To hear Premier Christy Clark, and her provincial Liberal government colleagues talk, the only issue that matters is getting natural gas out of the ground and selling it to Asian markets.
Never mind the report released by Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, B.C.’s Representative for Children and Youth, documenting more than a decade of misguided spending by the Ministry of Children and Family Development to the tune of about $66 million.
Turpel-Lafond referred to some of the Ministry’s initiatives as, “big, blue sky initiatives,” that cost a lot of money, but she could not find any evidence to suggest even a single penny from those initiatives was spent to help a single child.
A week has passed since the report was released and the premier has not said a word.
In defending her government’s push to advance the liquefied natural gas industry in B.C., Clark argued the industry could provide the province with a trillion dollars of revenue over the next several decades.
The opposition NDP, environmental groups and climate scientists point out the current LNG proposals would push the province’s greenhouse gas emissions well off the legislated 2020 target.
Undaunted, Clark said, by selling liquefied natural gas to Asian markets, B.C. would, “(be) ... doing the world a favour.”
How magnanimous of the premier to have the global environment at heart.
Hopefully one day, she will have the same empathy for the impoverished children of British Columbia.