Vancouver Sun reporter Gordon Hoekstra dug into the Pacific Carbon Trust (PCT) with a series of weekend articles and the news is as bad for taxpayers as we feared.

The PCT is a scheme dreamed up by former Premier Gordon Campbell where B.C. government, businesses and individuals could buy carbon credits and be assured their money was going to worthwhile B.C. carbon reduction projects.

We have identified several problems with the PCT. Taxpayers bought $19.4 million worth of carbon credits last year—money that flowed out of classrooms and hospitals and into big business like Encana and Canfor. Even environmentalists agreed with us that the PCT was flawed. School boards, for example, paid $4.4 million for carbon credits at a time where they are scrambling for every available dollar.

Despite Campbell’s dream that business would embrace the PCT, 99 per cent of all carbon credits sold have been paid by taxpayers.

There have been suggestions from both the BC Liberals and BC NDP that the PCT can be fixed. We disagree—just scrap it.

Now the Vancouver Sun has dug into the spending side of the PCT, and the news is scary. Here are his pieces. Today, the Sun editorialized that the PCT should go:

If there was any lingering doubt that the Pacific Carbon Trust is a waste of tax dollars, it has been swept away by an investigation by The Vancouver Sun that found it is violating its own rules in awarding contracts.

Sun reporter Gordon Hoekstra found that 22 out of 25 projects were already underway when they were awarded millions of dollars by the Trust as an incentive to reduce carbon emissions.

The contracts appear to violate one of the underpinnings of the whole notion that underlies the operation of the PCT, a Crown corporation set up by the Liberal government under then-premier Gordon Campbell to buy and sell carbon offsets.

Hoekstra’s discovery that the projects were already underway when the contracts were awarded undermines any claim that they wouldn’t have been viable without the influx of funding from the Pacific Carbon Trust.

What makes this a public issue is that most of the funding being funnelled into these projects, most of which are being run by private companies, including the energy giant Encana Inc., comes from taxpayers who rightfully expected their money would be spent on health, education and other services the province provides.

The rationale for the higher price was to assure taxpayers that we would be getting value for that money. That rationale has now been deeply eroded.

To wit: The money given to Encana was for a project to reduce gas flaring in northeast B.C., which it was already required to do by provincial regulation.

Kruger Products received funding in 2011 for a wood-fired energy system that had been completed in 2009.

TransLink received credit in 2011 for hydrogen fuel buses that were put on the road in Whistler in 2009.

Add all this to earlier analysis that shows gains attributed to forestry projects are equally suspect and we end up with little more than a self-justifying and self-perpetuating bureaucracy that needs to be scrapped.

And scrapped soon, before any more tax dollars are wasted.

The Sun is right. Come on, Premier Clark. This wasn’t your mess—just kill it already.