Posting by Dave Schreck on his Strategic Thoughts blog about Bill 17, which he refers to as the “Flood Valleys for Power for Export Act”. Read article
Flood Valleys, Destroy Rivers for Power for Export
Tag Archives: Water and Energy
Site C, HST and truth in B.C. politics
Special for the Common Sense Canadian
The Campbell Liberals’ decision to proceed with Site C is almost as bad as their Harmonized Sales Tax scam because it’s obvious from the content of the Site C announcement that it’s premature – before the proper studies have been done – and so is mainly a PR ploy to try to distract public attention away from the popular revolt against the HST.
Furthermore, the way Premier Gordon Campbell was obviously trying to use the Site C issue to position himself into a province-building legacy akin to W.A.C. Bennett’s is further offensive, especially since he has been deconstructing so much of the legacies like B.C. Hydro and BCRail left by previous governments but also because his spending and taxing choices in general have been so regressive.
Those Vancouver school kids demonstrating against underfunding of education were right on: the Campbell crowd can find hundreds of millions of dollars to retrofit a roof for a soccer stadium (and many other dubious spending choices like that) but they won’t find money for school districts to properly fund education, for health boards to properly fund hospitals or for other pressing needs such as welfare and Medicare as well as useful programs such as arts and culture grants.
More recently we have seen a wave of layoffs in the provincial government and it’s no surprise that some of the steepest cuts have come in Ministries such as Environment and Forests that are charged with protecting the public interests while political agencies such as Public Affairs Bureau have generally been spared from such cuts.
It’s clear that the main reason Campbell is doing what he’s doing – bringing in the HST in order to get the $1.6-billion bribe from Ottawa – is to try to minimize his embarrassment over the huge deficit, and especially to try to hide the fact that he lied about the size of that deficit in the previous election campaign, which is unconscionable.
The Site C issue itself is a prime example of Campbell’s deceits: the Campbell Liberals have knowingly misrepresented the state of the province’s energy supplies, claiming we are net importers when really we have an abundance of reliable supplies which we choose to enhance by being clever traders – we import power from Alberta when it’s cheap and we export power to the U.S. when it’s highly profitable.
I am not opposed to economic growth and expansion of power supplies, and I’d even support Site C provided it can be fairly proven to be safe from the engineering perspective and viable from environmental and community perspectives, but I am very opposed to Campbell pushing it ahead prematurely for primarily partisan reasons.
So what we have is Campbell trashing the public interest in many ways and many areas in order to vainly try to rescue his own political reputation. It is disgusting. He must go.
If you haven’t signed the HST petition yet you should ensure you do so well before the July 5 deadline regardless of how you feel about the petition proponent Bill Vander Zalm, whose own record is checkered. That’s because the issues are bigger than the personalities involved, and a vote against the Campbell Liberals’ mismanagement of the HST can also be – and should be – a vote against his mismanagement of many other issues too.
The world’s shortest blog!
Premier Campbell’s decision to go ahead with Site “C” demonstrates what I’ve said all over the province and written for anyone who will print it for nearly three years:
“Run of River, better stated as private power initiatives, will not supply power to BC Hydro because it produces its power during the run-off when BC Hydro doesn’t need it!”
This is the question Premier Campbell must now answer –
Now you have admitted that private power will not be going for BC consumption but for export, and now that you’ve approved Site “C” to produce power for our use, will the private rivers policy, which destroys our rivers to supply power in the United States, be ended with no new licenses to be issued?
Plutonic Tops List of Power Firms Donating to Libs
Of the 14 successful firms in BC Hydro’s latest call for power, 10 have made contributions to the Liberals totaling nearly $385,000. By Will McMartin in The Tyee. Read article
Rex in Effect! Weyler’s Must-Watch Speech on Private Power and the Myth of Endless Growth
Watch the 12 minute video here: here
DY-NA-MITE! Those three syllables best describe Rex Weyler’s recent speech to a crowd of 300 in Vancouver – who filled Heritage Hall to hear about private river power and its threat to BC’s spectacular Bute Inlet. In just over 10 min Rex tears to shreds the whole Campbell private power program, undermining the assumptions of endless growth that serve as the foundation to this house of cards. Peak oil, consumerism, limits to growth: these are tough topics – taboos even – but Rex boils them down into simple, compelling logic that anyone can immediately grasp.
Do yourself a favour and watch this video – then forward it to everyone you know. It’s as good an explanation as you will ever find of the challenges we face as a species, and the only real solutions to them.
Excerpt: “We keep thinking if we just consume a little bit more of the planet, if we just industrialize a little bit more of our wilderness that somehow that’s going to solve our problem….We keep hoping that somehow these technological innovations are going to save us. It’s not going to work that way. The only thing that’s going to make us more sustainable and solve problems such as global warming is for us to get smart and start consuming less stuff. That means consuming less of our rivers, consuming less of our wilderness, consuming less of everything. We’re going to have to teach ourselves, our children, and help them teach their children that we can live richer lives with less consumption.”
“There’s no future in which you keep growing forever…These big corporations – General Electric, Shell Oil – they understand this. They know what’s happening and they’re making a grab for every last resource on the planet. Why are they in BC, eyeballing 600 rivers? Because it’s here. And because no one’s got it yet… This movement to occupy and industrialize 600 rivers in BC is nothing more than a resource grab by one of the largest and most predatory corporations on the planet, General Electric and their local buddies – for huge profits. And when we see all our politicians running into lucrative jobs with these power companies, this is just scandalous corruption.”
Rex Weyler is a co-founder of Greenpeace and has recently joined both BC Citizens for Public Power – as a spokesperson and advisor – and this publication as a contributor.
The Case against the Site C Dam
“A reporter’s Peace River journey against a powerful current of dubious assumptions and official spin.” A five-part series at The Tyee by Max Fawcett.
Read part 1
Site C Would Drown a Vital BC Breadbasket Read part 2
Wood River Wild
A video by Bill Noble about the Wood River in the Central Rocky Mountains of BC, a proposed river privatization site. View video
Hansen and Campbell’s Private Power Falsehoods
The trouble with talking about simple issues concerning private power is that their evil is so egregious people have trouble believing that any government would tolerate it. While one can understand that corporations don’t give a damn about the environment or, indeed, the well being of British Columbians, surely the government cares! Doesn’t it?
In a moment, we will get to a youtube video of BC Liberal Finance Minister Colin Hansen that contains so many falsehoods it would make Pinnochio blush! But first, let me lay out here the myths peddled by Hansen, Premier Campbell, and their private power pals – and the real facts that contradict them.
UNTRUE: BC is a net importer of power. What the premier does is prove again that while figures don’t lie, liars can sure as hell figure. Campbell uses BC Hydro’s figures and neatly avoids the fact that it’s not the only major provider of energy – if you include Alcan, Teck Cominco and Fortis, according to the National Energy Board, which supervises power sales and purchases, BC is most often a net exporter of power. It does import from Alberta and Washington sometimes, but does that in off-peak periods, then flips it back to them at peak periods for a very large profit. It can do this because it can “store electricity” in the form of water in its large public reservoirs.
UNTRUE: In order for BC to be energy self sufficient, it needs private power production. This is an egregious falsehood. The vast majority of private power can only be produced during the spring run-off period – a time when BC Hydro has plenty of power and full reservoirs. During the winter months, when BC Hydro sometimes has need of power most of these private power projects can’t provide it.
UNTRUE: BC Hydro depends on dirty power from Burrard Thermal. When the public’s supposedly independent (no more, thanks to Campbell) energy watchdog, the BC Utilities Commission, rejected his latest private power call for being “not in the public interest,” Campbell promptly steamrolled over our regulator. He and his ilk falsely claimed BC Hydro was depending too much on Burrard Thermal, and, thus, should be buying more private power instead. For starters, BC Hydro only uses Burrard Thermal a few days out of the year as back-up power, so families don’t freeze in their homes when other power sources unexpectedly go down. Campbell has also deliberately saddled BC Hydro with onerous “worst case scenario” requirements to have far more power than it needs – and on top of that to have even more “insurance” power – all to justify more private power contracts. Campbell has no intention to stop using Burrard Thermal! The only thing that has changed is that BC Hydro now has to pretend Burrard doesn’t exist on its books, so as to falsely boost its needs for private power! What’s more, besides hydro power, natural gas, which Burrard Thermal uses, is cleaner than any other source of firm energy (excepting perhaps geothermal). It thus makes abundant good sense to keep Burrard Thermal as backup power for the few days in the year when BC Hydro needs electricity.
UNTRUE: Private power plants are “green”. This is a falsehood that even Pinocchio in his prime wouldn’t utter. While each plant is different, they all have an enormous, often devastating effect on rivers and their ecology. Fish in rivers are the canary in the mine. Power plants badly silt the river when being built; they require roads and transmission lines that mean clear cuts. The building and operation of private power plants severely damage fish, thus impacting heavily on bears, eagles and other wildlife upon which the entire ecology depends.
After they’re built there is a permanent siphoning of up to 90% of the flow into a tunnel, not to come back to the riverbed for many kilometers. This means that the river, for all intents and purposes, simply doesn’t exist for the length of the diversion. Sometimes the water never comes back but is simply dumped into a convenient lake.
We must also bear in mind that it’s not only salmon runs we’re concerned about but also the resident Bull Trout, Dolly Varden, Rainbows and Cutthroat. This point is glossed over by governments and industry.
This is why other jurisdictions, like California, do not consider BC’s private river power projects “green”.
UNTRUE: Private power plants provide jobs. The fact is that the employment is confined to the building of the plant and according to Don McInnes of General Electric/Plutonic, the largest private power player in BC, only about a third of the labour force will be local. Once it’s completed, the facility is fully computerized – yielding a few jobs at best.
Here are the facts
FACT: BC Hydro is forced by the government to enter into contracts with private power companies at double or more than Hydro can sell that power for.
FACT: Because Hydro can’t use most of the private energy when it’s created, since it doesn’t need it, it must export the power at a 50% loss or higher. Premier Campbell has given us a new business technique – buy high and sell low!
FACT: Because BC Hydro must pay these unconscionable amounts to private power companies, it will not be able to pay its annual dividend of 100s of million dollars (nearly one billion a few years ago) into the provincial treasury where it goes into health, education, social programs etc.
FACT: The dividend paid annually by BC Hydro, that went into health, schools and social programs will now be going to shareholders of large corporations including General Electric and its largest shareholder, Warren Buffett.
Think about that when the government hasn’t enough money to look after its health and education obligations – think about it when you see the mentally ill, deprived of assistance, and sleeping under bridges…
FACT: BC Hydro will raise electricity costs dramatically (over 50% already in just a five year period – the mere tip of the ice berg). It must or else it goes broke. You can only take on so many Campbell-dictated sweetheart deals with private power producers for so long before you either pick up your losses from the citizenry and industry, or go broke. Either way the taxpayer loses, big time!
FACT: All our energy needs for as far ahead as we can see can, according to BC Hydro, be produced through conservation, upgrade of present facilities, new facilities on flood control dams and by taking back the power we’re entitled under the Columbia River Treaty. Moreover, because, as noted above, private power is produced when BC Hydro can’t use it, even if we did need more power it sure as hell won’t come from private power!
It must always be borne in mind that neither the governments nor industry give a damn about the environmental issues and their answers must be listened to in that light. They are not impartial judges trying to do justice but interested parties flogging a program they badly want.
To see what I mean, I invite you hear what Finance Minister Colin Hansen, the second most powerful member of Cabinet has to say.
The Finance Minister simply put, either lies through his teeth or is as dumb as a sack full of hammers.
He alleges that the province is a net importer of power (false), that private power is needed (false), that they are best to provide small scale power (false), that “run of river” projects are small (false), that the river continues to run at “its normal stream” (false).
In 1:51 minutes BC’s Finance Minister manages to produce five out and out falsehoods!
Simply put, the Campbell energy “plan” is one falsehood piled upon another.
Hardly Shocking: Tsawwassen Power Line Boondoggle
According to this past weekend’s cover story in the Province,
the Campbell Government’s brilliant plan to sell potentially cancer-causing homes to new families in Tsawwassen has
proven a colossal failure. This section of the community, along 53A St., is described by Kent Spencer in his
article “High Voltage, Low Sales” (not available in full online) as a “ghost town,” where entire blocks of houses
now sit vacant.
104 homes were purchased by the Campbell Government over a year ago from former owners outraged by the
government’s ploughing of new high-voltage power lines through their backyards and over their lone high
school. The 230,000-volt lines were double the power of the old ones they replaced – which residents had been
told for years by BC Hydro would be coming down a few years ago and not replaced (those who would cast
these folks as NIMBY’s should bear this in mind).
Cancer Sale!
So far, only 28 out of 104 homes have sold – which should come as no surprise at all. Would you buy a home
that could result in your child contracting leukemia? Would you take that chance, even if you got a deal on
the place, even if the science wasn’t 100%? Imagine someone saying, “Unless you can prove
to me this will kill my child or give me ovarian cancer, well, I’ve got no problem with it.” (It’s a wonder, then,
that even 28 homes have sold!) Apparently building on the popular Sleep Country “Mismatched Mattress Sale”,
the Campbell Government has come up with a cutting-edge real estate promo: The Cancer Sale!
Donald Trump, take note.
2008: An Electric Summer
My experience with this issue dates back to two years ago, when I spent several months going back and forth on
an almost weekly basis to sunny Tsawwassen (I say that with intended irony, in light of the pall that has been cast
over this wonderful little town in recent years by Campbell & co.) In those visits I attended and
documented various community meetings, rallies, and blockades – interviewing distressed residents, and ultimately
producing a short documentary on the subject entitled “Crossing the Lines”.
My colleague Rafe Mair also spoke at several big rallies and public meetings, in solidarity with the community.
It was a summer of high drama and emotion – which saw mothers pitted against a government that did everything in
its power to attack them: obtaining court injunctions, deploying police, and pursuing a vicious and deceitful PR
campaign against the opponents of the power lines. The crown corporation tasked as bag man for Campbell’s
plan, the BC Transmission Corporation (BCTC), used tax dollars to spy on and intimidate these families, following
their every move by helicopter and by vehicle (one memorable incident was captured in a frantic 911 call by one of
these brave ladies, describing in real time how she was being aggressively tailed through town). They even
hired a video production company to record and photograph the mothers and their children returning home from school
and baseball games. All this was eloquently described to the public on the steps of the BC Supreme Court by
several of the four mothers named in the BCTC injunction. The court action was sought to prevent the mothers
from lawfully (they never once broke any law) barring access to their properties to erect the massive
new power poles. Watch Clip
Why the backlash?
That summer, 2,500 citizens of all ages came together for a rally at South Delta Secondary – today overshadowed
by the power poles that traverse the school grounds where children study and play. It was probably the
biggest gathering of its kind in the community’s history – these were not folks generally prone to political
protest. There, the crowd heard from, among others, Dr. Jason Ford, Childhood Leukemia Specialist at
Children’s Hospital. Holding up a pile of research papers from the world’s top medical journals and
universities – each with differing opinions on the subject – Dr. Ford said:
“There’s a lot of research into what causes childhood leukemia – and since this whole power line issue
has come up in Tsawwassen, I’ve had a lot of questions from people here: ‘Are my children going to be at
risk?’ And I have to tell you I don’t know. And the sad fact is really nobody knows.
This is an area of great controversy and intense research in the medical field… And the safe thing, when you
don’t know, is to bury the lines.”
[emphasis mine]
Dr. Ford was defining here the essence of the the Precautionary Principle. A principle which Canada is
committed to, based on a United Nations convention we and many other countries have signed. But that’s, of
course, not how Gordon Campbell operates.
Why not bury the lines?
Campbell and then Energy Minister “Tricky Dick” Neufeld (who skipped town for the Senate a little after this
fracas) repeatedly claimed residents had snubbed an earlier offer to bury the lines, so that option was now
forever off the table. Basically they were saying, “You snooze, you lose.”
The reality is they did make a back-room offer to a few homeowners – but it was to bury the lines
only one meter under ground, without the protective shielding required to make them safe (a little
like handling weapons-grade plutonium with only rubber gloves for protection).
The resulting EMF levels (the measurement for potentially cancerous electromagnetic radiation) for a child
playing atop these lines (remember, they are actually in residents’ back yards) would have been – and get
this: UP TO 265 TIMES THE DANGER LEVEL FOR CANCER
as identified by the head of the BC Cancer Research Centre, Dr. Richard Gallagher. Which gives you a
teeny inkling why those folks might have rejected that offer…
The rationale Campbell finally settled on for pushing the power poles ahead was simply
that the over-ground method was more cost-effective. thst’s it. Case closed. Sorry ma’am, your child’s life – just not cost-effective.
I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do. Our hands are tied, you see.
The real numbers
Setting aside the considerable moral problem with placing “cost-effectiveness” ahead of human health, Campbell
was – big surprise! – full of crap. The cost to the taxpayer of not burying the lines has now
far exceeded the cost of doing so.
And that’s not taking into account the financial and emotional tally of laying waste to a community and
trampling on citizens’ democratic rights.
So how do the numbers stack up?
- Cost of properly burying and shielding the lines: Up to $24 million
(depending on whether you believe the government’s estimate or the engineers independently hired by Tsawwassen
residents, with hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money, which pegged it at several million dollars less than
the government’s number – I know which estimate I’m inclined to believe, but let’s just say for our purposes it really was $24 million) - Price paid for 104 homes: $58.4 million
- Additional cost to carry, upgrade, and resell the homes (i.e., financing, maintenance,
security, marketing and sales fees, etc.): $22.9 million
(which will only increase the longer the homes don’t sell)
- Amount recouped from sales thus far: approximately $17 million
So as of right now, we taxpayers have lost more than $57 million
on this deal! And that’s not counting the undisclosed price tag for erecting the towers compared to
burying the lines – nor the costly legal, spying, and harassment campaign against the community.
So let’s go ahead and call this what it is: an utter boondoggle that was entirely avoidable.
Adding insult to injury, if the remaining homes do sell in the two years the government now
thinks it will take, the money taxpayers manage to recoup will come at the expense of putting new,
unsuspecting families in harm’s way. And that’s what I call a lose-lose
proposition.
Campbell, what was the point?!
I made several predictions when all the fuss over the power lines was going down. One was that we
would end up losing money on these houses – that it would prove to have been cheaper (not to mention more
morally upright) just to safely bury the lines and keep those families happy in their homes; the
other was that this debacle would cost the Liberals a historically safe seat in Tsawwassen.
Despite her many virtues, Independent MLA Vicki Huntington (a contributor to this publication)
would not have won her historic 2009 victory over former Liberal Attorney-General Wally Oppal in
Tsawwassen were it not for this polarizing issue. The fact that Campbell pushed these lines through –
over the rational, economically well-grounded objections of the public – is an example of extreme hubris.
Speaking of hubris, let me now indulge in a little of my own and say, for the record: Gordon Campbell,
I told you so.
The lesser of two evils?
When these remaining homes don’t sell – and I hope, not for fiscal reasons but for moral ones that
they don’t – we will face an interesting calculus. It may still prove more economical (especially if
the residents’ engineering study is correct) to tear down the lines and properly bury and shield them –
thus rendering the homes safe and salable – than to allow the shadow cast by these power lines to drive
more people away, and further deteriorate property and community values in Tsawwassen.
The government’s confidence in selling the remaining homes is misguided. Neighbourhoods without
a critical mass of happy residents and functioning homes don’t sustain themselves. Just look at the
wave of recent defaults south of the border. A few abandoned homes can quickly devastate a whole
neighbourhood, as remaining families jump ship – often at enormous cost. The bitter taste that
lingers from the power line debacle in Tsawwassen threatens to destabilize more of the surrounding
community, if the root problem isn’t addressed. And that root problem is that people just don’t
want to live in a place where they and their loved ones could realistically die of cancer…
Go figure.
Damn Protesters
Long before the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and Whistler. Before that nail-biter of a hockey game. Before any of that was even thought about, I must say that I have thanked my lucky stars each and every night for the good luck of being born Canadian.
I love the way I can drink water straight from the tap. I love that I can live in a big city yet get myself to the wilderness on a Saturday morning for a sunrise hike.
I love the way when, my Dad had heart problems while on vacation on the Sunshine Coast – he was helicoptered to Saint Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, operated on, and returned to us in better shape than ever – all free of charge.
So what I do for a living may come as a bit of a surprise. I am a professional protester.
I work for an environmental organization, the Wilderness Committee, as its National Campaign Director. We conduct grass-roots education campaigns that advocate for more nature protection, more park lands and better laws to protect fish and wildlife.
In my day to day work I photograph endangered wilderness areas, write educational brochures, do media interviews and of course – protest. I protest a lot.
It may seem weird that one so happy as I – would be protesting in many cases, governments representing the very nation that I profess to love.
Name a thing you really love about Canada, and I’ll bet dollars to Tim Horton’s donuts that protest signs, banners and rallies had something to do with it. If you want good stuff done, you need a citizenry ready willing and able to get off it’s collective butt and do a little protesting from time to time.
Most Canadians have heard of Tommy Douglas, that skinny guy with the gift of the gab from Saskatchewan. Fifty years ago he turned the protests of a nation sick with the high cost of being sick into the beginnings of the Canadian public health care system that we are so proud of today. But Tommy couldn’t have done any of it without thousands of people willing to speak up in protest of the pay as you go system that was killing off those who couldn’t afford to pay.
Next time you pour yourself a glass of water anywhere in Metro Vancouver – take a close look.
Back in the 1920s locals were protesting the logging that was ripping apart the forested valleys that produced the water. One Ernest Cleveland, riding the political wave caused by the protesters, rose to the challenge, and was given control of the watersheds by the government of the day. Ernest shut down the logging and then proclaimed “they will log those watersheds over my dead body”. Ernest kept his promise until his death in the mid 1950s.
By the 1960s the logging companies had wormed their way back into Vancouver’s watersheds and the big trees were coming down again. So were the mountain sides as the denuded slopes melted into muddy torrents every November. Vancouverites looked at their murky water glasses and fumed. But by the late 1980s a new generation of protesters had risen again! The beginning of 1990s saw the end of logging in the watersheds – and a clearer future in our drinking glasses.
In fact, all across BC the so-called tree wars of the 1980s and 90s resulted in some mighty fine areas being protected. The protesters of that era made it possible for people today to enjoy such amazing wild places as Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, Meares Island Tribal Park, Valhalla Provincial Park, Stein Valley Heritage Park, Skagit Provincial Park, Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park and the Elaho Conservancy to name a few.
So what’s scrawled on my protest signs these days? Save BC’s wild rivers! All in all hundreds of rivers have been claimed by a myriad of private interests, with many plans in the works to dam and divert them. Publicly owned BC Hydro used to pour millions of dollars into the public coffers, which would then go to things like running the public health care system. Now the money flows to the private power companies.
I believe that this nightmare power play for our rivers can be stopped by the power of – you guessed it – protest! In 2008 over 1,000 people came out to protest a plan to dam and divert all eight tributaries of the Upper Pitt River, a major Lower Mainland salmon river. The BC government killed the project the following day. Similar huge crowds in the Kootenays appear to have stopped the proposed Glacier Howser private river diversion project. And the monstrous project being proposed by General Electric and Plutonic Power in the Bute Inlet area to dam and divert up to 17 rivers has been stalled for at least a year, due to strong public opposition.
Dam protesters? It’s the Canadian way … eh!