With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/411627
70 BCBusiness december 2014 It's right there on the province's licence plates: Beautiful British Columbia. That natural beauty serves as the foundation for a tourism industry that generated $13.5 billion in revenue in 2012, and a lot of it is generated on the coast. "The product that we sell in British Columbia is nature," says Evan Loveless, executive director of the Wilderness Tourism Association of British Columbia. "We have many different sectors within our nature-based tourism sector, whether it's skiing in the mountains or kayaking in the ocean. But the reason people come to do that in British Columbia is because of the natural setting we have." And while a major spill would have obvious consequences for tour operators who operate on or near the north coast, Loveless says it would also have serious second- order impacts. "Typically, people are going to come to British Columbia for three weeks to a month, and maybe only one week of their trip will be spent partaking in that specific adventure … [but] if they're not coming for that trip, they're not coming to British Columbia. They're going to go somewhere else." B.C.'s coastal waters generate hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity every year in the form of recreational activities like sport fishing and a variety of commercial fishing opera- tions. Commercial fishing alone employs approximately 16,000 people in B.C., and it, along with the fish processing and sport fishing industries, generates nearly $1.7 billion in annual rev- enues. While the construction of Northern Gateway wouldn't necessarily impact that activity, it would put those industries at greater risk than they face today. A 2012 report by UBC fisheries economists Ngaio Hotte and Rashid Sumaila—sponsored by the World Wildlife Foundation—found that the costs of a major oil spill would be considerable. "We compared the economic benefits of the project to potential losses of spills of varying scales and found that a large-scale spill could cost local fishermen, the Port of Prince Rupert, BC Ferries and marine tourism operators roughly $300 mil- lion, 4,000 full-time jobs and $200 million in contribution to GDP over 50 years," Hotte said at the time of the report's release. cOaStaL tOURiSM cOMMERciaL fiShing $13.5B Annual value of B.C.'s tourism industry It's no great secret that companies in the business of building and deploy- ing pipelines stand to directly benefit from the construction of a project as massive as Northern Gateway. But the ones that are in the business of doing the less glamorous work that precedes the actual laying of pipe might stand to reap even larger rewards. That's because there's just so much of it, from clearing the brush and prepar- ing the site to building the access roads and the facilities along the way. Indeed, the very nature of B.C.'s geography makes that kind of work more important—and more voluminous—than normal. "Any time that a pipeline crosses a body of water, whether it be a stream or a lake, they have to have 12-month road access into these points with valve shutoff," Zandberg says. "And when you cross into B.C., there are a lot of points where we'll have to have these additional roads built." ■ DivErSiFiED SERvicE PROvidERS Northern Gateway will cross some 773 water courses over its 1,177 kilometres, and each of those sites will require year-round road access Winner Loser Loser