In a world grappling with a building climate crisis, electrification has become a buzzword. Securing a reliable supply of clean — or at least relatively low-emission — and plentiful power to displace fossil fuels is regularly proffered by policymakers as the way forward.

But electrifying large swaths of society — from heavy industry to transportation — isn’t as simple as putting a plug in a socket. New power generation projects, such as wind and solar farms, need to be connected to the grid, which must have the capacity to carry and ferry that power. Transmission lines, substations and all kinds of electrical infrastructure must be built or upgraded to allow that to happen. None of it is cheap, especially when some of your biggest customers — such as mining operations or oil and gas facilities — could be located hundreds of kilometres away from the nearest power line.

So what happens when energy-hungry industries want to connect to the grid, but worry the cost of that access will hurt their bottom lines? B.C. may be about to find out.

Last week, the B.C. government approved the environmental assessment certificate for the Ksi Lisims liquefied natural gas (LNG) project. It will be built on an island near the mouth of the Nass River in northern B.C., close to the Alaska border. Once operational in 2028, Ksi Lisims could produce up to 12 million tonnes of LNG per year.

Natural gas — which is extracted in B.C. primarily through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — is mostly methane, a powerful greenhouse gas responsible for around 30 per cent of the current rise in global temperatures, according to the International Energy Agency.Electrifying Ksi Lisims would allow the facility to “produce some of the cleanest, low-carbon LNG anywhere in the world,” according to B.C. Premier David Eby.

To go electric, Ksi Lisims estimates needing to draw about 600 megawatts from B.C.’s power grid, according to internal government documents obtained by The Narwhal in February. The project’s remote location means building the required electrification infrastructure won’t be quick, cheap or easy and the project’s environmental certificate notes Ksi Lisims will likely be powered by natural gas when it begins operations. 

Ksi Lisims is one of eight major industrial projects — including LNG facilities, mines and oil and gas operations — that have expressed interest in connecting to B.C.’s grid. Together, they could require more than 3,000 megawatts of electricity. For context, the Site C dam is capable of producing up to 1,230 megawatts of power.

Every one of the projects listed in the internal documents was seeking more than 150 megawatts, and this number is important. It’s the threshold that should trigger a BC Hydro rule created in the early 1990s known as tariff supplement 6. It requires new industrial customers seeking more than 150 megawatts to pay the costs of generating and transmitting the power beyond that threshold.

The 150-megawatt threshold is meant to protect other BC Hydro customers, including residential users and small businesses, from being hit with higher electricity prices as a result of investments in new infrastructure to serve large industrial customers. However, requiring LNG, mining and other companies to pay those costs “could be prohibitive,” the documents note.

Despite being on the books for more than 30 years, tariff supplement 6 had never been applied because “no projects above 150 megawatts have been built in B.C.,” according to a briefing note prepared for Eby in March 2024. 

But, with multiple large industrial projects exploring their options for connecting to BC Hydro’s grid, that will not be the case for long. 

B.C. government opted to pay for part of Cedar LNG’s connection costs

At 214 megawatts required, Cedar LNG was one of the first projects to trigger tariff supplement 6’s threshold. The facility, a floating liquefaction and export terminal in Kitimat, could produce three million tonnes of LNG per year for export to Asian markets. The company was spared additional generating costs for clean power because BC Hydro was forecasting a power surplus when Cedar LNG’s connection to the provincial grid was being assessed.

As for the transmission infrastructure needed to electrify Cedar LNG, the provincial government opted to contribute $200 million to help build a new 287-kilovolt transmission line, a new substation, new distribution lines and nearshore electrification for the project.

Access to BC Hydro’s electrical grid will allow Cedar LNG to produce “the lowest emission LNG in the world,” according to B.C. Energy Minister Adrian Dix.

“This is the best LNG in the world,” Dix said during the July announcement. “Our market position, our proximity to the Asian market, makes it the best LNG in the world and it’s the lowest emission LNG in the world.”

So how much did Cedar LNG pay for the infrastructure that will allow it to market its product as the cleanest in the world? The Energy Ministry referred The Narwhal’s questions about Cedar LNG’s contribution to the transmission infrastructure to the company, which did not respond by publication time.

The Narwhal also asked the Energy Ministry whether other major projects — such as Ksi Lisims — can also expect the province to pay for a portion of any transmission infrastructure required to go electric, but did not receive a response.

The government has been eyeing changes to tariff supplement 6 for more than a year in a bid to find ways “to balance industrial competitiveness with electrification in other sectors of the economy, all while keeping rates affordable,” according to the 2024 briefing note to the premier.

Earlier this year, the BC Utilities Commission, an independent regulator that oversees energy utilities, ordered BC Hydro to review the rule, noting its age and lack of nuance in assigning costs. The commission set a Sept. 30 deadline for the review to begin but has since granted BC Hydro an extension until April 30.

In pleading its case, BC Hydro told the commission it needed more time to develop alternatives to tariff supplement 6 — something the Energy Ministry was already mulling over in March 2024. BC Hydro also noted that some economic development policies the provincial government is considering “could impact the scope and objectives of any review.”

The details of what those policies are and how they could impact the review of tariff supplement 6 are considered confidential and have not been made public.

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B.C. Energy Minister Adrian Dix says he isn’t ruling out building more hydro dams to provide electricity as demand soars, including from industries like liquefied natural gas (LNG) and mining. 

In an interview with The Narwhal, Dix said he is confident B.C. can meet the challenge of electrifying emissions-heavy industries and a huge anticipated demand for electricity from other BC Hydro customers.

Dix said the cost of building solar and wind projects is coming down and there are potential opportunities to generate power from geothermal and hydrogen.

“We have the opportunity to make this happen here because we’ve got the backbone of the hydro system,” he said. “I don’t exclude looking at other dams as well in B.C. to create this sort of battery for that as well.”

Dix’s comments come as the $16-billion Site C dam project nears completion on B.C.’s Peace River, following huge cost overruns, delays and legal challenges from First Nations. Once the publicly funded dam is fully operational later this year, a decade after construction began, it will be capable of generating up to about 1,200 megawatts of electricity, boosting BC Hydro’s power supply by about eight per cent.

However, if Phase 2 of LNG Canada’s liquefied natural gas facility near Kitimat, B.C., moves forward and powers its operations with electricity — rather than natural gas — it would eat up about half of the Site C dam’s capacity. Government documents obtained by The Narwhal via freedom of information legislation show the facility estimated in March 2024 that it would need 585 megawatts to reduce Phase 2 carbon emissions to comply with B.C.’s climate targets. 

Adding two more LNG facilities planned for B.C.’s north coast — Ksi Lisims LNG and Cedar LNG — to the provincial power grid, along with LNG Canada Phase 2, would require a total of 1,400 megawatts of electricity, the documents show.

In an emailed response to questions, BC Hydro spokesperson Mora Scott said, “At this time, BC Hydro has no plans to build another dam.” Scott directed The Narwhal to BC Hydro’s 2021 list of new supply options. Those included wind, solar, geothermal, natural gas, run-of-river hydro, biomass and small storage hydro projects.

The Narwhal reached out to the Energy Ministry to seek clarification about Dix’s comments but did not receive a response.

B.C. shelved 10 potential hydro projects following 2010 Clean Energy Act

Over the years, B.C. has considered building more hydro dams, including on the Peace and Liard rivers in the province’s north.

But potential plans for more dams were shelved in 2010 when the previous B.C. Liberal government passed the Clean Energy Act around the same time it announced its intention to proceed with the Site C dam. 

The Clean Energy Act stripped the BC Utilities Commission of its watchdog role to determine whether building the Site C dam was in the public’s financial interest. The act also prohibited building about ten other potential hydro dams, including a fourth dam on the Peace River, a dam on the Liard River and dams on the Iskut and Homathko rivers.

B.C.’s decision to pull back from dam building followed a report from the World Commission on Dams, which studied hydro projects around the world for the World Bank. The commission found hydro dams emitted greenhouse gases, had huge social, environmental and economic impacts and disproportionately affected Indigenous Peoples.

The Site C dam flooded 128 kilometres of the Peace River and its tributaries, destroying some of Canada’s best farmland, habitat for more than 100 species at risk of extinction, culturally important sites for Treaty 8 First Nations and Indigenous hunting, fishing and trapping grounds. 

Dams on the Columbia River in the province’s southeast also inundated prime agricultural land, destroyed salmon runs and displaced First Nations, among many other impacts. 

B.C. may add more generating capacity to the Revelstoke dam: Dix

B.C. also has other options for adding additional power to the grid, including reclaiming power it sends to the U.S. as part of the Columbia River Treaty. 

The 61-year-old treaty regulates flood control, electricity generation, water flows and salmon restoration in the Columbia River basin on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border. After years of discussions, Canada and the U.S. announced an agreement in principle on a revamped treaty last July, but the changes were not finalized before U.S. President Donald Trump took office in January. Trump suspended negotiations in March, leaving the future of the treaty in limbo.

The B.C. government also recently approved nine new wind projects and a solar project.

Dix said the province is “strongly looking at” augmenting the capacity of the Revelstoke dam in B.C.’s southeast.

The Revelstoke dam currently supplies about 15 per cent of the electricity BC Hydro generates each year and there is room to add a sixth generating unit to the dam, which was completed in 1984. The addition would add about 500 megawatts of electricity to BC Hydro’s supply and take about three years to complete, BC Hydro has estimated. 

The Revelstoke 6 project, as it’s known, received an environmental assessment certificate in 2018 but BC Hydro suspended the project indefinitely in 2022. At the time, BC Hydro was “not forecasting a need for a sixth generating unit at Revelstoke dam over the next 20 years,” a BC Hydro spokesperson said in 2022 when the project was suspended.

Dix said having abundant hydro power makes renewable energy projects more attractive for the province because it provides a backstop. 

“Here in B.C., we have a great hydro system to build on, and that doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges and there are choices to make about that,” Dix told The Narwhal. “But it’s a chance to build our economy.” 

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Photojournalists provide us an essential glimpse into lives outside of our own.

In a time of generative AI and a deluge of images of anything we can imagine, photojournalists ground us firmly in reality. They are by nature always out in communities — there is no work-from-home option for a photojournalism assignment — and documenting real peoples’ lived experiences.

Here, B.C. bureau lead Sarah Cox and senior editor Michelle Cyca tell us a little bit about their favourite photos from The Narwhal’s 2024 reporting in British Columbia. Their choices span the province and beyond — and highlight some of our best on-the-ground work of the year.

The healing power of fire

Northwest B.C. reporter Matt Simmons is keenly interested in stories that point to solutions to seemingly intractable issues, including the increasingly frequent and intense wildfires sparked by climate change. This spring, Matt headed out into Gitanyow territory with photographer Marty Clemens to witness a cultural burn.

As Matt tells us in a poignant feature about using fire to heal the land, bringing back ancient Indigenous fire practices helps restore cultural connections, strengthen communities and mitigate the wildfires that are darkening the skies of our collective summers.

When wildfire threatens your home

We were in the thick of another unnerving wildfire season in B.C. when audience engagement editor Karan Saxena spotted a post on Instagram. “On Wednesday night, a massive lightning storm rolled across the West Kootenays, lighting up the darkness and setting dry hillsides ablaze,” photographer Louis Bockner wrote in July.

Louis, who lives in the small community of Argenta, B.C., had awoken to find several fires burning on the mountain directly above his community. “It’s something many of us have been waiting for, knowing it as an inevitable reality of living so intimately with the forests we love so dearly,” Louis said. “It’s also something that we have prepared for.”

We reached out to Louis, a volunteer firefighter, and asked if he would write a photo essay. Argenta was evacuated as the fire moved closer, threatening the homes of Louis and his neighbours. In between long and fraught shifts fighting the fire and snatching a few hours of sleep here and there, Louis managed to capture the angst and grief of living with wildfire and the moment-by-moment scene unfolding in Argenta as residents worked tirelessly with the BC Wildfire Service to protect their community. Louis’s photographs, shot amid eerie red skies and menacing smoke, are a testament to the power of collective action as we grapple with the disquieting impacts of climate change.

Bringing balance back to the plains

Glimpsed less often on our site than caribou or salmon, buffalo are both ecologically and culturally irreplaceable to the Indigenous nations of the plains. After being driven to the brink of extinction in an effort to starve and relocate Indigenous communities, buffalo herds (paskwâwi-mostoswak in Cree) are finally returning to the grasslands and healing the landscape through their vital presence, as documented in this beautiful and deeply personal story by Métis photojournalist Kayla MacInnis. 

Kayla travelled through British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Montana to report this story; on her travels, she learned that many of these prairie highways are palimpsests of the original trails tamped down by migrating buffalo.

The summer air was choked with wildfire smoke, which required Kayla to adjust her plans on the fly, and she called midway through the trip, worried about the quality of the photos she was getting. In the end, the wildfire haze made many of her images even more hauntingly beautiful — a reminder of how fragile and imperilled our natural world is, and how vital the task of caring for our homelands. 

Bison on the move

Thousands of animals are struck and injured, or killed, by vehicles in B.C. One wood bison herd made a northern B.C. highway its home — leaving biologists and local residents searching for solutions.

In March, The Narwhal’s B.C. biodiversity reporter, Ainslie Cruickshank, teamed up with photographer Geoffrey Reynaud to bring us the story of the Nordquist bison herd, which lick road salt at their peril, and how Dane Nan Yḗ Dāh Kaska Land Guardians are working with government scientists to better protect this iconic and threatened species. 

A valley is flooded

In late August, Peace River Valley farmers Ken and Arlene Boon watched the waters rise as BC Hydro began to flood the valley and their family’s expropriated lands for the Site C dam project.

Local photographer Don Hoffmann travelled up and down the valley in northeast B.C., becoming one of the few people to capture the last images of the biodiverse and culturally rich area on Treaty 8 territory before it was inundated for the publicly funded $16-billion hydro project.

Don’s recent shots of the valley stand in sharp contrast to photos he took before the project got underway more than nine years ago, a sobering reminder that all “clean” energy projects come at a cost — some far higher than others.

The ‘last gasp’ of herring in the Salish Sea

In November, W̱SÁNEĆ hereditary chiefs held a press conference in Sidney, B.C., to call for a moratorium on herring fisheries in the Strait of Georgia, and we were lucky Taylor Roades was able to capture it.

In full regalia, the hereditary chiefs asserted their Treaty Rights and called for the urgent protection of the “last gasp” of herring in their territory, which is the backdrop for Taylor’s powerful, moving portraits.

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After flooding Treaty 8 territory to build the Site C project, BC Hydro says it plans to give the $16-billion dam and its newly created reservoir Indigenous language names.

In a recent report, the public utility says Indigenous language names were recommended and “advanced for consideration” following BC Hydro’s engagement with 13 Indigenous nations affected by the project on Treaty 8 territory in northeast B.C. 

It’s a move that has prompted at least one First Nations leader to call the plan inappropriate.

“I find it extremely offensive that they are considering placing an Indigenous name on it,” West Moberly First Nations Chief Roland Willson told The Narwhal.

BC Hydro flooded 83 kilometres of the Peace River this fall to create a large reservoir that also partially flooded seven of the river’s tributaries. Reservoir filling followed almost a decade of dam construction, overshadowed by huge cost overruns, First Nations lawsuits and serious geotechnical issues that were hidden from the public. 

“Participation in the naming of Site C provides the opportunity to acknowledge the presence of the project on Indigenous traditional lands and contributes to reconciliation,” BC Hydro’s report to the B.C. Utilities Commission says. 

But Willson said giving the Site C dam and its reservoir Indigenous names flies in the face of reconciliation, noting his nation is deeply impacted by the project. 

BC Hydro has various settlements with First Nations as Site C flooding wraps up

West Moberly, along with other Treaty 8 nations, lost traditional hunting, fishing and trapping grounds and culturally and spiritually important sites to the publicly funded hydro project, which will help power B.C.’s new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export industry. Reservoir filling began in late August and finished earlier this month.

“They jam this thing down our throats,” Willson said. “They walk around all over the place talking about the agreements they have. They don’t have agreements with anybody. They have settlements.” 

In an emailed response to questions from The Narwhal, BC Hydro spokesperson Greg Alexis said the public utility has signed Site C dam impact benefits agreements with eight Treaty 8 First Nations that include cash payments, contracting opportunities, land transfers and land protection measures. Alexis said the total value of payments to impacted nations is confidential. 

Willson pointed out West Moberly still has a civil claim focused on the impact of the first two dams on the Peace River, after reluctantly agreeing in 2022 to a partial settlement related to the Site C project — the third dam.

“We haven’t completely let that court case go. They basically beat us into submission on this. We just couldn’t fight with them anymore. We don’t have the billions of dollars that they have to fight in court on things,” he said. “And so for them to say, ‘We’re going to honour the nations by giving it an Indigenous name,’ that’s kind of abuse. … They abuse the nations and then do something nice, name a dam after them.”

Alexis said local Indigenous nations were invited last year to participate in the naming of the Site C dam and reservoir. He reiterated the statement in BC Hydro’s report to the utilities commission, saying participation in the naming process contributes to reconciliation and provides an opportunity to acknowledge the impacts of the project on Treaty 8 rights and cultural interests.

Some recommended naming options in an Indigenous language were selected following a series of meetings and workshops with participating nations, Alexis said. The recommendations are being considered and, once a decision has been made, permanent names will be shared with the nations and then with the general public, he said. Willson said West Moberly did not participate in the name selection process.

BC Hydro did not answer questions asking for the shortlisted names, who will make the final decision about names and when it will be made. The utility also did not answer a question asking if First Nations have expressed concerns about giving the dam and reservoir permanent Indigenous language names. 

Site C dam project has significant adverse impacts on First Nations 

A review panel for the federal and provincial governments found the Site C dam would have significant effects on First Nations hunting, non-tenured trapping and fishing that could not be mitigated and would impede the capacity to transfer knowledge and culture to future generations. The panel disagreed with BC Hydro’s claim that Indigenous traditional practices were adaptable and could be reproduced elsewhere.

According to information the Treaty 8 Tribal Association submitted to the review panel, the Site C dam was slated to destroy 42 sites of cultural and spiritual value, including spiritual places, medicine collection areas, teaching areas and places for ceremonies and prayers. It was also poised to destroy 77 habitation places and 30 sites with First Nations transportation values, including portions of trails and canoe and boat routes along the Peace River and its tributaries.

BC Hydro’s report to the utilities commission says it is consulting with First Nations about plans for monitoring Indigenous burial sites outside the reservoir that may be impacted by erosion or slope instability. 

The report also says BC Hydro has worked for the past nine years with Indigenous nations impacted by the Site C project to complete numerous projects that “document and commemorate” historical use of the area.

Projects include educational signage at a viewpoint, a series of videos documenting historic use of the Peace River and the perspective of Indigenous nations on the impacts of the Site C dam, as well as “a travelling exhibit of artifacts uncovered during construction that has been displayed in numerous communities,” the report says.

In the report, BC Hydro also says it continues to work with Indigenous nations on the development of a future cultural centre, which the utility described as “an important accommodation for the cultural impacts of Site C.” The facility will “showcase local Indigenous culture and history in the region,” and store and display many of the artifacts uncovered during construction of the Site C project, according to the report.

Alexis said BC Hydro is not able to provide a final cost for the cultural centre “as it’s still too early in the process,” adding the money to build the centre is included in the Site C project budget.

Willson pointed out the visitor centre at the W.A.C. Bennett dam, the first dam built on the Peace River, has a plaque on the wall acknowledging its devastating impacts on First Nations. “And they apologize for what they did to us. And then while that’s hanging on the wall there, they’re flooding Site C. You know, they’re doing it again.”

First Nations artifacts should belong to First Nations, Willson said. “[They] shouldn’t be sitting in W.A.C. Bennett or Site C cultural heritage site. That should belong to the First Nations, and they should be sitting in our museum. They’ll spend $100 million on a cultural centre to show that they try and respect the First Nations and honour them — while they destroy their culture.”

The Site C dam’s current name derives from a master plan for five dams on the Peace River created by the former B.C. government led by then-premier W.A.C. Bennett. Potential dam sites were labelled with the first five letters of the alphabet. 

The W.A.C. Bennett dam became operational in 1968, while the second, the Peace Canyon dam, was completed in 1980. Together the two dams supply about 38 per cent of power generated annually by BC Hydro. The Site C dam is expected to add an additional 1,100 megawatts of capacity — enough electricity, according to BC Hydro, to power 450,000 homes. 

Other First Nations most impacted by the Site C project — Saulteau First Nations, Halfway River First Nation, Prophet River First Nation and Doig River First Nations — did not respond to a request for comment by publication time. 

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Over the past three years, undisclosed BC Hydro employees quietly awarded more than $430 million in contracts — without any competition — to three dozen companies and consultants for work on the troubled Site C hydro dam, according to a list obtained by The Narwhal. 

SNC-Lavalin, which in 2013 was banned from World Bank contracts for eight years due to fraud and corruption, was granted more than $62 million in sole-source contracts for engineering services on the hugely over-budget project, according to the list, released by BC Hydro in response to a freedom of information request. In one case, SNC-Lavalin was awarded a contract worth more than $25 million without any competing bids.

“It’s shocking,” said B.C. Green Party leader Sonia Furstenau. “This whole project has been so shrouded in secrecy and lack of transparency — and a complete disregard for the expectations that all of us should have for how public money is spent, and how public contracts are awarded.”

Governments in Canada generally go through a transparent bidding process for major contracts that allows multiple contractors to bid on the same project after a public body posts the criteria. A sole-source contract, also known as a no-bid or direct-award contract, allows selected suppliers to receive potentially lucrative contracts without any competition. 

The federal government prohibits direct-award contracts worth more than $25,000 unless there is a special justification such as a national emergency or national security interests. The B.C. government allows direct-award contracts under certain circumstances — including in an emergency or if only one contractor is qualified or available to provide the goods, services or construction required. B.C. also requires ministries granting direct-award contracts to disclose recipients and the amount of money they receive. But BC Hydro and other Crown corporations are exempt from the policy, the B.C. Office of the Clerk confirmed in an email. 

That means there is no requirement for BC Hydro to proactively disclose which companies or consultants it selects for direct-award work on the publicly funded Site C dam under construction on the Peace River in the province’s northeast. There is also no requirement for BC Hydro to proactively disclose who is making decisions to award millions of dollars of contracts, without competition.

BC Hydro took four months to respond to The Narwhal’s freedom of information request for a list of all direct-award contracts issued for work on the Site C project between 2020 and 2022. It censored the names of approximately one quarter of recipients, along with the amount of the awards and the type of work they were contracted to carry out.

David Silver, a faculty member at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, who is also the university’s chair in business and professional ethics, said the lack of transparency around Site C direct-award contracts “suggests a culture which does not want to be held to account.” 

The apparent secrecy makes it difficult for members of the public to track important developments in a project that has become a boondoggle for both the previous provincial Liberal government and the current New Democratic Party government.

The cost of the Site C dam has ballooned from $8.8 billion to $16 billion, making it the most expensive hydro dam in Canadian history — and not nearly the largest. Once complete, the dam will flood 128 kilometres of the Peace River and its tributaries, the equivalent distance of driving from Toronto to Niagara Falls or from Vancouver to Whistler. Among many impacts, the project will destroy Indigenous cultural sites and burial sites, eliminate some of Canada’s richest farmland, eradicate habitat for more than 100 species at risk of extinction and poison bull trout and other fish with methylmercury.

BC Hydro says the Site C dam will have the capacity to produce 1,100 megawatts of power — less than one-fifth of the capacity of Canada’s largest dam, the Robert Bourassa hydro project in northern Quebec.

The dam, plagued with geotechnical issues that were kept secret from the public, will help power the province’s new liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry championed by B.C.’s NDP government, the Alberta government’s energy war room and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

BC Hydro’s censure of no-bid contract recipients ‘deeply troubling’

BC Hydro defended its procurement practices in an emailed response to questions from The Narwhal, saying its approach for Site C was designed to achieve “value for money for ratepayers,” as well as to meet the project schedule, budget and technical requirements.

“It’s also designed to help provide economic opportunities for Indigenous groups, northern communities and the rest of the province,” BC Hydro spokesperson Greg Alexis said in the email.

The Crown corporation also noted it posts hundreds of opportunities for public tendering every year and said 90 per cent of Site C project contracts — based on value — have been awarded through open competitions since dam construction began in July 2015. Alexis added the corporation is subject to strict rules that govern when a direct award can be made.

“We have been clear that, as part of the Site C project, Indigenous accommodation may include contracting opportunities,” he wrote.

But Silver from the Sauder School of Business said he finds it “deeply troubling” that approximately one-quarter of the names of no-bid contract recipients and the amount of money they received were redacted from the documents obtained by The Narwhal. It’s also troubling that information about the contracts was only available through a freedom of information request and the public has no idea who is making huge decisions about how to spend public funds, he said.

The Narwhal asked BC Hydro which employees or committees make no-bid contract decisions but did not receive an answer. 

“I don’t see the justification for it,” Silver said. “If there is a justification, they need to declare it so at least that can be held to scrutiny. … It undermines the confidence of the public that [public funds] are being spent in a responsible manner.” 

Silver said BC Hydro has a duty to spend funds responsibly and fairly openly. “And an important safeguard is that they do so as transparently as possible.” In rare instances where transparency might not be possible, Silver said public bodies like BC Hydro must explain why they are not being transparent so the public has confidence they are telling the truth. “And the problem here is if they’re not being transparent, it’s very hard to hold them to account.”

BC Hydro justified the censorship of approximately one-quarter of the recipients of no-bid contracts during the three years on the grounds that disclosure would reveal legal advice, could harm relations between BC Hydro and an Indigenous governing entity or could result in undue financial loss or gain to a person or organization.

Silver said sometimes awarding no-bid contracts can be justified: for example, in an emergency situation where something needs to be fixed immediately or in a case where a firm is deeply invested in knowledge and expertise and it would be costly and disruptive to turn to another supplier to accomplish a particular task. 

“And sometimes the practice is corrupt,” he added. 

Given the recent history of SNC-Lavalin, “there is extra reason to err on the side of transparency,” Silver said.

In 2019, SNC-Lavalin Construction, a subsidiary of Montreal-based SNC-Lavalin Group, pleaded guilty to fraud and agreed to pay a fine of $280 million. SNC-Lavalin Group and two of its subsidiaries had faced charges alleging they paid almost $48 million to influence government decisions in Libya. 

The case embroiled the company in a controversy involving potential interference with the Canadian political system. The SNC-Lavalin affair centred on former federal attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould’s claim she was pressured by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s inner circle to settle criminal charges against the company through a deferred prosecution agreement, which is akin to a plea deal.

In May 2022, SNC-Lavalin disclosed it will pay Quebec almost $30 million over three years to settle bribery charges related to the Jacques Cartier Bridge deck rehabilitation project, after RCMP arrested two former company executives. The settlement came nearly five years after the conviction of the former president and CEO of the Federal Bridge Corp., who admitted to receiving $2.23 million in bribes from SNC-Lavalin in connection with the contract to repair the bridge, the Canadian Press reported at the time. 

In 2018, a former Quebec hospital executive who accepted a $10-million bribe in return for helping SNC-Lavalin win a Montreal hospital-building contract was sentenced to 39 months in prison, in a scandal provincial authorities described as the largest corruption fraud case in Canadian history. 

Furstenau questioned the direct awards to SNC-Lavalin given the company’s history. “I talk a lot about trust in democracy and trust in our institutions, and the kinds of things that are undermining that trust or are corrosive to that trust,” she said. “And then you find out that there are these enormous contracts being awarded with no bid, in a non-transparent way to a company that has, shall we say, a rather tarnished reputation. It’s so disturbing.”

In a 2021 statement announcing the World Bank had lifted sanctions against the company two years earlier than anticipated, SNC-Lavalin said the decision followed a rigorous assessment and monitoring process. “Since 2012, SNC-Lavalin has done its homework,” the company’s president and CEO Ian L. Edwards said at the time. “Over nearly 10 years, we evolved through honest reflection, hard work and a sustained commitment by and toward all our employees, leading to the integration of integrity best practices.”

Furstenau compared Site C direct-award contracts to the transparent and competitive process B.C. MLAs must follow to commission even minor work in their constituency offices. MLAs are required to find several contractors or companies to bid on each contract, she pointed out.

“There’s a whole complicated process for transparency and accountability in contracts for small jobs in constituency offices,” Furstenau said. “That should apply to multi-billion-dollar projects, strenuously. There should be an expectation that contracts are transparent, that they are posted, that it is clear who is bidding for them. And then the public can see at any time how these contracts are being awarded and who they’re being awarded to, and how public money is being spent.”

Harvey Elwin, an international hydro dam construction expert, earlier described the high level of confidentiality surrounding the Site C dam as “extraordinary,” saying he had never encountered such secrecy during his five decades designing, developing and managing large hydroelectric projects, including China’s Three Gorges dam.

SNC-Lavalin has received hundreds of millions in Site C dam contracts

SNC-Lavalin’s work on the Site C dam is not mentioned on its website, which profiles the company’s previous work on two smaller hydro projects in B.C. 

In an email, SNC-Lavalin media relations manager Laurence Myre Leroux said since 2010 SNC-Lavalin and Vancouver-based engineering and consulting firm Klohn Crippen Berger received direct-award contracts totalling about $350 million for Site C project work that includes “detailed design of the earthfill dam and generating station,” as well as technical support during construction and other engineering services. The freedom of information documents show Klohn Crippen Berger received almost $42 million in no-bid Site C contracts over the past three years. Leroux referred all other questions to BC Hydro. Klohn Crippen Berger did not respond to a request for comment.

For one earlier contract, SNC-Lavalin provided BC Hydro with a “shadow estimate” for its forecasted $8.3-billion price tag for the dam. A shadow estimate reviews numbers and costs to confirm they are accurate. SNC-Lavalin’s shadow estimate proved to be wildly wrong, missing the mark by more than $7 billion. 

Alexis, the BC Hydro spokesperson, said SNC-Lavalin and Klohn Crippen Berger received direct Site C project awards because of their historical knowledge of the project, “their historical role as designer on the project dating back to the 80s and 90s and their experience and expertise in large hydro projects within B.C., across Canada and around the world.”

BC Hydro former chief engineer received almost $1.6 million 

Other long-time recipients of direct-award contracts include Tracker Contracting, a road and lease construction company based in Fort St. John, and Formula Contractors. Tracker Contracting received more $12 million in direct-award contracts from 2020 through 2022, while Formula Contractors, a construction services company based in Prince George, was awarded more than $63 million, receiving one contract for more than $28 million.

The biggest winners of Site C no-bid contracts over the three years were companies belonging to the Duz Cho group based in Chetwynd, owned by McLeod Lake Indian Band. Over a three-year period starting in 2020, Duz Cho companies were granted more than $95 million in no-bid contracts for clearing and construction work.

One company belonging to the Halfway River First Nation was also given $10 million for Site C “health clinic provider” services. Halfway River Frost, an industrial services company owned by the nation, was granted $37 million. M&M Resources Inc., a private clearing, logging and civil earth works company based in Fort St. John, garnered more than $6.5 million in no-bid contracts over the three years.

Tracker Contracting, Formula Contractors, Duz Cho and Halfway River First Nation did not respond to requests for comment. 

TE Little Consulting, a firm headed by Tim Little, BC Hydro’s former chief engineer, received almost $900,000 in 2021 and 2022 in no-bid contracts for services as the Site C dam “independent engineer.” That’s on top of almost $700,000 Little previously received for Site C dam engineering services. 

Earlier no-bid Site C dam contracts include two worth almost $11 million that undisclosed BC Hydro employees granted to a B.C. numbered company whose officers and directors were top executives of Petrowest, the Alberta company that went bankrupt and was dismissed from Site C’s main civil works consortium.

The largest contract, for $10.1 million, was awarded to the numbered company in July 2017 — just two weeks before Petrowest was let go from the consortium for insolvency and months after the company’s financial difficulties were reported in the media. 

Silver said protecting the public interest may require a change in law to ensure transparency and the ability to hold BC Hydro and other public bodies to account. “If [the current law] gives them so much discretion that it’s essentially optional whether they comply or not, then the law needs to be changed.”

Some of the contractors won their first no-bid contracts years ago, when the B.C. Liberal Party was in power. B.C. United (formerly the B.C. Liberal Party) did not respond to a request to comment on the awards. Ernst & Young, the receiver for Petrowest, said it could not comment on any client work. The Narwhal was unable to reach Tim Little.

Furstenau said it’s been “a fool’s errand” to try to get information about the Site C project from the B.C. NDP government, particularly since the 2020 snap election that saw the party win a majority. 

“The lack of transparency around Site C is stunning, considering it’s the largest public infrastructure project in B.C. history and the public knows nothing other than it has ballooned in cost and time enormously.” 

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Apart from a little pocket of land on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, Blueberry River First Nations territory is an industrial wasteland. At a walking pace, it only takes about three minutes to stumble onto some kind of development. It’s a land of pipelines, clearcuts and gas rigs. But things are about to change.

After winning a hard-fought case before the B.C. Supreme Court in 2021, the Treaty 8 nation reached a final agreement with the province on Jan. 18. The agreement charts a path forward from a past where the province excluded the community from resource decisions and infringed on the nation’s constitutionally protected rights. Two days later, B.C. signed agreements with four neighbouring nations: Doig River, Halfway River, Saulteau and Fort Nelson. Collectively, the agreements represent a way out of conflict and a shared goal to heal the land. 

“Here we are, in the 21st century, fighting to protect that treaty and fighting to uphold our Treaty Rights — that is totally backwards in my eyes,” Blueberry River Chief Judy Desjarlais told The Narwhal. “As long as the grass grows, the sun shines and the rivers flow … that treaty is law.”

“Now, we’re both on the same page,” she continued. “They know where I’m coming from, I know where they’re coming from and this is what it means to my people. And we want to be able to continue on this path where we’re both building a sustainable future.”

The agreements come with funding for restoration projects, promises of new protected areas, restrictions on future oil and gas development and more. Hailed as history in the making, the agreements reflect a new way of looking at cumulative impacts and a shift towards shared decision making and co-management of the natural world.

Here’s what we know so far about what this means for land, water, wildlife and communities.

How did we get to this?

For decades, the B.C. government encouraged industry to extract resources from Blueberry River’s 38,300 square kilometre territory. The story was the same for neighbouring nations — the province allowed companies to reap financial benefits from vast stretches of forests and underground deposits of shale gas. Those who lived there watched as their lands were gradually fragmented until the fish and wildlife depending on intact ecosystems all but vanished — and with them went the peoples’ way of life.

That way of life was meant to be protected. In 1899, Canada made a commitment to the Indigenous Peoples who lived in B.C.’s northeast region. Signing what’s known as Treaty 8, the colonial government promised to protect their rights to hunt, trap and fish. Blueberry River First Nations’ ancestors formally agreed to the treaty in 1900.

Fast forward to 2015, when their descendants took the province to court for infringement of those rights. Six years later, B.C.’s top court handed down a ruling that found the province guilty of breaching its obligations under the treaty. Notably, there was no single culprit — B.C.’s infringement was a product of cumulative impacts, the sum total of all the developments it permitted. In a departure from its typical adversarial approach to litigation, the province didn’t appeal the decision. 

At a press conference celebrating the recently signed agreement, Premier David Eby, who was attorney general when B.C. lost the case and chose not to appeal, noted “the path to reconciliation is through negotiation and not through litigation.”

“Full partnership and respect is the only way forward for the northeast and also for our entire province,” he said. “Not endless court battles and not short-term transactional relationships.”

A few months into negotiations, the nation and the province signed an interim agreement that earmarked $65 million for habitat and cultural restoration and greenlighted 195 forestry and oil and gas projects that had been stuck in limbo since the court ruling. While those projects were allowed to proceed because they were already on the books when the court made its decision, B.C. imposed a moratorium on any new proposals until it could reach a final agreement.

Completing the agreement and reaching agreements with the other Treaty 8 nations lifts that moratorium and sets guidelines for what comes next.

Why are agreements with Treaty 8 nations needed?

The impact of industry on Treaty 8 territories is on a scale hard to comprehend.

On Blueberry River territory, rivers run dry because the oil and gas industry uses so much water for its fracking operations. What’s left is often tainted from industrial activity, impacting moose populations and other species that drink and bathe in the rivers and lakes. Throughout the region, caribou herds that once numbered in the thousands now teeter on the brink of extinction.

Chief Desjarlais said bringing politicians and government officials onto the territory helped move the negotiations forward.

“You have to come and see it to believe it for yourself,” she said. “I can tell you all day long, and you’re never gonna get the picture unless you’ve actually in the midst of it, flying over top of it, walking in what used to be a forest and now it’s cut blocks. Once they came, they saw. Now they understand.”

Forestry and fossil fuels aren’t the only contributors to the poor ecological health of the region. When B.C. built the W.A.C. Bennett dam in 1963, it flooded more than 1,700 square kilometres of forest, irrevocably changing the landscape. Add agricultural land to the mix and you start to get the picture.

In 2019, the province developed a cumulative effects framework to start figuring out how to keep this from happening again. The same year, it revised its Environmental Assessment Act, giving decision makers the power to put the brakes on individual projects while the province conducts regional assessments — to date, B.C. has yet to do one.

As well as its obligations to uphold Treaty Rights, B.C. is responsible for ensuring industrial development aligns with sustainable management of ecosystems and wildlife. One way the province is attempting to do so is through new land-use planning. Most of its existing plans date back to the 1990s and didn’t meaningfully include First Nations in the process.

Because Treaty 8 territories are so damaged, the region is an obvious starting point. Not that B.C. had much of a choice.

Why is this significant for Blueberry River and other Treaty 8 nations?

The agreements offer a kind of reset for the five nations — until now, the communities have borne the brunt of industry impacts and received next to nothing in economic benefits. For decades, the paradigm was strictly extractive.

“Doig River First Nation has been advocating for a meaningful role in decision-making in natural resource development in our territory for many years,” Doig River Chief Trevor Makahaday said in a statement. He noted the agreement sets the stage for “a new fiscal relationship between Treaty 8 First Nations and the province” that will “create economic certainty, heal the land and our people, and create overall stability for the region for generations to come.”

It’s a shift that takes B.C. a step closer to commitments it made in 2019 when it passed into law the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act.

“These agreements with Blueberry River First Nations and the Treaty 8 nations align with the [United Nations] Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by addressing Indigenous self-determination, cultural revitalization, and decision-making over traditional territories and resources,” Murray Rankin, Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, told The Narwhal in an email.

“It’s been a hard battle, so today is a very, very good day,” Chief Sharleen Gale, from Fort Nelson First Nation, said at a press conference on Jan. 20. “Our people, the people of the Fort Nelson First Nation, have a history of defending our rights, including challenging bad industrial practices in court and standing up firmly to government to protect our rights.” 

“Going forward, we can really work together on restoring our relationship and doing things right so that future generations will continue to have places to go to hunt, fish and trap.”

“It’s been said that reconciliation is hard work — and it is,” Rankin said at the press conference. “Make no mistake, the hard work of implementing the agreements with Treaty 8 nations is going to be challenging. It’ll take the best in all of us. But that change is already well underway.”

Desjarlais said one important change is when nations are involved in decision-making. 

“We get to sit at the table with industry to see what their plans are going to look like and what kind of footprint they may or may not leave,” she explained. 

Because the court case set a major precedent in B.C., with implications beyond provincial borders, the recent agreements will be followed closely by other governments, Indigenous and settler alike.

What do the agreements mean for B.C.’s oil and gas sector?

As B.C. and Blueberry River worked on negotiations, uncertainty around what would happen next fueled speculation about the Site C dam and the oil and gas sector. Treaty 8 territories are at the heart of the Montney region, the source of the province’s shale gas reserves and where the $16 billion hydroelectric project is set to flood more than 100 kilometres of the Peace River. Critics of the BC Hydro dam link it directly to the province’s push to export gas. The energy-intensive process of extracting, transporting and compressing gas is often done by burning fossil fuels — without electricity from Site C, emissions from the sector would far exceed reductions targets set by the province.

As the final agreement was negotiated, lobbyists and industry proponents voiced their fears to senior B.C. officials. Theirs was a warning of impending economic collapse, including the loss of thousands of jobs. But those fears were unfounded. 

While the agreements between the five Treaty 8 nations and the province do come with restrictions on how the oil and gas industry can operate in the region, there are no limits to how much fossil fuel the sector can extract.

“The agreement is not a cap on production, it is a cap on land disturbance,” Premier Eby said at a Jan. 18 press conference in Prince George.

Industry proponents applauded the decision.

“It is our expectation that the necessary work can now proceed to ensure that the gas Petronas Canada delivers to the LNG Canada project is responsibly produced right here in B.C., benefiting the entire province and country,” Izwan Ismail, CEO of Petronas, a Malaysian oil and gas giant, said in a statement.

Ismail’s comments were echoed by industry groups, including the Explorers and Producers Association of Canada.

“The agreement between the British Columbia government and Indigenous communities in northeast B.C. provides much-needed clarity to move forward with natural gas development,” Tristan Goodman, president and CEO of the association, said. “These historic agreements demonstrate a commitment from all parties to reconciliation and the environmentally conscious development of B.C.’s natural resources.”

The agreements come with restrictions on where companies can drill new wells. On Blueberry River territory, the plan is to encourage oil and gas activity in previously disturbed areas and limit any new disturbances to half the sector’s previous footprint.

“At a landscape-level, this is huge news,” Peter McCartney, climate campaigner with the Wilderness Committee, told The Narwhal. “I think this goes a long way to reduce the localized impacts of fracking and the gas industry. In terms of B.C.’s overall gas supply and any constraints on the industry … I think it’s unlikely that this will hold them back.” 

The B.C. Oil and Gas Commission declined an interview but told The Narwhal to check back in the coming weeks as the details are still being worked out.

How does this impact land, water and wildlife on Blueberry River First Nations territory?

B.C. noted in its announcement more than 650,000 hectares of Blueberry River First Nations territory will be protected from new forestry and oil and gas development. That protection could come in the form of new Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas, according to the press release. Chief Desjarlais called that land “no-go zones”.

“Some of those areas are traditional and ceremonial areas for our nation, our people,” she said. “A lot of stories that come from our Elders and our ancestors have generated from these no-go zones. For me to know that there will never be activity there, that makes me feel really good, because that legacy will continue on in our future generations.”

“We’re willing to work to move forward, but these areas absolutely need to be protected.”

B.C. also promised a revised ecosystem-based approach to land-use planning, including watershed-level details aimed to protect and recover water, river systems and wildlife features. Over the next three years, four plans will be developed, focusing on the areas of highest priority to the nation.

The province announced a pot of money to support restoration work. By 2025, B.C. will provide Blueberry River with $200 million on top of the $65 million already allocated. Other initiatives include support to launch a community stewardship, monitoring and guardian program. 

“It will never be back to what it once was,” Desjarlais said. “But we can start by restoring and trying to bring back where some of our landmarks were, start restoration in the major impact areas.”

Blueberry River will also receive $87.5 million over three years, plus an opportunity to start getting economic benefits from industry and a share of provincial royalty revenues in the next two fiscal years. 

B.C. said it will also set up a multi-year shared restoration fund for other Treaty 8 nations, but the amount has not yet been announced. Like Blueberry River, the nations will also have more money to play with through revenue-sharing agreements. 

The agreements also rolled out changes to forestry in the region, promising to reduce the annual allowable cut in the regional timber supply area by around 350,000 cubic metres per year and ending the use of aerial herbicides.

“This is huge for the boreal forest in northeast B.C.,” McCartney, with the Wilderness Committee, said. “The Blueberry River First Nations and all the Treaty 8 nations have our utmost gratitude for the work that they have done to get to this point where we can start healing the land and restoring the ecosystems that have been so heavily damaged.”

“I can’t imagine what our ancestors are feeling right now,” Desjarlais said. “But I’m sure they can rest easy knowing that what they signed years and years ago is still law and it’s still moving forward in protecting our cultural and traditional values.”

What comes next?

Because none of the agreements B.C. signed with Treaty 8 nations were publicly available prior to publication, many details will be revealed in the coming weeks. The agreement with Blueberry River includes a provision for an annual review of progress and a formal review after three years. B.C. and the nation agreed to get the ball rolling as quickly as possible for forestry and oil and gas.  

Permit applications that were paused during the negotiations will now move forward, with the province planning to push them through within the next 60 days. A revised process to handle new applications will be set up by April.

Chief Desjarlais said industry may be starting back up but it’s no longer business as usual.

“Especially in northeastern British Columbia, where we’re rich in resources, we had to come to find this thing called balance. And I think we’ve found the path.”

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For more than a decade, successive B.C. governments have thrown their hats behind an industry hellbent on getting gas out of the ground and across the Pacific to Asian markets.  

LNG Canada, a liquefaction and export facility under construction in Kitimat, is poised to be the first project to do so. As the facility inches closer towards a goal of firing up operations in 2025, its partner companies are eyeing investment for an approved expansion, which would double the amount of gas processed at the plant. 

The plan is to power that second phase by burning gas — at least at first. The export project is approved to use its own gas to run massive compressors that cool the fossil fuel to -162 C, reducing its volume for shipping. The moment it flips the switch to start operations of its first phase, running at half its potential capacity, it will become B.C.’s single largest emitter of carbon pollution. 

Phase two, which could come online as early as 2030, would send B.C. emissions skyrocketing. Running at full capacity, the operation would produce around 13 megatonnes of emissions annually, more than 20 per cent of B.C.’s total emissions in 2020. 

“We are in a climate emergency. We cannot afford to expand fossil fuel infrastructure and miss key emissions targets,” Sonia Furstenau, leader of the B.C. Greens, said in a statement. “LNG phase one already made it practically impossible to meet our CleanBC goals. LNG phase two makes it a pipe dream.”

CleanBC is the province’s plan to lower emissions by 40 per cent by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2050.

As LNG Canada tries to entice investors, its project partners are looking into ways to rely more on electricity instead of gas. 

Teresa Waddington, vice president of corporate relations with LNG Canada, told The Narwhal it has a team dedicated to exploring options, which could include redesigning expansion plans to eventually replace the gas turbines with electric motors.

While electrification would reduce emissions from the LNG export facility, it wouldn’t eliminate them. And powering the project would divert energy away from other sectors, Merran Smith, executive director of Clean Energy Canada, explained in an interview.

“If they were going to try to reduce their emissions using electricity, and they did that upstream, along the pipeline and at the plant, they would need about two Site Cs worth of electricity,” Smith said, noting demand for hydro is only going to increase as B.C. shifts to reduce carbon pollution in line with its climate plan. 

“We’re going to have to make choices,” she said. “We’ve also heard from the B.C. government that new industry needs to fit within the CleanBC plan. The B.C. government needs to be clear: What does it mean by those words?”

‘Time for a reset’: phase 2 at odds with climate science

When B.C. gave LNG Canada a green light in 2015, its approval was for both phases — with or without electrification. The province’s climate plan was unveiled three years later, setting ambitious targets. The current goal is to reduce emissions to 40 per cent below 2007 levels by 2030, scaling up to 80 per cent by 2050. It also set a sectoral target of 33 to 38 per cent reductions by 2030. All of these goals are relevant to LNG Canada, which has an estimated lifespan of 40 years.   

B.C.’s Ministry of Environmental and Climate Change Strategy confirmed future LNG projects have to align with B.C.’s climate commitments — but stopped short of explaining how phase two fits into that equation. 

“At this time, LNG Canada’s phase two project has not reached a final investment decision,” a ministry spokesperson wrote in an email. “Construction on phase one of the project is ongoing and is not expected to be complete until 2025.”

Tom Green, senior climate policy advisor with the David Suzuki Foundation, said B.C. needs to rethink its position on the project.

“It’s time for a reset,” he told The Narwhal. “Climate science is telling us that each additional tonne of carbon in the atmosphere is a tonne we can very ill afford.” 

Green said it’s disappointing to hear the original plans to power the second phase with gas are going ahead, despite CleanBC targets.

“Meanwhile, we have had the experience of how bad climate change is affecting British Columbians,” he said, noting the 2021 heat dome, in which 619 people died. “If you look at the social cost of carbon … we’re impoverishing ourselves with each tonne of LNG that we export.”

Smith said the province’s climate targets only accounted for LNG Canada’s initial operations and Woodfibre LNG, another proposed export facility. 

It’s unclear why B.C. didn’t factor the expansion into its climate strategy, but Green suggests it might be because there’s no way to reconcile the vast increase in emissions with provincial reductions goals.

“British Columbia hasn’t revised its legislative targets, probably in part because it knows it’s in such a pickle because of its commitment to the LNG industry,” he said.

LNG Canada executives say government support needed for electrification  

Jason Klein, LNG Canada’s CEO, said the company is taking a phased approach to using electricity because transmission lines haven’t been built.

“We can’t do an immediate and wholesale electrification of the plant and the pipeline,” he told Reuters earlier this month. “If the power was there today it would be a pretty straightforward decision.”

Waddington said any changes to the current plan are contingent on government support. Acknowledging federal and provincial emissions reduction targets, she noted electrification would need both governments to be on board to “help facilitate the power and transmission necessary to make it a viable option.”

Green worries governments will be coerced into further subsidizing the project, which has already received billions in financial support through a suite of tax breaks and incentives.    

“I think the big risk here is that B.C. and Canada are going to continue with public financing and concessions, not insisting that LNG Canada phase two or future projects use electric drive and be the lowest possible emissions,” he said. “Instead, they’re going to allow them to undermine our climate targets and then we’re going to end up with stranded assets and worsen the climate emergency. None of it makes much sense.”

The connection between Site C and LNG Canada

It appears the province is already putting the wheels in motion to supply more power to the project. 

On Jan. 19, BC Hydro CEO Chris O’Riley said the Crown corporation is starting the process to increase transmission capacity to Terrace, B.C., less than an hour north of Kitimat.

“This is a really important infrastructure initiative for us,” he told attendees at the B.C. Natural Resources Forum in Prince George. O’Riley didn’t specifically name LNG Canada in the announcement, but he noted industrial demand for hydro is increasing.

“While we currently have enough transmission capacity to serve the existing and committed load in the north coast, and we’ve got room to spare, we do have an unprecedented queue of potential customers that have applied for service and these are mines and LNG projects, port facilities and the like.”

B.C.’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy confirmed in an email that LNG Canada is one of those potential customers.

“BC Hydro is aware of the proponent’s request for a connection to the electricity grid to run operations for the proposed second phase of the project,” a ministry spokesperson wrote. “BC Hydro is assessing multiple scenarios for economic growth in northern B.C.”

Smith said the financial burden shouldn’t be on taxpayers, noting fossil fuel companies have deep enough pockets to pay for the hydro infrastructure.  

“They’re not a sector that needs a subsidy,” she said. “They’re a sector that’s making significant profits right now and they should be investing their profits into carbon reduction strategies.”

Like most oil and gas companies operating in Canada, Shell, LNG Canada’s biggest shareholder, earned record profits in 2022, posting a $9.49 billion profit in its third quarter, more than double what it took in the year before.

Global markets, in part due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, set the stage for all this profit and are fuelling a renewed push to get gas out of the ground and to buyers overseas.

Waddington said the LNG Canada project “represents a tremendous opportunity for our country to contribute a reliable supply of low-carbon LNG to the world at a seminal moment for global energy security.” 

Earlier this month, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was in Ottawa for talks about trade and the current energy crisis. According to reporting by The Globe and Mail, Kishida’s cabinet secretary for public affairs said LNG Canada will replace the gas Japan imports from Russia. Japanese company Mitsubishi, an automotive manufacturer that also controls more than half of that country’s gas imports, has a 15 per cent stake in LNG Canada.

But whether countries like Japan will need B.C. gas by the time the second phase comes online is up for debate. According to the International Energy Agency’s latest report, demand for natural gas is expected to taper over the coming decade as countries implement more aggressive climate strategies.

‘We need to choose’

Even if LNG Canada can switch to electric motors to power its phase two compressors, that doesn’t mean the project won’t contribute to the climate crisis. 

After the gas is shipped overseas, it has to be warmed up, put back into pipelines, shipped to buyers and burned to produce energy. And in B.C., emissions produced during liquefaction only account for some of the greenhouse gases that end up in the atmosphere. To get the gas from sources in the northeast, it first has to be fracked out of shale deposits and transported through the contentious Coastal GasLink pipeline. 

“The fossil fuels get burned at the destination and there’s methane emissions all along the chain,” Green said.

Methane has a warming potential of around 85 times that of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said it’s imperative to cut methane emissions by a third before 2030 to keep global warming from reaching catastrophic levels.  

“It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5 C,” Jim Skea, co-chair of the panel, said last year. “Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible.”

B.C.’s environment ministry said in a statement to The Narwhal it has set aggressive targets to address methane emissions. 

“The CleanBC Roadmap includes a range of actions to ensure the oil and gas sector meets its sectoral emissions target, including mandating a 75 per cent reduction in methane emissions from the sector by 2030, and nearly eliminating it by 2035, as well as significant supports for electrification of the sector.”

Supplying electricity to meet the energy-intensive demands of gas liquefaction comes with a slew of environmental implications.

For example, hydroelectric reservoirs also emit methane. And as vast areas are flooded to create those reservoirs, such as those slated to be submerged by Site C, existing natural carbon storage locked in forests and wetlands is lost.  

BC Hydro maintains it can meet the demands of LNG Canada.

“LNG Canada’s power needs can be met with BC Hydro’s existing electricity generation, and this can be done with or without Site C,” Mora Scott, spokesperson with the Crown corporation, told The Narwhal. 

Smith said she suspects that doesn’t take into account the projected demands of an increasingly electrified society, nor the full scope of the project. 

“We need to choose what we want that electricity to go to and I would suggest that we want to be powering industries that are going to be growing,” she said. “All evidence is that the LNG sector is one that will be declining in 2040 and 2050, whereas things like mining for metals and minerals for battery production, these are industries that will be growing.”

Green said investing in the fossil fuel industry is increasingly a losing proposition.

“Every barrel of oil you extract, every 1,000 cubic meters of gas you extract, once it’s burned, you’ve got to go and do it again,” he said. “When you put up a solar farm or a wind farm and set up the grid and put in place the storage, that’s an asset that keeps generating energy.”

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In the basement of Yvonne Tupper’s home, in northeast B.C., sits a banker’s box filled with papers from a Site C dam civil lawsuit that BC Hydro brought against her seven years ago. 

Tupper, a Saulteau First Nations member, still gets upset when she speaks about the ongoing lawsuit that accuses her and five others of conspiracy, intimidation, trespass, creating a public and private nuisance and “intentional interference with economic relations by unlawful means.” 

The lawsuit puts a “target on our backs” and sends the message that “it’s okay to bully us,” Tupper, an environmental monitor and cultural Knowledge Keeper for Saulteau First Nations, told The Narwhal.

The civil lawsuit was filed after Peace Valley farmers and First Nations members set up a winter camp at the Rocky Mountain Fort heritage site on the banks of the Peace River — once home to the first European fort in mainland B.C. and now a Site C dam acid-generating waste rock dump.

The campers demanded work on the Site C project be stopped until court cases against the project were heard and independent reviews could determine whether the project infringed treaty rights and was in the best interests of B.C. ratepayers. 

According to the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, the civil lawsuit bears the hallmarks of a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, also known as a SLAPP suit. SLAPP suits aim to intimidate and silence critics by burdening them with the financial and emotional cost of legal action. 

The Site C suit — which BC Hydro lawyers suggested in court could seek up to $420 million in damages from Tupper and other defendants — also names Jane and John Doe, meaning anyone can be added at any time.

The peaceful two-month camp was voluntarily dismantled the day after BC Hydro obtained a court injunction to remove people from the area so the old-growth forest around the designated heritage site could be clearcut before migratory birds returned to nest in the spring.

To collect evidence for the civil lawsuit and injunction application, BC Hydro monitored personal Facebook pages, Twitter and Instagram accounts, blogs, other social media and a GoFundMe page Tupper set up to raise money for the camp, which could only be accessed by helicopter or snowmobile. Dozens of people visited the encampment overnight or during the day to show their support, including scientist David Suzuki and Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs. 

Tupper said she has been “psychologically affected” by the lawsuit and believes BC Hydro may still be monitoring her social media accounts. “All those bridges and construction — that they said we held up — were completed years ago,” she said. “So I don’t understand why this lawsuit’s still going on.”

In an email, Greg Alexis, Site C manager of public affairs and community relations, said BC Hydro sent a letter in March 2021 offering to discontinue the legal action “and it was not accepted by the counsel for the defendants.”

“We also sent a follow up letter in May 2021 and BC Hydro has not yet received a response,” Alexis said. “We remain open to discussions to resolve this issue.” He said BC Hydro is not able to discuss the terms of the settlement offer.

Jason Gratl, the lawyer for five people named in the suit, said he could not discuss details about the settlement terms offered in 2021. He described the terms as “less favourable than the status quo” and “unacceptable.”

Lawsuit called ‘embarrassing’ for B.C. government 

According to Ga Grant, litigation staff counsel for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, the hallmarks of a SLAPP suit usually include a significant differential in power between parties and their access to resources. 

They also include “weak evidence of actual harm to that party that has more power,” Grant said. 

“Just because a case is filed against someone doesn’t mean it actually has merit. In fact, SLAPP suits are regularly used to quash dissent, even though they may be baseless.” 

Grant said such suits can cause “significant devastating harms to the freedom of expression and public debate that is very important to our democracy.” 

Verena Hofmann, one of the people named in the suit, said she was so intimidated and “rattled” by the lawsuit that she feared speaking out against the Site C project and “took a step back.” She stayed very quiet on social media, hoping to “fly under the radar” lest BC Hydro take her back to court. 

At first, Hofmann only wanted to speak to The Narwhal if her name wasn’t used but as she shared her story she changed her mind.

“I’m proud of what I did,” she said. “I used my voice. I stood up. And now I’m afraid to say that my name can be used? No. I don’t want to be afraid that way and I don’t want others to feel that way.” 

Hofmann said she joined the camp because Site C dam construction was “ramrodded” through by BC Hydro and the B.C. government even though there were legal challenges waiting to be heard by the courts — including a landmark treaty rights case that might have stopped construction of the hugely over-budget $16 billion project, the most expensive hydro dam in Canadian history. 

The B.C. government greenlighted the project after it changed the law to remove the independent BC Utilities Commission — which had previously rejected the dam on the grounds that it was too environmentally harmful and the energy wasn’t needed at the time — from oversight. While court cases were still waiting to be heard, and in the absence of an independent review, former B.C. Premier Christy Clark vowed to push dam construction “past the point of no return.” 

Hofmann said she was particularly stressed by BC Hydro’s claim of damages from the campers, which lawyers for the public utility suggested in court could total as much as $420 million. The claim for damages was “outrageously exaggerated,” Hofmann said. “It’s unfathomable and unimaginable that [I] myself could have made those damages.” 

Hofmann recalled a sense of panic as she worried she would lose her home and that other campers, too, would lose their homes, land and possessions. “Nobody had any money to fight this,” she said, adding that she had to ask friends for money to help cover her legal expenses. 

Hofmann spoke about the industrialization of the once-bucolic Peace River Valley for the Site C dam, expressing grief at how the closely knit valley community has been torn apart by the project. Many residents were forced to relocate or their property was expropriated by BC Hydro to make way for the future reservoir, which will flood 128 kilometres of the valley and its tributaries, roughly the same distance as driving from Vancouver to Whistler. 

BC Hydro’s charges were ‘worrisome’ 

Ken Boon, a farmer who was named in the civil suit along with his wife Arlene Boon, said the civil law suit “basically weaponized what BC Hydro really wanted, which was the injunction.”

“There’s no doubt that the actions BC Hydro took were meant to be a deterrent … We know first hand that there were people very concerned about getting involved because of the possible financial implications,” said Boon, whose third-generation farmhouse and farmland was expropriated by BC Hydro in 2016. 

The Boons now live in a cabin on a small slice of their former property, sandwiched between the future reservoir and a section of a provincial highway that was relocated out of the flood zone.

Boon said he and his wife no longer worry about the lawsuit because “it would be virtually impossible and bizarre to the extreme” for BC Hydro to move ahead with it now. 

“At the time, it was a pretty concerning thing,” he said. “They were throwing around some big numbers that seemed pretty bizarre in the scheme of things. How they determined those numbers was never clear to us. Obviously when you’re up against a mega corporation like BC Hydro that has limitless funds at their disposal and you’re just a little guy it’s definitely worrisome. They could crush you like a bug.”

BC Hydro offered to drop the lawsuit in the spring of 2016 if the couple signed an agreement promising not to engage in any actions that would impede construction of the dam, said Boon, who is the president of the Peace Valley Landowners Association, representing landowners who are affected by the Site C project. 

“Seven years have gone by since this civil claim was initiated, and we have not done any action to physically impede the project in that time,” he said. “However, we have continued to protest against the project through peaceful and lawful methods while being respectful of those working on it. Under the circumstances, why would we want to sign any such document?” he said. “BC Hydro did not need our signature to slap this suit on us, so they can — and should — just drop it without our signature. Otherwise, they can leave it open as a reminder of their bully tactics.”

Esther Pedersen, another Peace Valley resident named in the suit, said she has ignored the civil lawsuit, calling it “embarrassing” for the B.C. government. 

Pedersen didn’t stay overnight at the Rocky Mountain Fort camp, which was also a gathering place for Indigenous people. She only visited the camp once for 15 minutes when there was an extra seat in the helicopter that transported Suzuki and Phillip. 

Pedersen allowed access through her rural property to the public land where the helicopter picked up Suzuki and Phillip. She also used a freezer outside her house to collect food for the campers, which was dropped off by community members.

“This is like somebody who’s playing Monopoly who doesn’t like the rules and says, ‘oh, yeah, okay, well, you have to pay a million dollars. Okay? No, two million,’’ ’ she said. “It’s stupid. It’s childish. Can I go to jail forever? Really? For what?”

“Are you telling me that I can be sued for $400 million for feeding 28 people [at] a traditional camp?”

B.C.’s new premier David Eby, the former executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, championed anti-SLAPP suit legislation when he was the province’s attorney general. In one interview, Eby described SLAPP suits as lawsuits “filed to silence somebody on a matter of public interest.” 

In 2019, the province passed the Protection of Public Participation Act. The Act allows defendants like Hofmann and the Boons to apply to the court to dismiss a lawsuit on the grounds that it impinges on the ability to speak freely on a matter of public interest. If the court agrees, it can decide the defendant’s costs must be covered by the proponent of the lawsuit.

But the Act applies only to lawsuits filed after May, 2018, exempting the Site C civil lawsuit. 

Grant said the purpose of anti-SLAPP legislation like the Protection of Participation Act is to ensure voices can be heard without the threat of expensive legal action.

She said it is very concerning the Act doesn’t cover cases like the Site C civil lawsuit that “essentially are still being used aggressively against people.”

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BC Hydro and the Site C dam’s main civil works contractor have been charged under the federal Fisheries Act for failing to immediately report the discharge of four million litres of potentially contaminated acid rock drainage water into the fish-bearing Peace River. 

The contractor, Peace River Hydro Partners, was also charged with depositing a harmful substance into the Peace River, according to BC Hydro’s latest quarterly Site C dam report. The report, released in late December, says the public utility learned of the charges in late October following an investigation by Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Acid rock drainage poses a threat to fish and other aquatic life through acidification of water and elevated concentrations of metals such as copper, cadmium, iron, zinc and aluminum. Four million litres is about one-and-a-half Olympic-sized swimming pools of water.

The Site C dam will flood 128 kilometres of the Peace River and its tributaries, destroying some of Canada’s richest agricultural land, habitat for more than 100 species at risk of extinction, Indigenous graves and Treaty 8 hunting, fishing and trapping grounds. BC Hydro says the $16 billion dam —  the most expensive hydro project in Canadian history — will generate enough electricity to power 450,000 homes. An independent investigation by the B.C. Utilities Commission found the same amount of power could be generated by a suite of renewables, including wind, for about half the price. 

The water discharge incident, which began on Sept. 8, 2018, occurred during a rainfall event at the dam site in northeast B.C., when “large volumes of rainwater flowed over potentially acid-generating rock that had been exposed” during excavations for the project, according to the report. 

The civil works contractor — a partnership between the Spanish corporation Acciona and the South Korean corporation Samsung — utilizes various holding ponds and a water treatment plant to manage water prior to discharge in the Peace River, according to the report. “As the rain event continued, the holding ponds reached capacity” and the water was released over a period of 24 hours “to protect the water management infrastructure and ensure the capacity of the holding ponds,” the report says. 

BC Hydro says it reported the event on Sept. 9 to provincial and federal agencies, including the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency. It “subsequently updated” the agency, along with the federal fisheries department, Emergency Management BC and other agencies, according to the report, which says BC Hydro “will be reviewing the matter and considering next steps.” 

BC Hydro characterized the volume of water discharged into the Peace River as “relatively small” compared to the river’s overall flow, saying no impacts to fish or aquatic life were detected.

In an emailed response to questions, Greg Alexis, Site C manager of public affairs and community relations, said BC Hydro is aware of the recent charges under the Fisheries Act “and we will provide our response through the courts.”

“In the meantime, we will not be providing any further comment on the charges,” Alexis wrote.

He said it is still early in the process but BC Hydro understands it would ultimately be the court that decides the penalty if the utility or Peace River Hydro Partners is convicted. 

Fines for violating the Fisheries Act are increasingly hefty. In 2021, Teck Resources was ordered to pay $60 million — the biggest fine in Canadian history — after pleading guilty to polluting fish-bearing waterways in the Elk Valley, where the company operates metallurgical coal mines. 

Alexis said BC Hydro undertook a review of the Site C dam project’s “care of water systems on the right bank” of the Peace River immediately following the rainfall event. “We can confirm there have been no further incidents,” he said. 

“We are also not aware of any evidence suggesting that fish or aquatic life were impacted as a result of this event.”

Site C acid drainage into the Peace River is a ‘huge concern’

Adrienne Berchtold, an ecologist and mining impacts researcher with the SkeenaWild Conservation Trust, said the discharge of any acid rock drainage water is concerning. 

Acid rock discharge happens when naturally occurring materials in rock, including sulphur-bearing materials, are exposed to oxygen, moisture and bacteria, and release acid into water. The discharge tends to have elevated levels of heavy metals that are harmful to aquatic life. “It can affect fish in a lot of their regular daily functions,” including their ability to smell and breathe, Berchtold said.

The Site C dam will affect 32 fish species, including bull trout and three other species vulnerable to extinction, according to a review panel that examined the project for the federal and provincial governments. 

Copper, for instance, can affect the ability of fish to find food, avoid predators and navigate through their habitat, Berchtold said. “All of these sort of sudden lethal or not acutely lethal effects can affect the fish’s ability to survive.” Apex predators like bull trout are more at-risk than other fish because heavy metals accumulate in their bodies as they consume smaller, contaminated fish, she explained. 

Numerous studies confirm acid rock drainage can have long-term impacts on the health of fish populations, with a lower abundance of fish and decreased genetic diversity, Berchtold added. “So certainly, acid drainage is a huge concern in terms of potential aquatic effects.”

She said acid rock discharge is diluted in larger water bodies like the Peace River but four million litres “is not an insignificant volume.” 

In an emailed response to questions, Environment and Climate Change Canada said it would not be appropriate to comment because the matter is currently before the courts. 

Updated Jan. 16, 2023, at 10:27 a.m. PT: A previous version of this story stated acid rock drainage occurs when naturally occurring materials in rock are exposed to oxygen and light. The story has been updated to clarify acid rock discharge happens when naturally occurring materials in rock are exposed to oxygen, moisture and bacteria.

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Peace Valley residents and avid birders knew it was coming but that doesn’t make the destruction of an irreplaceable wetland any easier. 

This month, BC Hydro is set to drain and log Watson Slough to make way for the Site C dam in northwest B.C. Beavers will be trapped and euthanized and their dams will be destroyed to release the water from the wetlands.

The slough, a collection of different types of wetlands stretching 20 hectares — roughly the size of 25 Canadian football fields — is a beloved nature area in the Peace River Valley renowned for birdwatching and visited by hundreds of schoolchildren over the years. It’s home to at-risk species like the yellow rail, a small marsh bird that hides among the grasses, and the stocky western toad. Elk, black bears, beavers, deer and muskrats also use the wetland along Highway 29 west of Fort St. John.

BC Hydro says it is going to replace the wetlands the controversial hydroelectric project destroys, but experts warn that wetlands are like old growth forests and can’t truly be replaced. 

“One of the things we’ve known for years now, for decades, is that wetlands aren’t really replaceable,” Rebecca Rooney, a wetland ecologist at the University of Waterloo, told The Narwhal in an interview. “The idea that we can destroy things and then recreate them at our convenience is just a beautiful lie.”

The Site C dam could destroy close to 800 hectares of wetland in the Peace River Valley, according to the 2014 federal-provincial environmental assessment report. 

BC Hydro’s goal is to preserve the net function of the wetlands that will be destroyed, spokesperson Bob Gammer said in a statement to The Narwhal. To do that the utility company is working with Ducks Unlimited Canada to build new marshes and conserve existing wetlands at risk of destruction by other projects. The non-profit has restored hundreds of wetlands in B.C. since 1968. According to BC Hydro, most of the newly constructed wetlands will be marshes or shallow open water areas.

But not all wetlands are the same. 

Grassy marshes are a far cry from tufa seeps (rare, mossy, hillside wetlands) that take thousands of years to form. There are seven tufa seeps within the Site C project area and at least five will be destroyed. So will the only marl fen, another rare wetland found at Watson Slough, which supports a rich array of plants.

BC Hydro has itself acknowledged tufa seeps and marl fens “are unusual ecosystems that cannot be recreated,” according to the environmental assessment report.

The utility company’s approach “satisfies the federal and provincial conditions,” Gammer said. “Both levels of government are well aware of and have vetted and accepted our compensation program to meet our regulatory requirements,” he said.

Wetland compensation projects are ostensibly framed as a way to offset the impact of new development or resource extraction. But Rooney sees them as more of a “tax that businesses pay to carry on with business as usual.”

“It is better than nothing,” she said. “If the policy goal is to preserve wetlands and their function for future generations, that’s not happening.”

‘Cookie cutter’ wetlands can’t replace nature’s diversity 

“It is quite an amazing wetland,” Peace Valley farmer Ken Boon told The Narwhal, referring to Watson Slough. “It’s just a real hub for biodiversity.”For Boon, who lives just a few kilometres from the slough, it’s not only the loss of the wetland that’s concerning — it’s how B.C. Hydro plans to go about destroying it. 

Watson Slough was initially meant to be logged more than five years ago. The work was delayed at the behest of local communities and the Peace River Regional District, who argued it was unnecessary to destroy the wetland so many years before the reservoir was filled. Boon said in 2017 there were no plans to cull the beavers and drain the slough.

In response, Gammer said “detailed clearing plans had not previously been developed for the entire slough.”

BC Hydro now says it’s necessary to drain the wetland to allow for safe logging this winter to prevent any safety hazards once the reservoir is filled. As for the beavers, BC Hydro determined it’s the most humane option, Gammer said. “The likelihood of a beaver surviving relocation is quite low, while the stress of trapping and relocation will be quite high,” he said.

When it comes to BC Hydro’s plans to replace the lost wetlands, Boon thinks that’s a “pretty impossible task.”

Across Canada, huge numbers of wetlands are wrecked to make room for cities, farmland, mines and other industrial projects. In some areas, such as southwestern Ontario, more than 90 per cent of the wetlands that once dotted the landscape are now gone, Rooney said. “Every single one that’s left is precious,” she said.

Wetlands are home to a diversity of plants and animals. They help clean contaminants from  water and manage its flow through the landscape. Importantly, in the context of climate change, they can capture and store carbon.

The different types of wetlands — bogs, fens, swamps and marshes — are better at some of these things than others. A major challenge with compensation programs is the diverse collection of wetlands that occur naturally end up replaced with a stock model, Rooney said. “We just get this cookie cutter duck factory, which is really great at doing some things but can’t replace everything that has been lost,” she said.

In a statement to The Narwhal, Bruce Harrison, Ducks Unlimited Canada’s B.C. head of conservation science and planning, said he agrees “the best way to conserve wetlands is to avoid impacts wherever possible and that compensation should be the last tool in the toolbox.”

“However, we also understand that sometimes wetland impacts cannot be avoided, in which case offsetting wetlands is necessary,” he said. “These efforts are hugely important to the ecological health and functioning of the Peace River Valley.”

In general, it takes a few years for a replacement wetland to be “mostly functional,” Harrison said, though the timeline can vary depending on the state of the replacement site and type of wetland being restored.

So far, BC Hydro and Ducks Unlimited Canada have identified 500 hectares that could be used for compensation wetlands, Gammer said. Ducks Unlimited has already built a 50-hectare marsh near Clayhurst, a community east of Fort St. John near the B.C.-Alberta border, according to Gammer.

The organizations are also working to preserve another 175 hectares of wetlands in the region this summer, which according to BC Hydro, would have been lost otherwise. These are wetlands Ducks Unlimited built about 30 years ago. Gammer said they are “at the end of their engineered lifespans.” BC Hydro provided funding “that was not otherwise available” for Ducks Unlimited to rebuild the wetlands’ water control structures to ensure they continue to function, he said.

BC Hydro offered few other details about its plans to offset the damage to important wetland habitats. The Narwhal asked, for instance, for a map or locations of all wetlands slated to be destroyed by the Site C dam as well as potential replacement wetlands. In response, Gammer said more information would be available as Site C nears completion. The project is expected to be completed in 2025.

In a follow up statement to The Narwhal, a spokesperson for Ducks Unlimited Canada said the organization “is acting in the capacity of a solutions provider, assisting BC Hydro in meeting its wetland mitigation responsibilities which have been established by federal and provincial regulatory authorities.” “It will be up to the regulators to decide whether BC Hydro has fully compensated for all wetland functions lost due to Site C,” the statement said. 

Watson Slough drew people from near and far to experience the wetland ecosystem

As the construction of the Site C dam moves forward, birders near and far are forced to contend with the imminent loss of the slough.

The Peace River runs through a break in the Rockies, which allows warm Pacific air to flow through the mountains, creating a unique microclimate in the region to the east, said Brian Churchill, a retired biologist who lived for decades in Fort St. John. It draws migratory birds more typically seen in the Prairie provinces to this patch of habitat at the edge of their range in northeast B.C., he said.

For Churchill, Watson Slough holds special memories. It’s where he went the day he got his hearing aid. “I actually heard a sora,” he said. Its distinct call drew Churchill’s eye and he and his wife were able to spot the secretive grey-and-brown bird. “It’s a real special bird and I had never seen one and certainly never heard one,” he said.

Avid local birder Evan Pye has spotted dozens of species at Watson Slough, according to ebird, a Cornell Lab of Ornithology project that tracks birds around the world. “It’s a special place,” he said, “it’s usually very peaceful there.”

It’s also “easy access to find birds that you find nowhere else in B.C.,” he said.

It’s so easy to get to that busloads of school kids visited the wetlands on field trips. For years, trails were maintained through Watson Slough, drawing locals and tourists alike to watch the wildlife. 

“That’s priceless,” Rooney, the wetland ecologist, said. “These ecosystems that we have that become these flagships for education and for outreach are these precious jewels and we really need to do everything we can to protect them.”

BC Hydro expects the public will be able to access most of the replacement wetland projects, Gammer said, but it remains to be seen what kind of habitat these new marshes will offer. 

The joint federal-provincial panel — which assessed the environmental impacts of the Site C dam years ago — found reason to be worried for the yellow rail and western toad, as well as other species.

The Site C dam “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,” the panel concluded. The wetland compensation program wouldn’t be enough to make up for the habitat the western toad would lose, the report said.

“Every wetland is kind of like its own ecosystem and the changes of actually making one that’s identical to what you’re destroying is probably slim to nil,” Pye said. It’s like “cutting down an old, old tree and replacing it with a seedling.”

BC Hydro said it will begin to drain Watson Slough in September. The area will be logged over the winter.  

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After a decades-long fight against the Site C dam, Monday was a bittersweet day for West Moberly First Nations Chief Roland Willson. 

The Nation and the province announced a partial settlement agreement has been reached over the beleaguered hydroelectric project on the Peace River in northeastern B.C., which will see the release of West Moberly’s claims against the Site C project in exchange for an impact and benefits agreement and contracting opportunities. 

“Site C has progressed to a point where it is unlikely that any judge will order the dam dismantled. Because of this, we have reluctantly agreed to settle that portion of our court case related to Site C,” read a statement from West Moberly First Nations.

“The final nail in the coffin was a while ago,” Chief Roland Willson told The Narwhal. “They had no intention of stopping.”

“We’re never going to be in agreement with Site C. That’s never going to happen. And every time we drive by that development it’s going to be a constant reminder of what’s been done to us,” Willson said. “Forcing us into this situation like this is not something to be proud of. They beat us into submission, basically.” 

A 2014 federal-provincial review of the Site C dam found the project would cause “significant adverse effects” to First Nations’ fishing, hunting and trapping. Construction on the project began in 2015, with then-premier Christy Clark vowing to get the project past the “point of no return.” In 2019, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination called for the B.C. government to suspend construction of the Site C dam until the project obtained the “free, prior and informed consent” of Indigenous Peoples, but construction continued. 

Asked about the toll fighting the dam for three decades has taken on his Nation, Willson said “it’s massive.” 

“We’ve expended an enormous amount of energy, an enormous amount of goodwill from our supporters. And that’s the sad part of this is we kinda feel we’ve let people down. But the reality is we’ve done everything that we could do to try to stop this and they just kind of ran over us,” he said. “We’re at the point now where we’ve got to pick up the pieces.” 

The Site C dam is a 1,100 megawatt hydro dam that has been proposed as the third dam on the Peace River since the 1970s. The cost of the project has ballooned from $7.9 billion since 2014, when it was reviewed by a federal-provincial panel, to over $16 billion, making it both the costliest dam in Canadian history and the most expensive publicly funded infrastructure project in B.C. history. When Site C is completed, it will flood 128 kilometres of the Peace River and its tributaries, putting Indigenous burial grounds, traditional hunting and fishing areas, habitat for more than 100 species vulnerable to extinction and some of Canada’s richest farmland under up to 50 metres of water.

In its decades-long fight against the dam, West Moberly First Nations launched judicial reviews and made an injunction application, before filing a civil lawsuit against the province. 

West Moberly will direct the benefits of the Site C settlement toward reclaiming and restoring land, revitalizing the community’s culture and “protecting the best of what’s left.” 

The remainder of the civil claim, which relates to the cumulative impacts of resource development and previous dams on the Peace River, has not been settled but has been paused while the Nation and the province enter confidential discussions to resolve matters.

“I appreciate that it has been a difficult decision for West Moberly to resolve its claims against Site C,” Chris O’Riley, president and CEO, BC Hydro said in a joint press release. “These agreements provide us a foundation to move forward together in a manner that fosters a mutually beneficial relationship.”

Site C dam ‘should have never gotten to this stage’ 

Peace Valley farmer Ken Boon, an outspoken critic of the Site C dam, said the settlement agreement seemed “inevitable.” 

“I tip my hat to West Moberly. They truly tried to stop this dam and save the valley and unfortunately that wasn’t to be,” he said. 

Boon had hoped that the West Moberly fight would help light a way forward to resolve this type of conflict differently in the future, but he doesn’t feel hopeful after reading the comments from government and BC Hydro in their press release on the settlement. 

“On the surface, I don’t see any change from the government or BC Hydro’s perspective on how projects will be brought forward or moved forward and that’s what we need. We can’t afford to do any more bad projects like this in the face of climate change and reconciliation,” Boon said. “We’ve got to have a better way of advancing projects. It should have never gotten to this stage.”

Asked if the fight against Site C is officially over, Boon said: “If anything is going to stop it now, it’s probably going to be geotechnical problems.”

An investigation by The Narwhal’s Sarah Cox in 2020 revealed that senior officials with the B.C. government knew about deepening geotechnical problems and budget issues for more than a year before the public was informed. 

“We’ve already seen how the B.C. government and BC Hydro will literally move mountains of dirt and mountains of money to keep this thing going and I expect they’ll continue doing that and probably get a project built,” Boon said.

Boon said many people have already left the Peace Valley, but he and his wife Arlene are still living in their third-generation farmhouse, enjoying a lush, green landscape after a wet spring. On Tuesday morning, just like hundreds of mornings before, they got up at 6 a.m., listened to the birds singing and put on a pot of coffee. 

While they are feeling sad about news of the settlement, they are still finding beauty amidst it all. 

“Right here, at our house, we still look out and it’s still fairly beautiful, despite some of the destruction that you have to look at,” Boon said. “The swallows are here in force. They’re just a joy, hey? You can’t help but be a little cheerful when there’s literally hundreds and hundreds of swallows of three different species that converge on our yard every year. I like to think that they’re old buddies that come back every year.” 

Once the reservoir flooding begins in 2023 the Boons’ future is uncertain, but they are going to do everything they can to stay in the valley. 

“I can’t think of any place I’d rather live,” Boon said. “We know our days are numbered in the current situation. We’re kinda just rolling with the punches.” 

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