Forestry giant Canfor is logging critical habitat for mountain caribou, recent video footage reveals.

The company, which donated just shy of $1 million to the BC Liberal Party, has proceeded with clearcuts in the Upper Clearwater Valley, near Wells Gray Provincial Park, despite a legal application for an emergency stop-work order currently under review by federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna and a commitment by the company not to log critical habitat for species at risk.

The video, which includes drone footage of a large-scale clearcut on the western slopes of the Clearwater Valley, was made public by the Wilderness Committee.

“We were shocked to see this huge logging operation smack-dab in the critical habitat zone of this threatened species,” said Joe Foy, the organization’s national campaign director.

The area is the subject of an April 7 legal application to the federal government under Canada’s Species at Risk Act (SARA) for an emergency order to ban Canfor’s proposed logging in caribou habitat. Filed by lawyer Bill Andrews on behalf of concerned local and B.C. groups, the application argues that logging permits issued to Canfor by the former BC Liberal government are located in federally designated critical habitat for mountain caribou, which are listed as “endangered” by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) and “threatened” under SARA.

Endangered Caribou Habitat Clearcut During B.C. Election Uncertainty https://t.co/T4qkgklPsM #bcpoli #cdnpoli @cathmckenna @GeorgeHeyman pic.twitter.com/PDseEwK2ri

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) July 26, 2017

The application has been under review by the Canadian Wildlife Service for three and a half months. Staff there are preparing a report for the minister on whether there is an “imminent threat to the recovery of the Wells Gray caribou herd,” Andrews has been told.

“The next step will be for the minister to decide whether to recommend that the federal cabinet make an emergency order to stop the proposed logging,” Andrews added.

Panorama of logging in the Upper Clearwater Valley. Image: Courtesy, Wilderness Comittee.

On the provincial front, Andrews is heartened by the results of the recent election, as both the BC NDP and Greens have campaigned for species at risk legislation.

The mandate letter for George Heyman, the new Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, stated that one of Heyman’s priorities is to “enact an endangered species law and harmonize other laws to ensure they are all working towards the goal of protecting our beautiful province.”

While the transfer of power dragged on in Victoria and federal bureaucrats were taking their time studying the caribou issue, Canfor ploughed ahead with its controversial logging. This work even violates the company’s own commitments by CEO Don Kayne to the B.C. Special Committee on Timber Supply in 2012:

• Canfor does not support actions that would overturn landscape objectives set through public planning processes unless there is full public consultation and support.
• We will not support actions that impact parks, riparian areas or areas that provide critical habitat for species at risk, or other important environmental values such as biodiversity and old growth.

REFERRAL GROUP CANFOR Don Kayne Remarks Special Committee by DeSmog Canada on Scribd

The above logging contradicts both promises. The local Referral Group — officially designated to represent the concerns of the community regarding logging plans in the region — has steadfastly opposed this logging, as has the Wells Gray Gateway Protection Society. Moreover, the area in question is designated Type 2 Matrix critical habitat for mountain caribou by the federal government.

While mountain caribou don’t inhabit the Upper Clearwater Valley directly today, its forests are recognized as vital to the survival of caribou in terms of predator management. When Type 2 Matrix habitat is logged, it is replaced by early seral forest, which is a mixture of brush and young deciduous shrubs and trees like willow, alder, and poplar. This is poor habitat for caribou but ideal for other ungulates.

“By clearcutting these areas, you increase the deer and moose population, who feed on the new growth,” explains Foy. “That in turn attracts wolves, which kill caribou.”

Wolves don’t naturally prefer caribou, but they will eat them when the opportunity arises. Given their ability to travel up to 100 km a day, wolves can easily access caribou herds a long way away from these clearcuts.

The mountain caribou herd known as Wells Grey South has plummeted from about 320 animals in 1994 to 120 today. The same disturbing trend is occurring across southern B.C., where caribou are being driven to the brink of extinction, despite the province spending millions of dollars on helicopter wolf kills, with 163 wolves shot in 2016 and likely more to be killed this year.

“No scientific evidence has ever been published showing that killing wolves can help recover caribou populations,” explains lichenologist and local resident Trevor Goward. “That’s because cull programs don’t get to the root of the problem: habitat loss from logging and other industrial activities, which drive the increased predation.”

The Clearwater River. Courtesy, Wilderness Committee.

Mountain caribou are a unique subset of woodland caribou, seen only in southern B.C. today. They depend on old-growth and mature forests for food and predator avoidance. Over thousands of years, they evolved the practice, unique among all caribou, of heading to high alpine country in the winter to avoid wolves and cougars. There, they subsist on black hair lichens that hang from subalpine fir and spruce.

Despite the area being federally designated as critical habitat for caribou, the site plan for Block B131, where this footage of Canfor’s recent logging was captured, makes no mention of caribou under the “Wildlife” section of the plan. Instead, it states:

“The block is not within critical deer winter range or moose habitat…no critical wildlife features were found during development of this block.”

Canfor Logging Plans B131 Specs by DeSmog Canada on Scribd

Canfor representatives declined to comment for this story.

On July 16, Canfor suspended local logging operations due to forest fire activity in the region, but indicated last Friday on its Facebook page that it intended to reopen its Vavenby Mill and logging in the region on Monday July 24.

As the smoke clears, tensions over caribou issues and logging are likely to resume. A recent Facebook post from the Wells Gray Gateway Protection Society noted construction work on Road 80, which could be laying the groundwork for more logging, this time at Block T121, on the east side of the valley, for which Canfor received a permit from the BC Liberal government earlier this year.

But with a decision on an emergency order banning logging expected soon from the federal government and new provincial leadership committed to protecting endangered species, the clock may now be ticking for Canfor’s logging operations in critical habitat for endangered caribou.

Main Image: David Moskowitz

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The B.C. government is granting logging permits in critical caribou habitat, despite evidence that B.C.’s Southern Mountain Caribou are being driven to extinction by habitat loss — a move that has driven citizens to call on the federal government to enforce the Species At Risk Act.

Among the hardest hit regions in the province is the area in and around Wells Gray Park, the scenic home to Helmcken Falls, two hours north of Kamloops.

There, people like Trevor Goward, a longtime local resident, naturalist and professional lichenologist, are sounding the alarm over the province’s failure to protect caribou.

Goward, along with a group of local citizens, is currently preparing to file with the federal government for an emergency stop to a fresh round of clearcuts in the Upper Clearwater Valley, which lies just outside of the southern boundaries of Wells Gray Park.

Canfor has obtained permits to log blocks W101 and W102 on the west side of the Clearwater River, and block T121 on the east side — all designated critical habitat for caribou. The company is sitting on nine more blocks on the east side, covering hundreds of hectares, and has indicated imminent plans to file for a number of additional permits there.

Canfor and its subsidiaries have donated a total of $884,366.08 to the BC Liberals since 2005, according to data released by Elections BC and the BC Liberals. The Council of Forest Industries, of which Canfor is a member, has donated an additional $54,815.00.

Canfor did not respond to a request for comment.

Image: Trevor Goward and Jason Hollinger

In filing their petition, Goward and his group are essentially going over the head of the province, which has jurisdiction over logging and caribou management, but not over endangered species. That constitutional responsibility for endangered species falls to the federal government, under the Species at Risk Act (SARA).

The Southern Mountain Caribou were listed as “threatened” when SARA was created in 2002. Then in 2014, they were designated as “endangered” by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.

“The province of B.C. has utterly failed to prevent logging in areas outside the Wells Gray Park where logging boosts deer and moose populations and artificially increases the number of wolves that then prey on caribou,” explains Bill Andrews, lawyer for Goward’s petition group.

A major point of divergence between the province and federal government’s approach to endangered Southern Mountain Caribou is in the treatment of “matrix habitat” — areas where caribou may not necessarily roam, but, because they are adjacent to other critical habitat, are nevertheless important to the caribou’s survival.

When matrix areas are clearcut, they attract and sustain predators, including wolves which can travel up to 100 kilometres per day — yet the B.C. government does not prevent logging in these areas, restricting industry only in those it narrowly defines as “core habitat.”

The new Canfor cutblocks fall directly within what is considered Type 2 Matrix habitat by the Species At Risk Act, meaning it should be kept relatively free of predators

“The federal government has constitutional authority to step in and protect the critical habitat of an endangered species where the province is unwilling to do so,” Andrews says.

“My clients are petitioning federal minister of environment Catherine McKenna to do just that.”

#BCLiberals Grant Major Political Donor Permission to Log #Endangered Caribou Habitat https://t.co/wazlcuTtnm #Canfor #bcpoli #bcelxn17

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) April 3, 2017

Caribou’s True Culprit: Habitat Destruction

While the province of B.C. has placed much of the blame for disappearing caribou on wolves, a closer look reveals the real culprit: decades of habitat loss from various forms of industry and, most notably, landmark changes to B.C.’s logging regulations under the 16-year tenure of the B.C. Liberal government.

Goward has produced a graph that lays key policy and legislative changes over declining caribou populations, revealing a stark parallel.

In 2004, the B.C. Liberals switched to the Forest and Range Practices Act, which essentially deregulated the forestry sector and put logging companies in charge of policing their own operations. As a 2011 B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union report, “B.C. Forests in Crisis,” put it:

“Under FRPA, industry was given control over its operations, and entrusted to achieve on-the-ground results with less government supervision. Industry was allowed to define its own ‘results,’ as long as the results were consistent with general government objectives, and forest professionals would be relied upon to ensure sustainable practices (called “professional reliance”)…These policy changes significantly reduced the role of government in the forest industry. Direct government involvement in on-the-ground forest management was seriously limited, and key levers to influence industry activities were removed.”

These regulatory changes ushered in a series of devastating clearcuts throughout the Wells Gray region and all around the province.

Image: Trevor Goward and Jason Hollinger

In February, the B.C. government issued an election-time announcement, committing $27 million toward caribou recovery efforts. But the announcement downplayed a dramatic reduction in caribou numbers and plans to expand the province’s controversial wolf cull program to new caribou regions.

“It’s a policy to influence politics,” Chris Darimont, Hakai-Raincoast professor at the University of Victoria, says. “The province needs to be recognized for ‘doing something’. And despite the controversy about wolf control now, it’s easier politically than halting industry where endangered caribou roam.”

Christy Clark’s Caribou Numbers Game

In its February announcement, the B.C. government released population figures for the total of B.C.’s woodland population herds — numbers that mask precipitous declines in specific herds.

“Today there are some 19,000 caribou in the province, compared to between 30,000 and 40,000 at the turn of the last century,” the press release states. Yet only around 1,300 Southern Mountain Caribou remain across the province and many herds — including the Northern Woodland Caribou in the Peace region — are now endangered or even extirpated (locally extinct).

All of B.C.’s caribou are of the woodland variety, but there are different subpopulations within that.

South of Prince George roams a unique variety known as mountain or “deep snow” caribou. What makes the Southern Mountain Caribou special is their wintertime vertical migration into the high country. Their saucer-like hooves enable them to walk on top of 3-meter deep snow into alpine and sub-alpine habitat, where they evade predators like wolves and cougars and feed on black hair lichens which hang in abundance from the branches of spruce and fir.

It is the Southern Mountain Caribou that has experts worried the animal is being ignored by the B.C. Government.

The South Columbia herd around Mount Revelstoke, for example, has fallen from 120 animals in 1994 to just four in the 2016 census.

The Monsahee herd was recently classified as extirpated — meaning locally extinct — with just one very lonely animal noted in the census.

The province’s recent announcement acknowledges the need for habitat protection but much of the program’s focus is on “predator management” — which is more or less a lovely euphemism for killing wolves — and a maternal penning program, the effectiveness of which has been questioned.

Helicopter wolf kill programs have been taking place since 2015 in the South Peace and Southern Selkirks, but this year the province has added a new one in the North Columbia, near Revelstoke.

In 2016, 163 wolves were killed by the government’s program, a doubling from the previous year.

With the addition of a third kill program in 2017, the number is expected to grow again.

Although a portion of the $27 million is specifically set aside to support wolf culls in the Southern Mountain Caribou region, the announcement emphasized recovery work for the healthier woodland caribou north of the Peace Valley and in less industrialized portions of northwest B.C. — herds that still matter to hunters, an important voter constituency for the B.C. Liberals.

A 2017 protection study from the joint Canada-British Columbia Southern Mountain Caribou (Central Group) in B.C., found more than a quarter of the $12.5 million spent on caribou recovery between 2006 and 2016 went to predator-related initiatives — half of which was spent specifically on killing wolves.

Only $168,000, or about 1.3 per cent of the total, was spent on habitat management.

The Ministry of Forest, Lands and Natural Resource Operations (FLNRO) declined to provide details on how this new $27 million will be allocated, stating simply, “since the funding has just been announced, a detailed breakdown of how the funds will be spent is not yet available.”

Caribou in the Timber Sacrifice Zone

The province began the Mountain Caribou Recovery Implementation Program in 2008 — the goal of which was to return mountain caribou from the Prince George and the Omineca Mountains south to the Washington border to 1995 census levels by 2028.

Nearly halfway into that timeframe, the program has been a dismal failure.

Most notably, the province has resisted protecting caribou habitat in areas rich in timber resources.

Just 0.65 per cent of B.C.’s Timber Harvesting Land Base has been set aside for ungulate winter range — and of this amount, very little is prime habitat for caribou.

Those lands that are protected from logging are often impacted by heavy-duty snowmobiling, which carves a path for predators to access caribou in alpine habitat.

Forestry clearcuts and recreational activities create a cascading effect by stripping the landscape of old-growth and mature forests. What grows in their place is a mixture of brush and young deciduous shrubs and trees like willow, alder, and poplar — known as early seral forest.

Seral forest makes for poor caribou habitat but attracts and sustains lots of deer, moose and elk, which in turn attract predators such as wolves and cougars. Caribou often end up killed as “by-catch.”

The de facto response from the province has been to emphasize removing these predators rather than protecting caribou habitat from industry — the fundamental method of caribou recovery consistently recommended by the scientific community.

B.C. Liberals Walked Away from Local Use Plan

For Goward, however, the problem is much bigger than concerns over logging and its impact on Wells Gray’s mountain caribou.

“What we’re looking at here,” he says, “ is a breakdown of participatory democracy — a situation where the B.C. government called for, supported and signed into effect a land-use agreement with local residents — only to walk away from it a few years later.”

Goward belongs to the Upper Clearwater Referral Group, which grew out of a relatively collaborative land use visioning process with the NDP government in the mid-to-late nineties.

Recognizing local concerns over clearcuts, the government engaged with citizens to develop a local use plan under the Kamloops Land and Resource Management Plan (LRMP). The resulting agreement, called the “Guiding Principles,” was intended to achieve a lasting balance between industry and other user groups in the Upper Clearwater Valley.

In 2000, a year after the B.C. government signed onto the Guiding Principles, it convened the Referral Group, which it mandated to act as a watchdog committee to ensure the Guiding Principles agreement was respected by all parties.

While the B.C. Liberal Government of the 2000s maintained some contact with the group, it has steadily backed away from those earlier commitments and now, in 2016, has abandoned them entirely.

This left locals like Goward feeling frustrated and without a voice as new clearcuts loom over the valley.

Logging near the south end of Wells Gray Park since 1984. Image: Damien Gillis via Google Maps

Problem Widespread in B.C.

This problem is far from isolated to the Wells Gray region. It’s a pattern visible all across southern B.C.

In the Selkirk Mountains, caribou face an uphill battle too.

Like Goward, naturalists there see it as a problem of habitat destruction and are seeking to stem the decline by creating a new provincial park that would connect to other exiting ones and preserve some of the last truly intact sections of old-growth caribou habitat from clearcuts. (This is the subject of a new short documentary I directed called Primeval: Enter the Incomappleux.)

Craig Pettitt, a charter director of Valhalla Wilderness Society, based in New Denver told DeSmog Canada caribou can be pushed over the recovery threshold.

“Once these mountain caribou are wiped out, we can’t simply import woodland caribou from further north to repopulate the region,” explains Pettitt.

Previous attempts to transplant northern woodland caribou into southern mountain herds have proved an utter failure.

The issue also goes beyond any individual cut block or road to a bigger picture of repeated habitat destruction by many activities over a prolonged period.

This notion was underscored by an important 2015 paper published in the journal Biological Conservation, titled “Witnessing Extinction: Cumulative impacts across landscapes and the future loss of an evolutionarily significant unit of woodland caribou in Canada.”

“Currently, we are observing the decline, extirpation, and perhaps extinction of several evolutionarily significant units of woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou), an iconic and cultural keystone species,” the authors note, drawing on 11 years worth of data and observations on declining caribou populations.

“The cumulative impacts of multiple anthropogenic activities are now recognized as one of the most pressing problems facing the conservation and management of wildlife across North America and beyond.”

The authors look at habitat destruction through the lens of cumulative impacts — the piling on of various layers of industrial development on the natural landscape — or, as Goward’s group refers to it in a new website dedicated to raising these issues, death by a thousand (clear)cuts.

A similar situation has unfolded in B.C.’s Peace region where decades of road building, logging, mining, dams, power lines, conventional gas and fracking have heavily industrialized two thirds of the landscape, leaving little contiguous habitat for species like caribou.

While cumulative impacts are an important legal consideration in decisions on resource projects in the U.S., in Canada, they aren’t given much weight in environmental reviews, as the Joint Review Panel into Site C Dam sharply pointed out in its final report, noting “the Panel recommends that the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency undertake, on an urgent basis, an update of its guidance on cumulative effects assessment…”

Mountain Caribou. Photo: David Moskowitz/Mountain Caribou Initiative

As conservation biologist and wolf expert Paul Paquet puts it, “A long history of shortsighted and misguided accommodation of the forest industry has conspired to deprive mountain caribou of their life requisites and placed their survival in jeopardy. Their future now depends on our repairing the environmentally destructive mistakes of the past while stopping those of the present.”

It also depends on British Columbians demanding their government put the survival of an iconic species ahead of the interests of deep-pocketed donors.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Major industrial power users in British Columbia fear that if the proposed Site C dam becomes a reality, rate hikes could put mills and mines out of business while saddling taxpayers with a costly white elephant and ballooning BC Hydro debt.

A decision on the $7.9 billion plan to build a third hydroelectric dam on the Peace River will be made by the federal and provincial governments this fall.

Economic questions about the mega-project were raised by last month’s joint review panel report, which noted the dam would likely be “the largest provincial public expenditure of the next 20 years.”

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The panel, which did not come out for or against the project, found that, based on cost comparisons provided by BC Hydro, Site C would be the most economical way to provide new power — but said it could not measure the true cost or need and recommended the B.C. Utilities Commission should look at it, an idea immediately dismissed by Energy Minister Bill Bennett. (The commission turned down the Site C project in the early ’80s.)

Strong opposition to Site C is now coming from the unlikely direction of the Association of Major Power Customers of B.C., an organization representing about 20 of the largest employers and industrial customers in the province.

“We have absolutely no confidence that this is the least cost plan,” association executive director Richard Stout told DeSmog Canada.

“It’s not the right project right now”

Major industrial power users in B.C. have seen a 50 per cent increase in rates over the last five years and are looking at another 50 per cent over the next five years, he said.

“It is unusual for us to criticize a government of this stripe, but BC Hydro has been out of control for a good 10 years,” Stout said, pointing to almost $5-billion in deferred accounts.

“Any other business would have been declared bankrupt by now,” he said.

Site C will take a decade to build and, with changing markets and a burgeoning natural gas industry causing a surplus of generating capacity in North America, it is almost impossible to accurately predict demand and prices, Stout said.

“All we know is the original load forecasts are going to be wrong,” he said. “It’s not the right project right now.”

Craig Thomson, energy and environment supervisor at Canfor Taylor pulp mill told DeSmog Canada that industry in B.C. was built with a foundation of low power rates, but in the last five years that has changed and Site C would be the final straw.

“I think the cost of hydro-electric dam construction is so astronomical that no one will ever do it again and we’re going to have this huge white elephant,” he said.

“Potentially it’s going to drive our industry out of business.”

B.C.’s natural gas hypocrisy

Doubts are growing about cost comparisons made by BC Hydro, which didn’t include the use of gas power because the 2010 Clean Energy Act demands that 93 per cent of the province’s energy needs be met by clean, renewable power.

The act effectively eliminated the use of gas turbines and sent the gas-fired Burrard Thermal generating station into early retirement.

But the province has now handed a Clean Energy Act exemption to the liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry, a move that allows gas plants to meet their massive power needs with natural gas. Meantime, BC Hydro is prevented from using natural gas even as a backup to renewables.

“It’s really hypocritical to allow them [LNG facilities] to burn gas,” Merran Smith at Clean Energy Canada told DeSmog Canada. “The carbon emissions, as well as the air pollution, are inconsistent with the province’s goals.”

“Gas is a fossil fuel. It may be cleaner than coal or oil, but it still has a heavy carbon footprint.”

Should gas turbines be allowed for backup power?

Like many others, Stout believes alternatives to Site C should be considered, including the use of gas turbines as an intermittent source of power — something that would first need the government to change the Clean Energy Act.

Thomson is looking at new technologies coming on stream and, in the meantime, Burrard Thermal, with a similar capacity to Site C, could provide sufficient intermittent power, he suggested.

“Electricity is 32 per cent of our operating cost and, if it goes up and up, someone is going to say the business is not viable and the doors will close,” he warned.

Energy economics expert Marvin Shaffer, adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University, believes Burrard Thermal should never have been eliminated as a source of backup energy.

“I’m not suggesting that an old, relatively inefficient plant like Burrard should be used as a base load facility. What Burrard can do is provide a very cost-effective backup to the hydro system as well as back-up peak capacity exactly where it might be required,” Shaffer said.

Burrard Thermal generating station was sent into early retirement with the introduction of the 2010 Clean Energy Act. Credit: Niall Williams via Flickr.

With Burrard in place, B.C. would have no shortfall of energy until 2033 and, even without Burrard, strategically placed gas thermal plants could supply low cost energy as needed, he said.

Faced with Site C as the alternative to intermittently using gas turbines, even Joe Foy of the Wilderness Committee comes down on the side of occasional gas use.

“It seems a better solution than drowning 100 kilometres of farmland when you don’t even need that power for 300 days of the year,” he said.

Oxford study: Dams routinely come in 90% over budget

Many also have concerns that, when costs such as transmission lines are factored in, Site C’s cost will soar above $7.9 billion.

Fears that costs will run amuck are backed by an Oxford University study of power dams that found construction costs of large dams are, on average, more than 90 per cent higher than their budgets.

Mark Winfield, associate professor in the environmental studies faculty at York University, sees parallels between Site C and costly nuclear power plant plans in Ontario.

“Large hydro projects like Site C and nuclear power plant construction or refurbishment reflect a focus on large, centralized, high-cost, high-risk, high-environmental impact, long-lived generating infrastructure,” he said.

That limits opportunities for the system to adapt to market changes and sets the focus on only one path, Winfield said.

“In both cases there are significant uncertainties about future demand and, therefore, substantial risk of making major investments in projects which may turn out not to be needed or which are overtaken by newer, better technologies,” he said.

Site C’s legacy: cheap power or wealth destruction?

Dan Potts, former executive director of the Association of Major Power Customers of B.C., believes the lasting legacy of Site C would be wealth destruction.

“The huge cost will rob the province of valuable resources that could be used to deliver other needed government services as well as burden the B.C. economy with debt and high electric power rates that will sap our competitiveness,” he said.

Times have changed from when previous dams were built on the Peace and Columbia Rivers, said Potts, who has calculated that gas prices would have to almost quadruple before power from Site C would be economically viable for export.

“B.C. Hydro has filed information that the cost of electric power from Site C will be in the range of $100 per megawatt hour. Current market prices are in the range of $30 per megawatt hour. If Site C were now operational, the market value of the power produced would be $350 million per year less than the cost,” Potts said.

Site C will lose $800 million in first four years: report

The possibility of exporting excess power to help fund the dam was discounted by the joint review panel, which predicted that, unless prices changed radically, B.C. Hydro operations would lose $800-million in the first four years of operations:

These losses would come home to B.C. ratepayers in one way or another. B.C. Hydro’s expectation is that it might sell Site C surpluses for only about one-third of costs, leaving B.C. ratepayers to pay for the rest.

But the panel also says that Site C, after an initial burst of expenditure, would lock in low rates for decades and produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions than other sources.

Ignoring the Clean Energy Act is not an option for BC Hydro and there is no doubt Site C compares favourably to other clean energy costs, said Hydro spokesman Dave Conway. In comparison to Site C power at $100 per megawatt hour, new generation from wind or micro-hydro comes in at $128 per megawatt hour, he said.

However, the panel noted that geothermal energy would cost about the same as Site C power — and as a firm source of power could present a viable alternative to the dam. Geothermal could be built incrementally to meet demand, eliminating the early-year losses of Site C, the panel noted.

Even without Site C, customers are looking at a 28 per cent increase in rates over the next five years, but British Columbians should bear in mind that they are paying one of the four lowest energy rates in North America, Conway said.

However, Foy would like all British Columbians to consider what else could be done with almost $8-billion.

“Maybe better education for kids or health care?” he asked.

“If we spend $8-billion on Site C, what community doesn’t get a health care facility?”

Image Credit: An area of the Peace River Valley threatened by Site C. Photo by tuchodi via Flickr.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.