they catch everything. In the event of a catastrophe like this, there’s remedial action, and then the engineers will make sure that nothing like this happens again down the road. To come in with more policy on top of policy, more regulations on top of regulations, and auditors on top of auditors and inspectors…. I don’t think it’s the way to go, particularly at this juncture in time.

British Columbia has a rich history of mining. Up in the northwest part of the province, there has been mining — I think over 150 different mines have opened up in that area — since the end of the 19th century, and we don’t see the degradation of the area. You can go in and see some of the remnants of those mines today. Eventually, technology will come about where some of these mines will reopen again and contribute to our economy in British Columbia, like it is already. Mining contributes a significant amount to the folks in British Columbia already.

We have that golden triangle up in the northwest part of the province here. Red Chris mine is at the top, and you get down below into the Brucejack mine area. Billions of dollars are invested into these facilities, following the regulations, setting everything up according to the regulations and the laws of British Columbia and of this country. People are intent on ensuring that the people who work there are working there in a safe environment and that that environment is maintained properly.

At KSM mines or Seabridge Gold…. Another big opportunity is coming up there. A little bit further to the east of that particular area…. We have tremendous opportunities with mines, all the way over to Mount Milligan and north into the Kemess area. There are hundreds and hundreds of people working in those mines that are living throughout British Columbia and that rely on those mines to provide an income for their families.

Increased regulatory burdens, like I said earlier, are going to push those mines that much closer to the brink of having to shut down just because of the overhead costs that they have. It amazes me that this government hasn’t given that any consideration at this particular time.

In talking to some of the mining companies up in my area…. The amount of time that it takes to get a permit through, to go through the bureaucratic process and to get a work permit in order to do something on that mining site, has placed a tremendous load on these companies that is not necessary at this particular time.

The Green Party member who spoke before me alluded to the fact that B.C. has some high environmental standards. The companies that are working towards those standards are probably some of the best in the world. They’re not operating to a low standard.

[4:20 p.m.]

We operate under some of the highest standards in the world, here in British Columbia. If she took the time to visit some of these mines and go through them and have the mining folks point out all the different things that they’re doing in compliance with the regulatory side of things, she may come away with a different prospective on that. It’s important that she probably undertake that opportunity sometime down the road here.

I look at Mackenzie right now — Mackenzie, B.C., in my riding — devastated by the forestry downturn. Just about every mill in the town itself has been shut down, curtailed either temporarily or permanently. There’s one remanufacturing mill working there. The saving grace for that community right now is that a lot of the folks there work at Mount Milligan. I did have about 450 people, pre-COVID, working there, but because of the social distancing and some of the requirements there, they’re down significantly from that, I believe. Perhaps only half the people are working there.

There’s the Kemess North mine — which is a little ways north of there — that is going through significant work right now to get that up and running in the foreseeable future. We have rare earth mineral opportunities in British Columbia second to none. We have some…. I don’t even know what the names of some of these things are; they’re so far down on the periodic table itself. But we have a lot of opportunity here.

We have several countries around the world that are looking at some of the rare earth mineral opportunities we have in the interior of British Columbia. More opportunities for people to get back to work. More people to pay taxes, to support social structures that we have in British Columbia, to help pay down this amount of money that this government is spending right now in order to deal with the COVID issues in British Columbia and, of course, nationally. With the regulatory process that we already have in British Columbia, what better place to open up a mine? To open up a mine in a jurisdiction that has credibility in the way things are done.

When you look at those who…. The geologists, the companies that invest in mining, the exploratory work that is done right across the province — you’re looking at different things. These folks have to be pretty bold to put a stake in the ground and say: “Let’s have a look at this” and “Let’s develop this.” From the time they do that until the time there’s a mine on the site, if it ever gets to that point, it’s years, or it could be decades, down the road. There has been a lot of money invested in that tenure, that particular time, over that period of time, that comes out of somebody’s pocket, somebody’s investment portfolio. A lot of pension funds at stake with these investment portfolios as well.

So I think this is a bad time to introduce more regulation on a resource sector that is already overburdened. It would be nice if government would take a second look at that and maybe pull back and try and bring something in that’s going to boost the economy, get the economy running, so that people can get back to work as things open up from the COVID pandemic.

There’s a lot that can be done. I haven’t heard anything from this government to indicate that they have any idea on how to get things started at all. Increase taxes, increase regulatory burden, do all of these things that are completely the opposite of what needs to be done to get the economy in British Columbia up and running again.

It’s a small bill. There’s not much there other than more bureaucracy and a couple more government positions to hire auditors. I’m sure that the mining industry is sitting back just reeling over the thought of having more auditors come into their system and look at what the inspectors have already done and perhaps exercise some authority in there that will cost them a little bit more money at the end of the day. Again, it would be nice if they would review their approach on this and wait until the economic times are better in British Columbia before they introduce that.

[4:25 p.m.]

Coal is another big factor. Metallurgic coal in British Columbia…. Some of the highest-producing metallurgic coal — or best metallurgic coal — in the world is found here in British Columbia. We wouldn’t have all of the other products that we enjoy around the world, and in British Columbia, if it wasn’t for metallurgic coal. You know, the steel towers that hold the aluminum wires up to transport our power from the W.A.C. Bennett dam, Site C and throughout the province here are just a small indication of what’s there.

You look at the aluminum that is made at the Kitimat smelter that is used in vehicle production, is used in aircraft production. Just about all of the aluminum products that you see around here — that comes from the ground. All of the components of that come out of the ground for the most part — everything that we have in society.

I think somebody said one time that there are 64 elements in a cell phone that come out of the ground. So if we don’t support mining in a major way in this province, particularly with the downturn in the forest sector that we see, we need something that’s going to come in behind it and prop things up as we regrow the trees and re-establish the forest industry again at some point in time down the road in the future. But in the meantime, we need something to help that out.

If you want to see the impact that mining has right across British Columbia, there’s a website out there that’s called the Google Earth Engine and Timelapse. Just put that in your web browser, those that are listening intently at home or anybody who wants to have a look at it. Put that into your web browser, and it will bring up Google Earth Timelapse.

It’s a time lapse of the entire planet from 1984 till 2018. Focus in on British Columbia. Put Mount Polley into it or Mount Milligan or any of the other mining entities or companies that we have operating in British Columbia. Just look at the size of the footprint that they have, the impact they may have on the environment, versus what we see with forestry, versus what we see with urban development, with the roads and whatnot. Mining has a pretty small footprint in this province in comparison to a lot of the other things that we do. I don’t think that’s often taken into consideration.

This is poor timing for this particular bill. I don’t see the safety factor improving at all with this particular bill. It’s just going to be more bureaucracy at the end of the day. I think things will be okay until we get the economy up and running again, which would be a better time for this government to implement this bill. So I certainly don’t support it.

P. Milobar: It gives me pleasure to rise to speak to Bill 6, the Mines Amendment Act, 2020.

It’s interesting. There’s always legislation that comes through any House, be it provincial, federal or municipal. Sometimes the legislation will actually effect change and create what it purports to do. Other times, it appears that the legislation is an exercise in shuffling paper and creating more bureaucracy than actually increasing safety standards and increasing public trust.

With this bill, I do note that sometimes…. It’s always an interesting cue. At least, I have noticed that with ministers introducing their legislation on second reading, the length of time they talk, a lot of times, I think, actually does indicate, sometimes, the pride or lack thereof they might have in their own piece of legislation. Certainly, the minister introducing today…. I think he takes longer avoiding answering a question in question period than he did today introducing his own piece of legislation around the Mining Act.

It does give one pause to wonder why that would be, that there was so little engagement from the government on this bill as we’re in second reading here. Now we’ve heard from the House Leader of the Third Party and her concerns around the mining industry. I know that comes from a heartfelt place from that member. But to say and to characterize that we shouldn’t just point to other jurisdictions and say: “Well, we need to be world leaders….”

I have news for that member. We already are world leaders when it comes to mining and regulation. We are world leaders when it comes to safety, when it comes to human rights standards within those mining jurisdictions. Do we have work to do, especially on things around human rights, equal employment opportunities and things of that nature? Of course we do. We have it in a wide spectrum of things throughout our society.

[4:30 p.m.]

It is not solely in the purview of the mining world that things like that still need to have improvements made. I think everyone in this House has always been committed to trying to make sure that those types of improvements happen.

[S. Gibson in the chair.]

This bill, however, does make one question if it’s not just meant to create that bureaucracy. Creating bureaucracy for pure bureaucracy’s sake and creating more red tape does nothing to actually change the safety levels of the mine. It does nothing to change any of the accountability within mining within British Columbia. It simply makes them less competitive, it makes them more onerous to try to operate, and it makes companies question whether they truly want to work in this jurisdiction.

We talk a lot about the new emerging green economy and shifting resources and trying to change our power generation and how we’re going to operate as a society. By and large, I support those ideals and those initiatives moving forward.

But let’s be very clear about most of those technologies. If we’re talking about electric cars, if we’re talking about wind power, copper is a major, major component both of electric vehicles as well as wind turbines. Those both need, obviously, mining to happen. I would prefer that the copper come from our jurisdiction, where we reap the economic benefit — our jurisdiction, which has world-leading environmental standards and world-leading safety standards already for the mining industry — than other parts of the world.

We simply cannot, as a population of British Columbia, demand this massive shift over to a different technology and a different way to process energy and then point our finger to some other jurisdiction in the world and say: “You go ahead, and you mine, and you use child labour, and you use all these other non-safe mining practices to get us the materials we need so that we can feel good about ourselves driving an electric vehicle.”

If we’re truly going to try to leverage the full benefit of any of these new technologies, that has to have that global perspective as well. It just simply does. The fact of the matter is that the economic well-being of mining to British Columbia is great.

I think it’s fitting that I spoke after the member for Prince George–Mackenzie. In 2019, there was a study done on the impact of mining on communities. The number one mining city in British Columbia is Kamloops, where I’m from — 410 mining supply companies. And $342½ million a year is spent by the mining industry to those 410 mining suppliers. It’s significant in its footprint within Kamloops.

I say it’s fitting. I would never dare suggest that P.G. is second to Kamloops in any way, shape or form, but in this study, they actually are. Prince George is the second mining community in British Columbia, which makes sense. They’re very much a regional hub, a gateway to the north, geographically centred in our province. They’re second, with 300 suppliers, at $252 million a year. So there is significant impact to rural communities around mining.

For those of us that day in, day out work with these companies within our ridings and see the benefits that they bring to the communities and see, frankly, the good corporate citizenship that they provide to our communities, from support of arts groups to support of a wide range of non-profit groups — the United Way and many others — that all has to factor in as well.

All too often when we characterize these companies, we try to demonize them and say they’re an evil empire and they’re just in it for themselves. But if you look around this great province and you look at mining towns and you look at the infrastructure and the community centres and the community involvement those companies have had…. It’s diminished over time, admittedly, as it has with all bigger industry, because they have to stay competitive.

That’s the key part of it. If we want those other side benefits of having these operations in our communities — things like hockey rinks being built and swimming pools being built and libraries being built, all those other things that have gone into these communities, largely with the mining companies support…. If not 100 percent, certainly they’re usually at the table when their door gets knocked on. Let alone the property taxes they pay into those communities. Let alone all the people they employ in those communities that also pay property taxes and help to provide all of the supports that those communities need.

[4:35 p.m.]

It’s one thing to talk about just their impact to the provincial coffers. But there’s a large impact to these rural communities that they do. They provide a sense of worth. They provide a job where people take pride in where and what they do for a living, and their kids take pride in their parents for working in those environments as well.

In my part of the world, they have very strong connections with the area First Nations and very strong partnership agreements. There’s real work happening, where Indigenous youth have access to training, hiring and a full job at New Gold, in the underground mine, where a large portion of their workforce is Indigenous, earning family-supporting wages. These are important industries to rural B.C. These are important industries to all of B.C.

Downtown Vancouver. You look at the headquarters of the techs and that of the world that have been there over time. They sometimes leave and sometimes come back, for various economic reasons. In fact, if memory serves, I think the last time we lost all the headquarters in downtown Vancouver to Calgary was when the NDP were in power the last time, because of their oppressive red tape and taxation policies. That’s not good for the B.C. economy. That’s not good for anyone. We need these services. We need these supplies.

I’ll give you an example of how philanthropic these companies can be. In Kamloops — I’ll use my own example — our United Way drive every year sets an ever-increasing target. The Steelworkers, in partnership with Highland Valley Copper and Teck, are usually the largest donators to that, with the Steelworkers, as a union, and their employer working out an agreement in terms of matching contributions.

That has diminished as the market has dropped this last year, because, frankly, mines are in survival mode right now. Between commodity prices, exchange rates, COVID, you name it, they’re not in great shape right now, so they’d rather make sure they keep everyone employed. But in a typical year, it’s hundreds of thousands of dollars that kick-starts a fundraising campaign that has benefits all the way up to Williams Lake, south of us down into Merritt, east out into the Chase area and up the North Thompson Valley, because it’s a regional United Way. That’s just one example of the benefits that the mining industry does bring.

No one on this side is saying that the mining industry should not have proper accountability and practices, should not operate safely. We agree with that. What we don’t agree with is this bill, because this bill is not going to actually accomplish any of that. This bill will just drag out processes. That doesn’t necessarily provide any greater public good. It doesn’t provide any more public faith in the system. It simply unnecessarily delays things.

The number one thing you hear from large operators of resource extraction is: “Just give me an answer. Tell me what I need to do. Let me know what the rules of the game are so I know how to make sure that my paperwork gets filed properly, I get the proper reports you need, and I can consult with the proper people. But then give me an answer. After I’ve done all that, give me a yes, give me a no, but don’t tie me up for eight years.”

That’s a very real concern. We have not seen a new mine come on line in the three years of this government. There are not even rumours of them. Major projects that were lined up on the books to start were lined up on the books under the previous government. Those projects are either proceeding now or they’re not proceeding at all. There are no new major projects being proposed in this province on the investment docket for government to try to work with to try to move forward. That should say something. That says everything you need to know about capital dollars and investment dollars in view of what’s going on in British Columbia.

This was pre-COVID. I can’t imagine that as we move through the COVID pandemic, as companies are more and more stretched, the response from this government, to bring in even more bureaucratic mess for people to try to jump through, which doesn’t actually accomplish a whole lot at the end of the day in terms of improvements, is going to somehow make things better.

[4:40 p.m.]

You couple that with industries and a general business climate right now where the answer back from government seems to be just to increase taxes or defer taxes: “We’ll send you a bill in a couple months. We’re not actually going to help you out. We’ll just tell you that you can pay us in a little bit longer time frame. We’re not going to actually help you out. We’re going to tell you to go and fire all your employees even though you didn’t want to, even though you had no intention of laying them off 100 days ago. We’re not going to help you out to change that simple regulation so that you don’t have to fire people you had no intention of firing in the first place and people you had no intention of cutting a severance cheque to in the first place, because they were going to be gainfully employed with your business.”

Instead of giving those companies a little bit more time, we have the government’s approach to business, which is to get them into regulatory bankruptcy, essentially.

The fact that we have concerns about the level of regulation and bureaucratic mess that this is going to create I think is very valid, because we see it in all sorts of government policy right now with this government. They haven’t seemed to slow down their regulatory pace because of COVID. If anything, they’re doubling down on it. There seems to be very little recognition about the importance of mining.

I remember the former Mining Minister under this government whose famous speech at mining conferences to a room full of miners would be explaining to them that everything in the room came from mining. That’s a great speech for a mining minister to give to a grade 6 class when they’re talking about mining and trying to explain what mining is. But one would think that everyone in that room whose livelihood depends on mining already probably had an inkling that things in that room came from mining.

But that’s the level of commitment we have seen through one and now two ministers from this government towards mining. It is a strategy to delay. It is a strategy to grind out and be seen to be doing something with the end target, the end want, of having nothing new of any consequence come on the books, which is why this government would view mining as a sunset industry.

As I’ve touched on and other members have touched on before, the very nature of trying to shift to a greener economy or a greener energy source requires mining. It might be an electric haul truck that ultimately is going to do it. It might be an electric shovel that’s going to do it. I have no doubt that the mining industry is going to keep innovating and coming up with cleaner, better and safer ways to mine a product. But at the end of the day, they will be mining. They will need to mine, plain and simple, for us to be able to create what it is that we, as a society, want our future to look like.

They don’t simply mine to create a combustion engine car and an electric car magically appears off an assembly line with no inputs coming from that same mine. It just simply doesn’t work that way. To essentially, as a jurisdiction, tell the rest of the world: “Go ahead. Ramp up your mining efforts so that we can all surround ourselves in new technology, and even though we have the resources to actually contribute to that, we’re not going to. We’re going to create a regulatory regime that makes it so that it doesn’t work.”

Why that is a concern is, as I say, that we are already global leaders in this respect. The fact that some people who don’t particularly like mining in general and don’t like the current level of regulations does not mean that they are bad regulations. It simply means that people who don’t like mining under any circumstance want regulations to a level where we will not see mining happen. But that does not mean that we don’t have world-class mining and regulations right now.

[4:45 p.m.]

It is important to compare it to other jurisdictions in the world. Otherwise, what’s the point of uttering the phrase: “We want to be world-class”? We see this time and again. We see this in the education system. The government coming into power was saying how horrible our education system was operating. Now the minister who uttered those same types of phrases is praising the education system in British Columbia for how its outcomes are. Its outcomes haven’t changed from when they were in opposition. We were world leaders in education in British Columbia then. We’re world leaders in education in British Columbia now. The only thing that changed was the tone of the minister between being a minister and being in opposition. We’re seeing the same thing with mining.

It is incredibly important. The saying is: “The canary in the coal mine.” Maybe it’s fitting that we’re talking about mining right now and trying to make sure it stays as a competitive industry when compared to its competitors in jurisdictions around the world, because this is but one of several industries. We have seen this government’s policies and changes and so-called improvements to things decimate the forest industry — decimate it. Forestry has always had ups and downs. I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this.

This is all pre-COVID. COVID has made things worse, but things weren’t getting any better 100 days ago under this government and their regulation. Now we see yet another bill that we’re supposed to think is really no big deal. The industry actually loves it. The industry will be fine with it. What industry will do is take their investment dollars, like we’ve seen in the forest industry, and they’re going to go to a different jurisdiction. There’s mining all over the world. Mines can wait. They’ll go to another jurisdiction with their investment dollars, and they’ll wait.

We will be no better off as a province as a result of that. We’ll continue to have high unemployment coming out of COVID as a result of that — higher than necessary as a result of that. But the government can check off a check box and say that they’ve added more burdensome regulation to an industry that’s already struggling. Somehow, this government considers that a win. It’s the only government I know that considers an economic recovery strategy to involve increasing taxes and increasing regulation burden in a time of a worldwide pandemic crisis. That’s what this does.

The sheer lack of strength of conviction to want to even speak to their own bill, not just as members but as a minister, is shocking. The minister’s preamble to the bill when it was introduced to the House was longer than his comments at second reading today. How is the public, how are we as opposition, to get a true sense of what the minister’s really driving at if the best he can do is read, essentially, what would be not even considered an executive summary of his bill?

We were brought back to this Legislature under extra­ordinary circumstances. We were told there were one or two housekeeping-type bills to bring forward. We’ve seen an avalanche of bills in the first two days — what are we up to, eight or ten? — when we have 13 days left in this session. We have more bills on the order paper that we still haven’t dealt with from the first session, when we broke in March, and we have about 13 days.

This bill was so critical for us to deal with in these types of economic times and pandemic situation and virtual versus in-person House sitting. It was such a critical piece of legislation that the minister was able to muster a minute and a half to bring it forward.

[4:50 p.m.]

I give the leader, the House Leader of the Third Party…. I guess I shouldn’t pre-empt what might or might not happen in your leadership race. I give the House Leader of the Third Party full marks. It’s obviously something she feels is important to her, and she made sure she spoke for quite a while on it and made sure her opinions and outlook were known. Whether I agree with that or not, what her ultimate outlook is, is somewhat irrelevant. The time was taken to actually make sure the public understood where she and her party stood on this.

Here we are with a critical piece of legislation, because that’s the only reason I could think it would have been introduced in the middle of a pandemic on a shortened sitting schedule, when we have 13 days of debate left in total and probably about 20 bills outstanding now.

This is the new piece of housekeeping type of bill that we were told the government would be bringing forward. Well, obviously, the minister feels it’s housekeeping, because it garnered a minute and a half of description and debate and salesmanship from the minister. I’m sure that in closing, maybe there will be a little bit more to add. Hopefully, there will be, because certainly, as we move into committee stage, we’ll make sure we have a lot of questions about this, because we know there are a lot of questions in our communities about this.

Mining in British Columbia. We cannot turn our back wholesale on industries that have got us to where we are today. Both my grandfathers were underground pick-and-shovel coal miners. I’m not that far removed from a mining family. They are good-paying jobs. They are family-supporting jobs. They do a lot for our community. They help generations move forward and go after other careers and other options and other choices in their life. It’s something to be proud of.

In my community, as I say, we’re the number one community for mining communities in the province. Mining is a big deal in Kamloops. We’ve gone through some controversial mining proposals in Kamloops. I lived through it pretty much the whole time I was mayor, on a mining proposal. It didn’t ultimately go forward. It didn’t go forward because the process worked. The process was a little ugly at times, because people that really wanted it, wanted it to be approved now, and people that didn’t want it, wanted it to be declined now.

It wasn’t that the process wasn’t working. It was that people just wanted the process to be faster. They wanted an end point. This legislation doesn’t do that. This legislation does the opposite. This legislation can actually lead, in my experience, to even more angst and unrest in communities as the levels of bureaucracy get ramped up, as the cost pressures to mining companies get ramped up, cost pressures that don’t need to be there.

If there was a new added cost that was going to actually add a net benefit to the public good, that’s understandable. This bill does none of that. This bill is yet another bill of window dressing by this government, to appear to be doing great strides when, in fact, they’re not doing much at all. The only thing they actually are doing is adding layers and layers and layers of regulation.

Think of the mines nowadays trying to come forward with the new Environmental Assessment Act, which is not a faster, streamlined process, despite what the Environment Minister says. I would find it shocking that an NDP government propped up by a Green Party would actually want to accelerate mine approvals or any environmental assessment process or approval. So let’s just really think on that statement, that it’s supposed to actually speed things up. Just ask yourself: does that make any sense? No, it doesn’t.

So you’ve got that layered on with this, layered on with professional reliance, none of which will actually change much of how the professionals conduct themselves. They’re professionals. Engineers are professionals.

[4:55 p.m.]

All the other professions are professionals. They conduct themselves and hold themselves to a very high standard. This government felt they needed to meddle with that, so now let’s delay things even further. Let’s make it even more regulatorily burdensome. Then let’s layer that on with the Environmental Assessment Act, and then let’s layer that on with this Mines Amendment Act.

We’ll do it one bill at a time so that the cumulative effect doesn’t seem quite as great. But as the rest of these bills all finish up their regulatory, behind-the-scenes backroom deals at the cabinet table — because everything of any substance in all those bills is being left to regulation — just wait and see what the impact is.

We’ve already seen what the impact is in the last three years. Forestry is dead. New mines aren’t opening or getting permitted. New mines aren’t even trying to go through the process right now. There’s a bit of exploration going on. That’s what we have. That’s the response. Well, let’s put on even more regulation under those circumstances. Let’s put on even more taxation under those circumstances. We’ll just tell them that it’ll be okay, and I’m sure they’ll believe it.

Well, I can tell you, when Highland Valley Copper shut down for a few weeks back when they were having issues with their hydro costs and a few other costs and the commodity market, our family hotel saw an instant drop in business, in the restaurant and in the bar. We didn’t have many actual miners that were direct customers. The city of Kamloops, as a whole, slowed right down instantly, and it progressively got slower and slower as it got closer and closer to shutdown date. As soon as a deal got struck, as soon as the government — the former B.C. Liberal government — struck a deal to figure out a way to make sure that the mine could reopen, the whole city started to slowly get busier again, even though there was another couple weeks before that mine was going to reopen fully.

There is a direct and an immediate impact when these large operations struggle. It doesn’t matter the size of the city. It’s immediate. We’re 45 minutes away, as a city, from Highland Valley Copper. It was immediate. This very much jeopardizes those cities, those towns, for a window-dressing exercise that will not accomplish what it’s purported to do by this government. But that’s what most of the legislation we’ve seen over the last three years has been about.

I thank you for this time, and I look forward to the committee stage, where we will question the heck out of this bill and try to get to the root of what’s really at play here.

D. Barnett: I’m very pleased today to be able to speak to Bill 6, the Mines Amendment Act. This is another piece of legislation that has some good points, and it has some impediments to mining in British Columbia.

Our mining industry has been the backbone of many of our regions and much of the province of British Columbia — a resource industry that has paid wages, taxes, benefits. Through the years, without these resource industries in mining, this province would not be as vibrant as it is today. The taxation and the jobs that it created, from resource industries such as mining, provide social services, education, health care.

The more rules and regulations you put before these mines certainly does not encourage investment. My area is one where we lived through Mount Polley. Many, many people from the Cariboo-Chilcotin work at Mount Polley. It is in Cariboo North, but I have been very engaged with Mount Polley.

[5:00 p.m.]

My colleague for Cariboo North and I were there along with the Premier and the minister the day of the devastation. We saw what happened. It was devastating to everyone — to employees, to investors, to the region, to the people that care and to the First Nations. But the action taken by government of the day was quick. It was swift, and everyone became fully engaged. The report that was done showed what actually happened.

As we move forward with Mount Polley…. I’ve spent many, many days visiting that mine. The remediation is incredible. Everyone who likes to sit back and say, “It isn’t good,” should take a look at what has happened. That creek is beautiful. The fish are bigger than ever. It is a place that we should all be proud of what has been done there by the company.

Do we need strong regulations? You bet we do. Do we care about the environment as citizens in this province? You bet we do. Do the people in the Cariboo-Chilcotin and Cariboo North care about environment? We care great, because we live here. Those of us that live here and work here in these resource communities understand how we must take care of the environment and how we must listen to the needs of First Nations and others. We are working together as best we can, particularly in the circumstances we’re in right now — because of COVID — that nobody predicted.

Like my colleague before me said, at this time, we don’t need to put more impediments on industry. We need to work with them. We need to make sure that what they’re doing is the best environmental work that can be done. As the colleagues before me have said, people must understand that we wouldn’t be here today, on this great technology we have called virtual work, if it wasn’t for mining. We’re here today, all of us, because we have mining, because we have copper, because we have zinc and because we have everything we need to provide the high technology that is here today.

So I would hope that the government would listen to the opposition. We have many MLAs who have much experience, who were Ministers of Mines, who understand regulatory regimes. Regulations that are there now are stiff. Most of them were recommended from the Mount Polley disaster, and most of them were implemented by the previous government.

I would ask the minister today: how will you improve the quality by more bureaucracy — by more time frames? Sometimes the public feels good…. If they feel there are more regulations and more fines, maybe that makes the public feel good. I’m sure it does, because we all want the best there is for our environment.

But people also need to understand the costs of doing business. When the costs of doing business far exceed…. And yes, profits. I know many people don’t like the word “profit,” but you know, that’s what business is all about. But to business, before profit comes safety of their workers — the best there is for the environment and the communities that they work, live and play in.

The help that our mines have given to so many employees, to so many communities…. These mines helped when the fires were on. They provided what they could in equipment. I know now, when this pandemic came every mine that I can think of — that I’d heard of — did what they could do to provide safety equipment for hospitals and health care providers in their region. These are great corporate people who really care.

[5:05 p.m.]

I get very frustrated and very upset when I hear people say that mines and their corporations are only there for profit, but they’re not. They’re there to create jobs to help our social network of the province of British Columbia and to provide a commodity so that we can continue to manufacture what we need — and basically throughout the world.

Mining has been a number one industry in British Columbia. And you take the footprint of a mine versus the footprint of a forest industry. It’s pretty small. When they leave, take a look at the mines where they have left. You take Morehead Lake in the Cariboo. Used to be a mine. Nobody would know that now. Beautiful lake, full of tourists, full of fish. You take a look at Butchart Gardens in Victoria. That, at one time, was a mine. There isn’t a prettier place or a better tourist site.

When we take a look at more rules, more regulations, more costs to industry, I think we should take a step back and say: “We have good regulations. We have good rules. We are proud of our mining industry in this province.” Let’s not pour more impediments on the local people who care so much about their jobs, their future and the environment in the province of British Columbia.

Like one of my colleagues before me said, I think it would be great if every MLA sitting in Victoria took a tour of these mines so you could understand them a lot better. I’m far from a miner, but I have spent much time going to mines — above ground, below ground, mines of all kinds — to understand how they work and what they must do to comply with the regulatory regime in British Columbia and also under the federal government acts.

I encourage everyone to take a good look at what the regulations are now, what the regime is now, before you stand and support another bill that could impede and stop a lot of investment in the province of British Columbia.

D. Davies: It gives me great pleasure to be able to speak here this morning on Bill 6. First of all, just wanted to do a quick shout-out to all of our front-line workers in the Peace country. Of course, we’re coming out of some pretty crazy times right now. So I want — as my first real time speaking and having the opportunity — to thank them and to give them a shout-out. I certainly want to do that.

We’ve all been so thankful, not just in the Peace country, for these folks that have worked tirelessly right across the province, as well as all the residents. We were pretty lucky in the Peace country to actually have very few cases. You know, people took it pretty serious and listened to the guidance of Dr. Henry. Like I say, I think things are showing now that success. So I just wanted to thank all of them.

We’re talking about mining and the impacts that this bill is going to have or could potentially have on mines in B.C. Mining is one of the original and foundational industries in the province — a critical key to our economy. In fact, if you walk out — and I’m here in Victoria — into the rotunda, and you look up at the beautifully painted ceiling, it has the original industries of British Columbia painted and portrayed on that ceiling. And mining, of course, is one of those.

[5:10 p.m.]

As I’ve heard from many of our colleagues, there seems to be a group of folks out there that say mining and some of the other industries are kind of on their last legs and going away. I think we heard one of my colleagues also mention that it’s a sunset industry. I disagree with that completely.

Like many of the others that attack our industries — I use the word “attack,” because it is — I think they come at it with false information. They don’t have the facts. Mining, like all the other industries, has made an unbelievable advancement and innovation in environmental, safety standards. Over the years, B.C. is now leading the way.

It doesn’t matter if you’re talking mining or if you’re talking the natural gas sector or forestry. Other countries are looking at us for how to do things better because we are doing it right and leading the way. This innovation we’ve seen is, in fact, a subpiece of our economy. Mining companies specifically invest millions upon millions of dollars on innovating and doing things better.

We heard members speak earlier about how bad the mining companies are. They aren’t. Like I say, there have been accidents, and we have learned from those, and we are learning. Companies have made commitments to improve. That’s what we’re seeing.

In our province alone, there are 40,000 people that rely on this sector for their livelihood, providing for their families, supporting businesses, keeping the economies of their small communities and these rural communities thriving. Maybe I won’t use the word “thriving” right now because it’s more surviving right now. These companies, like the mining companies that are operating, provide a huge impact on those communities and keep them going.

I’m also proud to say that the mining sector is a key part of our transition to a cleaner economy. We just have to look around us. The member from Langley earlier held up his cell phone. We’re sitting here, and I’m talking on my laptop. We’ve seen the incredible increase of need for these minerals used in our everyday electronics that we all rely on.

Electric vehicles have become very popular, and we’re being encouraged to buy more of those. We have solar and wind that are all using mined materials, and there’s a big move to go into these. So when I see those comments that the mining industry is a sunset industry, that it’s an industry that is going to go away — I don’t think it is.

We’re going to get better at it. We’re going to get more…. The technology is going to improve. It will be better on the environment. And we are going to continue to have to need mining. I cannot see us not needing steel any time soon. The amount of ore that is required for there to the metallurgical coal that’s required to make steel…. I’m sure my colleague from Peace River South has a number of mines that mine metallurgical coal. I’m sure he can talk at great length about the contributions that the mining industry is making directly to the local economies within his riding.

It’s not just the impact they have. I mean, they provide jobs. But all of these mining companies make incredible contributions to the non-profit sector, whether they’re supporting the food banks or they’re supporting youth groups. All of these mining companies contribute huge amounts to making our rural communities better communities for the residents.

[5:15 p.m.]

Speaking of economies — I think this may have been mentioned earlier, as well, and just kind of ties in with where mining is going — the mining industry went from $7.7 billion in 2015 to $8.7 billion in 2016. The projections are going to be increasing.

Bill 6 has some worrisome parts. Some of it comes down to some dreaded words to anyone in any industry, any business — or anybody trying to make a go of it on their own out in the world. Those dreaded words, Mr. Speaker, are “red tape.”

At first glance, this bill has created some new items. It was covered a little bit earlier on in the audit unit. Chief auditor, chief permitting officer, new enforcement powers for the chief inspector and designates. We don’t fully know the impact and what this is going to have on the mining sector. We’ll certainly be digging further into these during committee stage. I look forward to those discussions, certainly, with my colleagues.

We all support increasing safety in our mines. We all support mining companies that are working toward that goal, and they are. It’s important, I think, to understand — and it has been talked about also — reducing red tape does not mean sacrificing safety.

Again, we all live here in this beautiful province. We want to leave the province better for those behind. I mean, I want to leave this to my children. I hope they stay in British Columbia and have their own families. I’m sure that I probably speak for everybody who has kids or who lives in this province. We do want to leave it better.

It’s no different than the folks that work in those mines. They go to work each and every day with that exact same thought. “I am working and creating a livelihood for my family, but I’m also going to be making sure that all of the rules and all the environmental components are being followed.”

We’re concerned, though, that while the economy right now is in dire straits, and it is, the NDP continue to be more focused on creating red tape, creating regulation, instead of helping to get these industries thriving again. We’ve seen it over and over again. This isn’t new — increasing red tape, increasing the size of government, creating larger government. This is something that the NDP has always done. It was done in the ’90s as well.

This does nothing other than to hinder industry and scare off any investment at a time when we do need to embrace and support them as we are coming out of this pandemic and needing to rebuild our economy.

It’s odd. It seems like it was a week ago, but it was only yesterday that I spoke in the House on the private member’s motion. I’m just going to read a little piece about…. I’ve talked a lot about the economy over my time in this place, over the last three years — or on similar topics.

Even before COVID-19 hit, a little over 100 days ago, B.C. was already losing its competitive advantage. Fast-forward to today. We are certainly in a whole new world. Every country is vying for the same capital dollars that are out there to get people working in their own economies. The competition is much stronger now than it was just a few months ago.

I’m going to read a little piece from my private member’s statement that I read yesterday. “After a lack of supports and heavy-handed tax increases by this government, many of our resource industries have lost their competitive edge on the national and the global markets. Capital dollars are like water; they will take the path of least resistance.” There is a lot of resistance in British Columbia right now.

[5:20 p.m.]

As my colleague from Kamloops North already mentioned, in three years, since the NDP government took power three years ago, there has not been one new mine start-up in this province. That, I think, speaks volumes about the red tape and regulation that’s out there. It speaks volumes about where the investment dollars are flowing. They’re not flowing into British Columbia. They’re going the other way. They’re going to wherever they will go, wherever people are out there that are fighting for those same dollars. That’s where they’re going to go because of our level of red tape that we have.

B.C. is also known as a global centre for mineral exploration and development.

A couple of days ago, when I came down here, I was going through Vancouver. Every time I go through Vancouver I kind of look at…. I’m from Fort St. John. We don’t have a lot of big buildings. I always go downtown in Vancouver and look up at these incredible buildings that are downtown and wonder who all is in those buildings.

Well, there are more than 700 mining and mineral firms that are based in Vancouver alone. So many people in Vancouver rely on mining for their income, for their well-being. I don’t think most of those people, many of those people, even understand the impact that mining has in Vancouver, on that city. In fact, there is about a third of all B.C.-based businesses that supply materials and the goods and services that the mining industry is using all over. A third of those are located in the Lower Mainland. It’s an incredible piece of the economy in the Lower Mainland.

British Columbia has the potential to lead economic growth in Canada following this pandemic. It is directly attributed — I mentioned this yesterday in my statement as well — to the abundance of resources we have in British Columbia. We have a very diversified economy. We are the envy of many places around the world. We have mining, oil and gas, fishing, the forest sector. We’ve got agriculture, tourism. In fact, I think we have it all. There isn’t an industry that we don’t have in this province, and we are very blessed for that.

With that, of course, we’re very strategically located as the gateway to the Pacific, having the ports, the port access, being well positioned to serve the Asian markets, which are, of course, demanding many of our goods. Like I say, they will go elsewhere if we cannot provide.

I think that’s where it comes back to the important role that we in British Columbia can play in doing mining right and leading the way in innovation and making sure that other countries can look to us to see: “Okay, that is how it’s done.” I think that is a great thing that we can be proud of here in British Columbia, and it’s something that we should be able to promote around the world and encourage other places around the world that they should be following our suit.

With all that being said, the different resources, the Asian market being in close proximity to the ports…. It makes us automatically extremely competitive on the globe, but we need to have the right policies and the right amount of red tape in place.

Before any of that matters, this government needs more…. At the end of the day, the government needs to understand that they will not be able to tax themselves out of this economic downturn.

I don’t know about all of you. I’m sure you probably will agree. I’m taxed enough. Everybody that I talk to also agrees that they are taxed enough. We cannot continue in this direction of trying to tax our way out of this economic crisis that we are in. We saw that through the ’90s under the NDP, and it broke the province and scared industry out. Here we are again.

Our resource sector, I believe, must play a significant role in leading us out of this crisis we’re in. I really do believe that with the right policies in place, the right supports in place, and standing up there and being proud….

[5:25 p.m.]

Government should be standing up there on their soapbox talking about how great we are at doing mining, how great we are at doing oil and gas extraction, how great we are at agriculture, forestry. We don’t hear that enough from government. We don’t hear government selling how good we are anywhere. All we hear about is more taxation, more red tape and, in some cases, how we can curtail development.

As I move toward closing, I do look forward to hearing, in committee stage, how some of these pieces will impact mining. I definitely look forward to those discussions and just encourage everyone to be safe out there. With that, I’ll conclude.

Deputy Speaker: I now recognize the Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources to close debate.

J. Rustad: Excuse me. There are a couple other speakers, I believe. If I could ask the Chair to recognize the other speakers who would like to speak to this.

Deputy Speaker: Very well. That was not on my list. Please proceed.

J. Rustad: Thank you, hon. Chair, for the opportunity to speak to Bill 6. This is my first opportunity to use the technology. I’m in Victoria. I’m in my office. There seems to be a little bit of throughput problem from time to time, and the sound cuts out occasionally. Hopefully, the gist of what I would like to say with regard to Bill 6 will be able to come through.

I want to thank my colleagues for their comments that were brought forward and the minister for bringing this bill forward. It provides an opportunity to talk about mining, and it provides an opportunity to talk about my riding of Nechako Lakes. Mining is one of the key economic activities, behind forestry and agriculture, that helps to support the communities and people of my riding. Although it has played a lesser role of late, in the last number of years, it’s still a very critical piece of activity happening in my riding.

Lots of people in my riding want to see a successful mining industry, whether it is Mount Milligan and the operations that are happening there and supporting Fort St. James and other communities or it’s the hope that we will see a start on [audio interrupted] and on the Blackwater project south of Vanderhoof. There is the Endako mine, of course, which has been put into care for the time being because molybdenum prices do not support it. For many, many decades, it was a vital part to my riding. I know the people in Fraser Lake, in particular, and across my riding are looking forward to the day when that mine can be up and running again.

[R. Chouhan in the chair.]

My riding also looks forward to other mines, such as Kemess Underground, happening and to the opportunity to be a part of that. There’s a lot of exploration work that is going on in my area and some very exciting projects for nickel as well as molybdenum and other types of resources throughout my riding.

Mining and exploration play a critical part, which is why I wanted to talk about Bill 6. I’ve stepped back. I remember back when Mount Polley happened, when the incident happened. I was the minister responsible for Aboriginal Relations at the time. Of course, this was a critical issue that came up. I engaged with a number of First Nations, and I was very engaged with the incident at the time.

I got directly involved, working with the nations, finding a path forward where the government could work with the nations to [audio interrupted], to find a path to reconciliation and to find a path to do the restoration work that needed to happen, and also to be part of that significant review that made a lot of recommendations around improvements to the mining sector. I think it has been said by previous speakers that a lot of those recommendations have been implemented and are now a part of what we do for mining in this province.

What I find interesting about this particular piece [audio interrupted]. We’re talking about the mine audits and effectiveness unit. There’s nowhere else in the world that does this, where they have separated this component from the mine approval process.

[5:30 p.m.]

The expertise that’s required to go through and do this type of work is highly, highly technical. There are not a lot of people that are capable and qualified, not to mention that the people that are capable and qualified, not to mention that the people that are part of this need to have that experience, background and understanding as to what’s happening with the mine. It’s for that reason that at the time when that recommendation came forward, we looked at it and went: “It doesn’t make sense.”

We all want to see the improvements in the safety standards across the province, but it made it very challenging to look at that [audio interrupted] recommendation actually coming through. I see now that it is coming through, and it makes me curious as to how the current minister and current government look at resolving some of those issues. It’ll be an interesting conversation when we get to the committee stage of this bill. When I look at this bill once again coming forward, and I think about it in the context of where we are, I’d understand bringing this bill forward back in February. I don’t understand today.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, which is still ongoing, and the state of emergency and the damage that has been done to our economy, I would think that government would have been focused on trying to find ways to encourage investment, trying to find ways to get people back to work, trying to find ways to attract [audio interrupted] the job creation that this province is going to need to be able to drive its economy, to be able to pay for its bills and to be able to reduce the tax burden on the average person.

What is odd is that government seems to be proceeding like nothing has happened, like there isn’t a difference between where we were 100, 120 days ago versus where we are today. I’m very curious as to why this has come up at this time and is moving forward. When I think about mining, I think about the fact that it’s — what? — six or eight months now to get a notice-of-work permit through, to get people actually working and engaged on the land base. Why wouldn’t the government be focused on reducing that, on finding a way to be able get people working and to be able to get activity happening in mining?

I think about the fact that in the 1990s we saw two mines close for every mine that opened under the NDP. Here we are now, three years under an NDP mandate, entering the fourth year of an NDP mandate. There hasn’t been a single new mine starting construction in this province. I went to the industry and asked them why. It’s because there isn’t the confidence. Industry isn’t looking to invest in the province for major mines and in going forward with a major project, because there’s no clarity, there’s uncertainty on the land base, and the process is overly burdensome. The cost structure makes it very challenging for the economics, as we saw with the reduced mine life of Mount Milligan.

These are the things that I thought government would be bringing forward today. We’re in the middle of…. We’re trying to figure out how we’re going to recover from this pandemic. Why are those not the priorities that we need to be thinking about as a society and as a government? I mean, I’d be happy to sit down with government to try to work through these things and find ways to be able to expand that kind of investment. Sadly, they don’t seem to be interested. They just seem to want to go forward with their agenda — which, quite frankly, I think, is misplaced, given the environment that we are in today.

I had the pleasure of engaging with a lot of people during Roundup this year in January down in Vancouver, which is a major mining conference. A lot of companies present; a lot of companies bring forward information. I had an opportunity to speak on a panel as well. I raised some of these questions at the time.

The moderator was good in terms of the process, and Vaughn Palmer was making sure that we didn’t get into anything too partisan, which I think was good. It added value to that. But there weren’t, really, answers to these types of questions back then.

One of the presentations that I thought would be worthwhile just raising, which I found really quite fascinating, was from the owners of Brucejack, which is a world-class gold mine up in the northwest of B.C. that finished construction and is now producing. They said that back in the ’90s when they brought forward a project to be approved, they had to bring a pile of information to go through for the decision on a mine. It was a binder about six inches thick, which is a lot of information.

[5:35 p.m.]

He said that today, in moving forward that process for the Brucejack mine, the binder was six feet thick, with that much extra requirements to be done to be able to move forward and mine. At the end of the day, he said, the reality was that there wasn’t a lot of difference between what was done back in the ’90s versus what’s done today.

We all know that the standards and our environment are world-class in British Columbia. The process is very rigorous. The time it takes to get through is really a burden. Surely we can find a way to be able to provide a path forward for these projects that meet those environmental standards, that do not require that length of time and that amount of paperwork — if you want to call it that — in terms of the review.

I’m not suggesting that we cut any corners on our environmental standards at all, but surely there are some ways that we could be doing things better to be able to attract the investment. When you think about our society and about where we’re going, whether it’s electric vehicles or it’s all the devices we like to use, the technology, even windmills and other types of things, there’s going to be such a heavier focus on electricity. That means a huge focus on resources, on copper.

The fact is that we do not have new mines starting construction. We have mines that are going to play out. They eventually are going to run out of their resources, and they’re going to have to close. Where is the pipeline of replacement mines so that British Columbia can carry on with being a successful mining jurisdiction to meet these needs of our society?

I think I did the analysis back in January — I’m going off the top of my head, so I might have these numbers wrong — and British Columbia, by far, was the largest copper producer in the country. Yet we do not produce enough to meet what would be required if we wanted to have all the vehicles all-electric in this province and, certainly, in this country.

That means we’re relying on other jurisdictions, which do not have the same kind of environmental standards. Why are we not making it a priority that as a province, we would be producing the kinds of materials that are needed for our society — in British Columbia, in Canada and also in other jurisdictions of the world — so that with good environmental standards, work standards and health standards, good-paying jobs were being provided here, as opposed to these other jurisdictions where they don’t have those kinds of standards?

It puzzles me that at this time we’re not looking at bringing forward legislation for that type of goal for our province, that would meet those kinds of standards, that would help expand an industry which is going to be so vital to our future. I think about the 40,000-some-odd jobs that are part of our province, part of our payroll, part of meeting what we need as a province, part of providing for communities and families. These are good-paying jobs, $100,000-plus — $115,000, $120,000, I think — is what the average wage is.

Why aren’t we focused on wanting to see more of that in this province? What’s the plan by this government? The answer to that, sadly, always comes up blank. I know that different governments have their different priorities, but surely, when we look at the environment, when we look at what we need to do, this would be a high priority for the current government to be thinking about.

I think, as well, about that time when Mount Polley went. I just want to go back and reflect a little bit. I never experienced something like that before as a minister or as an MLA or, really, been involved in anything like that in my life in British Columbia. It was pretty traumatic. I know it shook the confidence of a lot of people and shook the confidence of the industry. That confidence needed to be rebuilt. The steps that we took as a government, I think, went a long way to being able to rebuild that, particularly with First Nations.

The reason why I think about that with First Nations is that most people probably don’t realize that mining, across Canada, is the No. 1 employer for First Nations people as a percentage of their industry. It’s amazing how many people with Indigenous backgrounds do work in the mining industry, because of the jobs it provides and also because the jobs are local. They’re local to where a lot of Indigenous people live because they’re not in the cities. They’re out in the areas that First Nations may be close to.

[5:40 p.m.]

When you think about post–Mount Polley, you think, boy, maybe it’s challenging to move some projects forward. I remember particularly with the Blackwater project, there was a group of First Nations with the Carrier-Sekani Tribal Council that came to government and said: “Get on with it. We have gone through the environmental process. We think we’ve got a good project going forward. We’re confident in the project. We’re working with the company. We’ve got benefits in place. We’ve agreed with the government in terms of the benefits that will come to First Nations that are shared. Get on with approving it.”

Think about that. You’ve got a number of First Nations, half a dozen First Nations, that come forward to government and want to see a mine go forward. That was unheard of. It was unheard of to see that, but it speaks to the fact that there was a process and confidence in place after Mount Polley to be able to advance a project to do it right, to make sure that it was respectful, to make sure that First Nations are engaged while wanting to see a mine and the benefits that come from that mine.

I think that’s what we should be talking about and celebrating and finding out how we can do that better, how we can do more of that so that we see these mining opportunities advance in this province, creating those jobs and supporting the communities and families.

Once again, I really wonder. We’re sitting in this situation where the world has changed since February. The world has changed since the budget. We’re debating the budget implementation, which seems to be, really, kind of…. Why are we doing this when the entire [audio interrupted] the world has changed? And now we’re debating a piece of mining legislation coming forward that seems to completely ignore the changes in the realities that we’re facing as a society and that will be changed and with us for, likely, many months, if not years, ahead.

We need to be thinking more about what we can do to support families, support our workforce, support communities right across the province. Mining can play a critical role in doing that. I hope this minister and this government will think about that and think about what we really should be doing to encourage that kind of investment, actually become a destination where companies want to invest in new mining projects, building new mines in this province, as opposed to the current situation that we have, which is investment fleeing this province and not looking at being part of building our future.

We’re seeing that in forestry. We’re seeing it in mining. I think we’re seeing it in all the resource sectors, and I think this government’s priorities are misplaced when they don’t look at that and try to find a way to reverse that trend and bring that investment back here.

It’s unfortunate that it’s a mirror image of what hap­pened in the 1990s. My hope is that government will take advice from us and turn around and start saying: “How do we start finding ways to bring those industries in and treat them with the priority that they deserve?” They’re an important piece of what we need for our future. They’re an important piece of our environment and meeting our goals, and they’re an important piece of what builds our society and the fabric that makes British Columbia such a great province.

It’s an honour to have an opportunity to be able to speak on behalf of Nechako Lakes, and I hope that we’ll see government come forward with those kinds of opportunities to build and expand mining in this province. Thank you for the opportunity to speak here today.

Deputy Speaker: The House will be recessed for a couple of minutes. We’ll try to help the member to get the audio back.

The House recessed from 5:45 p.m. to 5:50 p.m.

[R. Chouhan in the chair.]

Interjections.

Deputy Speaker: Okay, Members. Thank you very much for your assistance. Let’s have some quietness here, please.

R. Sultan: Thank you for your patience.

I’ve been listening to the debate on Bill 6, and it recalled the line from a German poet in the 1700s who said: “Nothing is more terrible than to see ignorance in action.”

I make that rather harsh parallel because I’m an engineer and a mining person as well, and I see both of my chosen fields of endeavour impacted by Bill 6 rather seriously. I’ve been a professional engineer for many, many decades — more than I would care to admit. I have produced three engineering children and grandchildren. We are an engineering family. I spent a good deal of my life teaching the engineers at IBM and General Electric.

The bill attempts to address serious issues, of course, because engineering collapses and failures are hardly unknown in our society. At the risk of embarrassing some of my colleagues, I’d merely mention the Quebec Bridge. The steel from the collapsed girders, rumour has it, still are in the form of the iron rings we wear to remind us: don’t design Quebec Bridges that fall down. We had the city square collapse in Metrotown years ago. Mount Polley is certainly in the news. We only have to talk about a lot of high-tech failures, starting with our friends down in Boeing in Seattle.

We’re going to solve these problems. And they are genuine problems. But the solutions offered by our friends in government are, I’m afraid, rather limited in their impact. First of all, we had the office of the superintendent of professional governance created — sort of an über-regulator — who is going to regulate the engineering regulators. Because a nice guy was put into the position, I understand it’s sort of working okay. But are they going to prevent another Mount Polley collapse with this new über-regulator apparatus? I wouldn’t bet on it.

Now we have a rather elaborate structure, which is going to create a three-headed monster, in my considered opinion. Think about it. The member from Kootenay East referred to the possibility that we could conceive of a mine manager finding on his doorstep one day the chief mines inspector, the mine permitting deputy minister, I presume, the chief mines auditor and now the über-regulator himself trying to make sure that the engineers and geoscien­tists are competent.

This is all to solve problems, whether it’s contaminated landfill or a tailings pond collapse. Well, if we look back at all of these mining catastrophes in history, there are certain themes. Let me point out some of the obvious ones that I can identify. Some of these catastrophes, and we need look no farther than south of the border to Boeing 737 MAX…. The marketplace, the capitalists — those scoundrels more interested in profits than safety are pushing the engineers beyond what they, in fact, think is reasonable.

[5:55 p.m.]

That is probably a more common situation than you might believe. The royal commission set up to look at the city square collapse decided the problem was the very skimpy engineering budget which allowed the hiring of one of the least qualified engineers in town to do the design. You sort of get what you pay for in this business. Buy cheap and you’re going to get cheap engineering. That’s the rule.

Also, there are many instances where the time delay between execution and consequence is rather long. That was the case with Mount Polley. It was permitted by the NDP, we should remind all of us again. The failure occurred under the watch of the B.C. Liberals, who, of course, ended up wearing it.

These are long lead time flaws. Nobody doubts that there was some incompetence on display, and the directly involved engineers are now paying the price.

That raises another good point. Namely, we have here a profession of about 35,000 registrants in British Columbia who like to think they are self-regulating. They have boards of discipline. It’s very much modelled after the medical model. If you’re somehow leaving the forceps inside the abdomen of the patient, we’re going to call you on to the carpet and say: “Are you really competent?” In the engineering world, the same thing happens.

It isn’t as though there was not already a well-developed apparatus of regulation and throwing the less competent out on their ear or, perhaps, just curtailing a little. “We’ll let you design septic tanks, but please stay away from suspension bridges.”

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

Now we’re going to have a committee set up with all sorts of new powers. I think, as some have already alluded to, it not only risks being ineffectual; I can predict now that it will be. How are you going to regulate an engineering design? How are you going to regulate a construction project supervised by an engineer? Well, you’d better be a pretty smart engineer yourself if you’re going to start out to do that.

I don’t see much evidence they’re planning to hire a great big room full of engineers to staff this new entity, so they are beholden to the engineers on the ground and the assurance of competence that they have. Guess what. They’re already regulated. And guess what. They’re already under the stewardship, you might say, of their peers, who, because their own livelihoods are at stake, are rather tough-minded when they hear about incompetence in action.

This is why I think we have here another classic case of a problem. Yes, Mount Polley was a big problem. It started, I would remind you for the third time, under the NDP watch. But to think this is going to prevent Mount Polleys in the future? I wouldn’t bet on it. We’re going to have 737 MAXs falling out of the sky. We’re going to have Second Narrows Bridges falling down. We’re going to see contaminated landfills on Vancouver Island.

All the flaws of a modern technical civilization will carry on. Can anybody in Victoria be smart enough or all present enough to prevent this from happening? No. You depend on qualified, capable people. Make sure they’re educated and experienced to do the job they’re being asked to do. Make sure the engineering budgets are adequate. Don’t try it on the cheap, or you’ll end up with another Station Square Save-On-Foods collapse at Metrotown.

All of these things go into the world of creating professional competence. It’s not different in engineering than in any other field.

Mr. Speaker: Member, if I might ask you to adjourn the debate.

R. Sultan: That’s my rather jaundiced view of this legislation. I suppose it will create some jobs in Victoria. I’ll grant that. I suppose, maybe, it will emerge as a key plank in the NDP government recovery program.

Mr. Speaker: Member, noting the hour.

R. Sultan: I’ve said my piece. I think the Speaker is telling me I should sit down. And I am sitting down.

Mr. Speaker: Thank you, as always, Member.

Member, noting the hour, if you might adjourn the debate.

R. Sultan moved adjournment of debate.

Motion approved.

Mr. Speaker: Members, a deferred division will take place shortly on the motion for second reading of Bill 4, Budget Measures Implementation Act, 2020.

Members, pursuant to the sessional order regulating hybrid proceedings of the House, the House stands recessed until 6:10 p.m.

The House recessed from 6 p.m. to 6:11 p.m.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

Mr. Speaker: I call the House back to order. Members, we will proceed with the deferred division at 6:15, in about four minutes.

[6:15 p.m.]

Members, we will now proceed with the deferred division. The question is second reading of Bill 4, Budget Measures Implementation Act, 2020.

[6:20 p.m. - 6:25 p.m.]

BILL 4 — BUDGET MEASURES
IMPLEMENTATION ACT, 2020

(continued)

Second reading of Bill 4 approved on the following division:

YEAS — 43
Bains	Beare	Begg
Brar	Chandra Herbert	Chen
Chouhan	Chow	Darcy
Dean	D’Eith	Dix
Donaldson	Eby	Elmore
Farnworth	Fleming	Fraser
Furstenau	Glumac	Heyman
Horgan	James	Kahlon
Kang	Leonard	Ma
Malcolmson	Mark	Mungall
Olsen	Popham	Ralston
Rice	Robinson	Routledge
Routley	Simons	Simpson
Sims	Singh	Trevena
	Weaver
NAYS — 41
Ashton	Barnett	Bernier
Bond	Cadieux	Clovechok
Coleman	Davies	de Jong
Foster	Gibson	Hunt
Isaacs	Johal	Kyllo
Lee	Letnick	Martin
Milobar	Morris	Oakes
Paton	Polak	Redies
Reid	Ross	Rustad
Shypitka	Stewart	Stilwell
Stone	Sturdy	Sullivan
Sultan	Tegart	Thomson
Thornthwaite	Throness	Wat
Wilkinson		Yap

Hon. C. James: I move that the bill be referred to a Committee of the Whole House to be considered at the next sitting of the House after today.

Bill 4, Budget Measures Implementation Act, 2020, read a second time and referred to a Committee of the Whole House for consideration at the next sitting of the House after today.

Hon. M. Farnworth moved adjournment of the House.

Motion approved.

Mr. Speaker: This House stands adjourned.

The House adjourned at 6:27 p.m.