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e-PIC Problems
webmaster : Jun 15.2007The on-line database for British Columbia’s Environmental Assessment Office (BC EAO) is called e-PIC, or environmental Project Information Centre. It is where you are supposed to be able to access information about projects currently being considered by the BC EAO. But the BC EAO seems to be playing fast and loose with when it chooses to make information public and when it doesn’t.
Take for example the The Tulsequah Chief Mine Project proposed for the Taku watershed. It went through a provincial environmental assessment that ended in 2002. In January of this year, the owners of the Tulsequah Chief mine tried to breathe some life into their moribund project by changing from a road access route to road-barge access. The change is not a small one. It involves building around 10 km of newly proposed industrial haul road in an isolated wilderness area, building a barge loading facility on the bank of the salmon-rich Taku River, and then operating hoverbarges up and down an international waterway towed by a tow vehicle so experimental that it hasn’t been invented yet!
With an assessment now underway on the new barge proposal involving provincial, Canadian and US federal, and Alaskan agencies, information should now be on the site so that the public can better understand the potential risks from this new proposal. After all, the initial proposal by the mining company was submitted in January, and formal comments have been submitted by Alaskan and US agencies. It’s hard to say whether provincial or Canadian federal agencies have made any submissions, because nothing is on the e-PIC website! (The Alaskan comments have raised very serious concerns. Keep watching our site for details.)
A generous soul might suggest that the lack of information is the result of delays given the large volume of proposals currently on the table across BC. Unfortunately, that is not the case. I received a letter from the BC Transmission Corporation this week which mentioned that the BC EAO has just accepted the Trasmission Corporation’s request for a review of a proposed Northwest Transmission Line and, voilà, that assessment is already up on the e-PIC site.
The Northwest Transmission Line project is a story unto itself. British Columbia has made sure that the project is in review by the BC EAO, but acknowledges that "a decision to proceed with the potential NTL has not been made." Why would a project be in an environmental assessment before it is even a project? Maybe because the BC government is still navigating the politics of making a massive public investment to subsidize the mining sector, and isn’t quite ready to announce it yet. On the other hand, they don’t want it slowed down by an environmental assessment when they do announce it. Solution? Send it into environmental assessment now so there are no time delays when it is finally announced.
The Northwest Transmission line would extend from Terrace to Bob Quinn in the Iskut-Stikine watershed. The BC Transmission Corporation is looking at a 287 kV line, which is would provide far more power than the tiny communities of the Iskut-Stikine need to move off of diesel generators. The excess power would be a public subsidy to the many mining projects in that region that are currently uneconomic. A project with such potentially profound impacts and such a huge cost for taxpayers warrants scrutiny by the public. Unfortunately, it isn’t getting that because BC is having public servants assess it without making a public announcement that would draw public attention to this massive project.
All of this raises a lot of questions about the commitment to public access to decision making in British Columbia. The transboundary region is British Columbia’s last great wilderness region. The government’s plans for it should be public.