Skeena BC Green Party

08/31/2026

Last week, Business in Vancouver reported that the BC government had made a basic mistake in its 2026 budget that led it to inflate projected gas extraction royalties—what fracking companies pay the Province for access to the resources below Earth's surface—by $500 million per year.

This is an egregious and embarrassing mistake on its own with troubling implications for the NDP's fiscal planning. But it points to two even more fundamental problems.

First, even if the Province's numbers were correct, we would be netting pennies on the dollar compared to what foreign shareholders are earning from the gas in this Province, especially as the LNG industry rakes in record profits thanks to war profiteering. British Columbians—and the Indigenous nations in the Peace region whose lands are being destroyed by this industry—deserve a hell of a lot more than that.

Second, the BC government's royalty revenue forecast relies on the assumption that fracked gas prices in BC will double this year thanks to the ramp-up of LNG Canada. You know who competes with LNG Canada for access to gas produced in BC? Every British Columbian who heats their home with gas and every industry in BC that uses gas for manufacturing, including the already-struggling forestry industry. If gas prices double, the average utility bill could rise by close to $200 a year, and BC's industries could be paying hundreds of millions more than they are today.

The BC NDP, in other words, is betting part of its budget on radically increasing costs for the rest of us by subsidizing the LNG industry. It's win-win for the foreign shareholders that own the oil and gas industry. It's lose-lose for the people of BC.

We're fighting for the people, not for foreign shareholders. Join us. https://bcgreens.ca/join-us/

BIV article: https://www.google.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.biv.com%2Fnews%2Fbudget-error-could-cost-bc-billions-in-gas-royalties-12702159&btnI

Running on Fumes report on the economic impact of rising gas prices: https://davidsuzuki.org/science-learning-centre-article/running-on-fumes-b-c-lngs-overhyped-promises-risky-future-and-public-costs/

08/24/2026

Every time you turn around, more news comes out about more unexplained pollution from LNG Canada while the BC Energy Regulator does next to nothing and the David Eby NDP government calls for expansion. Not only does the NDP government call for LNG expansion, it stands ready to spend more public dollars on these projects, which raises the question: Why are we paying MAGA-connected billionaires to pollute our air?

Last year LNG Canada sent 10% of the gas it received up its flare stack and out into our airshed. And earlier this year we found out the acid gas incinerators were not working as they should for a while, which meant even more toxic waste going up the flare stack and into our lungs.

And where does LNG Canada spend money in the community? It spends it on anything but sorely needed adequate air monitoring. Why does the company not want adequate air monitoring? Does it know something we don't?

Pollution from the LNG Canada plant is something residents are concerned about, but the plant's billionaire owners and the NDP government are not. They tell us that all this exhaust going into the air is of no consequence to our health. But what's their evidence? What air monitoring do they do?

The existing monitoring stations were put in place to measure the types of pollutants that would come from Kitimat's aluminum smelter. These monitors are not designed to detect the types of gases that could come from an LNG compressor plant. Pollutants such as hydrogen sulfide, benzene, and mercury are removed from natural gas before it's compressed and cooled. These gases are not supposed to end up in our air, but without monitoring we have no idea what happens to them. They are in natural gas before compression, but not after compression. Where do they go? We have to trust the billionaires and the NDP government that the gases simply disappear into thin air. Hey wait a minute... we breathe that air.

VICTORIA, B.C. – Statement from Jeremy Valeriote, MLA for West Vancouver-Sea to Sky, on the BC Energy Regulator’s decision to allow FortisBC to discharge four times the amount of wastewater […]

08/17/2026

The City of Terrace is moving forward with a bylaw proposal that would ban AI data centres from downtown, but would allow them to move forward at the Skeena Industrial Development Park near the airport. The city has also published a "Notice of Intention" to lease part of the Industrial Park to Versorium Energy Ltd., an Alberta-based company that specializes in building gas-fired power generation to support the data centre boom in Alberta.

The entire premise of the AI industry—an industry owned almost exclusively by the world's wealthiest people—is that it will "revolutionize work," which is a euphemism for taking away people's jobs. Along the way, it's destroying communities, poisoning water supplies, and driving up electricity costs. The data centre industry has nothing to offer our communities.

Our friends at the Skeena Local Action Network have put together a letter writing campaign asking Terrace City Council to pass a stronger bylaw that will protect our communities from the predatory investors behind this industry. Join us in making sure that Terrace Council knows where we stand, and that their jobs are on the line.

Last year, the Terrace Standard reported that the city was in talks with a company called Skeena Data Centres about potentially siting a data centre at the municipally-owned industrial park land near the airport. City Council is now considering a bylaw that would ban data centres from the downtown a...

08/10/2026

BC is burning, and climate change is the cause. The hot and dry conditions brought on by excessive burning of fossil fuels have caused normally occurring fires to explode in size and scale that overwhelm our ability to respond. 20,000 people are on the run, hoping against hope that they'll have homes to return to when the flames finally subside.

The NDP government is responding as best it can, spending millions on fire fighting, emergency management, and crisis mitigation. But at the same time, the NDP government is still moving forward with plans to increase the production and burning of the exact fuel that is the root cause of the conditions that enabled the disaster.

And this disaster is not a one-off. Lytton is still not rebuilt after it was burned down. And just next door in Washington state, 700 buildings were destroyed by wildfire in Spokane. Add Fort McMurray, Paradise California, and Los Angeles to the list. Not to mention large parts of France, Spain, and Greece. Not just BC is on fire, but the whole planet is on fire, and David Eby's NDP is helping the billionaire owners of the LNG industry stoke those fires, purely for profit.

Once more, billionaires are asking us to suffer the consequences of their unimaginably huge profit taking, and our political leaders, at all levels, are saying together, in unison, "Sir yes sir!" Our governments are aligning themselves with foreign billionaires, not with us.

And as we said last week, the taxes and royalties derived from this disaster-creating industry are drops in the bucket compared to the billions of dollars of taxpayer handouts that the province and the federal government lovingly give away every year to the fossil fuel industry to make their projects profitable. And even worse, it's Trump-aligned billionaires that are leading the charge in BC's exploitation of the world's population.

A different model of development for the northwest is possible, one that actually prioritizes our well being rather than that of Texas oilmen and Wall Street billionaires. But we have to fight for it.

Join us.

08/03/2026

David Eby visited Terrace last week. One of the highlights, according to the mayor, was showing Eby some of what the Northwest Resource Benefits Alliance (RBA) agreement has been funding in Terrace.

The RBA agreement was a one-off payout by the province to northern communities to try to offset the very real costs that projects like LNG Canada and Coastal GasLink imposed on us. Terrace City Council says they've been advocating with the province to make this agreement permanent, meaning our communities would receive compensation on an ongoing basis rather than just this single payout, which would undoubtedly help us manage some of the harms these projects bring. But the bigger scandal here is one of scale: the amount of wealth that is being extracted and exported from our communities and deposited in the pockets of foreign shareholders and, increasingly, Trump-aligned US billionaires, makes the RBA agreement and the property taxes Kitimat gets from LNG look like a drop in the bucket. They're also drops in the bucket compared to the billions of dollars of taxpayer handouts that the province and the federal government had to give to LNG Canada to make the project move forward in the first place. Carney and Eby are about to do it again: they are falling over themselves to provide more public financing to help sweeten the deal for the foreign investors behind LNG Canada Phase 2 and Ksi Lisims LNG.

You wouldn't know it from what they say publicly, but the City of Terrace has, in the past, explained these costs quite clearly. Here's an excerpt from a letter submitted by the City in 2024 to the BC Environmental Assessment Office:

"Some might see this influx as a key economic driver but it has actually been the opposite. Citizens have seen their municipal services erode due to higher costs for supplies and labour not because of the federal economy but rather local scarcity issues as the small amount of key suppliers and trades pivoted and or upright and moved to be closer to the LNG development. The influx of workers required for this type of development has seen housing in Terrace reach an all time high in prices and a vacancy rate of less that 1 per cent."

Our communities pay the costs for these projects: our infrastructure is overloaded, our housing markets explode, homelessness and toxic drug deaths skyrocket, affordability just generally collapses. Our health infrastructure is overwhelmed, and our health is directly assaulted by the emissions from compressor stations and flares. The RBA agreement funding is nowhere near enough to offset these costs. More funding from the Province would be welcome, of course, but it wouldn't solve the fundamental problem: our region is being pillaged by foreign investors who are setting the world on fire for their own profit, and we're being manipulated into welcoming them with open arms.

The RBA shouldn't need to exist. We should be able to make rational, democratic decisions about what projects should and shouldn't move forward, and the benefits of those projects should go first and foremost to our communities—not to the billionaire shareholders that own so much of Canada's infrastructure today.

A different model of development for the northwest is possible, one that actually prioritizes our wellbeing rather than that of Texas oilmen and Wall Street billionaires. But we have to fight for it.

Join us.

Join the BC Greens to vote in party elections, shape policy, and attend events. Membership starts at $10/year or free for youth.

07/31/2026

Terrace city council has made some initial moves to regulate data centres, but their current plan (still with staff following a discussion at council last week) would allow data centre construction in the industrial park near the airport and seems to leave a number of loopholes open to the very things they suggest they want to prevent. The upcoming municipal elections are an opportunity: if we don't want data centres in our communities, we need to make this an election issue.

We are a provincial party and Terrace and Kitimat elections don't have parties, but we'll be watching closely to see where candidates stand on this issue.

07/27/2026

A BC-wide moratorium on AI data centres is needed. BC Greens are calling for a moratorium until legislation is in place that will make sure local communities have the power to effectively reject data centre projects that provide more benefit to remote billionaires than to the communities themselves.

Elected officials are our only defence against the billionaire's desire to take our wealth and make it their own. City councils play an important role, but they're the weakest links in the fight against these Silicon Valley billionaire tech-bros and their dreams of a future that leaves them with all the wealth and the rest of us with scraps. We need a province-wide response that puts the power over people's lives back into people's hands.

A Terrace city councillor has said about Skeen Data Centers that "it's a website, not a proposal". On the one hand, this is literally true. Council has not officially received any kind of proposal from the proponent. Yet the proponent is raising funds right now as we speak, and by the time a proposal lands in front of council, millions of dollars would be committed to make sure the project goes ahead. Once a proposal is on the table, it becomes a money vs people issue, and money doesn't give up.

The billionaire class is building an economy that works for them, and only them. Remote billionaires don't care whether people in Skeena live or die. They only care about extracting profits for themselves. Billionaires want wealth for themselves more than they want an economy that works for all.

We'll get a few jobs out of the data centre deal during construction, and after that a handful of jobs that'll soon be automated away. And maybe Skeena Data Centers will pay a token amount towards an indoor multi-sport facility or something like that as long as it has their name on it. But that's all we'll get, aside from the pollution. They'll get the profits. The fruits of our labour will go to them, not us. We do the work and suffer the consequences; increased noise and air pollution, dropping water levels, higher gas and electricity rates, the list goes on. And the billionaires? They buy a few more yachts that they'll never use.

Sign the BC Greens call for a moratorium until proper legislation is in place, legislation that will empower communities to take their future into their own hands.

Petition: Moratorium on AI Data Centres // Home 9 Petitions 9 Petition: Moratorium on AI Data Centres Sign Now Stand up to Big Tech, call on Premier Eby for an AI data centre moratorium. We all deserve drinkable water, affordable energy, and a safe community — Big Tech is threatening our right to ...

07/20/2026

"We have the best environmental regulations in the world." Canada has "the cleanest LNG in the world." That's what we're constantly told as the government throws billions of our dollars into the pockets of the foreign oil companies and American private equity firms who are building out the LNG export industry in this country.

Problem is, it's not even remotely true: our regulations are weak, and often, they're simply not followed. There's no enforcement, so why would companies follow the rules? When journalists break news about equipment failures and disasters, the government simply rewrites the rules to allow the company to keep polluting. We saw this repeatedly with the construction of Coastal GasLink and we've all been breathing its implications for the last year with the insane levels of flaring at LNG Canada.

LNG Canada flared the most gas of any LNG facility worldwide in 2025, beating the 2024 global record by 50%. The BC Energy Regulator knew the company was vastly exceeding its permits but refused to issue enforcement orders or notify the public, instead helping the company mislead us. When they were finally pressured to issue an order, it was vague and lacking any consequences.

Flaring is only part of the issue: recent investigations using an OGI thermal imaging camera found that the facility, like most LNG and gas facilities, is constantly "burping" invisible methane gas and other toxic pollutants, likely including benzene and other volatile organic compounds.

It is absurd that the government is not just allowing a doubling of this facility to move forward while this situation persists, but is actually aggressively supporting that expansion with billions of dollars of public financing.

Thank you to Charles Claus and the Kitimat Terrace Clean Air Coalition for putting the word out about this in the Standard and informing people about the issue at the Skeena Valley Farmer's Market. A government that worked for us instead of for foreign billionaires would not allow Phase 2 to move forward until the first phase was operating stably, safely, and without harming our communities.

07/16/2026

We really appreciate our former MP Taylor Bachrach signing this public letter from a group of NDP parliamentarians to the BC NDP. As the letter makes clear, BC has gone from climate leader to climate denier. Premier Eby and the Prime Minister now claim regularly that a radical expansion of fracked gas and oil production is "climate action."

This isn't just a crisis for our futures. As Bachrach and his colleagues make clear, it's a crisis for British Columbians today: it's residents of BC that now have to compete with foreign-owned export projects for gas to heat their homes, for electricity to run their businesses. We are being sacrificed to pad the pockets of American private equity billionaires aligned with Donald Trump.

Unfortunately, we don't think an open letter is going to change the BC NDP's course. It's why many of us have joined the BC Green Party, and it's why we're starting this Riding Association.

We're tired of choosing between two parties that are fighting over who can give more money to foreign billionaires to pollute our air and water and drive up our utility bills.

Join us.

https://bcgreens.ca/join

07/13/2026

The Skeena BC Greens are opposed to data centres in Terrace and area.

People are right to be opposed to AI data centres. We've all read the news, and we've all seen how the already ultra rich data centre owners abuse people and water and land, and how they have little concern for the negative impacts on local communities.

The one planned for Terrace is of particular concern. For one thing, no matter what the proponent says about wind and geothermal, it will have gas power. Skeena Data Centers (American spelling) is unlikely to get provincial subsidies and support unless they use BC gas. We've seen this already in Alberta with the data centre that Meta is building outside Edmonton. A beaming Premier Smith announced a few days ago, with great glee and joy, that it would have an on site 1GW gas powered generation system, isolated from the Alberta grid. For context, the capacity of Site C is 1.2GW. She's happy because the power plant for the data centre will be a huge consumer of Alberta gas. The same would apply to Terrace. Premier David Eby seems to have taken on the role as BC's chief gas salesman, so if you want to build a data centre in BC you need to burn BC gas. The cleaner, cheaper technologies that are increasingly common outside of BC are off the table.

And then there's the pollution. Pollution appears to be a major feature of the plan. The AI generated picture of the power plant on the Skeena Data Centers website shows us what the company intends to build. This is additional pollution for our already stressed airshed, given the excessive flaring from LNG Canada plus the flaring that will come from the Cedar LNG project also in Kitimat.

And of course, data centres are yet another example of (mostly foreign) billionaires extracting our resources and destroying our local environment while declaring zero income and buying mega yachts. They are, in effect, confiscating our community's wealth and hoarding it for themselves.

Opposition is the sane response to this proposal.

This AI generated photo of the proposed data center power plant was taken from the Skeena Data Centers website.