As I make my way around  the province I find the following the greatest area of misunderstanding (a misunderstanding fostered and encouraged by the government and the private river people) to be that private power will help take care of BC’s energy needs..

When lawyers see a statement like “fish live in water therefore I must visit the North Pole” they call it a non sequitur; literally “it does not follow”.

The Campbell government and the power producers have a pronounced a classic non sequitur in the private power debate. They say “British Columbia needs or will need power therefore we must have private 'run of river' projects.”

Remember that electricity in bulk cannot be stored and must be used as it is created. BC Hydro "stores" electricity by creating a reservoir behind its dams which can be used to turn their generators. For all intents and purposes, private river plants do not have the ability to store significant amounts of water. In fact they boast of the fact that they don’t create reservoirs. They must, then, rely upon the quantity of the river flow. The amount of energy produced by private power must come from the Spring run-off; when the height of the river drops, as it does after run-off, little if any electricity can be created.

It does not, then, follow that if we need power we can use private river projects because the vast majority of power created by private projects comes at the same time BC Hydro’s reservoirs are full thus have no use for private river power.

In short, the only use for private power is export which is what Donald McInnis, CEO of the Plutonic/General Electric partnership freely admits.

As I write this it's one down, 6 to go on my 7 speeches in 7 days tour. It is my intention to speak in every corner of the province against the privatizing of our power.

Since I began this fight I've been wondering what argument the government was going to put up it being impossible for me to see anything to be said for this energy plan.

Forgive me if I go over some old ground today but as the government's spin is now becoming clearer I think it's time to put some things in perspective.

First, let me say that Save Our Rivers Society is opposed to any privatization of power. We have been well served by BC Hydro since the late 60s and we'd be damned fools to let it go.

Second, here's what the government story is. We need power they tell us and quote statistics to demonstrate this. They use BC Hydro figures to demonstrate this but that does not include the 12% of power that comes from other sources such as Alcan, Teck Cominco, Fortis and the like. The National Energy Board, an independent body which issues the export permits, has BC a net exporter of most years.

At the meeting in Squamish was a man with an interest in private river power and his mantra was "we need power therefore we must encourage private river power. He spent much of his questioning stating and demonstrating the need for more power, especially into the future.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to break down our message into its component parts. I do this because on every possible ground the government and the private power people are dead wrong and, to save a lawsuit, are telling, in Churchill’s words, bushels of terminological inexactitudes.

Today let’s talk about BC’s need for power and, if we need it, how it can be obtained.

It seems to me that the old maxim I learned in Law School prevails: “He who alleges has the onus of proof." That would be the Campbell government. It seems to me that they rest their case on two arguments. Rather than putting forth a white paper with their research and holding public meetings where we, the ignorant rabble can have our say, the reasons given by the Campbell government are these:

1.   The public wants more computers and plasma TVs so we must have more power. (You might note the absence of any science in that assertion!)

2.   BC Hydro, our public power utility, is a net importer of energy and have been for 7 of the last 10 years.  It appears this is nothing more than legalistic trickery: they are very careful to say "BC Hydro," as opposed to the province of British Columbia (and then strip away what they consider as power trading directly under Hydro until they are left with numbers that suit their purposes).  Which explains why the most reliable figures we have - on BC, our public power province - tell a very different story. I ask you this question: which would you prefer, the figures of a government that is deeply committed to private power (BC Hydro, as a crown corporation, is under the thumb of the Campbell Government - and therefore under tremendous duress to back up the government's private power policy), or the National Energy Board, which monitors all sales of energy abroad and which says that BC has been a net exporter of energy for 8 of the last 11 years? (Stats BC's numbers also suggest we are typically net exporters of power.)

So let's consider the creative arithmetic the government is using to hoodwink us into believing we're net importer of power and are therefore in a panic to hand over our rivers to private companies to develop new sources of energy. Here is one way it can be accomplished: You can charge as imports the power we get from Alberta and immediately sell it, “flip” it if you will, to the American Market. A moments thought tells you that the only imports that count are those you use yourself. I use this example. Suppose you make widgets and export 1000 of them each year to the States. Suppose you find that you can buy widgets from Alberta cheaper that you can make them yourself so you buy 2000 widgets from them and export them to the US. Does that mean that we are net “importers” of 1000 widgets? Of course not … the 2000 we imported from Alberta were never for our use domestically. There are several other arithmetical twisters used by the Campbell crowd such as messing with the Columbia River Treaty provisions but the plain fact remains – We British Columbians are net exporters of energy.

Now to the second matter. If we were in need of energy, how would we get it? At this point it must be stated that wind, tidal, and solar power, and these private river schemes provide intermittent power – they can’t produce it when there is no wind, it’s slack tide, the sun’s not out or there isn’t enough water in the river. Moreover, electricity cannot be stored – the amount of hydroelectric power “stored” is in the amount of water in the reservoir available to be converted into power (unlike our historic large public dams, "run of river" power cannot be stored this way). None of the above can produce reliable power all the time and you and I want power at the flip of a switch when ever we want the lights to go on...

Let’s deal with the case at hand – private power plants. And here is the nub of the matter – the only time they can make meaningful contributions of power is during the Spring run-off which is the very time BC Hydro’s reservoirs are full to brimming.

What then if private plants make energy when Hydro doesn’t need it, which is to say all the time; what do they do with their power?

Excellent question, since BC Hydro has been forced by the Campbell government to buy this power at nearly 20x the cost of their own power and forced to sell if at less than they pay for it. Because they can’t use the power itself, BC Hydro must sell it into the grid at a considerable loss. This is the latest market philosophy of the Campbell government, learned at the knee of the Fraser Institute: Buy high and sell low!

Therefore one can see that not only does BC not need power it’s public power company, BC Hydro must buy power it doesn’t and sell it at a loss!

One final note – for the foreseeable future all needs in excess of what Hydro can now produce can be achieved through a modest conservation program, expanding the generators on present dams and install new ones at appropriate dams.

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For this edition of The Flow I want to take us back to the beginning – in fact, before the beginning.

As many of you know, I was a cabinet minister in BC for five years back in the 70s. During that time we made several major changes in policy and let me use an example of one I made as Minister of Consumer & Corporate Affairs.
 
In 1978 I brought in a new Residential Tenancy Act to replace the old Landlord and Tenancy Act. This bill represented a marked departure from the old one. The rights of landlords and tenants were much changed.
 
The government had a handsome majority and if I had wanted to, I could have simply tabled the bill and crammed it through the legislature but this isn’t the way we did things.
 
To be honest I can’t remember whether I put the proposed bill out in a White Paper for comments or tabled the bill promising not to call if for hearing until affected people could be heard. It’s essentially the same thing.
 
It was not long before I heard it from all stakeholders, as we call them now. My deputy, Tex Enemark and I attended many meetings, each involving people angry about one thing or another. (Tex and I at one point laughed to ourselves that we must be doing something right since everyone was angry). We used the input to change many parts of the bill and - horror of all horrors - I even asked Norman Levy, my NDP critic, to meet with me and discuss the bill.
 
This wasn’t just Rafe Mair’s way – it was the government’s way.

The history of Alcan and the city of Kitimat it spawned has been, to put it mildly, spotted. The idea behind the original massive environmental disaster was to allow Alcan to reverse rivers, build lakes, install pipes and generators, construct dams, and run roughshod over the rights of First Nations in order to supply electricity to its new aluminum smelter and the “vicinity of the works” (if they had any left over after their aluminum smelting needs were met). The original agreement as enshrined in legislation was for an aluminum smelter, not a power company.

Over the years, in cahoots with the provincial government, Alcan did in fact become a power company - a big one - and its interest in smelting faded as the power dollars rolled in.

When I was part of the large group fighting Kemano II back in the 90s Alcan promised that this power was going to fuel a new smelter as well as the one in Kitimat … or was it two new smelters? Or perhaps four? It was difficult to keep count. As the struggle continued I was under considerable pressure from Kitimat and elsewhere to butt out - that Alcan was their buddy and would always keep its workers and their families close to their warm heart. The City Council of Terrace, which would have supplied much of the labour and equipment for Kemano II, passed a resolution declaring Terrace to be a “Rafe Mair free zone.”

One morning I interviewed Bill Rich, an Alcan VP who was quarterbacking Kemano II, and I got this usually taciturn executive to pound his fist on the table and say “you don’t seem to understand that Alcan is not in the Aluminum business … it’s in the power business!” In anger, veritas!

To cut to the chase, it began to dawn on the people of Kitimat that the smelter was shutting down lines, that Alcan was neglecting maintenance and modernization. And where were all those new smelters?

Watch five minute video of Alexandra Morton's recent press conference discussing her victory and what it means for the future of wild salmon on BC's coast
Having trouble streaming the high-res version? Watch video - medium resolution

We at Save Our Rivers Society are proud as punch of our Board of Advisors whose individual and collective knowledge of fish and their habitat easily outshines anything industry or the Campbell government can claim (though I admit that’s damning with very faint praise). In that truly august body of advisors is my hero, Alexandra Morton, who a couple of weeks ago, along with her co-plaintiffs, won a landmark lawsuit which declared that the Federal government has exclusive jurisdiction over fisheries and that fish farms constitute a fishery. The judge gave Fisheries and Oceans Canada a year to get its act together. It is a justified humiliation for the Campbell government.

Let me tell you a bit about Alex. She came to us from the United States in 1979 as a biologist studying whales. She fell in love with and married a Canadian biologist of similar inclinations – including marriage to this lovely lady. Tragedy struck when with Alex and their young son watched Robin Morton drown due to faulty diving gear.

A few years ago Alex became concerned at the number of sea lice in the channels in the Broughton Archipelago and the effect they might be having on tiny migrating wild salmon smolts. If there were a problem, was it in any way related to the Atlantic Salmon fish cages that were situated right in the paths of these migrating wild fish? She did her testing and to make a long story a bit shorter she found that there indeed was a relationship and that millions of small wild salmon were dying  from predatory lice so that large international fish farmers could ply their trade in nicely suitable, for them, channels.

The sea lice issue is simple to understand. Fish farms have hundreds of thousands of Salmon (hosts) with millions of lice that nail the wild salmon smolts as they run the gauntlet of these farms.

Alex was hit with everything but the ring post along the way - Fisheries and Oceans Canada threatened to arrest her for illegal testing; the fish farmers hired Hill and Knowlton, the world's largest PR firm, to discredit her - they also hired a flatulent discredited former Greenpeacer to try to discredit her. The Provincial Liberal government called into question her scientific integrity. She was pilloried by the local press, mostly ignored by the mainstream media, and constantly badmouthed by the “establishment”.

Before long, the world's acknowledged scientists in this field validated her work and her findings - some of them did studies of their own which confirmed Alex's work. She was peer published many times over - in the world's top journals, like Science - yet the fish farmers kept fighting. The ex-Greenpeacer attacked her personally; the governments ignored her findings and claimed that all the science was on their side; the mayor of Port McNeil, Gerry Furney, set up a picket line, complete with him badmouthing me on a loud hailer, to prevent my wife and me going into the archipelago to view the situation with Alex. I don’t mind admitting that I was scared for our safety.

The struggle between the time Alex got onto the sea lice issue and her recent court victory was such that I don’t know how she stayed the course. But she did and recently the BC Salmon Forum chaired by former House of Commons Speaker John Fraser confirmed, as if confirmation was needed, that fish farms and their lice pose a huge risk to migrating wild salmon smolts.

The legal victory has been pooh-poohed by the usual suspects but it has been a terrific morale booster for Alex and all of us who proudly fight under her leadership. Moreover, The Campbell government finds itself in the position of having to file their Notice of Appeal, if that’s the route they decide to go, right in the middle of the election campaign.

For the general public, however, this case means that the Campbell government stands shamed – at least they ought to feel ashamed – by a doughty fighter that took all the abuse they could give her, stood her ground and is gloriously vindicated.

Need I say how proud we at Save Our Salmon Society to have Alexandra as an advisor?

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As we at Save Our Rivers plow on, trying to inform the public about the BC Energy Plan and the privatization of our energy providers, we keep coming up against the notion that BC needs energy, badly and quickly. After looking at what BC Hydro has said, namely that we don’t, we’re told by the government to ignore Hydro.

But, the government says, BC has been a net importer for 7 of the last 10 years. So we checked with the Canadian National Energy Board which is responsible for exports of energy and they tell us NO! BRITISH COLUMBIA HAS BEEN A NET EXPORTER OF ENERGY FOR 8 OF THE LAST 11 YEARS (1997 - 2007)!

We point out that private power plants can only supply energy during the spring run-off, when we definitely don't need it, a fact demonstrably not dealt with by the government (which always does have the habit of avoiding the truth); indeed on this point the silence is deafening.<>This raises a pretty obvious question: If private power is not needed by BC - and, even if it were, private power companies will produce far more energy than we need and at a time we don’t need it - why the hell are they destroying our environment with the blessing of the Campbell government to create this power?

The only answer left to the puzzle is that this private energy will be for export, not for the needs of British Columbia’s domestic, business and industrial use.

But how can this be? The former Energy Minister and now Senator Richard Neufeld assured us over and over that BC was in serious need of power. The new Minister, Blair Lekstrom in a recent article in the Victoria Times Colonist said the same.

Well, folks, it remained for Donald McInnis, the president of Plutonic Power, the company seeking to build the biggest private hydropower plant in Canada, bigger than Site “C” would be, to blurt out the truth. McInnis recently stated that "You'd have to be in a coma to not see where the B.C. government is going; now we need consistency of policy and certainty of timelines … "

"An export plan is an obvious place for us to go."

The cat is out of the bag and the stated domestic need the government has peddled to us is just so much barnyard droppings.

Our rivers, up to about 700 applications now, will be butchered to warm California swimming pools. Moreover, once we embark down this slippery slope we’re in this forever. We will be, like Bre’r Rabbit, stuck to the tar baby.

We will devastate our environment so that American states don’t have to ruin theirs. We give up the handsome profits BC Hydro has provided the provincial treasury as we export our power, our environment and our revenue. We will then become hostage to Chapter 11 of NAFTA whose rules, because it is a treaty, will trump any legislation Ottawa or Victoria may pass.

The truth of the matter was told us, the citizens of BC, not by Premier Campbell but by the president of the biggest player in the private energy game.

Premier Campbell’s credibility is that of the clock that strikes 13 – he cannot be relied upon for the truth.

If the government won’t change, we will have to change the government.

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Earlier this week, Damien and I went to Powell River to learn about Plutonic Power’s project in Bute Inlet. We will also be attending the company's public comment meeting in Campbell River on Feb 2, then hosting our own event in Courtenay on Feb 3 from 7-9 PM at the Florence Filberg Centre, seeing as the company and government EAO have not deemed it necessary to hold a meeting in that community.

Here is a bit of a summary of the project:

Proponent:  Plutonic Hydro Inc. / General Electric would have a 60% controlling interest
Number of creeks dammed: 17
Total Annual Output: 2,980 GWh
Total Estimated Project Cost: $4 billion, making it the largest single private power project in Canada
Estimated Annual Gross Revenue: Approximately $300,000,000 - 40 year contract including indexed escalation = approx. $16 billion
Wildlife affected: grizzly bear, salmon, resident salmonids.
Power lines: 428 km
Roads: 265 km
Bridges: 100 bridges
Production: 1027MW
Total crown land grants required for all of the above: Up to 45,000 hectares

Now a few notes of comparison with Site C:

It would only require only approx. 8,000 hectares of crown land in total (vs. up to 45,000 for the Bute) but would deliver significantly more power throughout the year (4,500 GWh vs. 2,980 GWh from the Bute project) and would be much more valuable "firm power"  The cost of power generated from Site C would be about half of that generated by the Bute project.

Plutonic's proposed project, then, is bigger than Site “C”, indeed the biggest private hydropower project in the country.

Let me make it absolutely clear that Save Our Rivers Society is not in favour of Site C. There is no need for Site C. It’s instructive, however, to note that BC Hydro is acting like they want it to proceed. We will vehemently oppose such a move. Having said that, the Site C situation does present an interesting contrast between what Hydro does to get public input and theCampbell government’s approach for private power proposals.

The Plutonic Power project in Bute Inlet – remember it’s bigger and far more environmentally intrusive than Site C - has involved NO, ZERO public hearings on the merits of the project. It will have had three on the “terms of reference” for the Environmental Assessment Office but Zilch on whether it should be done in the first place. Premier Gordon Campbell makes those sorts of decisions all by himself and they somehow, by the most amazing of circumstances, they always favour his corporate friends.

BC Hydro, on the other hand has had 48, yes 48 public hearings where the public can question the merits of the proposal and they plan more!
 
It becomes more and more obvious that the Campbell government doesn’t give a damn about the public.

If the government won’t change then we’ll just have to change the government.

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