Another year and another laundry list of promises from the B.C. Government. As you've probably heard by now, the province recently made a sweeping series of promises about how it will tackle climate change and a range of other issues over the next decade. However, while government talks a good game about addressing climate change, and is even prepared to reach into your pockets to fund some token programs, it is real decisions on land use and transportation in our community that make those promises ring hollow.

As your MLA, I've often criticized government for adopting themes rather than substance, my disappointment in this year's shopping list stems from what it omitted rather than for what government chose to include in its latest long litany of vague promises.

Last January, Premier Campbell famously returned from his annual Maui vacation and decided that climate change constituted a serious threat to future generations of British Columbians. Although he spent the previous six years of his tenure as Premier studiously ignoring warnings about climate change, I believe most British Columbians welcomed his reversal. Campbell dedicated most of last year's Throne Speech to outlining an ambitious plan for combating climate change and followed it last fall with legislation mandating that British Columbians reduce their collective greenhouse gas emissions by 33 per cent by 2020.

I supported the bill because I believe that the residents of our community want to do their part to reduce emissions for their families and for future generations. But as so often is the case, the devil is in the details and so I waited for some substantive plans about how we were going to accomplish this important objective.

One year, two Throne Speeches and two provincial budgets later, and we're still waiting for the substantive change that scientists have warned are necessary to meet the global challenge. The budget tabled this year introduces a new tax on gasoline and home heating fuel under the guise of a carbon tax. A new tax is not a climate change plan; in fact, budget documents show that the government expects consumption of fossil fuels to rise in the immediate term not decline.

So families and individuals will pay more and large polluters will get a free pass. More disturbing, subsidies for oil and gas exploration are increasing to over $300 million this year. Hard to see fairness in that equation, but the government will send each citizen a hundred bucks to offset any initial impacts from the gas tax. I am sure Jimmy Pattison and other wealthy British Columbians can use that cash to ease the pain, but it will do little for rural and suburban voters forced to say in their car for a lack of transit options.

And while we wait and pretend that a new gas tax and increased subsidies for more oil and gas activity will help save us from ourselves, the impacts of many of government's other decisions are increasingly being felt by local residents and the environment.

First off, we're still wrestling with the fallout from the Forest Minister's back-room deal to allow Western Forest Products to pull thousands of hectares of private forest lands out of their Tree Farm Licenses on Vancouver Island. With the stroke of a pen, government reduced the forest land base, reduced timber available to local forest workers, foreclosed potential treaty solutions, reduced public access to wilderness areas that local residents have enjoyed for decades and created a land-use planning mess that our regional and local governments will have to sort out for years to come.

I, for one, can't figure out how making a land-use decision that will increase urban sprawl on the southwest coast will decrease greenhouse gas emissions.

Secondly, we're stuck watching government make promises about building transit to reduce congestion and greenhouse gas emissions in the Lower Mainland while paying only lip service to the needs of one of Vancouver Island's fastest growing regions. Residents are not asking for a pricey SkyTrain line or a second highway. They're simply looking for decent transit options and a modest commuter rail system on an existing rail line.

What we should be tackling is a new green Building Code, massive focus on energy conservation, retrofit programs for existing residential and commercial buildings, substantial transit improvements and a much harder line on industrial polluters. Those are the green polices that will resonate with the broader public. Sadly, practical proposals seem to take a back seat to slogans and corporate handouts.

So while government will bombard us with taxpayer-funded ads and mailers about its latest Throne Speech and its visions for a greener British Columbia, I'll keep waiting and hoping and fighting to force the Campbell government to hear the real concerns of the residents of Malahat-Juan de Fuca.