“Something Is Wrong Here”: An Interview With Sarah Cox About Damming Canadian Rivers for Hydroelectricity

Introduction

Rivers sustain us. For decades of laboring as an environmental attorney protecting them from pollution, water withdrawals, and pushing forward with dam removals and restoration of river ecosystems and fisheries here in the United States. Yet, I was astonished to learn that the central pillar of the Canadian Government’s “clean energy plan” is to continue building massive megadams to export hydroelectricity to the United States as “renewable” energy and a solution to the climate crisis and to make profits off our rivers, of course. Science, facts, and firsthand testimonials of impacted communities show that it is anything but clean and renewable energy. The Canadian government’s plan hit close to home in 2017 when a new hydropower subsea cable from Nova Scotia to my hometown of Plymouth, Massachusetts was proposed as a “clean energy” replacement for the soon-to-be retired Pilgrim nuclear station. The 1970s campaign against Pilgrim launched my awakening as an environmental activist. I learned that in 2015, the Stop James Bay megadam campaign started by the Cree and Inuit of Quebec was remobilizing to stop Canada’s new megadams and the billion-dollar export corridors to the United States. I got involved.

In Canada, indigenous communities had formed an alliance of communities impacted by hydropower, “Wa Ni Ska Tan,” or “Rise Up” in Cree, and it was at their 2019 conference that I met the brilliant author and journalist Sarah Cox. As a writer for the Narwhal, she is one of Canada’s leading environmental writers and investigative journalists. Her book, Breaching the Peace: The Site C Dam and a Valley’s Stand Against Big Hydro, released in 2018 (and reviewed in New Solutions, Vol. 30, Issue 3), documented all of the issues I was hearing about from community members, scientists, and activists about the Canadian government’s hydropower policies and megadams that were being repeated throughout Canada—and indeed the world—with the new push for more dams for “green electricity.” These included: stolen indigenous territory, displacement of marginalized communities for industrial energy extraction and the resulting environmental racism, methylmercury poisoning of wild foods, biodiversity extinction and of course irreversible destruction of forests, river systems, taiga (boreal forest), and agricultural lands. In Canada, hundreds of thousands of square miles have been destroyed, and in addition, another 60 percent of rivers are planned to be dammed. Most of the electricity Canada ships to the United States is from the ancestral lands of indigenous people where dams were built without their consent and often without their knowledge. Sarah’s book puts all the issues in context: it is meticulously researched, a gripping read, and a must for anyone interested in climate justice and the future of our planet. I was thrilled when Sarah said yes to my request for an interview!

Interview

INTERVIEWER: What inspired you to write the book?

COX: In addition to many years in journalism, I spent eight or nine years working for conservation groups. In 2013, when I was acting Executive Direct for Sierra Club BC, I was invited to attend the annual “Paddle for the Peace,” in northeast British Columbia (BC), a place known as the Peace region. It’s a spectacularly beautiful part of the world but very far from where most British Columbians live and largely out of sight and out of mind. It’s a fourteen-hour drive from Vancouver, if you don’t stop. I had never been to the Peace before. I spent time in the Peace River Valley and met people who would lose their homes, their farms, their traditional territory, their ancestors’ gravesites, and their communities to the Site C dam. Their stories stuck with me. When I returned to journalism a few years later, I felt very compelled to write the book.

It began as a writing project that would detail the impact of a big hydro project on First Nations, farmers, biodiversity, the climate, and more than hundred species already at risk of extinction. But it morphed into something more complex as I dug into the reasons why the B.C. government was so intent to push the project “past the point of no return,” in the words of our former B.C. premier Christy Clark. The path to move the project forward was strewn with contradictions, secrecy, and disinformation and marked by a repeated failure of due process. For instance, the dam flies in the face of Canada’s commitments to the United Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and international human rights standards, including justification for the forced evictions of people like Ken and Arlene Boon, third-generation Peace farmers who will lose their home to the project. West Moberly First Nations, whose territory includes the area that will be flooded by the dam, has filed a civil claim alleging that Site C, along with two previous dams on the Peace River that were constructed in the 1960s and 1970s, constitutes an unjustifiable infringement of the nation’s treaty rights. The case won’t be heard until 2022. The government hasn’t waited to find out if the project violates constitutionally protected treaty rights; it’s full steam ahead regardless.

At $10.7 billion and counting, the Site C dam is the most expensive publicly funded project in B.C.’s history. It’s also arguably the most secretive. British Columbians only found out in July 2020 that the Crown corporation building the project, BC Hydro, doesn’t know when the project will be finished or how much it will cost. There are serious geotechnical problems that haven’t been solved, and the cost is soaring.

We don’t need the energy the dam will produce. And we’ll never be able to sell the power for what it costs to generate it, leaving ratepayers to make up the difference. As I write in the book, “At every step of the way, the government seemed far more interested in securing its own political future than in the repercussions of saddling hydro customers with a cripplingly expensive project that, as the months ticked by, assumed many characteristics of a boondoggle.” The former CEO of BC Hydro calls the Site C dam a “white elephant.” The term white elephant, I learned, was coined after the King of Siam gave rare and holy albino elephants to courtiers he disliked. They couldn’t dispose of the gift, which ruined them financially.

INTERVIEWER: I’m interviewing you during the COVID-19 pandemic that is causing global upheaval. What lessons from the Site C story resonate with more impact today than they might have prepandemic?

COX: Well, to start, the Site C project has received special treatment from the provincial government during the pandemic. Businesses closed down. Schools, colleges, and universities shut down. Playgrounds were roped off. People stayed at home. The streets of Victoria, B.C.’s capital city, where I live, were empty. Just about everybody worked from home, if they still had a job. People made big sacrifices. But BC Hydro was allowed to continue construction of the Site C dam, even though the local community was very concerned about fly-in fly-out workers. BC Hydro said it would reduce their workforce, but the numbers quickly crept up again, so that one thousand workers were on site.

Following pressure from the Peace River Regional District, BC Hydro began reporting the number of workers on site every day, and the number of workers in self-isolation with flu-like symptoms, which was up to sixteen at a time. They never said if any of the workers had been tested for COVID-19, and, at that time, B.C. was only testing people who had been out of the country or who were so ill they had to go to the hospital. The local community was extremely concerned about the risk posed by workers flying in from other provinces and other parts of B.C. Eventually BC Hydro was compelled to stop allowing workers to come into the nearby small city of Fort St. John on “Site C leisure buses.” For me, it again spoke to the government’s determination to push the project forward at all costs.

The pandemic, I think, compels us to reconsider our relationship with the natural world. And there’s no better place to start than with the Peace River Valley. Let me tell you a bit about the place. It’s a rare low-elevation northern valley, which means it has a milder climate than the area all around it. It’s absolutely gorgeous, with some of Canada’s richest farmland along the north banks and rare-old growth boreal forest along the south banks. The valley itself is very wide, as is the winding Peace River, which runs below sandstone cliffs in its long journey through the valley. So you have this stunning diversity of scenery.

The valley is a meeting place for four different biomes, which gives rise to an unusual diversity of species. It’s a continental flyway for migrating birds and part of the boreal bird nursery. Up to thirty thousand songbirds and woodpeckers nest in the future flood zone. The valley also provides habitat for more than one hundred species that are already at risk of extinction—fish like bull trout, mammals like wolverine and fisher, plant species like the Peace daisy, which grows nowhere else in the world but in the Peace River Valley, birds like the Canada warbler, butterflies, bees.

There are rare wetlands called tufa seeps, which look like something from another world or maybe from The Hobbit. Imagine slopes of natural steps carpeted with thick moss and with crystal clear pools of water. Some of the tufa seeps run over entrances to chambers as large as rooms in your house. One botanist told me he knew it wasn’t a scientific way to describe them, but they were “magical.” And all that will be clear-cut and flooded for a project that we don’t need and can’t afford. When Canadian academics examined the Site C dam, they found it will have more serious adverse environmental effects than any project ever examined in the history of Canada’s environmental assessment act. That includes oil sands projects and big mining projects.

Last year, scientists from around the world warned of a global biodiversity crisis, saying nature is declining at rates unprecedented in human history—with grave impacts for economies, livelihoods, food security, health, and the quality of life worldwide. It behooves us to pay attention to that or we will be the architects of our own undoing.

I think the pandemic has also compelled many people to consider where their food comes from, and how long their community could last without food trucked in and flown in from other places. The farmland that will be flooded for the Site C dam is some of Canada’s best. The topsoil on the Boon’s riverside fields is three metres deep. Three dozen family farms will be directly affected by the Site C dam, and many others will be indirectly affected. When two agrologists crunched the numbers, they found that the farmland that will be destroyed for this project has the capacity to grow fruits and vegetables to feed one million people a year. The valley doesn’t have as long a growing season as does similarly rich farmland in B.C.’s south, but it makes up for that because there are so many hours of daylight in the summer—it really only gets dark for a few hours—that everything grows like stink. There’s a photo of Arlene Boon, one of the farmers the book follows, with a beet the size of a squash. And while climate change will hit other farming areas hard, it’s expected to enhance agricultural production in the Peace area. We put our future food security at risk by destroying some of Canada’s best northern farmland when there are other, far less destructive ways to get power should we ever need more.

INTERVIEWER: Canada’s economy faces new challenges brought on by the pandemic. Does Site C’s exorbitant cost add to the burden of the province?

COX: The bill for the Site C dam won’t come due until the power comes online. That was scheduled for 2024, following nine years of construction. But now we don’t have a clue when the project will be finished, given the profound geotechnical issues they are facing (issues, I might add, that engineers warned about years ago). So British Columbians have a reprieve from the financial wallop, for now.

To get an idea of what we could face financially in B.C., we can look at what’s happening in Manitoba and Newfoundland and Labrador, two other provinces that decided to build big hydro dams even though they, too, didn’t need the power.

In Canada, energy is largely produced and controlled by Crown corporations, which can always get bailouts from governments. In 2019, for example, B.C.’s social democratic government bailed out BC Hydro for $1.1 billion. BC Hydro remains in financial trouble, even before the astronomical tab for Site C comes due. I doubt any private-sector companies would build a project whose energy can never be sold for anywhere near what it costs to produce—that’s financially foolish and shareholders would quickly hold them accountable.

I think there’s something alluring for governments about megaprojects. They can point to them and say, “look what we did.” They can say they’re creating thousands of jobs—albeit, temporary ones—and jobs are always a key issue when the time for reelection rolls around. There are plenty of photo opportunities for politicians who don hard hats. Our former premier Christy Clark was notorious for that. She called the Site C dam a “legacy” project, modelled after B.C.’s big dams of the past. Well, in the past, we didn’t have wind and solar energy and other alternatives to large dams that are more environmentally friendly and a lot cheaper. But our provincial governments in Canada haven’t moved along with the times. They didn’t do their homework, and got caught out.

Here in Canada, we are bucking the trend in Europe and North America, where the unacceptable price tags and profound social and environmental impacts of large hydro projects means more big dams are being dismantled than are being built. The Newfoundland and Labrador government pressed ahead, despite widespread opposition, and built the Muskrat Falls dam on Labrador’s Churchill River. What a waste of public money. Even the head of the Crown corporation that built the dam called it a boondoggle.

The dam flooded the traditional homeland of the Innu, Inuit, and southern Inuit, destroying more than one hundred square kilometres of a sub-Arctic valley that has long provided indigenous peoples with food and travel routes and is considered to be the most important cultural and environmental feature in all of Labrador. The dam will contaminate traditional aboriginal foods—such as seals and land-locked salmon, known as ouananiche—with methylmercury. It will also eliminate bird-breeding wetlands and habitat for at-risk species such as caribou, including for the highly endangered Red Wine Mountain caribou herd.

The project was sold to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador as a $6 billion project. (That, by the way, was about Site C’s price tag when the project was announced in 2010). But Muskrat Falls cost $12.7 billion. The Newfoundland government subsequently spent $35 million on a commission of inquiry, which examined why construction was approved in the first place and why the provincial government didn’t shelve the project amidst early warning signs of its unaffordable price tag.

To pay for the project, Newfoundland hydro customers faced a 50 percent rate hike, in a best case scenario. That’s in a province where there are many pensioners on fixed incomes who rely on inefficient baseboard heating to get them through long, cold winters. But unlike B.C., the Newfoundland and Labrador government can’t afford to bail out the province’s hydro authority. If they did, the province could face bankruptcy. So now Canada’s federal government has stepped in, saying it will help to keep hydro rates “affordable” in Newfoundland. In other words, federal taxpayers will help shoulder the cost of the project.

In Manitoba, the provincial government forged ahead with the Keeyask dam, seven hundred kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, in the territory of the Tataskweyak Cree Nation and Fox Lake Cree Nation. Reservoir flooding started in August 2020. The dam will inundate ninety-three square kilometres of the Nelson River and boreal taiga lands, or “snow forests” of pine, spruce, and larch. It will destroy spawning areas and other habitat for fish such as sturgeon and destroy or fragment habitat for caribou, moose, and beaver.

Like the Muskrat Falls and Site C dams, the Keeyask project will also have a significant impact on indigenous peoples, eliminating trapping, fishing, and hunting sites in the traditional territory of Treaty Five nations. And like the Site C and Muskrat falls dams, the Keeyask project wasn’t subject to an independent review to determine if it was in the best interests of Manitobans. In all three cases, the independent watchdog body that normally looks out for the public interest was removed, hamstrung, or ignored by provincial politicians who were determined to push ahead with big hydro projects even though their electricity was not needed domestically.

And now, not surprisingly, the Keeyask dam is also hugely overbudget, and Manitobans face hydro rate hikes to pay for the project. The amount of those hikes has yet to be determined.

We don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in B.C. yet, but so far the pandemic has suppressed electricity demand in the province, exacerbating our energy glut. We have so much electricity in B.C. right now that BC Hydro is paying independent power producers not to produce electricity. Imagine!

INTERVIEWER: The pandemic has shut down international borders and even borders between provinces and states in some countries including Canada and Australia, disrupting trade and food supply chains. What are the implications for Canadian hydropower dams being built to export electricity to the United States, and what are the long-term consequences of flooding agricultural lands to produce energy for export? Is this a good trade-off?

COX: One thing the pandemic has taught us is that we need to be more self-sufficient in our communities and less reliant on things that are produced far away. Energy should be no different. As part of my research for the book, I attended the world’s largest hydro conference in Minneapolis. It was super interesting on so many levels. Who ever knew that there is a hydro hall of fame for large dams that reach their hundredth birthday? The conference had workshops like the “Extreme Makeover” session, the engineering equivalent of face-lifts, and joint replacements for aging dam structures.

One of the workshops I attended discussed the European trend of households and businesses becoming “prosumers”—both consumers and producers of energy. There are all sorts of reasons for doing that. In B.C., for example, 10 percent of electricity is wasted when we send it long distances through transmission lines. Local energy projects can supply communities when lines go down in the storms that are becoming more frequent with climate change. Last year, I reported on small, green energy producers in the Kootenay region of B.C., all of them family-run, who have supplied power to the grid for decades. They had just been told by BC Hydro that their contracts wouldn’t be renewed. Why? Because B.C. has too much energy. And the government in power in B.C. right now is ideologically opposed to private power producers, even though the power is far cheaper than what we’ll be paying for power for the Site C dam.

There are many indigenous communities in B.C. that want to get involved in wind, solar, and small, run of river hydropower, as a way to create sustainable jobs. But BC Hydro won’t buy their energy, so they can’t move forward with their plans. Similarly, high hydro bills are compelling some B.C. municipalities to examine alternatives to powering facilities like arenas. The town of Hudson’s Hope, which will lose a considerable number of homes for the Site C dam, installed solar panels on the rooftops of its public works shop, municipal building, curling rink, arena, and beside sewage treatment lagoons. It’s going to save an estimated $70,000 a year in hydro bills, amounting to more than $2 million in savings over thirty years. But now BC Hydro is proposing to change the rules, so that any households, businesses, or municipalities that install solar can’t sell their extra electricity back to the grid. Something is wrong here.