Steady Ground in an Unsteady Season

Delegates will arrive in Vancouver in two weeks carrying more than the usual agenda. Nominations for the October 17th local elections close three days before the convention opens. The province has just come through a punishing fire season — more than 300,000 hectares burned, over 500 homes and structures damaged or destroyed, one life lost, and a state of provincial emergency that ran from August 8th until it was lifted on August 27th. And Canada's counter-tariffs on $27.6 billion of American goods take effect on September 8th, the week before we gather, after negotiations with Washington collapsed.

For anyone working to advance a major project in this province, four things follow.

Communities in transition ahead of the October elections

Six weeks after the convention closes, councils and boards will be reconstituted. Project relationships are too often built with individuals rather than institutions — a supportive mayor, a director who has been at the table since the beginning. When those people change, a proponent can find themselves explaining a project from first principles to a body that inherited the community's unanswered questions without the context behind them. Write commitments into the institutional record. Invest in staff, who are the continuity layer. And recognize that decision-making capacity narrows now and again in November.

The long recovery after a difficult fire season

The visible impacts are evacuations, air quality, and exhausted local staff — nine First Nations were still under evacuation when the provincial declaration was lifted. The longer arc matters more for our work. Severely burned watersheds behave differently for years — infiltration drops, sediment loads climb, debris-flow risk rises, and drinking water sources become vulnerable. Add several consecutive drought years and the cumulative effects picture in many regions no longer resembles the one in the original application. The question worth asking early is whether your environmental baseline still describes the landscape you are actually operating in. 

Changes in the political landscape

The Official Opposition has gone from 44 seats to 28 since the 2024 election, with nine of those departures in August alone. Most of the departing members now sit as independents, and several have said they intend to stand up a new centre-right party before the fall sitting. A byelection in Abbotsford-Mission on September 26th — eight days after the convention closes — will determine whether the Opposition leader takes a seat in the House at all. In mid-August the Premier made a small cabinet change following Finance Minister Brenda Bailey's cancer diagnosis, moving Josie Osborne to Finance and Ravi Kahlon to Health, with Minister Bailey taking Jobs and Economic Growth. We wish her a full recovery. We take no view on the politics. Our focus is on the operational reality: the file continues, but the faces may not. Projects that depend on a particular political champion are exposed to that change. Projects grounded in durable agreements are not.

Trade pressures in resource-dependent communities

Softwood duties in the mid-40 per cent range, new tariffs on panel products, and a counter-tariff list covering more than 700 American goods are not evenly distributed pressures. They land in Prince George, the Cariboo, the Kootenays, the North Island — the same communities hosting the mines, transmission lines, and energy projects on the province's priority list. Those communities have a strong economic case for new development and are being asked to absorb its impacts while recovering from fire. Both are true, and a proponent who acknowledges only the first will not be trusted on the second.

The through-line is this. The province has moved decisively on speed: roughly $88 billion in priority projects under Look West, streamlined permitting, coordinated federal referrals. Speed is worth having, but it is a delivery mechanism, not a source of certainty. Certainty comes from consent, credible baseline science, and commitments that survive an election. Where those foundations are thin, acceleration moves the conflict downstream into litigation and consultation challenges.

That is why Falkirk keeps its five practice areas integrated. Post-fire hydrology is a water question that becomes a permitting question. Cumulative effects is a land question that becomes a consent question. UNDRIP is a foundational value for our firm, not a compliance heading.

I will be at the convention September 14th to 18th and would welcome conversations on election-transition planning, post-fire baseline reassessment, and structuring commitments so they hold across a change in council.