B.C. hasn’t been particularly good at including Indigenous populations in the decision-making process. First Nations are often brought to the table after high-level political decisions have already been made — leading to significant social and legal conflict over consultation, consent and the management of natural resources.

Legal challenges of Site C, the cumulative impacts of B.C.’s sprawling oil and gas operations and the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline are all current examples of what these conflicts look like.

But it doesn’t have to be so, say a team of researchers from by the University of Victoria’s POLIS Water Sustainability Project and the Centre for Indigenous Environmental Resources in a new report, which proposes B.C. manage water resources via a co-governance model based on a principle of collaborative consent.

“Imagine Indigenous people being involved at the highest level of policy-making and reaching an agreement that is good for everyone,” said Merrell-Ann Phare, founding executive director of the Centre for Indigenous Environmental Resources and lead author of the report.

Water is a good issue for the collaborative consent approach as it concerns everyone in a community, Phare said.

Disputes between government and Indigenous communities are often clouded by a perceived need for legal clarity on rights, but there are many areas where, even without legal clarity, different levels of government are able to work out solutions, she added.

“We need to pull up the chairs to those tables for Indigenous governments and we need the federal and provincial governments to recognize that,” she said.

“Indigenous governments have a right to be there.”

Collaborative consent would not mean an end to legal challenges, but it would help find solutions to some of the battles that continue for generations, said Phare, adding that B.C. would not be breaking new ground as territorial and Indigenous governments in the Northwest Territories already use a collaborative consent approach.

Cowichan Watershed Revitalization a Collaborative Consent Success Story

A little more than a decade ago, the Cowichan watershed was a mess.

Clearcuts on surrounding slopes intensified run-off during winter storms. A 2003 drought resulted in critically low water levels that made it impossible for Chinook salmon to reach spawning grounds. Future droughts were on the horizon and water quality was threatened by sewage, fertilizer and a rapidly expanding population.

Catalyst Paper — the largest employer in the area — was on the verge of shutting down because of a water shortage.

“The management situation of the day was not working and the risks to the river and its communities were great,” says a 2014 case study of the evolution of the Cowichan Watershed Board by the University of Victoria’s POLIS Water Sustainability Project.

Management of the watershed was spread among a patchwork of federal, provincial, Indigenous and local governments, while waterfront home owners and local businesses wanted input on how to deal with ongoing droughts and the shrinking salmon runs.

There was general acknowledgement that action was needed to save Cowichan Lake and the iconic Cowichan River, but with the jigsaw of federal and provincial acts and the need for Cowichan Tribes to protect their interests, little was accomplished.

A 2007 plan set out a proactive approach to water management, but, two years later, implementation was minimal, largely because of lack of leadership and scattered responsibilities.

It was clear that a different type of management was needed, with local leadership, so, the Cowichan Watershed Board was formed with the chair of the Cowichan Valley Regional District and chief of Cowichan Tribes as joint chairs, while other agencies were encouraged follow board decisions.

That style of management typifies collaborative consent, which should be the model used in B.C. to defuse conflict around water and land use, the new report recommends.

Resolution for System of Delays, Court Cases with Water Co-Governance

Conflicts could be avoided if Indigenous governments were given an equal seat at the table at the start of a process, instead of being brought in after decisions are made, says the report.

Delays, court cases and disagreements are common as Indigenous communities battle to protect traditional territories, while other levels of government and, in some cases, major corporations, write legislation or set the rules, only to have them challenged by First Nations, who frequently claim inadequate consultation.

Collaborative consent, with all parties committed to working together as equals, takes the heat out of issues as everyone works towards decisions they can live with, says the report, which suggests that the method should be used to come up with regulations for B.C.’s new Water Sustainability Act.

Rosie Simms, co-author of the report and POLIS water law and policy researcher, said collaborative consent offers a way for B.C. to govern according to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous people, as promised by Premier John Horgan.

Water is a compelling issue because jurisdictional overlaps and gaps pave the way for creative forms of co-governance, Simms said.

Indigenous History, Lessons Benefit Local Government

Back in the Cowichan Valley, the collaboration has helped people understand the extent of Cowichan Tribes’ history in the area and traditional knowledge is now used to help inform decisions, said Chief William Seymour.

“We all have the same concerns about our watershed. The logging that went on and what happened to our streams, what happened to our water levels and the water temperature, all the issues of contamination with sewage and fertilizer going into the river — everyone in the valley has those concerns,” Seymour said.

With everyone working towards the same goals, protection of the watershed is improving, he said.

Jon Lefebure, Cowichan Valley Regional District chair, said an excellent relationship has developed between Cowichan Tribes and the district because of the equal partnership on the Watershed Board.

“It has flowed into many other things we do around land use and the opioid crisis — which has an impact on all parts of our community,” he said.

The relationship has also brought local government a new awareness of First Nations culture and the advantages offered by their history and perceptions, Lefebure said.

For example, there is an emphasis on taking only what you need and leaving the rest for future generations, as opposed to the culture of taking all you can and damn the consequences, he said.

Priorities for the watershed are based on looking at the whole system, rather than individual pieces and are guided by a traditional Cowichan Tribes lesson that “everything on this earth is what sustains us, everything on this earth is connected together,” says the POLIS case study.

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The lives of salmon and bears in B.C. are inextricably linked and new research by scientists at Raincoast Conservation and the University of Victoria underlines the importance of conservation managers looking at entire ecosystems in order to keep both species healthy.

The wide-ranging study of the amount of salmon eaten by bears in different areas was conducted by a group led by Megan Adams, Hakai-Raincoast scholar and PhD candidate at UVic and was published today in the peer-reviewed journal Ecosphere.

Researchers looked at more than 1,400 hair samples from 886 grizzly and black bears, which ranged over almost 700,000 square kilometres of B.C. from 1995 to 2014.

The huge database has produced a pattern showing salmon hotspots and demonstrating how the health of bears improves and population density increases when there is an abundance of salmon and declines when salmon runs fail — illustrated by bear deaths on the Central Coast when sockeye runs crashed.

“The more meat that bears get, and especially more fish, the healthier they are. They have a larger body size and they have more cubs,” Adams said in an interview with DeSmog Canada.

“I like to look at these hotspot maps as health indicators of the ecosystem. If it is thriving, you have fishy, fitter bears,” she said.

Male grizzlies are the biggest consumers of salmon and one surprise of the study was the discovery that it is not only bears living in coastal areas such as the Great Bear Rainforest that rely on salmon — bears living 1,000 kilometres from the coast prefer a fishy diet.

Salmon Conservation Would Help Bear Populations

“We are letting the animals tell the story themselves. One of the exciting things to me is how far into the interior this predator/prey system goes,” Adams said, pointing out that the maps show salmon/bear hotspots stretching up to the Alberta border.

However, in the interior of B.C., the bears cannot access as many fish and, in those vulnerable areas, where every fish counts, salmon conservation efforts would help bear populations.

The study shows that protected areas with plentiful salmon produced the fittest bears and resource managers looking at new protected areas should focus on areas with high salmon availability, Adams said.

One of the problems in salmon/bear management is the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans is responsible for salmon while the provincial government is responsible for bears.

Adams would like to see barriers broken down and different levels of government working cooperatively together.

“These results demonstrate important connections between land and sea over huge landscapes,” Adams said.

“Fisheries and land-use management would benefit from integrating beyond discrete geo-political jurisdictions to take ecosystem processes into account.”

Salmon Play Role in Human-Bear Interactions

Ensuring bears have sufficient salmon to eat would also benefit humans as the study shows that bears eating high-salmon diets show decreased levels of stress hormones.

Fishy bears are happier bears and that is likely to mean fewer human/bear conflicts, Adams said, linking the research to a previous study by Raincoast Conservation biologist Kyle Artelle.

Artelle, who is also a co-author on Adams’ study, looked at patterns of bear-human conflicts that resulted in bears being killed by private individuals or conservation officers, over the last 35 years.

Usually the bear is killed if it comes too close to town and the study looked at whether there were patterns indicating why there were more conflicts at certain times and in specific areas, Artelle said in an interview.

“We found that in the years with very low amounts of salmon, there was a disproportionate amount of conflict. There was a strong association,” he said.

“Most likely bears take greater risks in times of food insecurity and come closer to humans . . . Salmon are so important to bears and salmon are strongly associated with conflict,” he said.

Artelle’s study found that, contrary to some expectations, increased hunting had no effect on conflict.

“At first you might think that, if you up the hunting, you have fewer bears to get into trouble, but there is no data to support that,” Artelle said.

It also found that removing bears that were seen as “bad apples” had no effect on future incidents.

Bears are already facing challenges ranging from trophy hunting — the largest source of mortality across all grizzly populations — to climate change and development and Adams wonders what the hotspot maps would have looked like a century ago, before development, ecosystem fragmentation in the Interior and dams on the Columbia River wiped out populations of salmon and grizzly bears.

Megan Adams conducts research in her lab. Photo: A.S. Wright

“For both male and female grizzlies, there’s a big hole in the interior, all up the main passage of the Fraser (River). That’s because bears have been extirpated — there are no grizzly bears living along that huge salmon thoroughfare,” she said.

Now, with research showing the importance of salmon runs, the emphasis should be on ensuring plentiful fish because the bears are the final consumers after salmon have survived orcas, hungry seals and the fishing fleets, scientists emphasize.

Danielle Shaw, Wuikinuxv Nation stewardship director, who has collaborated with Adams on the Central Coast Bear Working Group, said the health of salmon stocks are a direct indicator of the health of the ecosystem and consideration must be given to all the consumers.

“By looking at what other species need to ensure theirr own sustenance, we are progressing towards a more ecosystem-based approach to conservation and management.”

“We have a responsibility to ensure all other species are fed before we fill our own bellies,” she said.

Image: Grizzly bear. Photo: A.S. Wright

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A race to expand B.C. natural gas pipelines and infrastructure is on, signalling two possible outcomes: the death of our homegrown liquefied natural gas (LNG) export dream, and the dawn of the most ironic resource boom in provincial history.

Consider that B.C. natural gas is finally going to be exported overseas by LNG tanker — not from Pacific tidewater, but through Cheniere's new Sabine River LNG export terminal on the Gulf coast near Louisiana. In February 2017, Bloomberg reported Cheniere had entered into a supply deal that would see gas from the Montney shale formation [which straddles B.C. and Alberta] shipped from the facility.

“This is a great potential outlet [for Canada],” Madeline Jowdy, Pira Energy Group’s Senior Director of Global Gas and LNG, told Bloomberg of the Cheniere LNG deal. She added that B.C. LNG projects “look like they are going to be a long time coming, if ever, in my opinion.”

Just a few years ago, B.C. was banking its future on the fate of about 20 proposed LNG facilities — based on the idea that our natural gas would be super-cooled into liquid and exported by ship to lucrative Asian markets. It’s widely acknowledged that B.C. came too late to the party, but this has not been the experience of the U.S.: their LNG export capacity is expected to rise from 2 to nearly 10 billion cubic feet/day between now and the end of 2019 as five LNG plants commence operations.  (To put that in perspective, B.C.’s total production is around 4.6 billion cubic feet/day.)

With this will come a voracious appetite for gas that the bountiful U.S. shale gas fields alone cannot hope to satiate in the decades to come.

Producers Focus on North America

The death of B.C.’s mass LNG export industry was formalized by an announcement by TransCanada on June 14. The company, whose 90,000 km of natural gas pipeline supplies about a quarter of North American consumption, announced it would spend $2 billion to expand its NOVA Gas (NGTL) system to connect northern B.C. and Alberta natural gas producers to “premium intra-basin and export markets.”

This is just part of a wider $5.1 billion program designed to ramp up pipeline capacity in the B.C. and Alberta’s Montney and Deep Basin exploration areas, which have been hurt in recent history in part by a lack of shipping capacity.

During the same week, Enbridge announced that its own T-south line expansion in B.C. could not meet producer demand, while both Veresen and Pembina Pipeline Corp plan to expand their B.C. and Alberta natural gas infrastructure.

How the Death of B.C.’s LNG Dream Could Stoke a B.C. Natural Gas Boom https://t.co/Y784Luv4QX #LNG #climate #energy #bcpoli @TransCanada pic.twitter.com/btXSKZnuXY

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) June 17, 2017

“Our gas in the medium-term is going to go east, not west,” said David Maddison, CEO of Black Swan Energy, one of about a dozen producers that will be using new TransCanada infrastructure, to the Globe and Mail on June 14. He conceded that both uncertainty and the long construction window of proposed B.C. LNG plants make them “something you’re not going to be able to depend on in the short term.”

Changing Price and Supply Scenario

The shale gas boom in the U.S., centred around vast deposits like the Marcellus shale, has meant that the volume of B.C. and Alberta gas being exported to the U.S. declined for years. But this could soon be changing: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives energy analyst David Hughes, who has spent decades studying all the major U.S. shale plays, says a number of factors bode well for the future of B.C. natural gas exports south of the border. 

“Not only are they building a lot of LNG export facilities, but U.S. gas production has peaked within the last 12 months and is now declining. If you look down the road, a huge amount of future production is going to have to come from the Montney, because that is where a major proportion of remaining recoverable gas lies.”

Up to now, the Americans have been prioritizing all the “sweet spots” — the easiest and cheapest locations to extract gas.  Hughes says they are now being forced to work the less-than-ideal locations, which is going to mean lower productivity wells and higher priced gas. 

“Prices are nearly double what they were two years ago, and I think prices are going to go up.”

A Better Use for Our Gas?

Is selling our natural gas in North America better for the planet and British Columbians than sending it on LNG ships to Asia? 

In a report for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives published in May 2015, David Hughes found that burning liquefied, fracked gas exported from B.C. to Asia would ultimately generate emissions similar to coal. He concluded that “exporting B.C. LNG to China would increase greenhouse gas emissions over at least the next 50 years, compared to building state-of-the-art coal plants.” That's in large part due to the enormously energy intensive process of cooling the gas to the point it turns into a liquid (-162 degrees Celsius) for export.

While B.C. gas will be shipped through U.S. LNG facilities in the future, keeping more of it in North America may have its benefits. Low shale gas prices in recent history — from a glut of cheap U.S. shale gas — has incentivized the construction of new gas-fuelled power generation facilities to displace dirtier coal — with expected capacity additions of roughly 10 GW in 2017 and more than 25 GW in 2018. To keep these plants up and running into the future, it’s going to take a lot of natural gas, which in this domestic use is definitely cleaner than coal.

Hughes says keeping more of our gas at home will mean better energy security for British Columbians too. Close to 50 per cent of space heating and 65 per cent of water heating in Canadian homes is currently fuelled by natural gas, according to Natural Resources Canada.

“The concept that we’re going to heat our homes and run everything with windmills and solar, it would be great if it could be done, but I’m skeptical we can scale it up that much. I thought LNG was a bad idea in the long term, because we’re going to need that gas here.” 

Photo: Garth Lenz, compressor station near Blueberry River First Nation in northeastern British Columbia.

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Saskatchewan has developed a bit of a negative reputation on the environmental front lately.

Guess that’s what happens when a premier threatens to sue the federal government over mandated carbon pricing and instead promotes the extremely expensive technology of carbon capture and storage.

That’s why it came as quite a surprise when provincial electricity utility SaskPower announced in mid-May that it had signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) — a contract for guaranteed sales at a fixed price — with geothermal company Deep Earth Energy Production.

The project in Williston Basin is an extremely small one: at five megawatts (MW), it will represent only 0.1 per cent of the province’s current electricity capacity. But it will be the first geothermal power project in Canada and experts say that it’s a huge step forward for geothermal, not only for Saskatchewan but the entire country.

“Saskatchewan is very quiet and all of a sudden boom, they make an announcement,” says Alison Thompson, chair and co-founder of the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association (CanGEA), in an interview with DeSmog Canada. “This is a little bit unexpected, but of course very, very positive. It has to start somewhere.”

“We don’t have any geothermal power generation in Canada yet,” adds Kirsten Marcia, president and CEO of Deep Earth Energy Production, also known as DEEP. “A successful project like DEEP will really help bolster other projects in other provinces to move ahead and get a little more traction.”

There’s also plenty of opportunity for retraining oil and gas workers for geothermal projects, including in manufacturing components, performing electrical work and operating rigs. In 2014, it was calculated by CanGEA that while the controversial Site C Dam in northeastern B.C. would only generate 150 permanent jobs, the same amount of power produced by geothermal would result in 2,000.

Saskatchewan Did What?! Province OKs Canada’s First #Geothermal Power Plant https://t.co/cf6kY2lrkb #SaskPower #cdnpoli #renewableenergy

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) June 7, 2017

A downturn in oil and gas production in Alberta has also left a highly skilled drilling workforce without jobs. The geothermal industry has argued the province’s abandoned oil and gas wells present an opportunity to potentially put thousands of drillers back to work.

Recent Changes to Federal Tax Code Helped Push Project Forward

It’s anticipated that drilling for the project will commence later this year, but DEEP has been attempting to build this project for many years.

Initially, it was expected that power production would begin in 2013.

But Marcia says in an interview that it encountered problems in funding the project, resulting in delays. In 2014, a $2 million pre-feasibility study that was co-funded by Natural Resources Canada and SaskPower concluded that 2017 was a viable operational date for the project if studies and tests were completed in a timely manner.

Thompson — who also serves as a principal of Borealis GeoPower —  points to the federal government’s recent change to the tax code to recognize geothermal heat as renewable energy, which allows for flow-through share capabilities, as a key reason for why the project could finally move forward.

“The province wants to know that the developer is actually going to spend their money and develop,” she says. “By having the mechanism available to raise financing for a project and drill wells, that signals to the province that if they provided the PPA, the private sector could do their part and go ahead and get financing.”

Aquifer Could Support 20 Small Geothermal Plants

Thompson says that in the “volcanic section of the world” — which includes the likes of Iceland, New Zealand and California — it’s not unusual to have a geothermal plant with capacity to generate 200 megawatts of electricity.

That’s simply not possible in most of Canada. Instead, geothermal companies wishing to generate electricity from heat will have to drill over three kilometres into the earth to reach the resource in the range of 120 degrees Celsius, constructing a series of small plants within the same region.

Marcia notes that most geothermal gradings are about 30 degrees Celsius per kilometre. At this location — right along the United States border, near Estevan — it’s about 40 degrees Celsius per kilometre.

In other words, it’s an ideal spot.

According to DEEP, the Williston Basin Hot Sedimentary Aquifer could support 200 megawatts worth of capacity from more than 20 plants.

The current estimate for the first five megawatt plant is around $40 million in capital costs, or about $8 million per megawatt of new installed capacity. For context, British Columbia’s proposed Site C Dam would add 1,100 megawatts for $9 billion, or about $8.2 million per megawatt of installed capacity.

However, Marcia notes that she anticipates the federal government will fund about half of the project, bringing down capital costs significantly. It’s also expected that economies of scale in later projects would result in capital cost savings of 10 per cent.

In addition, DEEP plans to sell the wastewater before reinjecting it back into the earth. Marcia says the most obvious client would be a greenhouse developer, with the wastewater discounted to the price of readily available natural gas and coming with carbon credits for the developer.

“There’s a huge business case for our wastewater,” she explains. “The water that comes out of the plant is still 65 degrees Celsius, so it’s extremely hot still. We’ve done some modelling on what we can do with that: as it turns out, from just one of our plants, we could heat a 45 acre greenhouse.”

In an interview with a Saskatchewan radio station, Marcia suggested that heat could help grow a variety of products, including legal marijuana.

Province Still Plans to Expand Fossil Fuel Power In Future Years

This is all taking place within the context of Saskatchewan’s commitment to have 50 per cent of generating capacity from renewable sources by 2030.

Saskatchewan’s grid currently has 4,437 megawatts of capacity. The plan is to increase that to 7,000 megawatts by 2030, meaning that 3,500 megawatts of capacity will have to come from renewables if the government sticks with its commitment.

“Obviously, five megawatts isn’t a lot when they’re looking at possibly a 7,000 megawatt grid by 2030,” says Mark Bigland-Pritchard, energy consultant and co-author of the report SaskPower’s Carbon Capture Project: What Risk? What Reward? “By itself, it’s insignificant. If they can do a whole lot of them as they are saying, then it’s another contributor.”

Most of the growth in renewables to 2030 will come from new wind power, via a controversial procurement process that only allows for utility-scale producers to bid (effectively disqualifying the community-scale wind projects). Solar projects are expected to add another 60 megawatts, an arguably small amount given the province is one of the sunniest places in North America.

Bigland-Pritchard notes that Saskatchewan’s plan completely disregards the “low-hanging fruit in climate policy” of conservation, and includes a further buildout of fossil fuel powered electricity. In addition, Saskatchewan is the only province that relies on coal-fired power that hasn’t announced a roadmap to phasing out the high-polluting source.

Despite that, he suggests there is potential for geothermal projects in Saskatchewan, especially if DEEP manages to get its first pilot plant working in two years or so.

“If — and it’s an enormous ‘if’ — they can make this geothermal system work in the first one to five units, then they could easily get enough to replace at least one coal unit,” he says.

Electric Utilities Must Grant More Permits for Geothermal

Next up for DEEP is the completion of the $8 million bankable feasibility study, which the company has already secured funding for. Marcia says the company will be drilling in the fourth quarter of this year, once final well licensing is completed and depending on rig availability.

Thompson emphasizes that SaskPower will have to give out far more permits to DEEP and other geothermal companies in order to ensure the power source is allowed to expand; she emphasizes that it’s not that companies don’t have the knowledge or technology or even the financing. The hold-up is the permitting process.

She adds there have been no permits given for geothermal in Alberta.

“[SaskPower’s decision] really speaks to not the resource quality, but to their commitment to use all the tools in their toolbox for renewable energy,” she concludes. “And I hope it sends a strong message to British Columbia, who has been very, very slow in giving out electricity purchase agreements to the geothermal industry, even though the resource there is the best in Canada.”

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After three weeks of nail-biting, British Columbians finally have a clearer sense of what’s in store for the province as the NDP and Greens released their cooperation agreement today.

The 10-page agreement establishes the basis for the Greens to “provide confidence” in an NDP government. Translation: the agreement lays out what the NDP agreed to in return for the Greens guaranteeing to support NDP budgets and confidence motions.

And boy oh boy, is there ever a lot of gold in this document. Here are 10 of the biggest potential game changers on the energy and environment file.

1) Kinder Morgan is In For a Fight

The agreement doesn’t mince words where Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline is concerned. It says the parties will “immediately employ every tool available” to stop the project.

In a press conference Tuesday, Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver countered arguments that B.C.’s prosperity relies on an oil pipeline project: “The idea that a pipeline is going to create jobs in this economy is a myth.”

“I think British Columbians are frankly sick and tired of hearing that the economy of the 21st century is the economy of tomorrow.”

Clean Energy Canada estimates that, with a well-designed clean growth and climate strategy, 270,000 jobs would be created in B.C. by 2025.

2) Site C Dam Will Be Sent for Review

The $9 billion publicly funded Site C hydro dam has been beleaguered by questions about cost and demand. The project will be sent to the B.C. Utilities Commission immediately for review of its “economic viability” in context of the “current supply and demand conditions.” Asked whether construction will be halted while the project undergoes review, NDP leader John Horgan said work will continue. The review will be completed on a six-week and three-month timeframe.

3) Revitalize the Environmental Assessment Process

This one sounds super geeky, but could go a long way to restoring British Columbians’ faith in environmental reviews and, ultimately, allowing for the right kinds of responsible resource development. The federal government is also in the process of reforming federal environmental assessments, so the timing is right.  

10 Potential Game-Changers in B.C.’s NDP-Green Agreement https://t.co/QmO8HMxGaH #bcpoli #bcelxn17 #climate #SiteC #KinderMorgan #cdnpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) May 30, 2017

4) Increase Carbon Tax

The agreement lays out a $5/year increase to the carbon tax beginning in April 2018. This will get B.C. to the federally mandated carbon price of $50/tonne by 2022. The plan also includes expanding the tax to what are known as “fugitive emissions,” which are currently wildly underestimated and untaxed. The parties have also committed to creating a plan to actually meet B.C.’s climate targets (what an idea!).

A 2015 study by Clean Energy Canada and Navius Research found that strong climate leadership would attract an additional $5 billion of renewable energy investment to British Columbia over the coming decade.

5) Transit Funding

The parties will work together to “act immediately to improve transit and transportation infrastructure” to “reduce emissions, create jobs and get people home faster.” This is a pretty vague one, but the fact it made it into the argument makes it clear that it’s a priority.

6) Emerging Economy Task Force

Has a task force ever changed the world? We’re not sure, but we like the sound of this one, which will be charged with developing made-in-B.C. solutions to address the changing nature of business over the next 10 to 25 years.

7) Goodbye GDP, Meet GPI

The agreement also commits to developing a genuine progress indicator, or GPI.

This is a really interesting commitment that represents a fundamental shift to a different way of measuring progress. Right now, we tend to rely on gross domestic product numbers, or GDP. But here’s the thing: when there’s an oil spill, for instance, that can offer a big boost to GDP, but not necessarily be good for society. A genuine progress indicator takes into account health care, safety, a clean environment and other indicators of well-being.

8) Referendum on Proportional Representation

Legislation will be passed during the first session of the legislature, requiring a referendum on proportional representation in the fall of 2018, in tandem with municipal elections. The agreement also stipulates that both parties will campaign in favour of the change.

While there’s been debate about whether the change should be put to a referendum, if successful, this represents perhaps the biggest game-changer of all.

9) Banning Big Money & Lobbying Reform

This one is also huge. In the first session of the legislature, the Greens and NDP will co-operate to pass legislation that will ban corporate, union and out-of-province donations to political parties. The legislation will also place a limit on individual donations. So at long last, B.C. is about to join the rest of Canada in putting limits on what money can buy.

The agreement also outlines lobbying reforms that will prevent lobbying by former politicians for several years after holding office.

Bonus: legislation will also be passed to require a fall and spring sitting of the legislature each year — which means our politicians will actually have to, you know, go to work (Christy Clark cancelled the fall sitting in 2016).

10) Relationship with Indigenous Peoples

The agreement begins by stating that a “foundational piece of this relationship” is that both caucuses support the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the Tsilhqot’in Supreme Court decision.

The Tsilhqot’in became the first indigenous peoples in North America to officially win title to their land with a Supreme Court decision in 2013. Still, that hasn’t stopped the First Nation from having to fend off mining projects supported by the B.C. Liberals.

Much lip service has been paid to UNDRIP (we’re looking at you Trudeau and you Notley), so we’ll have to watch closely to see how that commitment plays out in B.C.

Image: Green party leader Andrew Weaver and NDP leader John Horgan at the signing of the parties' Supply and Confidence Agreement. Photo: BC NDP via Flickr

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The fossil fuel industry lobbied the B.C. government more than 22,000 times between April 2010 and October 2016, according to a report released Wednesday by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives as part of the Corporate Mapping Project.

The report also found that 48 fossil fuel companies and associated industry groups have donated $5.2 million to B.C. political parties between 2008 and 2015 — 92 per cent of which has gone to the BC Liberals.

The analysis found seven of the top 10 political donors from the fossil fuel industry are also B.C.’s most active lobbyists.

The Corporate Mapping Project is a six-year research and public engagement initiative jointly led by the University of Victoria, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Alberta-based Parkland Institute.

Researchers have painstakingly analyzed lobbying and political donation records to demonstrate the extensive political influence of the fossil fuel industry in B.C.

“I was definitely surprised at the sheer volume of lobbying contacts that we found,” Nick Graham, lead author of the report and PhD candidate at the University of Victoria, told DeSmog Canada.

Spectra Energy, Enbridge, FortisBC, Encana, Chevron Canada, CAPP and Teck Resources conducted the majority of registered lobbying contacts, more than 19,500 in total since the lobbyist registry was first initiated in 2010 — an average of 14 lobbying contacts in B.C. per day.

“We were expecting to see some overlap between political donations and lobbying,” Graham said. “Part of what donations help achieve is access to government so we certainly expected to see some of that.”

The top 10 fossil fuel industry donors were responsible for $3.8 million in contributions to the BC Liberals and $270,000 to the BC NDP.

The Corporate Mapping Project report, co-authored by Shannon Daub of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Bill Carroll, professor of sociology at the University of Victoria, is the first systematic analysis of fossil fuel lobbying in B.C.

Top 10 fossil fuel industry donors in B.C. Source: CCPA, Corporate Mapping Project.

Clear Connection Between Lobbying, Donations and Policy Outcomes

“There is a fairly clear connection between lobbying, donations and policy outcomes that is quite troubling,” Daub told DeSmog Canada.

“It can be difficult to draw a line between a political donation or a meeting and policy because so little information is released to the public about what is going on behind closed doors,” Daub said.

But, she added, a more broad analysis like this can help connect the dots.

“We did note the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, for example, in a one year period between October 2015 and August 2016, reported 201 lobbying contacts with the provincial government specifically in relation to the climate leadership plan.”

“And of course that plan turned out to not be much of a plan at all,” Daub added.

The analysis found 28 per cent of lobbying by the top fossil fuel lobbyists was with cabinet ministers.

Several cabinet ministers were the frequent target of lobbying contacts, the most popular being Minister of Natural Gas Development Rich Coleman, who was listed in 733 contacts with the top 10 fossil fuel firms.

The other most contacted senior ministers are Premier Christy Clark (618 contacts), Minister of Energy and Mines Bill Bennett (437), Environment Minister Mary Polak (354) and Finance Minister Mike de Jong (330).

“It really does speak to the development of these close relationships,” Graham said. “You do see particular firms heavily targeting individuals. There is this really tight, if not cozy, ongoing relationship that develops and the perspective of the two become quite closely aligned.”

Companies such as Encana, with significant operations in B.C.’s natural gas plays focused heavily on lobbying Natural Gas Development Minister Coleman, the analysis found.

Source: CCPA, Corporate Mapping Project

Corporate Influence Far Outweighs Environmental Voices

Graham added the analysis was shaped in part by the B.C. government’s push for increased extractive industry projects in the province for nearly the last decade.

“The paper began from the perspective of seeing this really incredible push around expanding fossil fuel development in the province especially around natural gas and the really aggressive promotion of the LNG industry in particular by the government.”

“Part of our question was, ‘how can we explain this? What explains this?’ ” Graham said.

“What we found are there are multiple explanations that point to the structural power of industry and the provincial government’s reliance on resource rent. But also major corporate influence: the ability of corporations to have these stores of capital to pressure government on an ongoing basis.”

The analysis found a total of 1,300 lobby contacts between the government and environmental or non-governmental organizations during the same timeframe.

Daub said there is clearly not level access to provincial decision-makers in B.C.

“What shows really clearly from these numbers is that we have one industry with a very disproportionate level of access to government and government policy,” she said.

B.C.’s Ongoing Transparency Problem

B.C. has some of the weakest political donation rules in the country, which allow unlimited donations from individuals, foreigners, corporations and unions.

“Clearly it’s just time to ban big money in politics all together. One of the recommendations in our report is to put a stop to corporate and union donations and a cap on individual contributions.”

Federally, political parties cannot accept donations from corporations or unions and provinces like Quebec place a $100 limit on personal donations.

“It’s supposed to be one person, one vote,” Daub said. “Instead in B.C. it’s more like one dollar, one vote.”

A level democratic playing field is important for the public to have confidence in the political system but also to feel they can meaningfully participate in the process, Daub said.

Beyond problems with special interest dollars flooding the political process, B.C. also has poor transparency requirements when it comes to lobbying.

Lobbyists must register to lobby in B.C. and provide a list of intended meetings. However, there is no official record kept that distinguishes between intended and actual meetings.

Any meetings requested by public officials are not registered.

In addition, lobby records do not give the public detailed information about the content of meetings.

“Teck is one of the biggest lobbyists in the province among industry groups and they have a particular focus on MLAs,” Daub said. “But what they report they’ve lobbied on is things like ‘mining,’ or ‘employment and training’ or ‘aboriginal affairs.’ ”

“That doesn’t tell us anything about what they’re actually talking to these public officials about.”

Daub said better records should be kept of lobbying interactions that gives the public a decent account of when and how frequently these meetings are taking place and what public policy matters are at stake.

“A more transparent system would make it much easier for the public to find out what is going on in these closed door meetings.”

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If you read any commentary in the wake of Trudeau’s pipeline approvals, you might have come across the sentiment that pipeline opponents are “environmental NIMBYs” and “angry mobs” who are “stuck in bondage to strange ideologies…eyes ablaze with truth oil,” having “demolished trust in agencies.”

Conversely, pipeline proponents are “realistic” and “rational,” able to offer up “informed discussion and courtesy” due to their nuanced understandings of economics and deep respect for regulatory processes.

“In the current political climate, if you disagree with an economic model or the critical assumptions underlying it you court the risk of being labelled an extremist or emotional, or simply unqualified to participate in the debate,” says Jason MacLean, assistant professor of law at Lakehead University and author of two recent Maclean’s essays on climate policy.

It’s a quaint notion: proponents of oilsands and pipeline expansion are mere technocrats only trying to do what’s best for Canada but are being tragically derailed by rabid protesters who don’t care about facts and figures.

But it disguises the much deeper fact that fossil fuel companies exist for the sole purpose of ensuring maximum returns for their shareholders.

Writing off industry opponents as blindly anti-everything ignores the incredible amount of sociopolitical influence the fossil fuel industry deploys to maintain its position in an increasingly carbon-constrained world.

Fossil Fuel Industry’s Barriers to a Low-Carbon Economy

“Private investments of [the fossil fuel industry’s] magnitude create an enormous inertia because the investors will want their money back and investments recuperated, and profit in the end,” Andreas Malm, author of Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, told DeSmog Canada.

“That means they will fight tooth and nail to maintain the infrastructures for as long as possible and for as long as they can generate revenue.”

Despite a clear and urgent need to transition our energy systems to renewable sources, dismantling fossil fuel-based infrastructure has proven “very, very difficult to do,” says Malm, who serves as an associate senior lecturer in human ecology at Sweden’s Lund University.

“Efforts to mitigate climate change have generally been very naive about how deeply rooted fossil fuels are in certain power structures related to wealth accumulation.”

“Their business interests are at stake here,” he concludes. “They want to survive. They want to continue digging fossil fuels out of the ground. As long as they are not challenged, we won’t make any progress on climate.”

From supercharged lobbying efforts to hefty political donations to high-profile public relations campaigns that influence even our deepest personal notions of freedom, the fossil fuel industry plays an aggressive role in contouring the politically possible  — all in an effort to keep opponents and alternatives at bay.

Fossil Fuels and the Making of a Carbon-Dependent Way of Life

A common refrain from fossil fuel companies and associations is that their products underpin our entire way of life.

In many ways, this is true.

As Bob Johnson, associate professor of history at National University in San Diego and author of Carbon Nation: Fossil Fuels in the Making of American Culture, points out, everything from cooking soup on a stove, to practising hot yoga, to flying across the country to visit relatives for Christmas, to protecting national parks from deforestation draws on the availability of cheap fossil fuels.

But it’s also no coincidence that we’re living in a society completely dependent on fossil fuels.

“That way of life had to be engineered,” says Timothy Mitchell, chair and professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University and author of Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil.

“The oil companies and others worked very hard to create a way of life that would become enormously dependent on oil and carbon-heavy: gas-guzzling automobiles, to interstate highway systems, to suburban life, to any number of ways of living to which there were always alternatives.”

It might sound conspiratorial. But there are many examples of fossil fuel companies directly funding efforts to deny climate change, including ExxonMobil and Talisman Energy (in 2004, the latter funnelled money to the notorious Friends of Science group, which claims climate change is caused by solar flares).

Mitchell says industry has also done a lot to encourage car-based cultures, including sponsoring and publishing travel guides, maps and ads in which the car became a centrepiece of consumer lifestyles.

Johnson said that’s been aided by the work of think tanks and industry associations — including the Cato Institute (started and funded by Charles Koch) and the American Petroleum Institute — creating a deep cultural relationship between concepts of mobility and freedom.

Johnson says an industry film in the 1950s proposed a Petroleum Bill of Rights, taking the U.S. Constitution and assigning relationships between specific articles and petroleum, such as the freedom of movement and travel.

“These are people and institutions whose goal is to shape public opinion through things like children’s programming, editorials, buying up newspaper influence, having journalists in hand and subsidizing politicized science,” Johnson says.

As the University of Ottawa’s Patrick McCurdy has identified with his MediaToil project, multi-million dollar advertising campaigns by corporations have strategically evolved over the years in response to criticisms, with recent efforts targeting “lifestyle rhetoric.”

Enbridge’s recent “Life Takes Energy” campaign directly connects “dinner with dad,” “amazing journeys” and caring for one’s newborn child to oil and gas products.

While not technically wrong, this and other industry campaigns are designed to obscure the ways societies can actually make choices about the types of energy used.

Many of our energy demands can be at least partly met with a substituted combination of solar, wind and geothermal, accompanied by significant investments in public transit infrastructure, energy efficiency and smart grids. Municipalities can be key players in such scenarios, with the powers to amend zoning bylaws, limit urban sprawl via developer levies, approve bike lanes and cycle tracks, and even plant more trees to reduce demands on air conditioning.

There are many alternatives. But you won’t hear such ideas in fossil fuel advertisements.

Fossil Fuel Industry and the Purchase of Political Influence

But the fossil fuel industry invests in much more than public relations campaigns. Lobbying and political donations are also ways industry can leverage its economic capital for political influence.

In Canada fossil fuel companies and associations have lobbied the federal government hundreds of times since they were elected in October 2015.

Major players include Suncor (96 times), CAPP (84 times), Enbridge (66 times), Imperial Oil (62 times), Shell Canada (59 times), TransCanada (39 times), Northern Gateway (38 times) and Kinder Morgan (26 times).

And those are only the communications that we know about.

Under the current iteration of the Lobbying Act, lobbyists only have to log “oral, prearranged” communications, which leaves emails, texts, letters and speaking at a “non-prearranged time” wide open.

Duff Conacher, founder and long-time coordinator of Democracy Watch, says the ongoing federal cash-for-access scandal — in which people paid $1,525 to attend one of 100 Liberal fundraisers in private homes and have the chance to lobby Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and high-ranking cabinet ministers — was almost certainly taken advantage of by fossil fuel executives, even if that fact remains undocumented.

“It’s completely undemocratic and unethical for the government to keep this information secret,” Conacher says.

Fossil fuel companies are some of the largest companies in the country, meaning they have considerable resources to dedicate to toward activities like hiring lobbyists and potentially hosting or attending fundraisers.

Conacher also notes that while corporate donations were banned at the federal level in 2007, it’s still possible that companies use executives, managers, spouses and family members to secretly donate to a party and riding association using corporate money; an Elections Quebec audit identified $12.8 million in likely funnelled donations from corporations to provincial parties between 2006 and 2011.

“We essentially have a system of legalized bribery with our donation system and secret unethical lobbying,” Conacher says. “You put those two together and you’re going to have corruption of the decisions that cabinet ministers make across the country.”

The ‘Revolving Door’ Between Industry and Politics

All of those actions take place from the outside, with lobbyists and executives pushing for change either legally or otherwise.

But industry also has significant influence from the inside of governments.

“We see an easy trafficking between fossil industry players and government agencies: a revolving door between the carbon industry and politics,” Johnson says.

Powerful industry players in Canada have gone on to sit on environmental review panels, lead staff at the ministry of natural resources and lead political campaigns.

The embeddedness of industry players in the upper political echelon can have real world consequence, Johnson says.

“You end up with really soft regulations, really slippery policy language, the giveaways of mineral rights.”

For instance, Janet Annesley, the former head of CAPP and current chief of staff for Natural Resources Canada, has officially met twice with her former employer, CAPP, as well as members of CAPP, including Suncor, Encana and CNRL.

Tracing Fossil Fuel Influence Through Political Cycle

And these three factors — advertising, lobbying and appointments — all achieve maximum influence in our current electoral system.

Imre Szeman, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and co-director of the University of Alberta’s Petrocultures research cluster, says that for him, the approvals of the Trans Mountain and Line 3 pipelines are an outcome of Trudeau’s political calculation.

The pipelines, he said, go hand in hand with the government’s controversial backtracking on electoral reform.

“We operate by means of a government form that was established in the 18th century: post-monarchy, constitutional democracies that operate on a four-year electoral cycle,” Szeman says.

“Once again, we have a situation where governments are more concerned with their own electoral possibilities than making true, long-term decisions about what they’re going to do.”

Entrenched, powerful interests greatly benefit from a system in which politicians must think very short-term in scope.

Fossil fuel companies generate a significant amount of GDP, exports, capital investments, jobs and government revenues, which are good selling points for a government that must have numbers to show come election time.

Malm says the obvious first step to managing climate change — let alone solving it — is to put an end to any expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure. Others have argued the same.

But political parties want to win elections. And fossil fuel companies will do everything they can to exploit that fact, in desperate attempt to maximize profits from huge capital investments in an increasingly carbon-constrained world.

It’s an extremely dangerous combo.

“When you have a very powerful industry that’s important to the GDP, it’s going to have major effects on what the government does,” Szeman concludes.

“This is a matter of social survival for all of us in the long run.”

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If you feel exhausted by Canada’s fevered debates about oil pipelines, liquefied natural gas terminals, renewable energy projects and mines, there just might be relief in sight.

Right now, the federal government is reviewing its environmental assessment (EA) process. Yes, it’s reviewing its reviews. And while that might sound kinda boring, it could actually revolutionize the way Canada makes decisions about energy projects.

“My highest hope is that Canada will take advantage of this once in a lifetime opportunity … and take a really visionary approach to environmental assessment,” said Anna Johnston, staff counsel at West Coast Environmental Law.

That could include implementing something called “strategic environmental assessment,” which creates a forum for the larger discussions about things like oil exports, LNG development or all mining in an area.

So instead of the current environmental assessment process, in which pipeline reviews have become proxy battles for issues such as climate change and cumulative effects, there’d actually be a higher-level review designed specifically to examine those big-picture questions.

This week, the panel that will help determine the future of environmental decision-making arrives in B.C. at the end of its cross-country tour.

We spoke to Johnston — who is part of the advisory council providing advice to the panel — about the review, how strategic environmental assessment could help move Canada’s energy conversation out of gridlock and how Canadians can get involved.

Q: Why does this review matter to everyday Canadians?

What we saw with CEAA 2012 [the changes to environmental assessment made under the Harper government] was that it was a real erosion of democracy and it put Canadians’ environment at risk.

We’re in the middle of this national conversation about what we’re going to do about climate change, for example, and we’re seeing protests across the country about projects that have gone through environmental assessment largely because people have felt like the environmental assessment was inadequate and there was a lack of transparency and accountability in the review process.

Good environmental assessment allows the public to have a meaningful say.

The public really cares about climate change and they really care about their ability to have a say. So it’s about trusting government and it’s about knowing that you’re able to have a say and influence decisions.

But then it’s also about, on this other level, how are we going to get to carbon neutral by 2050? Environmental assessment is the main tool for making decisions about proposals that affect the environment.

There’s a lot of concern that no matter how good the [climate] plans might be that we need to make sure they influence the project-level decisions.

Q: How should we best grapple with those big societal questions?

Right now we’re grappling with them at the project level. So when Kinder Morgan or Energy East proposes a pipeline to take tarsands bitumen to tidewater all of these concerns come up at that project level, where it takes an incredibly long time and the reviewing bodies and the proponent argue it’s outside of the scope of the assessment.

The solution is to create a forum for those policy-level discussions where you have essentially an environmental assessment of a government policy or a plan to have oil to tidewater, without tying that conversation to a particular project.

Right now we’re trying to have these really high-level national conversations about climate change, tarsands, at the same time as in a project-level assessment, getting down into the weeds of whether or not a pipeline should be sited here, maybe on a different route, what are the impacts on a particular species?

So it’s just putting way too much into one basket.

Best practices in environmental assessment say you have to begin with what’s called a strategic environmental assessment. And that’s where you have those policy discussions. Once you get that strategic assessment that has examined those bigger picture policy-level issues then those assessments can provide guidance at the project level.

So it might be that if we’d had a national conversation about oil to tidewater 10 years ago, we would have been able to decide as a country that that was not a viable idea, that it was going to bring us away from any reasonable goals to do our fair share on climate change and that we’d never approve a project. And that would have saved everybody a ton of money and a ton of time.

Q: How does a strategic environmental assessment actually work? In some senses, aren’t those policy-level decisions typically political decisions?

Yea, they are political decisions but we already have a requirement that government plans, policies and programs that require ministerial approval get a strategic environmental assessment. That requirement is set out in the cabinet directive.

The problem is that it’s not being followed. The auditor general and the commissioner of environment and sustainable development have found that time and time again that government departments and agencies are not doing strategic environmental assessments in the vast majority of cases.

So it’s already required, the government has already acknowledged the importance of it. It’s just that we need to put that requirement into legislation so that there’s more accountability.

There’s another kind of strategic environmental assessment where you are doing a regional scale environmental assessment, but you narrow it in some way so you might only be looking at all mining in an area, or all oil and gas in an area, and you come out with a regional-scale plan for how you want that kind of development to occur.

There’s pretty broad consensus among not just environmental groups, but also among industry groups, that doing those kinds of regional-scale assessments would really ease the burden on proponents, on the public, on indigenous peoples, on government, because it would mean first of all that we’re creating a vision for what we want development in the region to look like and how we want the environment in the future to look like and then set out these pathways for how to get there.

Then we’d have that strategic-level guidance for the project-level assessments. It would ease the burden at the project level

Q: Would this work for something like the development of LNG, for instance?

Yea, that’s the perfect example of where we should have done a strategic EA.

Right at the very first whisperings of LNG in B.C., we should have done a strategic EA of LNG in B.C., figured out whether we should have LNG at all — could we have LNG and achieve our climate obligations and goals?

Are there particular communities who would like to have LNG? Are there particular environments that could sustain an LNG facility? Are there particular environments that are a no-go zone? Many would say that Lelu Island should have been flagged right off the bat as a no-go zone.

If we had done that at the very outset, then when the project proponents come along, they’d have the guidance from a strategic EA that would have said: maybe we can have one or two in B.C. Here are the different temporal spacings they’d need to occur in and here are the locations, the pipeline routes and the LNG facility locations where it might work. And then once you get to the project-level EA you’re looking much more closely at the specifics.

Q: Do you feel hopeful about the outcome of the review?

Yes, I feel hopeful. I think the biggest challenge that this panel is facing right now is how to drill down to really concrete recommendations to the government. So they’re hearing a lot of things … at the 50,000-foot level … and the difficulty for them will be drilling down to a more practical implementation level.

Q: Will fixing the environmental review process really solve our problems? Or ultimately do we need that to come from the political level?

I think you need both. You need elected decision makers making good decisions for the people who voted them in. But you can’t rely exclusively on them so we need to have good processes. And that’s one of the main purposes of environmental assessment.

Q: What is the thinking about recommendations — should they be binding?

There are two schools of thought on that … the minister probably should retain some sort of discretion but I think that the legislation needs to set out much more explicitly the criteria by which she makes her decisions … right now, our decision-making process is the minister concludes: “Will this project result in significant adverse impacts and, if so, are they justified?”

And the justification decision is made by cabinet behind the dark curtains of cabinet, where they get to take into consideration anything, even beyond the environmental assessment, including political considerations.

That black box of the justification decision is what really undermines public confidence in the process.

So you can have ministers making decisions, but the legislation should really clearly set out the decision-making criteria, so that the public, so that indigenous people, so that proponents know exactly what this project needs to achieve in order to get approved.

Q: What are the biggest points of push back from industry?

One of the things I’ve been hearing from industry is that they think the provinces should be entrusted exclusively to do environmental assessments where they have jurisdiction or where there’s shared jurisdiction. I don’t share that view. I think you get better processes when you have both parties, or all parties, at the table, collaborating, drawing on the highest standards of process.

Q: Who should participate in these hearings?

Anyone who is concerned about the environment, who has experience with environmental assessment, anyone who was shut out of the Kinder Morgan [Trans Mountain] environmental assessment or had to fill out those long forms, and anybody who has concerns about how the public is engaged in decision-making.

There are two different types of public process: there are the hearings, which are a little bit more formal and you get one-on-one time with the panel for 15 minutes. And then there are the workshops, which more people are able to attend and it’s more of a dialogue on key questions on federal EA and I think that it’s really important that the panel get a diversity of experiences and a diversity of voices.

This isn’t just for experts for sure.

More Resources

• The panel is holding sessions in Kamloops, Fort St John, Prince Rupert, Vancouver and Nanaimo, finishing up on December 15. Find out how to get involved.
• The panel’s report will be released on Jan. 31, 2017, followed by the release of the Fisheries Act review in mid to late February and the review of the National Energy Board on March 31. *UPDATE: In December, the panel’s deadline was extended until March 31. There will also be a 30-day public comment period on the report.
• Read Johnston’s full participant’s guide for the environmental assessment review.

This interview has been condensed. 

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Almost 30 months after 25-million cubic metres of contaminated sludge and water swept into lakes and creeks around the Mount Polley Mine, near Williams Lake, MiningWatch Canada has filed a private prosecution against the provincial government and Mount Polley Mining Corporation.

MiningWatch, supported by a coalition of environmental, First Nations and social justice organizations from Canada and Alaska, was forced to take action because the Crown has failed to lay charges and enforce the Fisheries Act despite ample evidence, said Ugo Lapointe, MiningWatch national program coordinator.

“We are all concerned that, almost 30 months later, despite clear evidence of impacts on waters, fish and fish habitat, no sanctions and no penalties have been brought forwards by any level of government,” Lapointe said.

“This sends the wrong signal to the industry across the country and undermines public confidence in the capacity of our regulatory system to work effectively to protect our environment.”

The collapse of the Mount Polley tailings pond dam destroyed or permanently affected more than 2.6 million square metres of aquatic and riparian habitat, according to MiningWatch.

Mount Polley is a gold and copper mine operated by Mount Polley Mining Corporation, a subsidiary of Vancouver-based Imperial Metals. The company also owns Red Chris Mine near the B.C. border with Southeast Alaska and is exploring the possibility of opening two mines in Clayoquot Sound.

Mount Polley closed after the 2014 dam breach, but started full production again last year when it was given a clean bill of health by the province.

The MiningWatch charges were filed in Provincial Court in Williams Lake Tuesday, using a provision of the Criminal Code that allows citizens to start a private prosecution if they believe someone has committed an indictable offence.

The legislation is a valuable constitutional safeguard that provides for citizens to enforce federal laws, such as the Fisheries Act, to protect public resources, said MiningWatch lawyer Lilina Lisenko.

The same legislation was used by salmon farm activist Alexandra Morton in a case against Marine Harvest Canada, when the company pleaded guilty to illegal possession of wild salmon, and for an ongoing lawsuit by Marilyn Burgoon against Executive Fuel Flight Services after 33,000 litres of jet fuel spilled into Lemon Creek.

“The next step is to go through the process hearing and, if the court accepts the evidence, then they set up a trial date,” Lapointe said in an interview.

However, looking at the massive expense of taking the province and a mining corporation to court, Lapointe is hoping the case will be picked up by the Federal Crown.

“They can decide whether to take over the case or not,” he said.

#MtPolley & BC Gov't Target of Criminal Charges Brought by Watchdog @MiningWatch Canada https://t.co/eOiRNGj9Cz #bcpoli #bcmining #cdnpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) October 19, 2016

MiningWatch lawyers will be arguing that Mount Polley Mining Corporation and the province failed to implement minimum safeguards, which led to the largest mine-waste spill in Canadian history and to violations of the Fisheries Act.

The province was aware that the tailings pond and dam were not constructed according to design, but the Ministry of Energy and Mines did not enforce the law or apply its own policies, says a MiningWatch background paper.

Last December B.C. Chief Inspector of Mines, Al Hoffman decided not to forward charges to Crown counsel over the collapse of the tailings pond dam.

At that time Hoffman said that the company had poor practices, but he could not find evidence of non-compliance with mining regulations.

Hoffman found a major cause of the dam failure was a weak glacial soil layer beneath the foundation of the dam and other factors included the slope of the pond’s embankment, inadequate water management and insufficient beaches.

Imperial Metals is suing two engineering firms for damages over the dam failure.

B.C.’s Auditor General Carol Bellringer found in a report released in May that provincial monitoring and inspections of mines were inadequate to ensure mine operators complied with requirements.

Another investigation into the Mount Polley disaster is being led by B.C.’s Conservation Officer Service with assistance from Environment Canada, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and RCMP, but there is no indication whether charges will be laid.

Than investigation is ongoing, a spokesman for the B.C. Ministry of Environment said Tuesday.

A letter to MiningWatch lawyer Lilina Lysenko, written last month by Thomas Hlavac of Fisheries and Oceans, said investigators have served a number of search warrants to obtain evidence.

“That evidence is under examination by the investigators. Any charges supported (by) the evidence will be recommended to the Public Prosecution Service of Canada for their consideration and action,” Hlavac wrote.

Tara Scurr of Amnesty International Canada, one of the organizations supporting MiningWatch, said it is concerning that the mine has been granted a license to resume full operations when the Conservation Officer Service’s criminal investigation has not yet finished.

“While there is evidence of some impact on fish and fish habitat, many questions remain to be answered about long-term impacts and what role people affected by the spill will have in determining any remedies that are required,” Scurr said.

Bev Sellars, chair of the group First Nations Women Advocating for Responsible Mining and a councillor with the Xat’sull First Nation in Williams Lake, said there is no point in having laws if governments and industry are not held accountable when they are violated.

“The disaster that was the Mount Polley tailings pond collapse is not over for those of us who live and depend on the lands and waters and particularly on the salmon that have always sustained us,” she said.

“Nor is it over for those living in the shadows of other existing and planned mines across B.C. who are acutely aware of the government’s own panel of experts who reported we can expect to see two more such failures every decade,” she said.

Mount Polley Mining Corporation referred questions to Steve Robertson, Imperial Metals vice-president of corporate affairs, who did not respond to calls from DeSmog Canada Tuesday.

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As the cost of producing energy from wind and sun continues to drop, power produced by the Site C dam will be an increasingly bad bargain, according to leading U.S. energy economist Robert McCullough.

In a report comparing the cost of nuclear, hydro and natural gas energy with power produced by solar and land-based wind farms, McCullough concludes that renewables cost less than half the cost of hydro.

“While there would be costs associated with suspending or halting construction of Site C, I remain of the view that BC Hydro could save $112.74-million on an annual basis by instead building wind and solar. This amount could be higher if tax credits for renewable energy were considered,” McCullough wrote in a cover letter to Ken Boon, Peace Valley Landowner Association president.

The initial report by McCullough looked at the economics of closing the aging Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in Southern California. A major factor in the decision to close the plant was that nuclear, like coal and hydropower, no longer compared favourably with increasingly low natural gas prices and renewable energy.

“While natural gas prices plummeted over the past decade, the cost of renewables also fell — sharply — as economies of scale in wind and solar dominated the market,” McCullough wrote.

McCullough, an expert on power utilities in the Pacific Northwest and principal of an energy policy research company based in Portland, then looked at conclusions drawn in the Diablo Canyon report in relation to Site C.

If BC Hydro put a halt to Site C construction it would free up more than $112 million annually to spend on other pressing infrastructure projects or BC Hydro could write a cheque for $57.84 to every B.C. household every year, McCullough suggested.

The provincial government has said that wind and solar are not viable options because they are intermittent, rather than firm sources of power.

But McCullough noted that hydroelectric energy is also subject to monthly and annual variability.

“As penetration of renewables increases, the portfolio effect of many different projects has reduced the overall variability of output very significantly in recent years,” he said.

McCullough concluded that the 2016 cost of producing solar energy would be $59 per megawatt hour, while wind would be $72 and Site C almost $84.

Yeowza! Halting Construction of #SiteC Could Save $112-million Annually, Says Energy Expert #bcpoli @LavoieJudith https://t.co/cEuaO6BX0t

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) October 11, 2016

Last year, shortly before construction began on the $9-billion project that will create an 83-kilometre reservoir on the Peace River, McCullough was commissioned by the Peace Valley Landowners Association to take a look at the business case for the project and concluded that BC Hydro had taken liberties with its figures to make Site C look better than alternatives, such as small, independent hydro projects.

That report found that Site C was more than three times as costly as renewables and natural gas and McCullough publicly called Site C an expensive luxury.

The government has stuck to its figures, saying they have been rigorously scrutinized, and has steadfastly refused to send the project to the B.C. Utilities Commission for review.

Ken Boon said in an interview that it should not come as a shock to government that there are cheaper options, but they have insisted on using “trumped up and very optimistic numbers.”

“But even using those figures they don’t compare to using renewables and then what happens when it inevitably goes over budget as always seems to happen with large projects such as hydroelectric dams?” he asked.

“Then there’s the whole problem of building a big white elephant instead of small green projects as and when you need them…Building 1950’s technology in 2016 is not making much sense.”

McCullough’s report looks only at the financial aspects, but the cost also has to be counted in other areas, such as environmental harm and socio-economic problems, Boon said.

A recent analysis from a group of academics at the University of British Columbia found the Site C dam is the most environmentally destructive project ever considered under the federal Canadian Environmental Assessment Act.

“This just reaffirms once more that this project needs to go to a robust B.C. Utilities Commission hearing with cross-examination and witnesses under oath. What this report says is that it’s not too late,” he said.

Image: Site C dam construction along the banks of the Peace River. Photo: Garth Lenz/DeSmog Canada 

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(Valemount, B.C.) — A forestry town is working to re-invent itself as a renewable energy leader with a project that promises community revitalization from the ground up.  

The mountain village of Valemount, British Columbia, located along the Rocky Mountain trench is eyeing the nearby Canoe Reach hot springs — one of the hottest surface hot springs in Canada — as a source of geothermal heat and renewable electricity generation.

“Valemount used to be a typical northern forest town,” Silvio Gislimberti, head of the Valemount Geothermal Association, told DeSmog Canada. “But now we would like to create a geothermal industrial park.”

An old mill that shut down in 2007 provides a near perfect location for Borealis Geopower, the company working with the community to make something of the region’s geothermal potential.

Craig Dunn, chief geologist with Borealis Geopower, said Valemount is one of the best-known hot spots for geothermal development in all of Canada.

“The resource opportunity is pretty incredible all the way down the Rocky Mountain trench, including opportunities like Radium and Fairmont, which are all a part of the system.”

Valemount has a “competitive advantage” according to Gislimberti.

“We know we have a good heat source, that heat source is — relatively speaking — close to the surface, so 1.5 to two kilometres down, and we have easy road access to the Kinbasket Canoe Reach region from existing forestry roads,” he said.

Valemount sits on the end of a long power line, which means any electricity generated in the area could be fed back into the provincial grid. Unlike large-scale hydro projects like the Site C dam, geothermal has a very small environmental footprint. And unlike wind and solar, geothermal can provide base-load electricity production even when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.

“I think the concept is great,” said Steve Grasby, geochemist with Natural Resources Canada. “Instead of looking at where the high potential regions are in Canada — which can sometimes be far from demand — they’re starting with the demand.”

Grasby said it just makes sense to explore heat resources “near a town that is closer to people and demand.”

“The question is can they find a reliable heat source,” Grasby said. “My understanding is there hasn’t been any exploration drilling done yet. That will be the telltale thing.”

Grasby added geothermal is similar to oil and gas exploration: “You just don’t know until you start drilling,” he said.

Borealis began to engage with the community in Valemount in 2010 after the company received a geothermal exploration permit from the B.C. government. The permit grants Borealis the opportunity many other geothermal developers across the border in Alberta are desperate for — taking a commercial geothermal project from the drawing board to the drill bore.

But for Borealis, and for the villagers of Valemount, the geothermal dream amounts to much more than power generation.

Borealis hopes to build a 15-megawatt power plant that will supply power back to the BC Hydro grid but the community envisions a “holistic energy development program,” as Dunn put it, that will support a whole host of community-led projects.

“Places like Iceland are getting more and more use of what is called heat-cascading,” Dunn said. “So you have a high-temperature resource that may be used for power, then it may be used for brewing applications, and then greenhouses and in the end it may be used to make sure your sidewalk doesn’t freeze.”

Meet The Forestry Town Striving to Become Canada’s First #Geothermal Village https://t.co/6QSYozKwWv #bcpoli #renewables

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) August 19, 2016

Beyond that, Dunn said locals already have plans for the residual heat leftover from the proposed 15-megawatt power plant Borealis wants to power with steam-driven turbines.

“That creates an opportunity for what looks like an eco-village or a geo-park…That means we can have a number of organizations like greenhouses, fish farming, brewery, silviculture, or timber industry applications in close proximity and they can actually take advantage of each other’s opportunities, trading CO2 with each other if necessary from the brewery back to growing operations.”

The local Three Ranges Brewery is already lined up to use the geothermal resources developed by Borealis.

“Three Ranges brewery is one of the Robson Valley highlight reels of new development in the area. It’s a small microbrewery that brews incredible beer — if I do say so myself,” Dunn said with a laugh.

Three Ranges owner and brewer Michael Lewis said he is excited to incorporate geothermal energy into his operations.

“As a brewery we use a lot of temperature control — both on the hot side and the cooling side. My options here are either propane and electric and we use primarily electric, but it would be nice to have a renewable energy resource like geothermal that we could use on the heating and cooling sides and get the best bang for our buck.”

“It would make us the first geothermal brewery in Canada,” Lewis said.

Lewis said the village was quick to establish a Direct Use Heat Committee and the Valemount Geothermal Society when the idea of developing the heat source first arose.

“There’s a rising tide making sure we get something going and become the first geothermal village in the entire country.”

The idea of creating a new zero-waste community while also using geothermal heat is exciting, Lewis said.

“It has the potential for being a really ticketable showcase to show the world what can be done with geothermal.”

Despite the excitement, there is still the issue of the high upfront cost of geothermal. “It’s significantly more expensive because it’s not highly practiced.”

Lewis said even transitioning his brewery to use a geothermal heat-exchange system is going to cost him. “It’s more expensive than doing something with natural gas, but it’s smarter.”

“It’s a part of that pioneering spirit that is this valley.”

Alison Thompson, president and founder of the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association, said the community of Valemount has exhibited an extraordinary amount of interest in geothermal, which puts the project at a huge advantage.

“You can have an association, you can have government, industrial project proponents pushing for projects, but there’s something to be said for pull,” Thompson told DeSmog Canada.

“The villagers are very well informed. That’s what really sets them apart.”

Thompson added the community established a Geothermal Committee and has sought out independent experts to weigh in on questions that come up about the project.

“I think this is what is so unique in Valemount — it’s not one person or one committee, or one business, or group: it is the village.”

“For other communities that are interested, I think they could take a lesson from the way Valemount has nurtured this and rolled it out to be inclusive,” Thompson said.

Corie Marshall, president of the Valemount Geothermal Society, said locals are prevented from growing food beyond the short summer season so the community is planning on using warm water leftover from the proposed geothermal power plant to heat greenhouses throughout the colder months.

“A lot of times in the winter we can get minus 35, sometimes minus 40…We tend to get a lot of snow. There are also times in the summer where people lose their tomatoes because of frost.”

Many people feel conflicted about burning wood for heat and even for heating greenhouses because of the impacts on air quality, Marshall said.

“We’re at the end of a transmission line that comes up from Kamloops. There are times when a branch falls near Kamloops and we’re out of power, three hours away,” she noted.

Geothermal electricity production offers a way to both stabilize the local grid as well as limit the need for electricity from direct heat use, Marshall said.

Marshall said that at this stage the project needs financial support to take it to the next step. Borealis is currently on the hunt for project investors.

“The biggest thing is we need to actually drill holes. Borealis Geopower has done lots of surface studies, a lot of good science, good information but at one point we need to drill holes. The drilling is expensive but now is the best time to do it because so many of the drill rigs are out of work in Alberta.”

“Somebody needs to find — or fund — the first drills and then we go from there.”

When asked when she hopes that will happen, Marshall smiled and said, “yesterday.”

Image: Carol Linnitt

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