Come home, come home, come home, says Christy Clark

Christy Clark at the Trucker Loggers Association conference.

THE#BCBIZDAILY
Christy Clark calls workers West, and the perks (and pains) of life off the grid

Christy Clark wants you to come home
Christy Clark has a message British Columbians working on the flagging oil sands: come home. “Many of [them] will now be looking for work, so my call to them is to come home. Come home, come home to your province where you were born and you want to raise your children,” said Clark to an audience of truck loggers at their annual convention in Victoria. Clark also touched the government’s ambition to oversee three LNG plants in operation by 2020: “The script that we had for LNG is not going to proceed… in the way that we’d expected it to.” She added that some companies might be attracted to B.C. by the low Canadian dollar and a skilled workforce, despite the slide in the price of oil, to which natural gas is pegged. (As for the fate Fort McMurray, where the premier plans to kick off her ‘Come Home’ ad campaign: if only it could kickstart its tourism sector.)

Life off the grid
Feel like you’ve been priced out of the Lower Mainland? Here’s a cheap option: buy a plot of land and live off the grid. That’s what David and his wife Sally Cox, two white-collar urbanites, attempted a decade ago on a small island at the top of the Georgia Straight. Now David has lived to tell his story about one affordable alternative to condo living in an e-book released last week. “Everything you do, you do yourself,” he explained in an interview with the CBC. “Water comes from the creek, power from solar panels and some of our food from the beach.

Mining meetup
Last year was the worst one for mineral exploration since the end of the 2008 recessionaccording to Gavon Dirom, the president of the Association for Mineral Exploration B.C. The industry’s many challenges—from major miners pairing back investments to juniors facing a financing crunch—will be the theme of this year’s Mineral Exploration Roundup, being held in Vancouver later this week. But there might be a silver lining: advanced exploration work in B.C. for new precious metal mines is at a historic high.