The Gordon Campbell government has never hidden its support for creating an offshore oil and gas industry. Shortly after taking office in 2001, it appointed a six-member B.C. Liberal caucus subcommittee, which included future energy minister Blair Lekstrom, to seek public input on lifting a provincial moratorium on offshore drilling.

In October 2001, then–energy minister Richard Neufeld appointed a three-member scientific review panel, chaired by former University of Victoria president David Strong. Its mandate was to offer advice in four areas related to offshore oil and gas exploration, including whether “any specific government actions” should be taken prior to removing the provincial moratorium.

The B.C. moratorium had been announced by the Social Credit government in 1989. This came 17 years after the federal government announced a moratorium on offshore drilling and on crude-oil tanker traffic passing through Dixon Entrance, Hecate Strait, and Queen Charlotte Sound. (Tankers carrying crude oil from Alaska travel west of Haida Gwaii and Vancouver Island and enter Juan de Fuca Strait on their way to Washington-state oil refineries.)

In January 2002, the B.C. scientific review panel reported that although there are “gaps in knowledge”, there was no justification for a “blanket moratorium” on offshore drilling. It noted that with “continuing commitment to ongoing principles of adaptive management and sustainable development, the existing policies maintaining an ongoing moratorium on hydrocarbon exploration and development offshore [in] British Columbia can responsibly be ended”.

In the February 2003 throne speech, the province declared that by 2010, the government “wants to have an offshore oil and gas industry that is up and running, environmentally sound and booming with job creation”. Four years later, Neufeld told the legislature that an estimated $100 billion worth of resources under the ocean could be extracted. “But we need to actually do it in a safe manner with the correct information and the correct regulatory regime,” he stated, according to Hansard.

Neufeld, now a Conservative senator, also mentioned offshore drilling along Canada’s East Coast and in the Beaufort Sea, the Great Lakes, the North Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico. He noted that thousands of people, including many B.C. residents, board cruise ships in the Gulf of Mexico, where he estimated there were 4,000 drilling platforms. “People cruise around them,” Neufeld said. “That’s where they want to go. I’ve never heard anybody come back and say, ”˜That was terrible.’ ”

During the same debate, then–NDP MLA Gregor Robertson reminded Neufeld that the Alaskan oil and gas industry “has dumped billions of tons of toxic muds, cuttings, and produced waters into Cook Inlet”, according to Hansard. Robertson, now Vancouver’s mayor, noted that Environmental Protection Agency studies showed that these pollutants had entered the food chain.

Neufeld responded that times have changed. “When the member talks about cuttings going into the ocean, I don’t know about Alaska, but I know the last time I was in the Gulf of Mexico, I remember being told that doesn’t happen there,” he said. “In fact, a lot of that doesn’t even happen onshore anymore.”

On April 20, a BP drilling platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 people and leaking about 800,000 litres of oil a day into the water. Almost two weeks after the giant oil spill began threatening Louisiana residents’ way of life, Neufeld’s successor as energy minister, Blair Lekstrom, didn’t rule out offshore drilling in B.C., according to a Canadian Press report. “If it can be done properly, I think people will entertain it; if it can’t be, then it won’t be,” Lekstrom told reporters in Victoria.

Jennifer Lash, executive director of the Living Oceans Society, told the Georgia Straight by phone that B.C. government and industry officials were claiming in 2003 and 2004 that blowouts don’t happen because of technological improvements. “If the moratorium were to be lifted here and there were to be rigs here, there would one day be a spill,” Lash predicted. “We can see from the experience in the Gulf just how catastrophic it is.”

Lash called for a legislated ban on offshore drilling off B.C.’s west coast. NDP federal energy critic Nathan Cullen, whose Skeena riding includes the north coast and Haida Gwaii, echoed the call. “The current premier and prime minister are both chomping at the bit to drill for oil and gas in similarly dangerous situations,” Cullen told the Straight by phone. “And the implications would be catastrophic for British Columbians.”

Lash pointed out that a former federal natural resources minister, Gary Lunn, told her by phone more than three years ago that the Conservative government will not lift the federal moratorium on offshore drilling. However, Cullen claimed that Lunn’s successors in the portfolio—Lisa Raitt and Christian Paradis—have each told him that they favour offshore drilling in B.C. He said that the current minister, Paradis, informed him before the Gulf of Mexico disaster that this is a “top priority” for the federal government. “I don’t think anything has shifted in their minds,” Cullen said. “I think they see it [the blowout] as a public-relations problem, but their faith in the oil and gas industry is absolute and unshakable.”

The Ministry of Natural Resources did not make Paradis available for an interview by the Straight’s deadline.