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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