NASCALL RIVER: CASCADE-STUTSLEM VS. PRIMEX INVESTMENTS

UNNATI GANDHI
Globe and Mail
April 5, 2008

VANCOUVER — Two years after a landmark agreement was struck by politicians, environmentalists and aboriginals to conserve an area of British Columbia’s coast, a $200-million hydro project that critics say would do exactly the opposite is stalling legislation to protect a key site.
The plan to create conservancies, a new form of legal land protection, was publicly announced by Premier Gordon Campbell in February of 2006, as a way of ending a decade of confrontations in and around the Great Bear Rainforest, supporting aboriginal people and protecting the area’s natural diversity.
Commercial logging, mining and hydroelectric power generation are banned from the conservancies.
But while the province has formally established 65 such areas on the central and north coasts since 2006, the proposed Cascade-Stutslem conservancy, which falls within Heiltsuk Nation territory near Bella Coola, remains undesignated.

That’s despite a land-use agreement between the province and the Heiltsuk tribal council, according to NDP North Coast MLA Gary Coons.
He raised the issue in the legislature this week.
The reason for the delay, Mr. Coons said, is that a numbered company, wholly owned by Vancouver-based Primex Investments Ltd., has proposed to build a two-site hydroelectric project with a combined capacity of 71 megawatts on the Nascall River.

The project would overlap with the proposed conservancy, but, under the 2006 agreement, the two cannot coexist.  Despite that, it seems both proposals are making their way through the system.

In a project description filed to the province’s Environmental Assessment Office in January, Primex says that conversations it had with ministry representatives indicate that the proposed conservancy “has not proceeded through the legislative process” because the Nascall River project is “in conflict” with the proposed conservancy.

“[Ministry of Environment] representatives have indicated that the conservancy designation would not be going ahead until there was agreement with first nations and Independent Power Producers … in the area.”
Mr. Coons said a private project should not interfere with a public agreement.
“They indicate that the conservancy would not be going ahead until there’s an agreement. I see that as forcing the first nations to bow to the pressure of agreeing to these [independent power producers].”

Minister of Environment Barry Penner said in an interview this week the ministry is not accommodating the company’s proposal.  ”That is not ministry policy. We are working with the first nations to refine the boundaries for legal purposes,” he said. When asked if a hydro project could be approved, he replied: “Conservancy legislation defines what’s permitted within a conservancy.”  He said he expects to table new legislation to establish additional conservancies before the spring session ends on May 30. He would not say whether the site of the proposed Nascall project is among them.

William Gladstone, chief of the Heiltsuk tribal council, said he is confident the conservancy will be designated “in the near future.  ”I think we have a lot of say in what happens,” Mr. Gladstone said. He added that Primex’s hydroelectric project is in its early stages and that “they’re a little late in the game” for their land-use proposals.

“When you designate an area to be protected, that’s what it is, protected. It’s spelled out clearly in the agreement that we have … that there will be no hydro development, logging or other commercial endeavours that would compromise the protected area.”
Lee Rennison, vice-president of Primex, said the company is continuing its environmental assessment for the project until it hears otherwise from the province.

“As with every project, there are people who support it and people who don’t,” she said, acknowledging that the project would overlap the boundaries of the proposed conservancy, but that the amount of land is negligible.

Of the roughly 140,000 hectares that could be set aside, about 1,000 hectares would be affected, she said.
But Ian McAllister, founder of the B.C. coast conservation group Pacific Wild, said the impact on the land will be much greater, and the project goes against “the spirit and intent” of the conservancy agreement.

“This isn’t a small project by any stretch of the imagination,” he said. “This is in fact flooding one of the most spectacular, intact lake systems on the B.C. coast. And they’re planning on flooding it as deep as 10 to 15 metres. Entire first nations seasonal villages would be flooded. Large tracts of forest could be lost. It would completely alter the entire lake system.”

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