As the national conversation about the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline goes thoroughly bananas, one thing is becoming crystal clear: this conflict is likely to get worse before it gets better.

Thankfully, there are people out there who specialize in resolving conflicts like this — people like Canadian Adam Kahane who has been credited with helping to end Colombia’s civil war.

For Kahane — the author of the book Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree With or Like or Trust — the most striking thing about the pipeline debate is that the rules are not clear.

“The question of who gets to decide on what in Canada between the provincial and federal governments on one hand and Indigenous rights holders on the other hand is not settled,” he told DeSmog Canada in an interview.

While many statements by politicians pretend there’s one right answer and agreement about what’s in the “national interest,” that too is up for debate.

“To say ‘this is what’s needed for the good of the nation’ gives an overly simplistic answer to a very difficult question, which is: whose good is being talked about here?” Kahane said.

And then there’s the question of whether the hysterical political statements are part of a negotiation strategy we’re not aware of.

“People say all sorts of things to try to shift the terrain to their advantage,” Kahane said.

We asked Kahane to shed some light on the dynamics at play in the pipeline debate, based on his experience mediating conflicts around the world.

What do you think about the heated rhetoric that’s happening with our political leaders right now?

I was very surprised at the rhetoric, especially when Trudeau and Notley both said … within the last few days ‘this is going to happen.’ That surprised me because it’s not the sort of thing politicians normally say.

I would have expected them to say ‘we’re going to try to find a way forward’ and ‘this is complicated, but no doubt we can work it out.’ But when you say ‘this is going to happen’ for me it means two things: first of all, that there’s only one correct answer to this. It has to be this way. And mostly when there are disputes like this, actually the way to move forward is to make some sort of compromise or new idea. The way things end up is not the way things are at the beginning.

That’s an unusual thing to say about a complicated and contentious situation.

The second thing is when someone in authority says ‘it is going to happen,’ it implies that if necessary they will impose it … Usually you impose things only when finding a mutually agreeable solution has proven to be impossible or where the other actor is illegitimate. So it’s an unusual thing to say about a public policy issue.

Have you seen situations before in different contexts where a government has started to say ‘this will happen’ when there’s a contentious situation? Does it bring up any parallels for you?

Yes, absolutely. Governments and other people with power often say ‘it’s going to be like this.’

What’s interesting to me about all the people who are saying ‘it’s going to be like this’ is: what is their power to impose the solution they want?

Does the federal government have the power — constitutional, regulatory, financial or, in an extreme situation, with security forces? Does the government of Alberta have the power, including through the trade sanctions that have been discussed? But similarly do the opponents of the pipeline have the power — legal or political or through their willingness to protest and be arrested? Does anybody have the power to impose the solution they want regardless of the others? And if not, then who is going to negotiate?

Normally when there’s a situation where different people want different things, there’s a lot of fuss and eventually some kind of agreement is come to. In the end, it’s not a unilateral solution. It’s a negotiation or collaboration or whatever you call it.

What I can’t tell is: to what extent are the statements … really meant as a declaration of unilateralism … or is it part of a negotiation? That’s not clear to me. Are the people making these statements on all sides announcing their intention to force … or are they simply being vocal about their positions as part of a negotiation or collaboration?

For me, what makes this very complicated and unusual is the question: who has power over what is not clear because there are many constitutional questions here including, I think, questions about the power and authority — political, constitutional, moral authority — of different First Nations groups. It’s not as though there’s this one rule here, everybody knows what the rule is and the question is who’s following the rule or not following the rule. No, the rules about who gets to decide about what, especially about land use in unceded territory, is not settled in Canada.

It seems like in much of the news coverage and political statements on this, there isn’t much addressing of the real differences that are at play. There’s a lot of posturing, but there’s almost a logic schism. People aren’t discussing the same thing. Is that something that you come across often in your work?

Yes, and I would go further than that. I think there is not an acknowledgement that there are real differences, that there are multiple conflicting objectives. Many statements are pretending that actually there is one right answer, but something that makes it even more difficult is that there is not acknowledgement that when we talk about the good of the whole, that there’s not one whole. There are many wholes here. So when many people say ‘the good of the nation,’ what is that? Canada? Alberta? B.C.? Burnaby? The different First Nations that are affected by the pipeline?

To say ‘this is what’s needed for the good of the nation’ gives an overly simplistic answer to a very difficult question, which is: whose good is being talked about here?

When B.C. people say, ‘this might be good for Alberta, but it’s not good for those of us along the coastline of B.C.,’ not only are there real differences that are not being discussed, there are different wholes that are being ignored. The fact that there is not one superior whole in Canada — the fact that it’s a confederation of multiple wholes where the rules about some of the wholes, especially the Indigenous wholes — makes it difficult to assert that this is the one correct answer.

And yet that is something that we see. Is that common in political rhetoric that you see around the world, this assertion of one correct answer when it’s quite obvious to anyone who’s paying close attention that there isn’t one correct answer?

It’s very common that politicians or chief executives or community leaders, it’s very common that authorities say ‘it’s like this. This is what matters. This is the good of the whole. This is the correct answer.’ They try that and sometimes it works and sometimes they simply don’t have the capacity to impose their answer.

That’s what’s really not clear to me about this situation is when Prime Minister Trudeau says ‘it’s going to be like this’ does he actually have the constitutional and political and moral authority to make it like this? It doesn’t look that simple to me.

People do this all the time, all around the world and in every sphere of life … That’s called forcing and sometimes it works, but the problem with forcing, as everybody knows is I try to make it the way I want it to be, you don’t like it and you push back and we either ping pong back and forth or we get stuck. That’s the problem with forcing.

Have you seen situations like this play out in Canada before, where there’s been these statements that a leader will impose their desired solution upon a certain jurisdiction?

I don’t think it’s an analogy, but it’s another interesting example of this. I was talking to somebody today about: what are different ways that different actors have tried to impose an answer to the question of Quebec separatism?

The FLQ tried to impose an answer through, amongst other things, kidnappings and bombings in the October crisis. Then Prime Minister Trudeau tried to impose an answer first through the use of the military and then through a constitutional settlement, then the PQ government tried to create an answer through the referenda. And actually, in each of these cases, people were trying to say ‘it’s going to be like this, we’re going to make it like this’ and it actually didn’t turn out like this. The story keeps going and keeps unfolding in unexpected and unpredictable ways.

With respect to the current situation, that the people who are saying ‘it has to be like this’ — whether it’s the Alberta government or the B.C. government or the federal government or the protesters — I’m not confident that any of those people have the way to make it the way they want it to be. And furthermore, I’m not confident that if they do succeed that it will last. That’s the problem with forcing is it tends to be temporary. Eventually the people who were on the losing side of it find a way to get back in the game.

I’m interested in such situations in how is it possible to find a way forward collaboratively, through negotiation. This is what I’m not seeing in this current situation. Maybe it’s taking place behind the scenes, but I don’t see it.

The dialogue is very heated and quite polarizing. At the same time, when I think about the situation, sitting down and trying to collaborate, on some issues maybe there isn’t a middle road. What if there isn’t a collaborative solution in the sense that B.C. simply doesn’t want a new oil pipeline and Alberta absolutely does want a new oil pipeline?

I don’t believe that there’s only two answers — that either there is a pipeline as currently proposed or there isn’t. I don’t know what they are, but I’m confident that there’s more than two options. Options about safety, options about governance, options about economics, options about control, options about volume, options about all kinds of things.

Nelson Mandela once said that one of the features of the complex is the way things end up can’t be seen from the beginning. The exact quote is: “One effect of sustained conflict is to narrow our vision of what is possible. Time and again, conflicts are resolved through shifts that were unimaginable at the start.”

One of the features of these conflicts is polarization. There are lots of different ways to do things and I don’t know whether a solution that works for more of the wholes can be arrived at, but stating that it either has to be my way or no way doesn’t move us forward much.

I don’t believe the statement that it’s either like it is now or it’s the opposite. This is not plausible to me.

You raise this interesting tension that there’s likely this negotiation or collaboration happening behind closed doors and there are also these public statements that are potentially playing some role in that larger negotiation game.

Probably. Maybe all of this is just part of the negotiation. That would be a normal thing. People say all sorts of things to try to shift the terrain to their advantage … I suppose in a constitutional democracy if you really litigate everything to the Supreme Court, there’ll be a right answer and a wrong answer, but that’s a long road. Maybe that’s how the answer will be arrived at.

That’s why some things in Canada have to be settled in the court.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

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When the B.C. government announced its promised review of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, earlier this month, it came as a shock to many that it wouldn’t examine human health impacts.

The announcement coincided with the release in the U.S. of the most authoritative study of fracking’s threats to human health ever published, which found “no evidence that fracking can be practiced in a manner that does not threaten human health.”

For Caleb Behn, the government’s announcement marked a loss of hope in the less than one-year-old NDP government.

“They’ve shown themselves ready to sacrifice us and the unborn who will come after us in this territory,” Behn told DeSmog Canada.

Behn is Eh-Cho Dene and Dunne Za/Cree from Treaty 8 in northeastern British Columbia, the epicenter of B.C.’s fracking operations. He was the focus of the 2013 documentary Fractured Land.

Since 2010, the B.C. government has authorized the drilling of 4,772 new wells. There are approximately 25,000 wells in B.C., 12,771 of which are reported as active.

We spoke to Behn about his experience of fracking on and near his traditional territory. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The fracking review announced by the NDP last week won’t involve health impacts. What was your reaction to that?

First thing I’ll say, for the NDP to exempt a review of fracking from any health-oriented research is — I don’t know if I have strong enough words — I feel as if it’s criminal hypocrisy.

To give this problematic industry and this problematic technology a pass on health because you’re pro LNG puts Indigenous and rural populations at risk.

Data gaps and knowledge gaps have been acknowledged in every piece of research ever conducted on this issue in British Columbia. The type of research that has been done up to date in B.C. has been entirely inadequate. That’s well known.

The vast majority of original research on fracking — 84 per cent of which has been conducted in the last four or five years — indicates health risks are present or strongly indicated.

More recently I helped facilitate a pilot study looking at muconic acid, amongst other compounds, in the urine of pregnant Indigenous women in northeast B.C.

Muconic acid is a marker of benzene exposure.

The findings are intense.

In essence, rural woman in northeast B.C. have three and a half times the national average of this marker that is likely, but not guaranteed, benzene metabolization.

What’s interesting is Indigenous women within that cohort have six times the national average.

This is the first original research into the potential human health impacts of fracking in northeast B.C. and I’m surprised it hasn’t raised some red flags. It took over two years to conduct.

To avoid addressing these health impacts in a fracking review is hypocrisy of the deepest and most dangerous kind. And it is evident it’s of a very strategic benefit to the LNG industry.

Can you describe the impact fracking has had on your territory and on your people?

Here’s the problem, you’re dealing with chronic or sub-chronic cumulative exposure illnesses that have long latency periods.

In some ways it’s easy to identify certain risks, like a rig blew up and a worker was killed or a rig caught fire and did some damage.

The really troubling bits are the long latency illnesses like cancer, asthma and gestational problems, so things associated with in utero exposure.

As a person with a major birth defect, I am uniquely sensitive to that issue.

It’s things like increased risk of pre-term birth.

Research now indicates that those who live near active gas wells are 1.5 to four times more likely to suffer asthma attacks than those living further away, with the closest groups having the highest risk.

There’s a 2017 study which analyzed birth certificates for infants born in Pennsylvania that found indicators of poor infant health, in this case lower birth weight for babies, born to mothers living near fracking sites.

You combine that finding with our pilot study in northeast of B.C. looking at the markings of benzene exposure in air of pregnant women, you understand why it’s important to use a precautionary approach to these developments.

Is it that we’re poor and colonized that children do poorly in the northeast or is it the consequence of living in a benzene plume? Again without the science and without research, how can we even approach that question?

I can tell you life is hard in the north, kids don’t do well up there. There’s a lot of crime, a lot of abuse. A lot of that comes from colonization, a lot of that comes from racism, from dysfunction in communities.

But what level of that comes from the ambient hydrogen sulfide, ambient benzene?

We don’t have quantifiable numbers.

We also hear about the social impacts, especially for Indigenous women and children, when it comes to industrialization.

Taylor Roades \ DeSmog Canada

What is your experience of those social impacts?

There’s one major issue I can speak to specifically: violence against women.

My aunty has a very successful business in Fort Nelson, working in the oil and gas industry.

It’s confirmed there’s a rise in crime, sexual violence and the trafficking of Indigenous women during booms in the industry.

Research from in 2015 found there is a linear relationship between highly paid shadow populations in industrial camps, a highly masculine culture and a rise in crime and sexual violence and trafficking of Indigenous women.

Fort St. James data from local RCMP shows a 38 per cent increase in sexual assaults in first year of the construction phase of industrial projects, as well as an increase in sex work in areas where there’s increase in industrial traffic.

What I can tell you is that in my experience, it’s a violent, aggressive and competitive world when these industries come in, subject to boom and bust cycles.

The northeast has been made into a sacrifice zone.

The NDP recently announced some big incentives to entice the LNG industry to come to B.C. Combined with a fracking inquiry that won’t study health impacts, what does that new announcement signal to you?

Many of us in the Indigenous community in northeast B.C. in particular had hope in the NDP. But they’ve shown themselves ready to sacrifice us and the unborn who will come after us in this territory.

That is what is on the table, and that’s why it’s really hurtful to hear them exempt public health from the fracking inquiry.

But we do know the NDP assistant deputy minister did inform the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers over a month in advance of them announcing this review, that health would be exempted.

Of course health is the key issue because with health comes massive financial liability. There’s significant power for doctors and medical health advisors in the Public Health Act.

And what you’re seeing in my view is an affirmation that marginal populations far away from the Lower Mainland don’t matter all that much.

In the Indigenous community we don’t have the research dollars to parse out which of this is due to upstream contamination from logging and mining, versus upstream contamination of our air plume by oil and gas.

I think as an Indigenous person from northeast B.C. that is familiar with these issues, that’s why the exemption is so criminally hypocritical.

The current government frequently evokes Indigenous rights and climate change action in the announcements they make, some of which seem at cross-purposes. What is it like to hear government use that language?

It’s eco-imperialism. Because here is what the NDP is doing — they’re adopting the same crass double think politics that the BC Liberals and the federal Liberals have adopted where they mouth the words but even a superficial analysis of their positions and policies identifies the outright lies.

So to claim that somehow Kinder Morgan is going to lead to protecting the coast — it’s not disingenuous, it’s literally double-think.

So in my view as someone from the sacrifice zone, it’s the saddest manifestation of what is worst in the modern colonial state, to not only colonize the land and the water and the children but also the ideas of decolonization.

To take the very terms that were supposed to ameliorate and begin to try to do better and use those terms like reconciliation and decolonization and UNDRIP and the doctrine of free, prior and informed consent, to sully their aspirations with this crass manipulative rhetoric is the saddest reflection of what our province is becoming and what our country is becoming in my view

I really hope your readers think long and hard about the absolute inconsistency with the NDP’s position on Kinder Morgan and fracking and LNG and Site C.

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Both Canada and British Columbia have vowed to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). And yet recent natural resource decisions — like the approval of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline or ongoing construction of the Site C dam — have some wondering what governments mean when they make that promise.

Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada, says natural resource development can create conflict with Indigenous populations and often make Indigenous women and children, the most vulnerable members of our population, more vulnerable.

Neve recently traveled to B.C. to highlight human rights abuses in the province with high ranking officials including attorney general David Eby and Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation Minister Scott Fraser.

DeSmog Canada asked Neve how he was received by the government and what human rights abuses he is concerned about in B.C.

The interview has been edited for brevity.

How would you place B.C. on the spectrum of Canadian and international human rights concerns?

Amnesty International has a number of serious and long-standing human rights concerns here in B.C. which go back quite a number of years. Obviously here in B.C. and Canada we are very fortunate when it comes to human rights. We are not faced with the horrific situations that capture headlines in places like Syria or the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar, or countries with hundreds of people being held as prisoners of conscience.

But there are very real and pressing human rights concerns in Canada and in B.C.

By any measure, it is the rights of Indigenous people that is our biggest challenge and our most serious responsibility when it comes to improving Canada’s human rights record.

[The] Site C [dam] is really an iconic example of the long-standing failure to show proper regard for the rights of Indigenous peoples in Canada, and how readily and easily governments across this country seem on one hand to be able to talk aspirational and inspirational things when it comes to the rights of Indigenous peoples, and then turn around and make decisions that simply do not live up to those words. And that’s not acceptable.

What are some of the key issues you’ve been discussing with B.C. cabinet ministers and senior government officials?

In 2004 we issued a major nation-wide report, Stolen Sisters, documenting the severity of violence and discrimination against Indigenous women everywhere in Canada. It included a significant component looking at concerns here in B.C.

Here we are, 14 years later, and that has not at all been addressed and there continue to be very serious concerns in B.C.

Related to that, about a year and half ago we put out a major report looking at the situation in the northeast of the province and the way in which that area’s resource development boom has had a very significant, and sadly detrimental, impact on the rights of Indigenous peoples — and particularly on the rights of Indigenous women. A response is needed to ensure that Indigenous rights and rights of Indigenous women in particular are better safeguarded and respected in the context of resource development.

A response is needed to ensure that Indigenous rights and rights of Indigenous women in particular are better safeguarded and respected in the context of resource development.

We were deeply disappointed that the government chose in December to continue with construction of the [Site C] dam. We find it totally unacceptable that the government has chosen what they consider to be financial considerations over — once again — a commitment to uphold the right of Indigenous peoples. But we’re not giving up.

Are there other projects in B.C. that cause you particular concern?

We’ve also been focusing on the very serious human rights concerns associated with the 2014 mining disaster at the Mount Polley mine which… has a very serious impact on First Nations in the area. We’re very concerned that here we are, four years later, and there’s been no accountability for what has happened there.

We follow with concern and interest all the developments around Kinder Morgan. We know there’s a lot of concern about fracking in the province. If there was a moment where there was a very clear international human rights dimension that we felt needed some attention we would look at that.

What role does resource development in B.C. play in violence against Indigenous women and girls?

In 2016 we put out a report, Out of Sight, Out of Mind. It highlights the fact that the province’s resource boom — and we focused on the situation in and around Fort St. John — has had very detrimental impacts for women’s safety and Indigenous women in particular. And even beyond safety, just in general regard for protection of their rights.

How is that?

There’s a massive influx of transient workers, which brings with it a very serious pressure on local services across a whole variety of areas, including for women who may be having economic insecurity, or who may be facing risk of violence in the home or community. Those services are dramatically overextended.

Indigenous women and girls inevitably suffer more than others.

The influx of a transient population brings people who aren’t known in the community, and with it concerns about their actions against Indigenous women and girls. And all of this without any kind of commitment to gender analysis, as resource projects are being approved and decisions being made about how policing is going to be funded and what kind of policing and at what levels. There’s a terrible gap and it’s Indigenous women and girls who suffer as a result.

One of our key recommendations is to ensure that we are bringing a strong model of gender-based analysis into decisions about all sorts of resource development projects, small ones and also large ones like the Site C dam.

Has B.C. made progress in addressing human rights issues?

We have very much welcomed the new government’s very strong commitment to endorse the United Nation Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). If we truly did have decision-making and laws and policies and an approach to consultation and relations that were in keeping with the framework of the declaration, a lot of these issues would not have become the human rights travesties that they have become. The solutions, the way forward, would be much more obvious.

We’re very enthusiastic and encouraging that the government move forward with their plans to move past simply saying ‘we believe in the declaration’ to actually starting to develop a legislative framework and some strong commitments to making it so.

The other very significant law reform initiative underway in the province is the reestablishment of the B.C. Human Rights Commission. We were very troubled over a decade ago now when the previous government dis-established the previous human rights commission. It certainly is a welcome move to reverse that step and get B.C. back in the game of ensuring that there is a provincial level body that is going to be a strong champion of human rights in the province.

What kind of a reception did you get from the government on Site C?

We weren’t naive enough to think that we were going to sit down with any members of government and make our case about why it was the wrong decision and suddenly have them reserve the decision in the meeting. We repeatedly heard at every level that they felt anguish and conflict about the decision and certainly didn’t feel happy about it.

This really is now a matter for the courts. Lawsuits have been commenced and there’s important steps coming forward, including a hearing in July with respect to a request that’s been made for an injunction. We are strongly calling on the government to ensure that they adopt a litigation strategy as they go through those lawsuits that is entirely consistent with their commitments to UNDRIP and to the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

In years and decades past both federal and provincial lawyers would show up in court in Indigenous rights cases and be aggressive and obstructive and litigious. They would take positions that important international standards like UNDRIP shouldn’t be applied. If this government’s commitment to UNDRIP is genuine, one of the first places to demonstrate that is the tone and the substance of the arguments that they make as this case moves through the courts.

That injunction application in July [filed by West Moberly First Nations and Prophet River First Nation to halt Site C construction until their legal case can be heard] will be a first test. One very obvious way to demonstrate how genuine they are would be to simply agree to the injunction without fighting it out in the courts. But at a minimum they need to ensure the legal arguments they make do not run counter to the commitments they say they embrace.

What are some of your other specific requests of the B.C. government?

We’re in a very challenging and important time right now when it comes to addressing violence against Indigenous women and girls right now in Canada because we have the National Inquiry [into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls] underway.

Clearly that has come up in all our meetings. We’re concerned that while the inquiry is proceeding — and we now have the prospect of another two years — that the kinds of concrete steps and action that need to be taken now to address this very severe human rights situation have largely been put on hold.

So we are calling on all governments and certainly the B.C. government to start to much more actively pursue reforms and programs now, and not wait for the end of the national inquiry. We’re concerned that government are not doing enough to address the very serious gaps in services for Indigenous women and girls who face violence.

How would you characterize this government’s receptiveness to Amnesty International compared to the previous B.C. government?

Amnesty is never partisan in how we go about our work. We seek to engage with all governments of all political stripes. We did not have a particularly encouraging record of engagement with the previous government provincially. We never had a ministerial level meeting with the previous government.

Did you ask for meetings with the previous government under the BC Liberals?

Yes, several times. Whereas with the current government doors have opened that were previously shut and we welcome that very much. But clearly it’s not just about sitting down and talking. What we’re keen to see now is the follow-up and action that will put proof to the promises, especially around things like UNDRIP.

We’re hearing all the right things and sensing a genuine commitment to move that forward. But then you have something like the Site C decision, which completely contradicts the commitment to UNDRIP and the embrace of the [recommendations of the] Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

At the heart of both of those is a fundamental principle that true regard for treaty rights means something. We’re clearly not seeing that around Site C.

We are fortunate that we are so prosperous here in Canada. That means our responsibility to dig deeper and truly do the right thing when it comes to our human rights record is all the greater.

We have the resources, we have the knowledge, we have the awareness. There’s no excuse for not moving forward with a strong human rights agenda that will stand as a model globally.

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. Energy Minister Michelle Mungall said Thursday that “there’s a mess” at BC Hydro. Mungall made the comment after the B.C. Utilities Commission denied the government’s request for a hydro rate freeze — putting the kibosh on one of the NDP’s campaign promises.

Instead, the commission approved a scheduled three per cent hydro rate hike for April 1, saying that the increase is not sufficient to cover BC Hydro’s costs. What’s going on? And what does it mean for you and your future hydro bill?

DeSmog Canada caught up with Eoin Finn, a former partner at KPMG, one of the world’s largest accounting and consulting firms, to find out. Finn is also a director of the Pacific Electricity Ratepayers Association.

Are you surprised by yesterday’s decision to increase hydro rates, after the NDP promised to freeze them?

Not at all. The financial condition of BC Hydro is dire. The $140 million — that a three per cent rate increase would give them — is the first step in trying to put BC Hydro back together again. For the government to make that promise was extremely rash and I think that they at this stage realize how dire the situation is at BC Hydro.

The BCUC said that even the three per cent rate hike won’t cover its cost. What does that mean for BC Hydro customers?

It means they have to raise the rates. To put hydro back in shape in any decent fiscal condition is going to require that BC Hydro double its rates in the next 15 years.

Minister Mungall said “there’s a mess” at BC Hydro. What does she mean?

BC Hydro owes $20 billion.

And in addition to that they have used these terrible deferral accounts to defer roughly $6 billion more of debt. Instead they call it an asset. It’s the craziest accounting system I’ve ever seen. This complies with no known accounting system in the world and is definitely not generally accepted accounting principles.

The debt to equity ratio — which is a common measure of the financial health of an organization — is the worst in BC Hydro of any public or private utility in North America.

How did we end up in this situation?

We had a government for 16 years that preferred to shut its eyes and tell Hydro to give it a fixed amount of money every year, and then didn’t let them up their rates in order to be able to afford it. They didn’t want people to get excited about big rate increases. [Essentially they said] we’ll keep taking the dividend from BC Hydro — about $3 billion in all — to pay for government programs, but we won’t let Hydro charge the rates that would keep them whole in that arrangement.

And then the government fiddled further with BC Hydro and said: ‘You will buy more power from these independent power producers (IPPs) and give them a rate that will cover their expenses and capital costs.’

BC Hydro’s gone ahead and done that with over 100 IPPs. It’s currently buying power from them at an average $93 a megawatt hour and then selling it back to the average customer for $88 a megawatt hour. Now there’s no retailer I’ve ever seen that can put stuff on the shelves and sell it for less than it’s buying it for that can last for very long. Since Hydro has only one thing on its shelf — power — basically it’s a money-losing proposition.

“The debt to equity ratio — which is a common measure of the financial health of an organization — is the worst in BC Hydro of any public or private utility in North America.” https://t.co/YmH9DxWJrF

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) March 2, 2018

How would you compare the situation at BC Hydro to what’s going on with ICBC?

They’re similar messes, for much the same reasons. Basically the government has moderated the rates in both organizations — required to keep revenues and expenses somewhat in line — for its own purposes. It has raided the reserve funds of ICBC to the point where it can no longer be solvent, and compliant with the legal requirement to keep reserves sufficient to cover claims.

It’s much the same situation with BC Hydro. They’ve been told to keep rates down but as expenses go up the government has said: ‘That’s your problem. If we cap your rates, your business is to get expenses down so we come out even-steven.’ But clearly ICBC cannot do that. Nor can BC Hydro. The government has meddled and removed the regulator’s ability to regulate so that expenses and revenue stay in line.

How does the $10.7 billion Site C dam factor into the mix?

It adds a surplus of power for no known customer. So BC Hydro is going to add $11 billion more of debt without any customer for the power.

Their alternatives are to sell it to a non-existent LNG industry at $54 a megawatt hour. Or they can sell it to Alberta at a wholesale price — again for way less than it cost to produce it. Or, sell it into the U.S. market at $25 to $30 per megawatt hour. All of which are money-losing propositions. And that’s for Site C power that’s going to cost $120 per megawatt hour [to produce]. Demand in B.C. has remained stagnant and flat for the last 15 years.

When do the bulk of Site C’s costs hit the books?

It doesn’t begin to leak into the operating costs until the switch is turned on in 2024. But it’s still accumulating debt. Hydro plugged in the debt at somewhere around three per cent for the next 70 years, the operating life of Site C. The problem is that debt interest costs are going up. Since Site C is 100 per cent debt-financed, it’s really sensitive to any increase in interest rates, which are currently destined to go up from historic lows.

What is that going to mean for Site C’s $10.7 billion price tag?

The capital cost is $10.7 billion. But over the next 70 years the interest cost on that is going to be huge. Although the capital cost left to go will be about nine and a half billion dollars — because they’ve already borrowed two billion — the interest costs alone on that borrowed capital will be over $20 billion on top of the $10.7 billion to build it.

You’ve got to pay back the capital costs over 70 years, you have to pay the interest on the money you borrowed over 70 years, and you have to pay the operating and maintenance costs of Site C. And then you’ve got to find a buyer.

What is the Pacific Electricity Ratepayers Association?

It’s a group of people who are very concerned about the future of BC Hydro. It was formed mid-last year as a society. It’s essentially a pressure group trying to force reality into the situation with BC Hydro. If we don’t improve it we will lose it. Its purpose is to critically examine the financial health of BC Hydro.

It also had a purpose in trying to stop the construction of the Site C dam. It still has that purpose; it is still worth stopping that project.

What needs to happen to fix the mess at BC Hydro?

The government needs to take their hands off the misuse of BC Hydro, and allow the regulator [BCUC] to do its job. Currently there are two restrictions on that. One is the famous direction 7, which the previous Liberal government issued, restricting the B.C. Utilities Commission’s powers to regulate BC Hydro.

And the second one is the Clean Energy Act, which ignores the fact that we have this ready-made power at much lower rates from the Columbia River Treaty. It forces B.C. to be self-sufficient in electrical energy no matter what the cost.

What is the first step that needs to be taken?

Repeal the changes that the Liberal government made to the Clean Energy Act that requires B.C. to be self-sufficient in electrical energy. That would allow all sorts of things.

I think they also have to take a long hard look at why we are buying power from IPPs at 93 bucks a megawatt hour and — because it’s surplus to our needs — selling it south of the border for $30 a megawatt hour. That’s not a sustainable situation. And the third thing is to repeal direction 7 of the previous Liberal government’s cabinet order, which places big restrictions on the power of the regulator.

Do you think they have the cojones to do all this?

No.

So where does that leave us?

The three per cent hydro rate increase is just the start. I figure that in the next 15 years they’re going to have to double the rates to keep the situation from getting to a bailout by the government, whereby the government takes BC Hydro’s debt and puts it on its books rather than BC Hydro’s books. And, if it does that, it really will be threatening its credit rating with Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s.

The BC NDP may not be in power for very long. BC Hydro is in dire danger of being sold piecemeal to the private sector. And then we will lose all control over our rates. We’ll be in an Ontario-like situation where they sold off Hydro One, and then look at their rates, they’re double what B.C.’s are. That’s what we’re facing.

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.

Changing from an energy system powered by fossil fuels to one based on renewable energy takes long-term planning, innovation and a buy-in from citizens, industry and all levels of government, says deep decarbonization expert Manfred Fischedick, an advisor to the German government during its transition from a country reliant on coal and nuclear energy to the global poster child for renewable energy.

Germany is aiming to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 95 per cent of 1990 levels by 2050. Strategies call for a 50 per cent reduction in energy consumption and a minimum of 80 per cent of the country’s energy to be generated by renewables by 2050.

Yes, it can be done, yes, there are skeptics, yes, it takes hard work and yes it is worth it, were the messages Fischedick brought to B.C. this week.

Fischedick, vice-president of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, met with provincial politicians and spoke at the University of Victoria on strategies for shifting to a renewable energy future.

“I am very much looking forward to the experience exchange.To convey some of the learnings of Germany, but of course to take with me some of the learning from Canada,” Fischedick told DeSmog Canada.

We asked Fischedick what Canada can learn from Germany, how his country faced the biggest challenges in its transition and what the energy expert makes of Canada’s oil pipeline debate.

So what lessons can Canada learn from Germany’s transition to clean energy?

The most important aspect is to have a long term strategy and, for Germany, that  came in 2011 after the Fukishima accident happened. The strategy for 2050 sets very concrete milestones focused on renewable energy and energy efficiency. Specific targets are set for both areas and sector specific targets have  been set so that companies and individuals have an orientation mark.

Secondly, build up a sophisticated and sufficient monitoring system. Strategy is always good, but implementing the strategy is even better. You need to see what is working well and where there is room for improvement so each year there is a monitoring report from the government, which is important for building confidence among the public. Then there is an independent scientific commission that gives additional recommendations to government, so the whole thing is very transparent.

The third point is sector specific targets. We established these targets in 2016 and now each sector knows about what efforts are necessary in the next decades to meet greenhouse gas emissions targets.

The fourth point is to organize a top-down, bottom-up process. We need to provide the necessary framework at the federal level and then to initiate and set a path in the regions and cities and companies to organize an implementation culture, to empower cities to address greenhouse gas emissions or to empower companies to do it. That’s very important to have broad support.

Another thing that’s important is the electricity sector. We started 15 years ago with five per cent renewables in the system, mainly based on hydropower, and, last year, for the first time, more than one-third of the electricity system was based on renewables, so it’s a very dynamic increase and it was possible to guarantee and even improve grid stability. That’s a very important message that it is possible to increase renewables within a very short time-frame without jeopardising system stability. If you go back 10 years in Germany the discussion was whether it would be possible to have more than 10 or 12 per cent of renewables in the system without jeopardizing stability and without the risk of the collapse of the system.

How did Germany convince the man-in-the-street, the general public that this was necessary?

The starting point in Germany was that people in general would say they were highly concerned about the environment and there were complaints about nuclear power plants and the risks associated with nuclear power plants, so we have a long term tradition of thinking about alternative energy systems.

Secondly, right from the beginning, you have to draw on citizen engagement and participation. For example, the biggest state developed a climate protection plan and then asked questions on the future energy system and how to achieve the ambitious greenhouse gas emissions targets by 2050. They did it in a way that they invited more than 400 different stakeholders — from energy utilities, from industries, from labour unions, from non-governmental organizations, from associations to be part of the process. So it really was a participatory process. It was a very transparent and open-minded process with a lot of communication with the public. It allowed people to step into the discussion, to be part of planning the future energy system and to convince them it was the way to go. It motivated people.

We learned in the last two decades that it is very important to motivate people to invest in renewables in the specific areas where they live so there is a sense of ownership and being an effective part of the transition to renewable energy. It is not someone from the outside investing in the windmill next to you or in the solar facility. We did a lot of motivation campaigns.

We also have many cities in Germany that are proactive with regards to mitigation and they very often do it in a way that involves citizens. They do workshops and look for proposals in a very open way.

“We learned in the last two decades that it is very important to motivate people to invest in renewables in the specific areas where they live so there is a sense of ownership.” https://t.co/01KAcrYruA #climate #renewables pic.twitter.com/dX0DyHWvGR

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) February 23, 2018

You also emphasize energy efficiency and that everyone has a personal responsibility?

Yes, that’s true. We have to inform people of the need to go in that direction and, at the same time, it reduces their energy costs. We need to have a contact person at the local level and that’s done in many cities nowadays for climate management. They can give direct advice to people living in the area, which means much more than a motivation campaign at the federal level. You have to go into the local communities to speak directly to people. One city in the northern area, the energy heart of Germany, started a process where they did a campaign with local building owners to convince building owners to invest in retrofitting their buildings. It was extremely successful.

What were the biggest challenges. Are there parts of the transition that still worry you?

First of all there’s the technological challenge because in Germany we do have many solar and wind energy sources and we did well in the last couple of years to increase the share from five per cent to 33 per cent, but the next is the goal to double the renewables by 2030 — that is a major step forward because it requires infrastructure and it requires an extension of the transmission grid and requires a change in market structure, so a lot of things have to be done. Then the main challenge is to provide appropriate long-term storage. We really need technical plans of what is doable and it is a question of what is affordable.

Then the energy sectors like transport and industry have some limitations on the direct use of electricity. Immobility is not appropriate for trucks or planes. Transport is the most problematic sector, a hot topic, because in Germany as in many countries, we are not able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in that sector for the last 25 years. Following our pathway to reduce emissions by at least 80 per cent by the middle of the century, we need a total shift in that sector and very soon. We need public acceptance and public support for the social challenges. We are changing a significant part of the economic structure of the country and it’s a long-term process over a couple of decades. It can be hard to motivate people to counteract the NIMBY effect. It requires a lot of effort.

What is your opinion of the controversy and polarized debate over the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion?

If countries invest a lot of money in traditional infrastructure like oil and gas infrastructure there is a danger because traditional energy systems are changing on a global scale and, if you really take into consideration the Paris agreement, then it becomes quite clear that there is no long-term future for oil and coal for instance. So you have to take into consideration that investments made now, may not be successful for a longer time period and there might be a risk of stranded investments.

The other message I would like to convey is to think about new energy potentials and think about whether it can be done any faster than many experts expected a couple of years ago. We are now in a situation where wind energy has become very, very competitive in many countries. I know in Canada you have very low energy prices, but nevertheless there is still room for cost reductions through the solar and wind sectors.

(Edited for length and clarity)

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Mark Jaccard has seen it all before.

Over the decades, the leading energy economist from Simon Fraser University has watched as government after goverment pledge lofty climate targets and proceed to totally overshoot them: Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien, Stephen Harper. But he certainly hasn’t been silent. In that time, Jaccard has authored dozens of books and papers based on modelling that points out the political hypocrisies and maps how to get back on track.

Now, his sights have turned to the federal and Alberta governments, which are loudly proclaiming that the proposed Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline can be reconciled with Canada’s international climate commitments.

In a widely shared op-ed for the Globe and Mail titled “Trudeau’s Orwellian logic: We reduce emissions by increasing them,” Jaccard systematically pulled apart popular pro-pipeline arguments. Notably, he calmly reminded readers that despite what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says, the federal government doesn’t need any pipeline to implement its climate policies but simply needs to “quickly apply his federal authority” to impose them. You know, just like Alberta is calling on Ottawa to do in order to build the pipeline.

On Wednesday, DeSmog Canada interviewed Jaccard about the op-ed, pipeline politics and the challenge of building new oil pipelines and meeting climate targets.

Why did you write this op-ed?

I write about once a year in the Globe and Mail. The articles are almost always the same. What motivates me is if I hear enough inaccuracies that I put aside other stuff that I’m working on, which is all related — analysis and so on that I’m doing for governments, independents, academic paper, theses that my students are doing. In this case, I was really struck by the illogic of Trudeau saying that we had to say “yes” to this pipeline in order to get the Pan-Canadian Framework that reduces emissions. Just to be clear, I think it’s been great to have Prime Minister Trudeau for the last two years working on climate instead of Stephen Harper faking it. Trudeau has really done some things that I really support. It’s not like I lightly attack politicians. But I think that point he was making right now needed to be challenged.

Have you been surprised by the emergence of that particular argument: in order to complete the Pan-Canadian Framework, we need this pipeline?

When Trudeau made the announcement a year ago that he was not going to allow Northern Gateway to go ahead but said he was going to allow Trans Mountain, at the request of some politician I did a public forum in Vancouver in which I explained his decision. If you’re the prime minister of all Canadians, you sincerely have to try to please everyone. That’s his idea of cooperative federalism. I understand how a Canadian prime minister would have that view. At the same time, he said to Brad Wall of Saskatchewan that “you’re not willing to play ball at all, so we’re just going to have to roll over you.” With Alberta though, he had a government that said “we want to do things differently, we’re going to be a model in the world of a fossil fuel-rich region that actually tries to act on climate.” Trudeau had to make a strategic choice that related to being the prime minister of all Canadians to a federal system and trying to get action. I understand completely why he did that.

There’s been a lot of rhetoric lately suggesting the construction of new pipelines will only slightly increase Canada’s annual emissions, calculated at around eight megatonnes or so. Why do you think that particular argument doesn’t fit well into the bigger picture?

I’m really glad you asked that. That is what I do. I model. A model is a representation, in my case, of how the energy economy system unfolds or would unfold under certain key assumptions about the economics and policy. If someone were paying me a lot of money — and I’ve been offered this in the past — to make an argument that “oh, building this fossil fuel infrastructure won’t increase greenhouse gas emissions,” I can make that argument. In the case of an oil pipeline, I would say: “Oh, all it’s going to do is reconfigure things. There will be a little more oil going to the West Coast, a little less going to the U.S., a little less going on rail car.” I could do that for you beautifully. I could do that one pipeline after another, until you’ve built ten more pipelines and tripled and quadrupled the size of the oilsands. When someone comes out with a number like that of eight megatonnes, I immediately want to say “ok, what assumptions?” Because I can also — if someone else was paying me, or actually they wouldn’t have money to pay me so I was doing it for free — I could do an analysis that showed that if you look at the total output of oilsands or oil in Canada, it correlates perfectly with pipeline capacity. In other words, you need the delivery pipeline infrastructure to match your production capacity. I would argue the real correct long-run way — the total system evolution way — of looking at a new pipeline is to correlate it one-to-one per barrel of oil of production. If the pipeline can carry 800,000 barrels of oil a day, then assume that you’re causing 800,000 barrels of oil per day of production in Canada.

Now, you can still make the argument that the production would have happened somewhere else. And that leads us to the general issue that climate change is a global collective action problem. We can always ensure that we will fail if we say “if I act to try to save us, others will just compensate.” By that logic, we all go to hell together. What you have to do is say “okay, how do we think strategically: what if we act as leaders, and as leaders we try to form what are called ‘climate clubs’ of first movers. And then we use approaches like being a demonstration, probably by trade pressures and so on to try to get the rest of the world to go along with us.” What I’m giving you right here is the standard rationale that they can use, and I just got a lot of that in the last 24 hours after the op-ed from Alberta, about why we should be allowed to continue on this destructive path.

“By that logic, we all go to hell together.” @MarkJaccard on Trudeau’s pipeline talking points https://t.co/7JSlYNtnQC #oilsands #cdnpoli #bcpoli #ableg pic.twitter.com/hlvK97uUYG

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) February 21, 2018

You’re obviously not arguing that the oilsands should be shut down tomorrow, just that they not be allowed to expand, right?

Exactly. When you asked me what motivated me to write this right now, some of it was to do with this whole collective action thing. Another one was that every time I turn on Twitter I get an ad from Alberta that tells me British Columbia is threatening Alberta jobs. It’s not true! It’s threatening jobs ten years from now of maybe British Columbians that moved to get jobs, or people from Newfoundland, or from China. Those people might not have jobs but the current Albertans are not threatened if you don’t expand the oilsands. That really started to bug me.

Anything you wanted to add?

A big motivator for the op-ed as well was that I’ve done a lot of the national modelling. If you froze the emissions from the oilsands, it is still really hard to hit a Paris target. If you look on the graphs, we’ve gone all the way up to 2.5 million barrels a day. Maybe it’s going to stabilize up there. That would be fine with me. But if you build more pipelines, it’s most likely going to keep going higher.

The talk has been “oh well, this is Trudeau helping Rachel Notley stay in power.” I don’t think Rachel Notley’s going to stay in power. As the federal government, you’ve just got to get ready for the fact that you’re going to have different people in different jurisdictions who are going to stop you from doing a climate policy. Trudeau says he’s serious about his Paris commitment. That’s one area where I have expertise and people like me should be speaking up. People have a short memory if it’s not their area. I understand that. But I need to explain why Brian Mulroney didn’t hit his target, and Jean Chretien, and Stephen Harper. To me, the burden of proof is on Trudeau. If he’s going to keep telling Canadians that he’s serious about his Paris targets, then the burden of proof is on him. Any expert will tell you that he should already have all the policies in place right now. We can map how they achieve Paris. I was trying to make that shout out as well with the op-ed.

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Lighthouse Beach, a white sand crescent on the north coast of Nova Scotia, was once considered the jewel of the region. People would flock there from New Glasgow and Pictou on summer weekends, visiting the lobster bar and swimming in the clear waters of the Northumberland Strait.

There had been plans for a twice-daily train that would carry visitors between the seaside, a hotel and a local yacht club. Dreams began of a destination national park. But all of these plans were choked off by the introduction of a giant pulp and paper mill in 1967 that literally transformed a large part of Pictou Landing into a toxic dump.

You can smell it usually before you can see it: clouds of sulphur belching from the Abercrombie Point Pulp and Paper Mill smokestacks. For decades, the plant pumped contaminated water into the strait, using Boat Harbour, once an idyllic tidal lagoon used for fishing and clam digging, as a settling pond for highly toxic effluent.

It was also once my family’s home.

My family settled over 200 years ago in this piece of Mi’kmaq First Nation territory, eventually transferring their own property into government care for — as they were told — protection for future generations.

Waves now roll in on Lighthouse Beach dark brown and foamy, the colour of Guinness, where I — like so many other kids in the area — learned to swim and sail.

Photo credit: Dr. Gerry Farrell

The story of Pictou Landing is one of desperation, of corruption and incompetence. So perhaps it’s no surprise that when Canadian journalist and anthropologist Joan Baxter tried to tell it, old forces of power moved in to silence her. The mill’s owners tried to banish Baxter and her book The Mill: Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest from local bookstores.

Of course, that backfired in spectacular fashion: The Mill sold out two printings and became the best-selling book in Nova Scotia Chapters and Coles book stores the month it was released.

I reached Baxter at her home in Nova Scotia to talk about The Mill, the stories that were told to hide industry’s impacts from locals and the fight against years of environmental racism and degradation still plaguing the region to this day.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about the environmental situation around the mill and Boat Harbour.

Back in the mid ’60s when the provincial government of Nova Scotia was desperate to try to find some industry in Pictou County, which was really hurting, they were wooing big industries.

In 1964, just before Christmas, [Premier Robert] Stanfield announced that Scott Paper was going to move into Pictou County. Of course, the pulp mill was moving in but nobody really talked about where the effluent was going to go.

The province, in its desperation to lure this big foreign corporation, did something that’s never, to my knowledge, been done before.

The province agreed to take care of the effluent from that mill. So we would own the effluent. We would give them really cheap fresh water, we even built a dam to give them over 90 million litres of water a day from the river, then we would take care of the effluent that came out, which was almost the same amount of really toxic effluent.

But they needed a place to put it. It’s probably criminal, I’m guessing: they lied to the local population, and certainly lied to the Pictou Landing First Nation, and said that they wouldn’t be able to fish anymore in this estuary called Boat Harbour — or, A’se’k, by the Mi’kmaq, which means “the other room.” But basically they’d still be able to boat and use it for recreation and there wouldn’t be a problem with the water.

Two people from the water authority, whose job it was to get the First Nation to sign off on this body of water, Boat Harbour, they took the chief up to New Brunswick. They showed them a non-functioning treatment centre that wasn’t even working and said, “This is what your water will look like; it’ll be perfectly clear.” So they tricked everybody.

Families, like your own, had an inkling that this wasn’t going to be the case. Even before the mill opened, in 1967, there were already people protesting what would happen to Boat Harbour because they knew when they closed it off and turned it into a receptacle for the vast amounts of toxic waste that was coming out of the mill that it would completely destroy the environment — which it did.

It turned it into one of Canada’s most egregious environmental disasters, right at the backdoor of the Pictou Landing First Nation. It completely destroyed what was an extremely important body of water for them. And it destroyed all of the beaches, Lighthouse Beach, and certainly your family and the people who had cottages and homes in Moodie Cove, all of that was destroyed. Lighthouse Beach was destroyed; it became a no-go area once the effluent began to flow.

Then there was a massive pipeline break. The effluent from the mill goes under Pictou Harbour then comes back up onto land, then it goes overland a little ways before it goes out into Boat Harbour. Forty-seven million litres… were spilled onto sacred Mi’kmaq land, at a site called Indian Point.

At that point the Pictou Landing First Nation said, enough is enough, and got the government to pass legislation, which they did in 2015: that Boat Harbour has to close in 2020, be remediated, and the effluent treatment has to be done differently, and be done somewhere else.

Already the bill for that, which of course the public purse in Nova Scotia will be covering, is $133 million and may go much higher.

The problem is the alternative plan is to … ship it directly out in a one-meter diameter pipe into the Northumberland Strait, just at the mouth of Pictou Harbour, into one of the most lucrative lobster fishing areas possibly in the province. That has the fishermen absolutely up in arms.

It’s been a travesty since day one. What the government gave away to that corporation in the 1960s, every successive government has just dug the hole deeper and made us responsible for more and more of the problems. The indemnity agreement that was signed in 1995 means that the people of Nova Scotia are also responsible for any new treatment plant that they make.

Photo credit: Dr. Gerry Farrell

The announcement of the mill was reported as being “hailed jubilantly from all parts of the county,” when in reality there was already significant opposition. What role did the media play in allowing this to happen and flourish? How has that role changed?

The Chronicle Herald did a series of four articles last week in which they said they were going to bring some facts in black and white about the mill, and how it worked, and what a benefit it was, but also talk to people who have concerns about the mill. Of those four articles, which was upwards of 4,000 words, I counted 56 or 57 that even alluded to the fact that there are fishermen and people concerned about the new plans for the effluent.

The University of King’s College, the report they did in 2009 about Boat Harbour I think is one of the landmark pieces of journalism in this province, ever. It took the lid off a really, really dirty secret that most people in Nova Scotia had no idea about. It’s a really remarkable piece of journalism.

Each generation comes and goes, and those stories get buried. You realize that history’s been repeating itself for 50 years. The people, the citizens, they rise up, they complain, they protest, they write letters, they get organized, they expend enormous amounts of time and energy and emotion — and get foiled by one government after another.

And then you hear the same promises coming out of the mill…Then you realize they’ve said that over and over again. It’s only when you put those years of media coverage together that you realize that the situation just keeps perpetuating itself.

Activism has been very hard on the citizens over the years, but they have made baby steps, and if they had not done all that research and passed it on to me, it would have taken me years to write this book.

Why did you decide to focus on the environmental activism around the mill?

Because that’s the biggest story about the mill. That is the story. What happened when I started to do research was I started to uncover all these previous waves of activism, going back to the very beginning.

There have been some fairly muted criticisms…that I didn’t bring the voices of the workers. The head of the union simply didn’t answer my calls. I went to his boss, I went to the UNIFOR communications person, they simply didn’t answer my correspondence.

I have had private messages since the book came out from people telling me there is a climate of fear within the mill. That the workers are either being told a pack of lies or that they’re being told to keep their mouths shut.

When this book was published, the mill tried to suppress it. What did that look like, and what effect did it have?

I was on my way to Halifax to do an interview on CTV about the book, when I got a call from Chapters telling me they had cancelled the book signing in New Glasgow.

I was never told exactly what the problem was, except that somebody had said they would destroy the book in front of me. They were worried about a disruption, the bookstore staff were feeling really insecure. They didn’t want anything ugly happening.

Because it had already been promoted and advertised on social media a lot of people went to the store looking for me to sign books, and of course I wasn’t there, and they were told it was cancelled, and social media took over.

It wasn’t until Tuesday that somebody managed to get a copy of the form letter that had been going out from Kathy Cloutier at the mill to former employees and employees, which they were to sign, threatening to boycott Coles and Indigo stores across the country if they allowed me to sign my book in New Glasgow.

That made it a bigger story, because people could see that it had been orchestrated, it had come from the mill.

We had had a very small first printing, because it was a small publisher with very little money. That printing sold out really quickly, and then a second one, and now we’re on the third one. It was the best-selling book in Coles and Chapters in Nova Scotia in December.

It’s just journalism. But the fact that it seems to have made such a splash makes me think that there’s a lot more room in Nova Scotia and in Canada for long-form journalism about some of the industries that we subsidize.

How do corporations have so much influence on Nova Scotia’s environmental policies?

Nova Scotia has some of the weakest environmental legislation of any place I’ve ever lived. We don’t have a clean air act.

Each one of the big industries in Nova Scotia negotiates its own industrial approval with its own specific emissions targets and so on. There’s no overall act that really looks after us.

It’s those jobs. Pictou County is hurting. They don’t have any of the former industries that they had. They’re really terrified. Nobody’s willing to pull the plug.

Each government just kicks it down the road to its successor. Nobody wants to be the one who is responsible for it.

It would take a government with vision and with courage to do what’s right and really play hardball — and say, ‘If you can’t clean this up and change the way you operate, then you have to close down.’

You call the mill’s owners “absentee corporate landlords” — why does it make a difference where the owners are based?

The Sinar Mas Group is so huge, it’s everywhere. They’re in China, they’re elsewhere in Asia. It’s a massive, massive corporate group. This is just a tiny little minnow in the ocean of their companies.

Honestly, do they care about it? Maybe they do, because they’re never going to get a better deal somewhere else.

Where are they going to get that much water that cheaply? Where are they going to be able to operate where they’ll be able to fail their emissions test and be fined less than $700? Where are they going to get access to Crown land at the low stumpage rates they get in Nova Scotia? I don’t know.

They’re bullies. And I think they’ve bullied their way for 50 years to get what they want. Anybody who tries to stop a book signing, then cancels a Christmas party at Pictou Lodge because the manager had the audacity to suggest it might hurt tourism having their effluent dumped right in front of his establishment — that’s bullying.

I think it’s a worldwide phenomenon, but I think it’s particularly bad in Nova Scotia. Our politicians get stars in their eyes when these great big guys come to our province because they take it as a sign that we’re a really good place to invest. No, we’re a place where you can take advantage of us.

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The fate of the Yukon’s Peel Watershed — one of the most pristine wilderness areas in Canada and home to four First Nations — will be decided by the Supreme Court of Canada on Dec. 1.

What lies in store for the Peel will be determined by future land-use planning in the territory and whether and how those plans grant industry access to the undeveloped region.

In 2014, the previous territorial government tossed out the lengthy work of an independent land-use planning commission that recommended protecting 80 per cent of the region from industry and roads, replacing it with one that only protects 29 per cent of the region.

ICYMI: Battle to Protect Northern Yukon, Home of Pristine Peel Watershed, From Industry Heads to Supreme Court

Two lower courts both agreed that the government seriously erred in doing so. The question being resolved by the Supreme Court is what stage in the planning process things must return to.

The plaintiffs — three First Nations and two environmental organizations represented by legendary lawyer Thomas Berger — contend that rewinding the process too far back will give the government an unfair do-over and set a dangerous precedent for future land-use battles.

To help try make sense of the situation, DeSmog Canada interviewed David Loeks, who served as chair of the six-member independent land-use planning commission. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In 2014 the Yukon Government decided to effectively throw out the plan and come up with its own, which only protected 29 per cent of the Peel as opposed to 80 per cent. Did that come as a surprise to you?

All through the planning process, we had shown the evolution and direction of our thinking. And the Yukon Government said, basically, “yup, ok, no worries, carry on.”

When we had written our recommended plan and we did it in good faith.

It’s at the 11th hour and 59th minute, after we had fielded the recommended plan and were now ready to draft the final recommended plan… the Yukon Government comes in with bunch of very routine things…[including] two very key [concerns], which were posed in inoperative language like “we want to see more balance” and “we want you to rethink your access provisions.”

At that stage in the planning process, the Umbrella Final Agreement required that review comments be actionable and strictly referenced to the text. These were neither. We more-or-less had to say that if we were to take these substantively, we’d have to back way, way up in the planning process. We’d have to go back two years or so. So we more-or-less carried on writing the plan as we did, saying “these are inoperative review comments.”

Meanwhile, by this time there is data that between 75 and 80 per cent of the Yukon wanted highly protected landscape. The First Nations wanted it 100 per cent protected. So there’s a lot of push towards the kind of plan we were drafting.

ICYMI: PHOTOS: Documenting the North’s Mighty and Threatened Peel Watershed

What happened next?

The Yukon Government is obligated by the UFA to take that plan out for review. This is where things left the rails.

They didn’t do that. Rather than taking the commission’s plan out for review, they cooked up their own plan. Rather than using the five-year process that we had, they did it in a backroom in three-and-a-half months out and pulled it out and went “tada.” And they claimed — rather than an illegitimately done, backroom, in-house plan — that they were only modifying the commission’s plan.

It was a stunning bit of misrepresentation. Then, they proceeded to take that out for review. Not the commission’s plan — the one they cooked up.

At that point, a number of parties were starting to cry foul. I more-or-less said there was nobody here speaking for the commission. So I adopted a public role of speaking in public, writing editorials, giving interviews and adding my voice to the other ones.

I was speaking for what the commission had in mind and what we were thinking. The public pressure really, really mounted and culminated in this lawsuit, and eventually brought the government down.

How has it felt for you, watching from the sidelines after doing so much work?

The government had been unequivocally reprimanded by the courts. So I thought, “ok, our position is well founded.”

If the Supreme Court comes in favour of the plaintiffs, you can pretty well be assured that the Peel plan will get adopted. If it sides in favour of the government, we’ll have to take at face value and hold him to it, Premier Sandy Silver’s statement that he will, regardless of what the courts have to say, accept and adopt the final recommended plan.

One will have more teeth behind it. The second is going to rely on the integrity and character of Mr. Silver. At this stage, there’s no reason to question that. I’m extremely hopeful that the final recommended plan will be adopted and if the plaintiffs lose their case and if Mr. Silver and the Liberal Party reneged on a very clear promise, then I guess you’d have to say “watch out” as society won’t let that lie.

“In a representative democracy, our parliamentarians like to believe that they are both anointed and uniquely gifted for knowing what the public interest is. History shows that’s not really true.” https://t.co/aFY1muiipB @ProtectPeel #cdnpoli #yukon #Y2Y @CPAWSYukon

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) November 28, 2017

What are some important takeaways from this experience?

Planning, if properly done, is radically democratic.

People should be informed and weigh in and should weigh in a meaningful way. I found having good survey data that showed what the public wanted was really important.

In a representative democracy, our parliamentarians like to believe that they are both anointed and uniquely gifted for knowing what the public interest is. History shows that’s not really true.

Very often, our political apparatus really ends up being the handmaiden to particular interests, often resource development industries.

I’ve been left with the really firm belief that when it comes to making fundamental decisions about how is our landscape going to look over time, you shouldn’t leave that to technical experts.

Commissioners, who after all aren’t elected but appointed, are citizens trying to do a good job. And the critical question all the while is ‘are we on the right track here?’ That’s what a planning commission is trying to figure out. If someone was to say ‘what’s the public interest?’ then let’s ask them as opposed to saying that you’ve been elected by them and will speak for them.

It’s made me more committed to participatory democracy than ever. That’s really what land-use planning needs a healthy dose of.

We did our planning process saying “we’ve got to have a lot of public meetings and consultations.”

There is a huge contrast between what we did and what the government did in their process. Government held open houses, and an open house can be okay but it’s really easy to make it fundamentally dishonest because nobody knows what the sense of anybody’s interests are other than the folks who run the open house.

In a public meeting, where you can actually have statements by the public and debates, you can see how things start to look. That’s a chance for the public to interact with each other as well as with the commission. These kinds of things really are profoundly democratic and really important.

That was one of the things I found was intellectually dishonest about the way the government had presented their pseudo-plan.

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Chris Turner’s new book, The Patch: The People, Pipelines and Politics of the Oil Sands, opens with a story about ducks.

Actually, in the context of the oilsands, it’s the story about ducks: more than 1,600 ducks migrating through northern Alberta died after landing on a tailings pond in 2008. It brought worldwide condemnation of the industry, and acted as a catalyst for environmental protests that are ongoing today.

The Patch is the story of what happened long before, and since, the turning point brought about by the ducks: how the industry came to be, how it scraped by through its infancy to become the roaring engine of Canadian industry in the early 2000’s; how its cycles of boom and bust have built fortunes and shifted the gravitational centre of Canada to a once-quiet patch of Boreal forest; and how the same ambitious industrial vision that stoked the fire may yet snuff it out.

Turner’s focus on the people of the Patch makes it unique among the multitude of books on the subject. He brings us into the lives of assortment of characters who have been drawn to the industry: driving first class buses and what were once the biggest dump trucks in the world; pulling a boat out of the water in PEI in time to catch the next morning’s shift in Fort McMurray; and doing shots of vodka with Soviet engineers after touring the subterranean death traps that would be adapted into a high-tech solution for mining underground oilsands deposits.

We spoke to Turner about his new book.

You open the book with the anecdote about the ducks. How important of a moment was that for the oilsands?

The reason I opened with that is because it represented a pivot point. From the industry’s point of view, this looked like another minor little hiccup along the way — business as usual, which at that moment was a roaring success. And the industry had always had local environmental problems, some worse than others, and it was a lot of ducks, but it was still seen as, ‘okay, these things happen, it’s a terrible tragedy but we’ll move on.’

What I was trying to get at by beginning the book with it was to say, this was the moment where the industry’s understanding of itself in a greater conversation nationally and internationally was beginning to shift forever.

What I call in the book this High Modern industrial triumph story was now going to become this ecological tragedy story. They didn’t see that shift coming, and that was part of why I think the duck incident resonated the way it did. It indicated how much the broad general public’s tolerance for that kind of environmental damage had changed. Why do you think the conversation was changing at that point?

To some degree, the global conversation about climate change was finally maturing. The clarity of the argument was beginning to emerge: that this was about fossil fuels, and about needing to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.

That didn’t happen all at once and certainly it didn’t all happen in 2008 — it was still ongoing. But it was the end of the necessity argument, which particularly for the oil business, has long been, and still to some degree remains, their main point: you need us.

I think that what we’re seeing, as the climate change debate has matured, is a direct challenge to that point. To say, maybe we don’t need you. Not only maybe not, but maybe in fact the last thing we need is more fossil fuel. The beginning of that collision in essence was some random duck incident in 2008. You mentioned the High Modern period, or spirit; what is it about the High Modern that allows or encourages the development of this huge project? 

It creates kind of the broad logic. You can go all the way back to the beginning of the 1900s, where you see pretty broad support; it was understood as a universal good that there was an oil deposit there.

There were these technical questions of how do you unlock it, but the general idea of progress was that you find a resource, particularly one as valuable as oil, you find a way to turn it into a commodity, money is made, work is done, this is the greater good. This is the purpose of an advanced industrial society.

That created the logic or justification for the oilsands, despite all the barriers, despite how long it took to develop it as a viable resource. That consensus was what I refer to as the High Modern worldview: whatever your political stripe, a resource of that value should be exploited. The technology for SAGD (Steam-assisted gravity drainage) came from the Soviet Union, which was known for its megaprojects. How similar are the giant capitalist oilsands operations and the giant communist megaprojects?

Probably more similar than a lot of the people in the industry like to think even now…in the sense that it really was a government-driven enterprise for generations. You can look at something like Syncrude; when the initial funding for Syncrude nearly collapsed in 1974, it was three governments — the Alberta, Ontario, and federal governments — all stepped up with money. So it was a kind of quasi-Crown corporation at its founding in some sense, although not directed by government, just funded by it.

So there’s probably more in common than anyone would like to think. And I think that speaks to the scale and scope of the energy industry. As much as we like to think of it as these wildcatters and entrepreneurs, like Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood, clawing the oil from the earth with his bare hands practically, the growth and the endurance of the industry has always involved huge public-supported backing.

Whether you were in the Soviet Union or in Canada, the way you did it was not all that different. It was similar scale, you were going to need a lot of public support and public money. The oilsands project has always been dogged by this issue of commercial viability. As you mentioned, that’s what set it back decades, and is still a problem. How has that extra cost influenced the development of the oilsands? 

It became a very technology-driven, engineering-driven enterprise. The conventional oil business, the basic kind of apparatus of getting the oil out of the ground has gotten much more efficient or that much more sophisticated, but it’s still, ‘you drill a well and you pump the oil.’ To make the oilsands viable required inventing or adapting all this technology. You needed — and still need — fleets of engineers to monitor and upgrade and improve and tweak and try new stuff.

The culture of the oilsands, I think, is uniquely a culture of engineers. There’s a strong sense of whatever the problem is, we can fix it, we can figure it out, we just need to put the right tools in place; but then also, people I talked to in the industry have said, part of the reason why we’ve been very bad at responding to criticism is that engineers by their nature don’t think in these public-relations terms very well. They’re not very good at emotional appeals, and storytelling and that sort of thing.

“You don’t start over from zero, today. We don’t begin the conversation about the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion with the fact of the thing itself. There are decades of history…distrust and political issues.” https://t.co/rn5LOxLoqW #oilsands #thepatch #cdnpoli @theturner

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) November 23, 2017

You set the whole book up as sort of a conflict between engineers and their worldview and that of environmentalists and people who think we should be leaving the whole thing in the ground. Can those two worldviews be reconciled when it comes to the oilsands? 

It’s an open question whether they can. I think there is a version of the story, and it’s one that Rachel Notley likes to tell, and some folks in Trudeau’s government like to tell, and some people in the industry, and some people who work in the more policy-wonky and less activist part of the environmental NGOs…which goes, okay, we unlocked this resource, it’s up and running, it’s producing soon to be three million barrels of oil a day, that is an enormous economic boom that will be an excellent stabilizer for the Canadian economy as it transitions to a low-carbon economy and does so in as neat and orderly a way as possible.

And that story is, I don’t think, entirely false.

The messy bit is you don’t start over from zero, today. We don’t begin the conversation about the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion with the fact of the thing itself. There are decades of history, there are decades of distrust and political issues and in the case of First Nations, legal issues, which are all sort of tangled up in what would otherwise be an easier thing to negotiate a compromise on.

So I think there is a middle path there, and probably that’s kind of the path we’ll more or less take, there will probably just be an enormous amount of push and pull from the more dug-in partisans on either side as it goes forward. You describe the pipelines as having become proxies for protests of the carbon economy generally. The fairness of that aside, how effective has it been in achieving the goals of the movements? 

From my observer’s point of view, it seems that the one thing about the pipeline protests and pipeline politics is that it’s extraordinarily effective as an organizing tool.

So you look at how Keystone XL itself was chosen as the target for protest, and what made it so attractive was that you could get such broad agreement. You had the hardcore climate activist NGOs, but then you also had regional environmental groups who were worried about regional environmental impacts; First Nations and other Indigenous people who were worried about encroachment on their land; ranchers; people worried about aquifers; people worried in the case of Trans Mountain about tanker traffic and its impact on wildlife.

There’s nothing else we’ve seen in the kind of climate change activism world that’s as good at galvanizing resistance and organizing resistance.

How effective is it if the ultimate goal is reducing CO2 emissions, if that’s the main point of it? I get a little less rosy in my assessment, because as long as the global economics of fossil fuels are what they are, whether a particular 500 or 800,000 barrels of oil a day moves down this pipeline or that pipeline is not going to be conclusive, and may not even be the first domino knocked over in a whole series of them. It might be just a one-off proxy war off to the side. In this current era of protests, carbon taxes, low oil prices, some seemingly intractable problems like tailings, how optimistic are you about the future of the oilsands?

The case for them is only going to get tougher. That seems to be broadly understood in a lot of the industry.

I think it’s understood more and more that there was this crazy 10-year boom, give or take, and that led to this unprecedented and unsustainable level of growth — and that that is now the past. The future is still an open question.

Folks in the industry will talk about their ability to innovate, their ability to reduce the carbon intensity of a barrel, their ability to attack and solve all the environmental questions. I don’t think that’s just window dressing; I think there is serious thought and effort being put into that. Can they do that in such a way and at a fast enough clip to stay competitive as fracking spreads worldwide, as demand maybe before too long begins to significantly be impacted by things like electric cars and renewable energy sources of all types? It’s a really difficult question.

There are still people who I think are aware of all these variables willing to put money into the industry…For example, you just saw Suncor announcing a new project of 40,000 barrels of SAGD. So a small expansion of a SAGD project, rather than these big, 200, 300,000 barrel-per-day mines. I think that’s the direction the industry is going.

And then there’s a whole bunch of variables that could completely change the industry in five or 10 years. Why did you want to work on this book? 

I’m a Calgarian. It is sort of my backyard.

It’s a story that hadn’t really been told for a general audience without a really significant slant to it. It’s a really compelling story; the backstory, the history of how it came to be is absolutely fascinating. Just a weird chapter in Canadian industrial history that’s never been told in a single story before. If I had had 100 more pages I would have happily gone deeper into the history.

The other thing was, I’ve written and spoken and done a lot of work on the energy transition from the green side — here’s this very exciting new economic basis and movement that’s emerging, and this is going to be a hugely compelling place for people to invest their energy and time and money for many years to come in solving the climate problem…What does it mean to a significant subset of the oil industry in northern Alberta that this shift is underway, and what does the energy transition look like from there?

Probably more importantly, if we are going to talk in some sort of consensus-building way about how Canada manages that energy transition, I think it’s important to understand that side of it as well. So a big part of what I was hoping to do with the book was, if you come into it hating the oilsands and thinking they should be shut down tomorrow, maybe you’ll understand a little bit more about how they came to be and why people are still invested in making them viable. If you come into it as a huge champion of the industry who’s had it up to here with the protests, maybe you’ll understand a little bit more about where that part of it came from as well.

I think the fence is not a weird place to be on this one.

There’s really compelling arguments for and against. Some of the rhetoric that came out of the anti-pipeline movement kind of painted over this notion that it could be very quickly scaled down. If the prime minister woke up tomorrow and thought, ‘We need to shut that thing down in five years,’ how would you ever compensate for that economically, not to mention politically? How would you absorb that shock? And if you don’t have a viable answer for that, then maybe you haven’t thought it all the way through.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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For decades, Kevin Taft has served as a thorn in the side of Alberta’s provincial government.

In his new book, Taft, who served as a Liberal MLA between 2001 and 2012, and as leader of the Alberta Liberal Party — the province’s official opposition — between 2004 and 2008, maintains his course.

Oil’s Deep State: How the Petroleum Industry Undermines Democracy and Stops Action on Global Warming — in Alberta, and in Ottawa is a controversial read.

Notably the book implicates the Alberta NDP, which was elected in 2015 with promises to challenge the sector’s dominance over political processes. To help explain why that didn’t happen, Taft deploys concepts of institutional capture and deep state — a term used when institutional capture occurs with several different entities and is maintained for a long time.

It’s a challenging and insightful read, one that will likely spark many debates about how we talk and think about the oil and gas sector.

DeSmog Canada chatted with Taft about the book.

What inspired you to write Oil’s Deep State?

When you’re in the middle of action in politics, you don’t necessarily see the bigger picture. You’re fighting the local battles.

After I left politics in Alberta, I was invited to go to Australia to talk about the effect of the fossil fuel industry on democracy, because they have some real concerns there. That prompted me to begin reflecting on my own experience.

Essentially, the book is an account of the collision between the oil industry and global warming, and how democracy is caught in the middle of that.

What I think I bring to the discussion is a sense of how the oil industry has systematically set out to capture a whole series of supposedly independent, democratic institutions like political parties — both governing and opposition — certain components of the civil service, departments of energy and environment, regulators, universities and so on. And how by capturing these and taking a coordinated approach to managing them or overseeing them, the oil industry has actually formed a kind of state within a state when it comes to its own interests: what I call a “deep state” or “oil’s deep state” in this particular case.

Did you sense these powers while in politics?

Oh, very much. Everywhere I would turn as a leader of the opposition, I would be facing or dealing with the oil industry. Whether I was trying to raise money to pay for the political party, or walking through the lobby of the legislature and watching lobbyists for the oil industry literally sometimes hugging government officials, or when I was at the university watching millions of dollars flow from the industry into the universities, and so on.

Of course, when you’re in the middle of the battlefield, you don’t necessarily see the bigger picture.

But when I backed away, I thought ‘gee, political parties should be independent, universities are set up supposedly to be independent, regulators by their very mandate are supposed to be independent.’ And yet over and over, I saw they weren’t.

The book touches on universities quite a few times in terms of how they’ve channelled some of this influence. What is it about institutions like the University of Calgary and University of Alberta that have them serving as such key leverage points for industry?

Universities, in the public mind, are seen as independent. They’re seen as thought leaders.

If you hear comments from a corporate spokesperson, your filters are sort of up.

But if you hear similar comments from a university academic, they simply have more credibility. That makes universities, ironically, a particularly tempting target for organizations wanting credibility.

The core of the debate on global warming is science. The universities, starting in the 1960s, were the foundation of much of the scientific research underlying global warming. To win the battle and delay action on global warming, the oil industry needed to gain influence in universities to smother or distort or counter the science that was coming out. And they succeeded substantially.

In the book, I drill into a very interesting legal case: the Bruce Carson illegal lobbying trial.

Carson was senior adviser to Stephen Harper in the prime minister’s office and then he went to a very generous-paying position at the University of Calgary to set up an institute there. He was ultimately charged with illegal lobbying on behalf of the oil industry in relation to that position at the university. During the trial, all kinds of behind-the-scenes documents came forward: e-mails, minutes, bank statements, corporate plans and so on that were never meant to be public.

When you drill into those, you can see how systematic the oil industry was and how many millions of dollars they poured into pulling together federal, environment, energy and provincial officials at the highest level. Politicians, academics: all of that to try to build an energy strategy that had fossil fuels at the middle of it.

This is not happy news for me. I live in Alberta, and have lived pretty much my whole life in Alberta.

There’s no question that Alberta and Canada have prospered and done well because of oil. I’m not happy that using oil is causing a global crisis.

But it is true. It is the reality. And we need to deal with that. As long as the oil industry has so much sway over our governing institutions, we’re not going to deal with it effectively.

A lot of people had high hopes for the Alberta NDP when they were elected, seeing as they’d spent a long time talking about the need for things like increased royalties and more focus on tailings reclamation. What do you think happened? Did they have that much of a choice, or were they effectively destined to get swallowed up in this deep state?

I have a lot of sympathy for Rachel Notley. She was elected as premier when nobody, including herself, really expected it. She and her cabinet stepped right into a scene that had already been set.

Her closest advisers in the civil service were very tight with the industry. You could almost say the Alberta Energy Regulator is run by the industry: it’s financed by industry and the chairman is a former industry executive. She was surrounded by pro-oil forces.

At the same time, I would have liked a little stiffer stance on things like royalties. We’re in a situation today in Alberta where the government sells almost three million barrels of bitumen to Big Oil every day. Three million barrels every day. But the Alberta government earns more from gaming and alcohol sales than it does from bitumen royalties. That’s how far out of whack the royalty system is.

The New Democrats really did nothing to change that. I was disappointed in that. I think their move on the carbon tax is very good. I support that. But I think they’ve made an error. It’s easy for me to say from where I am. But they’ve made a mistake in turning pipeline expansion into the live-or-die priority.

Here’s the key point: the interests of the oil industry are not the same as the interests of the people of Alberta. We’ve tended to forget that in Alberta. Unfortunately, I feel like the New Democrats — who had a heroic reputation in opposition — have forgotten that.

What do oil industry interests look like in a day-to-day context?

When I was leader of the opposition, the pressure from the industry was just brutal.

Let me just preface this by saying the oil industry is filled with lots of wonderful, capable people. I don’t want to demonize the individuals. And some of them became friends and real supporters. But at the end of the day, their interest is in producing and selling oil. Oil, when it’s burned, produces carbon dioxide, which is changing our climate.

When I was in politics as leader of the opposition, I had some pretty tough, confrontational meetings where energy executives are really raked me over the coals for taking a stand on higher royalties, for example.

I’d get called into meetings. They’d pound the table at times, making the coffee cups bounce as they try to intimidate me. You feel that pressure. I’m not saying I wasn’t influenced by that. Of course you feel that pressure.

It was a little bit of a different a debate in 2008. Interestingly, while I was under that pressure, so was Ed Stelmach, who was the leader of the Progressive Conservatives. And so were the New Democrats. All three political parties took a stand in 2008 for higher royalties. I’m not a hero in this at all. You feel those pressures.

But gosh, I wish that the New Democrats hadand just taken a little bit more of an independent, arm’s-length tact from the industry when they got elected.

You conclude the book by pointing to the zero-emissions movement and the opportunity in that for people to coalesce and make bigger demands of governments. Are there examples that you look to around in Canada or around the world which give you hope that this could work?

Sure. British Columbia, when they brought in their initial carbon tax 10 or so years ago, were world leaders.

You saw a fairly rapid response: emissions began to decline for a period of time. Then, the lobbyists and oil industry got their hold on the governing party and blocked advances in the carbon tax. I take heart from the election of the Greens to their position in holding the balance of power in B.C.

Europe is miles ahead of Canada in driving down emissions.

I don’t expect change to come inside Alberta now. Change will be driven into Alberta from outside. It’s going to be very painful for this province, because we have not prepared for the obvious reality that’s coming, which is the end of the fossil fuel industry. It will be phased out.

And we will either manage that phase-out or we will fight it. And if we manage it, then there’s a healthy transition ahead. If we fight it, it’s just going to be awful here.

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B.C. Green Party leader Andrew Weaver was never a big fan of LNG, he says, because he never thought the BC Liberal plan for a multi-billion domestic natural gas export industry was even possible. But that was the past: when it comes to the future of clean energy in British Columbia, what is possible?

In the following interview with journalist Christopher Pollon, the climate scientist turned politician expounds on LNG, Site C, and the imminent arrival of energy alternatives like geothermal, “pumped storage” hydro and more.

Weaver conducted this interview via speakerphone as he drove a broken microwave oven to a Victoria-area depot for recycling. Being Green, it seems, is a full-time gig.

Christopher Pollon: Is the dream of a big Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) export industry dead in B.C.?

Andrew Weaver: Yes, at least for the foreseeable future. It was absolutely irresponsible of the B.C. government to raise the expectations of people in the north. People in B.C. made changes in their lives, and in the process, the BC Liberals created an artificial divide between urban and rural in B.C.  

Meanwhile there’s a global market glut, landed contracts in Asia are five bucks and change, and China was supposed to be a market but is now a seller in the market because they are oversupplied. The idea that there was going to be a big mega project like Petronas [Pacific Northwest LNG], was nothing but a pipe dream. 

The real question is, what are we going to do with our resource? 

Bloomberg has forecasted that by around 2024, Asian prices will improve and the global glut could disappear. For the couple of LNG projects holding on, is this a matter of waiting that out, or by 2024 will these projects be obsolete?

We are in the middle of an energy revolution like we’ve never seen before, [so] to think that somehow we are going to continue to produce energy the way we were, is a bit of a myth. 

There are so many unknowns. With LNG, we don’t know [the impact] of the Iranian [natural gas] supplies, the world’s largest reserves, or what Russian supply is going to do.

We also know that the Paris Accord is a game changer. If the world leaders actually want to live up to what they signed, we are on a transitional path away from fossil fuel use…there can be no new investment in fossil fuels infrastructure, and any new investment in energy infrastructure should be transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewables. 

So I’m not clear there’s even going to be a [LNG] market in the 2020s that will need to be met.

Andrew Weaver Q&A: The Future of BC #Energy Beyond #SiteC and #LNG https://t.co/GrZFKH2t0W @AJWVictoriaBC @C_Pollon #geothermal #climate

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 29, 2017

Companies like FortisBC are saying there is a huge opportunity for B.C. to use natural gas as a substitute for dirty bunker fuel and diesel in marine ships and transport trucks. Do you agree?

I 100 per cent agree. I pushed for the conversion of B.C. ferries ships to being a domestic market for our own natural gas, and they are now doing just that. 

It’s also an opportunity for long-haul transport, using compressed natural gas.

We have world leading technologies here, through companies like Vedder and Westport Innovations. Getting ourselves off diesel and onto compressed natural gas is cleaner in terms of particulate emissions and it’s frankly cheaper, too.

There are five ferries already transitioned to LNG, what do we need to do to ramp up the fuel switching for more ships and transport trucks?

We need infrastructure to charge and refill, and second, [a mechanism] for pricing emissions, which drives innovation to low- and zero-emitting vehicles.

That’s why I’m excited about our [carbon] price going up in B.C., and across Canada, because this pricing will drive us to innovation. Also, through regulation we can start to regulate tail pipe regulations like they do in California.

Back to natural gas, the NDP has called for a scientific review of fracking — what do you think about this?

To me that’s a wishy washy statement. 

I don’t know what you want to review about it. I don’t understand why they called for a review, I honestly don’t. I can’t defend what I don’t understand.

At the Union of BC Municipalities annual meeting this week, there was a vote on a fracking moratorium. Is this an idea you would support?

The problem in B.C. is not so much the existence of fracking, it’s the ‘wild west’ nature of what’s going on in B.C.  It’s a free-for-all. 

There’s no overarching approach to resource development.

The right approach would be to pause and reflect on the cumulative impacts of our ‘wild west’ approach to resource extraction here in B.C.

Nobody is saying ‘stop producing natural gas,’ but under the BC Liberals it was a get-to-yes approach, and it didn’t matter what the question was. That’s irresponsible.  

We would like to take a detailed look at what we are doing in a cumulative sense. In our platform, we had called for [the creation of] a natural resources board, that we were very keen on.

Changing tracks to Site C, what do you think about the preliminary report from the BC Utilities Commission (BCUC) made public last week? 

I’m quite impressed so far, there are not a lot of answers, but there are a lot of good questions. 

BC Hydro numbers are being very effectively challenged, including on the cost of alternatives and for their approach to debt financing. BC Hydro did their typical approach, which was to submit hundreds of pages of documents. 

They’re not very convincing when it comes to their demand load forecast, though. 

It will be very interesting to see what BCUC reports. Ultimately it will be a cabinet decision, but as people who have been following know full well, the economics of Site C do not work right now. 

It was all about producing electricity subsidized for an LNG industry that doesn’t exist. So Site C is all about delivering the impossible. 

In a hypothetical world where Site C is cancelled, what sort of energy mix would B.C. need to look to for the future?

[The future] is a mix of using our existing dams more efficiently, combined with pumped storage, wind, solar, and geothermal. B.C. has it all. 

Learn about pumped storage potential in B.C.

If one jurisdiction could showcase to the world how to move forward, it is B.C.  And we’re missing out on that opportunity.  

That said, the industry is ready to go. I recently talked with a company looking at pumped storage hydro, which will use brownfield quarries, in partnership with First Nations. This is base supply — it’s one of the cheapest ways to meet peak demand. 

Take Vancouver Island for example, where we need to upgrade our transmission capacity to the mainland.  We could build pumped storage on the island, with the avoided cost of building transmission lines. Then look at a place like Valemont — they run out of electrons all the time there, we could build a geothermal plant there.

In the Kootenays there is a grid-scale solar development that wants to go forward, it’s already through the standing offer program, it’s ready to go. 

This is going to be my focus over the next couple of years in the legislature, and it’s ultimately the reason why I got into politics — to actually get us on track. 

It’s a track that was initially laid by Gordon Campbell under his first administration, which fell apart when Christy Clark came in and started talking about the impossible deliverance of LNG.

Image: B.C. Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver

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