January 15, 2018

Wild Times by Joe Foy

Until recently, I had been really looking forward to 2018. A new provincial government in Victoria was promising better attention to environmental protection and Indigenous peoples’ rights.

It felt a bit like Christmas Eve, waiting to unwrap long-anticipated gifts under the tree.

The biggest gift of all, of course, was the hoped-for cancellation of the Site C dam. Premier John Horgan had tasked the BC Utilities Commission (BCUC) with reviewing the $8.3 billion mega-project.

I had been working alongside many others since 2010 to stop the Site C dam from drowning the beautiful Peace River Valley, and drowning the ratepayers of BC in a sea of red ink to boot. Getting to know the local farm families and the First Nations people was a real education on how much they all love their precious homeland valley and how hard they have fought to keep the Peace.

When the promised BCUC report was made public in November 2017, it revealed the Site C dam as the bloated white elephant of a boondoggle many of us knew it to be. It was wildly over budget, and the BCUC found BC Hydro had consistently overestimated the need for future electricity. They questioned if the Site C dam was even needed at all. The BCUC also found a collection of smaller wind, solar, thermal as well as conservation measures could deliver enough power, if or when it was needed, to the BC grid at an equal or lower cost.

Regarding the $2 billion the former Liberal government had already spent, the BCUC found it could be paid off over a period of 30 years, along with remediation costs. All this is very doable in a province with a budget of over $50 billion a year.

In a nutshell the BCUC report describes the Site C dam as a real stinker of a deal, one private investors would not have touched with a ten-foot pole. I was as sure as sure could be the premier would soon cancel the Site C dam.

When an ashen-faced Premier John Horgan announced to a gaggle of TV cameras and radio mics on December 11 that the Site C dam was going to be built, I listened in shocked disbelief.

But when the premier and later the various ministers explained how they had come to their decision, my shocked disbelief turned to pure anger. The findings of the BCUC report were clearly not the foundation of the premier’s decision – not at all.

Instead, Horgan made the strange claim that the $2 billion already spent would need to be accounted for immediately if the Site C dam were stopped – and the province would not be able to do this without extreme hardship. The only way forward, according to the premier, is to flood over 100 kilometres of the Peace River Valley at a cost of well over $10 billion. That would include the loss of all the valley bottom farmland, farm family generational homes, First Nations heritage and sacred sites – and my trust.

Any trust people like me have that their NDP government knows right from wrong would be drowned too. Site C dam is a scam being pushed by a few people who want to get their hands on more than $10 billion of public funds. Stop Site C.

Joe Foy is the national campaign director for the Wilderness Committee, Canada’s largest membership-based wilderness preservation organization.

To see original article in the Watershed Sentinel click here.