BC Hydro $55 billion obligation direct result of Liberal policy Bruce Stewart | July 7, 2013 | 0 Comments 2 inShare Aid to corporate buddies will penalize all BC Hydro customers BC Premier Christy Clark addresses Westside-Kelowna all candidates debate Thursday. Photo: Christy Clark/Facebook. It was the scandal that brought the BC Liberals to power in 2001. (It’s been so juicy, in fact, that it’s featured in their re-election campaigns in 2005, 2009 and again this year.) Imagine: the New Democrats were so profligate, they wasted a whole half a billion dollars on the fast ferries! “You can never trust them again!” is the Liberal cry. One reason the entire BC NDP brain trust that lost the provincial election in May — from leader Adrian Dix to all those in charge of the party and its campaign — deserve to be smacked roundly around the head and shoulders before being booted to the curb is that they never answered this Liberal “big lie”. Boy, are there numbers they could have thrown back in the Liberals’ faces. Half a billion? Hah! Try 55 billion. That’s the cost of the independent power producer (IPP) contracts forced onto BC Hydro by the BC Liberal government. IPP agreements might cover a wind farm or a solar array, but generally deal with power produced from burning waste or run-of-river turbine scheme. The agreements guarantee a price for the power. That that price is twice or more what BC Hydro sells power for is irrelevant. The finances of BC Hydro have been broken ever since, and the debt burden of the crown corporation continues to rise. BC Hydro serving corporate buddies, not voters Meanwhile, all those buddies of the Liberals who set up IPP contracts have made off like bandits. So, too, has the Liberal party, which has feasted on the donations spun off from these corporations. The companies involved have often been the recipients of monies from the Pacific Coast Trust, transferring cash from hospitals and schools into corporate coffers (with, again, a “contribution” flowing back to the party) under the “carbon reduction” impositions of the Liberals. Right now, the Liberals are moaning about Hydro’s “surprise” overrun on the Northwest Transmission Line — which is being built to serve a few corporate buddies’ mines. Not penny one from the mine operators is going into the project, although they will benefit from the power. The BC population, on the other hand, will see nothing from the new line. But they’ll pay for it, just as they are paying for the IPP contracts, on their hydro bills — and with an ever-growing provincial debt obligation. The only thing that has kept the whole jury-rigged mess afloat is record low interest rates — which are ending. Two years from now, it’s highly likely interest costs for both the provincial government and the crown corporation will have doubled. That’ll blow a billion dollar hole in the Liberals’ budget (which will come out of programs) and force debt service charges onto hydro bills (just as exist in Ontario to dig out of the hole that province’s nuclear program and Green Energy Act created). BC Hydro Site C dam and LNG exports Oh, and the plans to build the dam at “Site C” in the Peace River country? Aside from the cost of the project, the Liberal government is mandating that the power be sold below cost, giving a deep discount to the companies fracking for natural gas. Without it, the economics of the Clark government’s rosy LNG export scheme don’t add up. So every household in BC can pay increased rates — either today with their power charge, or tomorrow as the debts that build up are added on — so that yet another bunch of corporate buddies and Liberal donors can get a discount that fattens their bottom line. Where was the NDP campaign in the face of this monstrous record? (It’s not like any of it is secret, or just revealed — the only post-campaign information that’s new is the revelation of the cost overrun on the Northwest Transmission Line. Everything else was readily available before April’s writ of election.) This is one of the most audacious exercises in unmitigated gall ever foisted on a democracy: the Liberals, under Premier Christy Clark, ran around the province screaming about how the NDP couldn’t be trusted with the economy over half a billion while running up a $55 billion hole in just one crown corporation’s finances (fully guaranteed by the taxpayers), in a bus marked “debt free BC” for a plan that requires further giveaways just to make the numbers “work” — and for which not one agreement has been signed. I guess in Clark’s universe technology and methods don’t go global. Can’t the Chinese frack for gas in China? It’s not like the methods and equipment required are secret, after all. Nope, in Clark’s world, all this pain in BC will see its payday as Asian buyers forgo accessing their own tight sources of oil and gas to simply buy from BC (spending the hundreds of millions per port to build LNG terminals to receive the shipments, of course). Good luck with that. In any event, any claims by the BC Liberals that they are either a party of free enterprise or good fiscal managers should be taken as the outright, bald-faced lie it is. They’re a party of corporate cronyism, with small local business and citizens as the patsies to pay for their buddies’ profits (and kickbacks to the party: they did go into the last campaign with a $10.7 million war chest, after all). They’re a party that turn 2+2 into 3, not 4, then claim it’s 5 — and are allowed to get away with it. Meanwhile everyone’s BC Hydro rates (except the favoured buddies), taxes, and debt load (the Liberals have quintupled the province’s debts since coming to power in 2001, and over one-third of that in just the two years since Clark became Premier) go up, up, up. British Columbians put these clowns back into office for another four years. The voters of Westside-Kelowna, next Wednesday, could at least throw the spanner in the works by defeating Christy Clark and forcing her out of provincial politics. And whether they vote Conservative, New Democrat, or Independent to do so, perhaps they should.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Jul 2013 20:31:25 +0000
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