Norway’s assets, California’s politics |

Three jurisdictions. Three green movements that gained political power. Three energy systems now scrambling to undo what ideology built.

What ideology built. A BP refinery steams in Gelsenkirchen as Germany’s economy contracts for a second consecutive year, October 24, 2024. Germany dismantled its nuclear fleet to satisfy a party that made anti-nuclear politics its founding mission — and now reckons with an energy shortfall it cannot afford to acknowledge. AP Photo/Martin Meissner

The California road. Fuel prices at a Sacramento gas station. California regulated its refining sector into near-extinction and then discovered that ideology has a price at the pump. British Columbia is watching. AP Photo/Rich Pedroncellir

Germany killed its nuclear fleet to satisfy a party that made anti-nuclear politics its founding mission. Taiwan legislated a nuclear-free homeland and discovered it had no domestic fossil fuels to fill the gap. California regulated its refining sector into near-extinction and is now paying close to six dollars a gallon while disruption to Strait of Hormuz shipping lanes has constrained Asian refinery access. B.C. has not reached that point. (In fact, it’s only because of Alberta oil, shipped from Burnaby to Southern California refineries, that Los Angelenos are not more reliant on dictator fuel for their commutes.)

These are not distant warnings. They are the destinations of a road that begins with the same assumption: that energy policy is primarily a moral question, and that markets will fill whatever gaps conviction creates.

Not every jurisdiction made that choice.

The vision and the gap. The sun sets behind wind turbines in the Taunus region near Frankfurt, Germany, November 10, 2024. Germany’s energy transformation is the most-studied cautionary tale in the world — a mandate that outran its supply chain by more than a decade, and is still catching up. AP Photo/Michael Probst

Norway extracted hydrocarbons under strict environmental standards, quarantined the proceeds in a sovereign wealth fund now worth more than $2 trillion, and used a hydro-dominated grid to power a genuine transition funded from strength. Western Australia built a world-class LNG export industry from scratch, negotiated hard-won Indigenous partnerships that are now studied internationally, and turned its coastal resource endowment into sustained prosperity. Saskatchewan produced uranium, potash, oil, and natural gas, refused to let environmental politics override economic logic, and simply got on with it. None of these jurisdictions abandoned environmental standards. What they abandoned was the idea that ideology is a substitute for strategy.

The model. People walk at the Oslo Opera House as the sun sets over downtown Oslo, April 26, 2021. Norway developed its hydrocarbons under strict environmental standards, quarantined the proceeds in a sovereign wealth fund now worth more than $2 trillion, and used a hydro-dominated grid to power a genuine transition funded from strength. AP Photo/Francisco Seco

Two roads into the future

Two roads. Few jurisdictions have been handed a clearer choice, or better reasons to choose correctly. British Columbia has world-class natural gas reserves in the Montney formation — one of the most significant unconventional plays in North America. It has a hydro-dominated grid among the best on the continent. It has a coastline facing the world’s fastest-growing energy markets at precisely the moment those markets are most desperate for reliable supply from stable, high-standard jurisdictions. And it has Indigenous leaders increasingly ready to drive development on their own terms — not to block it, but to own it.

The province’s natural gas sector alone contributed $14 billion to B.C.’s GDP in 2024, generating supply chain spending across 2,250 companies in 120 municipalities — including $832 million to Indigenous-owned businesses, a 150 per cent increase over 2022.

The question is not whether B.C. has the assets to take the Norwegian road. It does. The question is which road its government has actually been building.

The view from the seawall. Visitors on the Stanley Park seawall pass tankers at anchor in English Bay, Vancouver, July 27, 2009. The tankers visible from the city’s most popular waterfront walk are the physical expression of a coastal position that policy has consistently treated as a problem rather than an asset. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

WHICH WAY B.C. WENT

The green movement’s influence on B.C. policy has followed the playbook of the cautionary jurisdictions, not the successful ones. Permitting timelines that test the patience of capital. A regulatory culture shaped as much by opposition research as by engineering judgment. Vocal campaigns — some funded from outside Canada — that have successfully reframed resource development as a moral question rather than an economic and security one.

The Coastal GasLink pipeline, now complete and serving LNG Canada’s Kitimat terminal, was the subject of years of organized disruption. The Site C hydroelectric dam was nearly cancelled under political pressure before a government recognized that abandoning a half-built facility at enormous sunk cost would be indefensible. BC Hydro now imports electricity — some of it from coal-heavy American grids — during peak demand periods, while its own generation capacity lags.

These are not isolated decisions. They are the cumulative output of a political environment in which the green lobby has exercised influence disproportionate to its mandate. And sometimes that influence doesn’t operate from the outside at all.

THE LAWYER AT THE TABLE

Applause for the ascent. Deputy Premier and Attorney General Niki Sharma receives a standing ovation at her swearing-in ceremony, Government House, Victoria, November 18, 2024, as Minister Anne Kang and Lieutenant-Governor Janet Austin look on. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chad Hipolito

When B.C.’s Deputy Premier and Attorney General Niki Sharma was asked recently whether the province would mount a legal challenge to the Ottawa-Alberta MOU — a deal to advance a new oil pipeline from Alberta to B.C.’s north coast and designate it a project of national interest — she declined to rule it out. She was, she said, “staying tuned to see.”

That phrasing rewards a second look.

Before entering the legislature, Sharma’s most recent role in public life was as Senior Oil and Gas Campaigner for Stand.earth — an organization whose stated mission is to defeat oil and pipeline transportation infrastructure on the Pacific coast, operating out of offices in San Francisco, Bellingham, and Vancouver. She is now the province’s chief law officer, positioned to decide whether British Columbia deploys its legal machinery against a pipeline that Ottawa and Alberta have designated a matter of national interest.

None of this is a secret. It is simply worth naming plainly.

Ideology in biography

The Supreme Court of Canada has already ruled against B.C.’s jurisdictional arguments on Trans Mountain, affirming federal authority over interprovincial pipelines. Premier David Eby has acknowledged the legal ceiling, ruling out a straight constitutional challenge. Any litigation the province pursues would need a different theory — most likely centred on Indigenous consultation obligations or the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act. That is precisely the terrain Stand.earth has mapped and contested for years.

This is how ideology becomes policy without ever declaring itself as such. Not through manifestos, but through biography — through the accumulation of people, in the right positions, at the right moments, who share a settled view of what the answer should be before the question is formally asked.

A green gift, refused

What the MOU could build. The Northern Lights Carbon Capture and Storage facilities in Bergen, Norway, December 16, 2024. The Ottawa-Alberta MOU includes conditions that could necessitate world-leading carbon capture infrastructure on Canadian soil. The model British Columbia claims to admire and consistently struggles to replicate is already operating at scale in the country that built it from hydrocarbon revenues. Leon Neal/Pool Photo via AP

Which makes the litigation threat all the more striking when examined on its own terms. The Ottawa-Alberta MOU is, from almost any green policy perspective, an unexpected windfall for British Columbia. Set aside the oil pipeline for a moment — that will attract its predictable controversies — and consider what else the agreement puts on the table. The terms negotiated by the federal government include conditions that would necessitate what could be the world’s leading carbon capture and storage project, linked to the Pathways Alliance’s operations in the oil sands. They also create the framework and the imperative for electricity transmission infrastructure connecting Alberta’s grid to British Columbia’s — something that has long been technically challenging and politically dormant, but that would give B.C. access to significant new clean power capacity and give Alberta access to B.C.’s hydro-dominated system. The North Coast Transmission Line that B.C. is already fast-tracking points toward exactly this kind of east-west integration.

A government that genuinely believes in decarbonization should be at the table shaping these terms, not preparing litigation to obstruct them. The carbon capture requirement alone represents the kind of industrial-scale emissions reduction that no domestic CleanBC mandate has come close to delivering. The transmission corridor would address, at least in part, the very electricity supply constraints that are forcing B.C. to import power from coal-heavy American grids. These are not small things. They are precisely the outcomes a serious green government would claim as victories.

That the contemplated response in Victoria appears to be a court challenge is, on its face, difficult to reconcile with the values the government says it holds. It is considerably easier to reconcile with the professional biography of the Attorney General who would sign off on it.

THE POLICY RECORD

Somewhere in the years between 2017 and 2022, a working theory took hold in the upper reaches of B.C.’s NDP government. It was never stated plainly — governing theories rarely are — but it animated nearly every major policy decision that followed. The theory went roughly like this: British Columbia could have Norway’s wealth and California’s environmental politics simultaneously. It could build Singapore-style prosperity while adopting the green policy architecture of jurisdictions that had chosen ideology over energy security. It could mandate its way to a low-carbon economy while sitting on some of the most valuable hydrocarbons on the planet, and the two ambitions would reinforce rather than contradict each other.

It was an appealing theory. It was never seriously tested. The voices that asked — are you sure this is possible? Where is the evidence that it has worked elsewhere? What happens when the mandates outrun the supply chains? — were answered not with data but with contempt. The question itself was treated as a signal of bad faith, a proxy for opposition to climate action rather than a legitimate demand for evidence — and answered with dismissal rather than data.

It has now failed slowly, expensively, and in public.

A $3.5 billion investment that moved nothing

The launch moment. B.C. Environment Minister George Heyman, centre, joins hands with Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver, Premier John Horgan, Clean Energy Canada Executive Director Merran Smith, and Energy Minister Michelle Mungall — who holds her son Zavier — as a First Nations blessing precedes the release of the CleanBC plan in Vancouver, December 5, 2018. The moment of shared purpose captured here has not aged well: seven years and $3.5 billion later, the province’s emissions are fractionally above where they were in 2007. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

CleanBC — the NDP government’s signature climate policy stack — was funded in two tranches: $2.3 billion at launch in 2018, and a further $1.2 billion in 2022, for a total public investment of $3.5 billion over seven years. Its targets were ambitious: a 16 per cent emissions reduction by 2025, a 40 per cent reduction by 2030, zero-carbon new construction, a 75 per cent cut in methane, 100 per cent zero-emission vehicle sales by 2035. After all of it, the province’s gross emissions stand at approximately 65.6 million tonnes — fractionally above where they were in 2007, the baseline year the targets were measured against. The 2025 reduction target has been missed entirely. Even under the province’s own best-case modelling, with every planned CleanBC measure fully implemented, emissions would fall only 15 per cent from 2007 levels — achieving just 37 per cent of the 2030 target, and leaving a gap of nearly 17 million tonnes that the current policy landscape has no credible plan to close. The government’s own briefing notes have since acknowledged the original goals are no longer workable. Richard Mason, a former commissioner with the BC Utilities Commission, stated the conclusion plainly: the CleanBC program has completely failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions since 2017. Three and a half billion dollars. Zero net reduction. The targets retired quietly, in briefing notes, without a press conference.

The EV collapse

The EV mandate is the clearest case study in how this operates. B.C. introduced the zero-emission vehicle mandate in 2019 — the first jurisdiction in the world to legislate a 100 per cent ZEV sales target. That headline was the point. The follow-through was not. EV sales plummeted to around 15 per cent of new vehicle sales by mid-2025, down from over 22 per cent a year earlier, a collapse that accelerated when Ottawa and Victoria both pulled their rebate programs. The 90 per cent target for 2030 was quietly declared unreachable. The 100 per cent target for 2035 was abandoned. It fell to Energy Minister Adrian Dix to introduce the legislation walking it back — a retreat dressed as a recalibration.

The aviation fuel outlier

The aviation fuel mandate follows the same pattern, with the additional distinction of being a global outlier. B.C. is the only jurisdiction in North America imposing an implementation mandate for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). The logic was first-mover advantage. The reality is that global SAF production currently represents less than one per cent of world aviation fuel use, SAF costs two to four times more than conventional jet fuel, and the supply does not exist to meet B.C.’s targets. Airports like Vancouver International — critical nodes in the province’s trade economy — face competitive disadvantage. Smaller regional carriers already operating on thin margins face threats to their viability. B.C. did not develop a domestic SAF industry before mandating one. It mandated first, then discovered the supply chain doesn’t exist.

The electrification paradox

The electrification of heating tells the same story, with the added dimension that physics has something to say about it. CleanBC’s building program is designed to phase out natural gas heating across the province — including in communities where winter temperatures regularly fall well below zero — and replace it with heat pumps whose capital costs run two to three times higher than a gas furnace, in a housing market where every additional dollar of construction cost is already a political problem. The Zero Carbon Step Code does not formally ban gas outright; it simply makes compliance so onerous that gas is effectively dead for new construction without anyone having passed a law saying so. The problem is that heat pump efficiency drops sharply in extreme cold — precisely the conditions in much of the province — and the grid required to run them at scale does not yet exist, meaning the province is mandating the replacement of a system that works with one that is more expensive, less reliable in the coldest months, and dependent on electricity supply it cannot currently guarantee.

Meanwhile, the grid that is supposed to power this mandatory electrification is itself under acute strain. BC Hydro has confirmed there are 6,800 megawatts of industrial power connection requests in the queue — roughly the equivalent of six Site C dams. The province’s response has been to begin rationing electricity for new industrial projects, capping allocations by competitive process. BC Hydro’s electricity imports in 2025 totalled more than 5,500 gigawatt hours — more than Site C can produce in a normal water year — at a combined cost of nearly $2 billion over two fiscal years. Some of those imports came from American grids burning coal and gas.

Cargo containers are seen stacked at port, in Vancouver, on Thursday, February 10, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

The asset that policy treats as a problem

Waiting for the certificate. Nisga’a Nation President Eva Clayton waits for a press conference before the announcement of an environmental assessment certificate for the Ksi Lisims LNG project, Vancouver, September 16, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ethan Cairns

In the case of Ksi Lisims LNG, the government has itself acknowledged that BC Hydro cannot deliver the power required to fully electrify the project on time — a tacit admission that the province cannot satisfy its own conditions. It is attempting to constrain natural gas, one of its two great energy assets, with electricity — the other — while lacking sufficient electricity to complete the substitution. The Montney formation holds some of the cleanest, most abundant, and most competitively priced natural gas on the planet. Rather than treating it as the bridge fuel and grid-balancing resource it plainly is, CleanBC policy treats its continued use as a failure mode to be regulated away. The supply is there. The mandate is not to use it. The grid that was supposed to replace it is not ready. The result is a province importing power, rationing connections, adding cost to every new building, and calling it a climate plan.

The hidden cost

Natural resource revenues are forecast to bring B.C. $3.8 billion in 2026-27, with natural gas royalties alone projected to more than double as LNG exports ramp up. Against that backdrop, the province’s own analysis projects that CleanBC will leave B.C.’s economy $28 billion smaller in 2030 than it would otherwise be. Annual growth slows to 0.4 per cent in the second half of the decade — bumping along recession territory, in the words of the Business Council of BC’s chief economist. The Zero Carbon Step Code adds an estimated $15,300 to the cost of a standard new detached home at step three, rising to over $48,000 at the highest level — in a province already in a housing affordability crisis.

The pattern is consistent across every element of the program: announce the world-leading target, collect the headline, discover the gap between mandate and market, quietly retreat — and then, as the price of maintaining power, accelerate the review of the failing program under a cooperation accord with the BC Greens.

This is not ambition that fell short. This is ideology that substituted for strategy and billed the public for the privilege.

THE PRAGMATISTS WITHIN

The engineer in the room. B.C. Minister of Energy and Climate Solutions Adrian Dix speaks at a press conference in Vancouver, July 28, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ethan Cairns

None of this is to suggest the BC NDP has swallowed the green mantra whole. It has not, and the record deserves to be stated plainly. The province can point to six LNG export projects at various stages of development or production — a number that would have seemed implausible a decade ago and that represents real, permitted, Indigenous-partnered energy infrastructure advancing despite years of organized opposition. LNG Canada is producing.

Cedar LNG is moving. Woodfibre LNG is under construction. Ksi Lisims LNG is advancing. These are not rhetorical achievements. They are projects.

Partnership at the threshold. BC Premier David Eby shakes hands with Hereditary Chief Jake Duncan of the Haisla Nation as Hereditary Chief Basil Grant looks on, Cedar LNG environmental approval announcement, Vancouver, March 14, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Rich Lam

LNG Canada alone has directed $4.7 billion in contracts to Indigenous and B.C. businesses and employed more than 30,000 Canadians over its construction period. The Conference Board of Canada projects a fully developed LNG sector will add $8 billion annually to B.C.’s GDP, support 71,000 jobs, and deliver $78 billion in provincial revenues by 2064.

Within the government, there are practical-minded individuals doing work that rarely attracts the attention it deserves. Energy Minister Adrian Dix is one. Characteristically methodical and disinclined to headlines, Dix has focused on the hard engineering of the province’s energy future — grid planning, industrial electrification frameworks, the North Coast Transmission Line, the mechanics of connecting supply to demand in a province whose electricity needs are growing faster than its generation capacity. This is unglamorous, necessary work, and it is being done with more seriousness than the broader policy failures around it might suggest.

The tension within the NDP is real and worth naming. It is a government simultaneously advancing LNG export infrastructure and running a building electrification program that treats natural gas as a failure mode. It has permitted projects that its own climate policy stack makes harder to operate. It has Energy Minister Dix focused on grid reality and Attorney General Sharma “staying tuned” on pipeline litigation. These are not the positions of a government with a coherent energy strategy. They are the positions of a government pulled in irreconcilable directions — by the practical demands of a resource economy on one side, and by the political cost of Green Party support on the other.

The LNG record is real. The CleanBC record is also real. Both belong in the same sentence.

NOT RADICAL ENOUGH

It was not always like this. The original NDP-Green confidence and supply agreement, struck in 2017 between Premier John Horgan and Green leader Andrew Weaver, now has the quality of a sepia memory. Weaver was a climate scientist — a serious academic from the University of Victoria whose concerns about emissions were grounded in data rather than movement politics. The arrangement was transactional, even prickly at times, and drew its share of criticism from those who felt it gave a minor party leverage disproportionate to its mandate. That criticism, in retrospect, looks quaint. What it produced was governance — imperfect, contested, but recognizably connected to evidence and democratic accountability. When Weaver eventually retreated from politics and back to academia in 2020, he took with him something that has not been replaced: a green politics rooted in rigour rather than escalation. What came after was of a different character entirely.

After seven years of CleanBC, a $3.5-billion investment that produced no measurable reduction in emissions, a collapsed EV mandate, an unworkable SAF requirement, a building electrification program outrunning the grid it depends on, and a policy stack the government’s own modelling shows will shrink the economy by $28 billion — after all of that, performed in large part as the price of Green Party support — the BC Green Party, holding two of the legislature’s 93 seats on 8.2 per cent of the popular vote, looked at the NDP’s record and concluded: not radical enough.

In February 2026, the Cooperation and Responsible Government Accord brokered between the Eby government and the BC Greens was terminated, with Green Party leader Emily Lowan accusing the NDP of ceding its values to corporate interests and engaging in “flip-flopping and political cowardice.”

The accusation is worth sitting with. A government that designed its climate program as the explicit price of Green support, that accelerated CleanBC’s review ahead of schedule under a cooperation accord, that watched its own Energy Minister walk back the EV mandate rather than abandon the ideological framework that produced it — this government was told it had not done enough. By a party whose popular vote had fallen by nearly half since its previous election, and whose new leader holds no seat in the legislature.

A bridge between movements and power

The movement’s next move. Emily Lowan addresses supporters after being elected leader of the BC Green Party, Parkside Hotel, Victoria, September 24, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chad Hipolito

Lowan, born in 2000 and Canada’s first Generation Z leader of a major political party, supports an immediate moratorium on all new fossil fuel extraction permits — fracking wells, oil and gas projects, LNG facilities, and fossil fuel-derived hydrogen production. She does not currently hold a seat in the legislature. She has described her theory of change openly: she wants to be a “bridge between outside movements and inside pressure systems” — an explicit acknowledgment that the BC Greens under her leadership are not simply a political party competing for votes, but a transmission mechanism between activist networks operating outside the democratic system and the levers of government operating within it.

Before becoming party leader, Lowan served as Fossil Fuel Supply Campaigns Lead for Climate Action Network Canada, working in coalition with 180 civil society organizations to halt new fossil fuel expansion. Those organizations include groups that have not confined their opposition to lobbying and litigation. The campaign against the Coastal GasLink pipeline — a fully permitted project with the support of elected Indigenous band councils along its route — involved years of organized physical disruption: blockades, injunction violations, construction interference, and coordinated campaigns to frighten away the banks and insurers financing a project the courts repeatedly affirmed was lawful. The same playbook, refined over two decades, was deployed against Trans Mountain.

Despite minimal voter support, this strategy has been remarkably successful. Even in political and business circles there is remarkably low awareness that it even exists. It’s fair to wonder how this came about – and, where it’s leading next.

Two tracks, one agenda

The pattern has a consistent architecture. On the ground: disruption of infrastructure that has cleared every legal and regulatory hurdle the democratic system provides. In the political sphere: administrative pressure, legal challenge, and policy leverage — applied most recently through a confidence arrangement that made Green support the price of governing, and through an Attorney General whose professional formation was in exactly this ecosystem.

None of this was assembled in secret. The organizations are registered. The funding flows — some of it from foundations headquartered in the United States — are traceable. The connections between street-level campaigns and political strategy are, as Lowan herself describes them, a deliberate theory of change. What has never been put to British Columbians plainly is the question the convergence demands: is this the transformation you chose? Did you vote, in any election, for a strategy explicitly designed to make the development of your province’s lawfully approved, Indigenous-partnered energy infrastructure ungovernable?

The answer, for most voters, is almost certainly no. The agenda was not on a ballot. It was assembled piece by piece — through funding networks, legal interventions, political arrangements, and the steady accumulation of people, in the right positions, who shared a settled view of what the answer should be. The democratic system was not circumvented. It was navigated, with considerable sophistication, by people who understood it better than most of the people it was supposed to serve.

That is not a conspiracy. It is a strategy. And it has worked — until, perhaps, now.

The fork in the road has rarely been this legible.

VANCOUVER’S LONG SHADOW

A Vancouver movement reaches Ottawa. Avi Lewis celebrates his election as federal NDP leader with wife Naomi Klein, NDP convention, Winnipeg, March 29, 2026. THE CANADIAN PRESS/John Woods

The federal dimension of this story arrived on March 29, 2026, when Avi Lewis was elected leader of the federal New Democratic Party on the first ballot — becoming the first federal NDP leader never to have previously held elected office, having lost two federal bids in British Columbia ridings. He leads a party that won 6.3 per cent of the popular vote in the 2025 federal election — its worst result in party history — and holds just six seats in a 343-seat House of Commons, having lost official party status entirely. He lives in Vancouver, where he holds an academic post at UBC teaching climate justice and documentary film, a role he occupied between his unsuccessful attempts to win a parliamentary seat.

Lewis is married to Naomi Klein, with whom he co-authored the Leap Manifesto — a document calling for a complete moratorium on fossil fuel infrastructure that divided the NDP so sharply that the then Alberta NDP government described it as tone-deaf to the economic realities of resource-producing provinces.

The document that divided a party. Naomi Klein addresses the launch of the Leap Manifesto, Toronto, September 15, 2015. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darren Calabrese

His platform as leader calls for a Canadian Green New Deal, an end to new fossil fuel production, and what he describes as a challenge to the “disaster capitalists” of the energy sector. Former NDP leader Tom Mulcair has observed that Lewis has taken the fight against capitalism further than anyone in the history of the CCF and NDP combined.

Few underdog political movements have ever extracted so much policy leverage from a voting public that is almost completely uninterested in supporting them. The BC Greens, with 8.2 per cent of the provincial vote and two seats in a 93-seat legislature, shaped the terms of a $3.5-billion climate program, accelerated its review, and held a governing party to account on its climate commitments — right up until the moment they decided the party still wasn’t radical enough. The federal NDP, with 6.3 per cent of the national vote, six seats, no official party status, and a leader without a seat of his own, now advances a platform calling for the immediate end of fossil fuel development in a country whose economic sovereignty increasingly depends on it. The voting public has expressed, with some consistency, that it does not particularly want what these parties are offering. The parties have, with considerable sophistication, shaped policy anyway.

The family network that surrounds Lewis’s leadership is worth noting, not as a matter of conspiracy but as an illustration of how thoroughly Vancouver has become the organizational nerve centre of North American green politics. Naomi Klein’s brother Seth Klein — Avi Lewis’s brother-in-law — is a prominent climate activist and author who sought to register as a professional lobbyist before public attention caused him to withdraw. His partner is Christine Boyle, BC’s Minister of Housing and Municipal Affairs, who came to provincial politics via Vancouver city council, where she was a leading voice on climate emergency policy.

Another minister in the network. Christine Boyle, then an NDP election candidate, speaks at a campaign stop in Vancouver, October 17, 2024. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

None of these connections are hidden. They are, in their way, a portrait of a milieu — a dense, interlocking Vancouver-based network of activists, academics, politicians, and advocates who share a coherent worldview and have, over the past decade, placed representatives at nearly every level of government and civic influence available to them.

Where it started. The 80-foot halibut boat Phyllis Cormack — renamed Greenpeace for its voyage — is loaded with supplies on the north shore of False Creek, Vancouver, September 16, 1971. The working waterfront where this photograph was taken is today condominiums and bicycle paths. AP Photo

This should not be entirely surprising. Half a century ago — in the autumn of 1971, as this writer was beginning the fourth grade in Vancouver — a small group of activists loaded an 80-foot halibut boat on the north shore of False Creek and set sail for the Aleutian Islands to protest American nuclear testing. Greenpeace was founded on that working waterfront.

The global environmental movement has deep roots in this city, and those roots have grown in directions that now reach from municipal council to the legislature to federal party leadership. What has changed is not the ambition of the movement but its proximity to power — and its confidence that the levers of government are there to be used.

And yet the political mathematics are not permanently fixed — and what comes next is genuinely uncharted.

For a decade, the pattern was containable. The BC Greens held leverage disproportionate to their mandate, extracted a $3.5-billion climate program as the price of confidence supply, and ultimately declared even that insufficient. The federal NDP, reduced to six seats and stripped of official party status by a voting public that was clearly done with the project, responded by electing as leader a Vancouver academic who has never held elected office and whose platform calls for the immediate end of fossil fuel development. The same theory of change that captured the BC Greens — bridge between outside movements and inside pressure systems, in Lowan’s own words — has now captured the federal party whose support propped up two Liberal minority governments and whose MPs have historically held the balance of power in Ottawa.

False Creek today. An Aquabus water taxi approaches Granville Island on False Creek, Vancouver, August 1, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

This is no longer a provincial story. The movement that began on the north shore of False Creek, that learned its political craft in the corridors of the B.C. legislature, that placed its people in the attorney general’s office and the housing ministry and the federal party leadership, is now operating at national scale with a boldness that reflects confidence rather than caution. It is not shrinking. It is expanding — into federal energy policy, into pipeline litigation strategy, into the institutions that regulate the infrastructure on which Canada’s export economy depends.

The question this raises is the most important one in Canadian politics right now, and it belongs specifically to British Columbia to answer. This province is not simply one of thirteen jurisdictions in a federation. It is the gateway. The coast through which Canadian goods — natural gas, critical minerals, grain, lumber, seafood, oil — reach the markets that need them most, at a moment when those markets are paying a premium for reliable supply from stable democracies. No other province sits at that intersection of resource endowment, coastal access, and geopolitical timing. What happens here does not stay here. The decisions made in Victoria about pipelines, LNG terminals, permitting timelines, and litigation strategy reverberate through every resource community in the country and arrive, eventually, on the desks of trading partners who are already reconsidering whether Canada is serious about being a supplier.

Will voters continue to tolerate a political arrangement in which a movement commanding less than ten per cent of provincial support and six federal seats shapes the energy trajectory of the country’s most consequential export province? That is the question the next election must answer. The green movement’s theory of change has always depended on one assumption: that the public, once the transformation is complete, will accept it. The evidence of CleanBC — the collapsed mandates, the rationed grid, the $28-billion economic cost, the data centres that cannot be powered, the agricultural supply chains that depend on the energy being regulated away — suggests the transformation is not complete. It is failing. And failing slowly, expensively, and in public tends, in democracies, to produce consequences.

The appetite for a different answer is growing. And appetites, in politics, have a way of finding something to feed on.

THE PATH WORTH TAKING

None of this is an argument against caring about the environment. It is an argument about how to honour that care with something more durable than a mandate.

Norway did not build one of the world’s most enviable societies by pretending its hydrocarbons weren’t there. It developed them with rigour, banked the proceeds with discipline, invested in genuine innovation, and approached the question of what comes next from a position of strength rather than guilt. Its environmental standards are among the world’s most demanding. Its citizens are among the world’s most prosperous. The two facts are not in tension — they are the product of the same underlying seriousness about how a society actually functions.

What B.C. could build

Nations ready to lead. A person sits silhouetted at the foot of the Squamish Nation welcome figure at sunset, Ambleside Beach, West Vancouver, August 13, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

British Columbia has the ingredients for that story. World-class natural gas — some of the lowest-emission production anywhere — that can displace coal in Asia while funding the infrastructure for what follows. A hydro-dominated grid that is genuinely among the best on the continent, and that becomes more valuable, not less, as electrification grows. Indigenous nations with the legal standing, the economic ambition, and in many cases the enthusiasm to lead development on their own terms. A coastal position that the world’s fastest-growing energy markets would pay handsomely to access.

The setting sun reflects off of power lines as a motorist travels on the Trans-Canada Highway in Walhachin, B.C., west of Kamloops, on Tuesday, March 29, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

And energy is not the destination — it is the key. Solve the power question and what unlocks is the full breadth of what this province actually holds. Rich critical mineral deposits that the world’s battery and defence industries are scrambling to secure. A renewable forest industry capable of supplying the low-carbon construction materials that rapidly urbanizing populations need. Agricultural products — grain, produce, seafood — that move from field and ocean to global markets on the back of affordable, reliable energy at every step of the supply chain. Rural and urban Indigenous communities that are not looking for passive royalty cheques but for active economic roles — equity stakes, employment, procurement, and the intergenerational wealth that follows from ownership rather than adjacency.

There is a particular irony in the timing. The future that the green movement says it is building — the cloud-based, AI-powered, digitally connected economy — is not light. It is extraordinarily heavy. Every data centre running the models that are remaking global industry is a voracious consumer of electricity, operating around the clock, seven days a week, with zero tolerance for the intermittency that defines the renewable sources being mandated as replacements for the baseload power those centres require. The servers themselves are built from critical minerals pulled from the ground. The cables that carry the data run through infrastructure that must be constructed, maintained, and powered continuously. The future being described as clean and weightless is, in physical terms, one of the most resource-intensive enterprises humanity has ever undertaken — and it will not run on part-time energy. It requires exactly what British Columbia has and what its current policy framework treats as embarrassing: reliable, affordable, large-scale power from sources that show up when needed, not when the wind blows. The irony is not small. The jurisdictions that embrace their resource endowments are the ones that will power the digital future. The ones that miscast those endowments as relics of the past will find themselves importing both the energy and the infrastructure of the world they said they were building.

None of this moves without affordable, reliable, expanding energy supply. The green movement frames energy as a problem to be managed down. The evidence suggests it is the enabling condition for nearly everything worth building — and that managing it down means managing down the futures of the people who depend on what it powers. Energy is not pursued for its own sake. It is pursued to meet the needs of humanity, as efficiently and as environmentally soundly as possible. The question is not whether to meet those needs. It is whether to do so from a position of competence, or ideology.

The honest version of environmental stewardship in this province does not ask whether we develop these assets. It asks how — under what standards, with what partners, toward what long-term vision. That is a serious question and it deserves a serious answer. It will not be answered by a mandate that outruns its supply chain, a target buried in a spreadsheet, or a cooperation accord with a party that walks away when the results don’t satisfy.

The work that remains regardless

It is also worth naming something the polarised debate consistently obscures: regardless of which energy path a jurisdiction chooses, there is serious work to be done. Infrastructure ages. Remediation takes generations. Communities built around single industries need support through transitions that are real, not rhetorical. The lights-on moment — when the music stops and the gap between the vision and the available supply becomes undeniable — does not end the obligation. It clarifies it. The question was never whether to do the work. It was always whether to fund it from strength or scramble for it from weakness.

B.C. has the balance sheet to do it from strength. LNG Canada is producing. Cedar LNG, led by the Haisla Nation, represents exactly the kind of Indigenous-led export development that rewrites the old binaries. Woodfibre LNG is moving. The federal government has signed a memorandum of understanding with Alberta to advance a new pipeline to tidewater. The geopolitical moment is, for the first time in years, working in B.C.’s favour — a world scrambling for reliable energy supply from stable jurisdictions is looking at exactly what this province has.

Norway proved the model works. Western Australia is living it. The practical, optimistic, environmentally serious path is available — and it runs directly through the resources this province already has.

What it requires is a government willing to say so plainly. And mean it.

Stewart Muir is the founder and President & CEO of Resource Works Society. He has covered energy, resources, and public policy in British Columbia for more than three decades. He can be reached at [email protected] or through resourceworks.com.

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