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August 28, 2026
 
Considering how bad the business case is for LNG in B.C., a lot of people wonder why the province is pushing so hard to build it out.

Royalties, baby.

Companies that want to frack gas in B.C. have to pay for the privilege, forking over a percentage of revenue to public coffers.

David Eby’s government has been dealing with a deficit right from the start, so they’re looking for every cent they can to pump up the budget. New gas royalties, they said, were going to fill the bucket in a major way - and fix a decades-long failure to make companies pay their fair share for extracting a public resource.

But someone screwed up when they did the math.

This week, it was revealed that the government made a major mistake in calculating how much the province will earn in royalties. They’ve been selling the public on the need for LNG expansion based on a billion-dollar accounting error.

When asked about the error at a press conference on Tuesday, Premier David Eby said he was “not familiar with any error in the budget related to oil and gas revenues.”

But the chiefs of four Treaty 8 First Nations — groups whose territory has been heavily impacted by the explosion of fracking in B.C.’s northeast — have proof they gave Eby a letter identifying the alleged budget error and its long-term consequences.

Treaty 8 chiefs say the province has “cast aside” input from the nations, and “capitulated to the aggressive lobbying of multi-jurisdictional major corporations.”

B.C.’s reliance on royalties – instead of taxing companies – is astronomical. Royalties account for up to 94 per cent of what the province collects from the sector, against about five per cent from the industrial carbon tax and up to one per cent from corporate income taxes.

If their numbers are as off base as they appear to be, taxpayers will be losing billions, at the same time as the biggest gas companies operating in B.C. have reaped massive windfall profits. That’s money that could pay for multi-year health care improvements, schools and climate mitigation.

For more on the mistake, and Treaty 8’s fears that the province wants to “sweep this under the rug", read the bombshell article.
 
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An "No AI" town hall, a climate solutions fair and a webinar with a climate scientist. Get the event details...
 
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