The BC NDP is an umbrella party of anti-Socreds. There's a large populist/reactionary wing, and a large environmentalist wing. Sometimes, like when Carole James opposed the Carbon Tax in the 2009 election, and when Jenny Kwan led James' ouster as leader in 2011, the populist wing wins.
Other times, the environmentalist wing wins. Initially, Adrian Dix did not take a stand on the Kinder Morgan Transmountain pipeline, saying the party would reserve judgment until until the regulatory review and NEB environmental assessment were completed. He consistently stayed on that message of a "principled position".
Then, all of a sudden, on Earth Day and with 4 weeks to go in the election campaign, Dix said that the party would oppose KM even before the review process was complete. He didn't even tell party caucus before he made the announcement. At the time, KM wasn't as unpopular as it is today (most people were focused on Keystone XL and Northern Gateway), and the price of crude oil was around $90/bbl so the BC Liberals still had the "LNG boom" argument going for them.
All that goodwill the NDP fostered with voters wary the party following the Glen Clark era, and all because Dix wanted a hippie vote grab. Those hippies ended up voting BCGP instead, which had opposed KM from the start, and gave Andrew Weaver his seat in the legislature. And it might be the only seat they get, since the Global Greens Charter's mandate of grassroots policy-making mean that the anti-nuclear power, anti-wifi, homeopathy supporting, vaccines-cause-autism believing kooks will always be able to influence the party's policy platform (such fringe policies will end up turning off the mainstream voter).
Before you write me off as a sociopathic Socred, let me just say that I think it would be a good idea to de-emphasize resource extraction and real estate as the province's economic base, and invest more in tourism, film, fisheries, high-tech and renewable energy, as Tzeporah Berman is calling for. (Incidentally, she was the main organizer of the "War in the Woods" protests.)
However, the resource sector will always play a major role in the province's economy. Logging is how BC originally became rich. H.R. MacMillan (the planetarium guy) made his fortune in timber. Once machinery replaced pick-axes in the 1970s and made surface mining feasible, it started a mining boom, and the economic activity generated triggered a surge of office tower development in downtown Vancouver.
Lumber has had its ups and downs, and if the price of oil goes up, maybe LNG can be realized. Today, mining is the principal money maker in BC. BC holds has deposits of coal numbering around 20 billion tonnes. Over half of mineral production revenues in BC come from coal and it's the province's largest export commodity. BC also sits on 130 million oz. of gold, 800 million oz. of silver, 9 million tonnes of copper (essential to make electrical wire) making up two thirds of the country's entire copper reserves, over 10 million tonnes of zinc, not to mention we're the only province in Canada with Molybdenum reserves. Molybdenum is essential in steelmaking to create stronger alloys.
Natural resource exploration made up 11% of the province's GDP in 2013, which amounts to about $25 billion. Exports to other countries totalled $36 billion in 2013, or 15% of GDP. The resource sector employs about 50,000 people around this time, but the ancillary industries dependent on resource exploration is how hundreds of thousands of people across the province make their living. Skilled trades, utilities, construction, manufacturing, etc. And the ancilliary/supporting industries (finance, retail, law, engineering, trade, etc.) that depend on the economic activity generated by the resource sector hire many, many more people.
So the resource sector isn't going away anytime soon. With all that being said, BC's dependency on resources could be dialed down significantly. BC's glaciers will mostly be gone by 2100, partially thanks to the carbon emissions generated by resource extraction. Skilled professional workers in high-tech industries will cement the province's economic base, reducing the need to ship in TFWs from China or the Philippines on the cheap. And the First Nations will be happy we're not exploiting their land as much.
As for KM, I go by /u/ArchieMoses's conditions on support:
Generous royalties
Not cutting corners on the pipeline routing
Strong government oversight
Not footing the province or federal government with the bill if something goes wrong.
I'm not optimistic that this will happen, though. The provincial government's deal with Petronas stipulates that carbon taxes and royalty rates cannot be changed for 25 years, and over that time, the province would collect $600-700 million of royalty income. $25 million a year in royalties for an LNG project. That's worse than Alberta.