I don't agree with Carole James very often but I agree with her on the carbon tax!
It was ill thought out and slipped in before anyone had got the chance to state their position.
It WAS and is a money grab brought on by the Liberals gross expenditures of B.C,tax dollars on the Olympics and the lower mainland in general,as well as the reduced revenue from the forest industry.
There could have been a better way, but that's not how the Campbell government works.
Their distain and lack of concern for those displaced by the forest industry downturn is an insult to all those affected and it SHOULD cost them the next election!
And honestly,I believe the Liberals themselves could survive just fine with a bit of house cleaning,but Campbell the controlling dictator, has to go!
So Carole...what ARE the solutions hmmm...what,you don't have any?
...that's what I thought.

In Mackenzie she asked “How can you say the tax is fair when they have no alternative but to drive to Prince George.”

Gee ... I don't know ....

How can you say the tax is fair when people in the GVRD have to move out to Surrey or beyond in order to afford a house or condo and then drive into Vancouver 25 km ... and back home 25km ... 5 days per week = 250km per week and park their car for $10/day? Those living in the GVRD also have little choice.

Not quite a fair comment owl. GVRD residents have a fine public transit system. Not so in PG where, despite the best efforts, PG Transit is simply not a viable alternative. Surrey has the skytrain to the north end and that will be extended. Try to use public transit from North Nechako or College Heights.

It is terrible that the nothern interior communities are getting beat up like this, but the writing has been on the wall for at least a decade. Its not even about the pine beetle, western Canada needs to become more than just about resource extraction.

Sure lets elect the NDP. That should solve all our problems. They will probably try to organize (unionize) volunteers because "they just dont get paid enough" and I'm sure we would all love to pay more taxes.

"forestry is just part of our past in this province, when it really needs to be part of our future"

She is talking in the forestry heart of the province. What else is she going to say? If whe were in Oshawa as a guest speaker, she would say the same to autoworkers - they need to be part of the future.

She's a politician.

So, let's now deal with forestry. It is a primary industry in this province. At least Quebec has some sizable furniture manufacturing going on, for instance. We make virtually none of the equipment used by the industry. In fact, Canada is not a big player in that either. It comes from foreign countries.

And if it did come from here, it would typically not come from the hinterlands but from the lower mainland.

When someone thinks about developing the hinterlands of this province, it mostly deals with forestry.

Thus, James. All she can think about when we talk about the hinterlands of the north is forestry .. maybe even mining and oil and gas.......

Time to get some new blood into both sides of the house that can think beyond just building traditional industries and move to creating a competitive environment in a modern world economy.

Let us just stay with forestry. Where are the countries that have a forest industry, how well have they diversified and if they have diversied well, how did they do it?

Look at Sweden, Norway, Finland, Austria, etc.

http://www.metla.fi/julkaisut/workingpapers/2006/mwp038-01.pdf

We have had an easy go of it selling 2x4's to our neighbour. If you want to do frorestry with that being a reduced market, you've got to enter into the real competition.

So far, we have not shown that we can compete on a world scale. At least that is the impression I have. Anyone here have some other information, other than the limited custom market for prefabricated log structures?

"GVRD residents have a fine public transit system.

So what is a 2 hour per day commute worth to your life????????

The very reason I moved heer from Toronto many decades ago .... to expensive, to hectic, to taxing on my time. The payback for some of the urban amenities was imply not worth the negatives of urban living.

geez ... the computer is dropping letters like crazy today ...

:-)

BTW ... if one wants to go from Mackenzie to PG or reverse, we do have public tranist ..... Greyhound, around $30+ dollars ... 2hrs and 20 minutes .....

So maybe people have to quit exaggerating about what type of transportation is available and what is not .....

do the research, then comment about the lack of options ....

As I said, just another politician .. skim the surface and stretch the truth ...

"Speaking to the Northern Municipal meeting in Prince George, James offered up no proposals as to what the NDP would do to fix the problem."

The NDP does not have a great track record of fixing problems, although it has been very efficient at creating some where they did not exist before.

Premier Clarke made the headlines when he claimed that NDP policies would create 28,000 new forestry jobs! What happened then was that the number of jobs actually declined.

Therefore, why is anybody even a bit surprised?

owl - The two hour commute per day is worth about $600 month and a couple hundred square feet based on a one bedroom apartment. That is the difference between a place in Surrey and a place in Kits. I choose Kits but I do not have a family and as such I do not need a house. If I end up needing a house I will either have to make a lot more money or I will simply move out of GVRD.

If we are comparing public transit to driving yourself from Surrey I guarantee a bus from say Cloverdale to the first sky train station to the Burrard Station is faster than the drive from the same place during any kind of peak traffic. The difference in PG is that the commute will (likely) become considerably longer if you use public transit, due to the huge routes that are neccessay to service the low density areas and the intermittent buses.

The bottom line is that higher fuel costs only encourage public transit when there is a good system in place. Vancouver = good public transit. PG = serviceable public transit.

Normally you hit it pretty close owl,but you are way out to lunch on this one!
There is no comparison between public transit in the lower mainland and public transit up here!
Two entirely different things and two entirely different situations when it comes to winter etc.

From the other article on this.

"The Mayor of Dawson Creek, Calvin Kruk, called for the 7 resolutions to be deferred until more data was available. He said the material in the resolutions is anecdotal, and there needed to be scientific data to support the arguments that northerners will be unfairly taxed because of the need to heat homes and businesses."

It was not well received by the others, but Kruk is dead on as far as I am concerned.

To be scientific about the effect of additional gasoline tax on northerners versus southerners or rural versus urban srpeadsville, does anyone here know the total vehicle kilometres driven in a community of 100,000 versus a community of 2 million? Or, more fairly, the average private vehicle kilometres per person per year in the GVRD versus the Prince George CMA.

I am sure ICBC does.

BTW, here is a site that provides some information about commuting costs in the GVRD ......
http://www.relocation2bc.com/vancouver-commuting.htm

If commuting time and costs were not an issue, such sites would not exist …… in PG such sites do not exist ……. I know of no one who complains about commuting costs or time in PG …. Time and costs are very closely related in this case.

So, hopefully people can understand why I have to take the same position as the Kruk … show me the proof. Yes, some have longer commutes, but not on average.

On an associated note, when it comes to living in PG and living in the GVRD, one cannot look at a single issue. That overrsimplifies the world, in my mind at least. It is like saying that the cost of living index can be based on tracking one item alone.

In fact, we track many items in order to come up with a cost of living calculation of one place versus another.

So, I am relatively sure that the cost of living for basic goods and services in the GVRD is higher than in the PG CMA.

I think that arguing that one area is going to suffer more than another based on the cost of a single item cannot be used to argue that one area is unfairly treated. It may be true for that one area, but there are typically other areas where the reverse may be true.

"Northerners will be unfairly taxed..." So says the mayor of Dawson Creek. Ha ha ha Hey, Mr. Mayor. Where in this province does the "north" start? The northern city limits of the township of Hope? Gentlemen. Start yer whining.

Typical of the NDP- will fix the problem with no plan- gee sounds like 1995 all over- was in charge of implmenting a no-substance NDP plan- no direction, no guidance, etc- finally got fired by the Minister (without just cause-they had to give me another job and spend 30k to transfer my family. No one else was able to implement this poorly thought out plan either. I also remember the promise by Glen Clark to create 41,000 forestry jobs which was annouced in PG-

Have to agree with Owl and the mayor of Dawson Creek on this one. It's one thing to be against the tax, I can understand that argument. It's another to say that it's more unfair to northerners, without any factual basis for making that claim.

It might be more unfair to "some" northerners, then again, I'm positive there will be people in the GVRD paying more in fuel taxes than I EVER will be.