BC Liberals Owe Us a $65 Million Apology

By Will McMartin, Today, TheTyee.ca

Blair Lekstrom, B.C.'s minister of energy, mines and petroleum resources, rose in the legislature last Wednesday afternoon and introduced a bill that will send the BC Transmission Corporation back into the folds of BC Hydro and Power Authority, from whence it originated in the spring of 2003.

One might have hoped that Lekstrom had the decency (or courage) to apologize to British Columbians for a misguided, failed and costly experiment that went so horribly wrong, but he did not. Gordon Campbell's BC Liberals, elected in 2001 with a pledge to protect BC Hydro, the so-called "jewel" among the province's Crown corporations, instead embarked on a campaign to rip apart and hobble the utility giant. A third of BC Hydro's workers (nearly 1,600) were transferred to a private firm, Accenture, while responsibility for the province's 18,000 or so kilometres of electric transmission lines was shifted (along with 276 employees) to the newly-created BC Transmission Corp. BC Hydro was left with two -- generation and distribution -- of its three traditional areas of operation, somewhat more than half of its employees, and instructed to be a mere bystander as responsiblity for generating new, clean power was shifted to so-called Independent Power Producers (IPPs). Now, seven years on, many of those early moves have been or are being reversed. But it's not like taking a mulligan on the golf course, and saying "oops" doesn't quite cut it. What can't be un-done for B.C. taxpayers and BC Hydro ratepayers is the wasteful, unnecessary expenditure of millions of dollars in setting up, operating and dismantling a Crown corporation that proved, in the end (as many predicted at the beginning) to be utterly, completely unnecessary.According to calculations by The Tyee, the monies flushed down the drain through the BC Transmission Corp. is in the neighbourhood of $65 million, and likely much, much more. (more)