“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wicked of men will do the most wicked of things for the greatest good of everyone.”
– John Maynard Keynes

Alberta heating costs tripled

Ugh. I don’t know why I keep reading Common Ground. Every time I read it, I get angry, depressed, frustrated. I am more and more convinced that the only real function of our BC government is to serve as a tax collection basin in order to cover the costs of large non-local corporate enterprises, using the cover story that “we all need corporate jobs to maintain our economy.”
Of course I am being facetious. I am incredibly thankful that you and your group of writers are taking on these issues and informing the public, regardless of whether or not any of it really sinks in with enough people to make any difference. Thank you for the article on BC Hydro.
I came from Alberta where so much was privatized, and of course that was the beginning of the end of governments for public welfare. I watched as electricity and gas rates skyrocketed, customer service dropped to nil, confusion reigned supreme, and huge corporations raked in huge profits from public utilities.
Heating costs doubled, then tripled, then people just sighed and lost track. And it made me think: Is this really about public and private? Or is it really about huge corporations being supported by local governments in making huge profits and putting nothing back into the community other than a few jobs that may pay today but can easily be gone tomorrow, as our society is now ever increasingly dependent on corporate jobs for its very survival?
In Alberta I watched as lake levels dropped to provide water for petroleum processing plants, entire forests disappeared into stinking pulp mills, land chemically fertilized to death to the point that it now won’t even grow a dandelion every three feet, gas pipelines crisscrossing the countryside only a few miles apart, oil wells pumping 10 miles apart all across the landscape, strip mines miles and miles long, rivers polluted with toxic substances and Aboriginal peoples still taking their food from these rivers and getting sick.
The question arises: why are we all letting this happen and doing nothing about it? Well, although no one can disagree with positive thinking, perhaps we are all too busy trying to think positively to realize that something ugly is going on beneath our noses.
What is going to happen when our children see it all one day in the aftermath and look at us and ask why on Earth we didn’t do anything about it?
I do what I can, I read, I think, I write letters, I shop locally, I grow my own food, and according to Wendell Berry I am doing a good thing. But things like what you wrote about with BC Hydro are still happening, and very quickly too, and it seems like we are powerless to stop it.
Frankly I don’t think that even 100,000 letters to Gordon Campbell is going to stop them, because they are caught up in the ideology and they believe they are doing good for us all.
We call nature “resources” and then wonder why accountants and economists then see it merely as something to be used for current consumption habits and nothing more.
Wendell Berry wrote about this in his book, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture in 1977 and it is horrifically appropriate. Maybe it just took this long for the mega-corporate greed to hit Western Canada.
One thing I agree with him about: we are too addicted to mega-corporate industrial products and the comfortable lifestyle we assume, we have given up on many basic values and we will lose our nature, our clean air, our clean water, our clean fish, our health, everything, if we don’t learn to say no to mega-corporate products, from processed foods to cars to computers. Not that we shouldn’t have these things at all, but that if we could learn to produce more of what we “need” locally, then corporate responsibility would be much easier to enforce.
The importance of local responsibility is down just as much to companies as to individuals, and in fact, perhaps that is the crux: mega-corporations suffer extreme lack of personal responsibility.
And finally, I just learned that the “Campbell Mega-Corporate Tax-Break Office” is now planning on changing the rules for meat processing for farms, making it illegal to have on-farm slaughtering and farm gate sales of meat by September 2007.
So thank you for enraging me once more. That is what your magazine does so well. Thinking may be painful at times but it is preferable to numbness.

Shannon LeBlanc,
A concerned BC resident

Hydro blowing out smoke screens

What a dynamite revelation your October 2006 issue was. Thank you for devoting so much attention and space to the topic of the biggest sell-out and breach of public trust in BC’s history. Thank goodness, a growing number of folks are becoming aware of how we are deliberately deceived by our political representatives.
With your articles, those people who thought the power-production licences were only about the “awful coal” will understand just what a cynical and literal smoke screen the coal power production controversy was/is.
Don’t we all believe that hydroelectric power is a clean and renewable source. So why worry?
The double-speak assigns benign names to things that are detrimental and not in the public interest. Clean, renewable energy: at what cost?

Gudrun Langolf,
Vancouver

Electrical inspector’s warning “follow the debt.”

I spent 20 years as an electrician, 12 years as an electrical designer, and 13 years as a Federal Electrical Inspector, right here in BC. In 1990 I heard then BC Hydro CEO Larry Bell give a 15 second sound “byte” on TV saying; “that BC Hydro needed a rate increase for environmental reasons.” This didn’t sit well with me and since 1990 I have been monitoring our BC Hydro, attending BC Utilities Commission Hearings and writing over 45 letters on what has and is happening to our BC Hydro. I’ve given six talks about our BC Hydro to Victoria area Rotary Clubs, a men’s group and the Victoria Electric Club, as well.
Congratulations to Austin Boyd and the October 2006 feature article “We Are Being Enronized - Private Power, Water Licences and Bill 30. So horribly true and accurate about our debt ridden BC Hydro. This made in BC Electricity Disaster, reminds me of Watergate, conducted by the United States Republicans. The key word from Watergate was “follow the money”. In our BC Hydro’s case it’s “follow the debt.”
Common Ground says our BC Hydro is a vertically integrated public corporation. Sorry to say it was, but the BC Liberals changed all that in 2001 when they were elected the BC Government. There are now four companies that make up our BC Hydro. 1. BC Generation. 2. BC Transmission. 3. BC Distribution. 4. BC Hydro. All four have a separate board of directors, separate financial goals, separate in-house and external lawyers, separate agenda’s as all four could appear at our BC Utilities Commission on a given topic. This is part of the deliberate debt issue, as each have separate annual budgets. The only thing “Integrated” is our BC Hydro still issues an annual public budget report. The BC Government receives a separate budget report, with the real budget inside facts. This non-integrated system is naturally more expensive than it used to be, or needs to be, in my opinion.
Austin Boyd’s feature article mentions some of the debt that is deliberately and quietly hidden. Here’s more! The most important point of Austin Boyd’s article is the highlighted cost; it costs us $6 dollars per Megawatt hour for the power produced by our BC Hydro.” In 2002, I tried for six Months to find our BC Hydro’s published costs and found it to be $23 Dollars per Megawatt. (1 Megawatt serves approximately 1000 homes.) If the $6 Dollar per Megawatt cost can be independently verified and the cost includes BC Hydro’s finance/operations costs, then you have dynamited the very basis of the cash payout reasoning and method to selected Power Smart Customers. The last known cash allowance was around $60 to $ 70 Dollars per Megawatt and a recent BC Hydro article indicates they are planning to raise the cost allowance much higher, thereby increasing customer debt still further. One must ask why?
Another Province wide public survey is underway, to ask for public input but the dark side is to find out how much BC Hydro customers know and then to determine how much more the deliberate debt level can be fast tracked.
I’m convinced that this cleverly calculated deliberate debt program is masterminded within our BC Hydro and / or the BC Energy Ministry and carefully follows the United States Republican Free Trade Agreement, endorsed initially by Mulroney federal conservatives and promoted by the Republican/ BC Liberals, since 2001. Our BC Hydro has now been positioned to be easily sold off, with all these hidden costs & hidden agenda. Austin Boyd’s article screams out that all BC Hydro Customers are losing the most vital publicly owned and produced low cost electricity from our BC Hydro and I agree, we will regret it.Thanks a Watt!

James (Jim) Campbell
Sidney, BC