Christy Clark may have disappeared from photo ops and headlines, but her legacy lives on in the continued construction of the $10.7-billion Site C dam project.
Clearly, the previous B.C. Liberal government set the province on the course of building Site C and the current government has had no choice but to follow through, gambling that the benefits will outweigh the costs in the long term.
For the current NDP government, as was expected, whether to proceed came down to an issue of affordability. Ultimately, continuing will cost ratepayers less in the short term than cancelling the project, given that mothballing the project would have cost $4 billion in debt, necessitating a 12.1 per cent B.C. Hydro rate hike over a 10-year period.
Some of the big winners coming out of the NDP government’s decision will be farmers, who will benefit from the establishment of a $20-million compensation fund, apprentices who will get jobs and experience, and First Nations groups that will get some say in mitigating the environmental and archeological damage and opportunities for procurement.
But the environmentalists, who were the most vocal in opposition, are certainly the biggest losers in this decision and will have to console themselves with the idea that as the province moves toward electrification to eliminate reliance on fossil fuels, the power from Site C, as costly as it is, will come in handy.
It is unclear, however, whether the average British Columbian taxpayer will benefit from the completion of this project. In the short term, they will not have to pay such high power rates. But will reliance on hydroelectric power slow the development of other sources of energy that have less impact on the planet? And will this dam render useless any meaningful efforts to cut electricity in the future?
As well, B.C. Hydro is hardly out of the woods. According to a B.C. government backgrounder, the public utility has $5.597 billion in liabilities that will have to be recovered eventually and is still locked in contracts with independent power producers whose power is three times more expensive than that produced by B.C. Hydro’s heritage assets – $100 per megawatt hour compared to $32/MWh.
So the cancellation of Site C is a good news/bad news story with the true outcome not to be known for years, probably decades. By then, the photo ops of Ms. Clark in hard hat and high-viz vest may be forgotten, but not her mega-project legacy.
