George Heyman, MLA for Vancouver-Fairview Speaks to Bill 6  The Liquified Natural Gas Income Tax Act during its second reading in the Legislature of British Columbia.

“Well, if this chamber was a class in drama, I guess we’d be calling what’s happened over the last few days, with the introduction of this bill, the denouement. I don’t know if over the last 18 months to two years what we’ve been witnessing is an exercise in monomania or a Greek tragedy.

What we’ve seen in the months leading up to the election was a Premier, a government and candidates who were almost obsessed with the promise of LNG, obsessed to the point of pumping it up to great heights, of hyping it in the greatest of terms. The reason I referenced a Greek tragedy is we often see in Greek tragedies the central characters riding on top of the world, creating a fantasy about everything good that has happened and will happen in the future, and, as events unfold, they are brought crashing down to earth, often with a very heavy thud, often with very tragic circumstances.

What we see with this bill…. After months and months of hype, after months and months of talk about great return — paying off the province’s debt through a prosperity fund, elimination of the provincial sales tax, trillions of dollars in income, hundreds of thousands of jobs — we now see speakers on the other side, in support of this bill, dealing with the reality that this tax bill demonstrates, dealing with the reality of what the real return to the province of B.C. may be.

It is not that that return will be nothing. That’s not what I or any of my colleagues are claiming. What it will be, if some of these proposals go forward…. If one or two of them go forward, as many commentators on the industry believe is the likely outcome, we will see a piece of B.C.’s economy, a promising piece of B.C.’s economy — a piece of B.C.’s economy that if we do it right, with a number of conditions, will benefit some British Columbians. But it will not be the one single industry that takes care of all of B.C.’s problems.”