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UBCM resolutions reveal a growing concern about whether B.C. can still deliver the conditions for growth.
By Stewart Muir
Delegates vote at the 2025 UBCM convention. The 2026 resolutions highlight concerns about B.C.’s capacity for economic growth. Photo: UBCM
Every year, the Union of B.C. Municipalities resolutions book arrives with the peculiar charm of a very large filing cabinet emptied onto a table.
Most motions are local or procedural. But taken together, they can reveal what municipal leaders are worrying about before the rest of the political system has quite found the language for it.
That is what makes the 2026 book interesting.
In this newly published interactive online resolution guide, we identified and analyzed 21 resolutions of particular significance to natural resources, energy, infrastructure, Indigenous partnerships and resource-community prosperity.
The striking thing is the pattern connecting them.
This isn’t simply another instalment of British Columbia’s familiar argument between development and environmental protection. Increasingly, municipalities are asking a different question:
Does British Columbia still have the capacity to make its economy work?
Capacity means electricity. Roads, railways and industrial land. Predictable access to fibre. Regulatory systems that can actually reach decisions. Working relationships among governments, Indigenous Nations and investors.
The clearest example is NR70 from Campbell River, titled “Immediate Action Required to Prevent Irreversible Economic Harm.”
It links regulatory delays and inconsistent federal and provincial policies directly to closures in forestry and aquaculture, then traces the effects through jobs, suppliers, Indigenous businesses and municipal revenues.
Campbell River is notable for another reason. It is the city that gave us the Alliance of Resource Communities, bringing together mayors and other local leaders around the economic future of resource-dependent communities. That makes its appearance here more than incidental. Campbell River has been developing an explicitly municipal voice on resource policy.
When a company complains about regulatory uncertainty, governments know where to file the complaint.
When a municipality says that uncertainty is threatening the viability of the community itself, the argument changes.
This is not really a case for deregulation. Good regulation is essential. Environmental standards matter. Indigenous rights have to be accommodated.
What economies cannot absorb indefinitely is indeterminate regulation: unknowable timelines, changing rules after capital is committed, jurisdictions that cannot coordinate, and policy decisions made without serious examination of their downstream economic effects.
The argument isn’t “get government out of the way.”
It is: make government work.
Electricity is the second major theme.
Another Campbell River resolution raises Vancouver Island’s supply dependence, constrained electricity availability and the risk that inadequate power will restrict investment. McBride makes essentially the same argument from rural B.C., linking reliability and capacity directly to industrial development.
Then comes a Kootenay Boundary resolution asking the Province and B.C. Utilities Commission to control electricity and water consumption by data centres.
That one deserves attention.
Governments want existing industry to electrify. They want new mines, critical-mineral processing, clean manufacturing and lower-emission industry. Now B.C. also wants AI infrastructure and data centres capable of consuming enormous quantities of electricity.
At some point, saying yes to one large load can affect the timetable for another.
That turns electricity planning into industrial policy.
Who gets connected first? Who pays for new transmission? Should a huge data centre with relatively few permanent employees receive the same treatment as a mine or manufacturing plant?
A third cluster concerns physical infrastructure.
Prince George wants northern highways, rail and bridges recognized as nationally important Asia-Pacific trade infrastructure. The Fraser Valley Regional District wants a provincial industrial land strategy. Squamish wants strategic rail corridors preserved.
For years, governments discussed major projects mainly in terms of whether they should be approved.
Now there is another question: does the system required to build them actually exist?
A mine without transmission capacity is not a mine. An export terminal without rail capacity is not much of an export terminal. A manufacturing strategy without industrial land is a PowerPoint deck.
Canada has rediscovered the language of nation-building projects. Fine. Nation building requires somewhere to put them.
There is also a growing municipal question about who benefits.
Resolutions raise taxation of clean-energy projects, pipeline valuation, high-energy digital infrastructure, industrial water charges and assessment rules for closed industrial facilities.
The underlying question is legitimate: if a community hosts major infrastructure and absorbs its impacts, what constitutes a fair local return?
Industry has the corresponding concern. If every government sees a new project as another source of revenue, investment eventually goes somewhere else.
The useful principle isn’t automatically higher or lower taxes. It is clarity and predictability.
Forestry supplies another revealing example. Prince George calls for predictable economic fibre, reduced regulatory burdens, First Nations participation and more active forest management.
UBCM classifies much of this as existing policy.
That is almost the point.
Everybody wants healthy forests, competitive mills, Indigenous participation and wildfire resilience.
And mills keep closing.
Eventually the question stops being, “What is the policy?”
It becomes: Why isn’t the policy producing the result?
The resolutions involving Indigenous title, treaties, archaeology and DRIPA require similar care. Municipalities want more certainty, information and participation.
That should not be turned into an argument that Indigenous rights are an obstacle to development. The better objective is reconciliation that produces durable certainty through agreements, economic participation and functioning processes.
Not every resolution points in the same direction.
Victoria supports the North Coast tanker prohibition and proposes provincial leadership on litigation against fossil-fuel companies. New Westminster wants a cumulative health assessment of the LNG industry before further expansion.
Marine risk, climate adaptation costs and health effects are legitimate policy concerns.
But legitimate concerns do not automatically validate every proposed remedy.
That distinction matters.
What emerges from UBCM is not a simple pro-resource versus anti-resource divide. It is a province confronting its own limitations.
Do we have enough electricity? Can we move goods? Do we have industrial land? Can forestry deliver economic fibre? Can permitting systems make timely decisions? Can reconciliation and investment certainty reinforce each other? Can host communities remain financially sustainable?
For years, B.C.’s resource debate focused on whether development should occur.
The 2026 UBCM resolutions suggest a more immediate question is moving to the front:
If British Columbia decides it wants economic development, is the province still capable of delivering it?
Stewart Muir is the President and CEO of Resource Works Society.
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