On April 7, 2012, Brian Cecil Parke ignited an enormous burn pile on his property near Pavilion Lake, west of Cache Creek, B.C. 

The fire burned for two days before he left his property without extinguishing it.

The fire spread 140 hectares over the next 36 days before a call came into the RCMP, which notified the Kamloops Fire Centre of the blaze. 

Parke’s actions landed him in front of a secretive, quasi-judicial body under the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations that, in 2017, ordered him to pony up almost $1 million in provincial firefighting costs, according to freedom of information documents obtained by The Narwhal.

The documents shed light on the little-known work of the ministry to track down firestarters and hold them accountable for their role in creating costly wildfires, which have become increasingly ferocious in recent years due to climate change.

The provincial Wildfire Act allows the B.C. government to recover “fire control costs and related amounts” from those who start wildfires. Those considered responsible have the right to an “opportunity-to-be-heard” proceeding before a “delegated decision maker” in a secretive process known to few outside the system.

The details surrounding the Ministry of Forest’s investigations and resulting wildfire penalties are not made public.

It’s not just individuals who are being held financially responsible — corporations have received the lion’s share of firefighting bills, with one penalty totalling more than $16 million.

And while seeking compensation for damages may be fair and good, some are raising concerns about the need for greater transparency around the penalties and who, ultimately, is responsible for handing them out.

‘No efforts were made to suppress the fire’

Parke’s hearing found he ignited a Category 3 fire — defined as larger than two metres high by three metres wide — and left his property while it was still smouldering. 

According to regulations outlined in the Wildfire Act, a fire of that size requires a fuel break (a gap in vegetation to slow a fire), someone monitoring it to ensure it doesn’t spread beyond its intended size and an official burn registration number with the province. 

Parke did not meet any of these requirements.

Crews fought the resulting blaze for more than a month until June 16, although it wasn’t officially declared extinguished until Sept. 1. 

For his role in the blaze, Parke was eventually handed a penalty of $921,958. 

The government’s itemized claim against Parke included $299,448 for wages and overtime, and $237,733 for helicopters. The smallest amount, $616, was to cover the repair and replacement of equipment. A mandatory overhead fee of 20 per cent of expenses was included in the total.

An itemized list of wildfire fighting expenses charged to Parke under the Wildfire Act. These details were released to The Narwhal through a freedom of information request.

In early 2019, the Forest Appeals Commission, an independent body that allows alleged firestarters to dispute decisions, permitted Parke to appeal the fine. He successfully negotiated an agreement with the province to reduce the amount by close to half, down to $500,162.

During his opportunity-to-be-heard hearing, he complained that it took the province 3.5 years to notify him of its intention to recover costs, raising issues of procedural fairness. He also theorized that trespassers lighting a campfire or arsonists may have been to blame for starting the wildfire. 

The documents note an investigation found Parke had a loader tractor, buckets, a hose, pumps and hand tools on site, but “no efforts were made to suppress the fire.”

Parke’s fine is on the higher side, but the general circumstances that led to his financial penalty are by no means unique. 

The documents reveal that other cases involve private landowners like Parke who got careless burning debris piles or waste in a metal barrel. 

In one case, campfires at a multi-day rave on private property attended by around 50 people got out of control, growing to 1.7 hectares. Provincial staff from the Clearwater and Kamloops fire zones attended the scene, and the unnamed owner of the property and party organizer was ordered in 2017 to pay $12,463 to cover firefighting costs.

Other cases involve major companies, deemed responsible for causing fires from train sparks, flaring at oil and gas operations or shoddy wiring at an outdoor work area.

But just who decides if people and companies are responsible — and how?

B.C.’s natural resource officers unequipped to deal with forestry and wildfire crimes: special investigation

More transparency needed surrounding penalties, ‘informal’ hearing process

Under B.C.’s Wildfire Act and wildfire regulations, the fines associated with causing and failing to extinguish a fire are clearly laid out. 

The province touts some of the highest fines in Canada.

And yet the process through which cost recovery for fighting wildfires is handled remains comparatively opaque. 

Delegated decision makers run hearings where the accused have a chance to defend themselves. These decision makers, who tend to be regional forest centre managers or deputy managers, act like judges, determining responsibility and the firefighting costs to be recovered. 

The fact that these individuals generally come from forestry, rather than legal, backgrounds isn’t necessarily a bad thing, according to Kevin Kriese, chair of the Forest Practices Board.

“The whole idea was not to plug up the courts,” Kriese told The Narwhal. These decision makers receive special training and have access to legal advice to help guide them in the process.

“If you look at fairness and access to justice, it’s a pretty efficient process,” Kriese said, adding the hearings tend to involve a mixture “of law and facts” and “a matter of some professional opinion” as to whether or not there was harm and its significance.

“It’s not a bad idea to have an actual professional or someone with knowledge of the topic making those decisions.”

In a written statement, the Ministry of Forests told The Narwhal an opportunity-to-be-heard hearing is not meant to resemble a civil court process. Rather, the hearing is “an informal fluid process” without pretrial discoveries or pretrial applications.

Kriese said he would welcome greater openness around the process because the prospect of bad publicity could result in fewer wildfires caused by negligence. 

“If a company knows that someone else got fined $25,000 for doing X, that may have deterrent value,” he said. “Companies don’t like these on their books.”

As of April 16 “most open burning activities have been prohibited throughout British Columbia,” according to the BC Wildfire Service. Photo: BC Wildfire Service / Facebook

Vancouver lawyer Steven Wallace, who represented Parke, said there may be a perception that the hearings are biased since they are run by a provincial official seeking to recoup firefighting costs for their own ministry.

Even so, he said, the Forest Appeals Commission, where individuals and companies can fight against fines, is a separate and independent body. 

Further appeals to decisions made by the Forest Practices Board can be brought to the B.C. Supreme Court.

The Forest Practices Board recommended in 2014 that the province create a publicly available, searchable database of penalties that have been handed out by the Ministry of Forests, including those under the Wildfire Act, to increase transparency. Currently, fines are only made public if they’re challenged at the Forest Appeals Commission. 

But the province has been slow to act. 

In its statement, the Ministry of Forests said the recommendation is being considered in light of legislative reform to the Forest and Range Practices Act “to enhance transparency and the public trust.” 

(In light of this opportunity for reform, the Forest Practices Board reissued an appeal in 2019 for greater public disclosure.)

Parke had insurance to cover his bill, but that’s not always the case for landowners, putting them at serious financial risk. 

“Frankly, some [fines] are going to bankrupt people,” Kriese said.

And not all appeals are as successful as Parke’s.

In 2017, the Forest Appeals Commission rejected Madeline Oker’s appeal of an order to pay $113,777 in firefighting costs and a $600 administrative penalty after her debris piles torched 8.7 hectares of Crown land near Fort St. John. 

The commission said in its decision that “although Ms. Oker was experiencing financial hardship and may be unable to pay those costs, the legislation does not recognize an inability to pay as a basis for not ordering a person to pay for fire suppression costs.”

The overriding message from these hearings is that anyone conducting burns in or around a forest must appreciate the serious financial consequences should that fire get out of control, Wallace said. 

“Anybody who is a major landowner with forests or who is working out in the forests must be very mindful of the requirements when dealing with fire.” 

‘Indicative of a truly corrupt system’: government investigation reveals BC Timber Sales violating old-growth logging rules

Corporate offenders make big showing on firestarter list

The freedom of information documents show corporate firestarters are by far the worst — and most stiffly penalized — offenders.

On the morning of June 11, 2015, CN workers cutting a rail line on the tracks near Lytton in the Fraser Canyon sent sparks into nearby grass. The fire danger rating that day was extreme, and rail-cutting is considered a high-risk activity.

Fuelled by dry conditions, strong winds and steep terrain that hampered firefighting efforts, the so-called Cisco Road fire grew stronger. It eventually ravaged 2,200 hectares of Crown land — more than five times the size of Stanley Park — and prompted an evacuation order for the Lytton First Nation.

The blaze wasn’t considered fully extinguished until October but continued to smolder for years — ending with a very pricey outcome for CN. 

In May 2018, CN was ordered to pay the province a whopping $16.28 million in cost-recovery fees and penalties for the fire.

CN disputed the amount to the Forest Appeals Commission, which actually increased the amount on March 20, 2020, to $16.61 million due to new information presented on the extent of wildfire damage.

The upgraded penalty included $169,065 for silviculture and reforestation, a $75,000 administrative penalty, $52,189 for loss of Crown timber, $9.37 million for other forest and grassland resources and $6.94 million for firefighting costs.

CN did not provide The Narwhal with a response.

The penalty against the railway may be the biggest of its kind in B.C.

Fighting forest fires takes a ton of time, resources and money. If you start a blaze in B.C., you could be on the hook for hundreds of thousands — even million — of dollars. Photo: B.C. Wildfire Service

“It’s certainly the largest one I’ve seen,” said Vancouver lawyer Ryan Morasiewicz, who specializes in law related to outdoor adventure. “People have to take these things seriously. I don’t think people realize, holy shit, if you’re negligent, you can be on the hook for a lot of money.” 

In 2013, Telus was found responsible for a tree falling on a power line along a forestry service road in 2006, which created a 380-hectare fire. The company was forced to pay in excess of $2.1 million for fire-control costs and the loss of Crown timber.

The documents also show CN’s problems were not isolated to the Cisco Road fire. The company received a penalty of $321,929 after one of the company’s trains ignited a wildfire that burned 171 hectares of winter habitat for mule deer and an old-growth management area near Williams Lake in 2014.

Forty-four per cent of that fine was for mature Crown timber damaged or destroyed by the fire. The rest was to cover other affected forests and grasslands. 

The Forest Appeals Commission reduced the company’s penalty to $203,597 in 2017.

CN was also ordered to pay $142,974 in 2017 for three wildfires within a span of about two months near Spences Bridge, Chetwynd and Hansard — a railway point northwest of the junction of the Fraser River and Bowron River. 

The company paid an additional $199,727 in 2019 for six fires — near Houston, Burns Lake, Kumsheen, Boston Bar and two near Lytton.

CP has also had its troubles. In 2019, the company was ordered to pay $155,247 for two fires, about two months apart, north of Spences Bridge and south of Lytton, the latter caused by rail-cutting.

Climate change making fires worse and more expensive to fight

British Columbia stands to face an ever-growing threat from wildfires due to global warming. 

The last decade was the hottest on record. Warmer temperatures mean drier forests, more dead trees from drought and beetle infestation and more frequent lightning strikes. These conditions are causing bigger wildfires that burn hotter and faster. 

The province got off relatively lucky in 2019, when 21,138 hectares burned at a firefighting cost of $182.5 million.

That came as a relief after two back-to-back record-breaking wildfire seasons. In 2017, 1.21 million hectares at cost of $649 million and in 2018 an estimated 1.35 million hectares burned at a cost of $615 million.

In those two years, humans caused 41 per cent and 25 per cent of the fires, respectively.

Fighting climate change is a tough uphill battle. Taking personal and corporate responsibility for ensuring fires do not get out of control is well within our reach.

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.

B.C. Green Party leader Andrew Weaver went from being B.C.’s solitary Green MLA in 2013 to holding the balance of power in the province’s current minority government.

While the transition has had its ups and downs for the climate scientist, public scrutiny of Weaver’s position and what he ought to do with his influence in government hit an all-time high recently with government’s decision to forge ahead with the controversial Site C dam.

We caught up with Weaver at his office in the legislature to ask him to reflect on the last seven months of cooperation with the NDP government and what he anticipates 2018 holds for some of B.C.’s most pressing energy and environment concerns.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

1) It’s been seven months since you signed a confidence and supply agreement with the NDP. Has that arrangement unfolded as you expected?

I’ve been very pleasantly surprised. I went into this agreement very skeptical about our ability to work with the NDP…[but] we recognized that what was critical for us was that we wanted to give people change. We put together this agreement that gave British Columbians certainty, articulated some key values both parties shared…When we started our negotiations it was pretty tense. When we ended it we ended up really getting to know each other and it was quite positive.

It wouldn’t have happened if there wasn’t a general willingness of both parties to put the interest of British Columbians first. There are areas where we disagree, like Site C dam — an obvious one. But in the end we agree to disagree and we understand that’s healthy. We can disagree and move on. It doesn’t mean we have to throw a hissy fit and make government fall.

2) It’s been a raucous time environmentally for this province. There have been some notable highs and lows. What are you most proud of?

One of the things I felt was a deal breaker for me in the negotiations [with the NDP] was climate policy and we all know underpinning any climate mitigation policy is increasing carbon pricing. To me it was a big victory that we had an increase in carbon price of $5 a year, starting in the April budget for four years … which will take us ahead of Trudeau’s target. So we have both leadership and certainty. To me that was a high point.

There were some other good things: we had a ban on grizzly hunting. I know it’s a bit populist and I know there were some people who are concerned because it wasn’t science based and we’ve been advocating for a science-based approach to ecosystem management…but dealing with grizzlies was a good thing.

3) What has emerged as a memorable low point?

Site C.

In addition, we still haven’t seen any action on fish farms. That to me is a critical one and we’re hoping to see something in the spring on that as these tenures come to. We’ll be pressuring government to take a hard look at the renewal of those tenures because they’re on the record saying they’re going to get fish [farms] out of the migratory path of sockeye.

The biggest issue that we’re working on right now is restructuring the professional reliance model to get industry out of the business of policing themselves.

We have a model where industry hires professional consultants to provide the underlying evidence that a proponent of a project will send into the environmental assessment process. We have a problem there.

We’re tackling that. We’ve got that public consultation process going on now. We’re hoping to see some movement going forward in that area.

The [example of professional reliance] that is most personal and relevant and local is of course the Shawnigan case.

The Shawnigan residents believed and frankly rightly so that government was abdicating its role to actually look out for the betterment of all people and letting industry in some sense police itself. So in that particular case we know the professional reliance engineering group were actually partners in the project and there was some conflict there and that’s all before the courts now.

Another example is Mount Polley. Again, when government is not there enforcing compliance and ensuring regulations are met and ensuring public oversight of these projects, things happen and the public loses trust.

Two other projects that stand out are Kinder Morgan and the Ajax mine.

4) On the subject of the Ajax mine, government recently announced it would not issue permits for that project but was cautious to say the decision was not the result of Indigenous veto. What do you make of this government’s promise to uphold Indigenous rights in this province?

We campaigned on this. We would introduce a Natural Resources Board and part of that board’s process would be to ensure when you’re doing an environmental assessment the process is actually modified through legislation to include assessments based on Indigenous values.

We know from the Tsilhqot’in case there are substantive issues with ignoring the wishes of First Nations. So our process would have involved changing the environmental assessment process to ensure as part of that process Indigenous input is there. Not in terms of a veto, and Indigenous peoples don’t talk in terms of a veto either, but in terms of ensuring their collective wisdom is looked at. It’s not that difficult to do: you have an environmental assessment process, you just need to expand the mandate of that but you also have to bring the actual collection of information and oversight into government too so you’re not letting industry choose which First Nation to consult. You’d have a Natural Resources Board that would have a broader oversight that would actually ensure any assessment process went through a process that had indigenous involvement as well.

It’s not easy but it’s what we need to do.

5) We recently put together a list of resource projects that got it right in 2017. What would you put on that list?

The Valemount geothermal project.

I spent ages pushing that project from the inside because there was an MOU sitting on the minister’s desk, waiting and waiting and waiting. All it needed was to get signed but BC Hydro didn’t want the power. So now they’ve got the exploration permit to get going … but it’s not only the Borealis project in Valemount, it’s also Glacier Destinations, which is a ski resort that’s going to happen there. It’s the exact opposite of Jumbo: the First Nations and the town went together to the architects of the Jumbo resort and said ‘we want this.’ And you have community support for geothermal.

Everybody wins.

6) Do you think more small-scale, local energy projects are in store for B.C.?

It’s the way of the future. It’s not only the way of the future, it’s the reason I got into politics.

When you build distributed renewable energy resources you’re putting them in small communities all across B.C. in partnership with First Nations, you’re getting these First Nations off diesel, you’re bringing long-term stable jobs into the communities. You’re not just building construction projects with no jobs at the end. There are so many examples whether in Tofino, Port Alberni, Lytton, where there have been very successful small-scale hydro projects done in partnership with First Nations.

We know right now there’s proposals for solar in Cranbrook, hopefully Borealis geothermal, wind projects all over the place and pumped storage. They’re all ready to go but in B.C. there’s only one purchaser of power: BC Hydro.  So none of them can go ahead unless BC Hydro says we will take that power from you but BC Hydro is building Site C and Site C is taking up any increase in demand for the foreseeable future.

7) What impact do you expect the approval of Site C to have on the renewable energy industry in B.C.?

A few days ago I received an e-mail from a CEO of a renewable energy company that is B.C.-based and they’re essentially saying Site C has killed their industry.

It’s not only him — I’ve heard that time and time again, that people have come to B.C. to invest in the renewable energy potential here and now they feel they have been thrown under the bus. There’s a reason the Canadian Wind Energy Association left B.C., went to Alberta and look what we see: 600 MW of power coming in at 3.7 cents per kilowatt hour. That’s the opportunity we lost.

8) You know a lot of people said the Site C decision should have been the moment the Green party used its position to bring down government. Did you consider that decision and why?

Not for a second.

Even before the decision I let people know that we’re not going to make government fall over whatever decision they made.

The question I would ask people is how would that have changed the outcome? If we caused government to fall on a vote … a budget amendment or confidence vote … government would fall, there would be an election probably by May or June and we’d have spent another $1 billion on Site C.

So what’s the possible results we could get? A majority Liberal government — Site C goes forward. Majority NDP government — Site C goes forward. Minority government — we’re back at the negotiating table.

The reason we didn’t put it in the confidence agreement is that’s not how you develop partnerships. You don’t put a gun to someone’s head … we accepted the NDP’s argument that we would send this to the BCUC. We were comfortable with that because we knew what the BCUC would say. We were delighted with that report. They had everything they needed to cancel it.

9) You’ve said before that with the approval of Site C your party will push for a greater electrification of B.C.’s systems. Is that something you’ll be turning your attention toward in 2018?

We’re already pushing for the introduction of an aggressive zero emission vehicle standard. We need BC Hydro to step up and start to bring in the infrastructure for electric. We need to change legislation and regulatory structure in B.C. to allow people to charge for power in charging stations.

Industry wants to invest in charging stations but they can’t sell the power unless they’re a utility. It starts to become bureaucratic. We will push for electrification. What else can we do?

10) Energy and environment issues are quickly evolving from transitions in energy markets to evolving perspectives on Indigenous rights. One industry that has been affected by these changes is the LNG industry. What is your take on LNG for 2018?

If B.C. starts to focus again on trying to land an LNG industry given all that has happened, I can tell you I am voting government down. I am not standing by no matter when it happens. I am not standing by and watching us give away the farm yet again to land an industry we’re not competitive in. That’s my line in the sand.

LNG is gone because we know global markets, China is over supplied in their contracts. For some time there is no supply gap that needs to be filled.

This is the opportunity to capitalize on the new economy. Given our stable democracy in unstable times, given our access to clean energy and businesses around the world that want to label themselves clean, if we go down this LNG path and start to sign sweet deals again then we might as well have the BC Liberals back in power.

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.

Being an environmental journalist at this point in history can be a bit, well, depressing. It often means bringing negative stories to light: stories about government failing to balance development with environmental protection, or about companies getting away with harmful practices, or about Indigenous peoples’ rights being set aside in the name of progress.

But it’s not all bad news out there.

And DeSmog Canada wants to celebrate those people and organizations that go out of their way to do development right — those that build their plans around meaningful consultation with Indigenous peoples, minimize environmental harms even at a cost to their business and raise the bar for their industries.

We’ve gathered a list of some of the projects we want to fist-bump this year. We’re not suggesting they’re perfect; any large extractive project comes with an environmental cost. But these are projects that rise above the rest in their efforts to minimize that cost.

The Displacer

Rivers Inlet Run-of-River Hydro Project

High on a hillside above the rusting diesel tanks of Rivers Inlet, a new project is coming to life that will render them obsolete. A run-of-river hydro plant is going to displace most of the community’s diesel use starting in the new year, bringing clean and renewable energy to a remote corner of the province.

But it’s not just the technology that puts this project on our list. This indigenous-led project was planned from the beginning with the local wildlife in mind. The entire system is above the highest point salmon reach in that stream, meaning spawning habitat is not affected.

The road was built in consultation with grizzly expert Megan Adams, who recommended a winding road with lots of escape routes to minimize human-bear contact. And throughout the project’s planning and construction, Wuikinuxv elders and community members were involved and employed by the proponent, the Barkley Project Group.

The Redeemer

‘Namgis-Owned Land-Based Salmon Farm

Fish farming has been one of the hot-button issues on the West Coast for more than a decade. First Nations, environmental groups and other concerned residents are resisting the industry, citing fears over the farms’ effects on wild fish stocks. Specifically, open-pen farms are regarded as being dangerous for their ability to pass diseases to wild fish.

One way around that problem is to isolate the fish in land-based tanks, preventing contact between the farmed Atlantic salmon and their wild Pacific cousins — and that’s exactly the approach taken by the ‘Namgis First Nation-owned Kuterra.

The farm even makes use of geothermal energy to heat the tanks. It’s an expensive way to farm fish, more suited to raising smolts than adult fish, and the company has been hard pressed to turn a profit thus far. But as a way to minimize the known and potential harms of fish farming, this is one way to shake up an industry in need of new ideas.

The Electrifier

Borden Gold

Even with electric vehicles poised to define commuting in the next decade, it still seems ambitious to imagine that the heavy machinery of a mine would be next. But Goldcorp is aiming to electrify an entire mine with its new Borden Gold project southwest of Timmins, Ontario. It wants the underground mine to be all-electric by 2021 — a Canadian first.

The mine will use an electricity and battery-powered underground fleet, which is expected to eliminate all emissions associated with moving ore and waste rock. Bonus: with less diesel fumes kicking around, the Borden Mine will require 50 per cent less ventilation than a regular underground mine.

This means Goldcorp expects to cut carbon dioxide emissions by more than half and eliminate three million litres of diesel fuel, one million litres of propane and 35,000 megawatt hours of electricity every year.

While mining for gold is not essential, mining for other minerals is important for a renewable energy economy and Borden will hopefully set an example for others.

The Transformer

Kimberley’s SunMine

Over the decades, the site of Teck’s (formerly Cominco’s) Sullivan Mine in Kimberley, B.C., hosted a steel mill, fertilizer plant and tailings ponds, rendering the area tree-less for the forseeable future. What to do with an elevated, south-facing slope that could never again see natural shade? Why, build B.C.’s largest solar farm, of course.

With land and capital contributions from Teck, the Province of B.C. Innovative Clean Energy Fund and a $2 million loan to the City of Kimberley approved by 76 per cent of voters, Kimberley’s SunMine project was a no-brainer.

When it started generating electricity in 2015, it became the first solar project in B.C. to sell power directly into BC Hydro’s power grid.

At peak operation, SunMine powers an estimated 200 Kimberley homes, and can generate nearly $250,000 annually in revenue to help repay the initial loan, cover operating costs and, hopefully, expand the project in the future.

Image: SunMine solar array. Photo: City of Kimberley

The Foresters

Cortes Island community forestry project

If managed properly, forests can provide sustainable income for a community while not sacrificing their ecological values. It’s a delicate balance, but one that’s being tried out on Cortes Island, near Campbell River, B.C.

In 2011, the island’s First Nation and non-First Nation communities came together to co-manage their forests for their mutual benefit. Together, they control licences that make up about a third of the island, sharing the proceeds equally between the Klahoose First Nation and the Cortes Community Forest Co-operative.

In contrast to a normal corporate forestry operation, the partnership’s values voluntarily include preservation of the forest ecosystem, the development of recreational trails and protecting biodiversity and aesthetic values — and all the money it makes remains in the community. Even some of the logs stay on the island; the partnership reports that most of the local construction and carpentry companies are making use of its wood.

The Geyser

Valemount, B.C’s Geothermal Project

The town of Valemount, B.C., is sitting on an endless supply of heat and power — and it’s in the final stages of doing something about it. The town has been working on a plan for years that would allow it to first develop a hot spring, then develop a community geothermal plant to meet the town’s existing energy needs and, eventually, use that energy and heat for other uses as well, like heating a greenhouse, brewing beer or melting ice on the streets.

“It has the potential for being a really ticketable showcase to show the world what can be done with geothermal,” owner of the local Three Ranges brewery Michael Lewis told DeSmog Canada in 2016.

So far, the project’s proponent, Borealis Geopower, has secured rights to develop geothermal in Valemount but has yet to receive drilling permits. Exploratory drilling is the next step Borealis will take to identify just how hot the geothermal potential is beneath the town. But if Valemount’s local hot spots are any indication, there’s likely a wealth of clean, sustainable and cheap energy just below the surface.

We’re on the look out for trail-breaking projects to profile. Know of one? Please tell us about it in the comments below!

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.

A court in Toronto will soon begin deliberating over whether or not to seize Chevron's Canadian assets in order to force the company to comply with an $9.5-billion judgement in Ecuador.

The company doesn’t deny that Texaco, which Chevron bought in 2000, deliberately dumped billions of gallons of toxic oil waste in the Ecuadorian Amazon, resulting in massive environmental devastation and a health crisis affecting thousands of people. But the company claims it did its part to clean up the rainforest.

But the settlement Chevron had with the Ecuadorian government and the state-run oil company, PetroEcuador, does not preclude citizens affected by that oil pollution from seeking damages. Ecuadorian plaintiffs first filed a suit against the company in 1993. Chevron lost a high-profile trial in Ecuador in 2011, and every Ecuadorian court that has considered the evidence since then — including an appeals court and the country's Supreme Court — has ruled against Chevron.

Yet still the company refuses to pay. Chevron has even gone venue shopping in an attempt to avoid paying for a cleanup of its toxic mess — filing an investor-state dispute at the Hague, pressing RICO charges against the Ecuadorians and their lawyers in a New York court. But the communities in Ecuador affected by Chevron’s pollution have not remained idle, and have instead pursued Chevron in Canada to try and collect on the company's debt.

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled unanimously in 2015 that the Ecuadorian plaintiffs could pursue an enforcement action against Chevron. In the majority opinion, Justice Clément Gascon wrote: “In a world in which businesses, assets and people cross borders with ease, courts are increasingly called upon to recognize and enforce judgments from other jurisdictions. Sometimes, successful recognition and enforcement in another forum is the only means by which a foreign judgment creditor can obtain its due.”

Now, in an open letter released this week, more than a dozen Canadian organizations, including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Idle No More Canada, MiningWatch, Sierra Club British Columbia, United Steelworkers, and Unifor, have called Chevron out for its attempts to abuse the civil justice system and evade paying the Ecuador judgment.

“While Chevron continues its international litigation ‘shell game’ thousands of people continue to be systematically poisoned and suffer daily from Chevron's refusal to pay a $9.5 billion judgment to clean up its toxic waste in Ecuador,” the letter states. “Chevron's refusal to honor the judgment against it has forced these communities to come to Canada in a last ditch effort to seize assets to force Chevron to comply with the rule of law.”

"We are grateful that the people of Canada, just like their Supreme Court, have chosen to side with those of us affected by Chevron's deplorable actions when it polluted our communities and water supply,” Humberto Piaguaje, President of the Union of Affected Communities in Ecuador, who will be attending the court sessions in Canada, said in a statement. “The indigenous peoples of Ecuador deserve full access to justice and a healthy environment so that we and our Amazonian neighbors can live with dignity.”

There are signs, however, that Chevron is already attempting to circumvent enforcement of any ruling against the company in Canada. Recent reports have stated that Chevron is currently trying to sell several billion-dollars-worth of its Canadian assets. After insisting the original trial over its pollution in the Amazon be held in an Ecuadorian court, Chevron stripped its assets from the country, which some saw as a deliberate attempt to avoid having to pay any adverse judgement against the company. The fear is that Chevron is attempting the same thing in Canada.

Canadian Civil Society: Freeze Chevron Assets, Use To Cover #Ecuador Judgement on #Amazon Destruction https://t.co/ZL1Y4l8TNS #cdnpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 13, 2016

In their letter, the groups call on Canadian authorities to stop Chevron from selling its Canadian assets before a decision can be reached in the trial, stating in the letter that it "would set a terrible precedent for other corporations intending to evade responsibility for environmental and human rights crimes."

Chevron’s tactics of delay and obfuscation are nothing new for the oil industry, of course. BP held out for two years before finally agreeing to pay $1 billion to fishermen and others affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. And the recent #ExxonKnew scandal erupted after it was discovered that the oil giant’s own scientists had been warning of the dangers of carbon pollution leading to runaway climate change since at least the 1970s — but Exxon continued to fund climate denial anyway.

Sierra Club BC Campaigns Director Caitlyn Vernon said that oil companies have operated with impunity for years, despite leaving a legacy of environmental destruction and human rights abuses. "Whether in Canada or around the world, oil companies such as Chevron, Enbridge and Kinder Morgan must be held accountable for oil spills, climate change impacts, and their treatment of local and indigenous populations," she said.

Now, environmentalists say, the Canadian court system has the opportunity to see some small measure of justice is done in this precedent-setting case.

"The Canadian environmental and human rights community has joined forces with the affected communities in Ecuador because we recognize this to be one of the most important corporate accountability cases in history," said Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Climate & Energy Campaigner with Greenpeace Canada. "Chevron must not be allowed to evade its legal and moral responsibilities simply because it has the might to fight on indefinitely in the courts.”  

Image Credit: Oil pollution in Lago Agrio, November 2007. Texaco operated dozens of drilling sites in the area before pulling out of Ecuador altogether. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

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.

In 2012, I took a fateful trip to Cortes Island — a northern gulf island three ferry rides away from Vancouver — to document the Cortes community’s fight to fend off an impending logging operation by coastal timber giant Island Timberlands.

Community members took us deep into the woods privately owned by Island Timberlands and showed us the hidden pockets of old-growth that the company was targeting. I was struck by how passionate and knowledgeable these Cortes residents were about the land, sharing a trove of fascinating information about the fungal networks underlying our footsteps and their relationships with the giant trees that were scattered throughout this complex and ancient ecosystem.

They explained why cutting down this forest and replacing it with young trees was not adequate to protect the values they held dear. A young forest simply could not filter the drinking water, or sustain the wildlife, or generate the tourism interest that they required to continue living on this tiny island. And furthermore, they felt there was something sacred here that simply should not be tampered with.

Heartwood: A West Coast Forestry Documentree [NEW TRAILER] from Ramshackle Pictures on Vimeo. Fund this work on Indiegogo.

I also discovered that while these people were opposed to the clear-cutting of these ancient forests, most of them were not entirely opposed to logging — they simply had a different vision for how it should be done. A group on Cortes had been engaged for 20 years in efforts to obtain a Community Forest in partnership with the Klahoose First Nation. If granted, this would give Cortes the chance to manage nearly all of its public forestlands in a model of its choosing. What follows are some of the ideas for how Cortes intended to do things differently.

Firstly, the forest industry had been on a race to the bottom for years, harvesting smaller and smaller trees at younger and younger ages, sometimes as young as 50 years. But Cortes had a vision for extending growing rotations to 200 years, allowing trees to grow to a greater size, quality and value, increasing the ratio of clear heartwood at the centre of the trees — the wood that carpenters cherish.

This would allow mosses and lichens to return, providing nitrogen for the trees and food for the deer, which would in turn become prey for larger predators such as wolves and cougars. In other words — cultivating a healthy ecosystem.

When it comes time to harvest again, rather than taking out all the trees using feller-bunchers and burning the so-called waste wood on the hillsides — as is the current practice in the industry — Cortes would employ hand-fallers to selectively harvest middle-aged trees, leaving the youngest trees to continue growing and the oldest trees to continue providing wildlife habitat and seed for new trees.

According to Ben Parfitt of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, as of 2008, “17.5 million cubic meters of usable wood has been left behind at logging operations in BC, an amount that would fill a line of logging trucks lined bumper to bumper on the Trans Canada Highway from Vancouver to Halifax and almost all the way back again.” That is a staggering amount of wood being left to rot or burn — and a substantial amount of carbon being released into our atmosphere.

Finally, rather than exporting the wood overseas, Cortes wanted to create a local value-added industry, with local millers and manufacturers making finished wood products out of the raw materials before the timber left the island.

Raw log exports have accelerated dramatically on the coast in recent years. B.C. has seen a 1,200 per cent increase in unprocessed wood leaving our shores in the past decade, with the vast majority of those logs coming from the coast, where there are more private lands and fewer restrictions on log exports. Meanwhile, over half of coastal mills have closed shop in the past 20 years. By processing that wood here in B.C., we could keep more people employed while harvesting less timber.

It was this vision for a forest industry that works for the people as well as for the forests that sparked my interest in making a documentary. Films about people trying to stop logging had already been done. But a film about people trying to practice truly sustainable forestry was something that I had never seen before.

#Cortes Island: A Different Vision for #Forestry in British Columbia https://t.co/iz93GAZ7OH #bcpoli #cdnpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 6, 2016

Throughout the course of making this film, the Cortes Island vision of starting a Community Forest has come to fruition. In October 2013, the B.C. government granted Klahoose and the Cortes Forestry Co-Op a Community Forestry Agreement, granting them the ability to manage most of the Crown forestlands on Cortes for the long-term benefit of their community.

They have hired a forest manager, surveyed much of the land-base, and have begun selectively harvesting several areas on Cortes. In a spirit of transparency rarely seen in B.C.’s forest sector, the Cortes Community Forest Partnership has allowed me to film their operations on the ground for my documentary. They have been eager to show the world the caliber of forestry that is being done on Cortes.

And it has been fascinating getting to witness the level of thought that goes into selecting which trees will remain, which will be cut, and how those trees will be taken down so as not to damage the ones that are being left behind. It is a level of care and skill that I had never witnessed before in any industrial clear-cuts.

That is not to say there aren’t challenges. Finding local fallers has been difficult, so off-island fallers have had to be brought in. Eco-forestry is expensive, so the margins are thin, adding pressure to harvest more than the community may be comfortable with at first. Furthermore, people haven’t had time to invest in milling equipment or woodshops, so some logs are leaving the island unprocessed. And there is pressure from the B.C. government, whose Annual Allowable Cut (AAC) dictates the minimum amount of timber that must be harvested each year.

So by no means is Cortes some utopia. There is a whole range of dilemmas and disagreements on the island about how much timber should be logged, where it should be done, how it should be done, who should log it, who should mill it, and how much timber — if any — should be leaving the island unprocessed.

But this is all a work in progress. The hope is that as the Community Forest puts some money in the bank, it will be able to assist the community in building up its value-added industries. And after just its second harvest, they were able to sell more wood on-island than the first time around. So things are moving in the right direction. But in order to stay on track, Cortes must not lose the trust they worked so hard to build. This means keeping the lines of communication open — and really listening to input from the community. It is, after all, a community forest.

In the past four years that I’ve spent documenting forestry issues on the coast, I have come to realize that whatever solutions we concoct must take into account the First Nations whose unceded territories dominate these lands; the thousands of forestry workers that depend on these forests for employment; and the coastal communities that depend on these forests for other uses such as clean water, tourism and recreation. The only solutions that will be truly sustainable are the ones that don’t try to compromise between our multiple forest values, but that bring them all up together as a synergistic whole.

My Heartwood series is about moving to a place where the various forest users in B.C. no longer have to be in conflict with one another. It is about moving beyond the paradigm where timber value is the sole metric for the value of a forest. It is about coming up with a holistic value system that takes into account all the intangible and unquantifiable services that forests provide our communities.

And yes, it is also about getting to a place where communities can sustainably grow and harvest timber for generations to come. These are not new ideas. The solutions have been floating around for decades. It’s just that finally — at least on Cortes Island ­— some of them are finally starting to be implemented. It’s time for the rest of the province to catch up and start moving in the same direction.

Daniel J. Pierce is a Victoria-based documentary filmmaker. He is almost finished production on a documentary series entitled Heartwood: A West Coast Forestry Documentree. He is in the midst of a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for the post-production of this series. 

Image: TJ Watt of the Ancient Forest Alliance.

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.

This is a guest post by filmmaker Daniel J. Pierce.

The Wilderness Committee and other forest activists were in court in Victoria on Monday to limit Teal Jones' latest attempt to obtain a new injunction against logging protesters in the Walbran Valley.

Despite appeals from activists and a packed gallery of Walbran supporters, Teal Jones was awarded the injunction, which expires at the end of March, rather than September as they had requested.

The injunction creates 50-meter "bubble zones" around Teal Jones' machines, vehicles and work crews in the Walbran Valley, prohibiting the public from coming within 50 meters of any logging activities within the company's Tree Farm License 46.

The Central Walbran Valley from Ramshackle Pictures on Vimeo.

Justice Jennifer Power acknowledged that the Walbran Valley is an area of high public value, but she settled on the conclusion that Teal Jones does have the right to harvest timber in the area — and the public does not have a right to interfere with the company’s operations.

Activists started blockading Teal Jones' road-building and forestry activities in the Walbran Valley in early November 2015, when the B.C. government approved cut-block 4424 north of the Walbran River.

This highly contentious ancient forest — which is unfragmented by logging — falls within an area known as “the bite.” Environmental groups are calling on the government to include “the bite” into the adjacent Carmanah-Walbran Provincial Park.

The Wilderness Committee fears that the scope of this new injunction is overly broad and will interfere with lawful conservation activities in the Walbran, discouraging people from witnessing the logging or experiencing these ecosystems.

“This injunction might scare people away from going to the Walbran Valley to see the ancient forest, and it could chill public discussion about the logging and civil disobedience that has been occurring in the area,” said Torrance Coste, Vancouver Island Campaigner for the Wilderness Committee.  

But the Wilderness Committee vows to continue to engage in its public awareness campaign in the Walbran Valley.

“We’ll continue to monitor the Valley, take photographs and bring people in to see this world-class ecosystem up close,” Coste explained.

“Teal Jones’ own lawyers told the court there is nothing wrong with citizens being in the Walbran in accordance with the injunction, so we encourage people to get up there, conduct themselves lawfully and witness what’s happening.”

Image: Daniel J. Pierce

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.

“Without natural resources we’d be naked” claims a message stencilled on the chests of four nearly naked, muscular young men.

They are the Natural Runners team in the April 2015 Vancouver Sun Run, sponsored by Resource Works, an organization that has raced to the front of the pack of resource industry promotional efforts.

There were no “without tourism we’d be naked” or “without technology we’d be naked” teams in the race, so B.C.’s natural resources had the message box to itself.

No one would likely take this point — revenues from natural resource extraction pay for our clothes, food, education and health care — too literally. But it’s part of a broader strategy to remake the industry’s reputation and, in the process, attack critics of unrestrained resource extraction. Resource Works is a leader in this campaign.

Resource Works and the Christy Clark Government

The message also helps the Christy Clark government, which has hitched its prospects to the resource industry cart. The Resource Works board and advisory council met with the B.C. Liberal Caucus a month before the organization’s launch. What they discussed was not revealed.

Resource Works’ nude runners is just the latest front in the war against environmentalists. And Resource Works’ undisclosed financial backers seem to be budgeting lavishly for it. Witness the dozens of slick promotional videos, the reports, the web site, the meetings across the province, the articles written by former Vancouver Sun journalists, and more.

Resource Works was launched in April 2014 with a mandate, as executive director Stewart Muir claims, “to create a badly needed middle ground conversation about natural resources in B.C.,” middle ground meaning an area of compromise or possible agreement. Such a conversation would recognize the strong resource-extraction component at the core of our prosperity, “but this is achieved with a responsible approach to environmental sustainability.”

But how middle ground is the Resource Works conversation? Does it give equal weight to resource extraction and environmental sustainability as it claims it does in its quest for the middle ground? It doesn’t help that Muir calls environmentalists the “anti-everything movement” with “the folk-singing, the props and the sloganeering.”

Nor do the organization’s publications help. “The Citizen’s Guide to LNG: Sea to Sky Edition,” is an evaluation of the Woodfibre liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant proposed for the Squamish waterfront. The report was also featured on the organization’s weekly video series titled “Higher Ground.”

Christy Clark’s LNG Ambitions

The timing was fortuitous for the Christy Clark government, which seemed desperate to have at least one LNG project underway.

“Confusion, misinformation and fear are part of the mix in the debate over liquefied natural gas in B.C.,” the video declared. “While the province is poised to break through and develop a new LNG export industry, it’s clear many British Columbians feel pulled in different directions when it comes to the use of natural resources.”

“That’s why Resource Works produced the Citizens’ Guide to LNG,” the video states, to address these concerns and present facts sometimes left out of the debate. But instead of providing balance and facts, the report, written by Muir and Barinder Rasode, Resource Works director of social responsibility and a former Surrey city councillor, turns out to be a 67-page paean to LNG:

LNG is a great product; BC will miss out if its LNG isn’t exported; LNG is safe, has little impact on climate, air and water, and has negligible impacts on human health and salmon populations; it will create high-paying jobs, provide ample tax revenues for increased teachers’ salaries and major benefits for First Nations. And we don’t have to worry about health, safety or the environment because B.C. has a first-class regulatory system in place.

Howe Sound tanker safety is a crucial question for residents who live along the route. But Muir and Rasode write reassuringly: “we have not seen evidence that Howe Sound is considered a narrow waterway by maritime professionals.”

They can say this because when they did interview a leading maritime professional, they didn’t ask him about Howe Sound, as Rafe Mair of the CommonSense Canadian points out in a blog post. The professional was Michael Hightower of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, whom Muir ands Rasode call “the world’s leading expert on maritime LNG safety.”

Mair relates that local resident Eoin Finn, a former KPMG partner and a chemistry PhD, did contact Hightower, who confirmed he had not been asked about Howe Sound. When Finn asked him, Hightower judged Bowen Island and parts of West Vancouver to be within a one-mile radius of tanker traffic and thus at risk.

Muir and Rasode demonstrate the same flaws in their brief discussion of fracking. They take as their definitive statement of fracking risks an American film titled Gasland. This film, they say, “has led some to fear that the practice is inherently unsafe.” Their response: “we have not found evidence to support a connection between the film’s claims and hydraulic fracturing in British Columbia.”

How could there possibly be a connection? Gasland looks at fracking in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Texas. Why didn’t they instead ask homegrown critics of fracking in B.C., of which there are many.

Mair is not kind to the organization: “They are obviously flacks for the LNG industry and pretty obviously for the Christy Clark government as well.”

Dark Funds Behind Resource Works

“Are they paid flacks?” he asks, but can’t answer because Resource Works doesn’t disclose its funding, either for the LNG study or for any of its products. The organization did volunteer the information that seed funding came from the B.C. Business Council, which says in its annual report that it “initiated” the organization.

Greg D’Avignon, the Business Council’s CEO is on the Resource Works board, perhaps representing the council’s investment. Other directors indicate a strong connection to the mining industry. Board chair Doug Horswill is a senior vice-president at Teck Resources, B.C.’s mining giant. Before his stint at Teck, Horswill served as B.C.’s deputy minister of energy, mines and petroleum resources. And before that he worked at mining companies Utah International and Inco. It’s B.C.’s version of the revolving door syndrome.

Director Philippa Wilshaw is an audit partner at KPMG and an expert on financial reporting in the mining industry. Then there’s advisory council chair Lyn Anglin, who is former president and CEO of Geoscience BC, a provincially-funded body whose mandate is to attract mineral and oil and gas investment to the province. Anglin left Resource Works after just six months to take a new job as chief scientific officer at Imperial Metals Corp., owner of the Mont Polley mine.

Is Mair correct that Resource Works is a flack for the Christy Clark government? Stewart Muir has been in the news before because of his close connections to Clark. He was married to Athana Mentzelopoulos, Clark’s deputy minister of jobs, tourism and skills training, and before that was in charge of Clark’s “priority” files. Mentzelopoulos is so close to Clark she was bridesmaid at Clark’s wedding, as Clark was at hers and Muir’s.

Muir’s problem arose when he was awarded a $141,000-a-year contract for the job of vice-president of communication at Vancouver Island Health Authority. The job wasn’t publicly posted and tenders were not called. When the news hit the fan, the contract was withdrawn. Then Muir moved to Resource Works.

Geoff Plant provides another link to the Clark government. He was attorney general under Gordon Campbell and was appointed by Clark in 2012 as the government’s chief legal strategist for the Northern Gateway Pipeline Joint Review Panel proceedings — resource development writ large. His expertise is aboriginal law, crucial territory for Clark’s resource-exploitation agenda.

While these industry and government connections are hidden beneath the surface, the message stencilled on the chests of the four nearly naked young men continues to resonate in the media.

Without natural resources, we’d be naked.

We cannot retain our standard of living without the pipelines, tanker traffic, LNG plants, mining developments and coal export projects that industry currently has in the works.

It’s an effective message, but one easy enough to see straight through.

Image Credit: Resource Works

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.

A moratorium on oil and gas development on a large piece of the continental shelf between Southwest Nova Scotia and Cape Cod called Georges Bank will be extended for seven years, protecting the ecologically diverse waters beloved by fishermen and environmental groups in the region.

The shallow waters of Georges Bank, located about 100 kilometres off the Nova Scotia coast is abundant in haddock, halibut and scallops and is a refuge for endangered turtles and whales that migrate through the nutrient-rich corridor.

The shelf is also thought to be home to large quantities of natural gas.

Nova Scotia recently announced it will renew legislation, Bill C-64, this fall that maintains the moratorium, following a similar decision announced by the federal government before parliament broke for summer.

According to Mark Butler, policy director at the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax, the provincial decision to extend the moratorium “passed at the very last minute.”

“It’s quite amazing, really, but nonetheless it passed.”

Many were holding their breath as the end of the current sitting of Parliament neared. “There was a fair amount of pessimism, so I think everybody was surprised at what happened in the final hours of the House of Commons,” said Butler about Bill C-64. “It passed first, second and third readings in one vote, which is unusual I understand.”

Spill in Georges Bay Would Have “Devastating Effect”

Throughout the history of the moratorium, fishers and groups representing the industry have been outspoken about the importance of the various fisheries on Georges Bank to the regional economy.

“It would be really tough if you had a spill there because of the currents,” said veteran fisher Dale Richardson on his way from his home in Little Harbour on the southern tip of Nova Scotia to Georges Bank to fish for swordfish. “It’s a mixing ground for that Bay of Fundy, northeast seaboard area. The dissipation of an oil slick would be unreal there. It could affect the whole Bay of Fundy and southwest coast of the province.”

Georges Bank has a diverse ecosystem with more than 100 fish species and many more of birds and marine mammals because the nutrient-rich Labrador Current washes over the shallow waters and meets the warmer Gulf Stream. Phytoplankton grows much faster there than on other continental shelves, setting up a feeding cycle for a complex eco-system.

A map of the Gulf of Maine shows the Canada/U.S. border cutting through Georges Bank. Credit: NOAA

While Richardson is a swordfisher in summer, his main occupation is as an inshore lobster fisher. He and the other 10,000 licensed lobster harvesters working off Canada’s East Coast rely on Georges Bank and other breeding grounds to grow a significant proportion of the nearly 75,000 tons of lobster landed in 2013 worth $680.5 million.

“It would have a devastating effect,” said Richardson of any accident involving petroleum on Georges Bank. “It would certainly affect anything that spawns and stays on the surface like lobster larvae, herring and things on or near the surface all the time.”

Lobster, herring, swordfish, bluefin tuna, scallops, cod and haddock — the list of commercial species that rely on Georges Bank as a breeding and feeding ground is significant. Many other important species also live there at certain times of the year including whales such as the endangered North Atlantic right whale, sea turtles, sharks and many species of seabirds.

The Battle for Georges Bank

Georges Bank is a sub-sea plateau of 28,800 square kilometers — about the size of Belgium — that was an island before the last ice age just 12,000 years ago. For the last 400 years, it’s been one of the world’s most productive fishing grounds.

In 1984, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled on a dispute between the U.S. and Canada, dividing Georges Bank between the two countries with the U.S. getting about four fifths.

About 40 years ago, oil companies drilled exploratory wells on Georges, but found nothing. The activity led to calls from fishers and environmental groups on both sides of the border to place a moratorium on oil and gas activity. Both countries did so in 1988, banning drilling until the year 2000.

On the Canadian side, the legislation also called for the creation of a joint federal provincial Public Review Panel, which later recommended extending the moratorium through 2012. The U.S. extended their moratorium a third time, setting an expiration date of 2017. The Canadian and provincial governments only extended theirs through 2015.

This fourth and latest moratorium will protect Georges Bank until 2022 from petroleum related activity by the oil companies that continue to hold exclusive exploratory rights on the Canadian portion of Georges.

Fisheries regulators in the U.S., however, are currently considering opening nearly 13,000 square kilometres of Georges Bank to commercial fisheries. The Fishery Management Council in New England state voted to reopen the area in June although the final decision rests with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A phytoplankton bloom illuminates Georges Bank. Credit: NASA via Stuart Rankin on Flickr.

Calls for More Research, Regulation Before Moratorium Lifted

The rich marine ecosystem of Georges Bank is at risk from more than a well blow out or oil spill, according to a massive 529-page study by the Maritime Region of the Federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Seismic testing and a wide array of impacts from toxic drilling wastes or produced water can negatively impact the mortality of eggs and larvae and have sub-lethal effects up through the food chain.

Others worry drilling for oil or gas could crowd out the centuries-old fishing industry.

“The area around the rig would close down even if there were no impacts from seismic or produced water or drill muds,” Mark Butler said. “Just the simple loss of access would be enough to hurt the fishing industry.”

Still, not all fishers are against the opening of Georges to the oil industry.

Dale Richardson said he’s not “100 per cent against drilling.”

“I just think we need to have more research. We have a tendency here in Nova Scotia and Canada to come in with the most lax regulations compared to the North Sea or other places. I’m not real comfortable with them going there yet.”

Looking into the future, Butler would rather see the moratorium become permanent than risk further last minute extensions.

“We obviously need to drastically change what types of energy we use and how we use it,” he said.

“Maybe by 2022 we’ll all come to realize we shouldn’t risk important areas like Georges Bank for nonrenewable resources. Maybe we’ll be over the hump by then.”

Image Credit: James Brooks 

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.

On the banks of the Peace River on Saturday, Grand Chief Stewart Phillip told hundreds of opponents to the Site C dam that he will be handcuffed if necessary to stop BC Hydro’s mega project from moving ahead. 

“From this point forward we have to really focus our efforts on how we’re going to physically stop this project from happening,” Phillip said during a speech at the 10th annual Paddle for the Peace. “The provincial cabinet recently approved permits to allow construction to begin. That’s where the rubber is going to hit the road.”

An emotional Phillip said B.C. is on the eve of an uprising after the government has repeatedly dealt in “bad faith” with First Nations.

Grand Chief Stewart Phillip has vowed to be arrested to stop the Site C Dam.

“If push comes to shove, I for one — being a grandfather of 14 grandchildren who I absolutely adore — I am more than willing to be arrested as long as that will contribute to stopping this project,” he said.

“I know when that moment comes I will not be alone.”

The Last Paddle for the Peace?

About 300 boats took to the water Saturday in what could be the last Paddle for the Peace — held on a stretch of the Peace River that will be flooded if the $8.8 billion Site C dam is built.

Construction is due to start on the dam any day now despite a pending Treaty 8 legal challenge, due to be heard by the federal Supreme Court on July 20.

“This is a watershed moment in the province of British Columbia and in this country,” Phillip said. “We simply can not — we can not allow this to happen.”

Beth Steiner, 8, helps bag lettuce at her parents market garden stand in the Peace Valley. The land the Steiners grow everything from corn to watermelons on will be flooded if the Site C dam is built.

Calls for a moratorium on construction on Site C have gained strength recently with the Greater Vancouver Regional District board, representing 23 local governments and 2.5 million people, voting to ask Premier Christy Clark for a two-year moratorium on construction.

The Peace River Regional District — which includes Fort St. John, the city that would see the most economic activity from the dam — voted on Thursday to write a letter to Clark to request that all construction on Site C be stopped until active court cases regarding the project have been completed.

The B.C. government has been criticized for pushing ahead with the project while ignoring repeated calls for an independent review of costs and demand — a recommendation made by the government’s own panel.

David Suzuki: ‘We Fundamentally Failed’

Famed environmentalist David Suzuki changed his schedule to join the paddle on Saturday (and helped rescue some capsized canoeists while he was at it) because the fight for the Peace Valley is near and dear to his heart. During a keynote speech, he told the crowd about his involvement with stopping the Site C dam for the first time in 1981.

“Thirty-five years later, guess what? We’re fighting exactly the same battles all over again,” Suzuki told the crowd. “What we thought were victories were not victories at all, because we fundamentally failed. We failed to shift the way we see our place on the planet.”

Ranchers Dick and Renee Ardill know the drain of the 34-year fight against the dam all too well. When the dam was first defeated, Dick was a spry 54-year-old. Now he’s 88 and grasps his truck for balance as he walks.

Dick Ardill has spent his 88 years ranching in the Peace Valley. His parents homesteaded the land in 1910.

His daughter Renee is sick of telling their story.

“I’m tired of the whole thing,” she told DeSmog Canada during a break from baling hay. “I’m tired of the stupidity of it.”

“You have to just keep going on and doing your job and, if we lose and they build the thing, we’ll worry about that when the time comes. In the meantime, I’m hoping that someone comes to their senses.”

While the recent rejection of the Peace Valley Landowners Association legal challenge was disappointing, it’s not the end of the world, Renee says.

“The battle goes on.”

Injunctions Will Be Filed to Stop Site C Dam Construction

“This is the tenth year we’ve done this and if BC Hydro and B.C. have their way we won’t be doing it any more,” said Roland Willson, chief of West Moberly First Nation, before canoes were put in the water.

West Moberly Chief Roland Willson.

In an interview with DeSmog Canada, Willson said he’s holding out for the courts to make the right decision.

“The dam is a direct infringement of our treaty rights,” he said.

Willson said injunctions will be filed to stop any construction that will cause “irreparable harm.”

Farmer Ken Boon, who hosts the Paddle for the Peace on his land, says the early construction plans look like a soft start.

“I’m still confident this dam will not be built,” Boon said. “All we’ve got to do is win one court case.”

Ken Boon is confident the Site C dam will not be built.

Boon’s land will be flooded if the dam is built, but he has yet to be approached by BC Hydro about moving.

“I’m pretty sure they’re expecting a lot of these to go to expropriation if things carry on,” he said.

As it stands, Boon and his wife Arlene still aren’t thinking about moving.

‘We’re Being Mowed Over’

Shawna-Marie Phillips is less optimistic. If construction moves forward, a 3,000-man camp will be located one kilometre from her organic farm and ranch.

Sometimes it feels like she’s yelling into the void and nobody’s listening, she said.

Given that the Site C dam is the most expensive public project in B.C. history, yet only one reporter from a major news outlet attended Saturday’s event, Phillips could be forgiven for feeling out of sight and out of mind.

“I feel like we’re being mowed over,” she said.  “I get a feeling that this is the last time.”

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.

Increased sulphur dioxide (SO2) pollution from the expanded Rio Tinto Alcan (RTA) aluminum smelter in Kitimat, B.C. will result in increased health costs for local households, an expert witness told an Environmental Appeals Board panel in Victoria, Monday.

Dr. Brian Scarfe, an economist and cost-benefit analyst from the University of Victoria, testified before the tribunal that the externalized health costs placed on residents living near the Kitimat smelter will outstrip the cost of introducing scrubbers — which remove SO2 pollution from effluent — to the RTA plant.

In 2013 the B.C. government approved RTA’s permit to increase production of the smelter. The ‘modernization’ project will limit the release of other aluminum-associated emissions including greenhouse gases, but will result in a 56 per cent increase of sulphur dioxide being pumped into the airshed.

B.C. ruled RTA was not required to install scrubbers to prevent the SO2 increase from 27 to 42 tonnes per day.

Two Kitimat elementary teachers, Emily Toews and Lis Stannus are appealing the $3.3 billion project upgrade, saying it poses an unnecessary threat to human and environmental health. Appellant Emily Toews suffers from asthma, which heightens her sensitivity to even low SO2 levels. Children and the elderly are both at higher risk to SO2 exposure.

Before the appeal panel Scarfe argued the issue comes down cost distribution.

“I don’t like to think of this as a zero sum game, but that is what we have: costs are going to fall one way or another, benefits are going to fall one way or another,” he said.

"If you have a process that is generating some form of pollution you need to consider that an impact on the environment and perhaps on human life — that’s an externality."

“We can think about households on one side and RTA on the other: clearly if nothing is done to limit SO2 there will be costs to the environment and costs to households in the area and that’s one kind of distribution," he said.

"The costs fall on one side while the other avoids costs.”

High Sulphur Content of North American Petroleum Coke a Factor

According to Scarfe, the petroleum coke or petcoke, a byproduct of refined hydrocarbons, being used in RTA’s smelting operations is very high in sulphur content.

He said the higher the sulphur content of the petcoke, “the larger the SO2 emissions will be in relation to the production capacity of the plant.”

Scarfe added the low-sulphur petcoke market has dried up in recent years and that the higher levels of sulphur present in petcoke feeds may be the outcome of increased unconventional hydrocarbon production like fracking. Petcoke is also a waste product of bitumen upgrading in the Alberta oilsands, where the sulphur content is extremely high.

“The sulphur content of petroleum being extracted in North America has gone up in number over time,” Scarfe said. The weighted average sulphur content in U.S. refineries has risen from 0.9 per cent in 1985 to 1.4 per cent in 2014.

RTA’s modernization proposal says the smelter expects to use petcoke with an average of 2.9 per cent sulphur but could be as high as 3.8 per cent.

These levels of sulphur would exceed the acceptable limits for smelters without scrubbers in foreign countries such as Iceland, Scarfe said.

“If you were looking for solutions for large amounts of sulphur dioxide one of the options would be to buy petcoke, even if more expensive, with lower sulphur content.”

He added that given a consistent supply of low-sulphur petcoke can’t be guaranteed, a safer long term solution for the Kitimat airshed would be for RTA to install scrubbers.

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.

The B.C. Ministry of Environment was too concerned with the interests of Rio Tinto Alcan when it granted the company a permit to dramatically increase the release of sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions in the Kitimat airshed, attendants of a tribunal heard in Victoria on Monday.

“This case raises the specter, in a very real way, of regulatory capture,” Chris Tollefson, lawyer for the University of Victoria’s Environmental Law Centre, argued in his opening statement.

Tollefson said the B.C. Ministry of Environment put senior official Frazer McKenzie in a conflicted position when it allowed Rio Tinto Alcan to pay his salary between 2007 and 2013 — during which time McKenzie was tasked with reviewing an upgrading application for the company’s Kitimat smelter.

In 2013, the province, acting through Ian Sharpe, environmental manager for the Ministry of Environment,  granted Rio Tinto Alcan permission to proceed with a $3.3 billion modernization project that would increase production and the amount of sulphur dioxide emissions released into the Kitimat airshed.

Two Kitimat residents, Emily Toews and Lis Stannus, appealed the project’s approval in 2013 with the B.C. Environmental Appeal Board, arguing the 56 per cent increase in sulphur dioxide emissions would threaten human and environmental health. Toews and Stannus are both elementary school teachers in the region.

“This case really does represent a situation where you have a regulator that has gotten too close to a powerful and well-resourced private interest that it is supposed to be independently regulating,” Tollefson told the tribunal, an independent body tasked with hearing appeals submitted to the Environmental Appeals Board.

Tollefson alleged Rio Tinto Alcan was granted too much authority in the decision-making process and “in the end got exactly what it wanted.”

The province announced the project did not require an environmental assessment because overall emissions will be reduced as a result of the modernization project — even though SO2 emissions are set to increase.

Tollefson argued that because Ministry of Environment officials were too wrapped up with Rio Tinto Alcan’s interests, they did not order the company to install scrubbers, designed to ‘scrub’ SO2 pollution out of the smelter’s effluent.

However, Rio Tinto Alcan has “covered its bets,” Tollefson said, by “setting aside the ability to install these scrubbers on a plug and play model” should the province decide to require them.

“If this Panel decides to order the installation of scrubbers, there is no technological or logistical reason why Rio Tinto Alcan can’t comply with that,” he said.

The province has not required scrubbers be installed — at an anticipated cost of between $100 and $200 million to the company — because “this concern to keep Rio Tinto Alcan content…in the end overshadowed the concern that should have been shown for the public interest.”

Ben Naylor, co-counsel for the Ministry of Environment said there was no conflict of interest and that Rio Tinto Alcan funded McKenzie’s position because of concerns there would be “inadequate staffing to deal with the application, including the application to increase sulphur dioxide.”

“This agreement allowed the government to secure funding for a complicated position,” he told the tribunal. “Without this funding this permit would not have been dealt with in the timeframe provided or with the amount of scientific rigour needed.”

Dan Bennett, a lawyer representing Rio Tinto Alcan, said the appellants have raised “no credible concerns” with the smelter’s modernization project. Doyle argued the changes will reduce the plant’s environmental footprint including reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 42 per cent.

But, he added, he does “acknowledge that suphur dioxide emissions are intended to increase and that results from the increased level of aluminum production.” 

Co-counsel for Rio Tinto Alcan Jana McLean added the “appellants request in this appeal to amend the permit to require scrubbers lacks any evidentiary foundation and is without scientific merit.”

The hearing will continue in Victoria for two weeks (April 27 – May 1 and May 11 – May 15) before continuing in Kitimat.

Image Credit: Robin Rowland

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.