Opposing a large hydro dam can be a lonely experience.

Just ask Roberta Frampton Benefiel, a long-time resident of the Labrador community of Happy Valley-Goose Bay, 36 kilometres from the boondoggle Muskrat Falls dam now nearing completion. 

As a member of the Labrador Land Protectors, which brings together both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, Benefiel now faces the possibility of yet another megadam on the Churchill River. If the proposed Gull Island dam is built, the Churchill “won’t be a river anymore,” she said in an interview with The Narwhal.

Mercury rising: how the Muskrat Falls dam threatens Inuit way of life

Yet when reached on the phone last week, Benefiel sounded positive — even optimistic — about the future of a growing global movement to stop the construction of destructive hydro dams. 

She had just returned from a three-day conference in Winnipeg organized by Wa Ni Ska Tan (a word that means “rise up” or “wake up” in Cree) to discuss the devastating impacts of large hydro projects across Canada and around the world. 

The sold-out conference brought together about 300 people, many from communities impacted by projects like the Site C dam under construction in northeastern B.C., the Keeyask dam under construction in northern Manitoba and dams in the global south in countries including India, Panama, Brazil and Colombia.

Roberta Benefiel of the Labrador Land Protectors at the Muskrat Falls Public Inquiry in St. John’s, NL on Wednesday, March 27, 2019. Photo: Paul Daly / The Narwhal

“This was really where, as a riverkeeper in Canada fighting a dam, we needed to be,” said Benefiel, who is also a member of Grand Riverkeeper Labrador, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the Churchill River and its estuaries. 

“Because we’re so far away and because we were just one Canadian dam group it just didn’t seem to work as well as it does with this Wa Ni Ska Tan group. Connecting with all the Canadian-affected communities was so important.”

Senator Mary Jane McCallum, who has advocated for the rights of hydro-impacted communities in Manitoba, said in a keynote address to the conference that she wants to launch a special investigation into the impacts of large Canadian hydro dams on Indigenous communities.

“You represent hope because you speak it and you walk it,” the senator told the crowd. “You’re intelligent, focused, witty and know when to break out into tears or laughter. That’s all good medicine. You are role models to me and I will carry this weekend to Senate with me to let me know that I’m not alone. And neither are you.”

Mary Jane McCallum speaking at the conference. Photo: Wa Ni Ska Tan

Social and environmental impacts of dams felt globally

Such an experience was precisely what the conference’s organizers had hoped to foster. 

In a post-conference call with The Narwhal, Wa Ni Ska Tan’s Ramona Neckoway and Stephane McLachlan said the three packed days of panel discussions and strategizing helped combine isolated struggles into a powerful international network. 

Neckoway, who is from the hydro-impacted community of Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation in northern Manitoba, said photos of eastern Himalayan dams shown at the conference by political ecologist Deepa Joshi “are so familiar to me in terms of what we see, even though it was halfway around the world.” 

McLachlan, coordinator of the University of Manitoba’s Environmental Conservation Lab, recalled other moments such as when a band councillor from Tataskweyak Cree Nation in northern Manitoba asked to get 50 copies of a strategy handout from a Brazilian dam opponent. In another instance, a fisherman from South Indian Lake showed a delegate from Panama a map of all the projects that Manitoba Hydro International (a controversial consulting subsidiary of the Crown corporation) has led in the Central American country.

Each instance represented a sharing of knowledge and experience among people who may have never met outside the conference, Neckoway and McLachlan noted. 

On the last day of the conference Panamanian Jonathan González Quiel released a statement saying connecting with other hydro-impacted individuals and communities is critical. 

“We used to be just a group of different rivers, but now we have converged to create a big ocean.”

‘That’s not consultation. That’s bullying’

It wasn’t all hopeful, however, with many moments of sorrow and frustration expressed throughout the conference. 

The opening panel featured Indigenous people whose communities have been negatively affected by the Site C, Muskrat Falls and Keeyask dams. 

Connie Greyeyes of Fort St. John, B.C., said resource projects, including the Site C dam, have increased the price of basic needs such as housing and food while the creation of man camps has compromised the safety of Indigenous women and girls. 

Denise Cole of the Labrador Land Protectors spoke about the potential collapse of infrastructure for the Muskrat Falls dam that could flood the homes of 1,000 people, as well as the impending methylmercury contamination of fish, a traditional food source for local Indigenous people.

A reckoning for Muskrat Falls

Members of Manitoba’s Tataskweyak Cree Nation talked about how their water has become dirty and contaminated since the advent of dam construction, which they said has brought with it significant social disorder, the abuse of drugs and alcohol, racial discrimination and the destruction of ancestral practices of hunting, trapping, fishing, and gathering. Burial sites, artifacts, and ancient trails have all been lost.

Robert Spence, a band councillor for the nation, broke down in tears while describing some of the impacts of the Keeyask dam and other large hydro projects. 

“The water was supposed to be the answer to all of our people’s prayers,” he said to the room. “Whenever I hear the word ‘development’ I cringe. To me, it’s such a dirty word.”

Consultation and partnership agreements among the Crown corporations building the dams and impacted First Nations were also deeply criticized at the conference, with some dismissing these elements of the process as the equivalent of blackmail. 

Spence described the effort to consult Indigenous communities and come to an agreement around benefits sharing as “a piggybank for lawyers and consultants.”

Cole added the reliance on consultation with a small number of “established leadership” can lead to project managers and bureaucrats ignoring community members.

Connie Greyeyes, pictured far left, said consultation around large-scale hydro projects can feel like bullying. Denise Cole, second from left, from the Labrador Land Protectors warned of a rise in methylmercury in the Muskrat Falls reservoir. Moderating the panel is The Narwhal’s B.C. legislative reporter Sarah Cox, pictured far right. Cox is the author of Breaching the Peace: The Site C Dam and a Valley’s Stand against Big Hydro. Photo: Wa Ni Ska Tan

“Our idea of consultation means that we have a meaningful consultation and come to an agreement that fits for everyone,” Greyeyes said. 

“Not ‘here’s what we’re going to do, you’re going to like it and accept it and take this amount of money or you’re not going to get anything at all.’ ”

“That’s not consultation. That’s bullying. That’s the way it is.”

Two Treaty 8 First Nations in British Columbia — West Moberly First Nations and Prophet River First Nation — have filed civil actions alleging that the Site C dam, along with two previous dams on the Peace River, constitutes an unjustifiable infringement of their treaty rights. 

A third Treaty 8 First Nation, Blueberry River First Nations, has launched legal action on the grounds that the cumulative impacts of industrial development in its traditional territory, including the Site C dam, infringes its treaty rights. 

Hydro in global south comes with high costs, privatization, displacement

International activists brought stories of similar destruction and dispossession.

Deepa Joshi of Coventry University in the United Kingdom condemned the framing of hydroelectric power as a “climate solution” given its immense social and environmental impacts and greenhouse gas emissions from reservoirs. 

She attributed the expansion of the “green economy agenda” in the global south to the post-2008 recession and desire for investors to find new profitable markets. That shift, Joshi said, was enabled in countries like India by reforms that made dam-building less financially risky and more profitable. 

Latin American attendees of the conference also tied recent dam-building sprees to shifts in global political economy, with Elisa Estronioli of the Brazilian Movement of Communities Affected by Dams noting that Brazilians pay exceedingly high rates for electricity because the sector has been privatized. 

Many hydro-affected communities in northern Manitoba also pay very high costs for power despite being most impacted by its development.

Manitoba’s hydro mess points to Canada’s larger problem with megadams

Quiel said the same corporations are building and financing these “projects of death” in Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama: “We have to expose and visualize who this enemy is that’s threatening our region,” he said through a translator.

KJ Joy of the India-based Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management said a conservative estimate of people displaced in India due to development projects over the last half-century is 40 to 50 million, with hydropower projects one of the biggest factors in displacement.

The Report of the World Commission on Dams, published in 2000, estimated that between 40 to 80 million people have been displaced globally by large dams, including between 26 and 58 million in India and China between the years 1950 and 1990. China’s Three Gorges Dam, completed in 2006, displaced an estimated 1.2 million people and flooded 13 cities.

On a much smaller scale, the forced displacement of people is also occurring in B.C. with the construction of the Site C dam. The global human rights group Amnesty International says the Site C project does not meet international standards for forced evictions. 

Costs of damages from Manitoba Hydro ‘incalculable,’ organizers say

As with any event of such a scale, there wasn’t one specific takeaway or solution that conclusively set the way forward. 

But many ideas emerged from a brainstorming session on the last day: class-action lawsuits against Crown corporations, engaging youth in hydro-impacted communities and helping them remember what life was like before the dams, improving public awareness with outreach and education campaigns, funding solar and wind power projects and introducing a moratorium on all new large dam projects while working to decommission existing ones.

Wa Ni Ska Tan organizers said the group will continue to strengthen international alliances, host more gatherings, and potentially work with McCallum on a special investigation into the impacts of large Canadian hydro projects on Indigenous communities. 

Benefiel said one of the biggest issues her group faces in drawing public attention to the impacts of Muskrat Falls is a lack of funding, especially compared to publicly funded Crown corporations that don’t have to raise money for TV ads, media relations or lawsuits.

An ‘invoice’ tallying the costs of hydro development in the province of Manitoba as ‘incalculable’ is delivered to Manitoba Hydro. Photo: Wa Ni Ska Tan

“They can outdo us in the media, they can out-fund us,” she said. “We really need to pull together and show a very strong resistance across the country in order to provide that glue that would pull in some funding for us to do these things.” 

That strong resistance was on full display at the end of the conference: a march through the freezing cold to the Manitoba Hydro building with banners, signs and chants led by Indigenous people from across Canada. 

There, conference participants delivered an invoice to the Crown corporation for a litany of hydro-caused damages: destruction of waterways, a decline in fish populations, methylmercury contamination and loss of culture among them. 

The total cost listed at the bottom of the invoice? 

“Incalculable: too great to be calculated or estimated.” 

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While news of Saskatchewan’s plan for a small geothermal power plant was met with excitement by renewable energy advocates,  experts say British Columbia is far better situated to capitalize on the technology yet has failed to do so.

“It should be a little bit of a shock that a less good resource is being developed in Saskatchewan over a world-class resource in B.C.,” said Alison Thompson, chair and co-founder of the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association (CanGEA).

B.C. is located on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a geothermal hot zone. Maps produced by CanGEA found B.C. has enough geothermal potential to power the entire province.

“There are geothermal projects all up the coast but they stop at the border. There’s nothing in B.C.,” Thompson said.

“This is clearly not technical, not economic. This is policy driven.”

Northeastern B.C., a hotbed of oil and gas drilling, is home to one of the hottest recorded wells in Canada, measured at around 170 degrees Celsius. Aquifer temperatures in Saskatchewan’s Williston Basin are recorded at around 120 degrees.

“You only need about 80 degrees for power,” Thompson said.

Project developers in Saskatchewan signed the first Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) for geothermal in Canada with the province’s utility provider, SaskPower.

The same has not been possible in B.C., where a primary focus on hydro development, most pronounced in the recent decision to build the controversial $9 billion Site C dam, has taken up the lion’s share of the the provincial utility provider’s attention.

In 1983 the B.C. Utilities Commission recommended the province to explore geothermal as a potential alternative to Site C. As the Site C Joint Review Panel noted in its final report on the project, the province put virtually no effort into exploring alternatives.

“If the senior governments were doing their job, there would be no need for this recommendation” to explore alternatives, the panel wrote in its final report on Site C in 2014. “The low level of effort is surprising, especially if it results in a plan that involves large and possibly avoidable environmental and social costs.”

Critics argue Site C has actually forced out renewable energy industries like wind and solar.

“At CanGEA, we’re in our 11th year and we’ve been advocating consistently for geothermal in B.C. with no results with B.C. Hydro and the Ministry of Energy,” Thompson said.

The West Moberly First Nation, which is fighting Site C in court, has also advocated for geothermal to no avail.

“If Saskatchewan can build a geothermal plant, why the hell isn’t B.C.? Especially when they know there’s geothermal potential here. We’ve asked to partner with them on it,” Chief Roland Willson told DeSmog Canada.

B.C. Hydro’s Mandate Needs Update: Weaver

B.C. Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver told DeSmog Canada geothermal is long overdue in B.C. but that “B.C. Hydro’s mandate needs to be massaged, be changed a bit.”

“The problem with geothermal in the province is not that we can’t do it,” Weaver said. “The problem is B.C. Hydro is the only buyer of power so no one is going to invest the capital in a project if there’s no buyer for the electricity.”

He added: “We have enormous potential for geothermal — it’s stable, base power that’s renewable and it will happen in B.C. sooner than we think.”

Steve Grasby, geoscientist with Natural Resource Canada’s Geological Survey, said in the 15 years he’s been researching Canada’s geothermal potential he has seen a massive shift in public awareness and interest.

A 2013 Geological Survey of Canada report found northeast B.C. has the “highest potential for immediate development of geothermal energy” anywhere in the country.

“When we first started this most people didn’t even know the term and if they heard it they didn’t know what it meant,” Grasby told DeSmog Canada.

“There has been a huge increase in awareness on all different levels. Now we’re seeing a lot of growing industry interest with small companies and people exploring this new opportunity.”

He added test drilling has yet to be completed in Saskatchewan, so it could be some time before more detailed knowledge of that resource comes to light.

Grasby said there is “tremendous” geothermal potential across Canada but the highest temperature regions are in B.C.

“That’s where we really have the potential to consider electrical generation compared to just direct heat. There’s been a lot of interest and various projects pushing forward. It’s an exciting time.”

B.C. Policy ‘Indifference’ to Geothermal Hurt Industry

In Valemount, B.C., plans for a geothermal ecovillage are underway. If successful, the plan will not only produce electricity but also provide direct heat for the community, recreational hot springs, year round greenhouses and a first-in-Canada geothermal brewery.

It took several years for the company behind the project, Borealis Geopower, to land a drilling permit.

Thompson, who’s also a principal at Borealis, said the regulatory system is slow, full of setbacks and plagued by what she considers chronic indifference.

Policy in B.C. hasn’t kept pace with advancements in the geothermal field, she said.

“For example, B.C. Hydro only thinks about electricity and there isn’t a utility provider in B.C. that thinks about heat. Geothermal can give you electricity, it can give you heat and it can even be a source of precious minerals that don’t have to be open pit mined. It provides jobs and carbon credits.”

Borealis is now awaiting a land access permit for the drilling pad from the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations.

Thompson said the permit is stuck in suspension as B.C.’s political landscape remains uncertain.

“If this was oil and gas permitting it would be done in weeks. With geothermal, this is rolling out in the months and years,” she said.

Korie Marshall from the Valemount Geothermal Society said some of the lag time can be considered the hazards of trailblazing.

“It’s not always fun to be first. We’ve been coming up against all these roadblocks that no one understands. We want to help fix that for others coming up.”

“A big part of our goal as a society is not to just get this going in Valemount but to show the rest of Canada that we can do it.”

Geothermal Energy a Part of Community Building

Meanwhile, geothermal companies are chomping at the bit to get to work in B.C.

“At StromTech we’re actively engaged with clients in northeastern B.C., in the Peace River region, to explore geothermal. There’s lots of good opportunity up there,” said Ben Lee, engineer and geothermal consultant with StromTech Energy Services.

StromTech is in the preliminary stages of conducting a feasibility study for a community led geothermal project with the West Moberly First Nation.

Lee said smaller communities stand to benefit from local geothermal projects, especially where heat from geothermal projects can be used to prop up other industries and jobs.

“The fact that we can generate electricity and generate heat in sustainable, renewable manner — that’s sometimes overlooked or glossed over,” Lee said.

Lee said northern communities concerned about food security are especially interested in the co-generation of electricity and direct heat from geothermal.

“The ability to grow food and produce that for themselves, reduce their reliance on imported food whether that be from the Okanagan or southern B.C. or California, that’s of interest to remote communities.”

“Where I see an opportunity for government, for B.C. Hydro to make a difference is in supporting localized, distributed generation.”

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An association representing B.C.’s commercial sector and business interests says it has compelling evidence that B.C. Hydro has over forecasted electricity demand over the past 50 years — leading to anticipated revenues “that won’t show up” and creating a large existing electricity surplus roughly equal to the power from the Site C dam.

The end result, according to David Craig, the executive director of the Commercial Energy Consumers Association of B.C., could be cumulative new hydro rate increases so significant that that some industries in B.C. may no longer be able to compete as well in their world markets, potentially risking the viability of some businesses and the jobs they support.

Craig confirmed that his association is challenging B.C. Hydro’s projections of power demand — known as “load forecasts” — in an on-going proceeding at the B.C. Utilities Commission, the agency responsible for approving hydro rate increases.

“We just want to get the truth,” said Craig, who previously spent more than 20 years working for B.C. Hydro in various management positions, including as the head of the utility’s accounting group and internal audit function.

“Hydro’s been buying too much energy at very expensive prices. It’s in the interests of all commercial customers in B.C. and all ratepayers to find out what the facts are.”

Craig’s comments come only weeks after Premier Christy Clark’s statement on the campaign trail that cancelling construction of the $8.8 billion Site C dam on the Peace River would “literally put British Columbia families and business in the dark.”

The premier’s statement is “just not accurate for a whole bunch of reasons,” according to economist Marvin Shaffer, a professor in SFU’s Public Policy Program.

“If Site C didn’t go ahead, there are other sources of supply,” explained Shaffer, who has said it is not cost effective to cancel Site C right now even though there “never was a business case for the government’s rush to build the Site C project.” (A recent UBC report, on the other hand, concluded that cancelling the controversial project by the end of June would save between $500 million and $1.6 billion.)

‘We Just Want the Truth’: Commercial Customers Warn @bchydro’s Forecasts Could Lead to Costly Oversupply https://t.co/r18ERthrga #SiteC

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) May 16, 2017

Craig declined to respond to Clark’s statement about the pressing need for Site C, saying that his job is “to get in, get the data, see if I can find the truth of what’s there and…present fact-based debate and argument.”

“We don’t get to prosecute the past but we do get to plan the future,” said Craig, whose association represents the commercial sector energy consumers by consulting with industries and organizations that include the B.C. Chamber of Commerce, Landlord B.C., the Building Owners and Managers Association, and the B.C. Greenhouse Growers’ Association, as well as B.C.’s municipalities.

According to B.C. Hydro’s own data, energy demand in B.C. has been stagnant for the past decade in the residential and commercial sectors.

Yet, during January’s cold snap, B.C. Hydro issued a news bulletin announcing that electricity demand in the province was at an “all time high,” and reassuring customers that “the power will be there on the coldest, darkest days of the year — without brownouts or without having to import expensive power from other jurisdictions.”

Investments like Site C, said the same B.C. Hydro bulletin, would help meet the “growing demand” for electricity in the province and ensure reliable power in the future.

When the government announced its final approval of Site C in December 2014, former Energy Ministry Bill Bennett told the media that B.C.’s electricity needs were forecast to increase by 40 per cent over the following 20 years. “It’s clear that to keep rates low, we must choose the option of building Site C,” Bennett said.

In a 2013 submission to B.C. Hydro’s Technical Advisory Committee, Craig’s association warned of the risks of proceeding with Site C and other power acquisitions when the electricity was not needed, saying that “this future power supply…needs to be avoided for as long as possible.”

“The risks of oversupply are the most prevalent risks in the B.C. Hydro system,” said the association. “The future rate increases for all B.C. Hydro customers, which come with these choices, will be significant if the power is supplied at existing rates.”

At the time, the association highlighted energy conservation measures as a cost effective way of helping to defer new energy purchases like Site C.

“We’ve spent money on conservation and efficiency and it’s working,” explained Craig, who is also the vice-president of the B.C. Advanced Conservation and Efficiency Association, a non-profit organization that advocates for enhanced conservation and energy efficiency practices.

But B.C. Hydro has backed away from energy conservation measures since 2013, the year before Site C’s final approval. It has reduced plans for energy conservation and efficiency for the next 20 years and expects energy savings to decline dramatically as Site C and other planned energy acquisitions are forecast to come on-line.

As part of the BCUC proceeding, the Commercial Energy Consumers Association asked B.C. Hydro to share its “load forecast” information and figures on actual energy demand for the past 50 years so it could do its own number-crunching.

Craig said that led to the emergence of the pattern of “systemic” over-forecasting, “decade by decade.”

“Why is B.C. Hydro still over forecasting after 10 years of declining use?” he asked.

Craig said the association’s goal is to ensure that if something is awry in B.C. Hydro’s data definitions it is corrected, so that load forecasts will be more accurate and B.C. does not continue to end up with large amounts of surplus power that could lead to higher hydro rates.

Right now, the province has so much electricity that B.C. Hydro is paying independent producers millions of dollars a year not to generate power.

Yet rising hydro costs are already challenging some of B.C.’s biggest industrial power users, including some pulp mills, to look for ways to manage their costs to remain competitive in their markets, including developing their own natural gas-fired power generation.

“[The] impact of over-forecasting is that their plans end up anticipating revenues that won’t show up,” explained Craig. “And when those revenues don’t show up it turns into rate increases. And when they acquire more energy than they need and sell it for less, that turns into rate increases.”


On April 28, B.C. Hydro corrected two “load forecast” figures it had provided to the BCUC, apologizing for the revisions.

The corrections were made to the 2003 and 2013 load forecasts — which project electricity demand for many years beyond those dates — and Craig said the “size of the error in the data for the 2013 forecast was substantial.”

He also confirmed that the Joint Review Panel that examined Site C for the federal and provincial governments — concluding that there was no need for Site C’s energy in the timeframe presented by B.C. Hydro — was given the same 2013 load forecast figures contained in B.C. Hydro’s corrections, and not the erroneous forecast.

Craig said far more than two years of load forecasts will need to be corrected in order to begin to address the problem of over-forecasting. “If they’re only correcting the data point for a couple of years that will not make any significant difference.”

He said the next step in the process is for the association to file its argument with the BCUC, and for B.C. Hydro to file counter-arguments.

“At that point you’ll have the debate open and transparent in front of the utilities commission and the utilities commission will make a decision on it.”

B.C. Hydro did not respond to two requests for comment.

B.C. Hydro Forecast Revisions Submission to B.C. Utilities Commission by DeSmog Canada on Scribd

Image: B.C. Hydro president Jessica McDonald at a Site C announcement. Photo: Province of B.C. via Flickr

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