Site C Hydro Project ain’t a ‘Horgan Hero’

Premier John Horgan has a dead weight hanging around his neck –the Site C Hydro project. 
Although it was started by the befuddled BC Liberals, it was continued under Horgan. 
He could have stopped it. It was recommended by many experts after he took office. He ignored that advice.

Like governments in Newfoundland and Labrador and Manitoba, the BC Government trusted a Hydro Corporation that is out of control. Such Crown Corporations have no real bosses. 

Both the Governments of the Muskrat Falls Project disaster in our most eastern Province and this disaster in our most western Province were warned, before the projects got started, by their respective environmental reviews that there were problems. These were ignored. 

Premier Horgan ordered a review of the project after it was obvious last year that it was in trouble. This review released this past Friday by Peter Milburn paints a terrible, tragic picture. 
The original price tag of $8.3 Billion is now $16 Billion. And still growing.

Milburn discloses that the oversight board did not work, in other words incompetent, and the day-to-day oversight agency, by Ernst and Young, was ignored by BC Hydro. 
Wow! What an indictment!

Horgan no doubt was driven as much by an idealogical bent as anything else. A lot of his political base resides there. There was and is lots of natural gas available to provide the incremental power that is needed and the geothermal potential is great, and perpetually ignored, even when the facts are presented to demonstrate its viability as was done in the case.

This myth that hydro is green lives on – concrete dams, steel transmission lines, destroying thousands of acres of eco system – and potential indigenous issues – this the Government of the Green as they hypocritically endorse a $40-billion fossil-fuel facility in Kitimat. 

Of course, additional “experts “ like Milburn have now endorsed finishing the project. 

And so, like our government deficits, keep the borrowing machine well oiled as the incompetence rolls on.