When B.C. MLAs returned to the Legislature last week, climate and environmental advocates and Indigenous leaders were there to meet them.

The advocates along with labour unions recently joined forces to tell British Columbia Premier David Eby that they’re frustrated with a lack of government response to key concerns. 

During a press conference on the lawn on October 6, experts and advocates issued failing grades to Eby’s government on a number of campaign promises that led to the B.C. NDP winning the last election.

Organizer Kiki Wood, senior oil and gas campaigner for Stand.Earth, said the organization is standing in solidarity with the union, in the face of the government’s inaction to the climate emergency.

Later, hundreds of members of the B.C. General Employees Union, on strike for a sixth week, landed at the same place to pressure Eby and other legislators to hear their demands and respond.

To make their message clear, climate campaigners Jason Mogus and Jeff Bradshaw created and erected a 17-foot inflatable effigy of the premier cuddling two smokestacks, one labeled LNG, the other OIL. “In photos, I see the premier hugging his family, so we designed it this way to show where his priorities are with American and foreign investors,” Bradshaw said. 

In its 2024 Climate Change Accountability report, the province admitted it’s not on track to meet either its 2025 or 2030 climate targets — targets it could only hope to have met by reversing recent investments in fossil fuel projects. Instead, the province has accelerated the trend in its recent approval of the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline and by backing the American-owned Ksi Lisims floating LNG terminal. 

The Nisga’a Nation, Rockies LNG, and Western LNG, are proponents of the project, however the entity that will construct, own and operate the asset is Texas-based Western LNG.

Wood said there’s been a record number of new renewable energy projects approved in the last two years. “A build-everything approach will not save us. We cannot continue to develop B.C.’s renewable energy industry if its sole purpose is to greenwash the oil and gas industry.” 

With a new legislative year in session, Wood says, the government of B.C. has a choice to make. “Will they stand firm with future generations, or with short term profits for the fossil fuel industry?” 

Along with Eby’s failure to achieve free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) from hereditary chiefs on the PRGT pipeline, the future of their territories is at stake. Jesse Stoeppler, co-executive director of the Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition, says he’s worried.

Wet’suwet’en hereditary chief Na’Moks, who has been fighting the Coastal GasLink (CGL) pipeline on his unceded territory for 10 years, is once again calling for solidarity and action. 

“If we don’t stand together, if you don’t change this pattern that we’re in, it is our children and grandchildren that will pay the highest price,” Na’Moks said. 

Stoeppler emphasized that the government does not have consent from Indigenous communities. “It’s very critical to point out that this so-called consent for these projects is not coming from hereditary leaders. It’s coming from band elected leaders that adhere to the outdated, inhumane and racist Indian Act that was designed and written in a way to systemically destroy who we are as Indigenous people.” 

“Instead of scaling up climate action, the BC NDP government is scaling it back. They’ve approved new LNG projects, and they’ve passed new laws fast-tracking these destructive projects and more like them, an approach that’s not all that different from the drill, baby, drill approach of a certain president that premier Eby and his cabinet ministers love to criticize,” Stoeppler said.

Wood went further and said “LNG project approvals and new fast-tracking legislation are not just bad climate policy, they’re an outright betrayal of the promises [Eby] made to young people, made to Indigenous communities, made to future generations and made to voters.” 

Torrance Coste, associate director of the Wilderness Committee, said that during his provincial election campaign, Premier Eby and the BC NDP were eager to exploit the opposition’s inaction on climate change as a “boogeyman.” Everyone agrees the BC Conservatives would be a total disaster on climate change,” but he said, “the gap between them and the BC NDP is getting narrower and narrower.”

Climate action was conspicuously absent from the 2025 Speech from the Throne.  

“Our progress [on climate] was stalled when this government was elected,” Wood said. Her organization, Stand.Earth, was watching closely to see what the first actions of the new government would be. She said they were dismayed when the first climate action they took was to cancel the consumer climate consumer Carbon Tax “without a plan for how it would leave a gaping hole, not only in BCs climate policies, but also in BCs budget.”

The 2018 Climate Change Accountability Act legislated provincial targets for greenhouse emissions reductions by 16 per cent by 2025 and 40 per cent by 2030, but, according to the 2024 Climate Change Accountability report, and contrary to the 2024 Clean BC Climate Change Report, which states the Ministry of Energy and Climate Solutions is on track to reduce emissions by 30 per cent by 2030, B.C.’s expected reduction for 2025 was only two per cent. The report does not explain the extent to which it will miss 2030 targets. 

After the press conference, BCGEU President Paul Finch had his own message for the premier on behalf of workers. 

Finch told media union members are already starting to “withdraw” support for the B.C. New Democrats, in a further push to force the government back to the table with a “reasonable offer.”

Speaking to the overlapping concerns raised by the environmental groups, he told Ricochet that “there’s a broad upsurge of concern from working people across the province and various advocacy groups, because government is increasingly out of touch with the needs of working people in this province. We’re seeing that reflected in the response to different advocacy groups across the province.” 

“When you have this many people united or with the same message, I think government is just increasingly refusing to listen and also refusing to act appropriately,” Finch told Ricochet.

 “Different advocacy groups are going to bring their perspective to the table with that. But what we all have in common is that government is increasingly out of touch with the people who live and work in this province. I think the government ignores working people at their own peril,” Finch added.

In its press release, the union said that 22,000 of its 34,000 workers are involved in job actions across the province. Now six-weeks long, the strike is the most significant in its 40-year history, said Finch. He says he’s heard nothing at all about potential negotiations from the NDP government. 

“There are a number of different areas where government could have made different spending decisions. And they made choices that didn’t put workers in this province first,” Finch said. 

The burden of climate inaction falls on everyone in Canada, he said, but in B.C., residents are being made to subsidize the very corporations doing harm. 

“These projects are not being built on private risk,” warned Coste. “They are being built with our money. By 2030, LNG projects in B.C. are slated to have siphoned off nearly four billion in subsidies from provincial and federal governments; two billion alone from B.C. through foregone revenues, subsidized electricity rates, tax and taxpayer funded infrastructure. The David Eby government’s calculation appears to be billions for LNG and pennies for families.”

Stoeppler said that the B.C. resident tax base and rate payers are paying for government subsidies to foreign owners “to take our resources only to stuff their own pockets. That is not okay. That is not in the name of British Columbians or Canadians or Indigenous people on Turtle Island, and it sets a very dangerous precedent when it comes to making unilateral decisions from this government,” he said. 

Those decisions counter mounting evidence of the unsustainability of the LNG sector. Clean Energy Canada’s An Uncertain Future report describes the sector’s uncertain future. It states that many of B.C.’s export projects are planned to come online when LNG oversupply is set to be most pronounced in the province’s intended export markets. For example, Japan’s LNG imports have fallen to their lowest rates in 14 years. The trend is seemingly at odds with Eby’s climate and energy policy plans.

The report concludes by warning that B.C. should be highly skeptical of investing in the expansion of an industry whose market is far from guaranteed, and which risks crowding out public and private investments in cleaner industries better poised for growth in the coming decades.”

While some MLAs came to the windows of the Legislature to watch the growing crowd outside, BC Green MLA Rob Bottrell was the only one out to come outside to speak with picketers. Newly elected BC Green leader Emily Lowan was also on hand to show the striking workers her support. Lowan campaigned on and recently won her party’s leadership race on a platform of climate action, a just transition and just taxation. 

BCGEU has signalled that the five per cent pay increase over two years the government offered is not good enough. The union wants a four per cent wage increase for its members yearly for two years (for a total of eight per cent) to meet spiralling inflation and a high cost of living. 

In solidarity with the union, Stoeppler said “aiming for the bare minimum is just not good enough. I know what it feels like when you’re aiming for something important and the response is just not good enough.” The union also opposes what Finch called a massive expansion of managerial bureaucracy and poor procurement processes throughout government. 

When Finch is reminded that the NDP have historically been the party of labour and unions he says sarcastically “yeah, I’ve heard that.” 

Describing some of the economic pressures the union is responding to in its wage demands, the Wilderness Committee’s Torrance Coste says, rather than subsidizing the fossil fuel sector, “we could be doing anything else and getting a better use of that money; affordable housing, address, transition, renewable energies, renewable energy, transit, local food system, anything would be a better expenditure for this money.”  

To round out the speeches Victoria City Counsellor Susan Kim described the trickle-down impact of Eby’s investment decisions from provincial to municipal coffers. “We are trying to do our part, but without a radical, fundamental transformation of the way that we are resourced to do our work. I continue to look to you, the people and our allies and First Nations for leadership on climate action because at this point, I am not trusting our partners in other levels of government.”