BC Liberals offer energy dividend

Photo: The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Liberal leader Christy Clark gives high fives to students from Port Edwards community school in Port Edwards, B.C. Friday, April 19. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

BC Liberal Leader Christy Clark says northern British Columbia is booming again and a Liberal government will make sure the communities that will pay the price for that boom will collect some of the cash.

Clark was in the Skeena Valley, on the final day of a whirlwind northern tour to sell her plans for BC's future.

She ended her day with a rally in Richmond, BC, where she announced she'd like to see a school of traditional Chinese medicine built.

"The northwest is becoming a boomtown again," Clark said after a rally in Terrace, a bustling city nestled in the mountains along the Skeena River and the oil and gas starting gate of the race to the BC coast and the markets of Asia.

Hydro power projects, mining, forestry, liquefied natural gas and just about anything else that can be put in a pipe, if it can be floated to China, there is a project online, underway or in the works somewhere nearby.

Clark announced Friday a Liberal government would negotiate a rural dividend plan that would see communities along a project path benefit directly.

Details have yet to be worked out with rural leaders, she said, but money would come from the Prosperity Fund announced in her throne speech to help fund infrastructure in communities that will see, Clark hopes, a flood of workers and activity.

"The communities that produce the resource experience growth and real change, and they have trouble managing it," Clark said on the third day of a whirlwind northern campaign tour.

Clark said the dividend would be about $25 million a year starting in 2015-2016, with more to come from LNG revenues.