Shove-through attitude won't win votes
Please forgive Vicki Huntington, the independent MLA from Delta South, for her skepticism over Monday's announcement that the long-proposed, $6.6-billion Site-C hydroelectric mega-project on the Peace River got a "green" light.
Huntington and her Delta constituents, you see, have seen all this before, in their own backyard.
They've seen an old and tired B.C. Liberal government resurrect well-worn, obsolete project ideas, ignore modern viable alternatives and, finally, ram them through despite public outcry.
They saw it with the controversial South Fraser Perimeter Road, which is now under preliminary construction in Delta and Surrey and, like Site C, is destroying significant amounts of farmland. The idea of the perimeter road was kicked around for years but still trumped more current options for moving Deltaport freight.
They saw it again when the Campbell government destroyed a Tsawwassen neighbourhood by choosing to run a high-voltage overhead transmission line through its heart to Vancouver Island, rather than bury the line or run it along a new non-residential route via Roberts Bank.
At the time, I said if the Campbell government can behave like this in Delta's backyard, it's capable of similar behaviour in other backyards. Subsequently, it was the B.C. Liberals' actions in Delta that led to Huntington's upset election as B.C.'s only independent MLA last spring.
Hence Monday, as the premier was making his Site-C announcement in Hudson's Hope, the politically astute Huntington (the late Tory cabinet minister Ron Huntington was her father and she's worked extensively on Parliament Hill) was in Victoria shaking her head in disbelief.
Once again, she notes, the Campbell government reaches into the past for solutions to today's challenges while ignoring contemporary alternatives.
"Site C will have huge impacts on the environment in a region that contains our northernmost agriculture," she says. "There's no science in this government's decision-making. They simply ignore it while focusing on delivering revenue to big business."
Huntington is referring here to Site C's long history in which it has twice been rejected for sound environmental and economic reasons.
Even now, many critics question the mega-project's need, since there are newer, enhanced alternative supply options such as conservation, wind power, solar, biomass and thermal energy. Even B.C. Hydro's latest outlook doesn't show a marked increase in net electricity demand until 2025.
Forget about building the 900-megawatt project to export electricity on an interim basis to the U.S., where California is our only major market.
The Golden State, which is still spitting mad about how it was mistreated by B.C. electricity exporters during its last energy crisis, only imports "green" energy now. It considers any hydroelectric resource over 30 megawatts to be anything but green.
At home, Site C could be utilized to supply power for increased development of B.C.'s northern gas fields and to assist Alberta in its tarsands developments. Yes, we're talking fossil fuels here along with an 83-kilometre-long Site-C reservoir that would flood about 7,000 hectares of top-rated farmland.
"I wonder what kind of province we will be passing on to the next generation?" Huntington asks. "I hope it's not just pavement and cement."