 We'll just give folks a minute or two to join and then we'll get going. Okay, good morning everyone. I'd like to begin by acknowledging that I'm joining you from the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Swahilite peoples. My name is Fen Biggs and I am the Canadian Oil Program Director here at stand.org. We're here today to release our new report, Subsidizing Climate Change. I'm going to introduce you to our panel first and then I'll walk you through some of the highlights of our report. So we're joined today by Vanessa Corkle, she's a Policy Advisor on Canadian Energy Transitions with the International Institute for Sustainable Development. We also have Fergus Canard with us. Fergus is the Economist who did the analysis that underpins our report and he'll talk to you a little bit about the methodology and work we did. And we're also joined by Alexander Woodsworth, Campaign Director at the Dogwood BC. So our report is based on an analysis of this year's BC budget. We went through on line by line through the budget itself and the supporting document, the ministerial service plans and identified fossil fuel subsidies using the World Trade Organization's definition. We found that this year the BC government will give $1.3 billion in subsidies, tax breaks, and other incentives to the fossil fuel industry. This is more than double the amount that when John Horgan and the BC NDP took office. The single largest increase this year comes from the Deepwell royalty program. This is a tax loophole that's designed to support the fracking industry. It is now at $421 million. But because we give out these credits faster than companies can cash them in, there is an outstanding liability of Deepwell credits that are held by fracking companies that now equals about $3.1 billion. That equals lost future revenue for the province of British Columbia. This budget through its estimates goes out to 2023, 2024, and it shows by that year fossil fuel subsidies will have raised to $1.8 billion. That will include a 150% increase in the Deepwell royalty credit. Additionally, this year the gap between the amount of money that the province takes in in terms of oil and gas royalties and the amount we give out in fossil fuel subsidies grew again. This year there's a five-fold amount of subsidies for every dollar that we brought in in royalties. At $182 million, royalty revenue is actually quite low in comparison to some other sources for the province. We took a look at other forms of revenue and found that for instance, BC makes less off oil and gas royalties than they do for vehicle licensing and permit registration, which is a pretty amazing fact. We also found that this year again BC spent more on fossil fuel subsidies than we did on clean BC, the provinces plan to fight climate change. In fact, in future years that gap is going to grow according to big budget estimates. Then finally we found that the province has consistently over the last five budgets underestimated the costs of fossil fuel subsidies and been low on that number every year and has overestimated future royalty revenue from the oil and gas industry. For instance, over the last five years the government predicted that royalty revenues from natural gas would increase by about 15.7%. In an actuality, they only rose by 4% over the same time. On the petroleum side, the numbers are even worse. They predicted a 2.1% increase when in reality those royalties fell by over 13%. This is the highlights from our report. You can find it online at Standout Earth and I hope you will all check out the full report. I'm going to pass it over to Vanessa now to talk about some of the broader context around fossil fuel subsidies. Thanks and congrats to Standout Earth on the release of this report. I'm speaking to you today from Ottawa and CDL-Gonkwinon-Oshami Territory. Just to contextualize the findings of this report, as momentum is increasing for a green recovery worldwide, including in Canada. We saw in mid-May the International Energy Agency release a major report modeling pathways to a net zero emissions economy. That report made it crystal clear that government investment in new fossil fuel production has to end this year if the world is to meet its climate targets. And provincial governments like BC cannot be exempted from this. Ultimately, fossil fuel subsidies make it cheaper for the recipients to produce and consume fossil fuels. So cheaper to pollute. And money put towards fossil fuels works against positive policies like carbon pricing that aim to put a price on pollution. Essentially like raising taxes on cigarettes to discourage smoking while giving those companies tax breaks to make more profits in cigarettes. So it's incongruous policies that we need to fix. There are particularly worrying trends in BC. We did a report on BC subsidies that looked at 2017 figures and back then outstanding royalty credits were at 2.6 billion. The jump to 3.1 in just a couple of years is really worrying. These types of subsidies distort the market and make fossil fuel investments and production seem artificially attractive, tilting the market away from the clean energy we so desperately need. Royalty adjustments are a huge problem in BC. We look at Canada writ large. It is the second largest provider of subsidies to fossil fuels among Canadian provinces. Royalties are supposed to pay for public goods when companies extract publicly owned resources. It is supposed to fund things like clean energy, housing, education. But instead, we are making it cheaper to create the climate change, which will have rapidly rising costs if we don't start to deal with this in a strong way. More worryingly is the emphasis that BC is putting on LNG or fracking. An example would be the 20-year agreement that the government of BC signed with LNG Canada, which was the clincher for their final investment decision and therefore also the clincher for the final investment decision of coastal gas link. This type of government support makes projects viable that would not otherwise be economic and can help lock in high carbon assets that might be surrounded by assets in the future. LNG is particularly problematic because we are seeing a continued argument from the gas industry that gas can be a bridge fuel. This argument is 30 years old and there is much evidence to debunk it. Recent research from the IASD energy team in Geneva released last week shows that there is no room for more fossil fuels of any kind, including gas, that renewables are much cheaper than gas, especially in power generation in countries like Asia. It is also a poor solution to energy access. Also because of the methane leakage associated with gas, it is not a clean solution and we should not be putting emphasis on this at all. So in closing, it is vital that as we are recovering from COVID that governments take a long hard look at what they're doing to support climate change policy and also their policies that might be working against that. And in particular, the BC oil and gas royalty review that has been promised is a huge opportunity that the BC government should not squander. It is extremely important that we deal with provincial fossil fuel subsidies in Canada and it is critical to address them if Canada and BC, as a contributor to that, is going to help meet our climate change goals under the Paris Agreement and our global commitments on fossil fuel subsidy phase out. Thanks. Thank you, Vanessa. I will very briefly talk through the call methodology of the analysis that underpinned this report. As Fenza already mentioned, it was done by looking directly at the 2021 BC budget. In particular, there were three key budget documents that contained the majority of the figures that underpinned the analysis. So the first and probably most important is the budget and fiscal plan that outlines at a high level the key revenue and expense measures across the entire BC budget. Secondly, were ministerial service plans. They outlined the operational and capital expenditures of individual ministries and in particular focus of this report were the Ministry of Environment and Climate Strategy, the Ministry of Energy, Minds and Low Carbon Innovation and the Ministry of Forest, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development often called Flinrope. The other document of interest were the 2021 estimates papers and they just get into a little bit more detail about individual revenue and expense items and provide a little bit more colour to the programs that the money is attached to. So with those documents in hand, the methodology for the analysis in the reports was quite simple. I read through them all and highlighted expenditures and programs that related to the consumption and production of fossil fuels, as well as those that related to climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as a handful of other programs and expense measures of interest often used for comparison to contextualise kind of the scale of spending on fossil fuels and climate change. Budget items that contributed to fossil fuel subsidisation figures that you'll find in the report include things like direct capital expenditure on fossil fuel projects or enabling infrastructure, as well as things like tax credits and exemptions for elements of the fossil fuel production supply chain, as well as exemptions and credits on the consumption of end products. Fossil fuel revenue sources cited in the report were also sourced directly from the government's own estimates. They can be found in the budget and fiscal plan. Once all of these relevant revenue and expense measures were categorised and captured for the current budget and its current plan period, I then went back through previous budgets starting from the 2016-17 budget year, working my way back up to our current year to track how the items identified had changed over time and to see whether there were any other programs or expense measures of interest that were introduced or paid for during that period and have since been discontinued or reformatted into a different program. I also tracked how these items identified in the current year were behaving over the current plan period, so I think Sven mentioned before, out to the year 2023-24 to track at least what the government is projecting as a future trend for the items of interest. Once all this information was compiled together, I conducted some basic trend analysis to see what elements of the budget were growing or shrinking and at what rate and some basic comparative analysis to other large features of the budget to try to contextualise the scale of both fossil fuel subsidisation, the revenue generated from its extraction as well as the province response to climate change. So I guess that's the, at a high level, the methodology for report. I would just, I guess, conclude by saying, I think, and maybe I'm biased because I'm an economist, but budgets are a really great way of drilling down into what a government's priorities actually are on paper. They're often underutilised for good reason. They're incredibly boring and long and sometimes hard to read, but they are a really great way of holding a government to account and tracking what is really important to decision makers. So my hope is that this analysis can paint a clearer picture for the state of fossil fuel support in this province and potentially inform action moving forward. Thanks. Thank you, Fergus. Alexandra? Thanks, Ben. Hi, I'm Alexandra Woodsworth. I'm calling in today from unceded seashell territory on the Sunshine Coast. Thanks so much, Ben and Stan and Fergus for putting together this report and inviting me to join today. So at Dogwood, we are campaigning to move the sea beyond gas in order to build a safe climate future. So I follow this issue pretty closely, but every time I hear it laid bare, as my colleagues have just done for you here today, the reality of what is happening here in BC with fossil fuel subsidies just hits me every single time. We're literally paying private, foreign-owned corporations to carry away BC's public resource and to profit from polluting our air and fueling the climate crisis. And we're doing it at the expense of other urgent priorities. So this is a zero-sum game. Every public dollar handed over to the fossil fuel sector is what is not available for other things British Columbians need, like healthcare and housing and renewable energy projects and clean tech. So one of the things in the report that was really concerning for me to see was how handouts to oil and gas are ballooning, obviously, but clean energy investments are falling so dramatically, looking around 75% down from last year to next year. Obviously, exactly the opposite of what scientists are telling us and now even the world's most influential energy forecasters at the IEA are telling world governments they need to do. It's the opposite of what our neighbors, our nearest competitors are doing. Joe Biden just announced plans to ax $35 billion worth of oil and gas subsidies from the U.S. budget, you know, citing market distortion, running counter to his goals of energy security, clean energy economy. The Canadian government has committed to phasing out fossil fuel subsidies by 2025. And as Vanessa mentioned, now we are second only to Alberta here in D.C. in terms of, yeah, how much provision we provide in terms of support for this sector. And it's showing in our emissions, which have risen faster than any other province in the country since the Paris climate accord. And they're on track to keep rising, unlike places like the U.S. and the EU. So Premier Horgan continues to sell British Columbians this myth that we're a climate leader, that we have the best climate plan in North America. And it's simply not true. And nothing symbolizes this more than spending twice as much to fund increased fracking than we do on climate action. This is what some folks call the new climate denial. Leaders say they get the climate crisis, but they are not practicing the policies that align with what the science says we need to do. So increasing handouts to oil and gas is also the opposite of what many NDP MLAs advocated passionately against when they were in opposition. They slammed the B.C. liberals for selling out B.C.'s future, for padding corporate profits, for the great giveaway to oil and gas companies. But since coming to power, as we've seen in this report, the NDP has completely doubled down on these subsidies. Even as the economy has been reeling in this pandemic, they have found more money than last year to hand out to big oil and gas companies, which is really fundamentally at odds with the NDP's core commitment to look out for everyday people. With these subsidies, instead of making life affordable for everyday folks, they are looking out for the rich and powerful at the top and for foreign-owned companies. It's also totally at odds with what British Columbians expect from their government. We know from polling that folks want strong action on climate. They support clean energy. And I think this is where the NDP faces some choices going forward. I think so far they've coasted on an outdated perception that B.C. is a climate leader. Awareness of this true emissions picture of the choices our government's making to use our tax dollars in this way on such a scale to finance this polluting industry remains relatively low. But polling also shows that our attachment in this province to natural or clean B.C. brand is very strong. And there's strong questions about what will happen as reality sinks in that when it comes to climate, we may be closer to dirty B.C., sort of sponsored by our tax dollars. So fossil fuel subsidies became a major issue during the provincial election. Public pressure resulted in this commitment from the NDP to review oil and gas royalties. And that process is coming later this year. And if it's fair and transparent and allows public participation, this is really going to shine an unprecedented spotlight on this this costly counterproductive outdated practice of subsidizing pollution. And the outcome of this review could really be seen as a litmus test for the B.C. NDP's commitments to climate action. Either they keep funding the main industry fielding emissions and B.C.'s climate camp plan keeps failing. Or they cut off these subsidies as really kind of like a baseline step for meaningful commitment to decarbonization. Yeah, so it's a choice, really prop up a sunset industry, keep looking out of touch with the strides being made by our neighbors, by our competitors, with the B.C. public with their own base, really, or cut those funds off and send a strong signal to climate concerned voters that B.C. is seriously about getting back on track when it comes to climate leadership. Thank you. Thank you, Alex. I'll just wrap up by saying that, you know, last December, the province came out with its first climate accountability report. And that showed that the gap to our 2030 target had grown yet again and that we are further behind. Report also found that there are two particular sectors that are lagging behind the rest of the economy dramatically, oil and gas and heavy trucking. Oil and gas contributes just three percent to B.C.'s GDP and is about half of one percent of the jobs. This is a very small industry that's getting a disproportionate amount of provincial funding that props it up and keeps it alive. At a time when we are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money into fighting climate change to try to reduce the impact, the simplest thing to do here is to end these subsidies and align the government's rhetoric and its actions. So later this year, as both Vanessa and Alexandra referenced, the province is going to conduct a royalty review. They promised that during the election and in the mandate letters, this is an opportunity for them to take a hard look at things like the deep well royalty credits that have basically is a case where, you know, they were brought in to support the fracking industry when it was in its infancy and was a new technology. But today over 80 percent of the wells in British Columbia are fracking wells and almost every single producer is in line for the hand up for these subsidies. We're no longer supporting innovation or a bridge fuel. We are supporting climate change. And the people of British Columbia have the right to know about that and that's why we've made these figures public today. With that, I'm going to open it up to questions. You can either use the Q&A function here in Zoom, raise your hand with the little button or just type straight in the chat and I will help fill up those questions. I've got one here in the chat that I think might be a good question for Vanessa. Can you talk a little bit about the clean infrastructure royalty program and whether this is a good fossil fuel subsidy because it reduces methane emissions or whether it's still problematic? Yeah, it's a really good question. So I think often what happens is governments are in a tough political position because they want to introduce a positive policy like carbon pricing, but they also want to bring heavy emitters and get their support. So in this sense, I think this royalty program being focused on methane leakage in theory could be a positive idea, but the reality is that it's still a subsidy. So we at ISD work with international definitions of subsidies. So the term of subsidy that has been defined by the World Trade Organization that over 170 countries have agreed to includes this type of subsidy even if there is an environmental benefit. And the reason is often it is actually cheaper for governments to achieve the same policy goals with different policies. So subsidies that have social environmental benefit should only be in place if there is literally no other viable alternative to them. And the onus should be on the government to demonstrate that. The other problem is that this is not happening in a vacuum. This infrastructure royalty, the clean infrastructure royalty program is actually one of a number of royalty credits. If there were no other royalty credits, then maybe you could argue that it is actually having some some outsized benefit that would justify keeping it. But the reality is that this adds to the many royalty credits that many of these companies are already receiving. So arguably is not an efficient subsidy. And so I think it's important to not get just accept the usefulness of a subsidy because it has some environmental claims. Thanks, Vanessa. I have one here for Alex Alexander. Obviously, old growth logging in Ferry Creek have been in the news a lot. Some people have called that a betrayal of the NDP's commitment on the environment. Do you think the fossil fuel subsidies are similar betrayal? Well, I think we have to go back and look at how strongly British Columbians believe in climate action and want to see that level of action here in BC. And yeah, the BC government has consistently the NDP has consistently made those commitments has consistently said that it will align with Paris. It will take these steps. And I think this is where this kind of new climate denialism comes in. We see we see them talking at both sides of their mouth so that we have some good investments. We do have some steps being taken. But we have a budget just coming out that shows projections of fracking increasing by 30 percent over the next few years. And obviously the funding that goes along that you've highlighted here today. So these two commitments absolutely don't line up. And that really does need to be highlighted more. And I think folks are ready to see that now. I think the old growth logging situation has kind of burst a bit of a bubble and really brought that level of public attention onto a number of BC's, you know, BCNDP's failures when it comes to the climate file. And yeah, I think climate voters, the more and more they see what's happening here, the more we get this awareness out there, are going to to really start to realize that, you know, the BC government's record is certainly not add up to to its its rhetoric. And that really needs to change. Okay, thank you all. I am not seeing any other questions in the chat. So I'll just remind everybody that you should have our release with a link to the report in your inbox. And that if you would like to do a one-on-one interview with any one of our panelists, there's media contact information there. Thank you everybody for joining us and thank you to the panel.