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VICTORIA The past week has featured three tests of Premier John Horgan’s promise of openness and transparency and his NDP government failed all three.
The most telling example was the leak of two internal reports from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, which showed the government has been assembling far more information about the COVID-19 outbreak than it made public.
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“The internal reports each over 45 pages are four times longer than the weekly reports published by the centre,” as Nathan Griffiths reported in The Vancouver Sun on Friday. “They delve into the details of COVID-19 case counts and vaccinations at the neighbourhood level, breakdowns about variants of concern, and more … a level of detail the centre has so far refused to make public despite repeated calls from a
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VICTORIA The West Moberly First Nations have obtained court-ordered access to much of the material that the New Democrats have withheld from the public on the safety and cost overruns at the troubled Site C project.
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Warren Milman made the ruling last week in response to an application from West Moberly and Chief Roland Willson. They sought the information as part of their legal action that tries to halt construction on B.C. Hydro’s Site C dam on grounds that it violates their treaty rights and poses a threat to their traditional territories along the Peace River in northeastern B.C.
Site C’s overruns are typical for dam megaprojects
A root cause of cost overruns for the Site C dam and other hydro megaprojects is political “bias” and “optimism,” a report suggests . | BC Hydro
Premier John Horgan assumed the demeanour of a physician delivering bad news to a patient when he revealed the findings of Peter Milburn’s review of the Site C dam project.
Horgan announced February 26 that the government will finish building the hydroelectric megaproject, despite new estimates that now put the cost of completing the project at $16 billion.
The capital cost of the dam had already jumped from $8.6 billion under the BC Liberal government, to $10.7 under the BC NDP, and hit its most recent estimate thanks to pandemic-related delays and some troublesome geotechnical challenges.
VANCOUVER The cost to cancel a massive B.C. energy development project would be at least $10 billion, provincial officials revealed in an update on the future of Site C. Thus the project will go ahead, Premier John Horgan and Energy Minister Bruce Ralston announced Friday, but with an increased budget and timeline. Horgan and Ralston spoke at a news conference in Victoria about the findings of a status report into the hydroelectric dam project in northeastern B.C. The report was commissioned by the provincial government in the summer, after Crown-owned BC Hydro raised concerns about rising costs and construction delays on the project on the Peace River near Fort St. John.
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The cost to build B.C. Hydroâs Site C has ballooned to $16 billion, making it the most expensive dam in Canadian history. With costs out of control and no upper limit in sight, Premier John Horgan dismissed the notion that Site C should be stopped.
He relied on a false narrative in order to do so. Premier Horgan said that if Site C construction was terminated, $10.2 billion in costs would be subject to an immediate writedown, and this writedown would cause a 26-per-cent increase in electricity rates.
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