Hydro orders protesters off Site C dam logging site
FORT ST. JOHN — Members of a small but defiant group are pledging to keep protesting the Site C hydroelectric project in northeastern B.C., despite being ordered off the land.
They set up a camp on Dec. 31, when B.C. Hydro and Power Authority issued an eviction notice while pressing ahead with land clearing for the controversial $9-billion dam.
The crown corporation gave protesters 24 hours to leave the area known as Rocky Mountain Fort, on the south bank of the Peace River, just a few kilometres south of Fort St. John.
It warned Hydro personnel will remove all contents of the camp and deliver it to RCMP but such action had not been taken by Monday afternoon.
Verena Hofmann, a Peace River Valley resident who was at the encampment over the weekend, said contractors appear ready to begin logging a three-kilometre region that is First Nations territory.
“We’ve just heard equipment has started up. It looks like they are intending to keep on cutting,” she said. “Treaty 8 First Nation people are holding their ground and are not moving from the site, so things are intensifying and changing quickly.”
Hofmann said demonstrators believe Hydro has no right to force them off the land in the midst of ongoing legal challenges involving Site C.
Several court cases raise major concerns about the potential impact of flooding from the creation of a new lake on the Peace River and the surrounding valley during construction of the dam.
She said five people at a time are occupying the west side of the mouth of the Moberly River in rotating shifts. First Nations and other landowners are staying in a small cabin that was flown to the bank, as well as a hunting tent.
It takes about 30 minutes by foot or less by snow machine to reach an area where contractors are set up, she said. “There is no physical structure blockading Hydro’s construction, it’s individual people approaching them and reasonably and respectfully pleading with them to cease construction.”
Local people are trying to protect the land — significant because it contains swaths of old-growth boreal forest — until court proceedings run their full course, Hofmann said.
She said the group has asked that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reassess the environmental approval granted for the project by the former Conservative government, in conjunction with the B.C. government.
The Rocky Mountain Fort was established in 1794 by the North West Company as a fur trading post and is the site of the earliest settler post in mainland B.C.