The provincial and federal governments have issued an environmental approval certificate for the Site C dam despite acknowledging it will cause significant adverse environmental effects.

“Those effects are justified in the circumstances,” says the decision statement signed by Leona Aglukkaq, Canada’s minister of environment.

The province must still decide whether to proceed with the 1,100-megawatt project based on an investment decision, expected by the end of this year.

“The final decision still has to go through the cabinet, so we’ll still be working to convince them it’s not the best decision,” said Andrea Morison of the Peace Valley Environment Association, a group that has fought the dam for decades.

The $8 billion project would be the third dam on the Peace River and would be located seven kilometres from Fort St. John, B.C.

The dam has been opposed by local farmers, ranchers and the Treaty 8 First Nations because it will flood 87 kilometres of the Peace River, impacting wildlife and flooding 30,000 acres of farmland, including an area the size of the city of Victoria within the Agricultural Land Reserve.

West Moberly Chief Roland Willson has already vowed to challenge the decision in court and has said the province can’t have both the Site C dam and liquefied natural gas (LNG) development, which requires gas from Treaty 8 territory.

The environmental assessment certificate is subject to 77 conditions, including establishing a fund of $20 million to compensate for lost agricultural lands and activities.

In May, a federal-provincial Joint Review Panel issued its report on Site C. The panel was ambivalent in its findings, saying both that the dam could provide cheap power but also that the costs needed to be examined further and that it’s not clear that the power will be needed on the timeline provided.

“The Joint Review Panel considering the dam’s impacts determined that they are so significant that only an ‘unambiguous need’ for the power would justify them. And BC Hydro did not demonstrate such a need,” said Karsten Heuer, president of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y). “We don’t understand the basis on which the B.C. and federal governments could issue their approvals.”

Y2Y has argued that the Site C reservoir would seriously impede wildlife movement in the region.

“The Peace River Valley is located at the narrowest width of the Yellowstone to Yukon region and the existing Williston Reservoir already is a major blockage to wildlife movement,” Heuer said.

The joint review panel’s report included a recommendation to refer the project for review by the independent B.C. Utilities Commission, saying the panel didn’t have the time or resources to comment on the cost of the project.

“All British Columbia Hydro ratepayers should be concerned about that,” said Gwen Johansson, mayor of the District of Hudson’s Hope.

The panel also found that the province has failed to look at alternatives to the Site C dam for the past three decades. New maps released this month indicate B.C. has enough low-impact geothermal energy to power the entire province. 

Read DeSmog Canada's 12-part series on the Site C dam.

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Proposed changes to B.C.’s Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) open the door to flooding the Peace Valley, which could feed a million people fruits and vegetables, according to an agricultural expert.

The Site C dam, if approved, would impact 13,000 hectares of agricultural land — including flooding 3,800 hectares of farmland in the ALR, an area nearly twice the size of the city of Victoria.

Bill 24 would split B.C.'s ALR into two zones. Zone 1 land would continue to be protected for food production, while Zone 2 land could be opened to non-agricultural uses, including oil and gas development.

On Monday, farmers from the Kootenays converged on the B.C. legislature, protesting the changes and saying they hadn’t been consulted. And on Tuesday, 13 soil experts wrote to Premier Christy Clark warning the bill will put at risk some of the province's best farmland.

With the changes, “the land reserve will be considered toothless,” says professional agrologist Wendy Holm, who has 40 years of experience in agriculture economics and public policy. “It opens the door for Site C.”

The Peace Valley falls into Zone 2, which includes the Interior, Kootenay and North regions — despite being capable of growing the same crops as the Fraser and Okanagan valleys (including melons, tomatoes and corn).

“There’s enough land to produce fresh fruits and vegetables for a million people,” Holm says of the Peace Valley. “There’s tremendous potential in the north.”

In a news release, the province said the changes would "provide farmers with more flexibility to support their farming operations" and "help farmers generate increased incomes and better support food production."

The ALR was created 40 years ago to preserve the province’s shrinking farmland in the face of rapid development pressures. Typically, to remove land from the reserve, approval is required from the province’s Agricultural Land Commission (ALC), which aims to conserve lands for food production.

But in December 2013, Energy and Mines Minister Bill Bennett wrote a letter to BC Hydro and the ALC seeking to block the commission’s involvement in the Site C review:

“The province is aware that one of the issues at the [JRP] hearing will be the effect of the project on agricultural land, some of which is within the Agricultural Land Reserve. I am writing to inform you that the government’s current view is that this process should not be duplicated … under the Agricultural Land Commission Act.”

However, the joint review panel assessing the proposal decided to request an opinion from the Agricultural Land Commission anyway — just days before its hearings finished.

“It’s the only large tract of vegetable land that’s not in production we have in the province,” says Holm, who was contracted by the Peace Valley Environmental Association to assess the Site C dam’s impact on agriculture. “We have to bring more land into production to meet our own food security needs.”

B.C. imports 57 per cent of fruits and vegetables consumed in the province that could be grown in the province, according to Holm’s presentation to the review panel.

“It’s not about what’s economic today,” she says. “This is land that forms part of the commons. This is part of the natural capital of our country.”

Holm says food prices are only going up, further increasing the importance of protecting agricultural land. “I think we’re going to see dramatically increasing food prices due to the droughts happening,” she says.

Some of the arable land in the Peace Valley is not currently farmed because the area has been under threat of flooding since the late 1950s, Holm says.

“Without the shadow of the dam, what is happening today would be different,” she says.

The Peace River already hosts two hydro dams — the WAC Bennett Dam, which began operating in 1968 and created the Williston Reservoir, the largest body of freshwater in B.C., and the Peace Canyon dam, completed in 1980.

In the 1980s, the Site C dam was considered by the independent BC Utilities Commission and turned down because the electricity it would produce was too expensive and not needed. In the ’90s, BC Hydro decided to suspend the project again because the need for power was still insufficient. The project may have been turned down by the utilities commission again, but in 2010 the provincial government removed Site C from the commission’s oversight.

The joint review panel is expected to issue its recommendation on the Site C dam in late April.

Photo: Downstream of the proposed Site C dam. Credit: Tuchodi via Flickr.

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