Paddle to the Premier promises to be a noisy affair

Break out the barbecue Premier Gordon Campbell. Company’s coming. Expect them to arrive by water, and probably pretty cranky after the long trip.

They are coming to deliver a message, one that’s been three decades in the making: ‘Put a halt for once and for all to your plans to construct yet another dam in the Peace Country. Northern BC has suffered enough.’

The fight over the Site C dam is heating up and a coalition of environmentalists, First Nations and pioneer families are taking it to the BC legislature on Sept. 19.

Paddle to the Premier will attempt to draw attention to the concerns around building a third dam on the Peace River. Treaty 8 Tribal Chief Liz Logan says the place still hasn’t recovered from the construction of the first two dams as Site C heads, prematurely she believes, to stage three in the review process, the environmental assessment.

The dam will destroy First Nations values and attachment to the land, fishing and hunting traditions, spiritual sites and wildlife habitat, she said. And for what? To supply California with energy and to continue the exploitation of oil and gas deposits like the one at the Horn River Basin?
The province doesn’t need the energy that will be produced from Site C for anything else, she said. It’s not clean energy and the cost to the area is just too rich.
Logan has long said that the Peace Country in the northeast portion of the province is the cash register of B.C. They have the biggest dams there, the biggest gas plants and the people in the rest of the province don’t seem to understand the cost of these things to the territory.

Gone will be hectares of class one and two agricultural land if Site C is built. Caribou and grizzly migration routes will be cut off. Mercury in fish stocks is a by-product. Currently there are warnings not to eat the fish from the lake at the two existing dam sites. Logan also says her pioneer family neighbours, who have been in the valley for many decades, will also be displaced by a third dam.
And Logan said the First Nations in the area are being railroaded yet again by the lack of serious consultation about the plan, how it will impact their treaty rights, and the issues that remain outstanding for First Nations after the first two dams were constructed.

That’s why they have decided to take their message to Victoria and make a public statement. It’s going to be a loud affair, she promises, and she invites coastal nations and anyone else that supports the Treaty 8 position to join them in solidarity.

Tria Donaldson is the Pacific Coast Campaigner for the Wilderness Committee, Canada’s largest membership-based, citizen-funded wilderness preservation organization. She said the group will stand with the First Nations and members of the Peace Valley Environmental Association at Paddle to the Premier. She tells us that Dr. David Suzuki is scheduled to speak, and she’s hoping for a turnout of one thousand people, many of whom will travel from Fort St. John.

Many will paddle into Victoria Harbour in canoes, a spectacle that was inspired by Chief Matthew Coon Come’s paddle to Manhattan in 1990, a protest to halt the export of electricity from the dams known as the Great Whale Project in Quebec.

Paddle to the Premier will be the first big rally on the issue of Site C dam, said Donaldson, who says it will be a very big deal. She said the project impacts treaty rights, land issues, and the wildlife corridor.

“The proposed 60 meter high Site C mega dam would flood over 100 km of river valley, drowning a land area equal to 14 Stanley Parks, and causing landslides as the banks of the reservoir erode over time,” reads a press release from the Wilderness Committee. “The flooding of the valley bottom would destroy old growth boreal forests that stores climate change-causing carbon dioxide, submerge over 7,000 acres of agricultural land, and wash away several people’s river-side homes.”

Both Chief Logan and Donaldson encourage support from southern people on the issue, and invite them to attend the rally at the legislature. Logan said the issues around Site C are not just a northern issue. It affects residents from all over the province.

For more information visit www.peacevalley.ca or wildernesscommittee.org