Power Struggle
Improving the energy dialogue in Canada (and beyond) through honest, non-partisan, and fact- based conversations.
The energy conversation is personal: it’s in our homes, in our hands, and now, it’s in our ears. Power Struggle invites you to listen in on honest, non-partisan, and fact-based conversations between host Stewart Muir and the leaders and thinkers designing modern energy.
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Power Struggle
The First Carbon Tax // Barry Penner
At Power Struggle we aim to end the conversation blackout around modern energy.
Barry Penner is a former park ranger turned lawyer, politician, and BC’s Minister of Environment. Known for major changes including North America’s first broad-based carbon tax, Barry brings tons of experience navigating climate policy, climate action and public trust.
Barry's tenure as British Columbia's Minister of the Environment was marked by significant strides in environmental policy, including the introduction of North America's first broad-based carbon tax and innovative programs for renewable energy. He shares the triumphs and hurdles of his career, from spearheading emissions reduction initiatives to managing personal health challenges and the emotional closure of a local courthouse. He offers valuable insights into the complexities of climate policy and the persistent struggle to balance economic growth with environmental responsibility.
As we explore the future of energy management in British Columbia, Barry discusses the importance of transparency and accountability in the energy sector.
In this episode:
- Barry’s beginnings in Kitimat, Chilliwack and early politics
- How a rallying campaign secured his first nomination
- Introducing North America's first carbon tax and the Climate Action Plan
- Are emissions higher now than pre-Covid?
- The BC Supreme court call that threatened his career
- Bringing together an 800 person protest
- Navigating a cancer diagnosis and career pivot
- Why BC Energy is a black box…
- Why is BC importing electricity? And what are the hidden costs?
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Links mentioned:
Energy Futures Institute: https://energyfuturesinstitute.ca/
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@BarryPenner1 on X /Twitter
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🎧 For audio versions of our podcast visit powerstruggle.ca and listen on the go in your favourite podcast app!
Video available on Power Struggle’s YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/@PowerStrugglePod
You brought in North America's first broad-based tax on carbon emissions. You're a conservative. Was that an obvious thing to do? Barry, thanks for coming into Power Struggle.
Barry Penner:It's great to be here.
Stewart Muir:I know that you grew up in northern BC and I wanted to ask you what it was like growing up there in the north.
Barry Penner:Well, it was a wonderful experience, but it had some limitations. So when I was six months old, I put my foot down and told my parents it was time to hightail it. And so we did and we migrated to the Fraser Valley. So while I was born in Kitimat, I can't really claim to have spent too much of my formative years there. But yeah, it was when I was, I think, still crawling, or maybe just learning to crawl, that my parents moved to the Fraser Valley. But my brother was born there a few years before I was in Kitimat and my dad had his first significant teaching job was there in Kitimat.
Stewart Muir:Now, Kitimat in the 20th century in British Columbia was a pretty special place. It was a model company town. It had everything, all the modern conveniences, but in a very remote location. But you don't have much memory of it. You don't have any memory of it at six months old.
Barry Penner:Not from that time, but we did go back to visit occasionally and I've been back there, of course, in my adult years, both as a minister and also since then. So it's interesting to take a look at it from that perspective and also, of course, I enjoy seeing my parents' slideshows, which I've seen many times over the years. For my father it was a wonderful experience. He enjoyed hiking and fishing and enjoyed all of that. For my mother it was different. She was more isolated because it was a more traditional time and my mother did not have employment outside the home and she was busy now with three young children and was feeling, I think, quite lonely. Her siblings all lived in the Fraser Valley and that's where her parents lived. So I think after a period of time there were some negotiations that took place between my parents and my father wisely decided to pursue employment in the Fraser Valley in order to accommodate my mother. But I think if he had his druthers he might have liked upstate. He really enjoyed the outdoor opportunities that came with living in Kitimat.
Stewart Muir:Well, it's still a significant place and I'm curious how the Kitimat of your earliest years, and then your family memory, and the Kitimat of today square up in terms of your perspective on energy, the environment and issues like that, you that you deal with today well, it was clearly an important stepping stone for my father to launch his career, his professional career as a teacher, and it was a burgeoning community at that time.
Barry Penner:It was a place of opportunity and so my father was interested in that and kind of went out, you know, stepped out and took that opportunity, and I guess my mother went along for the ride, not really sure what she would find, and so they lived there for a number of years in the 1960s.
Stewart Muir:And what drew them.
Barry Penner:I think for my dad it was a sense of adventure and again employment opportunity. He was a fairly new school teacher, newly minted out of university. There was a lot of buzz in British Columbia about Kitimat in the late 50s and 1960s. This was a happening place. It was a big government priority. Government policy had led to the establishment of Elkan in that community and the energy that was required to support Elkan, of course was why Elcan was there.
Stewart Muir:Elcan, the aluminum company of Canada.
Barry Penner:Right, and so my father was a social studies teacher at heart and he followed the news and this was certainly a community that was often mentioned in the news, and this was certainly a community that was often mentioned in the news and all the public policy around it was, in his mind, very exciting.
Stewart Muir:Fascinating. And today, what's going on up there?
Barry Penner:Well, the community has kind of reborn Again. We're seeing, after a number of years of doldrums and downsizing, a huge injection of billions of dollars of capital investment and again a boom town with job creation and opportunity related to LNG development through the LNG Canada project backed by Shell and others. And Elkhart still remains in the community. It went through a significant modernization, but now we have LNG added as another major industry. Forest industry is not what it was during my father's time, but it still is a segment of the economy there. But things do change over time. There is a new hospital. Sad to say, the hospital I was born in was knocked down about 10 years ago or so, but it's been replaced by a more modern hospital. The community has been revitalized.
Stewart Muir:So after you grew up in the Fraser Valley you went into law. You did studies at the Fraser Valley College. So what got you interested in the legal path.
Barry Penner:It was probably my time as a park ranger. I got a job. I think my first year into college I landed a summer job working for BC Parks and that was transformative for me. It was something I guess as a child I kind of had a dream about doing, but it came true. In my case, I got to be a park ranger in the summertime and there was a legal component to what I was doing. We're doing quite a bit of enforcement, uh, because initially I worked at cultus lake provincial park, which has a big urban interface. Um, up to two million people a year come up to cultus lake in just a couple of months, you know, between may and september.
Barry Penner:I remember going up there with my family so, yeah, there is a component of enforcement that's required to try and maintain order around the campgrounds and in the public areas. So I guess it was 1986 and 87 and a bit of 1988. I worked there at Chilliwack Lake Provincial Park and so at times I'd have questions when is our authority coming from for what we're doing? Why can't we do certain things? At times I'd have questions when is our authority coming from for what we're doing? Why can't we do certain things? And I wasn't satisfied by answers that might be well, we don't know, or just because I wanted to know why. And that kind of whetted my appetite and curiosity for legal matters to try to get to the heart of it. And where does our authority come from and where do the limitations come from?
Stewart Muir:And I understand your daughters are named after provincial parks of BC. Is that true that?
Barry Penner:is true, yeah, Fintry's named after Fintry Provincial Park in the Okanagan. Atlin the youngest is named after Atlin Provincial Park, which is located at the south end of BC's largest natural lake, Lake Atlin, and there's also a small community that has quite a lot of historic significance. The community of Atlin was a major player in the Gold Rush era, in the Yukon Gold Rush paddle wheelers. In fact, there's still a paddle wheeler parked on the shore there today at Lake Atlin.
Stewart Muir:You know, in a province where pretty much every other person one meets is from somewhere else, you're really a true British Columbian. Your roots are here. How far back do those roots go?
Barry Penner:Barry. Oh okay, my grandparents on both sides moved to British Columbia, so that would be in the 1940s, post-war. On my father's side, my grandfather, jacob Penner, was born in Saskatchewan as part of an extended Mennonite community north of Saskatoon and because of his upbringing he could speak German as well as English. But he could speak German and he went off to school and he became a school teacher himself. But when World War II came, certain xenophobia took over. Of course we can understand that. There was a fear of foreigners and particularly people who could speak Japanese or German, and in my grandfather's case he could speak German as well as English and the school board decided to fire him.
Barry Penner:So you know, partway through World War Two he lost his job, so very difficult times. He had five children and a wife to support, so it was tough. So they decamped and moved to the Fraser Valley and came to Chilliwack and he took on a teaching job in Chilliwack as well as some other work. He was a busy guy. He ran a postal route for Canada Post. At that time a new bridge, major infrastructure project in our area was built, the Agassiz-Rosedale Bridge. It came with tolls and he had a job collecting tolls for a while. So all of this to try and make ends meet and make up for lost time in terms of income, because World War II did represent a setback for him and the family because World War II did represent a setback for him and the family.
Stewart Muir:So you got back to where your grandparents were from, from Chilliwack. You're still there today, aren't you? I'm still based in Chilliwack correct and you went to school, went to law school, but then you made a decision, a pivotal decision in your life to go into public service.
Barry Penner:Well, in my undergraduate studies. I wasn't sure what I was going to take when I signed up my first year at Fraser Valley College, and so it was this mattering of typical arts courses, from English to geography to Canadian history and, I think, one sociology course, and then political science, oh, and economics, and I liked in particular both of the economics and the political science. I enjoyed geography as well. One thing led to another and I decided to focus on political science and economics and then did what was called university transfer to Simon Fraser University to complete a bachelor's degree in political science and economics.
Barry Penner:One of my instructors a seminal instructor for me was at Fraser Valley College a fellow named Scott Fast and he had run several times unsuccessfully for provincial office and also for federal. But he would talk about his experiences and that made it more real. You know, he really stimulated classroom discussion. So I think that planted a bit of a seed for me, but not a serious. I never thought I would run myself. But then I was at Simon Fraser and one day, walking down the hall, I saw a poster on the wall for the BC Legislative Internship Program and it looked interesting. But I thought well, look, I'm sure they have many applicants, I'm not sure I would be successful, so I did not immediately apply until the very last day of the deadline. One of my friends told me that he just applied and that he thought I should too. So, at the insistence of Jeff Belsher, I put in an application at the last minute and I became a legislative intern. So I had a front row seat to provincial politics, and that was a fabulous experience.
Stewart Muir:What motivated you to get into politics yourself? You've been a staffer, an intern, but then you decided you were going to get into it at the age of 29.
Barry Penner:Yeah. But when the idea first crossed my mind I could still remember where I was. I was sitting in the public gallery at the legislature watching Question Period and the then-opposition NDP was grilling the then faltering social credit government under Bill Van Der Zandt. I remember listening to one of the answers from one of the hapless social credit ministers as he was fumbling around and the thought went through my mind would I be any worse than that? A fairly low bar perhaps, but that is actually when the thought went through my mind. I thought, my goodness, I think I might be better than that, but I didn't pursue it at the time.
Barry Penner:But a few years later I finished law school, articled at a firm in Chilliwack and then started practicing and I went to an event in Abbotsford in support of Mike Dion, who I'd gotten to know as a lawyer around the courthouse in Chilliwack and Abbotsford. He asked me to help him out on his campaign when he ran for a by-election for the BC Liberals. Gordon Campbell was at an event to support Mike and after this event a little fundraiser, I guess. Out in the parking lot I was heading to my car and there was a guy that called me over to speak to him at his car. He was a guy that had been a legislative intern a year before me and his name is Mike McDonald.
Stewart Muir:I've heard of that name.
Barry Penner:You've heard of his name and so began my involvement with Mike McDonald. Over time, over years in elected office, I had lots to do with Mike. But he in the parking lot he said, hey, have you ever thought about running? And the answer was no, not really. And he said, but you should think about it. So kind of one thing led to another, and in fairly short order. That would have been this I don't know 1994. In 1995, I ran for a nomination in Chilliwack. It was a contested nomination against a sitting incumbent BC Liberal MLA and I won the nomination.
Stewart Muir:That's pretty uncommon. To displace a sitting MLA in a party nomination process is something that the incumbent MLA did not, and he didn't live in the community and it was a problem.
Barry Penner:It was a problem for other people that were trying to access him. His office was closed for months of the year. You know the message came back. You know it's not convenient for me to come to those meetings to meet with your colleagues at the Bar Association, because I don't live in Chilliwack. So as a guy that had grown up in Chilliwack and decided to come back and work there, it did rankle me that our elected representative did not live in Chilliwack and found it inconvenient to come to meet us for meetings.
Barry Penner:And then I guess the final seed was when there was a talk of a nomination meeting and the mayor of our community was thinking about running at that time and the local MLA organized a snap nomination meeting to try and head off a challenge before the mayor could sell memberships, because it's based on who turns out to vote. You have to be a member to vote. So the incumbent tried to head that off in the past by having a snap nomination right during the middle of session. And I knew just instinctively the party probably wouldn't like that because they want the MLAs to be focused on their job in Victoria and not worried about running a nomination battle. So I thought this is probably not good for the caucus. It's distracting from what they should be doing holding the government to account in Victoria. And then the mayor announced he wasn't running. So I thought, well, somebody needs to provide an option. Whatever the outcome might be, people should at least have a choice. So I put up my hand, and one thing led to another.
Stewart Muir:So what was a surprise for you, Barry, when you stepped into this? First of all, you secured the nomination. You then had to secure the seat in an election. What surprised you, and what should surprise us about what you learned?
Barry Penner:I was surprised at how many people were willing to step up and help. People I didn't know came out of the woodwork and put in countless hours phoning and driving around to pick up membership forms, collect $10 from people and that was for the nomination battle and then to give up a good part of a day on a weekend to come to a nomination meeting. And it did go several rounds because several other people then entered after I did. Then several others thought, well, maybe we'll try too. So it went a couple of rounds so we had to hold our supporters in the meeting. There were about a thousand people came out all together, so it was quite a big event. We had a floor team that was organized.
Barry Penner:My former political science instructor's daughter helped organize the floor and keep people from leaving, along with my brother and a few others, so we had quite an orchestrated campaign. Anyway, that was surprising how quickly people came together and then before the election campaign it was kind of similar. There's a lot of support that came forward. It was based on people who knew me or my parents or my brother or my sister over the years, my grandparents, so that community kind of the grassroots thing. It's quite tangible. It really does have an effect in politics.
Barry Penner:And I don't know if that was a surprise to me that it had that effect. I had a gut feeling that this could be done. I guess when I put up my hand I could see the angle this just might happen. I mean, objectively, it looked implausible. I had 12 days, I think, to sell memberships before they cut off maybe 10 days. And I had 12 days, I think, to sell memberships before they cut off maybe 10 days. And yet we did it in 10 days. We organized the numbers that we needed to win and you won, and we won.
Barry Penner:Now what? So? I was working for a law firm and one of the partners took me out during the process, just before the meeting, and I remember him sitting me down at our first ever Starbucks in Chilliwack and he said well, barry, have you thought about the worst case scenario? I'm not sure. What is that, fred, he goes, you might win. I thought he was joking.
Stewart Muir:So you won the election. What was it like when you started that job? You had a lot of priorities, it was a reformist government, it had a big agenda of change and you were part of that. But what was it like on that first day?
Barry Penner:Yeah. So obviously a lot of people were feeling disappointment at not having formed government. I didn't have quite the same sense of disappointment because this was still my first time at the plate and it was still exciting and good to be back at the legislature after having been there as an intern and able to dig into issues now that I was interested in, so immediately dove into issues, some of them related to energy, air quality, forestry, parks, trade, international trade I was interested in based on my time in Southeast Asia. It was an exciting time and yet frustrating because we're in opposition. You could still get some things done. It's a misnomer to say you can't. You have to work harder and you have to marshal public support through the media, through other communications, and just be persistent. But if you are, you can still move the needle on various issues.
Stewart Muir:Now in 2001,. You did get into government and one of the things you did, you brought in North America's first broad-based tax on carbon emissions. You're a conservative. The BC.
Barry Penner:Liberal movement is one that embraces conservatives. Was that an obvious thing to do? I describe myself as a small-c liberal, meaning fiscally conservative but open to various policy ideas, but fiscally conservative at heart.
Barry Penner:And that's based on my economics training and so forth. I guess I was environment minister. Of course, with that comes a whole range of challenges, but one of them was increasing evidence that climate change was happening and that humans were contributing to it, and that the pace of climate change was accelerating. So, question you know, what are you going to do about it?
Barry Penner:I frequently made the mistake of not turning my phone off when I go to sleep at night, and so one particular night my phone rang at two in the morning and it was Premier Campbell. He was in Beijing. Maybe he forgot what the time difference was, I'm not sure, but he called me and said remind me, what was that thing? You were talking about Something about emissions, and you know greenhouse gases and you know fossil fuels and what are your ideas on this? Because I'm looking out my hotel window here in Beijing and I cannot see across the street. The air is so thick, the pollution is so bad. So when I get back, please clear your calendar because we're going to take a deep dive into this. That kind of was the precursor to us working on the climate plan. That phone call at two in the morning was my first signal that something big was looming.
Stewart Muir:And that was BC's first climate action plan.
Barry Penner:Correct, which we introduced in 2007, but I guess the work on that would have started in 2006. The carbon tax itself sprung out of that the following year.
Stewart Muir:Well, at that time, barry, I was in the gallery of armchair critics myself at the Vancouver Sun. Were there a lot of other perspectives, and how did you filter them all into what you did when you came out with this historic carbon tax?
Barry Penner:Well, I remember more than once the conversation with Premier Campbell was. You know, let's make sure we're bringing people along with us. It's not going to help to alienate people and have them opposed to trying to mitigate our impact on the climate. So let's try to make this as palatable as possible Rebates for various things, retrofits for home efficiency, heat pumps, for example, more efficient natural gas furnaces, better insulation. I still remember there was a credit for bicycles and you know there's a number of things that were offered to try and make it more palatable. I remember advocating and we implemented it a $2,000 tax break for hybrid vehicles.
Barry Penner:At that time, full electric were not an option, but our government introduced the rebate program for hybrid electric vehicles at that time, which was very popular and it was trendsetting across the country. So there was a suite of things that we did to try and make a palatal, in addition to making sure it was revenue neutral, meaning that there were offsetting income tax reductions. The Auditor General is an independent officer of the legislature and was empowered to go and ask this very question and every year would report back. It's part of the budget process whether in fact, the income generated from the carbon tax was actually fully refunded through offsetting personal and business tax reductions, and the answer ultimately, was yes. In fact, other taxes ended up being reduced by a greater quantity than the carbon tax was collecting at that time.
Stewart Muir:What were your proudest accomplishments as Minister of the Environment of British Columbia, Barry?
Barry Penner:We did quite a few things. I was there for, I think, just over five years At the time. That was a record length of tenure. Environment ministers tend to turn over more quickly in British Columbia. There's a lot of pressure in that role in British Columbia, being the home base for Greenpeace and other environmental groups. So, yeah, the Climate Action Plan was really a mental stretch.
Barry Penner:I remember debating cap and trade legislation, going off to California to meet with Governor Schwarzenegger at the time, but I guess if I look back, it would be things like encouraging BC Hydro to open their minds to renewable energy projects. So under our tenure, bc got our first commercial wind power projects and I remember being quite delighted to be there to cut the ribbon and got it across the finish line as BC's first commercial wind power project. So that was a first. Other renewable options included Runner River hydro projects, which provided again zero emission electricity to help support the change that we're seeing in our energy transition. Our first solar power project got connected to the grid through what was then the Standing Offer Program, which has been cancelled by the current administration. But that Standing offer program did result in a number of renewable projects capturing methane from landfills and using it to generate electricity instead of just going into the atmosphere. So those are things I'm proud of having worked on.
Stewart Muir:Yeah, that was an exciting time. I remember in the newsroom at the newspaper reporters coming back in from probably the news conference where some of this was announced, they had these huge maps of the geothermal potential, where the wind was going to be. I think even tidal power was talked about, even though it's maybe still in the future. It was on these maps as to where the most promising places might be. You were looking at all the possibilities and that was really on your watch.
Barry Penner:That was an exciting time and we were being ambitious and set some aggressive targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions. I think we wanted to reduce emissions by one-third by 2020 as an interim step and that target, unfortunately, was not met. Our emissions really went flat. They went down but then started to creep up again, but when you consider how much our population and economy has grown since 2007, it actually is quite a feat that emissions are about the same in 2020 as they were in 2007, despite very significant population growth Emissions. You know they took a dip during COVID, but they've bounced back up again and we're waiting for the final numbers from the BC government. I think they might even be overdue, but based on what we're hearing through Statistics Canada, who does some of this modeling it looks like our emissions are probably up higher than they were prior to COVID, meaning that we're not on track to hit the next interim target.
Stewart Muir:So you're still following this field very, very closely. We'll come back to why that is. Over all those years you were in government, Barry, what was the most difficult single decision you had to make?
Barry Penner:Just for the listener's benefit. I had no idea what these questions were going to be today, so, uh, this is all happening for you on the spot my synapses are firing in real time here, or misfiring, as the case may be.
Barry Penner:It was the message I got on my answering machine on my phone when I stepped off a plane coming back from a team canada trade mission in southeast. As I went at my own expense and crashed the trade mission in 1997 because that year it was going to, among other places, thailand, and I thought, well, and I was our trade critic in opposition for the BC Liberals, so I thought I want to be there and I had those connections in Thailand and Glenn Clark was quite surprised to see me there. He was the premier at the time. I remember him being quite startled to see me in the hallway. He stuttered a few times when he saw me in the hallway and then was maybe more than surprised, maybe frustrated, when the ties asked me to stand at the front of the photo for all the group photos along with Premier Clark to give me equal billing when I go off the plane coming back from the Team Canada trade mission.
Barry Penner:Anyhow, I get off the plane and there's a voice message at YVR and it's from a BC Supreme Court judge giving me a heads-up that he's heard. The BC government is about to announce the closure of the Chilliwack Courthouse. Of course I'd been a lawyer, a practicing lawyer, when I got started in all this, and so that struck pretty close to the bone and that was just a sinking feeling. And now I'm the elected representative in opposition and the government's closing our courthouse in my community under my watch. That was a rude return.
Barry Penner:What that then precipitated was kind of my first, I guess, real flurry of mobilizing the community into protests and opposition and a concerted campaign with lots of help from others, including the mayor of Chilliwack at the time, really spearheading this campaign in the legislature on an ongoing basis, to the point where, finally, I got invited by Hugh Jal de Sange to his office one day and said how do we make this stop? Because the pain was getting difficult. You know, I'd worked, I'd represented in my time. I did a number of things. I represented some people that were on legal aid, including women that were victims of violence, and a number of those people had contacted me when I was in MLA and said you know what's happening, barry, I'm going to have to go on a bus with my attacker to a different courthouse because I don't have a car. I can't afford transportation. I'll be on the bus along with the accused going to Abbotsford or to New Westminster Supreme Court with the very person that assaulted me.
Barry Penner:Well, that is courthouse-sized and we had the only BC Supreme Court seat east of New Westminster seat east of New Westminster. So the expectation that people are going to have to travel that far for BC Supreme Court. Services like divorce is handled by the BC Supreme Court and serious personal injury matters, for example, litigated in BC Supreme Court and serious sexual assault, serious criminal matters are in typically BC Supreme Court. But for me it was very personal. The governing party was closing my courthouse and I was the MLA, so what was I going to do about it? So we had a rally in the rain. We had, I think, 800 people come out in short notice in Chilliwack.
Barry Penner:Large protests were not something Chilliwack was known for. It's considered mostly at the time, agrarian and some you and some had a significant forest industry at that time and media often disparagingly referred to as the Bible Belt. There is a fair bit of conservatism that way. A lot of traditional folks and a significant number of churches not known for activism filling the streets. But we did it. We didn't have email at the time. I had the Chamber of Commerce handbook. I had the Chamber of Commerce handbook, had the Rotary Club handbook which had people's business numbers and fax numbers. So I was faxing people all night to come to this protest rally to get the word out, and I didn't know what would really happen. Well, 800 people showed up and we made the news. We got on the TV news in Vancouver. You know again driving the agenda and getting noticed and then introducing a series of ever larger petitions signed by women's groups, signed by people from the women's shelters, signed by various community groups, injured people's groups, saying you're taking away our access to justice, and just kept this campaign up over a period of months, I think for maybe a year and so that culminated with the call to come and see the Attorney General in his office and the question how can we make this stop? Anyway, we ended up.
Barry Penner:The courthouse did have deficiencies, there had been escapes, people had been injured, so there was a problem with the old courthouse, and the solution that we came up with to make this pain end was we need some money from the province.
Barry Penner:The city of Chilliwack was willing to put up some property in the downtown core which had been getting run down and they wanted to revitalize it. So the idea was we'll tear down an old building, the city will contribute the land, the province will contribute $5 million, we'll turn it over to a developer on kind of a 3P basis or P3 basis to see what kind of other economic advantages they can wring out of it. So they leased some space themselves. They were allowed to do that to make some extra income, to make the whole package work, and we got a brand new courthouse complete with additional courtrooms and a BC Supreme Court room and more modern office space, a more secure building and without any asbestos problems like the old courthouse had. And we got all that for $5 million from the province. I mean, you couldn't hardly build a parking lot today for that amount of money.
Barry Penner:We have now a modern courthouse in Chilliwack, but that was a result of the community stepping up and not taking it lying down, so that was the most disappointing time that springs to my memory is that message from that judge telling me we're losing our courthouse, to then turning that around and getting a new one instead.
Stewart Muir:That's a pretty happy ending. So in 2007, almost the midway point of your being in government as an MLA minister, you had this diagnosis Correct A rare type of cancer.
Barry Penner:Yes, Again another thing that coincides with getting a rather unpleasant message on your phone. I'd had some curiosity about what?
Stewart Muir:I hope your phone's turned off now.
Barry Penner:You never know what's going to show up in your voicemail. So I had a lump show up in my chest which I kind of blocked. I think men in particular are pretty good at maybe pretending things aren't happening when they are, and I wasn't really conscious of the fact there was something there, except that one day I was putting on my dress shirt and there's a wet spot that showed through in one place and I thought what is that? Oh yeah, that's right. I never towel there. I avoid it because it always feels uncomfortable, not a pleasant sensation. Why is that? So I don't know how long it had been there. It probably been there at least six months, I'm just guessing, I don't know.
Barry Penner:But I pulled my dress shirt back to look at this thing and that doesn't look like it should be there. What is that? Looked like a wart is on my chest. So anyway, carried on, didn't do anything about it, until my fiancee one day said by the way, what is that thing? And I gave the same kind of answer which, well, I don't know. I just towel around. It's a bit uncomfortable, but I try to avoid it, and no big deal. And she said no, that is probably a deal. You maybe should ask your doctor about it, and I think if I hadn't been prompted to do that, I probably wouldn't have.
Stewart Muir:I don't know.
Barry Penner:I'm busy, just got other things on my mind. So I did see my doctor about it. Uh, initially I saw a dermatologist, I think in victoria, who gave me a kind of a blase answer. I don't know what it is, but I'll just remove it here in the office and we'll carry on, I don't know. It seemed like a matter of weeks and the thing was growing back. So then I asked my gp, like, should this be happening? And it hurts now, like now it's even really more painful all the time. And so then I got another referral and more examination and more studies, and finally it was actually apparently used as an assignment for physicians.
Barry Penner:People have recently completed medical school and they're in their training and one of their instructors had offered up to five or six of them as let's see who can figure out what this thing is. And one of them said I think I remember this from a textbook. One thing led to another and it was confirmed. And so I got this voice message on my phone one day at the legislature and it wasn't here's what you got. It was I need to see you right away. And I was like uh-oh, that's not really a message I'm used to getting from a doctor, I need to see you right away. When I walked into the doctor's office that day and I remember thinking my day could really change here when I come out of this office. I might be having a very different day than I am right now.
Barry Penner:It. When I come out of this office I might be having a very different day than I am right now. It was a sunny day, I remember it was a nice day. But I remember telling myself I might not be feeling the same way on my way out the door as I do right now going in. And it was true. So he told me that you're going to need surgery ASAP and then we'll take it from there. I remember going straight back to my constituency office because I had appointments and doing some work. But at the end of the day my constituency assistant, julie Brewer very dedicated and thoughtful person, at the end of the day she said is everything okay.
Barry Penner:She noticed something different, right, and I was trying to carry on like nothing happened. So then I told her, and she goes well what the hell are you doing here?
Barry Penner:But I said well, you know what are we going to do. So because of the type of cancer it is, it doesn't respond well to radiation or chemo. If you're going to have a solution, it's going to come with a scalpel, which means you've got to get at it quick and hard and cut as much as you can to get ahead of it. The first surgery was not successful. In that regard, I found this Leo Myles Sarcoma support group and in there they were talking about you need to get wide margins and the margins should be a certain number of millimeters to make sure you get clear margins on the tumor, and so I remember asking questions what are the margins? And the numbers that came back were a lot less than what in this chat group people were saying.
Barry Penner:So the recommendation that people had was there's this doctor I think it's sharon Weiss in Atlanta, georgia, and she was a preeminent specialist in leomyelocercoma at this big university and I thought what are the chances? She'll have time for me. But I just fired off an email and said this has happened to me and here's what I'm seeing are the numbers for the margins, what do you think? And she responded like almost instantly get that sample. I need the physical sample and you FedEx it to me and I will look at it, examine it and get back to you with recommendations.
Barry Penner:It took some effort to get the health system here to actually provide me my samples, which is interesting when you think about it's your body but it was a bit of a tug of war to get the information and the tissue samples sent to atlanta, georgia. I was at a cabinet retreat when I got the phone call the caller for a discussion about her analysis, so I stepped out, excuse myself from the meeting to go take that call and uh, she said you need to go back under the table and you need to go quick. So on the basis of that, I went back for a follow-up surgery and then that time we were able to get sufficiently wide margins, and so that's why I'm still here today.
Stewart Muir:What led to your decision to leave politics?
Barry Penner:Well, I'd been there at that point almost 16 years. I got started early, nominated at 29, elected at age 30. So I thought realistically I'm going to have to have another act and I thought it'll be harder to get a job in my 50s than in my 40s. So I thought I need to leave before I'm 50. My wife at the time and I had a child that started changing things a bit about being away so much in Victoria and elsewhere around the province. So all this kind of culminated with the idea that maybe it was time to do something else.
Barry Penner:So, off, I went out into the job market and ended up with a job at a law firm then known as Davison Company, a well-established Vancouver firm which is now part of DLA Canada. What drew me to them in particular was their office in Japan, because I was interested in keeping a foot there and their significant practice in energy. One of the things I did with DLA was handle a seminar at the Canadian Embassy on Canada as an energy superpower and talking about the possibilities of LNG exports from British Columbia, with an overview of our environmental assessment process and the duty to consult with First Nations.
Barry Penner:It was complicated to try and explain the various processes. Even when the government says it's a priority, as our government did at the time, doesn't mean it's a rubber stamp. There's still a lot of process, a lot of hurdles and a lot of challenges and in the Asian context that can be a bit confusing because they think, well, if the government's in charge and the government says they want to get it done, then what's taking so long? How hard could this be?
Stewart Muir:I remember the time in journalism I'd be around the table at a news meeting and people would ask me questions like do you believe in climate change? And my response was well, I don't need to believe it, it's just true. But the level of general awareness was very low in that decade when you entered politics, and now it's radically different. Everyone has a fact set on this. In China, you can see across the street again if you're visiting Beijing, but that doesn't mean that they aren't building a crazy number of coal plants, and you can't see that in Beijing because you're building it way off in the countryside. We're in this incredibly conflicted time where you have raging public debates on what you do about this. Recently, you've been part of something new, full disclosure. So have I? That something new is the Energy Futures Institute, and I just want to talk about what you see as the problem that we're addressing with the Energy Futures Institute.
Barry Penner:Really it's about public understanding and awareness, trying to bring people along in the discussion. Governments make pronouncements and then they're on to the next thing. The story is commonly known that we have a shrinking media in British Columbia and elsewhere, so there's less detailed reporting and in-depth analysis than there used to be. So governments can maybe more easily get away with a few news releases and announcements and on to the next thing, and the public doesn't necessarily get a chance to say wait a minute, what was that? Does this really add up?
Barry Penner:In the case of the energy picture in British Columbia, we have a revised GHG reduction target which we won't hit because we're really right back to where we were in 2007.
Barry Penner:Now, so the fact we haven't really moved the needle in all those years makes it unlikely, and the extreme will do it in the next six months and then by 2030, the target is 40% reduction. So that's again just over five years from now. We're expected to believe we're going to have 40% fewer GHG emissions, when, after all these years of the carbon tax and other measures, we've been able to keep it level but we haven't really taken it down. So the chances of a big reduction like that is unrealistic. But why is that? And then what are some of the prescriptions? So, in order to try and get to that target, the government says well, we can do that by a greater electrificationification. Because we have this abundance of electricity, we're kind of raised to believe as our birthright that through prudent, long-term planning and building of large hydroelectric dams, we have put ourselves in this position of boundless amounts of electricity that's clean and renewable.
Stewart Muir:And boundless amounts of water and water.
Barry Penner:Freshwater. And yet I know from my time in government that that's just not true. There were still years, even when I was there, that we were a net import of electricity, which is one of the reasons that I was a keen advocate for more renewable electricity sources in my time as a member of the legislature, because there were years we were importing electricity and I didn't think we should be dependent on our neighbors for that, given our plethora of energy options here in the province. There's a little bit of a flashback Information is power, and so those in power don't like to share information, because they really would prefer not to share power. It's human nature, but information is power, and so to try and understand what's happening, we have to try and get our hands on information that's credible and reliable and accurate, and so that's what we spend a lot of our time at Energy Futures doing is trying to figure out exactly what is happening, because these numbers as presented, this story as presented, doesn't pass the smell test.
Stewart Muir:Now you're chair of the Energy Futures Institute For the first six months or so of 2024,. You led research into the energy system of BC and you came up with some recommendations. One of them was actually to that point you just made, which is the idea of transparency. Because you go to Alberta, you can find out all of their energy sources at any moment of the day, how much is being produced from gas, from coal, from wind, from solar hydro, whatever it is For BC. What about BC?
Barry Penner:There's no such option here in BC. We have to wait for the government to tell us, or BC Hydro, and quite often it's actually not until StatsCan reports out, maybe a year or two later, that you get a detailed picture.
Stewart Muir:That's not real time.
Barry Penner:That is not real time. It's commonly referred to as a black box. When we're talking about the electrical system in North America, in British Columbia, it's a bit of a black box. You can't see from the outside, looking in, what's really happening. Bc Hydro will say well, that's to protect our competitive advantage, trading in the US market or in Alberta, so that they don't know what we got up our sleeve, what we could generate at a certain time. We don't want them to know, even though we know what they're up to. We don't want them to know what we're up to.
Barry Penner:But I think the public does need to understand what's possible, what's real, in order to build long-term public support for good public policy. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all the time. And if the public becomes convinced that this climate change agenda the government has is based on faulty information or has been based on something that's misleading and they've been bamboozled and fooled, I worry there'll be a backlash. And I think that's the risk when the government thinks we know better than you and you don't need to know the details. You don't need to know what's really going on. And I'm not just limiting us to British Columbia, but in Canada we have this culture of secrecy in government.
Stewart Muir:Well, as any journalist in Canada knows, when they call across the border to the United States to get some fact from the local sheriff or state official, they'll just give you everything. It's like wait a minute, I'm calling from Canada, you're not supposed to give that to me, you just oh, we'll tell you everything you need to know. Any other questions? Whereas in Canada, any journalist ever having to call a bureaucrat is just instantly shut down. Oh, you have to fill out a form. Oh, the person you need is over there and I'll send the call over there. Well, the call's not picked up. I mean, it's been that way for a long time and it's a radically different approach here. But BC is even different within Canada on some of these issues. When it comes to voters and citizens having the information they need, what information would you like them to have so they can make better decisions?
Barry Penner:So more timely information about what's really happening. We are overdue to get an update on our actual GHG profile in British Columbia. Bc government is supposed to be reporting this information about where our missions were at in the most recent year. You can get an sense of it from what StatsCan has, but it's supposed to be refined and released on a more granular level by the province. There's data, but what are we actually generating? So who was producing what electricity at what time? What systems worked? Which ones struggled in BC? We don't know.
Barry Penner:But if we had a real-time database because BC Hydro knows they have this information coming in the electrons are being reported and tracked. They can do it in California, they could do it in Alberta, we could do it here if we had the political will to do it, and then we could get a greater sense of just where are we today. But what we do know, because of the work we've done here, is that in 2023, british Columbia was a net import of electricity. Yes, there were times, hours of the day we sold, but overall we imported 20% of our total needs on a net basis and that's a record. Bc's never imported that amount before and this year the latest data I've been able to obtain is that we've been on track to double that.
Stewart Muir:Now. It was on your watch that the basic rule set was brought in for climate policy that, to a large extent, persists without any grand changes. Going back to how this started, compared to where it is now, what could have been done differently along the way so that you would have a situation today that you're less concerned about?
Barry Penner:Well, you know the governments have talked about we're going to have more electrification, the way forward, you know, for the electric vehicles, just as an example, there was a lot of talk about it. But if the government really believed it, then build for it, get ahead of it. But we haven't.
Stewart Muir:So build chargers.
Barry Penner:Charging stations, Power lines to deliver the power Substations and then generating it in the first place from clean sources. So when we're importing power, most of it's coming from the United States. The most recent information I've seen from the US is on average, 60% of their electricity comes from fossil fuel. That's 6-0. A shrinking component is coal, but a growing share of that is natural gas, so that's 60% overall. Then you have some nuclear and wind and solar. You know the majority is still fossil fuel. So we're importing that into BC but we're kind of pretending like it's zero emission when it's not. And it's rather ironic that we now have these policies. You can't use natural gas for new construction, for heating, but you can use electricity. In effect that's coming from natural gas generation outside our borders to heat your home. There's a few of these kind of logical disconnects that I think are detrimental to our economy, obviously, but also I'm not sure they're really accomplishing the climate objective either.
Stewart Muir:So we're counting those calories if they're domestic but not if they're imported. So natural gas use is frowned upon and even being eliminated at the-created electricity, as long as it's from outside of BC, without any climate accounting for that. Is that true?
Barry Penner:Yes, and without any carbon tax applying to the imports. No carbon tax right but if they generate it in BC, they have to pay carbon tax on the natural gas. That goes into that, but not if it's coming from Alberta or south of the border on the natural gas. That goes into that, but not if it's coming from Alberta or south of the border.
Stewart Muir:Now, is that an argument for being able to use natural gas in BC, or is it an argument for there being only zero emissions electricity?
Barry Penner:period? That's a good question. I think we can do both. Actually you have to do both because there are times when the renewables are not available in terms of wind. You know, interesting in the United States, despite record amounts of investment in the last couple of years in renewables solar and wind they've actually had their peak production ever from natural gas for electricity this past summer, like in July. And that's despite increased amounts of solar and wind being built. They still had to use more natural gas than ever before to generate enough electricity. And why is that? It's because on those very hottest days, when people from New York to Los Angeles and Phoenix in between were cranking up their air conditioners, it wasn't windy and the heat persisted after sunset. So the solar wasn't particularly helpful.
Barry Penner:And then people talk about what about battery storage? Well, the existing battery storage is usually good for a short period of time an hour or two max and it's depleted, so it can provide a bit of a bridge or help with ramping, you know, up and down over a short period of time. But for extended periods, where we're talking more than six hours, or for multiple days, according to a report I've come across from PowerX, the trading arm, PowerX monetizes the extra electricity made in BC and sells it to places like California for a lot of money sometimes.
Barry Penner:Or, if it's not extra, just importing and selling even when we're not in a surplus.
Barry Penner:Right, it's both ways. As long as there's a price differential, they can make money on that. But according to a report from PowerX, I think, in June, during that cold snap we had in January, battery storage in the Pacific Northwest actually probably was a net drain on the system because it didn't help across multiple days. We had a cold snap that was three or four days and those batteries were depleted in three or four hours and then they tried to recharge them, so actually drawing more power out of the system at a time when we were already short.
Stewart Muir:Well, let's hope that that technology improves. I noticed in California that they've seemingly extended the amount of time that they can store that midday solar so that it starts to change not to get into the technical talk, but the so-called duck curve. How would you say? Efi, that's, the Energy Futures Institute can balance the need for reliable energy and environmental concerns and affordability, which is also known as the energy trilemma. The trilemma which we're sort of obsessed about at the Power Struggle podcast.
Barry Penner:Right. I think it's being realistic and leveling with ourselves that we in British Columbia, as much as we want to, we're not going to solve the climate crisis on our own. This is, and it's not, a defeatist statement. I support renewables where they make sense and reducing our emissions and improving efficiency whenever we can, but the reality is we in British Columbia are not going to meaningfully move the needle on global emissions because we're such a small player. We are already punching above our weight and we should continue to do so, but there needs to be a reckoning of what does this cost us. If we really were to ban the use of natural gas for home heating and mandate electric vehicles for everyone, what will this cost? Who's going to pay and what will the impacts be to society when we're not currently equipped to deliver the required electricity for those end uses?
Stewart Muir:What makes you nervous about the future?
Barry Penner:Well, there's a lot to make you nervous, but you have to still keep your feet on the ground and move forward, and you have to make decisions based on the information you have in front of you. And hope is not a plan. So we can hope that there's a magic bullet coming 20 years. But what do we know now and what can we reasonably anticipate? Demand for electricity is going up anyway, with new technologies like artificial intelligence and EVs are coming and they will continue to take a greater share, and there's all other kinds of technologies that depend on electricity. Look at your gadgets, your iPhones, your iPads, your laptops, your sound systems whatever it is, it runs on electricity. Look at your gadgets, your iPhones, your iPads, your laptops, your sound systems whatever it is, it runs on electricity. So it's a pretty safe bet. We're going to need more. The rate of growth in electricity demand is already well ahead of historical averages over the last few decades, and that's before some of these new policies really bite. Like I said, that mandate for 90% EVs that's not in place yet. I mean it's legislative but it bites in 2029. But we're already seeing unprecedented electricity growth before that bites.
Barry Penner:So it's that kind of reckoning that I worry about and the impact of what happens before then. Will auto manufacturers continue to allocate the same number of vehicles to British Columbia if they think they're going to have to pay this $20,000 fine that the BC government's mandated in their legislation for vehicles that don't comply? I don't think so. They will work to avoid that. So one way they could do that is by withholding vehicles from British Columbia.
Barry Penner:So then what happens? I think, all things being equal, the price goes up. My basic economics training the supply and demand curves. You restrict supply, demand is still there, price goes up and so, in a cost of living crisis, what does that do to affordability? Kind of the philosophy I guess I have in looking at this is closing the door too early to other options can lead to a very bad outcome. If you don't have backup sources of power when you need it, you can get yourself in a lot of hurt, like if a hospital doesn't have electricity when they're going to be doing major surgery. You have a problem, so you need backup sources of energy.
Stewart Muir:If you were to build a map of that energy trilemma in terms of cheap, environmentally friendly and reliable energy, where would you stand among those three points?
Barry Penner:I would put an emphasis on reliability, because the consequences of not having access to energy and, in particular, electricity when you need it, is just so dire. Again, it's just something you can hardly fathom. Electricity when you need it, it's just so dire.
Stewart Muir:Again, it's just something you can hardly fathom. Barry Penner, what a great conversation this has been today. Thanks for coming on. Power Struggle.
Barry Penner:Very welcome. Great to be here.
