Reverse direction on Site C, or pay the price

The political spin that Premier John Horgan and his cabinet colleagues put on their decision to finish the job that Christy Clark started at Site C is almost as astonishing as the astronomical cost overruns that already plague the completely unnecessary hydroelectric project.

We had no choice, Horgan said in justifying his government’s decision to carry on with the $10.7-billion-and-counting project.

“It’s my view that activities that began before I was sworn in as premier are out of my control.”

Well if that’s the case, then what the NDP did by referring the project to the B.C. Utilities Commission for independent review — a review that gave the government all the justification it needed to kill the project — was a costly, unnecessary and insulting waste of taxpayers’ time and money.

Let’s be clear, Horgan and company had a choice. What they chose to do was place the entrenched interests of senior civil servants, B.C. Hydro executives and a well-funded lobby led by NDP insiders ahead of those British Columbians who demanded new power as needed from truly clean and renewable sources, protection of our irreplaceable farmlands, and lasting, meaningful reconciliation with First Nations.

The “we-had-no-choice” spin was then amplified by prominent NDP cabinet members such as Energy Minister Michelle Mungall, who said that the “$4 billion” spent on the project would add so much debt to the province’s books that all manner of spending on schools, hospitals and the like would have to be scrapped.

“To do anything but move forward,” Mungall warned, “would have to result in massive cuts to the services people count on us to deliver.”

This is bunk, and the government knows it.

Only $2 billion has been spent on the extraordinarily ill-advised project to date. Projected reclamation costs of $2 billion are wildly overstated. Government borrowing costs benefit from low interest rates. Amortization periods can be adjusted to lower the economic hit of repayment.

And even if, as Horgan, Mungall and others assert, the annual repayment costs are in the range of $125 million to $150 million, that represents less than 0.3 per cent of a $50-billion annual budget.

What I don’t understand — and what many NDP supporters now walking away from the party also don’t understand — is why throwing more money at Clark’s vanity project makes any economic sense at all.

Those investments will lead to the flooding of a river valley that boasts some of the most critical wildlife habitat and highestquality farmland in this province, old-growth forests that were on the books to be protected because their ecological values were so high, internationally renowned wetlands such as Watson Slough that are havens for songbirds, and First Nations hunting and fishing grounds and burial sites. None of this and more is “accounted” for when the government says we must soldier on with Site C.

The last time an NDP administration in this province wrestled with horrendous cost overruns on a state-funded megaproject, it was the $450-million fast-ferry fiasco. The ill-advised project helped to decimate the party in the 2001 election campaign, relegating it to the political wilderness from which it has only just emerged.

Already, Site C is 23 times more costly than the fast-ferry debacle. And given cost overruns at hydroelectric projects globally, that number will climb much higher.

True political leadership on Site C would cleave much more closely to the core values espoused by visionary NDP administrations of the past.

This is the party that in the 1970s inspired generations with the creation of the Agricultural Land Reserve, for example. All of us in the province owe a debt of gratitude to men such as Harold Steves, who fought to protect our province’s finite farmlands for the benefit of future generations and who persuaded his NDP colleagues to join him in taking that bold step.

The B.C. Liberals under Clark did their best to reverse those progressive gains. Now, shamefully, the NDP wants to complete Clark’s plans by destroying a river valley farmed by multiple generations of hard-working landowners and wiping out irreplaceable lands and waters used by First Nations since time immemorial.

The New Democratic Party is straying into dangerous territory, risking becoming known as the party of No Damn Principles.

Unless it reverses direction on Site C, it will soon see its own political future pushed past the point of no return.