Common Sense Canadian co-founder Damien Gillis and I have been raising concerns about the future of BC Hydro for over two years; and now a new economic analysis by contributor Erik Andersen, drawing on available hard data, proves beyond a doubt what we have been saying all along: Gordon Campbell’s private power program is unnecessary and costly to the point of threatening the very solvency of our most important crown corporation, BC Hydro – not to mention hitting the pocketbooks of every British Columbian and company doing business in our province that once relied on a steady supply of affordable public electricity.

It’s important to note why WAC Bennett bought the BC Electric in 1961 and made it into BC Hydro and Power Authority (BCH). The late premier – because our province is so large geographically and so sparsely settled – saw the need for ferries, rail, and power to be tools of public policy. He saw ferries as extensions of highways and knew that Black Ball Ferries, a private corporation, would only service areas that made money. He saw, similarly, that a private rail company would not service developing areas, so he created BC Rail. He also knew that for BC to compete on national and international markets we must have cheap, reliable power so created BCH and developed the “Two Rivers Policy”, bulking dams on the Peace and Columbia Rivers so that BC would always have clean, constant, and sufficient power. He was not opposed to selling power elsewhere but only so long as sufficient power was always available to British Columbia’s industries and people.

BC Hydro has been a huge success and is the envy of the world.

For reasons that can only be ideologically driven, the Campbell government has set out on a process that will bankrupt BCH (meanwhile Campbell has been in California this past week, shilling for this power which even Californians recognize is a bad deal for the environment, thus refusing to buy it – see
Campbell urges California to review imports by Scott Simpson in the Vancouver Sun. Despite what he and his ministers have stated, BC is not a net importer of power and never needs to be. With conservation, new generators on flood control dams and new generators and upgrades on power dams, and taking back the power to which we’re entitled under the Columbia River Treaty, we have power for as far as we wish to look.

Premier Campbell now has in place Independent Power Producers (IPPs), which he portrays as small private companies, doing no environmental damage, which will dam (IPPs prefer to say “weir”) up to 700 rivers in BC – saying that the energy produced will make us “energy sufficient by 2016”. Unfortunately Mr. Campbell is being very economical with the truth.

This power can only be produced during high run-off periods when BC Hydro doesn’t need their power – which they must buy anyway under contract – and since it can’t use it, it must then export it at less than half what they paid for it.

One doesn’t have to get much further than Kindergarten arithmetic to know that a company can’t do that very long before it goes broke!

It should also be noted that because BCH is forced into this “buy high/sell low” policy it will no longer be able to pay the government the very substantial annual dividends which went for our schools, hospitals and social programs.

What will now happen is a little three card monte game where BC Hydro will hike its rates to citizens and industry to make some extra money to give back to us as that missing dividend! One must also remember that there won’t be any BC Utilities Commission to stop this nonsense (Campbell took care of that just as soon as our public watchdog blew the whistle on the foolish scheme last year).

As Damien and I traveled the province speaking and showing DVDs, telling people what I’ve just revealed, there was no answer from either the “mom and pop” companies (such as General Electric, Ledcor etc.) nor from the government. During the 2009 election I spoke and challenged the Liberal government to meet with me in debate and there were no takers!

Now we know why – Damien and I have been right all along.

I believe that’s because Premier Campbell is a Fraser Institute acolyte who simply detests publicly owned companies. There is no other explanation for this mad energy policy whereby British Columbia sees its rivers and the ecology they sustain destroyed, its first class power company hurtling into bankruptcy, its profits going out of province all because of a hatred of public power by a far right-wing premier.

I said that Damien and I have been right all along as to what’s happening and this is where engineer and economist Erik Andersen comes in.

Click here to see his astonishing report making it clear what is happening. BC Hydro is going broke, it’s that simple.

Quite properly, Mr. Andersen doesn’t deal with government policies but just the facts.

Please read this and forward to your friends. The first step toward dealing with this catastrophe in the making is bringing an end to the fantasy Campbell has conjured for the past decade that this private power policy is an economic and environmental benefit for the people of BC.