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Tidal Wave

Terrace Mayor Carol Leclerc, whose city 60 kilometres (38 miles) to the north serves as the region’s hub, says she’s “99.9 per cent” sure the project will move forward, citing the flurry of activity. “It’s going to be like a tidal wave coming into the northwest.”

The clock is ticking. British Columbia has set a Nov. 30 deadline for a final decision if the project is to claim as much as $6 billion in tax breaks and savings. Meanwhile, in recent weeks both LNG Canada and TransCanada Corp., which would build the 670-kilometre pipeline to supply the terminal, have selected their main contractors to lock in prices for the project.

Photo by Ben Nelms/Bloomberg

Graham Pitzel, a Re/Max real estate broker in Kitimat, says he’s getting calls nearly every day from people in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary and Toronto interested in purchasing properties in the town of 8,000 people, speculating prices will surge as the project takes off. Homes used to stay on the market for six months; now the average is half that. He says bungalows never fetched more than $200,000 earlier, but he’s just sold one for $260,000 and has an offer of $290,000 on another.

“I’m building a house because if you try to do it after the project’s going, it’s going to be hard to find a contractor,” Pitzel says. “It’s now or never.”

Duties Exemption

Hurdles remain. The federal government has yet to clarify whether it’ll grant the project an exemption from duties on the complex steel modules needed to build a terminal. Each LNG model can be as tall as a 10-story building and weigh as much as 10 jumbo jets — no Canadian assembly yard has the experience or space to build them along with the water access to ship them to site, according to David Keane, president of the BC LNG Alliance. The federal finance ministry didn’t respond to a request seeking comment.