Members of the B.C. caucus of the federal Conservatives say they will be doing all they can to keep the province's economy afloat as an alliance of ideological foes gets set to take power in Victoria.
"We're concerned about B.C., we're concerned about the new political reality provincially and we want to help and make sure that our economy keeps chugging right along," Prince George-Peace River-Northern Rockies MP Bob Zimmer said.
The chair of the nine-member B.C.-Yukon caucus made the comment while speaking to local media prior to the start of meetings Friday and Saturday in Prince George.
The New Democrats and Greens have vowed to fight twinning of the Kinder Morgan pipeline but Richard Neufeld, a long-time B.C. Peace politician who is now a senator in Ottawa, doubts they will get very far given it's won the federal government's approval.
"And I've encouraged the federal government, through our leader in the Senate, to make sure that Prime Minister Trudeau keeps his word and says yes," Neufeld said.
However Neufeld, whose past includes a stint as the province's energy and mines Minister under the Gordon Campbell government, was not as sanguine about Site C, which an NDP-Green government would take to a review by the B.C. Utilities Commission.
"That's a difficult thing," Neufeld said.
That said, Neufeld predicted NDP leader John Horgan and Green Party leader Andrew Weaver will come to their senses once they've added up the costs in terms of remediation, canceled contracts and lawsuits that would come with stopping the work.
The province will need the electricity, if not right away, he added.
"When I was minister nine years ago, we were net importers of electricity in British Columbia and that was coming from the U.S. of A.," Neufeld said.
"I don't think we want to be in that position five years or 10 years from now, so it's a good project, it should go ahead."
He also later noted Horgan and Weaver once supported the project but reversed their positions for "purely political reasons." Asked what caucus members can do to advanced the cause of maintaining a strong B.C. economy, Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo MP Cathy Thompson noted a motion in support of the Kinder Morgan project won support the House of Commons.
Nancy Raine, a Conservative senator, said the original Kinder Morgan pipeline was built with the intention of twinning it at a later date and argued pipelines are the safest way to transport oil.
She also contended that Site C combined with a nearby wind farm amounts to "probably the greenest energy project, the two of them together, that you could find anywhere in North America. Why would the Green Party be against that? It doesn't make sense."
