Dear Editor,
Your readers won’t remember me, but I was the candidate for the Green Party of Canada in the 2021 federal election in the riding of New Westminster-Burnaby.
I’m writing, in part, to congratulate members of the federal NDP, on their success at moving the federal Liberals to starting work on two significant programs. Universal pharmacare and universal dental care are decades overdue in this country. The two most powerful people in the NDP are members of parliament for Burnaby, and we can be proud of party leader, Jagmeet Singh, and house leader, Peter Julian.
What if the Green Party had won the balance of power in 2021? Wouldn’t they have urged the Liberals to implement those two programs? Of course, but, something more, the Greens would have demanded two actions that would have gone a long way to paying for them.
The first demand would have been for the termination of work on the Trans Mountain Pipeline (TMX).
The Liberals would have claimed that the project was too far along to cancel (much as John Horgan claimed about the Site C Dam). The reality, however, is that when the Liberals purchased TMX (using our tax dollars), for $5 billion, it was estimated that the total cost of the project would be $12.6 billion. By 2022, the estimate had risen to $21.4 billion. Cancellation at that point would have saved taxpayers more than $13 billion, as costs on completion are currently estimated at more than $34 billion.
The second source of funds would have been from the termination of all forms of federal subsidy to the oil and gas sector.
In 2022 it is estimated that the federal government subsidized the oil and gas sector through direct financial support, loans, and tax deferrals amounting to more than $20 billion. The numbers for 2023 are still incomplete with six government agencies or programs reporting “Data not available” but, even without that information we know that subsidies amounted to more than $16.75 billion.
David W.G. Macdonald
Burnaby, BC
