I love donuts, but I wrote this article at home because I was worried it might be too hard to get a seat at my local Tim Hortons. That’s because on some days our hospital in New Westminster is so overcrowded the coffee shop doubles as an emergency ward.

Such are the cash-strapped times we live in.

Meanwhile, the BC government continues to shovel money out the back of a dump truck to their friends in the private hydropower industry to dam and divert our province’s wild rivers.

Our Liberal government’s generosity comes in the form of long-term energy purchase contracts granted to the private power companies at rates far above market rates for electrical energy BC doesn’t need and that we can only sell at a loss.

Does this sound like a recipe for disaster for folks like you and me? You bet it is. Just ask the guy in the bed next to you in line at your favourite donut shop.

People across the province are beginning to catch on to how badly they’ve been hosed by Victoria’s river privatization policies. A recent headline in Whistler’s Pique magazine reads, “IPP’s [Independent Power Producers] to cost BC Hydro almost $1 billion annually by 2014.” A billion dollars is a big bite out of the province’s healthcare budget. The line up at Timmy’s is about to get longer.

How did we get into this mess?

It all goes back to 2002 when then new Premier Campbell brought in the so-called Clean Energy Act. This law forces BC Hydro to buy unneeded electrical power at exorbitant prices in long-term, multi-decade contracts from the private power guys. Predictably, it sparked a gold rush on BC’s wild rivers. Today, BC Hydro is on the hook for about $30 billion dollars in long-term energy purchase contracts and over 800 rivers and streams are staked across the province. Yikes!

How do we get out of this mess? People power! This past year, people from many communities and walks of life, standing together, have stopped some pretty big private hydro projects dead in their tracks.

The Klinaklini River project would have required a three-story diversion tunnel carved through a mountain for 17 kilometres and would have backed up the river into a protected area. Thankfully, as a result of public opposition, the BC government pulled the plug on this nightmare project.

The proposed project on Glacier and Howser Creeks in the Kootenays pretty much sank this year under a tidal wave of public opposition and news the project would have toasted endangered bull trout habitat.

And then there was the biggest of them all, General Electric’s humungous Bute Inlet project, which aimed to dam and divert 17 rivers. GE’s behemoth has been stalled, thanks to a relentless campaign by thousands of people working to save the area’s world-renowned salmon and grizzly populations.

So that’s the good news; if we raise our voices together, we can save BC’s wild rivers and public power system.

For more information, see 2011_rivers_newspaper.pdf