SITE C FOLLIES
AXED BRIDGE TOLLS BRING DAM 11
It was sad and surreal watching Premier John Horgan’s December 11 news conference about the Site C dam. He conceded that his wife and his brother disagreed with his government’s decision to complete construction of the $10.7-billion albatross in northeastern B.C. The premier also acknowledged that there were deep divisions in other NDP families.
Horgan certainly knew that with this announcement, an undetermined number of NDP voters would switch their allegiance to the B.C. Greens. That’s because B.C. Green Leader Andrew Weaver and his colleagues have made a compelling case for cancelling the project. In part, it’s based on the price of other forms of renewable energy plummeting, making Site C power far more expensive in comparison.
Horgan’s justifications for proceeding sounded like they were right out of the mouth of the finance minister, Carole James, who was in Ottawa negotiating a larger share of cannabis revenues. He pointed out that cancelling Site C would have meant that a $4-billion debt would have to be repaid with no prospects of revenue from the dam. That’s because more than $2 billion has been spent and another $1.8 billion would need to be spent on remediation costs.
The premier maintained that this would deprive the NDP government of fiscal room to deliver new rapid transit, schools, and other public services in this term. He also claimed that cancelling the project would result in an immediate 12-percent increase in B.C. Hydro rates. And that, he suggested, went against the NDP promise of making life more affordable.
Horgan delivered this message with all the conviction he could muster, though he sounded thoroughly despondent.
As Weaver pointed out later, the NDP eliminated any fiscal wriggle room before the election by cancelling tolls on the Port Mann and Golden Ears bridges. On his website, Weaver noted that the end of road tolls moved $4.7 billion from self-supporting debt to taxpayersupported debt. That’s more than the cost of cancelling the Site C dam.
As a result of the New Democrats’ decision on bridge tolls, any increase in the provincial debt from cancelling the Site C dam would lower B.C.’S credit rating and cost taxpayers significantly more in debt-service payments each year.
“Yet today, they evoke concerns about increasing provincial debt as the reason why Site C must move forward,” Weaver stated on his website. “Had they not so crassly eliminated the tolls in a desperate attempt to grab votes, Site C could have been cancelled today.”
Horgan made a choice. Rather than having no Site C dam, restoring the beautiful Peace River Valley, and B.C. benefiting from decades of agricultural production, he and his brain trust decided that motorists will pay no tolls to cross two bridges in the eastern suburbs of Vancouver. And that might ensure the NDP keeps its seats in Metro Vancouver’s northeast sector and Surrey.
During his news conference, Horgan’s fiscal somersaults were breathtaking. According to him, cancelling the Site C dam would result in fewer public services than would be created by completing the project. Horgan also argued that proceeding with this $10.7-billion project will somehow protect ratepayers from higher B.C. Hydro rates.
At its current cost, the Site C dam would pay for the cost of a subway from Skytrain’s Vcc-clark station to UBC, six light-rail lines in Surrey, and two new Pattullo bridges. It would pay for about 100 schools or 20 new hospitals.
Yet here was Horgan making the case that cancelling the Site C dam would make it much harder for the B.C. government to build schools and hospitals. That’s to say nothing of the impact on Indigenous relations, the future of food production in B.C., or the deleterious effect on the renewableenergy sector and the employment and tax revenue that it would generate.
In 2015, author Jeff Rubin made the case in The Carbon Bubble: What Happens to Us When It Bursts that farmland is the new gold. That’s because climate change was helping agriculture north of the 49th parallel. He reported that NASA had noted that the growing season is 26 days longer on the Canadian Prairies, on average, than it was 50 years ago. This is enabling the production of new crops such as soybeans and corn.
“Already today, food prices provide a lot more value added than oil or coal,” Rubin told the Straight. “Thinking of it in the future, that’s going to be all the more the case.”
The Site C dam was created, in large part, to provide energy for B.C.’S liquefied-natural-gas industry, which is unlikely to materialize. In the future, electricity prices could fall sharply as increasingly cheap renewables pick up the slack and people and communities start generating their own power.
B.C.’S premier and his cabinet, on the other hand, have decided that because of sunk costs already spent, this justifies spending almost another $9 billion on a 1950s-style hydroelectric project that’s going to undermine B.C.’S agricultural production.
Somehow, we’re led to believe that this will enable the province to afford more schools, rapid-transit projects, and hospitals.
It’s a topsy-turvy political world in British Columbia. And you thought things were crazy south of the border.