{"id":82807,"date":"2015-12-10T14:58:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-10T15:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/resourcework2.devstudio.work\/?p=82807"},"modified":"2024-11-26T15:44:12","modified_gmt":"2024-11-26T15:44:12","slug":"a_better_approach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/resourcework2.devstudio.work\/?p=82807","title":{"rendered":"Group discussions: what does responsible development mean"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I\u2019ve just finished hosting a series of eight community discussion sessions across Metro Vancouver along with my colleagues at Resource Works. We spoke face to face with about 120 people, with participants representing business, community groups and local government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We will be putting out a full report on our findings from those sessions in December. But if I had to pick a single subject that stood out from the eight group discussions I was a part of, it would be that people desperately want a balanced assessment of resource development that they can trust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"u38650-11\"><strong>People are looking for a balanced discussion<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>The vast majority of the participants at our events expressed support for both economic development (including resource development) and also environmental stewardship. And there\u2019s this frustrating notion that if only things were done better we might be able to achieve this important balance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the problems is that resource issues are often presented as though they were absolute binary decisions: yes or no choices with no middle ground. At Resource Works, we want to get away from that kind of thinking, so when we held our conversation sessions, we didn\u2019t ask people whether they supported the economy OR the environment, whether they were pro OR anti resource industry. We asked them what responsible resource development meant to them. We asked them to describe a kind of resource development they could be confident in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When faced with important decisions on resource questions, we need to spend a bit more time asking \u201chow?\u201d rather than \u201cyes or no?\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"u38650-23\"><strong>What a \u201chow?\u201d conversation looks like<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Recently we saw the launch of Ecofiscal, a new Canadian think tank with a mission to promote environmental stewardship through economic policy. They\u2019re big fans of things like carbon pricing. What makes them relevant to this conversation is that they are adamant that we don\u2019t have to choose between the environment and the economy. We do not have to trade one for the other. We can develop both if we\u2019re smart about it. And they present a bold plan to back up that sentiment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was also impressed by a recent post by Marvin Shaffer on a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives blog. Shaffer is a well-respected economist and researcher who is regarded as being pretty solidly on the left of the political spectrum. He has been a research associate with the left-leaning CCPA for many years. (Full disclosure: I took a course on benefit-cost analysis taught by Shaffer at the SFU School of Public Policy in 2012.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Shaffer\u2019s recent blog post, aptly titled \u201cTime for a Different Approach,\u201d takes on concerns over Kinder Morgan\u2019s pipeline plans and the difficult choices faced by BC Ferries. He writes that \u201cit seems to me that there is a better policy answer to Kinder Morgan than outright rejection of its pipeline and terminal expansion proposal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I\u2019m not going to go into Shaffer\u2019s suggested solution in detail (it involves moving Kinder Morgan\u2019s facilities from Burnaby to Tsawwassen and consolidating the Lower Mainland ferry terminals), but to me the proposal is not as important as the attitude. His approach to the Kinder Morgan expansion isn\u2019t \u201cyes or no\u201d but \u201chow?\u201d And he bravely proposes some ambitious suggestions that he believes strike a middle ground between our shared economic and environmental concerns. Isn\u2019t that refreshing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"u38650-38\"><strong>Moving in the right direction<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>I\u2019m sure others will have problems with Shaffer\u2019s proposal and will prefer other options. Ditto for those of the Ecofiscal group. But by all means let\u2019s have those discussions. I\u2019d much rather be part of a debate where sensible people figure out the best \u201chow\u201d rather than the debates we seem to see most often, which involves entrenched \u201cyes\u201d and \u201cno\u201d factions duking it out with no intention of listening to each other. And this week I\u2019m a bit more optimistic that we\u2019re moving in the right direction.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The big question on my mind lately has been: how do we achieve a balanced discussion on the\u00a0tough issues? And I\u2019m apparently not the only one<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":87165,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[300,17,52,210,24],"class_list":["post-82807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oil-gas","tag-community-conversations","tag-environment","tag-pipelines","tag-research","tag-responsibility"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Group discussions: what does responsible development mean -<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/resourcework2.devstudio.work\/a_better_approach\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Group discussions: what does responsible development mean -\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The big question on my mind lately has been: how do we achieve a balanced discussion on the\u00a0tough issues? 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