Similkameen River. Photo: Gwen Barlee.
Upper Elk Creek. Photo: Anton Van Walraven.
Due to weak BC environmental laws, mountain goats, and other wildlife have little protections when it comes to the
development of private hydro projects. Purcell Mountain Range. Photo: Gary Diers.
British Columbia’s Public Wealth
In an era of climate change and rapidly disappearing fossil fuels, clean renewable energy is literally worth its weight in gold. In North America, the vast majority of the energy we use comes from fossil fuels, including coal and oil. These dirty fuels produce carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gasses which are changing the earth’s climate rapidly.
In British Columbia we have an enormous geographic advantage when it comes to the production of clean green energy. Our mountainous terrain, high rainfall and numerous creeks and rivers create ideal conditions to produce hydroelectricity. By handing over control of this valuable resource to private corporations we are not only giving away an invaluable public asset, we are severely constraining the ability of the provincial government to achieve important conservation objectives and energy self-sufficiency. Unlike BC Hydro, which is mandated to serve the public good, private power corporations have little incentive to promote conservation because doing so erodes their bottom line.
The government’s mad rush to develop private hydropower has resulted in a chaotic situation where cumulative environment impacts are ignored, regional planning is nonexistent, long-term energy security needs are undermined and local governments have been silenced. Instead of public ownership of hydroelectricity which serves the public interest, provides accountability and transparency, and returns hundreds of millions of dollar annually to provincial coffers, the provincial government has rolled the dice and decided to gamble, selling out the future of British Columbia’s streams and rivers.
Provincial environmental laws offer little protection
“The BC government’s Energy Policy is rapidly transforming the province’s electricity system from one owned and controlled
by the people of the province to one that is operated in the interests of private energy developers and multinational
energy corporations.”
Professor John Calvert, Simon Fraser University – Author of Sticker Shock
BC has no stand-alone endangered species legislation to safeguard wildlife impacted by private power projects, and the BC Environmental Assessment Process is little more than a paper tiger.5 In the 10 years the Environmental Assessment Office has been in operation it has never rejected a development, and the BC Environmental Assessment Act was weakened even further in 2002 when it was rewritten by the provincial government.6 An assessment is only applied if a project is large — over 50 Megawatts (MW) — which has encouraged some private hydro projects to escape even this minimal scrutiny by building 49 MW projects.7 Astoundingly, the BC government evaluates each of these projects in isolation. In doing so, the government fails to address the cumulative impacts of multiple projects in a concentrated geographic area, and the roads, logging, transmission lines, dams, river diversions, tunnel rock and slurry, powerhouses and maintenance, which accompany them. For instance, each of the 60 proposed projects in the Sea-to-Sky corridor would be evaluated as a “one-off”.
Public accountability and the democratic process
In 2005 when the Squamish Lillooet Regional District refused to sign off on a contentious private hydro project being built on the Ashlu River the BC government introduced Bill 30. The controversial legislation took away the zoning rights of all local governments to decide whether such projects should proceed – removing the only tool regional governments had to control the proliferation of private power projects.
