On April 19, 2010, Premier Gordon Campbell announced his government’s intention to proceed with the development of Site C on the Peace River. Most of the press coverage I have read has focused on the staging of the announcement (which invoked the historical legacy of W.A.C. Bennett), but has paid little attention to the more complex historical background of Site C, or why some groups might be concerned or opposed. For some hint of that background, have a look at a forum of op-eds (pro and con) that I edited for BC Studies last year. The following is part of my introduction that provides some historical context:
Site C forum: Considering the prospect of another dam on the Peace River
Site C marks a place on the Peace River, 7 km southwest of Fort St. John. The name has no connection to First Nations history, settler narratives, national or imperial history. It was invented in the 1950s by surveyors seeking to locate dam sites on the Peace River. Between Hudson’s Hope and the Alberta border, five such sites were located, each bearing a different letter, A, B, C, D and E. Site C was simply a surveyor’s place marker, conveying a modern understanding of territory and development. The letters had no local significance beyond that.
For the next twenty years, Site C remained an abstract signifier better known on maps than on the ground. The Wenner-Gren Corporation, which conducted the initial surveys, abandoned plans to dam the Peace. When the province assumed the task in the 1960s as part of a broader hydro-electric development strategy encompassing the Peace and Columbia rivers, it focused on developing upstream sites, impounding the headwaters at Lake Williston and passing the regulated flow through another dam completed in 1980 in the Peace Canyon. Over a few of years, a vast northern river was reconstructed. Lake Williston flooded a huge territory to form the largest human-made lake in North America. The regulated flow altered the seasonal rhythms of the river, bearing consequences for the river and ecology downstream, as far as the Peace-Athabasca delta.
In the late 1970s, Site C became the focus of a major debate about the future of hydro-electricity in British Columbia. BC Hydro, the provincial utility, wished to fulfill the logic of the Peace River projects and develop the next dam at Site C. Local interests reacted negatively. Earlier projects had caused considerable dislocation and hardship in the Peace Valley, particularly for First Nations, and another dam seemed too much to bear. A local environmental group, the Peace Valley Environment Association, formed in opposition. In 1982, the Site C project failed to gain the necessary energy project certificate from the newly formed BC Utilities Commission. The reason was not the potential environmental or social impacts, but because the BCUC judged that BC Hydro’s demand forecasts were unreliable and that other alternatives had not been sufficiently explored. In some ways the battle over Site C highlighted the controversial legacy of British Columbia’s big dam era, underlined the new role of environmentalism in large infrastructure planning and raised the possibility that future developments should be imagined and handled differently. These points were reinforced in the early 1990s when BC Hydro launched contingency investigations for a dam at Site C in the face of rising provincial demand. In the end, the corporation opted to pursue more aggressive conservation strategies and develop gas-fired generation.
Twenty years later and the name Site C has taken on a new significance. Site C once reflected a modernist view of progress; now its bears associations with clean energy in the Kyoto era. It sits at the center of the BC government’s Energy Plan which aims to reduce dependence on imported electricity and to find new sources of emissions-free generation to meet the rising electricity demands of the province. BC Hydro has been instructed to investigate the possibility of a dam at Site C and to consult the public. Over two years, public meetings have been held about Site C, new opposition coalitions have formed, and sundry investigations have been launched.