West Coast Olefins 5.6-billion dollar petrochemical plant relocation to Prince George has garnered differing views from Mayor Lyn Hall and Lheidli T’enneh Chief Clay Pountney.
The company secured back its original location of the BCR Industrial site after moving it north to McLeod Lake in May.
Hall told MyPGNow.com a project of this magnitude can help spur economic recovery.
“We want to have people become interested in this community from an investment perspective and we’ve seen that and we have seen a great deal of that over the last five or six years.”
“We are seeing a tremendous amount of companies within Prince George providing services to the resource sector whether it would be mining, the LNG, pipeline construction and those sorts of things, it’s another one of those major pieces of the puzzle when you talk about restarting the economy. If you take a look at the project and the magnitude of it, the impact it would have on the economy when it comes to job opportunities for a number of people. This is really something we have talked about as a city.”
However, Pountney stated the proposed petrochemical plant hasn’t been on good footing.
“This project has been moving around Northern BC for some time and all I can really say is that we are kind of right where we started two years ago when they first started coming around and had that big announcement and they really haven’t built much trust in my opinion.”
Discussions between the host first nation and West Coast Olefins have been ongoing since February of 2018 but have proven to be fruitless.
“We will see what happens in the new year when they come and reengage but we have worked with them extensively for the past two years and we are still right where we started.”
“That should speak a lot for itself.”
Pountney and McLeod Lake Indian Band Chief Harley Chingee issued a joint statement today (Thursday), saying they are not in support of it moving back to the BCR site and no future negotiations are planned.
In any case, Dayi Pountney noted a lot of hurdles need to be cleared in order for the petrochemical plant to move forward in the northern capital.
“When people always say, oh this project and they think that this is very easy to push something like this through there are many different phases first. There’s the environmental, which we don’t know what it looks like and then there was controversy about the airshed, things like that do come out in the environmental assessment of it and we will have to wait and see what that looks like.”
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