Nothing remains at the Rocky Mountain Fort site where Peace Valley farmers and First Nations camped for 60 days in the hopes of stopping clear-cut logging for the Site C dam. The camp was dismantled in March and the old-growth spruce and cottonwood forest was logged, as BC Hydro prepares to convert the Class 1 heritage site into a Site C waste rock dump.

But one notable thing still stands: the civil lawsuit BC Hydro filed in January against five campers and a supporter, a suit the B.C. Civil Liberties Association describes as a matter “of grave concern.”

The 13-page lawsuit accuses six Peace Valley residents of conspiracy, intimidation, trespass, creating a public and a private nuisance, and “intentional interference with economic relations by unlawful means.”

Most worrisome for the people named is that the suit seeks financial damages for BC Hydro that could result in the loss of their homes, life savings or other assets. Five of the six already stand to lose their houses, farms, land or traditional territory to the nearly $9 billion Peace River dam.

Josh Paterson, executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA), says the association is extremely concerned about the civil suit because it could put a chill on freedom of expression. It might cause others “to think twice before they talk about their political opinion.”

SLAPP style #SiteC suit by @BCHydro might stop others from expressing political opinion https://t.co/bO9dZGmsPc @SavePeaceValley #bcpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) May 25, 2016

BCCLA’s unease is heightened because BC Hydro is a Crown corporation, says Paterson. “For a government agency to come down in that way is of grave concern. What it does is send a message, perhaps deliberately, that ‘you’d better be careful if you plan to oppose these kinds of developments’…BC Hydro as a public institution should be very cautious about making these kinds of claims for damages it would impose.”

The civil suit, according to University of Victoria law professor Chris Tollefson, bears some of the hallmarks of a SLAPP suit, a strategic lawsuit against public participation.

SLAPP suits can stifle freedom of speech and quash opposition to controversial projects like the Site C dam, which Premier Christy Clark has vowed to push “past the point of no return,” despite four on-going court cases against the dam by Treaty 8 First Nations and Peace Valley landowners.

A fifth on-going legal action, launched by the Blueberry River First Nations, claims treaty rights have been violated by the cumulative impacts of Site C and other industrial development in the Peace.

“If the end result is that they face financial or personal ruin, a key implication is that others won’t want to follow in their footsteps and take that risk,” says Tollefson. “Then free speech becomes a luxury that only those who have nothing, or those who are incredibly rich, can afford.”

Tollefson, an expert on SLAPP suits, says it is the first time he has ever heard of a Crown corporation seeking damages from an individual in B.C. “or anywhere else for that matter,” for lawfully and peacefully exercising their right to protest on a matter of public interest.

Those named in the suit include farmers Ken and Arlene Boon, Helen Knott, a social worker from the Prophet River First Nation, and Yvonne Tupper, a community health worker from the Saulteau First Nations.

Esther Pedersen, a Peace Valley farmer whose land was used to helicopter two survival shacks across the river for the campers and to collect food donated by community members, was also named. The suit includes “Jane Doe” and “John Doe,” leaving open the possibility for other Site C opponents to be singled out as well.

After BC Hydro filed the civil suit, it launched an injunction application to remove campers from the fur trade fort site on the Peace River’s south bank, near the confluence of the Moberly River. That area was deemed to be so ecologically and historically important that the B.C. government had made four designations to protect its heritage resources, wildlife and old-growth forests. The government even went so far as to set aside the land to become part of a future B.C. protected area.

But BC Hydro had obtained the necessary government permits to log the forest and convert the fort site area into a 216-hectare rock dump for potentially acid-generating waste rock from Site C construction. After the camp was ruled illegal by the courts, the people named in the suit said they were law-abiding citizens and promptly dismantled their encampment.

Ken Boon says he and his wife Arlene made a personal request to BC Hydro CEO Jessica McDonald to drop the civil suit when McDonald recently visited their farm.

Peace River Valley farmer Ken Boon at the Rocky Mountain site encampment. Photo: Sarah Cox.

Accompanied by a driver and an aide, McDonald spent two hours with the Boons. “We basically agreed to disagree,” says Boon of the visit, which he characterizes as cordial and personable. “We showed her around the farm.”

The Boons will lose productive fields to flooding and when riverbanks slough into the dam reservoir, a deep body of water that will stretch for 107 kilometres along the Peace River and its tributaries. The Boon’s home and farm buildings are slated to be destroyed, to make way for the $530 million re-location of Highway 97 away from the flood zone.

Boon says McDonald was willing to drop the suit, but only if the Boons were prepared “to sign a document basically stating we would not impede further work or stand in the way of the project.”

The Boons declined to sign. They believe it is their constitutional right to oppose Site C, which will flood at least 6,500 hectares of prime farmland and, in the words of a government-appointed panel that reviewed the project, have “significant adverse effects” on the environment and on lands and resources used by First Nations.

In late April, BC Hydro launched a second civil suit, this time against hunger striker Kristen Henry and three others camped outside the Crown corporation’s head office in Vancouver to protest the Site C dam project.

The Vancouver campers packed up 10 days later, saying they did not have the money or the inclination to fight BC Hydro in court. BC Hydro claimed “hundreds of thousands” of dollars from them in damages, the four campers stated in a press release.

BC Hydro said the camp had forced it to take expensive measures to step up security, including spending $30,000 for new door handles to which people cannot chain themselves, up to $60,000 a month to hire the company Xpera Risk Mitigation and Investigation to monitor the campers, and up to $35,000 a month to boost general security measures.

Even though that camp, too, is gone, the civil law suit stands, Dave Conway, BC Hydro’s Site C community relations manager, confirmed in an email. Conway said in a separate email that the crown corporation cannot comment on the civil suit against the six Rocky Mountain fort campers due to the fact that it is an “on-going court action.”

The majority of U.S. states, along with Ontario and Quebec, have anti-SLAPP suit legislation. In 2001, the NDP government in B.C. passed similar legislation, called the Protection of Public Participation Act. Six months later, that legislation was repealed by the newly-elected B.C. Liberal government.

Such legislation, says Tollefson, aims to expedite justice and provide the courts with tools to dismiss SLAPP suits early on “so a very deep-pocketed corporation doesn’t get to drag it out and benefit from simply being better endowed.”

Image: Ken Boon on his farmland in the Peace Valley. Photo: Emma Gilchrist.

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The Peace Valley old-growth forest slated to be clear cut for the Site C dam is just as important, if not more ecologically significant, than the Great Bear Rainforest, says the wildlife biologist and retired provincial government manager who wrote B.C.’s management plan for the area.
 
“It’s more important from a biodiversity point of view because there’s far less of it,” Rod Backmeyer said in a phone interview.
 
“The boreal forest hasn’t had the high profile [of the Great Bear Rainforest]. You don’t get those classic giant trees with moss covered ground and logs under them that are so picturesque. It’s different here. It doesn’t mean that it has less value. It just doesn’t have that romantic flavour that some of the coastal old-growth has.”
 
The forest, on the south bank of the Peace River near its confluence with the Moberly River, surrounds an historic fort site where Peace Valley farmers and First Nations members have camped since New Year’s Eve. BC Hydro contractors built a logging bridge across the mouth of the Moberly during the Christmas holidays, but clear-cutting stopped when campers and their supporters, including First Nations elders, began to maintain a constant vigil near logging equipment.

The forest around the Rocky Mountain Fort site is so ecologically important that the B.C. government gave it three different protective designations. It is a designated Old-Growth Management Area, with centuries-old poplar, spruce and cottonwood trees that offer prime habitat for at-risk species like the fisher, which moves its young from nest to nest in tree cavities.
 
The area is also considered to be critical habitat for moose, and carries an official designation as Ungulate Winter Habitat. It provides increasingly rare winter habitat for the moose population, which is in such sharp decline in the Peace and elsewhere in B.C. that the provincial government has commissioned a five-year study to probe reasons for the die-off.
 
“You’re going to lose a lot of the critical winter range,” Backmeyer said of the planned logging. "We’re going to lose all of that lower slope and the big timber in the valley that’s the thermal cover and the security cover during those big storm events. It’s going to be gone.”
 
In addition to the old-growth and ungulate winter range designations, the area targeted for immediate clear cutting was set aside by the provincial government in 1969 as part of the South Peace Land Reserve that aims to protect unique wildlife values, including habitat for the elusive and at-risk wolverine.
 
The reserve contains some of the “highest wildlife values in the entire Peace,” according to the management plan that Backmeyer wrote in 1992 while working as a consultant. He was subsequently hired by the B.C. Ministry of the Environment as a wildlife biologist and later managed major projects for the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations.
 
Even though the area around the Rocky Mountain Fort site is not slated to be flooded until 2024, B.C. Energy Minister Bill Bennett has said clear cutting must take place by this March 31, before songbirds return to nest.
 
Canada is a signatory to the Migratory Birds Convention Act, which prevents migratory birds from being killed or their nests from being destroyed.
 
Myke Chutter, a bird specialist with the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, said mortality is significantly reduced if logging takes place before “the empty forest comes alive” with birds building nests and hatching their young. He said it is also illegal under the B.C. Wildlife Act to log trees with active songbird nests.
 
The land reserve provides important nesting habitat for four at-risk songbird species found nowhere in B.C. but in the Peace River Valley, according to the South Peace Land Reserve management plan.
 
These are the Black-throated Green Warbler, Connecticut Warbler, Mourning Warbler and Canada Warbler. (Since the management plan was written, the Atlas of the Breeding Birds of British Columbia has confirmed sightings of two of these species, the Canada Warbler and Mourning Warbler, in a small zone to the north of the Peace Valley.)
 
B.C.’s Conservation Data Centre, which maps known locations of at-risk species and ecological communities, lists the Canada Warbler and Black-throated Green Warbler as occurring around the Rocky Mountain Fort site.

Canada Warbler. Photo: Garth McElroy/Vireo from the Audobon Society.
 
The Canada Warbler, a small yellow and grey songbird with a white ring around its eye, is one of five migratory bird species whose sustainability could be threatened by Site C, according to a BC Hydro submission to the Joint Review Panel that examined Site C for the federal and provincial governments.  
 
That review panel concluded that the Site C dam and its huge reservoir would likely cause “significant adverse effects to migratory birds relying on valley bottom habitat during their life cycle and these losses would be permanent and cannot be mitigated.”
 
Environment Canada, in its submission to the Joint Review Panel, said it agreed with BC Hydro that the dam and its reservoir would pose “significant residual adverse effects” to at-risk migratory bird species.
 
The federal department went on to say that these adverse effects are potentially of greater magnitude than BC Hydro concluded, that a broader suite of migratory birds will potentially be affected by Site C than BC Hydro reported, and that the loss of nesting habitat to migratory birds and species at risk “has not been fully assessed.”
 
The land reserve, including the area around the Rocky Mountain Fort site, has such high environmental values that the majority of it was slated to become a provincial protected area.
 
The 7,000-hectare Peace Boudreau Protected Area was set aside in the 1980s but was never formally been designated by the B.C. Cabinet.
 
In 2015, the B.C. government assured the Saulteau First Nation it would protect Peace Boudreau as part of a Site C impact benefits agreement that was reached but not signed.
 
Up to one-third of the proposed protected area would be destroyed by the Site C reservoir, including the forest and river flats around the Rocky Mountain Fort site.
 
Backmeyer said the Peace is unusual because it is a low elevation valley that supports starkly different ecosystems and wildlife.
 
“It’s so unique in that you get almost semi-desert on one side of the valley and you get old growth spruce right across the river. You don’t find that anywhere else in B.C., that’s for sure.”

Image: U.S. Fish and Wildlife

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First Nations women camping at the Rocky Mountain Fort site and opposing ongoing construction for the Site C Dam say they feel intimidated and harassed by male security guards and “investigators” with ties to BC Hydro.

Women at the encampment told DeSmog Canada small groups of men arrive on site at least twice a day to film the predominantly female campers and repetitively question them about their intentions.

“There would be three or four of them with cameras and all males,” says Helen Knott, a Treaty 8 member and Fort St. John social worker who has sometimes been alone in the bush when security guards and investigators suddenly appear. “It was intimidating…as a young indigenous women coming into daily contact with men with cameras in the middle of nowhere.”

Knott has been camping at the historic fort site since New Year’s Eve when she and other Treaty 8 members, along with Peace Valley farmers and business owners, set up a wilderness camp to maintain a presence in an old-growth forest on Crown land that is slated to be clear cut and flooded for the Site C dam.

One group of rotating campers keeps a fire burning throughout the day near the bridge over the Moberly River that was constructed by BC Hydro during the Christmas holidays in preparation for logging. The forest is prime habitat for the blue-listed fisher and migrating songbirds, and is used by Treaty 8 members and elders for spiritual purposes and to collect plants for traditional medicines.

Helen Knott at the encampment. Photo: Sarah Cox.

Another group remains at the camp a 20-minute walk away, at the site of the first European fort in mainland B.C., where the Beaver people came to trade furs with early explorers and voyageurs in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The fort site, along with 42 other heritage sites along 107 kilometres of the Peace River and its tributaries, would be flooded by the $8.8 billion Site C dam project.

Knott says she has experienced some uncomfortable moments during the twice-daily questioning, during which security “investigators” film the women without their permission and ask for the names of the people present, how long they will stay and if they intend to allow or prevent “timber harvesting” in the area.

No logging has taken place since January 7 when the campers, who call themselves the Treaty 8 “Stewards of the Land,” began to maintain a constant vigil from dawn until dark, in temperatures as low as minus 25 Celsius, after old-growth cottonwoods were logged that day when they briefly returned to the fort site to get food.

“The other day because I wasn’t giving him (the investigator) the answers that he wanted, his voice started getting a little bit louder and he was talking over me,” Knott said. “He said ‘you’re not answering my questions,’ because I answered his question with a question. I asked him, ‘Are you still going to infringe on my treaty rights?’ And he started talking over me and his face got red and finally he just calmed down and he just walked away…He was getting worked up.”

Knott says she and others have asked the security investigators many times not to come into the camp where women are sleeping, eating and using an outdoor toilet, but they continue to do so at least twice a day, filming the campers standing outside their tent and cooking and sleeping huts, and asking the same questions again and again. “That is . . .basically borderline harassment especially when we’ve asked [them not to]…And they say this is what we were instructed to do and we say ‘well, it’s not okay.’”

Helen Knott and Yvonne Tupper do sunrise yoga on the newly-constructed bridge over the Moberly River as security guards watch and film. Photo: Sarah Cox.

The security guards and investigators wear jackets emblazoned with “Saulteau Safety and Security.” The Saulteau First Nation belongs to B.C.’s Treaty 8 Tribal Association, and the Nation was once strongly opposed to the dam’s construction. But following a 2015 band council election the Nation’s new leadership has taken a different tack.

According to a BC Hydro information bulletin, in July 2015 the new Saulteau chief and councilors agreed to terms for a Site C impact benefits agreement. The agreement followed a controversial on-line vote by band members that saw 144 people cast ballots out of 711 eligible voters. Eighty-nine band members voted in favour of the agreement, which included lump sum payments, an annual payment stream and contracting opportunities. A logging company owned by a Saulteau band member was awarded the contract to clear the south banks of the Peace River, including the area around the historic fort.

Camper Yvonne Tupper, a Treaty 8 member from the Saulteau First Nation, says she does not recognize any of the nine different security guards and investigators she has encountered, all of them wearing “Saulteau Safety and Security” jackets. A second Saulteau woman at the Treaty 8 Stewards of the Land camp, who did not wish her name to be public, also said she did not recognize any of the security guards or investigators.

“When a single female is out here they ask more questions and they intimidate more and we have proof of that [because they are] being recorded,” says Tupper, a Chetwynd community health worker.” She says the campers film every interaction with security investigators and guards.

A company profile on the Work BC Employment Services Centre for Fort St. John describes Saulteau Safety and Security as a “partnership” between the Saulteau First Nations and the Vancouver-based company Securiguard Services Ltd. It says a joint venture agreement signed by the Saulteau chief and councilors provides “a significant opportunity to partner with the local first nations people and award them the right to protect their lands and represent their identity.” Securiguard is a Site C contractor, according to BC Hydro.

Huts airlifted into the encampment, which is four hours from Fort St. John by highway, backroad and snowmobile. Photo: Sarah Cox.

A December 11, 2015 job posting for Saulteau Safety and Security guards based in Fort St. John directs applicants to the Securiguard website. The job posting asks for candidates “who are able to effectively and positively communicate in a customer service oriented manner with a variety of people.” The jobs pay a starting wage of $16 to $19 an hour. Duties include welcoming people into the area, patrolling, crowd control, crime prevention and “providing excellent customer service.”

BC Hydro media relations spokesperson Dave Conway, responding to an emailed request for an interview with BC Hydro to discuss the Rocky Mountain Fort camp and Saulteau Safety and Security, emailed back what has become a scripted response about the camp which states that BC Hydro is “not moving equipment within the immediate proximity of individuals or the encampment itself.”

Conway did not respond to a second email with specific questions about Saulteau Safety and Security and the joint venture’s interactions with female campers.

Verena Hofmann, a Peace resident who is supporting Treaty 8 members at the camp, says she also feels intimidated by the security investigators and has told them so on camera. “This is repetitive,” she said on January 13 to two investigators from Saulteau Security who called themselves Glen and Sten, after they filmed her and asked the same questions for the second time in several hours. “To me that feels like pestering and harassment and it doesn’t feel like trying to find workable solutions as we’re hearing in the media quoted by BC Hydro.”

Signage at the encampment. Photo: Sarah Cox.

The area slated to be logged is the subject of an ongoing judicial review court case by the West Moberly and Prophet River First Nations, who say they were not adequately consulted regarding the permit process. These two First Nations have two additional court cases against Site C. Peace Valley landowners also have an appeal case against the dam that will be heard in early April.

A fifth on-going court case, launched by the Blueberry River First Nation, claims that the cumulative impact of Site C and other extensive industrial development in the Peace violates the band’s treaty rights.

Image: Yvonne Tupper points to trees cut on crown land that is the subject of the ongoing court case with the West Moberly and Prophet River First Nations. Photo: Sarah Cox.

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One of the archaeologists who excavated the Rocky Mountain Fort site in the 1980s says much remains to be discovered about historical First Nations encampments near the site and valuable information will be lost forever if it is flooded for the Site C dam.

Lakehead University professor Scott Hamilton, a specialist in fur trade historic archaeology and ethnohistory, was a PhD student at Simon Fraser University when he spent two summers as the “pit boss” overseeing a dig to uncover the remains of the fort, the first European outpost in mainland B.C.

The site, near the confluence of the Peace and Moberly Rivers in northeastern B.C., is the scene of a First Nations-led standoff aimed at preventing BC Hydro from logging an area slated to be flooded by Site C’s reservoir, which would stretch for 107-kilometres along the Peace River and its tributaries.

Treaty 8 members and local farmers are camped out in minus 20-degree weather, vowing to risk arrest to protect Rocky Mountain Fort and the rest of the Peace River Valley from Site C. They have prevented planned logging from taking place so far this year.

Hamilton said excavations in the 1980s were “very much predisposed” to focus on fort structures and not on the relationship of aboriginal communities to the forts and fur trade. He said key information about the role of First Nations could be interpreted by examining the remains of encampments used by the Beaver and Sekani peoples who came to Rocky Mountain Fort to trade furs such as beaver, marten, lynx and fisher.

Peace River Valley farmer Ken Boon at the Rocky Mountain site encampment. Photo: Sarah Cox.

Adequate time was not taken to locate and study aboriginal encampments that “slipped through the cracks” because archeologists, with funding from the now defunct B.C. Heritage Trust, were busy excavating the remains of two fort buildings they found, said Hamilton.

“What about all those hard to find, hard to interpret, widely scattered aboriginal camps that represented the aboriginal side of the ledger in the fur trade?” he said.

“This is the great unknown in so much of fur trade history. How did aboriginal people engage in this enterprise? As active participants or passive pawns? And how does this experience resonate in aboriginal communities today?”

Locating and studying First Nations encampments near Rocky Mountain Fort would offer new insights into aboriginal involvement in the fur trade, said Hamilton. “We haven’t done very much of that yet and they will be gone forever if this project proceeds.”

The fort site, which Hamilton calls “a big deal” for its time in Canadian history, was selected in 1793 by explorer Alexander Mackenzie, who called it “an excellent situation for a fort or factory, as there is plenty of wood, and every reason to believe that the country abounds in beaver.”

The fort housed French Canadian voyaguers working for the North West Company, which later merged with the Hudson’s Bay Company. The outpost, where explorers David Thompson and John Finlay also stayed, was the gateway for exploration of the interior of B.C. and fur trade expansion.

Notably, Rocky Mountain Fort functioned as a provisioning centre for the fur trade industry. Using aboriginal food preservation techniques, it manufactured pemmican, or dried meat, for the long canoe journeys east to transport furs collected by aboriginal hunters to European markets. Explorers and voyageurs rendered grease from animal carcasses in order to preserve meat.

Among the many artifacts uncovered at the Rocky Mountain Fort during three-month long excavations in 1986 and 1987 were elk, bison and other animal bones, as well as grease from rendering.

David Burley, the Simon Fraser University archaeologist who oversaw the excavation project, said he is satisfied that archaeologists uncovered all the information they needed in order to understand the fort’s layout and functions. “It’s a significant piece of western Canadian history,” said Burley.

More than 20,000 artifacts were found, from glass beads, brass cufflinks and a glass bottle originally containing “Essence of Peppermint” to fishhooks, razors, axes and awls. Traditional Native bone and antler tools, as well as Micmac-style stone pipes, were also found and boxed.

Archeologists discovered the remains of a stone fireplace made of river cobblestones in the fort’s main building. “We took it apart and labeled each stone, and drew a diagram of how to put it back together again,” said Burley. The fireplace is currently in boxes at SFU.

The Environmental Impact Statement for Site C describes Rocky Mountain Fort as one of 42 heritage sites that would be affected by the dam. It says Rocky Mountain Fort was revisited as part of the study and “general site observations were made, but no assessment work was conducted as part of this program as extensive excavations have been previously completed at this site.”

Hamilton said he has very mixed feelings about the idea of much of the Peace River Valley being destroyed for the $8.8 billion Site C dam. “I’m not happy with the idea of that valley being flooded because of my own personal associations, but also because of the heritage and archaeological values that are going to be compromised.”

Image: Yvonne Tupper via Facebook

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