All posts by Rafe Mair

About Rafe Mair

Rafe Mair, LL.B, LL.D (Hon) a B.C. MLA 1975 to 1981, was Minister of Environment from late 1978 through 1979. In 1981 he left politics for Talk Radio becoming recognized as one of B.C.'s pre-eminent journalists. An avid fly fisherman, he took a special interest in Atlantic salmon farms and private power projects as environmental calamities and became a powerful voice in opposition to them. Rafe is the co-founder of The Common Sense Canadian and writes a regular blog at rafeonline.com. View all posts by Rafe Mair →

BC’s Fiscal Mess: Hydro, LNG Numbers Don’t Add Up

February 20, 2013Energy and Resources, Hydropower, LNG, Politics, Western CanadaRafe Mair

BC's Fiscal Mess: Hydro, LNG Numbers Don't Add Up — Proposed LNG plant in Kitimat – artist’s rendering

The famous bordello keeper of the 20s, Texas Guinan, used to greet her “guests” with, “Hello suckers!”

Texas Guinan has her presence today in the form of BC’s Finance Minister Mike de Jong.

First we must understand some underlying facts about BC finances.

A balanced budget – your style and mine – has us forecasting revenues and expenses accurately, including everything, not something to be pushed at a banker after a three martini lunch. If you don’t include everything you’ll have to borrow money when the car breaks down.

You and I know that if we don’t include everything, we’re just fooling ourselves. Well, folks, there’s no gentle way to put it. We have been played for fools and I’m only going to deal with three headings and leave the deep analysis to economists.

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

We are selling off some $800 million of Crown assets. This is like you and me selling our homes and using the revenue to balance our current budget. Using money from capital assets, you and I would say, doesn’t belong in our family’s budget because it simply isn’t proper revenue any more than selling off the family jewels is proper revenue.

Governments make up their own rules, of course, and some things that ought not to be are in the annual budget, while other things that ought to be there are missing.

Private Power Rip-off

Take BC Hydro – in fact, take it before General Electric takes it if the Liberal government is, God forbid, re-elected.

Under this government, BC Hydro, which used to pay us taxpayers hundreds of millions per year from its operating profits, is now essentially bankrupt, though not yet formalized. It will be sold with a Liberal victory in May.

No government would do such a thing?

Can you say BC Ferries? Can you say BC Rail?

Since the Liberals embarked on their deliberate plan to bankrupt BC Hydro, our crown jewel has seen its debt and contractual obligations rise to about $80 BILLION.

How has this happened?

Much of it comes from the sweetheart contracts BC Hydro is forced to give Independent Power Producers (IPPs). These contracts cost the public as high as five times the market rate for power and have pushed Hydro into an annual deficit position.

The trouble in dealing with this is it’s difficult if not impossible to believe.

Well believe it. Mair’s Axiom #1 prevails: “You make a serious mistake assuming that people in charge know what the hell they are doing.”

Now, if your family business started to lose big bucks and you decided to pump money from your family’s other sources of income into it, you would certainly show that in your budget. The Liberal government hasn’t told you about that.

LNG Pipe Dream

Finally, let’s take a look at projected income, particularly from Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), which is to be our fiscal saviour. Indeed, according to Premier Clark, we’ll be rolling in dough with this money!

Mr. de Jong perhaps hasn’t noticed that suddenly – and it has been sudden – the world is awash in natural gas. In the time I’ve been talking about it, our obvious major client, China, has discovered massive shale gas reserves of its own.

Believe it or not, it gets worse.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers has made it clear that unless the BC government and the federal government agree to give 30% capital cost allowances – meaning they want a 30% subsidy on the money spent building facilities, like what happens in Australia – then thanks but no thanks to this LNG scheme.

A glance at the Australia experience shows that at the end of the day, the taxpayer ends up footing a big portion of the construction costs to serve a world that doesn’t want their product.

Here’s what one BC political blog had to say on the matter, comparing the LNG issue to our experience with private power:

…LNG exporters are just like our IPP run of river companies, who did nothing, built nothing, acted only on their own behalf, and laid out no money to build 1 kilowatt of power without 30 and 40 year guaranteed contracts, contracts that Gordon the thief Campbell was more than willing to sign. IPPs did not take one single risk, we, the taxpayers, the BC Hydro ratepayers were ripped off…

There are no LNG facilities built as yet, nor will there be unless government pays their capital costs and even then I predict we’ll never see a single plant, let alone the 5 or more proposed.

Christy Clark’s vaunted “Prosperity Fund” will never receive one penny.

The Speech from the Throne and the Prosperity Fund – and the Budget – are barnyard droppings and Premier Clark is trusting that a disreputable, ongoing lie will fool the public.

Hello suckers!

Rafe on Liberals’ Delusional LNG Scheme

February 14, 2013Canada, LNG, Politics, Western CanadaRafe Mair

Don’t eat that, Elmer. Them’s horse buns!

The BC Liberal Government’s speech from the throne on February 12 – which hinged on promises of a $100 Billion windfall from BC’s heretofore nonexistent Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) industry – was an appalling attempt to divert attention away from reality with pie in a distant sky.

This government must be thrown out and one can say with certainty that any replacement would be an improvement.

Billions in a few years hence, perhaps trillions after that. We’ll become the LNG capital in the world! There are one or two dark spots on this sunny painting we should look at carefully.

The LNG will come largely from fracking, which is taking the world by storm. It involves drilling deep underground into shale beds where gas is trapped, then drilling horizontally through them, and ultimately pushing huge amounts of chemical-laced water through to crack open the shale and force the gas to the surface. Under Christy Clark’s grand LNG scheme, this gas would then be transported by pipeline to Kitimat or Prince Rupert, where it would be converted into LNG for export, mostly to Asia.

The first questions – the conditions precedent to this operation – are to do with the environment. In a radio interview with the CBC’s Rick Cluff Wednesday, Premier Christy Clark repeatedly referred to this gas as “clean”. Really?

Where does this water come from? The requirements are immense, so a large supply must be found.

Where does the chemically loaded water go? Into the water table, thence to the water supply of local residents?

What is the impact of the extraction of this gas on the stability of the area? Will there be earthquakes as a result of fracking, as a recent report from the Oil and Gas Commission suggests?

What is the impact of huge water extractions on the general ecology of the the supply area? Are there fish losses? What happens to the fauna and flora after the water is extracted? What impact is there on people, especially First Nations? What will be the impact of the water lost to this process on BC Hydro and its ratepayers – like the billions of litres coming from the Williston Reservoir?

There is this question Premier Clark won’t deal with because she doesn’t give a damn – what about the impact of pipelines (all four of them proposed to cut across BC), especially on wildlife?

The fact is that these concerns are being dealt with in several regions with a moratoriumon the enterprise until the answers to these and other questions are answered.

What we do know is that these sorts of concerns do not bother the Chinese in the least, which leads into the major economic concern. Asian prices are high now – 5 or 6 times higher than in North America, which is the basis for this whole scheme. This is a direct reflection of the current lack of cheap, local supply.

So here’s the rub – what if China develops its own supply of “fracked” gas? What happens to the overseas market price then?

One doesn’t have to be an economic genius or Nostradamus to predict that our proposed customer, China, will find plenty of shale and be awash with natural gas.

Even if China does not develop its own supply, who says BC can compete with other countries, such as Australia, which is into this big time?

Another nasty question: how does Premier Clark know how much tax room there will for BC in this development? Are we to suppose that the feds will see huge money without wanting to get into the taxing game themselves, big time?

It should be noted that at present there is no LNG plant in BC.

This is the bunch that wants to be re-elected on May 14. This is their blueprint. Not only have they done nothing to relieve our financial woes they have taken us for fools by feeding us a load of unattainable and inedible pie in the sky.

This government is unfit to govern.

Vaughn Palmer’s wrongheaded defense of private power projects

February 8, 2013Canada, Economics, Energy and Resources, Hydropower, Media, Politics, Western CanadaRafe Mair

Wow! The Vancouver Sun has been a-burst with environmental issues, two on the front page February 6.

Let’s first back up to Vaughn Palmer’s ill thought out column of February 4. It’s nice to see Palmer has finally sacrificed his virginity and tackled the Independent Power Producers’ (IPP) obscene contracts foisted by the government on BC Hydro. Before we rejoice at Palmer’s brain transplant we must recognize what tripe this column was.

Palmer defends gross overpayments to IPPs on the grounds that the contracts were granted at a time when electricity prices were much higher, which ignores the standard practice of tying contracts to prices at the time of sale. Certainly that would make matters riskier but that’s the name of the game in business.

Then Palmer attacks us skeptics by making the case that we will welcome these IPPs when we are short of energy, which Palmer sees in the immediate future. This is not so as Economist Erik Andersen has demonstrated. (You would see more of Andersen’s work if the Fraser Institute’s house organ, The Sun, would publish his work).

Mr. Andersen recently wrote in a letter intended for The Sun, but unpublished thus far, “When one sees value in a deliberately created surplus of anything costly, it can only be from ignorance of need. For decades, BC Hydro has an unbroken record of estimating provincial demand well in excess of recorded demand. The BCUC (BC Utilities Commission) recognized this several times in the last century but BC Hydro keeps coming back.”

Palmer also ignores the huge debt to IPPs by reason of these shameful overpriced contracts, which stand at over $50 BILLION and rising. It doesn’t seem to bother “Poodle Palmer” that if in the private sector BC Hydro would be in bankruptcy protection at best and that as of now BC residents owe about $16,000 per man, woman and child because of Hydro’s massive $70 BILLION in debt and contractual obligations.

Naturally, Palmer ignores the huge environmental cost of these projects; moreover, he neglects to mention that the IPPs are mostly out-of-province and out of Canada companies who – and these dots connect – take all the profits straight out of the pockets of ratepayers who will be dinged with ever-increasing rates to cover the costs of these government-cosseted corporate leeches.

The lead headline in The Sun of February 6 leads into a report that the federal government is ill-prepared for a tanker spill and talks about such a thing as “unlikely” – even though the Department of the Environment, scarcely made up of tree-huggers, assert that spills are a certainty.

That’s two certainties – a spill is certain and there is no way it can be cleaned up.

In Ancient times, Cato the Elder ended every speech to the Roman Senate, whatever the subject, with “Carthago delenda est” (Carthage must be destroyed”.) Eventually the Senate got the idea and Carthage was destroyed.

We must imitate Cato and wherever appropriate pronounce the essential truth about oil spills from pipelines or tankers: NOT IF BUT WHEN!

Rafe’s Welcome Letter to New Sun & Province Publisher

February 2, 2013Hydropower, Pipelines and Supertankers, Politics, Salmon Farming and Aquaculture, Western CanadaRafe Mair

In the Postmedia press this past week we learned that Gordon Fisher has become publisher of The Vancouver Sun and The Province. Here is my welcome.

Dear Mr. Fisher,

My congratulations on your new posting. These two papers need all the help they can get.

I’m an octogenarian now – I love that word because it’s more descriptive than “senior citizen” and because no one I knew in my 40s would have bet a plug nickel I’d ever get this far.

As a lifetime British Columbian I go back a long way. As a youngster I was a Tillicum mostly because The Province gave you a neat faked silver totem pole as a badge. The magic words were “Klahowya , Tillicum”, which my cousin said came from Indians saying to Hudson’s Bay employees, “Clerk how you?”

I doubt that but have never heard of a better answer

I didn’t join The Sun’s Uncle Ben club because my Dad hated The Sun – in those days there was real rivalry!

I remember some of the great writers of that day – Eric Nichol, Jack Scott, Harold Weir (a rabid royalist) and I even read Sir Michael Bruce, whose taffy-nosed columns used to get under everyone’s skin.

I would like to talk about more modern times.

Back in the 70s I ran for the BC Legislature and as I awaited the election I couldn’t wait to read Marjorie Nichols in The Sunas night after night she kicked the crap out of the NDP government, especially Dave Barrett.

When I was elected it seemed as if Marjorie had had a brain transplant as now she was hammering the hell out of the Socreds and Bill Bennett!

I asked myself how Marjorie had changed so dramatically until the light went on – it wasn’t Marjorie who had changed, it was the government!

As the days passed I noticed that Jack Webster, Pat Burns, Jack Wasserman, Denny Boyd, Garry Bannerman, Ed Murphy, Jim Hume, Barbara McClintock – indeed the entire political press were “unfairly” beating up on us.

After I left the government I realized that they were “holding our feet to the fire” and it made for a better, more responsive government. It was that obligation I adopted when in 1981 I went into radio.

In the nineties you will remember the NDP under Mike Harcourt took over for the next decade.

The print media, especially Mike Smyth of The Province and Vaughn Palmer of the Sun were merciless in their pursuit of at least a close proximity to the truth. There were two areas that stick in my mind – the fast ferries issue and Glen Clark’s dealing with a man trying to get a gambling licence, who did some work on the premier’s house.

These two and Les Leyne and Jim Hume, both of the Times-Colonist, were relentless in their pursuit of the facts and highly critical of the premier and other members of the government.

In 2001 it all changed as the Liberals under Gordon Campbell took power. The media suddenly started to avoid issues or give them a once-and-for-all treatment.

Let me be specific.

For the first time in my life, the environment has become an issue, perhaps the #1 in the province. In no special order, here are the main issues: loss of agricultural land due to the Gateway Project, fish farms, private river power, pipelines and tankers, and most recently “fracking”.

Mr. Fisher, I ask you to look at your columnists and determine for yourself whether any of these questions have been canvassed – not well canvassed but canvassed at all.

Let’s start with fish farms. These have not been covered at all in spite of the terrible consequences of them including ruination of wild salmon! I invite you to find a critical word – indeed any word at all – in Smyth or Palmer’s columns in the last 12 years. You will note that your former editor of the Sun editorial pages, a “fellow” of the Fraser Institute, freely gave op-ed opportunities to the fish farmers’ lobby, yet you’ll search in vain to see anything from, say, Alexandra Morton.

The so-called “run of river” policy has desecrated 75 rivers and proposes to do the same to hundreds more. These projects build a dam (they prefer to call them “weirs” but they are dams) which kill migrating salmon and resident trout and, in effect, permanently decimate the ecosystems that depend upon the river. You see, Mr. Fisher, these plants not only impact the fish directly but the entire ecology as they require roads and clear-cutting for transmission lines.

Let’s leave aside the environment and look at the economics.

BC Hydro is compelled by the provincial government to sign agreements with Independent Power Producers (IPPS) on a “take or pay” basis meaning that when IPPs are going all out during run-offs, BC Hydro, which has full reservoirs, must buy this power even though they don’t need it, at double to ten times the export price and many times more expensive than it can generate it themselves. BC Hydro owes IPPs for future power over $50 Billion!

This all means, of course, that Hydro can no longer pay a dividend to the government of the customary hundreds of millions of dollars and is, in fact, bankrupt by private, corporate standards.

I invite you to look at your columnists’ work over the past 5 years and try to find a discouraging word about private power. There have been the occasional, very occasional, news story but your political columnists are and have been silent.

Let me pause and tell you that after I had raised hell on this subject, Province editor Wayne Moriarty phoned me and whined, “Rafe, do you think I tell my columnists what they must not write about?” to which I replied ,“You don’t have to, Wayne, you don’t have to.”

Let’s move on to the pipelines issue, especially the Enbridge proposal and the proposed new Kinder Morgan line. At the same time, let’s glance at the tanker traffic these two pipelines will need.

These are both huge issues. The issue isn’t the risk of spills, Mr. Fisher, but the certainty of them. Even the Federal Environment Ministry (scarcely known to be tree-huggers) says that these spills are inevitable.

But, you may well ask, surely these spills can be cleaned up?

First let’s deal with the proposed Enbridge line, which is more than 1,000 Kilometers long and passes through the Rockies, the Rocky Mountain Trench, through the Coast Range then through The Great Bear Rainforest. When a spill occurs, how the devil will Enbridge get men and machines in to the spill area?

Mr. Fisher, it’s even worse. It doesn’t matter.

Enbridge had a huge spill into the Kalamazoo River in July 2010 and it hasn’t been cleaned up yet and never will be. Access to the spill site posed no difficulties but cleanup certainly did.

The cargo is what they call dilbit or diluted bitumen, product of the Tar Sands, which in itself is the world’s largest polluter. With ordinary bulk oil one can get to a lot of it by “rafting” which, as you would imagine, is surrounding it, localizing it then scooping it up.

Unfortunately, within a very short time after a dilbit spill, the bitumen separates from the diluent and sinks like a stone. Not only will Enbridge be unable to get to the spill, even if it could they would be helpless to do anything of consequence.

The problem scarcely ends there. The tanker traffic poses huge problems.

Again, Mr. Fisher, it’s not a matter of “if” but “when”. The consequences of a spill are too awful to even contemplate. Whether down Douglas Channel from Kitimat or through Vancouver Harbour from Burnaby the consequences of a spill will be horrendous.

Yes, with double hulling there will be fewer accidents, the operative word being fewer. As we know from the BC Ferry Queen of the North calamity, where there is a possibility of human error, tragedies will happen.

I’m sorry to have been so long-winded, Mr. Fisher, but my point is that Postmedia’s coverage of the matters mentioned has been pathetic and journalistic critique, let alone criticism, has been nonexistent.

I ask you, are you content to let this continue?

Yours very truly,
Rafe Mair

Environmental ‘Process’ a Myth in Stephen Harper’s Canada

January 28, 2013Canada, PoliticsRafe Mair

It’s past time that we began to examine the word “process” as it relates to the environment. It has become, you see, a federal buzz word for sacrificing the environment while making it look all nice and legal.

Last fall, I, along with Ben West of the Wilderness Committee, spoke to a group at a North Vancouver church hall. Conservative MP John Weston was there and chose to deal with C-38, the infamous Budget Bill which was also an omnibus bill. He chose to take the mic and defend the erasure of protection of fish habitat. In fact, he defended this outrageous section by saying it provided “process”. Moreover he claimed that this was why he supported Bill C-38.

He was lying through his teeth – he supported Bill C-38 because it was the budget. Moreover, he couldn’t have even argued with the section slashing habitat protections from the Fisheries Act because that would have been tantamount to opposing the budget and he would have been unceremoniously tossed out of Caucus and denied the right to run again on the Conservative ticket.

“Process” is a weasel word to disguise the fact that there will be no meaningful process at all.

Let’s go back a step or two. Some things we have decided to protect by denying anyone the privilege of interfering with it. Our national and provincial parks are thus protected. You cannot take a piece of a park and say, “I want to cut this down or dig it up or whatever so please tell me what the ‘process’ is that I must follow.”

I often put it to Lower Mainland readers that Stanley Park might be a good place to log, always reforesting as you go. It would provide jobs for several years and bring a lot of money into the city. So let’s set up a “process”.

“Bugger that!” would be the cry you would hear loud and clear. “Stanley Park is not for desecration, no matter what the reason.”

Would this change if a process was in place where the people could advise the logging company what environmental practices should be followed? Count that as a rhetorical question.

“Process” to Weston and his gang means holding hearings that do not involve the question of whether or not the public agrees with the plan but only deals with whatever safeguards should be adopted and at any rate, the government doesn’t need to pay any attention to whatever recommendations are put forward. In fact, the Harper government has made it clear that the proposed Enbridge pipeline will go ahead irrespective of what the Environmental hearings recommend.

Now, there is another thing we must ponder when considering trusting our environment to governments and their process.

For not only is it insulting to citizens’ intelligence to tell them that there is a “process” in place – doubly insulting if licenses are awarded, with limitations, when those limitations are not enforced.

Last week we learned – surprise! – that private river power operations (IPPs) in southwest BC racked up a staggering 749 environmental violations in 2010 alone, with virtually no consequences for the companies responsible. Spawning salmon are being trapped in pools downstream from private power dams and dying! In response, the Executive Director of the private power lobby, Paul Kariya, said words that, in effect, equated to “shit happens”.

The Federal Department Of Environment expressed some concerns about environmental protection generally and told us how rather than enforcing the law they were working with the miscreants in a cooperative way.

The truth is that there is virtually no investigation or enforcement at all. In the case of Fish Farmers, one of the first things the incoming Campbell government did was return all the fines levied against them when the NDP were in power and enforced the laws.

Private river power operators are permitted to police themselves. Why aren’t they being watched and dealt with? Do we really believe that when the water subsides the IPPs, rather than risk the salmon, they will shut down or decrease the water (and revenues) flowing through their pipes?

We in the fight for the environment have, naturally, concentrated on the big pictures. We haven’t paid enough attention to the extent of the crimes being visited upon our environment by Fish Farmers, IPPs and pipelines now in existence.

In my view, the Opposition NDP, who have funds for research, ought to do just that on the matters I’ve raised.

And do it now.

Environment still an afterthought to BC media in election run-up

January 21, 2013Energy and Resources, Fracking, LNG, Media, Oceans, Oil&Gas, Pipelines and Supertankers, Politics, Salmon Farming and AquacultureRafe Mair

Mike Smyth gave us a full page story of his interview with Adrian Dix in the Sunday Province without a word on the environment!

What’s with these guys at Postmedia? Are the thousands upon thousands of hits that organizations like the Wilderness Committee, and yes, the Common Sense Canadian, garner meaningless? Can it be that a handful of NDP supporters visit our websites 1000’s of times a day?

For reasons that escape me, Dix is getting a free ride in the capitalist press.

At least Fazil Mihlar, when he was editor of the Sun’s editorial pages up until recently, kept the faith with the far right, as this Fellow of the Fraser Institute flooded the op-ed pages with articles by anyone who’d kiss the ass of the fish farmers, coal miners, pipeline companies, the tanker people and so on. And we’ve long given up on star Suncolumnist Vaughn Palmer’s ability to ask a tough question of anyone or say something that even barely qualifies as controversial – but Mike was beginning to draw some blood in both major political camps.

There is, evidently, a strong aversion in the mainstream media to talk about the environment and I can only guess why. Was the Kalamazoo spill by Enbridge too complicated to deal with? And the 800+ other spills by this wretched despoiler of the outdoors?

Is the question of the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline too difficult to analyze, the issues being the same as the proposed Enbridge line?

Are we having trouble dealing with dilbit, the chemical-laced bitumen that it is proposed to be piped through our mountains and valleys into tankers to ply the waters of the Great Bear Rainforest? Is it too time consuming to let readers know of the disastrous difference between bitumen spills and the stuff with which the Exxon Valdez polluted our waters and killed our fish and birds?

What about LNG? (Liquified Natural Gas) Is it beyond the abilities of the Sun and the Province to deal with the environmental issues surrounding fracking, which, by drilling first vertically, then horizontally, pumps out gas from between layers of shale? Where do the enormous volumes of water required for this process come from? After it’s laced with poisonous chemicals and the result pumped underground to crack open the shale, where does it go? Into the water table? Are there potential consequences of stability to the earth’s crust – such as this recentreport from the BC Oil and Gas Commission suggests?

What about fish farms? The Province and Sun have avoided this issue like the plague, with the notable exception of Mihlar, who seems to have given a free pass to the fish farms when they wanted the op-ed page.

What of the desecration of farmland, especially in the Delta area?

Adrian Dix has taken stands on these issues – sort of. He’s against Enbridge but silent on Kinder Morgan. If Kinder Morgan proceeds there will be unbelievable risks from tankers in Vancouver Harbour right out until the open ocean is reached.

The NDP have approved of LNG plants for the northern coast. Does this mean that they are unconcerned about the threat pipelines pose to the fauna and flora they pass through? Does this mean they have satisfied themselves that fracking poses no environmental concerns?

And with the same concerns applying to Kinder Morgan as with Enbridge, how can Mr. Dix condemn the latter while being undecided about the former?

Mr. Dix seems to be concerned about fish farms, but what would he do about them?

And what about the private power catastrophe which has ruined or will soon ruin some 75 rivers while bankrupting BC Hydro? Mr. Dix seems to be against them but what would he do about them? Hydro is presently on the hook for $50 BILLION dollars from these thieves in three piece suits.

Meanwhile, another multi-billion-dollar Hydro boondoggle and environmental calamity awaits us with the proposed Site C Dam – which wouldflood over 12,000 acres of farmland and wilderness to provide subsidized electricity to new mines and gas operations. The NDP has been on the fence at best with this massive project.

Mr. Dix seems to believe that a clean fight is on its way. Is this because he doesn’t want the Liberals to deal with the little matter of outright forgery he committed to save Glen Clark’s scalp in the Pilarinos scandal?

Politics is a blood sport in BC and will be in spite of the hypocrisy of Mr Dix.

The Common Sense Canadian, being devoted to environmental issues. will likely support the NDP in the May election but this doesn’t mean we support handling Mr. Dix or anyone else with kid gloves.

All we really ask is for an informed public, something apparently anathema to the Postmedia and David Black papers.

Get with it you guys – the environment is a huge issue and you have a duty to get it in all aspects on the table.

Rafe Mair: Why BC’s First Nations should refuse Harper meetings…for now

January 15, 2013Canada, First Nations, PoliticsRafe Mair

I do not pretend for a second to know what is on the mind of First Nations leaders who have been skeptical of “Crown-First Nations” meetings such as took place this past Friday and the follow-ups currently being scheduled. Leaders like Union of BC Indian Chiefs’ Grand Chief Sewart Phillip and chiefs from Manitoba, Ontario and some from Saskatchewan have chosen to sit this latest round of talks out. Nor do I know what would change their minds on attending future conferences.

I do pretend to know something about politics.

National Assembly (AFN) Chief Shawn Atleo is a controversial political leader and how else could it be? His Assembly is supposed to represent First Nations throughout the nation. He doesn’t in real life and that is to be expected. His leadership is constantly in question – particularly from members of the “grassroots” Idle No More movement. This pressure has apparently taken its toll, as following Friday’s meeting, Atleo announced he was going on a “brief” sick leave.

On the other hand, while Stephen Harper doesn’t have every Canadian behind him, by reason of our “first past the post” system, he is a dictator so long as he is Prime Minister. Right from the get-go that makes conferences between the two parties difficult unto impossible.

The concerns of each band of First Nations not only are inconsistent with one another, how could that be otherwise?

Here are some facts:

Total Aboriginal population of BC: Approximately 200,000
Total number of Indian bands in BC: Approximately 200
Total number of eligible B.C. First Nations/Indian bands in the treaty process: 116

To complicate matters, most nations or regions have unique languages and dialects.

At the root of claims is land and these claims differ from band to band within BC, let alone within the country. Some land claims have been disposed of by treaty (often unfairly), while in BC, the vast majority are not under treaty and are subject to land claims being dealt with at a glacial pace. Moreover, many First Nations want nothing to do with the process.

The situation reminds one of Israel, where an Israeli government can claim it wants to settle borders with Palestinians yet continues to build on land which is part of the pre-1967 land owned by Palestinians. With First Nations, the BC and Canadian governments are permitting development of Indian land without a by-your-leave.

Again, while I have no insight into all the considerations of BC First Nations, let me tell you what I would feel if I was in Grand Chief Phillip’s mind or that of any BC chief’s position.

I would refuse to deal with Federal Minister for Indian and Northern Affairs and Northern Development John Duncan, who has consistently supported salmon farms, which many coastal First Nations vehemently oppose. His presence is like the red flag to the bull.

I would refuse any part of a meeting with the Feds until that part of the past budget that took away from protection of fish habitat is repealed.

There would be no parley until both the provincial and federal governments stopped approving of fish farms and mandated a removal to land of all existing farms.

I would demand both levels of governments respect the clearly stated position of Treaty 8 First Nations in northeast BC, who oppose Site C dam based on their treaty rights.

Similarly I would demand an immediate moratorium of all proposed pipelines until all Native claims are settled and I would demand that all tanker traffic – be it from Prince Rupert, Kitimat or Vancouver Harbour – be banned by legislation.

I would require that the recommendations of the Cohen Commission Report put in place immediately.

Finally, I would require any environmentally objectionable project be put to local residents as to the need for them in the first place and that this be done before any environmental hearings take place.

These gestures and actions would be a condition precedent to any parley with the feds.

Why would any BC Chief be bound to accept any resolutions unless they are consistent with their needs, desires and historical claims?

The meeting which was just held and is supposed to reconvene seeks to find a one-size-fits-all, whether specifically or in principle. Why should Grand Chief Phillip, who has a mandate to deal with BC matters, accept a conference which by its nature seeks solutions on a one-size-fits-all basis?

It’s not parochial to point out that decisions will cater to larger populations with the powers of persuasion they possess.

Given the obvious lack of interest by the Harper and Clark governments in the basic concerns of BC First Nations, it would be folly for local leaders to enter a process in which they have little to gain and a great deal to lose.

How the Environment is Becoming the Top Issue for Canadians

December 14, 2012Canada, Energy and Resources, Oceans, Oil&Gas, Politics, Salmon Farming and Aquaculture, WATER, Western CanadaAquaculture, Enbridge, KinderMorgan, Oil and gas, Politics, private river power, Salmon, Water and EnergyRafe Mair

Wendy and I, exercising a habit of some years now, are further depleting our kids’ legacies and will be away until January 10, starting with 20 days in the Caribbean then 4 days in Boston visiting friends.

It’s been an interesting year in the environmental field.

Opposition to the Enbridge Northern Gateway project is massive and I predict the same situation will prevail against the proposed Kinder Morgan expansion. In fact, this is the first time in my memory that the environment has been the #1 issue. In fact, one of the signs is that neither the government, nor sadly, the opposition want to come to grips with several major environmental issues. The federal government is beyond all hope and may have to be stopped by massive civil disobedience, which no doubt will come.

All of us who are now waiting in the trenches must, in my opinion, pay considerable homage to those who have fought before us when the public was not so concerned. They were branded as “tree huggers” by many who now have learned that they were in fact heroes.They indeed cleared the pathway to public awareness of what lay ahead if we didn’t learn from their experience.

We – that is to say those not committed to the philosophy of the Fraser Institute and its in-house newspaper, the Vancouver Sun – know that without fail large companies who wish to invade our wilderness and oceans lie through their teeth constantly and without exceptions. This doesn’t make us communists or even socialists – neither of those two styles of governance have been much in synch with matters environmental, with Russia and China being in a class of their own when it comes to ecological indifference – at best.

I believe that many British Columbians know that we’re not talking “left” and “right” here but “right” and “wrong”.

A very good example was my Roast in November 2012 in the WISE Hall in East Vancouver. As I noted on the occasion, many in attendance that night would rather have been caught in a house of ill-repute just a few years before. Perhaps the leading indicator was the folks of West Vancouver who fought so hard to save the Eagleridge plateau from the degradation of the wildlife habitat and then took a bus down to the East Delta Agricultural Hall to help protest against degradation of agricultural land, Burns Bog and other wildlife preserves by the expansion of the Deltaport project and South Fraser Perimeter Road by corporations and the government. The meeting was addressed by people from both the right and the left. It was a moment of great symbolism which simply is not understood well enough by both major BC parties, especially not by the Liberals.

Environmentalism is not shrill protest, for protest’s sake, based on political objects rather than evidence. People have seen and heard with their own eyes and ears what is happening with fish farms, private power projects that have all but bankrupted BC Hydro; they’ve seen farmland destroyed and looked at the record of pipelines and tanker companies; they have not only assessed the risks of catastrophes to come, but also realize the consequences that will flow. They have come to ask, “is it worth taking any risk if the damages will be catastrophic and permanent?”

I think that slowly but steadily the public has come to realize that money is no answer. What does it profit the province if they get billions of dollars but lose their wilderness as a result? In Biblical terms, what does it profit a man to gain the entire world but lose his own soul?

And the soul of the province, how we live, how we look at ourselves and how we look at our legacy has become a hugely important factor.

How much are our wild salmon worth?

What price on our rivers and the ecologies they sustain?

Is there any financial arrangement that will compensate for the loss of our coastal fauna and flora as well as the people who, for centuries, have been sustained by those resources? Incidentally, a recent UBC study found that a single oil spill from tankers on BC’s coast could wipe out all the economic gains of the Enbridge pipeline.

If we lose our farmlands, is there a price that will offset that? Will the farm cease to be the underpinning of our way of life? Is money going to buy us the food we need?

There is this notion that we must continue to “progress”, which is code for “money talks and when it does one should bow down in grateful obeisance to the god Mammon and forever hold our tongues.”

I reject that notion. We can progress and prosper without placing our entire outdoors at the certain risk of destruction. Other prosperous democracies have managed to survive without screwing up their environment as the people of BC are being asked to accept.

In the May election in 2013 we have what may be our last chance to stop right wing governments, mad economists and soulless corporate bloodsuckers from desecrating our beautiful land.

Public Will Soon Turn on Kinder Morgan…Will the NDP?

December 10, 2012Canada, Energy and Resources, Oil&Gas, Pipelines and Supertankers, Politics, WATER, Western CanadaAdrian Dix, BC Oil Pipelines and Supertankers, KinderMorgan, Oil and gas, Politics, Salmon, Water and EnergyRafe Mair

Mike Smyth had an interesting column in Sunday’s Province, dealing with the proposed second and much larger Kinder Morgan Pipeline to Vancouver, which would see a five-fold increase in tanker traffic through Vancouver’s harbour. In it he told us that the company was being very laid back compared with Enbridge, holding a series of public information sessions. Mr. Smyth, quite correctly in my view, said that the public, if only mildly involved now, would change its attitude toward Kinder Morgan.

Kinder Morgan will and indeed is being dishonest with the public. This is no different than Enbridge or any other pipeline – they all maintain that there will be no spills and that, if there are, they will be minor (which is what Enbridge said about Kalamazoo) and quickly cleaned up. This is nonsense and the public will very soon be letting Kinder Morgan know that.

We must all know that corporations simply do not tell the truth except by accident. Their face to the public comes from highly skilled public relations departments and highly skilled and expensive outside agencies.

As we have seen with BP in the Gulf of Mexico disaster, after the tragedy they are quick to find pictures of healthy birds and animals to show that all is well again.

Close to home, the Ashlu private river power project is of interest. Ledcor received its right to dam and divert the river on the basis that migratory salmon would not be interfered with. The permission was in these words:

A decision was taken on November 30, 2009 and was that the authority may exercise any power or perform any duty or function with respect to the project because, after taking into consideration the screening report and taking into account the implementation of appropriate mitigation measures, the authority is of the opinion that the project is not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects. (emphasis added).

To say that salmon have indeed been adversely interfered with is putting it very mildly indeed.

This report from the Wilderness Committee:

More than 3,000 pages of documents obtained separately by the Vancouver Sun and the Wilderness Committee through freedom of information requests show water-flow fluctuations caused by run-of-river hydro projects are killing fish — and the problem is not isolated.

While independent power producers insist their sector remains the cleanest energy option, the documents bolster environmentalists’ long-standing concerns about the industry.

“I’m seeing significant environmental problems,” said Gwen Barlee, policy director for the Wilderness Committee. “And that runs completely counter to what the companies are saying, which is essentially, ‘Trust us with your wild rivers and there won’t be any problems.’ ”

The documents detail repeated short-term fluctuations in water flows, resulting in the stranding and killing of juvenile fish downstream of two plants, Capital Power on the lower Mamma and Innergex on Ashlu Creek, another tributary of the Squamish.

In one incident on Ashlu Creek, on May 8, 2010, 166 salmon and trout fry became stranded due to rapidly dropping water levels. Fewer than half of the fry could be returned to the creek alive. Another 39 fry died during a stranding on April 20, 2011.

Neither hydro operation has been charged.

This happens all over the province – companies get government permission to dam a river, the understanding being that salmon runs will not be harmed, then the salmon runs are extensively damaged.

What is also endemic is the lack of any government surveillance of water used and released by the company. They promise, cross your heart and hope to die, that they will conform to the terms and when they don’t there are no consequences.

While Kinder Morgan isn’t into hydroelectricity, its pipeline will cross many streams and rivers and it too will cross its heart and promise that it will be so careful in fish habitat we have nothing to worry our pretty little heads about.

THEY KNOW THAT THERE WILL BE SPILLS IN FISH HABITAT, THAT THE CONSEQUENCES WILL BE HORRIBLE, AND THAT THERE IS NOTHING THEY CAN DO ABOUT IT.

But there is much more. If this line goes through there will be upwards of 350 tankers leaving Burrard Inlet every year going through the very dangerous 2nd Narrows Bridge, loaded with deadly bitumen.

We will be assured that there won’t be any accidents and, if there are, why it will all be cleaned up spick and span and that there will be no residual damage.

This is bullshit and they know it.

Kinder Morgan’s Director of Engineering and Marine Development Mike Davies acknowledged at a recent debate in Vancouver that there have been more than 70 spills from the current Trans Mountain Pipeline over its 60 year lifetime. That includes a 2007 spill that drenched a Burnaby neighbourhood in oil – for which the company was found partially responsible and ordered to pay a $150,000 fine by the courts. Then, last week we learned from a National Energy Board report on the spill of 90,000 litres of oil from the company’s Abbottsford tank farm in 2011 that emergency alarms warning of a leak went ignored by operators for hours.

This takes me into politics.

Adrian Dix, the leader of the NDP, won’t take a stand on the Kinder Morgan line until it formally files its application.

This cop-out is raw cowardice. Dix knows as much as he ever will about this pipeline – enough to oppose it no matter how much they will ship.

This is causing us at The Common Sense Canadian to re-think our policy for next May’s election.

Dix is evidently worried that he will be seen as “against everything”. No one, least of all Damien Gillis and I want Dix to be against everything but only those projects that will damage our precious province and all the fauna and flora that our wilderness sustains.

In addition to damage done in any particular place there is the question of the cumulative impact of the half dozen or more oil, gas and condensate pipelines now proposed for BC. No environmental process, Provincial or Federal, has addressed this question.

In fact the process reminds one of a Soviet “show” trial. The result is certain but to make it look good, governments hold hearings where the desirability of the project is out of order, it already being a “done deal”.

As it sits right now, as we survey the scene on environmental matters, there is little to separate the uncaring, corrupt Liberals from the gutless NDP.