Green hydro please, hold the greenwashing

By Craig Orr and Peter Broomhall

Barely a month after promising to prevent hydro entrepreneurs from constructing a power line through Pinecone Burke Provincial Park, the provincial government appears determined as ever to privatize “new” hydro development throughout British Columbia. No one who remembers a certain event of June 2006 will be surprised.

Nor should anyone be surprised, or fooled, by B.C. environment minister Barry Penner’s promise to the media the day after a 1,000-plus crowd jammed a Pitt Meadows high-school gymnasium to protest government support of a so-called green run-of-river project proposed for the upper Pitt River. Penner’s promise seemed calculated to mislead people into believing government would reconsider its hydro plans.

The Pitt Meadows crowd had condemned the provincial government for being too eager to (1) endorse an ecologically and socially insupportable project, (2) desecrate a park (and possibly many more) merely to satisfy business interests, (3) favour growth over conservation, and (4) give away what it has no right to give away—the public’s water and rivers.

Penner seemed almost contrite when he addressed the media. He acknowledged the public had spoken, and said he was listening. If Penner did listen, he certainly didn’t much heed what the Pitt Meadows crowd had so angrily said. Neither Penner nor his advisors attended the Pitt Meadows meeting. Significantly, too, Penner’s promise to disallow the hydro line included nothing about disallowing the upper Pitt River proposal itself.

What’s more, in an April 15 letter to Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows MLA Michael Sather, Penner as good as handed the ultimate decision to the Pitt proponent: “The Environmental Assessment Office (EAO) is awaiting information from the Proponent as to whether it intends to modify the proposed Project with a different transmission line route, or whether the EA will be abandoned.”

Penner’s memo suggests a single modification would ensure government approval, and that the door remains open to other developers—should the present proposal be abandoned.

The unabated staking and purchasing of water licences on hundreds of B.C. rivers hints the provincial government remains steadfast about subordinating public concerns to the interests of hydro developers, many of them foreign.

Nearly 650 licence applications have been made in the past decade, at least 90 of which have already been approved.

The anger demonstrated at Pitt Meadows has since been replicated at a number of meetings at scattered locations throughout the province—Vancouver, Manning park, Lillooet, Nelson, and Terrace.

The meetings likely attracted a greater than average percentage of people who want to know how and why government fails to adequately serve the public interest—in this case, by (1) deliberately sacrificing the environment to construction, (2) almost-intentionally creating widespread and deeply felt anger, and (3) betraying the public interest. Implicit, too, was a strong suspicion that government wasn’t as well informed and intelligent as it pretends to be.

So, June 2006? That’s when the Gordon Campbell Liberals took action to silence overwhelming local government and public opposition to an $87-million private-enterprise run-of-river power project on the Ashlu River, a tributary of the lower Squamish River. Bill 30 abolished local zoning authority to ensure that no one could ever again say no to a run-of-river project.

Calling a hydro project green or small doesn’t make it so—any more than calling our premier or minister green makes them so.

Had Premier Campbell and Minister Penner attended just one of the above-mentioned meetings, they would have learned, firsthand, that the public can distinguish between “green” and “greenwashing”. They would have also felt, firsthand, the anger prompted by government indifference toward overwhelming public concern over the wholesale privatization of B.C.’s rivers.

Craig Orr is the executive director and Peter Broomhall is a former chair of Watershed Watch Salmon Society.

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