EDITOR’S NOTE: Over the past several weeks, we’ve brought you the energy policy visions of Mike Farnworth and John Horgan. This week, in advance of the BC NDP leadership convention, we bring you a statement from the other main contender in the race – Adrian Dix.

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The current chaos within the Christy Clark government around the proposed 50% rate hike is really only the tip of a very large iceberg that the Liberals have created in the past few years. The long term plan to privatize, break up and sideline BC Hydro was premised on the creation of an entirely new corporate sector in BC: so-called independent power producers (IPPs).  In many ways it was a “solution” looking for a problem.  The results are clear: rising rates, huge liabilities forced on Hydro in the form of contracts with the IPPs, weak environmental assessment of IPPs, and overall electricity policy in a shambles.
 
Throughout this leadership campaign, I have said we must have a moratorium on new IPP projects and contracts. We  have to stop this train wreck, now. I said if we need to open up the contracts and the policies that drove the contracts and attempt to salvage the public interest in the immediate term. If that means tough re-negotiations to protect us from long term financial liabilities, then that is what will occur. My commitment is very simple: the Liberals’ IPP party will end, the clean-up will start, and the public must be spared the hang-over.
 
The central role of BC Hydro must be restored and a credible long term electricity plan created. Within that conservation and efficiency must be central. I have proposed an “energy efficiency mega-project” that will employ construction workers throughout BC to retrofit public buildings  such as schools, hospitals and offices.

Similar programs are needed for homes and private buildings. Conservation is job-intensive and critical to reducing the environmental footprint of our energy use and production.
 
While projects such as energy efficiency retrofits will help reduce greenhouse gases, we must do much more. I have called for regulations and standards to reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions. The carbon tax, even extended to industry, won’t do sufficiently what regulations will do. When society decided to ban DDT, we did not tax it – it was regulated.  I am also committed to pressuring Ottawa to develop a credible federal plan to deal with climate change so that provinces are not not acting in a vacuum. The BC Liberals’ support for Harper’s inaction will be ended and I will engage Ottawa and other provinces so Canada starts leading, rather than avoiding, climate solutions.
 
I am committed to scrapping the BC Liberal support for offshore oil and gas exploration, for the oil tankers and for the Enbridge pipeline. We must stop undertaking these projects just so the tar sands can be expanded at an exponential rate of growth.  British Columbians never signed our province up for that role and we should not accept it.
 
I was also the first leadership candidate to commit to expanded public scrutiny with specific steps for upstream oil and gas operations in BC.  I have committed to reviews of fracking, sour gas emissions and upstream greenhouse gas emissions in order to get public accountability and to identify concrete pollution reduction solutions. Doing nothing and relying on the Liberals’ policies of self-regulation in the gas fields are not satisfactory to me, any more than the IPP free-for-all has been. Putting politics aside, BC needs a change in government to save our environment and I believe I can provide the leadership to help make the NDP government again, and start the process of change.