Creating an LNG ready worker: British Columbia’s blueprint for extraction education

ABSTRACT

Since 2011, the government of British Columbia (BC) has focused on building the Canadian province’s economy through the development of a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) sector. In service of this endeavour, the government launched the Skills for Jobs Blueprint, which attempts to more clearly align BC’s education system with resource extraction industries. In this paper, I argue that at the heart of this policy is the idea of education for, through, and as extraction. Conceptually, ‘extraction education’ focuses on supply (what we can take out of the earth, institutions, and individuals) rather than demand (what is needed to put into the educational system to meet needs of the land, institutions, communities, and individuals), and is problematic on environmental, economic, employment, equity, and educational fronts. In theorising ‘extraction education’ I extend Freire’s ideas on ‘banking education’ and briefly explore dialogic, problem-posing counters to it.

KEYWORDS:

• Canada
• LNG
• Freire
• policy
• extraction education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The BC Liberals are a centre-right, economically neoliberal party who head the provincial government. They have no affiliation with the Federal Liberal party (led by the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau). The BC Liberals are considered further to the right on economic policy than the Federal Liberal Party of Canada.

2 Note that Real estate leasing and rentals is the number one industry in Canada followed by manufacturing (Statistics Canada 2016a).

3 Alberta continues to invest heavily in its tar/oil sands. This is despite falling oil prices and a recent fire in 2015 that devastated the town at the centre of the oil patch (Giovannetti 2016).

4 BC produces approximately 1% of Canada’s petroleum (CAPP 2015)

5 Canada’s provinces are headed by ‘premiers’ which are similar to ‘governors’ in US states.

6 See note 1.

7 Canada’s Indigenous peoples belong to three different groups: the Metis, a distinct group of descendants of people of Aboriginal and European heritage; the Inuit, a group of people whose cultural homeland is in the North of Canada (particularly in Nunavut, Northwest Territories, northern Quebec and Labrador), and First Nations, other first peoples of Canada. There are 198 distinct First Nations in BC.

8 Most of the land in BC is unceded as there were never treaties signed with First Nations as there were in other provinces. This legally means First Nations retain rights and title to their land.

9 In historical perspective, the percentage of funding for higher education from the BC government went from nearly 90% in 1979, to nearly 80% in 1989, to just over 70% in 1999, to under 60% in 2009 (Ivanova 2012).

10 The University of the Fraser Valley is a relatively new university in BC founded in the 1970s to meet the demands for vocational training in the province. It became a university in 2008, and now grants undergraduate and graduate degrees as well as offering flexible admissions criteria and many trades and vocationally oriented diploma and certificate programs (“University of the Fraser Valley” 2016).

11 For examples of education and educational programming focused on sustainability within BC’s post-secondary institutions see: http://pdce.educ.ubc.ca/med-in-educational-studies-education-for-sustainability/, https://www.grad.ubc.ca/prospective-students/graduate-degree-programs/master-of-science-resources-environment-sustainability, http://www.sfu.ca/sustainabledevelopment.html, http://www.vcc.ca/media/vancouver-community-college/content-assets/documents/news-events/Enviro_Strat_Plan_14-17_FINAL.pdf, http://www.bcit.ca/sustainability/education/