Northwest MLA's take to topic of Environmental Management Act in Legislature discussions

The BC Government moved its Environmental Management Amendment Act forward on Wednesday, taking the Bill 29 legislation to Second reading in the Legislature and with that another round of discussion was underway. 

During that session both North Coast MLA Jennifer Rice and Skeena MLA Ellis Ross claimed spots on the speakers list towards the midweek conversation.

Some background to the Bill can be reviewed here.

For Ms. Rice, the afternoon session provide her a chance to recount some of her work with the Heiltsuk Nation as well as to note of how the principle of 'polluter pay' will be key to the legislation.

There are plenty of examples here of where heavy industries have made a lot of money from the resources within the North Coast region. After they have accumulated the wealth that they have, and often depleted the resources, particularly a lot of fish resources, they have left our community. 

While I'm clear that the jobs that those industries have created and have provided for my constituents over the years…. When they have left, they have often left a mess: abandoned buildings, fish plants, boats, barrels of aviation fuel on a dock leaking into the coastal waters off Bella Bella on a site called Namu. 

Namu is a particular issue close to me and really important to the Heiltsuk First Nation. It's a location that was once a burial site for their ancestors. It has had carbon dating work done to 14,000 years ago. So it's one of the oldest known archaeological sites that we have in British Columbia. 

And you know we had a lot of fish-processing companies. 

I don't want to name them because there are a few, and I don't want to particularly identify one because ownership has changed. But these are big players in the British Columbia economy. 

I've been working on the issue of Namu, trying to support the Heiltsuk First Nations, whose territory Namu is situated on, reclaim their territory back but also reclaim it in a way that they can actually go back to living, to making an earning, to you know, having access to a really culturally important site to them without the risks, without contamination. 

We have the concept of "polluter pays," but in this case, and in other cases within my riding, the polluter has never paid. 

The polluter has made life worse for people on the coast. They have degraded the environment, closing down food, social and ceremonial harvesting sites because they essentially packed up and left. 

In some situations, it's like they closed the light and shut the door and left everything — paycheques, pay stubs, papers, office supplies, equipment, dangerous goods, as I mentioned earlier, barrels of aviation fuel, hydraulic fluid, oils. 

And there's no way of holding them accountable. The legislation of Bill 29 helps rectify that situation and creates a situation where this can't continue. 

For BC United MLA Ellis Ross, the focus of his discussion explored areas of environmental protection from his home community of the Haisla Nation.

A lot of what we talk about takes me back to where I got my start in 2003. Where I got my start was environmental remediation. I just picked up the ball where previous leaders in my First Nation had ended with not much success, sadly, because in Kitimat, we had over 60 to 70 years of industrial development. 

And You can't really blame anybody for the environmental damage that was done back then, because nobody really looked at the environment through the lens that we do today, including First Nations. 

I had a contaminated site right next to my village that I was going to clean up, and I was going to find the polluter-pay principle to be employed, only to find out that was a dump that my people used. We put in car batteries and transformers and oil and diesel. We ended up having to remediate that land using our own coin.

 So it's easy to point fingers, but you can't really judge what happened 60 or 70 years ago. Mind you, all of that work we did in terms of trying to remediate the Kitimat River, which had been backfilled for residential purposes, that was altered with diking for the community of Kitimat, that was damaged by overflow from the local sewage from the community of Kitimat and on and on and on…. 

We looked at the damage of Douglas Channel itself. The ocean…. which the bottom had been contaminated through 40, 50 years of unchecked pollution. 

My predecessors worked hard to try to remediate that, but they didn't have the tools that my band acquired in 2004 when the Haida court case came about. 

But we didn't just sit back and think about remediation only. We thought about mitigating in terms of future projects, including our own projects. We had to mitigate the impact of what we were planning to do. It was fairly easy to see the mitigation that had to be put in place based on the past history of Kitimat itself. 

We just wanted to do things in a better manner, and that was before environmental management became a buzzword, a political word. 

In fact, it's quite gratifying to see the issue of a bond — a polluter-pays bond — being incorporated into some of the agreements that the industry will actually sign on to once this legislation is passed. 

Contrary to popular belief, the Haisla First Nation knew exactly what we wanted to achieve in terms of environmental management. We actually put into our impact benefit agreements with LNG the polluter-pays principle, and they had to put up a bond. 

And that was like 15 years ago. 

As part of his presentation to the Legislature, Mr. Ross also returned to a frequent topic for him in the Chamber; that of the development of LNG terminals in the Northwest  noting of the challenges towards development for those proponents in the area,  as well as to some of the environmental protections in place towards those in the region.

But to think that we as First Nations over the 20 years have not thought about environmental management is lunacy. First Nations have been doing it long before I came along. My first record that I had to read in terms of the legal files that we were still pursuing came back in 1973, and they were actually fighting the effluent that was being dumped into the Kitimat River. And year after year after year, they fought every environmental impact they could, with no money, no resources. 

So I do like the idea that this government is now bringing back something that's been in place in my region for the last 20 years already in terms of "polluter pays," and also bringing back something that the previous B.C. Liberals had brought in, now named the B.C. United, of course. 

Instead of walking away from environmental management provisions, I'm actually quite glad the government has seen the light and decided to put this bill back in the House for debate and possible approval.

You can review both presentations from the Wednesday afternoon session from the BC Legislature Video Archive here, Ms. Rice's contribution is at 4:25 PM,  Mr. Ross follows up at the 4:35 PM mark.

A reminder, we review the work of the three MLA's when the Legislature is in session through our Legislature Weekly Review which we endeavour to post by Noon on Saturdays.

That archive can be found here.

For more notes on the Northwest MLA's and other themes from the Legislature can be reviewed here.