With Funding in hand, Northwest Resource Benefits Association prepares for community engagement

Now that they have some 300,000 dollars in funding in hand, the Northwest BC Resource Benefits Alliance is making its plans to consult with stakeholders across the region, seeking engagement with select proponents for major projects, with plans to expand their consultation process to include labour unions, local businesses, the community non profit sector and First Nations.

The focus of the engagement which is take place through the summer and fall will be to discuss ways to strengthen economic development in the Northwest.

There is also a plan to host community meetings later in the year, along with information sharing sessions set to be planned with local First Nations.

The update on the plans came from an information release in late June,  which charts the timeline for the Association through the summer.

As for the main mission of the NWBCRBA, that of negotiating a new funding agreement with the province when it comes to resource development, there is no new information to share with the public to this point as to the state of those negotiations.

The British Columbia government has also had little to share as to how they plan to approach the Northwest groups' ambitions towards a greater share of resource revenues, something that Skeena MLA Ellis Ross made note of back in  April as he attempted to learn if there was any progress at hand on those issues.

At the time, Minister Selina Robinson, noted that the the 300,000 dollars was designed to help the the Northwest Association build relationships across the region, but offered up no indication as to whether any actual negotiations towards deliver of resource revenues for the communities were set to get underway or in the planning stages.

Prince Rupert Mayor Lee Brain is one of the many community representatives with the group, serving on the political committee of the organization, though in recent months his notes on the progress of the group have been few and far between.

The last mention of the work of the Association came during Mr. Brain's Hays 2.0 presentation of April, when outlined the imbalance between the Peace Country which has a resource benefit agreement with province, with that of the North Coast and the rest of Northwest BC which doesn't.

"I'm on the political committee of this RBA and we've been meeting every Friday at 2 o'clock, we have a conference call and what we've been doing is had a strategy in place to get 300,,000 dollars out of the provincial government to help capacity funding so we can start a process of negotiating with the government ... We're now discussing our negotiating strategy and we have our group together and we're going to start, come May , meeting with the Ministry of Finance to start hashing out what this is going to look like ... if we can get this done, it's not just about Rupert this is  the whole area this would be significant revenue coming into our communities. -- Mayor Brain in April, speaking on the work of the Northwest BC Revenue Benefits Alliance

With their update of June, it would seem that the relationship building process has indeed been picking up speed, with more meetings and discussions around the Northwest on the agenda.

However when it comes to the desire for additional money for the range of concerns that the communities have raised over the last few years, that process seems to be on a slower timeline with few details available as to how close the NWBCRBA may be to its goals.

You can retrace some of the key elements towards those hopes from our archive page here.

Cross posted from the North Coast Review.