On a calm, chilly day in January, Saulteau First Nations member Julian Napoleon joined a three-helicopter rescue mission that rivalled a James Bond escapade in the Austrian Alps for its ingenuity and speed.

The search was on, in the snow-clad Misinchinka mountains in northeast B.C., for a dozen female caribou from an endangered herd called Klinse-Za. Caribou C-315S, spotted crossing an alpine meadow, was a bull’s eye target for a net gun shot by a biologist, balanced on a helicopter skid and strapped to his airborne machine.

“We swoop in immediately,” explained Napoleon, a UBC biology graduate. “The whole thing can go down in five minutes.”

A vet sprayed medetomidine, a sedative, into the animal’s nostrils and placed a thermometer in her rectum. If the caribou’s temperature reached 41 degrees Celsius, a sign of potentially fatal distress called capture myopathy, they would have to peel off the net and abort the mission.

Napoleon, tall and brawny, blindfolded the caribou and strapped her hooves, helping to ease her into a custom-made vinyl body bag. Calmly, so as not to alarm their nervy passenger, four men hoisted 120 kilograms of muscle, fur and antlers into the aircraft for a 15-minute flight.

One biologist held up the caribou’s head so she didn’t aspirate her stomach contents. “You’d probably lose the animal if that happens,” explained scientist Scott McNay, who was waiting to receive the cargo at a marshalling spot near the top of Mount Rochfort in B.C.’s Peace region.

Still trussed and bagged, the caribou travelled by snowmobile skimmer to a brand-new pen, circled by two electric fences to thwart wolves and other predators.

Scientist Scott McNay. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

Guardian Julian Napoleon. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

There, a team weighed the animal, scooped her poop to send to a lab for testing, drew three vials of blood to test for pregnancy and pathogens, plucked a clump of hair with rubber gloves for DNA testing and ran a portable ultrasound over her rump to measure body fat. They recorded the length of her legs, chest, and back, parted her milky-brown coat to check for ticks and injected a “health shot” of vitamins and deworming medication.

Then the team faded into the trees, leaving the groggy animal to struggle to her feet and eat some grey-green terrestrial lichen, hand-picked by members of Saulteau First Nations and West Moberly First Nations, partners in this Peace region maternity penning project.

For the next six months, caribou C-315S would live in the pen with 11 other caribou cows, airlifted to the enclosure in the hope they are pregnant and their calves will survive when released at three months of age. Outside the pen, at 10 months old, fewer than one out of three youngsters in this southern mountain population of woodland caribou is still alive.

“It’s kind of crazy,” Napoleon said in an interview with The Narwhal. “We have a big team of folks. We’ve got biologists, we’ve got veterinarians, we’ve got community members from Saulteau and West Moberly [First Nations]. We’ve got three helicopters for the bulk of the capture days. Once a caribou is shot with that gun everything has to happen very fast to ensure that it’s subjected to the least amount of stress possible.”

Kind of crazy, indeed. As the adage goes, desperate times call for desperate measures. In the age of the Sixth Great Extinction, far-fetched and expensive efforts to save endangered species are becoming as noteworthy as movie star shenanigans. This past summer, scientists fed a starving orca whale named “Scarlet” medicated Chinook salmon from a boat, while members of her highly endangered southern resident killer whale group swam nearby in noise-polluted waters depleted of their food source.

Caribou cows and their calves in their guarded enclosure. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

Endangered Vancouver Island marmots are bred at the Calgary Zoo, where zookeepers sometimes parade a taxidermied cougar past cages to stimulate alarm whistles — a piercing shriek warning other marmots of imminent danger. It’s a reflex the marmots will need once they are airlifted back to Vancouver Island for release, their movements monitored through tracking devices surgically implanted in their bellies.

At a Langley facility to breed endangered spotted owls, eggs are removed from platform nests in large aviaries where owls sometimes practice catching live mice in escape-proof troughs, to hone their hunting skills if the day ever comes when the population is viable enough for release. The eggs are placed in incubators and young biologists keep vigil through the night when they begin to hatch, like parents watching their newborn in the ICU.

The endangered spotted owl breeding facility has an annual budget of $362,000, including $270,000 in funding from the B.C. government. The Vancouver Island Marmot Foundation raised $760,000 in 2017 to save a winsome rodent that looks like a super-sized squirrel with beaver teeth. And that’s just the tip of the burgeoning cost of saving endangered species from ourselves: each caribou calf born in the pen costs $125,000, according to McNay’s calculations.

As species around the world wink out at an accelerating speed — 150 to 200 plant, insect, bird and mammal species become extinct each day — scientists have isolated the primary culprit for the carnage. It’s us, human beings, and Canadians are no exception to the doleful trend. A 2017 World Wildlife Fund report found that even when endangered species like caribou are protected by Canadian law, their populations continue to decline.

Like most people, I have never seen a caribou in the wild. I know them mainly as the antlered animal engraved on the Canadian quarter: stoic, regal and frequently mistaken for a moose. In popular culture, caribou are the eulogized creatures that pull Santa’s sleigh, courtesy of an 1823 Christmas poem whose author is believed to have been high on mushrooms when he envisioned reindeer in the sky.

Most Ice Age megafauna was wiped out 10,000 years ago, at the tail end of the last glacial period. But caribou, unlike wooly mammoth and steppe bison, survived. Their presence was indispensable to First Nations, who relied on the ungulate for sweet dried meat and tasty marrow to spread on bannock, like butter or jam.

“If you needed food you could always find a caribou,” said West Moberly First Nations chief Roland Willson. “Elders told us that the caribou have always been here for us when we needed them.”

Six decades ago, so many caribou roamed the south Peace region that elders described them as like “bugs on the landscape.” But now the animal whose braided tracks have graced the planet for at least two million years, about the time Homo erectus populations first wandered out of Africa, is vulnerable to extinction throughout most of its Canadian range, which often coincides with valuable forest lands, mineral tenures and oil and gas leases.

Improbable efforts to save woodland caribou are also underway in B.C.’s Columbia Mountains, where almost $2 million has been spent over the past five years for a penning project that has stabilized the herd but not increased it. In Alberta, where lucrative oil and gas operations overlap with caribou habitat, the provincial government has floated a proposal to rescue one caribou herd by enclosing the remaining 80 animals in a massive $15 million dollar pen.

In the south Peace region, the epicenter for resource extraction in B.C., five out of six caribou herds were imperiled by 2016. A seventh herd, the Burnt Pine group, was declared functionally extirpated in 2013 despite the legal efforts of West Moberly First Nations to save the last remaining 11 animals.

The Nation went to court to try to stop a mining company, First Coal Corporation, from exploring in the Burnt Pine herd’s critical winter range. But a favourable court ruling came too late. The lone survivor, a young bull, left the area in search of others of his kind. He was never seen again.

“There’s an argument that caribou are one of these creatures that are just doomed for extinction,” said Willson, a frequent presenter at forums and seminars across North America, where he speaks about the disappearance of caribou and their cultural value to his people. “They’ll just fade out. But what’s happening here is manmade.”

West Moberly Chief Roland Willson. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

For years the nations asked the B.C. government, which carefully monitors caribou herds and chronicles their demise, to prioritize herd recovery over industrial development in critical habitat. In 2014, with only 16 animals remaining in the Klinse-Za herd, named after an area that includes the sacred Twin Sisters mountains, the nations launched their own caribou recovery strategy, one that put caribou first.

The Klinse-Za herd, also known as the Moberly herd, was so close to local extinction that the nations hesitated to put all its reproductive females at risk in an untested, long-shot penning project. So the first penning experiment, at a different locale, took five females from the Klinse-Za and five from the neighbouring Scott East herd.

“We were two years away from extirpation,” McNay explained. “I remember asking First Nations how important it really is that we save these caribou, as opposed to letting the herd die and bringing them back in a reintroduction program. It was just terribly important to them that we save these caribou.”

Inside the first pen, “the animals all got to know each other,” McKay said. “It changed the social relationships. And when we released them there was a big mix between the herds. Some of the Klinse-Za animals went with the East Scott herd and the East Scott animals stayed with the Klinse-Za animals. We couldn’t really tell which herd was which any more.”

To pay for the penning project, the First Nations partnered with some of the same resource extraction companies that log, mine, frack for natural gas or build pipelines through caribou habitat.

An aerial view of the caribou pen. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

Sponsorship varies from year to year, but since the project’s inception the companies have included Enbridge, Canfor, West Fraser, Spectra Energy, Walter Energy, Anglo American, TransCanada, Canadian Natural and Teck.

Other sponsors are the federal government, the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation, BC Hydro and the B.C. Oil and Gas Research and Innovation Society.

The nations convinced the B.C. government, which allows virtually unbridled resource development in caribou habitat, to eventually contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for the penning enterprise. In the project’s early days, when money ran out for life support, the nations turned to crowdsourcing.

As spring bloomed in the pen in May, the first caribou calve arrived: a stillborn.  Two other cows were not pregnant; one wasted away with an intractable uterine infection and was not expected to survive. But nine caribou cows delivered nine healthy calves who soon found their legs in the alpine meadow while their watchful mothers browsed on arnica, grounsel, horsetail and sedges.

In early July, as clouds scurried across the northern sky, I travelled to the pen with Willson and McNay, the mustachioed biologist who manages the project.

McNay, passing around bug spray like a box of chocolates, warned it would be a long, rough ride in his Ford Super Duty pickup truck: 71 kilometres on an active logging road, traversed by scores of loaded trucks that left a fog of grey dust and an unpleasant film in our mouths, nine kilometers on an unused logging road, and eight kilometers lurching towards the heavens on a pathway riddled with a mechanical minefield of potholes and boulders.

The two-hour journey afforded a magnified look at some of the principal reasons for the caribou’s demise. We journeyed past a logging camp with a small city of trailers, ribbons of hydro lines that cut a wide swath through the boreal forest, and a mining stake with abandoned ore samples stacked in wooden boxes.

Around a bend was a bird’s eye view of one of the octopus arms of the Williston reservoir, which 50 years ago flooded an area 15 times the size of the city of Vancouver. The reservoir, behind the W.A.C. Bennett hydro dam, jump-started the decline of local caribou populations when it severed a major migration route.

“We’re in the heart of the resource extraction zone for B.C.,” Willson said. “Everything that makes B.C. excited is happening here. We have mining, we have oil and gas, we have forestry, there’s large scale hydroelectric.”

Widespread industrial development has spawned roads, well pads, and seismic lines. By 2012, according to Global Forest Watch, there were 45,000 kilometres of roads in the Peace. Together, the region’s linear disturbances could wrap around the planet four-and-a-half times.

“There are many, many studies that show a very strong correlation between the amount of industrial disturbance on the land and the decline of caribou populations,” McNay pointed out. “As industrial disturbance increases, caribou populations decline.”

Climate change is sometimes blamed for the caribou’s demise, caribou scientist Justina Ray told The Narwhal. But that’s only “nominally” correct, explained Ray, senior scientist and president of Wildlife Conservation Society Canada.

In the past, caribou herds could adapt to the footprint of forest fires by moving their range and avoiding burned areas for several decades until they rejuvenated.

“But when you’ve got fire in conjunction with escalating human disturbance on the very same landscape you’re talking about precluding options,” Ray said. “So fire becomes an increasing threat in this situation, when you’ve already got very, very small populations struggling to survive in a very modified landscape. And then this gets even more compounded by fire increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change.”

Sturdy, with heavy, elaborate antlers, caribou evolved over millions of years from a large South American deer. Rangifer tarandus adapted to harsh winters, with two half-moon shaped toes that grow longer in winter for grip on icy surfaces and a dense, insulating undercoat that also provides buoyancy while swimming.

Members of the Klinse-Za caribou herd. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

Southern mountain caribou populations in the Peace eat nothing but low-protein lichen from old-growth trees in mid-winter, when snow is too deep to crater for terrestrial lichen.

Clear-cut the old-growth trees and you remove a solitary mid-winter food source. Squeeze a species capable of traveling 50 kilometres in a single day into smaller and smaller areas, crisscrossed by roads and other linear disturbances, and you seal escape routes from wolves and lesser predators like grizzly bear and cougar.

As long as caribou have sufficient habitat they stand a good chance of eluding wolves and other predators. Females giving birth will naturally disperse, reducing the risk.

But ever-expanding roads and seismic lines function as highways for wolves, which are easy-target abettors in the caribou’s demise. As clear-cuts green up, browsing moose are drawn into traditional caribou habitat, inviting more wolf packs.

Moose will kick wolves so ferociously that it’s not uncommon for pack members to die even in a successful hunt. Elk herd their young into the centre of a circle and huddle around them, fighting off predators with antlers and hooves. White-tailed deer, speedy and stealthy, can outrun and outsmart their hunters. But caribou, said McNay, are “on the other side of the spectrum.” “They don’t seem to have those defense mechanisms, and rely solely on dispersing in a large intact range.”

Caribou, the only ungulate whose females have antlers, also display an inquisitiveness that begs for the adage “curiosity killed the cat” to be re-cast. Studying caribou on the Liard plateau, north of the Peace, McNay and a colleague once whipped out their laptops to type up their notes. The caribou ambled right up, eager to investigate the shiny contraptions.

“If you stand up and wave your arms back and forth like antlers you’ll get a bull coming right up,” McNay said. “It’s just wild. They are a species that really needs big open spaces of wilderness.”

Napoleon greeted us outside the pen, coffee mug in hand. A wall of black geotextile fabric enclosed the 15-hectare oval — the size of 28 football fields — constructed by Napoleon and a half-dozen others in the middle of a squally winter with snow several metres deep.

Near the pen entrance is a one-room shack where two guardians from each First Nations take turns living for a week at a time. The shack has two bunks, a small flat screen television powered by a generator, and a Coleman stove where Napoleon fried bacon for his lunch.

The pen contains a smorgasbord of natural caribou habitats, including old-growth subalpine fir and Engleman spruce with arboreal lichen, drier, rocky areas with terrestrial lichen, several feeding meadows and a stream. Following the caribou capture, and in the weeks before release at the end of July, the animals are fed lichen. Most of the time, they eat specially made caribou pellets with added vitamins from feeding troughs in the main meadow.

The guardians patrol the outside of the enclosure on ATVs, ferrying building supplies for continual pen reinforcement. They keep vigil with binoculars, rifles slung across their backs, making sure wolves, bears and cougars don’t stalk the enclosure. If they see a wolf, they shoot it.

Since 2015, in an eleventh-hour attempt to save caribou, the B.C. government has culled hundreds of wolves in the south Peace, shooting them from helicopters. In Alberta, the government has shot or poisoned more than 900 wolves since 2005.

But scientists like Ray and McNay caution that the controversial culling practice is only a short-term emergency measure. In biology circles, along with penning, it’s known as “intensive management.”

“If you don’t improve the conditions into which you’re releasing these poor things over time, then you will have to do this again and again every year,” Ray said. “And that’s hugely expensive.”

Until governments are prepared to take the political-hot potato step of reducing and restricting resource extraction in caribou habitat, scientists say herds in the south Peace and elsewhere will continue to decline, with more becoming locally extinct.

“Nobody wants to limit the [industrial] footprint,” Ray said. “They just want to manage what they’ve got….We’re sitting on a legacy of many decades of thinking there’s more than there is, that resources are abundant. You’re in a situation where people have expectations that this will continue indefinitely.”

Northeast B.C. is home to some of the province’s most industrialized landscapes. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

Reconciling different viewpoints about land use is extremely difficult and the longer governments wait to “put their foot down,” the harder it will be, Ray pointed out.  “Plus even if you put your foot down it’s still going to require extraordinary investment and stopping development in some places — and even that might not be successful given the forces of climate change and the fact that we may have gone too far.”

There’s no point in protecting and restoring caribou habitat — by decommissioning roads, planting trees in tricky high-elevation cut-blocks and limiting recreational uses — if more habitat is simultaneously destroyed, McNay noted.

“You wouldn’t go out and restore one road when five new roads are getting built. It’s really important to understand that concept. The basis for getting [to recovery] is either to do one heck of a lot of restoration or curtail some of the industrial disturbance. Somewhere there’s a balance.”

As a small measure of how much habitat restoration will cost, Cenovus Energy recently committed $32 million over 10 years for a caribou habitat restoration project in the range of the Cold Lake caribou herd, whose habitat overlaps with Cenovus oilsands sites. That’s $3.2 million per year to help one herd.

Compare that, McNay said, to B.C.’s commitment of $27 million over five years to assist 30 herds out of 52 that are in need of recovery. That boils down to about $900,000 per herd, according to McNay’s analysis, and about $100,000 has already been spent.

“Really what we’re looking at is $200,000 on average per herd per year,” compared to $3.2 million annually for one Alberta herd. “That’s a pretty big difference.”

Guided by Napoleon, we crossed the electric fence and slipped through the pen door. After squelching through a bog and a few twists and turns through the forest, we climbed a short ladder to a wooden lookout platform in a fir tree.

Peeking into the green meadow, speaking sotto voce, we spotted one caribou cow munching sedges, a mocha-coloured calf close to her side. Three more caribou appeared with their multi-sized offspring. The youngsters, with their dark muzzles and over-sized ears, resembled German Shepherd puppies on stilts.

“They are pretty gentle and incredibly affectionate animals,” said Napoleon. “They’re pretty special critters. We need them. They’re precious. I want all of them to survive.”

After four years, the penning project is achieving some success. Herd size has increased by 13 per cent a year, to 66 animals. Last year, all seven calves born in the pen survived their first year, compared to four out of nine calves released in 2014. The 10-month survival rate for calves born in the pen is close to 60 per cent, double that of calves born in the wild.

“The whole thing ultimately really has to boil down to habitat restoration and protection,” said McNay, pointing out that the herd needs to have 200 animals to be sustainable. “Ultimately that’s the real deal. That’s what has to happen. And we have to get there one way or another. Otherwise all this is for naught.”

On July 31, two guardians from West Moberly First Nations switched off power to the electric fence. They removed several panels of the geotextile fabric and placed the feeding troughs outside the pen, adding handfuls of terrestrial lichen. They had already cut a trail to the high alpine in order to expedite travel for the herd and, with any luck, avoid grizzly bears sighted earlier near the pen.

Rifles at the ready, in case any wolves appeared out of the ether, the guardians waited for the caribou to discover the exit. At 6:30 p.m., after 141 days in the maternity pen, the females left as a group, youngsters by their sides.

As of early September, all were still alive.

“We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that our grandchildren have caribou,” Willson said. “I hope that my grandchildren can hunt a caribou or see a caribou, and not just look at them on the back of our quarter.”

This report was produced with financial assistance from the Unchartered Journalism Fund.

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The German word schadenfreude immediately sprang to mind for Victoria lawyer Robert Janes when he heard the surprise news that the federal government will not contest an interim injunction application by a Treaty 8 First Nation seeking to halt work on the Site C dam.

Janes said there are many officials in Ottawa who believe the B.C. government is deliberately putting Ottawa in an untenable position on the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion championed by Alberta and the federal government.

“That has probably not created a lot of willingness on the part of the federal government to bail B.C. out of the fight that B.C. has chosen to have with the Treaty 8 First Nations,” said Janes, a litigator with extensive experience representing First Nations.

“I’m sure there are many federal politicians and officials having the feeling of schadenfreude or, as the German say, happiness in the misery of others, as they look at B.C. in this situation. But that of course is purely speculative.”

The decision leaves the B.C. government to stand alone in court this July fighting West Moberly First Nations, which brought the injunction application pending a full civil trial that aims to terminate the Site C project on the grounds that it infringes on treaty rights.

The question of whether the Site C dam infringes on treaty rights has never been tested in the courts, and a favourable ruling for First Nations could shut down the entire Peace River hydro project.

Tim Thielmann, a lawyer for West Moberly First Nations and Prophet River First Nation, said Canada’s position appears to be unprecedented.

Thielmann said he is not aware of any other case in Canada in which a government has elected not to defend its own authorizations from being struck down by litigation brought by First Nations.

The Site C dam required multiple federal authorizations to proceed, including one permit that granted BC Hydro permission to cause “serious harm” to fish habitat.

“They [the federal government] say that they do not consent to the injunction,” Thielmann said in an interview. “But they do not oppose the injunction. What they say is they take no position. It’s the equivalent of abstaining on a vote.”

In taking no position, Ottawa has also elected to bring no evidence to the courts to defend against the injunction, leaving B.C. on its own to justify the $10.7 billion Site C project, Thielmann pointed out.

In response to the First Nations’ civil claim, the federal government said it anticipates BC Hydro will submit “further applications for authorizations to Canada in respect of various aspects of the construction of Site C,” raising the question of what position Ottawa might take on future Site C project authorizations if the Kinder Morgan debacle continues.

Contradictory positions from federal government

The federal move also shines a national spotlight on the B.C. government’s contradictory position towards First Nations, a position that Chief Roland Willson of West Moberly First Nations called “hypocrisy.”

“They’re playing hardball on Kinder Morgan,” Willson said in an interview. “They’re saying ‘let’s stop everything and let the courts decide,’ but here on Site C they’re just rolling ahead.”

“We’ve asked them numerous times to stop. That’s the part that’s hard to understand. They’re saying one thing for Kinder Morgan but totally saying the complete opposite on Site C. They’re speaking out of both sides of their mouth.”

Like the federal government, B.C.’s NDP government has pledged to advance reconciliation and to uphold the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which states that large resource projects such as the Site C dam must have the free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous peoples.

“The irony here is that the [B.C.] premier himself has said that he will allow the courts to give direction to him before taking steps on Kinder Morgan that could be unconstitutional,” Thielmann said in an interview.

“The Site C direction he has so far chosen — to permit BC Hydro to destroy those lands and to fight the First Nations in court with teams of lawyers and endless resources — [means] that the First Nations ultimately never have that opportunity for the court’s decision on constitutionality before their rights are destroyed, before it’s too late. And that’s wrong.”

Janes, a principal with JFK Law Corporation, agreed that “it’s hard to reconcile” the B.C. government’s positions on the Site C dam and Kinder Morgan pipeline.

“Canada’s response really puts B.C. on the spot and highlights the inconsistencies of its position when it comes to First Nations,” said Janes, whose firm represents Alberta’s Mikisew Cree in an on-going challenge to the decision of the Federal Court of Appeal that First Nations are not owed a duty to consult when the Crown develops legislation.

Willson described the federal decision as “exciting” and said his nation is hopeful their injunction application now stands a greater chance of success.

“It’s also unnerving,” he said. “They cause a big fight and then they put their hands up and step back and say we’re not actually going to fight.”

Along with Chief Lynette Tsakoza of Prophet River First Nation, Willson called on the B.C. government to meet with Treaty 8 First Nations to discuss how to wind down work on Site C until the courts can rule on the question of treaty infringement.

“We remain ready and willing to discuss alternatives to Site C with the B.C. government,” Tsakoza said in a statement.

Willson said he believes the NDP government’s position would be different if the former B.C. Liberal government had advanced the Site C dam in the Vancouver area instead of in the province’s northeast, which some now refer to as an industrial sacrifice zone.

“Because it’s up north and it’s just affecting some First Nations and farmers, it’s no big deal. That’s the part that gets me upset. We don’t matter to them,” said Willson.

“And we don’t have the votes to make a difference. But this shouldn’t be about whether or not we can vote them [the NDP] in or vote them out; this should be about what’s right and what’s wrong.”

The federal decision is the second time in recent months that Treaty 8 First Nations fighting the troubled Site C project have had their hopes raised.

Instead of opposing an “interim, interim injunction” threatened by the nations’ legal team, in February BC Hydro decided to halt logging a 30-kilometre tract of old-growth boreal forest in a Site C transmission line corridor. That work remains suspended until after the injunction hearing in July.

B.C.’s Attorney General ministry referred questions about the federal decision to B.C.’s energy ministry.

In an emailed statement, the energy ministry said it is aware that the Attorney General of Canada received instructions to “take no position” on the injunction application brought by West Moberly First Nations.

“As this matter is before the Court, and out of respect for the judicial process, we have no further comment at this time,” said the statement.

A third Treaty 8 signatory, the Blueberry River First Nation, has launched a separate legal action claiming the cumulative impact of industrial development on its traditional territory, including the Site C dam, infringes on constitutionally protected treaty rights.

The Blueberry case, which is expected to stretch over 100 trial days, will also be heard starting in July.

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The Site C dam has lived many lives before its approval today by Premier John Horgan, from a twinkle in the eye of some BC Hydro engineers, to the target of multiple lawsuits, to two damning reports by the utilities regulator, to “the point of no return.”

Below, we’ve collected a few of the key moments in its life up to now.

• 1971: B.C. Hydro begins engineering feasibility studies for a potential third dam on the Peace River
• 1976: B.C. Hydro concludes that Site C, just upstream of Taylor, B.C., is the most feasible of the options on the table
• July 1980: B.C. Hydro releases an environmental impact statement, estimating the project might be completed by 1987 at the earliest; it also forecasts growth in power demand of 5.9 per cent for the following decade.
• Feb 13, 1981: The Globe and Mail reports that BC Hydro has applied for a water license to build Site C, then projected to cost $5.1 billion in 2017 dollars.
• May 3, 1983: BC Utilities Commission (BCUC) recommends against the project in a 315-page report, calling the utility’s demand forecasts “unreliable.”
• September 18, 1989: B.C. Hydro quietly revives Site C plan.
• November 30, 1993: BC Hydro CEO Marc Eliesen says, “Site C is dead for two reasons,” “The fiscal exposure is too great … the dam is too costly. Also it is environmentally unacceptable.”
• April 19, 2010: Premier Gordon Campbell announces the government is instructing BC Hydro to proceed with Site C. Cost is estimated at between $5 and $6.6 billion, though Campbell acknowledges the estimate is uncertain and based on old numbers. John Horgan, then energy critic for the NDP, tells the Vancouver Sun he believes the dam is unnecessary.
• May 17, 2011: Estimate of Site C cost pegged at $7.9 billion.
• May 18, 2011: John Horgan tells The Globe and Mail “The environment assessment process appears to be a sham.”
• August 2011: Environmental review begins.
• August 2013: Joint Review Panel (JRP) established to assess Site C for federal and provincial governments.
• October 14, 2014: Three-year environmental assessment complete. JRP concludes that Site C’s energy is not needed in the timeframe presented by BC Hydro. It recommends BCUC review Site C’s cost and alternatives. BC government ignores key JRP recommendations.

The Site C dam has lived many lives before its approval today by Premier John Horgan, from a twinkle in the eye of some BC Hydro engineers, to the target of multiple lawsuits, to two damning reports by the utilities regulator, to “the point of no return”. https://t.co/XxnUD4P68Z

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) December 12, 2017

• December 16, 2014: Site C receives provincial government approval. Cost now pegged at $8.8 billion.
• July 2015: Construction begins despite pending court cases launched by First Nations and Peace Valley landowners.
• January 2016: Premier Christy Clark vows to push Site C past the “point of no return.”
• January 23, 2017: Federal Court of Appeal dismisses lawsuit from West Moberly and Prophet River First Nations. Question of whether Site C violates treaty rights has still not been tested in the courts.
• May 9, 2017: NDP wins enough seats to form government, contingent on Green Party support. Green Party leader Andrew Weaver expresses strong opposition to Site C while Horgan declines to take a position, repeating a campaign promise to send project for independent BCUC review.
• May 15, 2017: Project has spent $1.75 billion.
• November 1, 2017: BCUC delivers its report saying Site C behind schedule and over budget, and power not likely to be needed. Says cost may exceed $10 billion.
• November 30, 2017: Expert panel briefs NDP government on Site C.
• December 11, 2017: NDP government greenlights Site C dam. Cost now pegged at $10.7 billion.
• December 11, 2017: Two Treaty 8 First Nations announce they will seek an injunction to stop work on Site C and will launch a lawsuit in BC Supreme Court on the grounds that Site C violates treaty rights.

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The West Moberly and Prophet River First Nations will seek an injunction against the Site C dam, which received a green-light from the B.C. government Monday.

The project, which will now cost an estimated $10.7 billion, has been vigorously fought by both nations, whose traditional territory will be flooded by the Site C reservoir.

In addition to a court-sponsored injunction, the nations also announced they will pursue a civil case against the project for treaty infringement.

“It was John Horgan’s NDP that demanded a Site C inquiry by the B.C. Utilities Commission, and the results they received from it were clear: no need for the power, better alternatives once we do, and no advantage to ratepayers to proceed,” Chief Roland Willson said in a statement. “With those findings, the only responsible choice was to immediately stop destroying the Peace River valley.”

A three-month investigation by the B.C. Utilities Commission found unresolved questions remained regarding Site C construction and the infringement of treaty rights.

Under Treaty 8, the government of Canada promised to guarantee the rights of local First Nations to hunt, trap, fish and continue their traditional way of life on their land. Although the two nations have brought and lost legal challenges in B.C. courts, the commission found the question of rights infringement is far from settled, saying the Crown would ultimately bear the risk of civil litigation should the province decide to continue with Site C.

Financial compensation would not be without precedent. The James Bay and Northern Quebec Final Agreement awarded $225 million (nearly $1 billion today) to Indigenous groups affected by hydro development there. The B.C. First Nations warned they would pursue a similar settlement if Site C were approved.

During a press conference Premier John Horgan said he recognized First Nations stand opposed to Site C and said his government remains committed to reconciliation and the principles of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

BREAKING: Two B.C. First Nations are asking for an injunction against #SiteC as they prepare a civil suit https://t.co/tBahBKlEUU pic.twitter.com/HIhVgS5R3O

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) December 11, 2017

“When it comes to reconciliation or working with Indigenous leadership, look there has been over 150 years of disappointment in British Columbia. I am not the first person to stand before you and disappoint Indigenous peoples,” Horgan said.

“But I am the first, I think, to stand before you and said that I am going to do my level best to make amends for a whole host of decisions, that previous governments have made to put Indigenous peoples in an unwinnable situation. To talk about resource sharing when all the resources are gone is not true reconciliation.”

“We have a lot of work to do. This is a very divisive issue,” Horgan said.

“They have more than what they need in front of them to stop this project,” West Moberly First Nations chief Roland Willson told DeSmog Canada.

Willson said his nation “saw the writing on the wall” when Horgan declined to stop construction of Site C pending an independent review of the project by the watchdog B.C. Utilities Commission.

“I don’t think they had any intention of cancelling it,” he said. “I was hoping for so much more.”

“This province doesn’t have billions of dollars to waste on a make-work boondoggle for power we don’t even need,” Chief Lynette Tsakoza of Prophet River First Nation said in a statement.

She pointed to a filmed interview with Horgan’s from 2014 as indication of her nation’s legal standing.

“First Nations in the region have entrenched constitutional rights,” Horgan stated in that interview. “Not just the requirement for consultation and accommodation — which we always hear about when we’re talking about resource projects — but they have entrenched constitutional rights to practice hunting and fishing as before.”

“And that’s going to be violated by this dam.”

With files from Sarah Cox.

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BC Hydro violated its environmental assessment certificate for the Site C dam project, according to a B.C. government report released Thursday.

The inspection report, from the B.C. Environmental Assessment Office, detailed how BC Hydro failed to develop acceptable mitigation measures for an aboriginal sweat lodge and suspected burial site, and cannot legally proceed with a bridge related to Site C highway relocation until it does so.

This means BC Hydro’s controversial highway re-location will need to be assessed again by the Environmental Assessment Office and an alternate route long supported by the First Nations may be considered after all.

“BC Hydro has not developed mitigation for known cultural values in the Bear Flats area, including the sweat lodge (and nearby camp) and the potential burial site…” noted the report, which points out that BC Hydro is well aware of the cultural importance of the area for local First Nations.

BC Hydro has been warned of non-compliance with regards to the 455-metre bridge BC Hydro planned as part of the highway relocation in an area of the valley called Cache Creek-Bear Flats, according to the 54-page report issued following a five-month investigation.

ICYMI: First Nations Chiefs Say Site C Highway Route Will Desecrate Graves, BC Hydro Disagrees

“As BC Hydro has been advised that the [Cultural Resources Management Plan] is not ‘to the satisfaction of’ the EAO and that it must be updated prior to conducting construction activities that may impact known cultural resources, it may be a non-compliance if BC Hydro were to proceed to conduct construction activities that may impact known cultural resources,” the report reads.

West Moberly First Nations Chief Roland Willson welcomed the findings, saying that BC Hydro has been “out of line” with his nation and the Prophet River First Nation. They jointly filed a complaint with the EAO in early April.

“A Crown Corporation should be setting the bar on how other [resource project] proponents have to deal with First Nations,” Willson said.

“They’re supposed to be setting the benchmark on this thing. What they’re doing is lowering the benchmark.”

West Moberly Chief Roland Willson. Photo: Jayce Hawkins | DeSmog Canada

Willson said the two First Nations repeatedly asked BC Hydro and the former B.C. government to use a short-listed alternate route for the Site C highway relocation and Cache Creek bridge to avoid “desecrating” aboriginal grave sites and to protect the sweat lodge and traditional gathering place at the confluence of Cache Creek and the Peace River.

ICYMI: ‘Stop the Losses’: Former BC Hydro CEO Calls for Cancellation of Site C Dam

But BC Hydro contractors clear-cut much of the Cache Creek area in February and March, after expropriating property from third generation Peace Valley farmers Ken and Arlene Boon, leaving the land looking like a “moonscape,” according to Willson.

Willson said he was at a meeting in Vancouver in March with BC Hydro representatives to discuss the issue of the Site C highway relocation when the forest near the sweat lodge and grave site was mulched.

“They were cutting the right of way as we were down there trying to solve the issue,” Willson said. “Sneaking small pox into blankets and handing them to us, it’s the same damn thing as how they’ve been treating us.”

“They just ignore us, belittle us, disregard anything we have to say.”

A lawyer for the First Nations said about 200 letters have been sent to the Environmental Assessment Office and BC Hydro by the First Nations on this issue alone.

At the time of publication BC Hydro media relations spokesperson Mora Scott had not replied to a request for comment.

Last year, BC Hydro apologized for the devastating impacts that the W.A.C. Bennett dam had on First Nations, who lost villages, food sources, burial grounds, spiritual areas, gathering places and transportation routes when the dam’s reservoir flooded their traditional territory.

According to BC Hydro documents, the $8.8 billion Site C dam would destroy 42 sites of cultural and spiritual significance for First Nations, including burial grounds, medicine collection areas, offering places for ceremonies and prayers, and locations associated with oral histories and place names.

Willson said one aboriginal burial site beside the chosen highway route was already known by First Nations and recorded by the B.C. government’s archeology branch, but another site along the new highway’s centre line was only discovered last year.

Logging and construction along the Peace River in September 2016. Photo: Garth Lenz | DeSmog Canada

First Nations brought in an archeologist who confirmed the site had all the hallmarks of a Dunne-Za grave — a depression in the ground, high on a hill, at the confluence of two rivers “where bodies are usually laid to rest, so that they have a view.”

Dunne-Za custom does not permit the disturbance of graves, and the First Nations have said the only acceptable mitigation is to move the highway to the short-listed route.

The EAO report casts new doubt on former premier Christy Clark’s claim in June that even a slight delay in re-routing the provincial highway out of the Site C flood zone and building a new highway bridge over Cache Creek — a delay requested by John Horgan shortly before he became premier — would tack on an extra $600 million to Site C’s $8.8 billion price tag.

In fact, BC Hydro is in danger of non-compliance until it makes changes to its Heritage Management Resource Plan and Cultural Management Resource Plan to ensure mitigation measures for the sweatlodge and gravesite are developed prior to construction. The plans are are “not to the satisfaction of the EAO,” said the report.

.@BCHydro Violated Rules for Protecting #Indigenous Sites, Must Re-Evaluate #SiteC Bridge Construction https://t.co/XDg7lwPWWq #bcpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) August 31, 2017

The report said BC Hydro must either adopt First Nations’ recommendations for avoiding harm to the sweat lodge and suspected gravesite — moving the highway to the short-listed route to avoid the area entirely — or develop new mitigation measures that meet the requirements of the EA certificate.

Any new mitigation measures must include “a detailed explanation with supporting analysis regarding why the mitigation proposed by the complainants is not necessary, is impractical, or is otherwise unreasonable,” said the EAO.

BC Hydro’s choice of highway route, according to the First Nations, would create disturbances that include “noise from truck traffic, safety (having a highway within the area where ceremony participants, including children, walk between rounds, etc.) as well as the destruction of the camp site itself, which with [the] feast house is tied to the enjoyment of the sweat and related cultural practices.”

The report determined that the general highway realignment route is consistent with the Site C environmental assessment certificate. But the bridge over Cache Creek is not, and BC Hydro must apply for an amendment to its environmental assessment certificate because it has changed the location and length of the bridge from the design originally approved, according to the EAO report.

BC Hydro has said its preferred highway route at Cache Creek was cheaper than the short-listed alternative, would affect less agricultural land and would allow for more passing opportunities for drivers.

Yet the Crown Corporation refused to release detailed information — called a Multiple Accounts Evaluation — about the relative costs and merits of the two routes, despite repeated requests from the First Nations and the Peace Valley Landowners Association, representing 70 landowners affected by Site C.

“They have a very viable option that is a win-win-win for everybody that they just refuse to acknowledge,” said Willson.

Cache Creek is one of six bridges in the Peace River Valley that will have to be rebuilt as part of a six-section, 30-kilometre highway relocation for Site C that BC Hydro documents said would cost approximately $530 million.

The area around Bear Flats-Cache Creek has “profound significance as Treaty 8 people have gathered, camped, hunted and practiced ceremony here since time immemorial,” according to a 2013 BC Hydro report that quotes NENAN, the Nenan Dane-zaa Deh Zana Child and Family Services Society, which holds annual youth and elders gatherings at Bear Flats.

Former BC Hydro CEO Jessica McDonald, who was fired last month by the new B.C. government, said in April that BC Hydro was  “absolutely committed to meeting the terms and conditions of it environmental assessment certificate.”

“A successful project from my perspective…is environmentally sound and meets the standards that we are held to,” McDonald said in an interview with Stuart McNish for the broadcast Conversations That Matter, a partner program with the Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University.

EAO Administrative Inspection Report Regarding Site C Hwy 29 Alignment_30Aug2017 by DeSmog Canada on Scribd

— With files from Sarah Cox

Photo: Bear Flats by Garth Lenz

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The Supreme Court of Canada has refused to hear an appeal brought by the West Moberly and Prophet River First Nations that argues the federal government failed to consider their constitutionally protected treaty rights when approving the $9 billion Site C dam in northeast B.C.

The rejection by Canada’s highest court has members of Treaty 8 First Nations wondering who bears the responsibility for determining whether or not a major project like Site C infringes on their rights as a treaty nation.

“This is very sad news,” Roland Willson, Chief of the West Moberly, told Desmog Canada.

“We have a treaty that is a part of the Constitution of Canada and there is no legal mechanism to protect the constitution, that piece of the constitution,” he said.

“Every other part of the Constitution they won’t tread on except the part that’s got to do with Indians — they’ll walk all over that.”

Image: Chief Roland Willson at the 2016 Paddle for the Peace. Photo: Carol Linnitt | DeSmog Canada

Infringement of Treaty Rights Not Adequately Considered

Caleb Behn, a former lawyer whose mother belongs to the West Moberly, said the decision has disturbing implications for the promise of reconciliation between the government of Canada and indigenous peoples.

“For the Supreme Court to think this appeal wasn’t even worth hearing confirms to me what my loyalty and that of my grandfather is worth to the Crown,” he said.

Under Treaty 8, the government of Canada promised to guarantee the rights of local First Nations to hunt, trap, fish and continue their traditional way of life on their land.

The West Moberly and Prophet River nations filed a judicial review of Site C in November 2014, saying the federal government failed to determine if the project, which will flood 107 kilometres of Peace River valley, violates those treaty rights.

In January 2017 a federal court ruled the government wasn’t obligated to make that determination, a ruling that puzzled legal experts.

The Supreme Court has now refused to hear the West Moberly and Prophet River First Nations’ appeal of that ruling.

“I’m a Treaty 8 person with a law degree, so I never allowed myself to get truly hopeful, because I’m too familiar with what the law really does to indigenous people, people of colour,” Behn told DeSmog Canada.

“This decision desecrates in my view something much more important that just the decision of the governor in council; this is how little regard sacred treaty, sacred balance, sacred law and natural law are worth in the 21st century,” he said.

A federally appointed Joint Review Panel found Site C would likely cause significant adverse effects on fishing, hunting and trapping in Treaty 8 territory.

The panel — which was instructed not to make a judgment if Site C infringed on treaty rights — found the negative impact of the dam could not be mitigated.

In May of 2016 a group of 250 prominent Canadian academics asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to halt construction of Site C so impacts on indigenous peoples could be properly considered.

Image: Site C construction. Photo: Garth Lenz | DeSmog Canada

Civil Suit Can Address Site C Damages After the Fact

Chris Tollefson, executive director of the Pacific Centre for Environmental Law and Litigation, previously told DeSmog Canada the two nations can file a civil case to determine if treaty rights have been infringed.

“If that is the only remedy, that that is not a very efficient or effective remedy,” he said.

“Whose responsibility is it to ensure decision are not made that irrevocably harm constitutionally protected rights?”

Chief Willson said a civil suit may be the only option to determine whether Treaty 8 is violated by Site C. The dam reservoir will flood sacred graves and spiritual sites as well as prized habitat

“There is no mechanism to protect the treaty. All we can do is file for damages now,” Willson said.

“This is the insanity of this whole thing: you can’t file a civil claim until there are damages. We have to sit here and wait until they destroy the valley and then file.”

“So they can approve every hair-brained project that comes up now and they only thing we can do is sue for damages,” Willson said.

“What’s the point of a consultation process?”

Tollefson said relying on a civil suit is a losing battle as long as Site C construction continues.

“You wonder whether that task has been assigned to any arm or branch of government or whether in the end all that is left is for this nation to undertake is a very complicated and lengthy proceeding to pursue that argument — which, without an injunction, will be a futile quest.”

Behn added the legal system plays off the disadvantage of indigenous peoples whose rights have long been undermined through Canada’s colonial past.

“We have to suck it up, wait for damage, and re-enter the fray in the same process that has proven itself to be incapable of providing justice for indigenous people.”

New B.C. Government a Final ‘Hail Mary’ for Fight Against Site C

The promise of a new government in B.C. is Chief Willson’s last hope to stop Site C, he said.

The NDP and Green parties have agreed to work together to topple the B.C. Liberal-led government and send Site C for immediate review with the B.C. Utilities Commission, a process the Liberals vetoed.

“That’s our hail Mary,” Willson said.

“We’re all sitting here praying there’s a vote of non-confidence and it will hit the pause button on Site C and stop what’s going on in Bear Flats,” he said.

“That’s the tragedy of this whole thing, the B.C. government is destroying our valley for a completely unnecessary project.”

NDP Party Leader John Horgan formally introduced a motion of non-confidence in the house, Wednesday and the outcome of that motion, whether a new NDP-led government or a re-election, is expect to be known by Friday.

Update July 4, 2017: The headline of this piece previously stated the case had been 'struck down' by the Supreme Court of Canada. It has been updated to more accurately reflect the legal situation.

Image: Valeen Jules at the 2016 Paddle for the Peace. Photo: Jayce Hawkins| DeSmog Canada

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

While news of Saskatchewan’s plan for a small geothermal power plant was met with excitement by renewable energy advocates,  experts say British Columbia is far better situated to capitalize on the technology yet has failed to do so.

“It should be a little bit of a shock that a less good resource is being developed in Saskatchewan over a world-class resource in B.C.,” said Alison Thompson, chair and co-founder of the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association (CanGEA).

B.C. is located on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a geothermal hot zone. Maps produced by CanGEA found B.C. has enough geothermal potential to power the entire province.

“There are geothermal projects all up the coast but they stop at the border. There’s nothing in B.C.,” Thompson said.

“This is clearly not technical, not economic. This is policy driven.”

Northeastern B.C., a hotbed of oil and gas drilling, is home to one of the hottest recorded wells in Canada, measured at around 170 degrees Celsius. Aquifer temperatures in Saskatchewan’s Williston Basin are recorded at around 120 degrees.

“You only need about 80 degrees for power,” Thompson said.

Project developers in Saskatchewan signed the first Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) for geothermal in Canada with the province’s utility provider, SaskPower.

The same has not been possible in B.C., where a primary focus on hydro development, most pronounced in the recent decision to build the controversial $9 billion Site C dam, has taken up the lion’s share of the the provincial utility provider’s attention.

In 1983 the B.C. Utilities Commission recommended the province to explore geothermal as a potential alternative to Site C. As the Site C Joint Review Panel noted in its final report on the project, the province put virtually no effort into exploring alternatives.

“If the senior governments were doing their job, there would be no need for this recommendation” to explore alternatives, the panel wrote in its final report on Site C in 2014. “The low level of effort is surprising, especially if it results in a plan that involves large and possibly avoidable environmental and social costs.”

Critics argue Site C has actually forced out renewable energy industries like wind and solar.

“At CanGEA, we’re in our 11th year and we’ve been advocating consistently for geothermal in B.C. with no results with B.C. Hydro and the Ministry of Energy,” Thompson said.

The West Moberly First Nation, which is fighting Site C in court, has also advocated for geothermal to no avail.

“If Saskatchewan can build a geothermal plant, why the hell isn’t B.C.? Especially when they know there’s geothermal potential here. We’ve asked to partner with them on it,” Chief Roland Willson told DeSmog Canada.

B.C. Hydro’s Mandate Needs Update: Weaver

B.C. Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver told DeSmog Canada geothermal is long overdue in B.C. but that “B.C. Hydro’s mandate needs to be massaged, be changed a bit.”

“The problem with geothermal in the province is not that we can’t do it,” Weaver said. “The problem is B.C. Hydro is the only buyer of power so no one is going to invest the capital in a project if there’s no buyer for the electricity.”

He added: “We have enormous potential for geothermal — it’s stable, base power that’s renewable and it will happen in B.C. sooner than we think.”

Steve Grasby, geoscientist with Natural Resource Canada’s Geological Survey, said in the 15 years he’s been researching Canada’s geothermal potential he has seen a massive shift in public awareness and interest.

A 2013 Geological Survey of Canada report found northeast B.C. has the “highest potential for immediate development of geothermal energy” anywhere in the country.

“When we first started this most people didn’t even know the term and if they heard it they didn’t know what it meant,” Grasby told DeSmog Canada.

“There has been a huge increase in awareness on all different levels. Now we’re seeing a lot of growing industry interest with small companies and people exploring this new opportunity.”

He added test drilling has yet to be completed in Saskatchewan, so it could be some time before more detailed knowledge of that resource comes to light.

Grasby said there is “tremendous” geothermal potential across Canada but the highest temperature regions are in B.C.

“That’s where we really have the potential to consider electrical generation compared to just direct heat. There’s been a lot of interest and various projects pushing forward. It’s an exciting time.”

B.C. Policy ‘Indifference’ to Geothermal Hurt Industry

In Valemount, B.C., plans for a geothermal ecovillage are underway. If successful, the plan will not only produce electricity but also provide direct heat for the community, recreational hot springs, year round greenhouses and a first-in-Canada geothermal brewery.

It took several years for the company behind the project, Borealis Geopower, to land a drilling permit.

Thompson, who’s also a principal at Borealis, said the regulatory system is slow, full of setbacks and plagued by what she considers chronic indifference.

Policy in B.C. hasn’t kept pace with advancements in the geothermal field, she said.

“For example, B.C. Hydro only thinks about electricity and there isn’t a utility provider in B.C. that thinks about heat. Geothermal can give you electricity, it can give you heat and it can even be a source of precious minerals that don’t have to be open pit mined. It provides jobs and carbon credits.”

Borealis is now awaiting a land access permit for the drilling pad from the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations.

Thompson said the permit is stuck in suspension as B.C.’s political landscape remains uncertain.

“If this was oil and gas permitting it would be done in weeks. With geothermal, this is rolling out in the months and years,” she said.

Korie Marshall from the Valemount Geothermal Society said some of the lag time can be considered the hazards of trailblazing.

“It’s not always fun to be first. We’ve been coming up against all these roadblocks that no one understands. We want to help fix that for others coming up.”

“A big part of our goal as a society is not to just get this going in Valemount but to show the rest of Canada that we can do it.”

Geothermal Energy a Part of Community Building

Meanwhile, geothermal companies are chomping at the bit to get to work in B.C.

“At StromTech we’re actively engaged with clients in northeastern B.C., in the Peace River region, to explore geothermal. There’s lots of good opportunity up there,” said Ben Lee, engineer and geothermal consultant with StromTech Energy Services.

StromTech is in the preliminary stages of conducting a feasibility study for a community led geothermal project with the West Moberly First Nation.

Lee said smaller communities stand to benefit from local geothermal projects, especially where heat from geothermal projects can be used to prop up other industries and jobs.

“The fact that we can generate electricity and generate heat in sustainable, renewable manner — that’s sometimes overlooked or glossed over,” Lee said.

Lee said northern communities concerned about food security are especially interested in the co-generation of electricity and direct heat from geothermal.

“The ability to grow food and produce that for themselves, reduce their reliance on imported food whether that be from the Okanagan or southern B.C. or California, that’s of interest to remote communities.”

“Where I see an opportunity for government, for B.C. Hydro to make a difference is in supporting localized, distributed generation.”

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The route chosen by BC Hydro for a Site C dam highway relocation will “desecrate” a First Nations burial ground and destroy a culturally significant site used by the Dunne-za people for millennia, says West Moberly First Nations Chief Roland Willson.

“This is a very serious matter,” Willson wrote in a letter to B.C. Transportation Minister Todd Stone, co-signed by Prophet River First Nation Chief Lynette Tsakoza. “Digging up graves is not acceptable in our custom.”

Willson told DeSmog that the graves are in an area of the Peace River valley known locally as Bear Flats/Cache Creek, which BC Hydro plans to clear cut this winter for the first phase of a $530 million project to move 30 kilometres of a provincial highway out of the Site C dam flood zone.

Called as tluuge by the Dunne-za, or Beaver people, an ethno-linguistic grouping within the Treaty 8 Tribal Association, the area slated for the first part of the highway realignment contains known B.C. archaeological sites, a natural spring, a sweat lodge, and a campground used by First Nations for elder and youth gatherings.

“The Dunne-Za people have been using Bear Flats for thousands of years and we’re still using it today,” Willson said in an interview.

“The desecration of burial sites is a very serious matter. There’s absolutely no reason for them to disrupt those graves. They can move the highway over.”

Chief Roland Willson from the film River Interrupted. Credit: Hawkins Film.

According to BC Hydro itself, the Bear Flats/Cache Creek area is classified as an “archeological site complex,” an area noted for its high density of archeological sites.

Eighteen archeological sites at the Bear Flats/Cache complex will be affected by the $8.8 billion Site C project, including four Class 1 sites and 10 Class 11 sites.

The Bear Flats/Cache Creek area, where highway construction is imminent. Credit: Garth Lenz.

In July 2015, BC Hydro received an eight-year permit from the B.C. Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations (FLNRO) to “alter” 163 archeological sites for Site C, including for the construction of permanent roads, clearing, surface stripping, excavations and inundation from the reservoir. The permit says all work must cease if human remains are found and the Archaeology Branch must be contacted for further direction.

In a statement e-mailed to DeSmog, BC Hydro said it has undertaken “extensive archeological fieldwork including extensive subsurface shovel testing” and has not found  “any specific burial locations that would be directly affected by the Highway 29 alignment” at Bear Flats/Cache Creek.

“We take the potential disturbance of burial sites with the utmost seriousness,” BC Hydro said in the statement.

The Crown corporation said it has extended repeated invitations to local First Nations to share specific information about potential burial sites they believe are in the Site C project area and has funded traditional land use studies for First Nations that have “not resulted in such information being shared with BC Hydro.”

A BC Hydro Heritage Resource Assessment report notes that four Treaty 8 First Nations believe there are burial sites in the vicinity of Bear Flats.

Testimony given by four Treaty 8 First Nations to the Joint Review Panel that examined Site C for the federal and provincial governments recounted how the Bear Flats area was traditionally used as a gathering spot because it had good habitation sites, proximity to ceremonial and sacred areas, good hunting and fishing opportunities, a nearby freshwater spring and multiple trails and transportation routes.

“Many of the trails which criss-crossed the Peace River valley came into or close to this gathering place, and were often used as horse pack trails by families on their seasonal rounds,” the testimony read.

“Historically we were hunter gatherers and there were certain places like Bear Flats where we’d come together,” Willson said.

Willson said he met with Minister of Aboriginal Relations John Rustad in July and again in October, in an effort to find a solution. He said he also met with FLNRO Minister Steve Thomson in October, and followed up with letters to the two ministers asking for an alternate route for the 8.5-kilometre Bear Flats portion of the highway realignment, in addition to writing to Stone and BC Hydro in early November with the same request.

“We still haven’t heard anything back.”

Willson said a second route shortlisted by BC Hydro would avoid adverse effects to First Nations’ “ancestral belongings and burial” and protect the homes of local farmers such as Ken and Arlene Boon, who live on a hill just above some of the archeological fieldwork sites. The Boons, along with seven other landowners at Bear Flats/Cache Creek, were informed in March that they must sign over their land to BC Hydro by the end of this year or face expropriation for the highway re-alignment.

“They don’t have to kick the Boons out just before Christmas,” said Willson. “There’s no reason for it.

Arlene Boon out for what could be her last harvest on the Bear Flats farm that’s been in her family for three generations. Photo: Garth Lenz.

In October, the West Moberly and Prophet River First Nations launched the Yellow Stakes campaign on the Boon’s farmland to raise money for their ongoing court cases against Site C. For each $100 donated to the First Nations legal challenges, a yellow stake is driven into the ground beside the Boon’s farmhouse, along the centre line for the Highway 29 relocation.

More than 300 stakes, similar to the ones BC Hydro contractors placed throughout the Bear Flats area to demarcate the highway’s new centre line, have been hammered into the earth, including a stake personally planted by Perry Bellegarde, the national chief of Canada’s Assembly of First Nations.

In their letter to Stone, the two First Nations chiefs said an alternate route would address “many of the substantive issues and concerns” regarding that portion of the highway relocation. “Our alternative routes also eliminate the need to remove the local farmers from their homes and, as such, have an added benefit for the general population,” they wrote.

“We have made considerable efforts to identify and communicate how the proposed realignment of Highway 29 will cause significant adverse effects to our treaty rights,” the chiefs said in their letter to Rustad. “We have also put a considerable amount of effort into finding solutions…The province, however, has refused to engage our nations on such matters for over three months.”

Ken Boon, who has been told he’s going to have to sign an agreement with BC Hydro by Christmas, so a highway can be built through his farm. Credit: Garth Lenz.

In response to questions about the highway re-alignment, BC Hydro spokesperson Dave Conway e-mailed a link to a BC Hydro information sheet that outlines why the route along the banks of the future Site C reservoir was selected for the Bear Flat highway relocation instead of the inland option requested by First Nations and Peace Valley landowners. According to BC Hydro, the route along the reservoir’s banks will increase the length of passing opportunities for drivers and has less of an impact on agricultural land and better geotechnical conditions.

The reservoir for the Site C dam, currently in the early stages of construction, will flood more than 100 kilometres of the Peace River and its tributaries, including Cache Creek, a wide-bottomed valley where prickly pear cacti grow and arrowheads and fossils, including part of a woolly mammoth tusk, have been found.

Earlier this year, the Peace Valley Landowners Association asked BC Hydro for a copy of the “Multiple Accounts Evaluation” that demonstrates how the highway relocation route was chosen. Association president Ken Boon said instead of receiving a copy of the evaluation the 70 landowners who will be affected by Site C were given only “a few vague reasons to justify the route.”

New Democratic Party transportation critic Claire Trevena also said has not received any answers to questions she sent to Stone in an August letter regarding the highway route selection at Bear Flats/Cache Creek.

Among other questions, Trevena asked if the ministry had the right to review the route options in light of costs and social impacts, if there were financial risks to the Crown that could arise from the choice of routes, when the ministry would become responsible for the new highway route and if the minister knew the full costs of both route options.

“We’re somewhat stymied because we’re not in the Legislature so I can’t ask questions directly of the minister,” Trevena said in an interview, referring to Premier Christy Clark’s cancellation of the fall session of the B.C. legislature.

“It’s extraordinarily difficult when we’re talking about something this serious and we not have recourse to the minister. Democracy can’t work and people’s best interests can’t be served when the government is effectively in hiding.”

DeSmog contacted the Ministry of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation, which said comment should come from the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations (FLNRO). The Ministry of Transportation did not respond to questions, including one asking if the cost of the highway realignment has changed from the $530 million previously reported by BC Hydro. And FLNRO, for its part, said the government’s statement on the issue would come from BC Hydro.

Main image: BC Hydro archaeologists on the Boon family farm. Credit: Garth Lenz.

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A caravan of Treaty 8 First Nations fighting the Site C dam arrived in Ottawa Tuesday, calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to halt the $9-billion project they say violates treaty rights.

The group arrives on Parliament Hill after a cross-Canada journey that brought them to the Federal Court of Appeal in Montreal on Monday, where a legal challenge by the West Moberly and Prophet River First Nations was heard.

“Anyone who reads the environmental assessment report can see that the Site C dam is an indisputable threat to our rights,” Roland Willson, chief of the West Moberly First Nation, said.

“Our nations are deeply grateful to all the organizations and individuals whose support has enabled us to continue this battle, but the fact remains that we wouldn’t have to go these lengths if the Trudeau government would act on the promises it has made to uphold our treaty, the Canadian constitution, and the UN Declaration [on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples].”

In July the Trudeau government issued two federal permits for the controversial project, a move that angered a broad coalition of Site C opponents and First Nations that say the permits broke the federal Liberals' promise of a renewed nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations. The permits apparently generated some controversy within the federal Liberal party, with Indigenous Liberal MP Robert-Falcon Ouellette from Winnipeg Centre coming out against the project and questioning whether adequate consultation with First Nations in B.C. was carried out.

Despite growing backlash, Trudeau has stayed quiet on the mega hydro dam. 

Most recently, the Assembly of First Nations came out strongly against the  dam, saying it violates the Canadian constitution, which enshrines aboriginal rights under section 35, as well as the UN Declaration, which has a clause about "free, prior and informed consent."

"Why don't they respect and follow their own constitution? Section 35. Existing aboriginal treaty rights," AFN National Chief Perry Bellegarde said in an interview with the Canadian Press. "It really comes back to building a healthy, respectful relationship with indigenous peoples and we just don't see it happening here in this instance."

.@JustinTrudeau Silent as B.C. #FirstNations Take #SiteC Dam Fight to Federal Court #bcpoli #cdnpoli https://t.co/qQssgjoEHz

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 14, 2016

An environmental assessment found the project — which will flood 83 kilometres of Peace River valley and eliminate 5,500 hectares of primarily high-value agricultural land — would have severe, permanent and irreversible impacts on First Nations cultural and territorial practices, but the federal and provincial governments approved it in 2014.

Treaty 8, signed with the federal government in 1899, protects First Nations' right to hunt, fish, trap and gather medicines in perpetuity.

“The Peace River valley is one of the last places we can go out on the land with our elders and learn the stories and traditions that make us who we are,” Helen Knott, a member of the Prophet River First Nation who traveled to Ottawa with other community members, said.

“If governments can get away with simply ignoring our treaty, we’ll soon be left with nothing.”

First Nations fighting the project have received high-profile support from a large consortium of Canadian academics, including the Royal Society of Canada, which agrees the project infringes on indigenous rights.

An independent environmental assessment performed by the academics concluded the dam would “severely undermine” the ability of First Nations to carry out their cultural practices. Their assessment also found Site C is the most environmentally destructive project ever considered under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act.

In August, international human rights watchdog Amnesty International released a report saying the Site C dam violates indigenous rights. Amnesty called on BC Hydro to halt all construction until legal challenges brought against the project by First Nations are heard in the courts.

The Amnesty report is called “The Point of No Return,” referencing a statement by B.C. Premier Christy Clark that the Site C damwill be brought “past the point of no return" before the next election.

First Nations and local landowners fighting the project hoped the Trudeau government would withhold federal permits, allowing time for legal challenges to make their way through the courts, but that hope was lost when two federal permits were granted in July.

NDP Indigenous and Northern Affairs Critic Charlie Angus joined First Nations leaders on Parliament Hill to condemn the Site C project and the federal government's recent permits.

“Why are we even here? Why is this necessary? We have a Prime Minister that promised a new relationship, a new nation to nation relationship,” Angus said. “We have a justice minister — for the first time ever — a Justice Minister who has been on the record saying a project like Site C runs roughshod over indigenous rights."

“If it’s before the courts, then why the hell did you sign those permits? That’s the question.” 

Lynette Tsakoza, Chief of the Prophet River First Nation, said the whole situation casts a poor light on the environmental assessment process. 

“The federal government’s actions in this case have eroded First Nations trust in regulatory processes that impact upon our rights,” she said.

Craig Benjamin, indigenous rights campaigner with Amnesty International Canada, said Canadians should be angry with the federal government’s treatment of this project.

“Anyone concerned about justice and human rights should be outraged by the federal government’s claim that the wide array of serious harms to First Nations this project would entail are ‘justified,’ especially given the fact that the need for the Site C dam remains in question and less harmful alternatives have never been properly considered,” Benjamin said.

In an unprecedented interview with DeSmog Canada, Harry Swain, chair of the joint federal-provincial panel tasked with reviewing the Site C project, said the government erred in approving the project because there was no demonstrated need for the electricity and alternatives to the dam hadn’t been fully explored.

Swain added the panel was asked to catalogue First Nations treaty and aboriginal rights, “but we were not to pass an opinion on them,” he said.

“We were not to say whether consultation had been adequate and so on and forth. If you are forbidden from talking about that, you can not come to a conclusion about the overall project,” he said.

More than 85,000 signatures calling on the federal government to halt the project have been collected by civil society organizations.

Amara Possian, campaign manager with LeadNow, a democracy advocacy organization fighting Site C said pressure is mounting on the federal government  to address concerns about the project.

“The federal government’s public commitment to a new relationship with Indigenous peoples has clearly resonated with Canadians,” she said.

“But the public is demanding more than just words. They government’s promise to uphold the treaties, the constitution and the UN Declaration requires concrete action when these rights are threatened.”

Image: Prime Minister Photo Gallery

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The B.C. Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations (FLNRO) granted BC Hydro several exemptions from the B.C. Wildlife Act to keep Site C dam construction from falling behind expected timelines, DeSmog Canada has learned.

The exemptions have some local First Nations and legal experts concerned Premier Christy Clark’s promise to “push the project past the point of no return” is occurring at the cost of B.C.’s own permitting rules and wildlife management.

“BC Hydro has gone rogue,” Chief Roland Willson of the West Moberly First Nation told DeSmog Canada. “Worse yet, the province is aware of the situation and chooses to look the other way. What’s the point of having a regulator if it refuses to regulate?”

E-mail correspondence obtained by DeSmog Canada show BC Hydro requested last-minute permission from the Ministry of Forests to undertake “emergency amphibian salvage” along the banks of the Peace River. The ministry granted BC Hydro several exemptions from the Wildlife Act to conduct the work — something legal experts say is against the law.

“The Wildlife Act and its regulations do not allow for exemptions from the ordinary permitting process,” Jocelyn Stacey, assistant professor at the UBC Allard School of Law and expert in environmental and administrative law, told DeSmog Canada. “This means that FLNRO acted without legal authority when it issued the exemption to BC Hydro.”

Ignoring B.C.’s established permitting process “raises the specific concern that BC Hydro is carrying out its Site C dam construction operations without the oversight by public officials that should be guaranteed by the ordinary permitting process,” Stacey added.

On May 13, BC Hydro sought permission to capture and relocate amphibian species including Boreal chorus frogs, Columbia spotted frogs, long-toed salamanders, wood frogs and western toads, all of which are protected under the B.C. Wildlife Act. 

Province Acting “With Impunity” in Granting Exemptions

BC Hydro proposed to begin the salvage work on May 17, only four days after permission was requested. In a letter addressed to Chris Addison, director of resource development with the Ministry of Forests, BC Hydro noted a preliminary field visit to the capture sites was conducted on May 12 — just one day before the request was submitted.

BC Hydro also noted that delaying permission to perform amphibian salvage — which the crown corporation claimed was crucial to the creation of three dikes along the south bank of the Peace River side channel — “risks significant schedule delays.”

In an e-mail dated May 25, FLNRO official Golnoush Hassanpour notified members of the Prophet River and West Moberly First Nations that several exemptions to the Wildlife Act were granted to BC Hydro. In a follow-up e-mail, Addison noted there is no provision in the Wildlife Act to grant such exemptions.

“There is no provision in the Wildlife Act for this specifically,” Addison wrote in the e-mail. “Rather it is an administrative law principle that functionally amounts to inducing error.”

UBC’s Stacey said the acknowledged lack of legal authority to grant such exemptions is troubling.

“I am most troubled…by the fact that the FLNRO official admitted he did not have the legal authority to issue such an exemption and suggested that he acted with impunity in doing so,” Stacey told DeSmog Canada.

“This kind of action goes against our most fundamental understanding of the rule of law: that public officials act according to law, and not based on their personal opinions or what they view as expedient under the circumstances.”

Stacey said this instance raises a much broader concern that unauthorized “exemptions” may be issued routinely, but added that because of a “general lack of transparency with the permitting process, the public is not aware that this is happening and cannot seek recourse from the courts in the form of judicial review.”

The Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations did not provide comment by time of publication.

BC Hydro: Site C “Construction Schedule At Risk”

The management of amphibian species falls under the auspice of the Wildlife Act and while BC Hydro submitted an application for an official salvage permit to the ministry in September 2015, it didn’t expect a permit to be issued until mid to late June 2016.

In its request letter, BC Hydro stated, “The salvage works cannot wait until the permit is issued; as noted, the delay in construction of the dikes puts the main civil works construction schedule at risk.”

Chief Lynette Tsakoza of the Prophet River First Nation said the province’s willingness to exempt BC Hydro from the rules is part of a “pattern.”

“Every other company would face charges, but not BC Hydro.”

Both the Prophet River and West Moberly First Nation are currently fighting the approval of the Site C dam in a legal challenge.

Last month, 250 top-level scientists and academics from across Canada called on the federal government to put the brakes on construction of the Site C dam — a move supported by the Royal Society of Canada.

Gordon Christie, associate professor at the UBC Allard School of Law, said the exemptions are emblematic of the province’s determination to advance the project — something that puts First Nations fighting the project in court at a disadvantage.

“What this particular episode tells you is how the province approaches things,” Christie told DeSmog Canada. “Their strategy is clearly just get this to a point where it can’t be stopped.”

Christie said the further BC Hydro gets the Site C project down the development path, the more difficult it will be for First Nations legal challenges to stand up in court.

“That’s the sickening part of all of this,” he said. “It takes so long for these kinds of challenges to get through the courts…and at the end of all that time passing you’re going to have the dam already built. That’s the strategy of the government.”

Christie added any compensation owed to Treaty 8 First Nations will be borne by the taxpayer, not the provincial government.

“They don’t lose at all,” he said. “Really it’s about the big issue: this is clearly a proposal that is being pushed through regardless of whether it’s infringing on treaty rights.”

Chief Willson said by granting BC Hydro exemptions from provincial rules like the Wildlife Act, the province is placing BC Hydro’s needs above those of First Nations and the general public.

“Forget environmental laws. Forget constitutional rights,” he said. “Forget everything that holds our society together. That’s what BC Hydro is demanding we all do.”

He added, “What infuriates me is that the province has agreed to ignore the laws and instead protect the selfish interests of BC Hydro.”

Clarence Willson, councillor with the West Moberly First Nation, told DeSmog Canada he sees these exemptions as emblematic of the government’s rush to advance the project.

“This in particular is a very good example of how our concerns seem to be pushed aside to expedite this project and we see this in all kinds of consultation we have with government,” he said.

“They’re doing everything they need to do grease the skids to move this project forward.” 

BC Hydro Letter to FLNRO Chris Addison re: Amphibian Salvage Permit Exemptions by DeSmog Canada

Image: Land is cleared along the banks of the Peace River to make way for Site C construction. Photo: Jayce Hawkins

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Premier Christy Clark has ambitious plans for the copious amounts of electricity — far more than British Columbia is expected to need for more than a decade — generated by the Site C dam on the Peace River: sell it to Alberta.   In a recent interview with Alaska Highway News, Clark said the power from the Site C dam, scheduled to come online in 2024, could potentially provide electricity to Alberta — where the government has recently committed to closing all of its coal-powered energy plants.   “We could potentially electrify the oilsands, which would make the oilsands the cleanest oil produced anywhere on the globe,” Clark said.   “If Canada wants to make an argument for our resources to find their way to market, let’s make them the cleanest in the world and let’s make that our brand.”

Need for Site C Unproven 

Clark’s suggestion that the Site C dam may power the oilsands shines a spotlight on the B.C. government’s ever-changing rationale for building the project.   Ken Boon, a Peace Valley farmer who lives on family land that will be flooded if the dam is built, said he finds the prospect of prime agricultural land being destroyed to supply the oilsands with electricity “very disturbing.”   “It highlights that they don’t have a market for the Site C power,” Boon told DeSmog Canada.   “So here we have a government floundering for a market while they go ahead building the project.”   In its final report, the federal-provincial panel tasked with reviewing the Site C dam said that, due to the severe environmental impacts of the project, the project should not proceed unless there is an unambiguous need for the power.   “Electrifying the oilsands doesn’t seem like a demonstrated unambiguous need,” he said.   Harry Swain, chair of the Joint Review Panel that reviewed Site C, said BC Hydro never mentioned Alberta as a potential market for the dam’s power in its application.   “One recognizes that things change over time, but this has an air of desperation,” Swain told DeSmog Canada.   "In the rationale for building the dam, BC Hydro put forward load forecasts that included a fair amount of electricity for the LNG industry and continued growth in other industrial, commercial and residential demand. Well, the truth is that since 2008 demand has been falling, not rising."   As DeSmog Canada recently reported, BC Hydro’s records show that without an expanded natural gas export sector, there is no demonstrable need for the Site C dam.   BC Hydro anticipates domestic energy consumption won’t surpass domestic energy supply until 2028, at the earliest.   According to BC Hydro’s estimates, major industrial users of electricity, such as the pulp and paper industry, will use less energy than previously thought — partially because the cost of electricity will increase 28 per cent over the next five years, in part to pay for the Site C dam.   A DeSmog Canada investigation revealed BC Hydro is in fact paying independent power producers not to produce electricity due to an oversupply problem.   “The case that we need this power by 2024 was not made then and is in even worse shape now," Swain said.   He added that electrifying the oilsands would require new transmission lines and likely a new regulatory process with Alberta.   "It does not appear to be a practical alternative.”

Destination for Site C Power a Moving Target 

B.C. LNG projects have been delayed, labeled unprofitable, caught up in land disputes and lack committed investors — hence Clark’s wandering eye.   “I think…we want to have as many customers for BC Hydro product as we can,” Clark told the Alaska Highway News.   Clark added that exporting power “allows us to lower rates for people who live here,” but did not make mention of BC Hydro’s plan to raise hydro rates until at least 2019.   Clark also didn’t mention that Site C’s power is going to cost $80 to $90 per megawatt hour to produce, but the pool price for electricity in Alberta right now is hovering at around $30 per megawatt hour.

Site C is ‘Cultural Genocide’: Chief 

West Moberly First Nation Chief Roland Willson said Clark’s suggestion Site C might be used to electrify the oilsands is absurd.

The purpose of Site C “is a never-ending moving target,” Willson said. “First it was for LNG, then it was to sell power to California, now it’s Alberta.”   He said recent revelations that BC Hydro is paying power producers not to produce highlights that there is no need for Site C.   “So it’s absolutely ridiculous that we’re destroying a valley to potentially sell the power to the Alberta tar sands now.”   The West Moberly and Prophet River First Nations are currently fighting against Site C in court, arguing the project infringes on rights guaranteed by Treaty 8.   Willson said Site C will not pass the Sparrow test, a legal litmus test for determining if a government decision justifiably violates First Nation’s rights, because there is no demonstrable need for the power it will produce.   “They’re taking away from us what we value,” Willson said, saying the effects of this project amount to “cultural genocide” for his community.   “It’s residential schools. It’s smallpox in blankets. Now it’s energy development,” he said.   “It’s criminal. They should be held accountable for the damages.”

With files from Emma Gilchrist.

Image: Christy Clark/Flickr.

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