Bob Zimmer is the Conservative Candidate for the Prince George Peace River Northern Rockies. He took over as the Conservative representative for this area when Jay Hill retired, forming the Conservative government under Stephen Harper, then moving on to opposition during the previous Liberal administration.
I never ever thought I’d be the Member of Parliament for the area. Never thought ever in life that I’d ever end up in Ottawa as a member of parliament. I was just like anybody. I was a carpenter. I was a young guy, just 19 years old, and I saw how much taxes taken off my cheques. It was a third, I’d worked about six months work and made about 30,000 and paid 10,000, and income tax. And then I started to pay attention to how Ottawa was spending my money. I got involved with the Reform Party, signed up when I was 19, but took a hiatus for a few years.
I was in university in 2003, and thought I should get involved again. Randy White was the MP where I was going to school. So I decided to help him out. And before I knew it, I was vice president of the riding down there. Moved back here to teach, and before I knew it, I was vice president here, then President within nine months. When Jay Hill was going to retire, people started to ask: Well, why don’t you run? And I thought I have four young children. It’s the right time in life. I’m in my early forties, so I thought: let’s get this thing going.
It comes down to a simple phrase that I’ve said many times, and it’s still the case: I want to make a difference. And that’s why I signed up to go to Ottawa. And there’s a lot of good people, Members of Parliament from all political stripes. The ones that go there to make a difference and people I can relate to.
When I started, we were in government, it was 2011. We had a majority. You could make a decision on things, and we had the numbers in the house to pass laws. It was good. There was things we did for LNG, the industry in the area. We are pro resource development, and it showed because trade in those resources was going well. In opposition, we didn’t have the majority anymore. But it doesn’t mean you can’t have influence as an individual member of parliament. But even still, we were able to affect and get things done. You don’t get as many things done when you have an opposition, but you can still get a lot done.
I live in Fort St. John and I was born in Dawson Creek, so I have a lot of connections to both of those communities. But I have connections to Tumbler Ridge. I come out here numerous times for the TR Cares golf tournament, and I was here when I was 15, working on the rec center with my dad. He was a super on that project.
I still consider myself a really down to earth normal guy, I don’t consider myself anybody special. So when I run into people, I talked to them and I have an honest curiosity about who they are and what they do. And I think that’s who we need In Ottawa that cares about everybody.
I’ve always said that. Some people perceive my position as the top of the pyramid, but I always see it as the opposite, I see it as the bottom. And we have 110,000 constituents here and I serve every one of them. That’s just the way I view my job. If you come into my office, I view my first goal is to provide good customer service.
The biggest issue this election—especially coming from a place like Tumbler—is resource development and getting it to market. I don’t need to tell anybody about how much a government that is not pro-resource development can affect a community that has mining as it’s backbone. The environment is still a big concern for a lot of residents of Tumbler, just like it is in the Peace. So we need to develop those resources and do it responsibility, but we do need to develop them. We think we have good story to offer the world. We have some of the best environmental practices for mining and for natural resources extraction on the planet. So why wouldn’t we have more Canada around the globe?
The market it what it is. Some are saying the market is the reason why our lumber companies are moving to the States. It is to a point, but if you back it up about, well, four years actually. The current government promised a soft lumber agreement, in conjunction with the Obama presidency. And the softwood lumber agreement for British Columbia is huge. And when that soft lumber agreement wasn’t renewed, like it was expected, tariffs were applied 25 percent. Last year, it was still manageable, they were still making money at $600 for a thousand board feet. But this year, the stumpage doubled, the price for lumber, drops by half—to $300 or so, and then you have no soft lumber agreement and still tariffs that are being applied as a result of that. These lumber companies see this coming, and they say, “we’re just going to move to the south.” How do we help that? Our job as the federal government is not to be in business, but to keep the gates of business open. So we will do our best to have trade agreements with trading partners. So we trade our natural resources, Keep those doors open, and have pro-resource policies in our government to rather than what we see with this current government, which seems to be regulation after regulation on top of an already robust system that. Bill C 69. We call it the “no pipelines bill,” because it’s already a robust system. Here they are going to layer on another two thirds of the regulations we already have on top of the ones we already have, essentially eliminating a new pipeline. So that’s where our government can be responsible, but also be with the mindset of getting it done.
We need to manage things like the annual allowable cut, so we have a sustainable future. And for LNG. Looking at the volume we have with the Montney Play and the Horn River Basin, We have 200 years plus of supply to export at the amounts that were being projected. So we have a lot of resources to export for a long period of time. And even for the folks that talk about renewable resources, These resources that we’re talking about developing are going to sustain us for quite a while, and give us a lot of time to figure out those renewables what they’re going to be. Because frankly, if we were to move to renewables tomorrow, we wouldn’t be able to heat our homes, we wouldn’t be able to drive down the road, we wouldn’t be able to fly across the country. So it gives us a lot of time to get things developed.
Should we develop our oil and gas resources or our renewable resources? I think we should do all of them. We have renewables, we have wind turbines. We also have geothermal around Valemount, which uses energy from the core of the Earth to make electricity and other things. We should be doing all of it and developing all of it. We have the expertise and the technology. So Let’s do it. This is the story that we have to bring to the world. And the example of natural gas, again, when you have an ambassador from Japan, coming to Canada saying, not just that, we want your gas, or we want your resources, but we need them. We’re getting off of nuclear energy, our people, We need your natural gas to heat our homes and to make electricity and all the rest. Because it’s clean. And it’s going to help. If you look at China, for instance, it has the potential to reduce emissions by half With the older inefficient generators by offsetting them with cleaner LNG. So we have a good story. If we were to stop all our natural resource development tomorrow—Fossil fuels and the like—if we were to go to zero tomorrow, it would take 21 days for China to overtake the amount that Canada sacrificed. So we’re going to sacrifice our entire economy for 21 days in a calendar year, and that’s forever, right? Well, that’s very short sighted in my book. We can be part of the overall plan to reduce emissions, while developing our resources and providing good community jobs and Canadians.
One example that I’ve heard is refining our own oil products here in Canada and selling a value added product to ourselves and to other places around the globe. Hundred percent, we should be doing all that we can in our own province to do that. But it’s difficult enough to try and get a pipeline built in Canada, just try and build a refinery in BC, because Elizabeth May and John Horgan and Thomas Mulcair at the time. So I think we should be doing more value added products, for the lumber industry, oil and gas industry, you name it, we should be doing it.
The phrase that we’ve used—and we really mean it—is technology not taxes. So again, instead of attacks that really do very little to reduce fossil fuel use, or pollution or emissions. You still have to get in your vehicle to come down to the golf course, come to see the debate. That isn’t changing. These aren’t niceties. You know, going to your job isn’t a nicety. Turning up the heat in the winter, because it’s cold isn’t a nicety. It’s survival. So to tax these things is aiming at the wrong target. We’ve even talked about eliminating GST off home heating bills, Because we realize that’s just not fair. If you talk about carbon tax, for it to be effective, you have to up the tax substantially to where you’re increasing the price of fuel by 30 to 50 cents a litre to even start making a dent. So on the other side, you’re looking at dramatically higher carbon tax costs for people for it to make a difference. But we think technology is the answer. And incentivizing. We’re still going after the Paris accord. That’s still the target that we’re shooting for. And we think we can get there.
I think everybody wants to see the caribou survived. There’s a reason why we live out here, Right? So we can go hunting, fishing, enjoy nature. We don’t want to see it go away. We don’t want to see the herds go away. We don’t see moose go to zero population either. It needs to be sustainable. One key tenet to our whole environmental plan is conservation. In Valemount, there’s a guy had been instrumental in remediating the headwaters of the Fraser. He’s done a lot of work in the community, getting donations to make this happen. He says, ‘guess how many of those Kinder Morgan protesters were up here to help remediate the stream?’ Because Valemount is on the path of the pipeline, right? Zero. And he said, Guess how much Kinder Morgan donated to help remediate that stream? And it was a substantial amount of money. What you have is real people on the ground that have awesome conservation mindsets that wants to, you know, make it sustainable for generations to come. We want to live in this kind of environment. So let’s keep it this way.
