Category Archives: WATER

Are They Ganging up on the People and Environment?

Energy and Resources, Fracking, Mining, WATER, Water and Hydrocarbons, , , , , ,
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Just before I get down to business, I know that all environmentalists will be saddened that a former member of the group, Patrick Moore, allegedly got stiffed by a client for $120,000. I hate to sound like a “Johnny-come-lately” with good advice but, Pat, there are some professions where it’s wise to get your money up front.
 
Those who specialize in conspiracy theories – I’m a sometime member but inching closer to full membership – might wonder if the despoilers of our environment are ganging up on us. This thought came to me as someone representing yet another very worthy cause came to me asking for advice – this one was on the “smart meters” proposed by the bankrupt BC Hydro, which somehow has a billion plus rattling around in their jeans. This is interesting because the difference between this and a tax is invisible and the Campbell/Clark government hasn’t even bothered to go through the motions of putting it to a vote in the Legislature – in addition to removing oversight authority from the public’s supposed watchdog, The BC Utilities Commission (also stripped of authority over Site C Dam and private power projects).
 
The fish farm debate heats up, if that’s possible, as we learn the scientist who advised the provincial government – standing against all other fish biologists dealing with this subject – was practicing voodoo science. That’s not quite what a colleague said about Dick Beamish but one must infer it from what he did say as he dissociated himself from anything Beamish said or did.
 
We have Independent power being proved by the hour to be an environmental catastrophe as well as being fiscally mad as they drive BC Hydro over a financial cliff.
 
And what is the latest cost of the original $1 billion dollar Site”C” at now? Did I see $8 billion with independent estimates topping $10 billion all for power we won’t need but is deliciously placed to extract natural gas and “mine” the biggest polluter on the planet, the Tar Sands?
 
We still have the Fish Lake (Prosperity Mine – don’t you love the PR slant on that name) supported by Premier Clark.
 
We have a brand new environmental threat in what is called “fracking” where gas is “mined” horizontally with enormous amounts of water taken out of an already overburdened supply. We haven’t even considered the NAFTA ramifications.
 
We have Premier Clark, if not approving pipelines from the Tar Sands to Kitimat and greater capacity of the Kinder Morgan line to Burnaby certainly not disapproving even though the record of the companies involved is appalling. On the same subject, the Campbell/Clark government some years ago wrote the feds saying that they didn’t oppose large oil tankers plying the most spectacular and dangerous waters in the world. The Campbell/Clark crowd are utterly unfazed by the fact that spills on land and sea are not “risks” but mathematical certainties.
 
While all this is going on, the C/C government is paving farm land and threatening wildlife sanctuaries.
 
It’s hard not to sniff a corporate/government conspiracy, with the government thinking they can pile so much on us at one time we can’t get our acts together.
 
They are wrong.            
 

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UBCM “Best Practice” and “Excellence awards” are for CAO’s

Canada, Politics, WATER, Western Canada,
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The Union of BC Municipalities is a powerful bureaucracy, forging education, political policies, directives and awards for excellence.  Good intentions have resulted in unintended consequences because ‘best practices’ and ‘excellence awards’ are not community based decision making, and the benefactors are not the communities, but chief administrators. 

How?  Can you imagine how much prestige and awe you would accrue, if you could format or implement ‘best management practices’ and obtain a $10 Million grant for your community?  You might be in demand to obtain millions for other small towns all over BC and possibly across Canada, find yourself receiving ‘excellence awards’ and happily implementing more ‘best practices’ elsewhere. 

But wait a minute… ‘Best management practices’ are in the Request for Decision regarding Cayoosh Creek campground in 2011.  Would anyone put that parched brown and almost empty campsite into the ‘best practice’ in any category?  The treatment of the previous campsite operators with a promise of a new lease for over a year?  Putting forth District plans to the Chamber of Commerce prior to alerting the operators of their loss of home and livelihood?  The LRA find nothing excellent in this. 

The $10,127,000 ‘water’ tax grant?  We have already published details for everyone’s scrutiny in ‘Not One Thin Dime’, Lillooet News, July 6, 2011. 

The 2010 tax assessment comparisons (available online) show per capita costs for Ashcroft $293, Barriere $256, Cache Creek $112, 100 Mile $281, Oliver $184, Pemberton $284 and Lillooet at $336.  Lillooet  proposes (per the $10,127,000 grant) to increase $250 per year, along with water metering charges.  What is ‘best practice’ when it chases gardeners away from their growing paradise?  What is ‘best practice’ when increasing our carbon footprint with more pumps for water delivery?

The intention of the UBCM ‘best practices’ and ‘awards for excellence’ with respect to certain matters fall far short of beneficial to Lillooet.  

On another note, the Premier’s office is contemplating a new bureaucrat or bureaucracy called ‘Municipal Auditor General’ and ‘best practices’ were referenced in conversations.  One comment stated emphatically ‘the new municipal auditor general should be at arms length from the UBCM.’  Those on the feedback side seemed to be in accord on that point.

The only way to work for change in any community is by voting in councilors with the entire community at heart.  

Anne-Marie Anderson
Secretary/Treasurer
Lillooet Ratepayers Association

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Campbell/Clark Libs Have No Credibility – HST Promises Meaningless

Canada, Politics, WATER, Western Canada, , , , ,
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I commented here last week upon Premier Clark’s silence on all the great issues she faces and questioned what her policies will be. I expect no answer because she wants to put all Gordon Campbell did into the darkest corner of the cupboard. The strategy is “that was then and now is now”; I am Premier Clark and my responsibility started last March 14 when I was sworn in.

This, as I will show, is not so. It started the day she became a Campbell cabinet minister in May 2001.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane but start with a current issue – what does the HST have in common with the environment? The answer to this will weave an unbroken and unbreakable thread back to 2001.

Both the HST end the environment ask public acceptance based upon the credibility of the Campbell/Clark government – a government that has lied through its teeth for the seemingly endless decade-plus they have been in power.

Surely no one, not even the Fraser Institute, believes that the Liberal government will drop the HST to 10% in 2014!

First of all, God’s mercy will see that they’re no longer in power so they won’t be around to keep a pledge they never intended to keep on the first place. If God is just and not merciful, there isn’t a chance that a future Liberal government will keep that promise. In short, Ms. Clark has made a pledge she will never redeem and may never be required to.
 
All government policy depends upon credibility. Unfortunately, the public has learned to expect some government deceit but usually it’s deceit by way of exaggeration – rather like the gilding of the lily practiced in most societies in order to stay at peace with one another. We learn how to discount the statements made – political statements are expected to have a measure of barnyard droppings mixed in. As former New York governor Mario Cuomo said, “You campaign in poetry and govern in prose.”
 
But this is different. Big time. We’re talking about major league falsehoods.
 
I call this government the “Campbell/Clark” government for that’s what it is. Premier Clark participated in the deceit when she was in government, accepted it uncritically when she was a talk show host, and perpetuates it in office by not dealing with it.
 
It started when Campbell, after holding the NDP to the highest standards of probity, somehow forgot that idealism when he was thrown into jail for drunk driving. Christy Clark, Education Minister, offered not a whisper of criticism. Like all good Liberal toadies, she went along.
 
He lied about BC Rail, Fish Farms and private power.
 
With BC Rail, he pledged in two elections including the one that made him premier that he would not privatize BC Rail (as did Ms. Clark, as co-author of the Liberals’ 2001 campaign platform). Of course, he did and Clark went along with him at the time, during her radio career and to this date.
 
Not a peep out of Clark, on air or in office, as Campbell settled the Basi-Virk case just before he, former Finance Minister Gary Collins, and Sir Hiss, Patrick Kinsella, were to give evidence.
 
Premier Campbell let fish farms expand exponentially saying that he was following the best science available. The public now knows what opponents of fish farms have always known – the scientist he was listening to was a disgrace to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and a fish farm industry suck. He was out of synch with every fish biologist in the world that deals with this issue. Christy Clark has been silent since the beginning and is silent now.
 
With private power companies (IPPS) the Campbell/Clark government has uttered nothing but falsehoods. I hate to dwell on poor old former Finance Minister Colin Hansen because he seems to be such a nice guy, but in a video blog the Liberals have now erased, he made half a dozen statements about so-called “run of river” policy that were plainly and simply falsehoods. These falsehoods were not minor little errors – they went to the root of the matter. Ms. Clark has not uttered a word of criticism – or strangely support – of this disastrous policy which even the Vancouver Province called “folly” and which a recent op-ed in the Vancouver Sun, published under the aegis of former Fraser Institute “fellow”, Fazil Milhar, roundly criticized.
 
This policy forces BC Hydro to buy from IPPs power they don’t need and must thus export at a 50%+ loss or use it at double or more what they can make it for themselves. This cost Hydro $600,000,000 last year and this is just the beginning of the reckoning. Not a word from our premier.
 
We have seen this policy drive BC Hydro to where they would be, if in the private sector, in bankruptcy protection with much worse to come. Not a squeak of criticism or concern from Ms. Clark.

We’ve seen this policy destroy one river, and its ecology, after another yet not a word from the premier at the time the policy was made when she was a cabinet member, later as a talk show host, or now as premier. Premier Clark, a supporter of the Prosperity Mine proposal at Fish Lake, now in charge of energy and the demise of BC Hydro, acts as if nothing was happening. And now she has pipelines and tankers to deal with.
 
It is critical to understand that pipeline leaks and tanker accidents are not risks but certainties. The Liberal government told the Federal government, in writing, some years ago that it did not oppose super tankers on the coast. In the recent Premiers Conference Ms. Clark hedged on the pipeline issue; she refused to take a stand.
 
This issue, like the private power issue, has no middle ground as in “you can’t be a little bit pregnant.” All the evidence she ever needs is there in logic – an unfettered risk is a calamity in waiting – and evidence of the colossal negligence of pipeline operators generally and Enbridge specifically. The decision is “yes” or “no” and there will never be more information needed than the premier presently possesses.

Silence implies consent. One of the penalties of consenting to the Liberal record is that no credibility remains.
 
As it is with the HST, as it is with the disgraceful deceit by this government from the outset, so it must be predicted for the future – an utter lack of credibility.
 
It is a millstone around Premier Clark’s neck she consented to.

It’s a millstone she can never be rid of.

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Kitimat Sentinel Piece on Rafe Mair as Canada’s Environmental Don Quixote

Water and Hydrocarbons
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From the Kitimat Northern Sentinel – July 22, 2011

by Allan Hewitson

I often think Don Quixote lives on in Canada and the bigger, more prominent and more challenging
the target windmill, the happier he seems to be, either leading or
joining the charge against it.

Now nearing 80, the seemingly tireless crusader I would
identify as closest to a real-life reincarnation of Miguel de
Cervante’s 17th century champion-in-chivalry and heroics  is BC’s own
environmental and always-for-honest-government battler, Rafe Mair.

I have followed Rafe Mair’s often-pugnacious escapades
and earnest campaigns for more than 20 years.  I still regularly read
his blog, his articles in The Tyee and on the Commonsense Canadian website.

I’ve faced off with him a couple of times in my
previous life and more recently. I must say he is very adept at “knife
to a gun fight” scenarios.

I don’t have his frenetic energy level, despite being a
few years younger. There’s little ambivalence in most people about
Mair. Some love him, some hate him. I suspect he prefers being liked,
but doesn’t much care one way or the other.

The former BC MLA, lawyer, cabinet minister,
broadcaster, radio commentator, writer and avid environmental
windmill-tilter and angry-man has added a whole lot of additional issues
to his list of targets since he first emerged to oppose situations he
did not agree with such as the Kemano Completion Project in BC and the
Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional accords nationally.

This week, as I surfed my e-mail, Rafe was again front
and centre, urging his website supporters to be active “as our own
media” in recirculating his thoughts to their own e-mail friends,
because he feels unable to count on the integrity or reliability of BC’s
mainstream media to alert British Columbians to the many indiscretions
of the federal government, the conspiratorial activities of what he
describes freely as “the corrupt B.C. Liberal Government”, or the legion
of doomsday scenarios facing this province, this country and the world
environment at the hands of big corporations..

An avid angler, Mair is still an ardent supporter of
“saving BC rivers”, but for him that challenge has taken on a more
serious and multi-national hue as he scraps with the province and its
support for proponents of dozens of private run-of-the-river
hydro-electric projects which he fears are combining to destroy scores
of vital wild salmon habitats as well as hastening the bankruptcy and
privatization of BC Hydro, forced by government to buy the power
produced by these projects at uneconomically-sustainable prices – and at
times when it is not needed.

Mair fully believes that BC waters are endangered by
dangerous oil and gas pipeline plans, the existing and the future
planned supertanker commercialization of the Douglas Channel, North
Coast, Haida Gwaii, Burrard Inlet, Gulf Islands and other waters.

Countless salmon rivers and creeks could be crossed by
oil and gas pipelines that will (“it’s a matter of time”, he says) leak
and pollute those coastal waters.

It appears that the Auditor-General of B.C. has finally
acknowledged what Rafe et al, have known forever, that BC’s
environmental assessment process is a sham and I have little doubt that
his view is accurate, but equally little confidence in the government’s
ability to adjust legislation to improve assessments.

Many other issues remain of deep concern to Mair,
including multi-national West Coast fish farming practices and related
impacts on wild salmon, gas exploration and fracking of natural gas
deposits in the north-east, items of past injustices and inaction – such
as the murky events leading up to the mysterious sale of BC Rail – wind
power and non-green “green” projects, the continuing HST fiasco where

BC will stand on the Liberals if new premier Christy Clark
waits till May, 2013 before going to the people in a new election,
Enbridge’s Gateway project, existing oil exports from Vancouver  and so
on.

His latest blogging effort, attacking corporations
supporting shark fishing for the purpose of de-finning the animals for
popular shark-fin soup, an oriental delicacy, demonstrates Mair shows
absolutely no signs of slowing down or backing off in pursuing his
beliefs: right and good in principle – and supportive of a
highly-energetic friend, Anthony Marr, a UBC-educated wildlife
preservationist.

Not surprising, I guess, because Marr shows on his own
website that there’s a mutual-admiration society between Rafe and
himself when he says, under the heading “Oil Spill a Certainty” by Rafe
Mair, that Rafe is “ THE most environmentally conscious and passionate
broadcaster and public figure in Canada, or the world for that matter,
that I’ve had the pleasure to know…”

Anyway, this all boils down to my personal
acknowledgment that Rafe Mair does hold some special status as a
pre-eminent commentator on matters environmental in British Columbia and
his advancing age certainly seems to be a non-factor in his
productivity.

That being said, he isn’t necessarily always right – or always wrong, for that matter.

But he remains a highly opinionated, persistent, impatient and powerful fighter for issues he opposes.

In this particular shark-fin instance and in many of
his other fights, I support his points of view, but not in everything.
Taking on the Asian world for sharks is a big step…

Read original article

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Christy Clark’s Silence on the Big Questions

Canada, Politics, WATER, Western Canada,
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I worry a lot when politicians are talking – usually double or even triple talk. Did I do that when I was in government?…Well it takes one to know one.
 
I worry even more when they say nothing, something that Premier Christy Clark finds impossible when fudging on motherhood “issues” and tossing out the usual barnyard droppings. What Premier Clark is very good at is deathly silence on matters of great consequence.
 
What is the premier’s stance on Independent Power Projects (IPPS) in the environmental sense?
 
Does she care about the enormous environmental impact they have? Has she considered the clouding of the river during construction? Is she concerned that the main river goes down to a trickle when it’s diverted into a tunnel? Does she concern herself with the clear-cutting for roads and transmission lines? It would be good to know.
 
Her only environmental pronouncement I know of is her support of the Fish Lake project which is not, to say the least, encouraging.
 
Does the premier care that because her government has forced BC Hydro to take IPP power when it doesn’t need it, Hydro must either sell it at a loss or use it instead its own much less expensive power? Does she even understand this? I ask because her spokesperson on the political panel on CBC at 7:40AM on Mondays clearly doesn’t.
 
Does the premier know that BC Hydro is carrying over $50 BILLION dollars in obligations to IPPs and that this increases with every new contract?
 
Surely Ms. Clark understands that this is the prescription for bankruptcy – or does she? Maybe she’s never had to balance a home budget and doesn’t comprehend these things.
 
Does the premier know that early in the Campbell regime – when she was deputy leader – her government told the federal government that it had no objection to oil tanker traffic on our coast? Do we take from her silence that even though a spill (and there are no good ones) is a certainty she doesn’t understand this or just couldn’t care less?
 
Moreover, if she and her government support these issues, why aren’t they boasting about them as good politicians always do when, like Jack Horner, they pull out a plum?
 
And what about pipelines? The Enbridge and Kinder Morgan lines will crisscross the province, over its most sensitive terrain and again, a spill is not a risk but a certainty – does that concern her?
 
Come to think on it, does the premier understand and does she care that BC hardly makes a dime out of these catastrophic oil transport deals?
 
What’s the premier’s attitude to the Highways Ministry paving agricultural land? Threatening sensitive wildlife preserves (in the case of Eagleridge they just paved it) and wildlife sanctuaries?
 
Does Christy Clark care that the Ministry of Environment – the resident eunuch in her harem – has virtually nothing to say on these matters because, thanks to her government, it’s a mere shell of its former self?
 
Does she care about anything except money?
 
Ah, Rafe, you must be fair here for she does say she cares for the family, although you’d never know it by the record of her government.

I think that the voters of BC are entitled to specific answers to these specific questions.
 
I also think that the best we can expect is platitudinous bullshit.
 
When Premier Clark flouts the fixed election term legislation passed by her and her government accompanied by passionate concern for democracy and fair play and calls a snap election, she will be asked these questions.
 
The Liberals were spared these questions in 2009 during an appalling campaign by the NDP – I don’t think they’ll be so lucky next time.
 
In the meantime, Damien Gillis and I of the Common Sense Canadian will be taking these issues by the internet and in person to every corner of the province and she should know that.
 

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Mainstream Media Blind to Real Environmental Issues

WATER, , ,
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Why is it that the mainstream media ignore the down and dirty part of the environment?
 
Yes, they do stuff on global warming and it’s good that they do but when it comes to local issues, apart from where Vancouver sends its garbage, they’re nowhere to be found.
 
Consider the fish farm issue. This from an earlier blog on this site:

The 2003 memo – recently made public via the Cohen Commission on collapsing Fraser sockeye stocks – contains some truly shocking passages for their candour and for how clearly they vindicate those who have been critical of DFO’s salmon farm science. Written by a respected DFO scientist, Dr. Brent Hargreaves, the memo severely attacks the credibility of a colleague, key salmon farm apologist Dr. Dick Beamish, whose science Hargreaves labels as “shoddy” and “unethical”, among other pejoratives. Here are a couple of choice passages:

“The research on sea lice that has been conducted by Beamish has been strongly and widely criticized in both the scientific community and the public media…I think to a large degree it was the inadequacies of Beamish’s research and conclusions that led to the lack of public confidence in DFO science…

…I also do not want to be directly associated, either professionally or personally, with either Beamish or his research…He always does exactly as he pleases, regardless of the (often negative) impacts on DFO staff and research programs.”

My question – why did Postmedia (Canwest in drag) have no space for this story? After all, the Campbell government based its entire disastrous policy on fish farms on Beamish’s rubbish!
 
The facts on the Campbell/Clark energy policy are no longer in dispute. These environmental catastrophes, built and operated by big private sector companies, produce power that BC Hydro is forced to take but for the most part can’t use and must either sell at a huge loss or use it instead of the must cheaper power they can produce themselves. BC Hydro would be, if in the private sector, in bankruptcy protection or even bankruptcy itself. Anyone who tries to balance the household budget understands this; so does the Clark government as did Campbell before but they’re too scared to admit it. Premier Clark hopes that it will go away but I can assure her that it won’t!
 
This is not a story requiring Postmedia coverage?
 
The Rupert Murdoch/News of the World scandal should make us all question our newspapers, especially Postmedia and the David Black papers. I don’t for a moment believe that either of these groups is hacking into private computers. I assure you that this is not my issue here. What the scandal does is alert us to the probably deliberate lack of coverage of environmental catastrophes, thus raising the clear question, WHY?
 
As the story goes, when a man gives his wife flowers for no reason, there’s a reason. And there’s a reason here.
 
I freely admit my bias – I don’t like the Postmedia papers and didn’t like them when they were Canwest or Pacific Press and before. But I tell you that there’s no malice here – just decades of demanding that they report what’s happening in our province fairly as news and critically as editors. I’m a lifetime British Columbian – damned near an octogenarian – so this goes back a long, long time.
 
There have been good years such as when the late Marjorie Nichols, the late Jack Wasserman, Allan Fotheringham, Jim Hume held the government’s feet to the fire – especially the government that I was in. In doing that, they were true journalists and we all, government and the public, were better informed, thus better for it. 
 
Today’s columnists know that if they get down and dirty on some subjects they don’t get printed. This isn’t some idle comment – I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t have grounds to. And I understand that these folks have families to raise, mortgages to pay and kids to educate. I learned about this myself as I saw what happened to broadcasters if the clientele that feed their station doesn’t like what’s being said about them. In my opinion, that’s why columnists were fearless and stubborn about attacking the NDP (which they were right to do) – there were no major advertisers angry at a pillorying of the hated “socialists”.
 
Today, if one wants to see the present government held to account one reads the Globe and Mail (I never thought I’d live long enough to have that coming from my pen!)
 
The Globe and Mail is still pretty tepid in its role as critic but I see their BC section with Mark Hume, Gary Mason, Justine Hunter and others delving into subjects – not with the thoroughness that, say, Vaughn Palmer with the NDP fast Ferry program – but they at least open the subject to daylight where Postmedia fears to tread.
 
I don’t flatter myself by thinking that Postmedia and Black won’t cover anything I’m on – that may be coincidence even though the coincidences are many. However I am reminded of the story of the courtroom in the Southern US where smoking was permitted. The lawyer for the plaintiff continually puffed on a cigar even though the judge asked him several times, politely, to desist.
 
At the end of the case the judge found for the defendant whereupon the lawyer for the plaintiff complained that the judge shouldn’t have decided for the other side just because he, the plaintiff’s lawyer smoked a cigar.
 
The judged replied, “counsellor, that’s not why I decided against you”.
 
“Well, Your Honour,” said the losing lawyer, “that’s a better reason than any you gave in your reasons for judgement!” 
 
The Vancouver Sun bleats that it is “Seriously Westcoast”, which is classic George Orwell’s “Newspeak” and has all the credibility of an ad singing the praises of cigarette smoking.
 
The public has two options as I see it  – read the Sun because of Rex Morgan MD and the Province for Luann and get critical examination of issues from blogs they trust. There’s a danger, of course, that this leads to only getting information that supports your views but in working through the papers searching for the comics and sports pages one can’t help reading the government line if only by osmosis.
 
As we say with the Common Sense Canadian (TheCanadian.org), we must fill the content gap of the mainstream press by being our own media.
 

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