Ex-minister praying for B.C. water

Don Plant 2009-04-06 Kelowna Daily Courier:

BC Hydro is on its deathbed and the province’s rivers will be ravaged, retired broadcaster Raif Mair told a Kelowna audience Sunday. A former environment minister with the Social Credit government in 1979, Mair took aim at the Campbell Liberals for making deals with independent power producers (IPPS) to sell electricity to BC Hydro. He encouraged a gathering of the Council of Canadians to vote NDP next month to stop the deal-making. “This is our water, our fish, our trees – all the things that identify us to the rest of the world and to ourselves. This is too important to allow to happen for any reason,” Mair said at Kelowna’s First United Church. “This is the biggest change in power generation since WAC Bennett in the 1960s.”

The public utility must buy electricity from the IPPs for roughly $120 per megawatt hour and sell it on the market for $60 an hour, Mair said. The government has taken away Hydro’s transmission lines and set up a new Crown agency – the BC Transmission Corporation. On top of that, local governments have no right to stop private companies from generating river power. And the government has made it impossible for British Columbians to oppose it, he said. “BC Hydro is now sick and indeed on its deathbed … BC Hydro can’t survive the Campbell government and I don’t think he wants it to survive.” Brian Wallace, legal counsel for the Joint Industry Electricity Steering Committee, said recently that without restrictions on the expansion of independent producers, BC Hydro may have to sell large annual power surpluses at a loss to buyers in the United States. Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, exporting water could be next, Mair said. “If you give any American company any right to use power, they have all the rights to use water. They can use it to export in bulk, bottles, whatever they want. “Our water, energy and our sovereignty are being shipped out to the U.S. by and large. NAFTA … takes precedence over contracts.”

BC Hydro has given British Columbians hundreds of millions of dollars every year as dividends to build hospitals, schools and roads, Mair said. Yet the government appears to be ignoring its free-enterprise ideology to make deals with private contractors. “What’s free enterprise about this? It’s first come first served, there’s no bidding on these licences, they get a monopoly in that area, they get a fixed price which is indexed and they have a guaranteed buyer for their product,” he said. The environmental consequences could be enormous. Power companies under 50 megawatts don’t need environmental assessments, Mair said. There’s too little enforcement to stop private companies from depleting the water supply in a river. “(That) ravages our environment for all time, takes BC Hydro’s profits away from you and me and it throttles the power system,” he said.