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    In-depth reporting and analysis
    Stephen Hume
    Posted July 6, 2020
    As the process of decolonizing and renaming our province gathers momentum, we consider the events that led to the founding of the Province of British Columbia.
     
    ON AUGUST 2, 1858, the British parliament passed a bill that formally created a government for what’s now the province of British Columbia. In did so by cobbling together several smaller colonies, fur trade administrative regions called New Caledonia, and remnants of the Columbia District and the Oregon Territory that had become American by treaty in 1846.
    The British legislation referred to “certain wild and unoccupied territories on the North-West Coast of North America” and cited the need to provide colonial government “until permanent Settlements shall be thereupon established, and the Number of Colonists increased.”
    The territories weren’t unoccupied, of course. And it could be argued that the occupants weren’t willing subjects of the British Crown, either. A few had signed treaties with James Douglas, the Black fur trader who was married to an indigenous woman and found himself at the crossroads of colonial history more by accident than intent. But most, we can be reasonably sure, didn’t consent to this abrupt change in their sovereign status.
    A famous painting of the installation of Douglas as governor of the new colony is significant primarily in the monoculture it depicts; white, bewhiskered men with bibles resplendent in the traditional regalia of their station—judicial robes, gilt-braided uniforms, cockaded military hats, and so on.
     

    John Innes’ painting of the inauguration of the Crown Colony of British Columbia, and the installation of James Douglas as its first governor
     
    There are no First Nations chiefs resplendent in their regalia. Save Douglas who is portrayed as a white patriarch, there are no Black officials present, although they would form the new colony’s first militia regiment, help lay the foundations of commerce and industry and one of them would be a delegate to the Yale Convention that drafted terms for entry into Confederation. No Chinese, although they would be crucial in building infrastructure and establishing a mercantile empire that reached from the Cariboo to San Francisco and back to China. None of the Hawaiians known—and not pejoratively for they were prized employees of the fur trade—as Kanakas.
    And there were no women. Women weren’t persons in the eyes of the law in 1858. They were chattels of their husbands and a man could still sell his wife at market for as little as a pint of beer, as happened in 1862.
    None of this was noted 116 years later when the government of British Columbia established the first Monday in August as BC Day, a statutory holiday honouring “the pioneers who built the colony.”
    But times and perceptions evolve. As the process of decolonizing public institutions, public attitudes and the collective psychology of the descendants of both colonized and colonizers gathers momentum—there are serious and legitimate suggestions that we consider changing the name of the province to reflect a decolonized present—it’s important to remember that history didn’t begin with the Gold Rush of 1858. It didn’t begin with the arrival of the fur trade in 1805; and it didn’t begin with the explorations of Captain George Vancouver in 1792, or the trading expedition of John Meares in 1786, or the scientific research expedition of Captain James Cook in 1778.
    If, for want of an arbitrary point of departure, we consider that the modern history of BC began with the initial braiding of First Nations and European narratives into our present reality, then we have to start near the end of July in 1774, and not with the British, but with a tiny Spanish exploratory mission.
     
    Ninstints: a 14,000-year-old Haida civilization
    BEHIND A LONG, SANDY CRESCENT, ideal for landing sea-going canoes amid rocky islets capped with trees sculpted by ceaseless spindrift, and backdropped by the dense, brooding green of rainforest, time-silvered totem poles at the long-abandoned village of Ninstints present a stunning representation of a 14,000-year-old Haida civilization at its cultural apex.
    Ninstints, the name under which it was designated a World Heritage Site in 1981, or Nan Sdins, or Nunstints, is the anglicized place name derived by Europeans from the hereditary name of a renowned chief, Nañ stîns, “He who is two.” To the Haida, the place is Sga’ngwa.i Inaga’-i, or S’Gang Gwaay Llanagaay, or just Skungwai—Red Cod Island Town. Anthony Island shields Ninstints from the fierce storms that sweep in from the vastness of the Pacific Ocean.
    Keel-runs, cleared for landings by the great dugout canoes, are still visible. Haida crews would travel thousands of miles by sea in these canoes—one crossed the Pacific Ocean in 1901. Their hull design later inspired that of fast clipper ships that raced tea from China to London.
     

    Ninstints in 2002 (Photo by C. Baertsch)
     
    On Ninstints, one can also still see the moss-covered ruins of the 17 great houses that once lined the beach, their cedar-planked front panels decorated with clan crests, lineages and indications of status. These were the Kunghit people and the Haida heraldry ranged from the chiefs who inherited the name Ninstints at the South end of the village to that at the North end, culminating with the great house of the famous chief Koyah, “Raven.” Koyah is infamous to English and American captains for leading resistance against European incursions, attacking visiting trading vessels on at least four occasions.
    But it’s the astonishing artistic richness of the surviving totems, mostly memorial or mortuary poles, that point to the richness of Haida culture. Some poles were destroyed in a fire said to be set in the late 19th Century by the crew of a passing sealing schooner from northern Vancouver Island in retaliation for an ancient but never forgotten Haida raid upon the Kwakwaka’wakw on North Vancouver Island. Other poles were removed by museum collectors trying to salvage the legacy—sadly, seven of these were destroyed in a fire at Skidegate where they had been sent for restoration. Those remaining still resonate with artistic force.   
    About a dozen poles still stand at Ninstints, of global importance says UNESCO because they do more than memorialize important persons of the past; they now commemorate the living culture of the Haida and their relationship with the land and the sea since time immemorial. “What survives is unique in the world, a 19th-century Haida village where the ruins of houses and memorial or mortuary poles illustrate the power and artistry of Haida society…The art represented by the carved poles at SGang Gwaay LInagaay (Nan Sdins) is recognized to be among the finest examples of its type in the world.”
    Traditional art forms on the Northwest Coast, inextricably entangled with social hierarchies, ceremonies and cosmologies, threatened the imported cosmologies of Christian missionaries and the imposition of new systems of law and governance imposed by colonial authorities. Family and tribal crests were looted as curios; ceremonial regalia was destroyed or appropriated and sold to museum collections. Ancient ceremonies themselves were outlawed and practitioners arrested and imprisoned. There was a systematic attempt by government to eradicate native languages. The last totem poles from that ancient Haida culture were carved and erected in villages at Skedans and Tanu in 1878.
    If, as many art historians believe, Haida carving represents an apex of Northwest Coast artistic achievement and the work at Ninstints is the apex of the apex, the place also symbolizes the nadir of Haida fortunes. Once the seat of powerful chiefs, then a wealthy and important trading centre, it was later depopulated by lethal epidemics, its social organization wrecked by greed and violence. Ninstints was abandoned in the 1870s, then pillaged as a source of artifacts. Finally it was installed as an iconic historic site of global significance that celebrates the resurrection of Haida culture from the ashes of near-annihilation.
    The fate of Ninstints had been cast about a century earlier, when first contact between an expanding European empire and the Haida civilization that had occupied its homeland since before the end of the last Ice Age, resulted in a collision that would ultimately have catastrophic consequences for both.
    As with everything else in Haida Gwaii, that story is written in the wind and the waves.
     
    1774: Spanish ship Santiago, checking up on Russians, meets the Haida
    FOAM-STREAKED FROM THE 8,000-KILOMETRE REACH of wind-swept ocean behind them, the dark swells heave landward without cease. They break in a glistening fringe along the forbidding 400-kilometre wall of reefs, cliffs and craggy headlands that form the outer coast of a sea-churned archipelago of unpardonable beauty.
    The more than 1,800 rain-washed, mist-draped reefs, islets and islands that comprise Haida Gwaii jut into the turbulent North Pacific about 650 kilometres northwest of the present boundary that separates Canada from the United States at Vancouver. Nutrient-rich upwellings from the cold abyss at the edge of the continental shelf on which the islands perch sustain one of the richest ecosystems on the planet. At Dolomite Narrows it’s said there is more life per square metre than anywhere else. One survey collected almost 15,000 different animals from 100 square metres of bottom. The waters surrounding what have been called the Galapagos of the North teem with fish, 200 species of seabirds, and sea mammals of astonishing variety—20 species of whales and porpoises, fur seals and Steller’s sea lions, massive beasts the size of a small car that slide through submarine kelp forests with fluid grace.
    And these remote islands, today occupied by 0.1 percent of the province’s population but with more than 500 identified Haida heritage sites, are the historical epicentre of the socio-economic earthquake in which our British Columbia first took shape.
    In geological terms, the archipelago—renamed in colonial times the Queen Charlotte Islands and then returned to their indigenous name by an act of the British Columbia legislature in 2010—mark a boundary where the huge Pacific plate slides northwest along North America. The friction generated as the billions of tonnes of rock in these two immense plates grind past one another along the Queen Charlotte fault create the phenomenon that engineers call stick-slip, a process of catch and release by two surfaces. The juddering that results makes this offshore region one of the world’s most unstable places, subject to constant shaking and occasionally to great earthquakes.
    Two of Canada’s most powerful known temblors have occurred in this offshore zone. The most recent, in 1949, releasing almost twice as much energy as the 1906 event that destroyed much of San Francisco. And one in 1700 released more than 44 times the energy of that 1949 event. The resulting tsunami caused coastal destruction as far away as Japan.
    In socio-economic terms Haida Gwaii, and in particular two specific places on the archipelago, are where British Columbia’s modern history began. And we know the precise date, right to the half-hour, the names of individuals, and the eye-witness accounts of the principals involved.
    The first historic event was accompanied by the fitful rain squalls typical in those waters even for the high summer month of Sqaana gyaas, the killer whale month, so named because the sound of bark being stripped from giant red cedars during the seasonal round of manufacturing clothing, mats and baskets was thought similar to that made by whales blowing.
    It was early afternoon on July 20, 1774 when a lookout from one of three adjacent Haida villages—Kkyuusta, Yaakkw or Dadens—glimpsed something utterly astonishing. Amid drifting patches of rain and fog just off Langara Island, its white wings flapping, swam a strange bird of supernatural proportions.
    The villagers were fearful, an informant later told geologist George Mercer Dawson. Their world was inhabited at its fringes by supernatural beings—animals with the power to take human form and language, cannibal ogres, a sea grizzly in whose thick otter-like fur a ghost collected the souls of the drowned and kept them in bubbles. A stretch of sea to the East was known to be populated by deep water monsters which occasionally surfaced to claim entire canoes with their passengers. But their chief, though he later admitted to sharing the people’s apprehension, decided boldness was required of a leader, for the sake of his own sense of dignity as much as anything. He put on his finest ceremonial regalia and prepared to greet the unknown.
    The name of the first person in what is now British Columbia to lay eyes on the fateful appearance of European colonizers off its shores—that Haida lookout—is lost to history. The name of the chief who bravely launched his canoe to investigate the apparition perhaps not. He probably owned the name Blakow-Coneehaw, a corruption of Gunia, a powerful chief whose influence extended to all three villages. The syllables of his name were first mangled in the mouth of a Scottish sea captain who visited 15 years after the momentous first encounter and then, again, during the attempt to render into English text the Haida words for which no orthography yet existed.
    In any event, in 1774 the chief had waited for slack tide. He launched his great canoe around 3 pm crewed by seven paddlers and a boy. It took about 90 minutes to reach the monstrous bird. When they were about 300 metres away, he greeted it, singing a welcome song, scattering eagle down on the water and extending his arms wide and then crossing them on his chest to signify peaceful intent.
    As the canoe drew closer, the chief and his paddlers saw and heard what they first thought were bird people, unintelligible cries coming from dark shapes that resembled cormorants perched on the rocks. They were keen observers. Preserved in the oral tradition is what they perceived to be the peculiar behaviour of what they now determined were human strangers: one would speak and the others would suddenly scurry up into a basket of ropes until he spoke again and they would all clamber back down.
    The great bird was the Spanish ship Santiago, a 200-tonne frigate on a top-secret mission from the naval base at San Blas, Mexico, a 5,000-kilometre sail to the South. The mission’s commander, Ensign Juan José Perez Hernandez, a native of the island of Majorca and considered the most able and experienced pilot in the San Blas naval department, had been sent to investigate intelligence reports leaking from St Petersburg about Russian expansion far to the north of Spanish-claimed territory.
     
     

    Juan José Perez Hernandez
     
    Beyond California, North America’s west coast was an unknown. The English pirate Sir Francis Drake had journeyed north while escaping with bullion and booty from raiding the South American and Mexican coasts in 1579. Another Spanish expedition in search of a northwest passage to the Atlantic was thought by some—and disputed by others—to have reached the South end of Vancouver Island and the strait later named for its pilot, Juan de Fuca, in 1592.  But for Perez, the charts were blank and the coastline and its currents, prevailing weather and maritime dangers a mystery. He’d set sail from San Blas with the ebbing tide at midnight on January 25, 1774, with a complement of 84. Armament included six cannons, 500 cannon balls and 36 muskets with bayonets. In an age before electricity and on-board freezers, provisions included a tonne-and-a-half of dried fish, five tonnes of beef jerky and 15 tonnes of hardtack.   
    The curious activities of the bird creatures observed by the Haida party that made first contact were the attempts by Perez to trim sails to account for the quartering, highly changeable winds that had been bedevilling him for the three days since he’d steered an eastward course in search of land after one of his crew had seen giant kelp. The Santiago’s lookout had actually sighted the coastline the day before and the ship had ventured closer but the wind had picked up sharply, the sky to the Southeast had suddenly darkened and the captain had prudently shortened sail, headed back to open water and hove-to 12 leagues off shore—about 60 kilometres—for the night.
    On July 19 at 4:30 pm, somewhere just west of Langara Island and fairly close inshore, the Spanish captain’s diary records first contact with the native inhabitants of what less than a century later would become British Columbia and Canada’s westernmost province.
    The canoe came alongside. It was big, befitting the stature of its chief, and almost half the length of the Santiago. The Spanish were impressed by its speed and the skill of the paddlers. Perez had specific instructions from the viceroy in Mexico not to interfere with, or harm or engage in commercial trade—although ceremonial exchanges of gifts would be all right—with any native peoples he encountered. He did plan to land, erect the massive wooden cross the ship’s carpenters had constructed, and claim the territory for the Spanish empire. When it became clear that the encounter was friendly, two more canoes approached.
    “The men were of good stature, well-formed, a smiling face, beautiful eyes and good looking,” Perez wrote in his expedition diary. “Their hair was tied up and arranged in the manner of a wig with a tail. Some wore it tied in the back and had beards and mustaches in the manner of the Chinese people.”
    The next day, unable to make headway against the strong current out of the East, Perez stood off Langara Island. This time, 21 canoes came out, two of them filled with women with babies at the breast and older children. All were led by an older man whom the Spanish commander likened to “a king or a captain.” They began exchanging sea otter, wolf and bear pelts and blankets “beautifully woven and made, according to what I saw, on a loom,” for items of European clothing, glass beads, an axe and some knives. Two came aboard the ship and he made gifts of bread and cheese.
    “They were all good-looking, white and fair,” Perez reported. “Most of them have blue eyes.” He also noted that the Haida had in their canoe a half a bayonet and a broken sword but before he could explore the origins—were they Russian items traded down from the North, or had they been traded north from Spanish territory?—weather conditions abruptly changed. The canoes quickly made for shore, the Haida singing and apparently happy with the exchange of goods.
    “It was afternoon and everyone was cheerful,” his diary says. “But less so, I, who wanted to anchor but was unable to get help from the wind. It made me ill-tempered, and even more so seeing that without a wind the furious flow of the current was separating me from the coast.”
    A freshening off-shore wind, the inconstancy and confusion of the weather and supplies dwindling—Perez calculated that even on half rations he’d have barely enough water for the return voyage—compelled him to “submit to the will of God,” and he bore away to the South.
    Neither Perez nor Gunia could know it, but the aftershocks of their encounter would be profound. A century later, the Haida people would be teetering at the brink of extinction, their culture in tatters and the globe-straddling Spanish empire would be banished from the western hemisphere, reduced to a few shrunken colonial holdings in Asia and Africa.
    Sailing south, and hoping to replenish his water barrels, Perez turned landward again having spotted a dazzling, snow covered peak—likely Vancouver Island’s highest mountain, Golden Hinde—and on August 8, having passed through a fog so dense visibility was less than the length of his ship, dropped anchor near the entrance to a sheltered opening in the coast line. He named it Surgidero de San Lorenzo but it would later be named Nootka.
    About 3 pm, Perez recounts, canoes began coming out. At first three canoes carrying nine men, then eventually five canoes. But they remained at a distance and would not come close. As had the Haida at Kkyuusta, the Nuu-chah-nulth viewed the Santiago with great trepidation. Years later, José Mariano Moziño reported that elders told him that when they first observed the Spanish ship, they concluded it was the great copper canoe of a supernatural being named Qua-utz who was part of their creation mythology and who had returned to punish them for bad behaviour. That story of first contact was later corroborated by Joseph Ingraham, captain of an American ship who left a remarkably observant account of his time among the Nuu-chah-nulth. Some took refuge in the bush, others retreated into their long houses, but a few took canoes out to confront the threat.
    The next day, however, when the crew of the Santiago made it clear their intentions were peaceful, 15 canoes came alongside. They traded sea otter pelts and cedar hats for knives, cloth and large abalone shells from California. Several Nuu-chah-nulth men came aboard. One of them managed to pocket several spoons belonging to Martinez which the English noted as evidence of a Spanish presence when they reached Nootka Sound four years later.
    Then, with the weather turning for the worse, Perez weighed anchor and with sails reefed and turbulent seas set course for San Blas. He would never return. The following year, on a second expedition to the North, he died at sea. But one of those vessels, the Sonora, a small 14-metre schooner commanded by a young naval lieutenant, Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, explored and mapped the coast to what’s now southeast Alaska. He, too, would play a key role in the shaping of BC’s history.
     
    After Captain Cook’s 1778 visit, a rapacious fur trade and disease transform history
    ON MARCH 29, 1778, A WEEK AFTER uncharacteristically missing the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca in severe weather—winds were gusting to 50 kilometres an hour—Britain’s greatest maritime explorer, Captain James Cook, found his way to the same narrow opening in the coastline that Perez had found four years before. But the English sailor, blessed with more congenial weather, sailed through into sheltered waters.
    Cook, like Perez, was on a secret mission. His orders were to seek a Northwest Passage between the Pacific and the Atlantic. His ship, Resolution, was accompanied by Discovery, among whose crew was a midshipman named George Vancouver who would also play a key role in BC’s future. This was Cook’s third great scientific mission and his officers and crew were shrewd and astute observers. Their accounts of the flora, the fauna, and Nuu-chah-nulth culture and society remain among the most valuable records of initial contact.
    As had the crew of Perez, Cook’s men traded with the Nuu-chah-nulth, who were shrewd and adept. The English had to pay for wood, water and even grass for the ships’ goats. John Weber, when he stopped to sketch figures in a long house, had to buy sketching time with brass buttons from his coat until he exhausted his supply. Metal items, the English traders discovered, were most in demand, in particular bits of iron, tools, utensils and weapons. These they traded for luxuriant sea otter pelts, carvings and art. Cook, himself, exchanged a broad sword with a brass hilt for a fur cloak worn by a leader that scholars now believe must have been Maquinna, the powerful whaling chief.
    Cook sailed away after a month of refitting, impatient to continue the mission that would take him to the Aleutian Islands and end a year later with his death on a beach during an altercation with Hawaiian islanders. But these two trade items, iron and furs, would utterly transform the social, cultural and political landscape of what’s now BC.
    When the two ships of the Cook expedition stopped in China to take on provisions for the final journey back to Britain, the crew found an astonishing demand among wealthy Chinese officials and aristocrats for the sea otter pelts they’d been using for bedding and clothing. James King, who had become captain of Discovery after Cook’s death and had inherited the furs obtained by both Cook and his successor in command, Charles Clerke, who had died at sea, sold 20 pelts in Canton for $800. Some crew members made even greater profits. In all, they sold their sea otter skins for an amount that, converted into current dollars, would exceed $300,000. For an outlay of about 12-pence, an investor might reap a return of 1,800 percent, or the equivalent of close to $15,000. When Cook’s official report was finally published in the September, 1784, a fur stampede began. Less than a year later, the first trading mission, commanded by Captain James Hanna, had been outfitted and set sail from Macao, China.    
    Within five years, more than a dozen trading vessels had visited Nootka and more than 170 expeditions, dominated by flinty New England captains, had sailed to a Northwest Coast that only a decade before had seemed as remote as the moon. The fur trade was rapacious. More than 120 ships took almost a million sea otter pelts from the Aleutian Islands alone by 1808. A century later, sea otters were so scarce they were thought extinct. And so, almost, were the Haida.
    Captain Cook had not discovered a “new” world, he had opened a portal between worlds, both of them as old as time. Wealth, prestige and power flooded through in both directions. For the Europeans it was the soft gold of the fur trade; for the Haida and the Nuu-chah-nulth it was technological transfer—as iron implements entered a metal-poor economy, they set off an enormous cultural explosion in carving, canoe and long-house building. Guns altered ancient balances of power. Chiefs attained wealth and status that would have been unimaginable to their fathers—Maquinna had distributed 100 muskets, 400 yards of cloth, 100 mirrors and 20 kegs of gunpowder at a single potlatch in 1803—only to have it later slip away from them. Easy wealth meant more chiefs and it shattered the economic advantage of hereditary dynasties. Inter-clan and inter-tribal violence proliferated. And the newcomers created new markets—Haida artists became the first on the coast to commercialize their art, crafting stunning carvings of traditional imagery and mythological motifs from a soft, black stone called argillite specifically for sale to visiting sailors.
    But more came through the portal than wealth and the attendant perils of wealth. So did a portfolio of viruses that indigenous immune systems had never encountered. The first to arrive was smallpox. How it came remains unclear—perhaps with Russians from Kamchatka, perhaps with the Spanish from Mexico, perhaps with some indigenous carrier travelling north. Certainly, a vast and lethal epidemic was already sweeping through the Great Plains and lapping up against the Rocky Mountains in what some have described as the greatest demographic catastrophe in human experience.
    The Northwest Coast smallpox epidemic of 1862 is the one most embedded in the popular imagination. But that’s because it was most visible to European colonizers. In fact, it had been preceded by a whole suite of equally apocalyptic disease events. Measles, malaria, influenza and other unidentified diseases followed one after another. Robert Boyd, who made a lifetime study of introduced diseases and their demographic impact on the Northwest Coast, calculated pre-contact population by working backward using mortality statistics. He estimates an indigenous population of almost 190,000 in 1770. By the time British Columbia had emerged as a political entity and entered confederation that population had declined by more than 80 percent and would not reach its nadir until 1900.
    Smallpox ravaged the North coast in 1775. Subsequent 18th-Century fur traders reported deserted villages of collapsing houses strewn with bones. Nathaniel Portlock, who had been with Cook at Nootka and returned to trade for sea otter pelts in 1789, cited depopulated villages and one scarred survivor who had his arm tattooed with marks for each of his children whom had perished—there were 10. In 1795, Charles Bishop said a Haida chief told him two-thirds of the population had died. The Haida estimate their pre-contact population to be as high as 20,000; scholarly estimates are 10,000 to 12,000. What’s not in dispute is that by 1900 there were fewer than 600.
    Some time in the late 18th Century, disheartened by the impacts of smallpox and the disruptions of the sea otter trade and its destabilizing influx of wealth, Gunia abandoned Kkyuusta for islands to the North in what’s now the Alaska Panhandle. His people followed him.
    At Ninstints, the Eagle and Raven families were gone from Red Cod Town by 1874.
    The 17 great houses on the terrace above the beach collapsed back into the soil, the raised mortuary boxes of once great chiefs crumbled and spilled their bones, totem poles tilted and fell to be swallowed by the underbrush. It became a place of ghosts at the fringes of collective memory, although not Haida memory—or Kwakwaka’wakw—until a century later when it would be reborn, a global revenant from the richness of Haida culture, a reminder to everyone that although our stories are now inextricably braided, it’s in our first cultures that British Columbia was actually born.
     
    Stephen Hume spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island. His byline has appeared in most major Canadian newspapers. The author of nine books of poetry, natural history, history and literary essays, he lives on the Saanich Peninsula.
     
     

    David Broadland
    March 2020
    Wildfires in BC are getting bigger. Much bigger. The forest-industrial complex blames fire suppression. The evidence suggests large areas of fuel-laden clearcuts are changing fire behaviour.
     
    A RECORD COMPILED BY BC GOVERNMENT SCIENTISTS since 1990 captures in cold, hard numbers the scale of the ecological apocalypse underway in BC’s Interior forests. The record shows that since 1990, the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere by wildfires in BC has doubled every nine years.
    For the nine years from 1990 to 1998, scientists estimated 52.3 million tonnes (megatonnes) of greenhouse gas emissions were released to the atmosphere by forest fires. From 1999 to 2007, that more than doubled to 120.9 megatonnes. Over the next 9-year period, ending with 2016, the total released doubled again, to 249.8 megatonnes.
    In 2017, 1,353 fires burned 1.22 million hectares, including some very large fires, all in BC’s Interior: the 191,865-hectare Elephant Hill Fire, the 545,151-hectare Chilcotin Plateau Fire—which was actually the merging of 20 separate fires—and the 241,160-hectare Hanceville Fire, another merging of smaller fires into a mega-fire.
    BC scientists estimated 176.6 megatonnes of greenhouse gases were released into the atmosphere by those 2017 fires.
    The next year was even worse: 2,117 fires burned 1.36-million hectares. Scientists haven’t yet made public their estimate of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere for that year, but it will likely be close to 200 megatonnes.
     

    Greenhouse gas emissions from wildfires in BC have doubled every nine years since 1990. The last 3 years suggest that rate of increase will continue.
     
    Last year—2019—saw a cooler, wetter summer and a relief for wildfire fighters. Yet the first three years of the current 9-year interval have already released 75 percent of the 500 megatonnes needed to maintain the doubling of the carbon released every nine years.
    All of the biggest fires, in both 2017 and 2018, occurred in areas where the impact of Mountain Pine Beetle infestation over the past 20 years has been most intense. The beetles have affected 16 million hectares of BC forests—an area more than five times that of Vancouver Island.
    Large areas of the 2017 fires overlapped salvage clearcuts of beetle-killed trees. In a report on the impact of the 2017 fires, the Ministry of Forests noted that about 80 percent of the fires’ area occurred in forests “significantly impacted” by Mountain Pine Beetle. The four largest fires of 2018 also burned in areas damaged by beetle infestation.
    The magnitude of the release makes provincial and municipal plans for reducing carbon emissions in BC appear functionally pointless—like trying to drain the Fraser River with a garden hose.
    Can anything be done to slow or reverse the trend toward bigger wildfires? That would depend on what’s causing wildfires to be bigger and whether or not humans can reverse the cause.
    Recently, the Vancouver Sun reported that two BC forestry scientists, Werner Kurz and Lori Daniels, are representing Canada in “a $1-million partnership between Canadian researchers and the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service to ‘de-escalate the devastating forest wildfires that are increasingly occurring due to climate change.’”
    The Sun reporter, Randy Shore, interviewed Daniels, a professor of forestry at UBC, who told him: “We are paying a huge cost in carbon today because we were so good at putting out fires in the past.”
    Daniels believes wildfires are getting bigger because of the build-up of fuel in forests, which Shore described as “fallen needles and dead branches.” If fire hadn’t been suppressed, those needles and dead branches would have been burned off by natural fire.
    Daniels offered a solution: “What happens if we thin out the forest and reduce the stress on those trees competing for a limiting resource like soil moisture?...Will the trees left behind grow faster and sequester more carbon? There is lots of evidence that under some circumstances, that is the case.”
    For such thinning to be effective at reducing fuel in the forest it would have to be removed. Daniels suggested the possible development of a new biomass economy: “If it is going to be burned, we should do that at high efficiency and displace fossil fuel with a form of sustainable energy. Lots of small communities are still reliant on fossil fuels, so these are linkages that we can make.”
    The idea sounds eminently reasonable, doesn’t it? But what if it’s wrong? What if “fire suppression” is not at the heart of escalating wildfires? Do forest scientists ever get things wrong?
    The forest-industrial complex—the forest-interested government agencies, industry, universities and media—that has led BC into the black-box carbon trap of exponentially-increasing emissions outlined above, is unable to hold itself accountable for the environmentally disastrous forestry practices it devised that have contributed disproportionately to a warmer climate. Its miscalculation of what was sustainable created giant clearcuts that shrivelled the forests’ ability to sequester carbon. That played a significant role in making winters too warm to kill the Mountain Pine Beetle, and that change was followed by widespread pine mortality, immense areas of salvage clearcuts, and now giant wildfires roaring through those same clearcuts.
    Now, it appears, the forest-industrial complex is diverting our attention away from what’s actually happening on the ground. The accumulation of giant clearcuts has altered microclimates and left hundreds of millions of tonnes of fuel on the ground. And now it’s burning, easily ignited by lightning, and affecting fire behaviour.
     

    A BC Wildfire Service air tanker tackles an aggressive wildfire in a clearcut
     
    An August 2018 “incident update” by the BC Wildfire Service describes the “behaviour prediction” for a fire near the Baezaeko River west of Quesnel: “Fire activity will have the potential to challenge control lines; don’t let your guard down. Be aware of gusty winds and the effect on fire behaviour, if only for a short time. The slash blocks have more fuel loading than the standard slash fuel type, expect higher intensity. This higher intensity can cause fire whirls to develop; this would cause rapid fire growth and increased spotting potential.”
    “Fire whirls” are like small tornados, formed by the rapid uplift of air in an intense fire. “Spotting” is the ability of fires to send out embers far ahead of a fire and start new fires. Wildfire Service incident updates commonly note the impact of logging slash in clearcuts that makes fires burn more intensely and dangerously.
    Yet nowhere to be seen in the forest-industrial complex’s description of what needs to happen now is an examination of the ways in which a landscape increasingly dominated by very large clearcuts has changed the behaviour of fire in BC’s forests. Nowhere to be seen is the option of reducing the volume of timber cut in BC to allow the provincial forests’ carbon sequestration capacity to recover.
    Unless you are delusionally optimistic, there’s no reason to believe that feeding tree parts to industrial burners will reduce the acceleration in the thermal destruction of BC’s forests. Once jobs are created to feed the burners, those bio-jobs will become the thing that must be protected at all costs. That way of thinking is what gave BC the beetle infestation in the first place.
    The stated belief that the acceleration in wildfire emissions is due to past fire suppression appears destined to become one of the great, all-time dead-end ideas in BC’s short but dramatic history of ecosystem disruption.
    Unless there is some real change in the fundamental factor driving this acceleration—the loss of BC forests’ carbon sequestration capacity—then between 2026 and 2034, the fifth nine-year interval in this exponential increase, BC forest fires will produce a total of 1,000 megatonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions, or an average of 110 megatonnes per year. The Mountain Pine Beetle infestation affected 16 million hectares of BC forests. Only a small fraction of these have burned, so there’s a high risk of more and bigger fires in the coming years.
    An aside to those folks who might think the scientists are purposely overestimating emissions from wildfires in order to justify amping up industrialization of forests: the estimate for 2017 works out to about 50 tonnes of forest carbon per hectare, which is less than what would be left on the ground after an Interior clearcut.
    Let’s put the magnitude of the wildfire emissions problem in perspective. BC’s carbon emissions—from all sources except forest-related emissions—totalled 64 megatonnes in 2017. CleanBC, the provincial government’s emissions reduction plan, has so far been able to identify, on paper, just 19 megatonnes of annual reductions it hopes will happen by 2030. LNG Canada at Kitimat will trigger 9 megatonnes. Teck Resources’ Frontier oil sands project was going to produce 4 megatonnes. The City of Victoria is targetting about 0.390 megatonnes through its climate action plan.
    Compare those drops in the bucket to the 110 megatonnes of annual emissions from forest fires alone that now seem certain to be in our near future. Other net emissions—the loss of forest carbon sequestration capacity and the premature decay of forest carbon initiated by harvesting—caused by BC’s forest industry and tallied in Defusing BC’s big, bad carbon bomb in our last edition—are upwards of 190 megatonnes each year.
    It’s the Province’s official position that it can’t do anything about any of these forest-industry-caused emissions. Although the exponential growth in emissions from wildfires outlined above appears in the British Columbia Provincial Greenhouse Gas Inventory, as do other emissions related to BC’s forest industry, they are not counted in BC like your car’s tailpipe emissions. Is that because they don’t impact climate stability? No, it’s because the Province claims nothing can be done about these net emissions.
    In the Province’s Methodology Book for the British Columbia Provincial Greenhouse Gas Inventory, the authors state that emissions from forest fires “are more volatile and subject to natural factors outside of direct human control and so are not reported as part of BC GHG emissions totals…”
    Yet it has become an article of faith of the forest-industrial complex that historical fire suppression by humans is the primary cause of big fires, and big fires mean higher emissions. This official confusion is disconcerting and demands a ground-truthing expedition.
     
    FOLLOWING THE FIRES OF 2017, which included the 191,865-hectare Elephant Hill Fire, the Ministry of Forests’ Pat Byrne, district manager of the 100-Mile House Natural Resource District, told the 100-Mile Free Press in July 2018: “Much of the area that was burned by both the Gustafsen and Elephant Hill fires, they burned over fire-dependent ecosystems…These ecosystems rely on fires as much as the soil and the air and the water they get. It’s how they evolve…The forest relies on a 10 to 15 year fire cycle to thin out the vegetation and create a more open forest…Removing fire from the landscape resulted in a dense forest and created conditions where fire could burn hotter and more aggressively than a natural setting would have ever allowed.”
    Byrne told the Free Press: “You’ve got a fire-dependent ecosystem and you exclude fire from it. What do you expect is going to happen?”
    The usual refutation of the “fire suppression causes big fires” belief is that “The Big Burn” of 1910 in Idaho, Montana, Washington and BC, occurred before the era of fire suppression had begun. The Big Burn, also known as “The Great Fire,” “The Devil’s Broom,” and “The Big Blow-up,” burned through 1.2 million hectares, which just happens to be about what was burned in BC in 2017.
    The Ministry of Forests’ own records show that four of the ten largest fires (in area) in BC’s recorded history occurred before the era of fire suppression began.
    If big, aggressive fires occurred before aircraft were able to bomb fires with water and fire retardant, how valid is the forest-industrial complex’s claim that “fire suppression” is the main cause for today’s big fires?
    There’s even more-convincing evidence that the fire-suppression-causes-big-fires narrative may be a big smoke screen blown into the talkosphere so the forest industry can cut more trees.
    One of the tools that’s available today that allows us to ground-truth the claims of the forest-industrial complex—to actually see what wildfires are burning—is satellite photography. We can compare aerial images taken before a fire with images taken afterward to see what was burned, and how completely it burned.
    Satellite photography of the area burned by the Elephant Hill Fire north of Arrowrock Provincial Park shows that much of the area had been severely modified in the last 20 years (below). At the time of the fire, it was mostly regrowth in clearcuts and unplanted clearcuts. In this area there was little “dense forest” left to burn. On Ministry of Forests maps of the Mountain Pine Beetle infestation, this area is shown as having a 71 to 100 percent rate of “kill” of lodgepole pine, hence the widespread clearcuts left by salvage logging.
     

    (Click image to enlarge) This part of the Elephant Hill Fire, according to Ministry of Forests’ mapping of the Mountain Pine Beetle infestation, had been heavily impacted by beetle kill. Earlier satellite images, taken after the salvage logging but before the fire, show some areas with regrowth and other areas with none. Only the oldest regrowth survived the 2017 fire. Many thousands of square kilometers of former lodgepole pine forest, killed by beetles and salvaged, were burned in 2017 and 2018. The beetle infestation has affected 16,000,000 hectares of BC forest, only a small fraction of which has been burned by 2020.
     
    The area shown above is typical of the juxtaposition of giant fires and massive clearcuts that are transforming BC’s interior forests into a wasteland. The density of mature forest has been reduced to thin ribbons of dark green separating seemingly endless burned-over clearcuts. Only the roads and wetlands are fireproof.
    Satellite imagery allows us to see, close-up, the fate of specific features engulfed by the fires. The images below show one such area burned by the Elephant Hill Fire. The first image below was taken about 2010. It shows clearcuts that have been partially replanted. Note the light green regrowth, the unplanted areas and the extent of more mature trees (dark green). Note the large piles of slash piled close to the roads. After this image was taken, more logging took place before the Elephant Hill Fire burned this area in 2017.
     
     Click image to enlarge
     
    Compare that image with the photo below. This satellite image was made in 2019, about two years after the Elephant Hill Fire. Note that most of the regrowth in the clearcut has been killed or damaged. Much of the unplanted area of the clearcut has burned (light gray areas). Some of the mature trees that were left around the clearcuts have survived while others were killed by the fire. The slash piles are now ash piles. These features are typical of BC’s biggest wildfires in the Interior.
     

    Click image to enlarge
     
    The satellite photography also shows that areas where extensive mechanical thinning had taken place survived the fire in some places but were incinerated in others. Corridor thinning mimics, to some extent, natural fire’s ability to open up a forest stand, but it’s an interim stage that will lead to a clearcut in the not-too-distant future. An extensive east-west belt of such thinning running across the entire pathway of the Elephant Hill Fire north of Loon Lake did not prevent the fire from moving northwards.
    The same mixed fire-survival performance of extensive thinning efforts can be found in satellite photography of the Hanceville Fire.
    (The most current satellite photography can be found at inaturalist.org.)
    The satellite photography shows that slash, left in logged-over areas, was an important factor in the eventual size of the Elephant Hill Fire. Equally evident from the satellite photography is that any plantation regrowth younger than about 20 years has been largely wiped out.
    Satellite photography of the huge areas burned by the Hanceville and Plateau fires of 2017 shows the same general outcomes: vast areas of clearcuts burned clean with the small patches of adjacent, mature forest that had been left between clearcuts moderately to severely damaged.
    The 16 million hectares of BC forest that have been impacted by the beetle infestation, combined with decades of extensive clearcutting of live conifer forests, has created an apocalyptic landscape in BC’s interior forests. Ministry of Forests’ reports on the 2017 and 2018 fires show large areas of the Interior—entire forest districts—where the “cumulative percentage of merchantable forest volume killed since 1999” is “greater than 45 percent.” This description, of course, doesn’t include the loss before 1999.
    The “killing” is the result of the logging of live trees, beetle infestation and wildfires. The result is a vast open area in the Interior that is littered with hundreds of millions of tonnes of tree parts in various stages of decay, all of it potential fuel for wildfires, just waiting for ignition. Although much of this area hasn’t been replanted, that which has been is also, under the right conditions, potent fuel requiring only ignition.
     
    Flames fuelled by clearcut slash flare outward from the Chutanli Lake Fire, July 30, 2018
     
    IN BC, THE CAUSE OF IGNITION for every wildfire is determined and recorded by the BC Wildfire Service, and so is each fire’s physical size. These records end up in the National Forestry Database. They show us that between 1990 and 1998, 59 percent of the area burned by wildfires in BC was attributed to fires ignited by lightning. Over the next nine-year period that rose to 81 percent. In the nine-year period ending with 2016, it rose to 85 percent. So lightning has become the overwhelming source of ignition of large wildfires in BC.
    The records also show that while the total area burned as a result of lightning ignition has risen, the actual number of forest fires started by lightning has fallen. Between 1990 and 1998, there were 12,158 fires ignited by lightning. During the next 9-year interval, that fell to 8,837 fires. That was followed by 9,339 fires ignited by lightning in the 9-year interval ending with 2016.
    The growth in the area burned by wildfires ignited by lightning isn’t the result of more lightning strikes hitting the forest—a factor that would be beyond human control.
    Now here’s the most critically important point in this story: Scientific research shows lightning is more likely to start a fire if it hits a harvested area than if it hits a forested area.
    Back in 2009, forest research scientists Meg Krawchuk and Steve Cumming published the results of an 8-year study of lightning ignition in 60,000 square kilometers of boreal forest in Alberta. They found that wildfires started by lightning ignition “increased in landscapes with more area harvested.” Because of the physical nature of the fuel in a “harvested area”—its dryness, smaller size, etc—it is more readily ignited by lightning than the fuel in an undisturbed stand of trees.
    Krawchuk and Cumming also noted: “In addition to the fine fuels and slash remaining after forest harvest, post-disturbance regeneration might also contribute to flammability.”
    The forest-industrial complex has, it would seem, created an immense area in the Interior of BC that is a crude incendiary device—like a Molotov cocktail—that only needs the right conditions of temperature, humidity and a bolt of lightning to burst into flames.
    The satellite imagery of BC’s recent big fires certainly confirms Krawchuk’s and Cumming’s speculation about the flammability of regrowth in clearcuts. In BC’s dry Interior forests, those plantations act like kindling and, in areas where fires burned in 2017, there’s now little remaining of 20 to 25 years of a build-up of kindling—or, as the forest-industrial complex calls it: “The Forests for Tomorrow.”
    Let me summarize.
    First, we know from National Forestry Database records that lightning strikes are igniting fewer fires, but the fires ignited by lightning are becoming larger.
    Second, we know from Ministry of Forests records and satellite photography that the cumulative area of harvested forest in BC’s Interior has grown very significantly in the last 20 years, and in many areas exceeds the amount of forested land.
    Third, we know that the big fires in BC’s Interior in 2017 all involved heavily harvested areas where either beetle-killed or live trees had been removed.
    Last, scientists have found that the more a landscape is harvested, the more lighting ignition occurs, and that’s because harvested areas have fuel on the ground that is more ignitable than standing forest.
    These facts strongly suggest that it’s the growing expanse of fuel-laden clearcuts that are producing larger fires.
    Climate change is no doubt making the fuel drier and more ignitable, and perhaps adding a little strength to winds that fan the fires. But it’s also possible that vast areas of clearcuts are creating those same effects all by themselves. Removal of the tree canopy allows the sun to heat the forest floor more readily, which reduces humidity and raises temperature. Removal of trees allows wind speed at forest-floor level to be higher in clearcuts than would be the case in an expanse of mature forest. Leaving 40 to 60 percent of the biomass of the forest in a clearcut creates a huge fuel load that is apparently readily ignitable by lightning and easily fanned by wind.
    Focus has obtained numerous photographs taken from fire-spotter aircraft, including those used in this story, that depict fires that apparently started in clearcuts, or clearcuts engulfed in flames. So there’s good evidence on the ground that this is happening. But this version of what’s happening is definitely not the narrative that is coming from the scientists whose role it is to keep timber flowing from the forests to the mills.
    The forest-industrial complex is pointing its collective finger at drier conditions created by climate change, and too dense fuel in the forest as a result of fire suppression. Its favoured solution appears to be to go into the forest and remove more trees.
    It’s possible that the forest-industrial complex is suffering from the cognitive bias known as the law of the instrument: Give a man a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.
     
    CONSIDER THE MAGNITUDE OF THE PROBLEM: In 1997, BC’s 60 million hectares of forests were able to sequester the equivalent of 103 megatonnes of carbon dioxide each year. Wildfires were emitting an average of 6 megatonnes each year.
    Twenty-three years latter, BC still has 60 million hectares of potential forestland, but has lost those 103 megatonnes of sequestration capacity. Wildfires are now emitting, on average, 58 megatonnes per year.
    Those two changes amount to a net increase of 155 megatonnes per year in emissions related to our provincial forests. That doesn’t include the 88 megatonnes of emissions that we must attribute to the premature decay of wood that will result from harvesting trees for wood products each year.
    The prognosis is bad. Going in the same direction, a further increase in the industrial use of forests by mining them for bio-energy will, if the past is any predictor of the future, just make things worse.
    As I pointed out last edition, the lowest-hanging fruit for BC in mitigating the damage being done to climate stability by its forestry practices is to end the export of raw logs, most of which are cut from coastal forests. If the Province banned raw log exports and reduced the annual allowable cut by 6.5 million cubic metres, 11 megatonnes of annual carbon emissions would be eliminated.
    We previously estimated that would impact 1,650 jobs. In a future low-carbon economy (assuming that’s where we are going), there would be no possible justification for allowing 1,650 jobs to produce 11 megatonnes of net emissions. Instead, the forest-industrial complex needs to start redirecting resources to jobs that don’t destroy forests. It needs to reinvent itself into an agency that can bring the forest back to its former health and capabilities.
    As it ponders its future, perhaps the forest-industrial complex ought to take to heart the words of Aldo Leopold, the American author, philosopher, scientist, ecologist, forester, conservationist, and environmentalist: “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus. He is working with a group of scientists, journalists and citizens to explore the potential for conserving selected BC forests for carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation and short-distance tourism potential. He welcomes your feedback.

    David Broadland
    January 2020
    Over the past 20 years, BC forests were so heavily logged that net carbon emissions caused by the industry are now twice as large as Alberta’s oil sands.
     
    AT THE HEIGHT OF LAST SUMMER'S ECONOMIC MELTDOWN in the BC interior’s forest industry, Marty Gibbons, president of United Steelworkers Local 1-417, based in Kamloops, told the Canadian Press: “Something needs to change immediately or these small communities that don’t have other employers are going to wither and die.” Gibbons concluded that “the largest driving factor is the Province’s complex stumpage system that results in high fees.”
    The average stumpage rate in BC—the price the Province charges forestry companies for harvesting a cubic metre of tree on Crown land—was around $23 for both the interior and the coast in 2019 (1). But the average stumpage paid for timber harvested from Crown land by major raw log exporters like TimberWest and Western Forest Products in the Campbell River Natural Resource District was much lower, ranging between $8 and $11 per cubic metre. Smaller companies paid even less—as little as $5 per cubic metre. Yet raw logs for export were selling at an average price of $128 per cubic metre through 2019 (2).
    Raw logs worth $4.146 billion were exported from BC to other countries for processing over the past five years (3). This huge overcut—unnecessary to meet domestic and international demand for BC’s finished wood products—has averaged 6.5 million cubic metres per year over those five years, equal to 41 percent of the total cut on Crown and private land on the coast (4). So claims that high stumpage rates in BC are the problem that needs to be solved seem out of touch with reality.
    But Gibbons is still right: something “needs to change immediately.” The required change, however, might be more than what he’s thinking. The interior’s forest industry has been destabilized by two climate-change-related phenomena—devastating wildfire and explosive mountain pine beetle infestation—that have been amplified by the immense extent of BC’s clearcut logging. Gibbons wants to knock a few bucks off the forest companies’ costs so they can run more shifts at the mills. What’s really needed, though, is a much deeper kind of change, one that would quickly transform BC’s forest industry. To start, we need to end the export of raw logs and shift that same volume to a new class of forest: protected forest-carbon reserves.
    There’s an urgent need to remove carbon from the atmosphere and reduce emissions at the same time. The only way to remove carbon on a large scale and then store it safely for a long time is to not harvest healthy, mature forests of long-lived species.
    The next 10 years need to be full of bold ideas as we look for and find solutions to the climate crisis. Initiatives like the Carbon Tax in Canada are necessary to disincentivize the use of fossil fuels, but planet Earth isn’t going to give us time to tax our emissions into submission. We need some quick shifts that will cut 10 megatonnes with a few strokes of the Premier’s pen. In BC, protecting the forest instead of destroying it is our only realistic option. If we don’t do this, we’ll run the risk that the rest of the world will start counting the emissions we are releasing from our forests and begin to think of us—and our manufactured wood products industry—as the Brazil of the North.
    Perhaps what’s required most at this critical moment is recognition by the BC government that an international market for sequestered forest-carbon is coming soon, and that forest companies need to start switching from destroying publicly-owned forests to protecting them. Not just old-growth forests, but mature second-growth stands of long-lived species, too.
     

    Forest loss (yellow) on Vancouver Island and the south coast mainland between 2000 and 2018 Source: Hansen/UMD/Google/USGS/NASA
     
    Our government leaders don’t seem to be thinking straight yet. Instead, deforestation on the BC coast is accelerating. Over the past six years, the area of coastal Crown land that was clearcut increased 16 percent over the previous six-year period. Our provincial forest’s capacity to serve as a carbon sink has vanished. Its catastrophic collapse is recorded in a 20-year segment of the Province’s annual inventory of provincial greenhouse gas emissions. In 1997, BC forests could sequester the equivalent of 103 megatonnes of CO2 annually. By 2017 that had fallen to 19.6 megatonnes (5). From 2020 on, our forests will be a net source of emissions—even without including those from wildfires. The image above shows—in yellow—the physical area of Vancouver Island, and the adjacent mainland coast, that was clearcut between 2000 and 2018. Vancouver Island has become an ecological war zone. But a different economic role for the forest is emerging, one that doesn’t destroy it.
    That new purpose is highlighted by a gaping hole in Canada’s plan to meet its emissions reduction commitment under the 2015 Paris Agreement. Canada’s 2018 progress report to the UNadmits there’s a nearly 100-megatonne gap in the plan to 2030 (and this assumes the rest of the plan will actually work). How will Canada live up to its promise over the next 10 years? The progress report puts it this way: “Potential increases in stored carbon (carbon sequestration) in forests, soils and wetlands will also contribute to reductions which, for a country such as Canada, could also play an important role in achieving the 2030 target.”
    The report offers no other possibility for filling that gap.
    Canada, then, will likely depend on using the carbon sequestration capacity of its forests to meet its Paris Agreement commitments.
    Article 5 of the Paris Agreement, through its reference to a commitment in Article 4 of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, encourages all countries to “…promote and cooperate in the conservation and enhancement, as appropriate, of sinks and reservoirs of all greenhouse gases not controlled by the Montreal Protocol, including biomass, forests and oceans as well as other terrestrial, coastal and marine ecosystems.”
    Depending on how Article 6 of the Paris Agreement is eventually detailed (its development was stymied at the Madrid COP), it’s possible that an international market mechanism for forest carbon is coming, and it can’t come soon enough.
    The over-exploitation of BC’s forests has added to an explosion in net carbon emissions, delivered to the atmosphere each year by the forest industry’s endless road building and progressive clearcuts. Below, I’ll show why this now amounts to over 190 megatonnes every year (and possibly much more), a far more powerful carbon bomb than is being dropped by Canada’s oil sands industry (6). It’s long past time for us to understand the inner workings of the bomb and to defuse it.
    There are two separate parts to BC’s bomb, and I will take you through each of these in some detail below.
    First, when a mature or old forest stand is logged, assuming it’s healthy, the living biomass that’s killed and cut up into small pieces begins a premature process of decay, often hundreds of years before that decay would occur naturally.
    Secondly, when that mature or old, healthy stand is clearcut, its potential to sequester carbon in the future is lost and it could then take anywhere from 60 years to several hundred years before a new replacement forest could sequester as much carbon as was being stored in the previous stand.
    Let me take you through the inner workings of each of these parts of BC’s carbon bomb. First, let’s consider the magnitude of the carbon emissions released when wood prematurely decays.
     

    Biomass left behind after clearcut logging on Crown land on Quadra Island (Photo by David Broadland)
     
    WHEN AN AREA OF FOREST IS CLEARCUT, three decay processes are initiated that result in emissions of carbon to the atmosphere.
    First, the removal of the trees allows the sun to warm the forest soil to a higher temperature than was possible when it was shaded by trees. That additional warmth speeds up decay processes and the release of greenhouse gases, a process somewhat akin to the melting of permafrost in the Arctic. Soil scientists tell us that forest soil contains even more carbon than all the trees and other biomass that grow in it. Recent studies have reported that as much as 20 percent of the carbon in the layer of soil at the forest floor is released to the atmosphere after an area of forest has been clearcut. This release is a wild card in our emerging understanding of the impact of clearcut logging on carbon emissions. For now it remains unquantified, but it’s definitely not zero.
    The second decay process begins after an area of forest is clearcut and the unused parts of trees left on the forest floor begin to decay. In his 2019 report Forestry and Carbon in BC (document at end of story), BC forest ecologist Jim Pojar estimated that 40 to 60 percent of the biomass of a forest is left in a clearcut. That includes the branches, stumps, roots, pieces of the stems that shattered when felled, the unutilizable tops of the trees, and unmerchantable trees that are killed in the mayhem of clearcut logging.
    For our purpose, we will use the mid-point of Pojar’s 40 to 60 percent estimate: half of the biomass is removed, and half remains on the forest floor. The Ministry of Forests’ log scaling system tells us what volume of wood is removed from the forest as merchantable logs. We then assume that an equal volume of wood is left in the clearcut.
    In 2018, the total volume of wood removed from BC’s forests, as reported in the ministry’s Harvest Billing System, was 54.1 million cubic metres. As per above, we are using the same number for the volume of wood that was left in clearcuts all over the province. So the total volume of wood in play is 108.2 million cubic metres. Both pools of wood—the wood left behind and the wood trucked away—begin to decay after a relatively short period of time following harvest. Each cubic metre of wood will eventually produce about 0.82 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions (7). So the wood left behind will produce 44 megatonnes and the wood trucked away will also produce 44 megatonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions—eventually.
    The average 6.5-million-cubic-metre cut for raw log exports accounts for 11 megatonnes of that 88-megatonne carbon bomb.
    You might have heard that the carbon in the logs that are harvested and turned into finished wood products will be safely stored in those products indefinitely. But the Ministry of Forests’ own research shows that after 28 years, half of the carbon in the wood products is no longer being safely stored; at 100 years, only 33 percent of the wood is still in safe storage (graph below). The rest will have returned to the atmosphere or is headed in that direction.
     

    This BC Ministry of Forests graph shows how the carbon stored in wood products declines over time. After 28 years, half of the carbon stored has been lost to the atmosphere. At 100 years, 33 percent remains.
     
    BC’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory quantifies the magnitude of the currently acknowledged deterioration of wood products. For 2017 it noted that “Emissions from Decomposition of Harvested Wood Products” contributed 42 megatonnes annually to the provincial greenhouse gas inventory, which is close to our estimate of 44 megatonnes for 2018 (8).
    For ethical reasons, we ought to attribute all of those future emissions to the year in which the wood was harvested.
    Note that the period of safe storage of carbon in wood products is much shorter than the expected life of most of the tree species that grow in coastal BC. A Sitka spruce is capable of attaining 700 years of age. Douglas fir commonly reach 600 to 800 years of age, and have been known to survive to 1000 years. Red cedar can reach even greater longevity. The Cheewat Lake Cedar near Clo-oose has been estimated to be as old as 2,500 years.
    The coastal forest’s longevity—compared with BC’s interior forests—arises, in part, because the coast’s wetter climate lowers the incidence of drought and wildfires that could kill the forest. As well, there are no mountain pine beetles in coastal BC.
    By eliminating the export of raw logs and instead protecting an equivalent volume of long-lived coastal stands each year, 11 megatonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions could be avoided. That would be a much more substantial reduction in provincial emissions than, for example, the BC Carbon Tax has produced after 10 years.
     

    The author measures the circumference (27 feet) of an apparently healthy 700-800-year-old Douglas fir on Quadra Island. Douglas fir are known to live for as long as 1000 years.
     
    THE SECOND PART OF THE BOMB—the loss of sequestration capacity—is a measure of the net growth, per year, of the carbon stored by our forests. Provincial data shows that sequestration capacity held steady at about 103 megatonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions per year between 1990 and 1999, and then began to decline through to 2017, the last year for which data is available. But the rate of decline suggests that our forests are now a net source of emissions, even without including the emissions released as a result of natural disturbances such as wildfires.
    The impact on climate stability of BC’s forests losing the ability to absorb 103 megatonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions per year is no different than the impact of releasing 103 megatonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions every year. Let me give you just a glimpse of how unbridled logging has reduced sequestration capacity. Consider the impact of logging roads.
    Logging in BC has required the construction of a vast and very expensive network of industrial-duty roads that have gouged out an equally vast area of previously productive forest and covered it over with blasted rock and gravel. The public has paid for these roads through reduced stumpage payments. They’re poor, if not impossible places for trees to grow.
    In BC, logging roads and landings are allowed to occupy up to seven percent of the area of a cutblock. As well, to avoid slash burning, the unmarketable wood left in a clearcut is increasingly consolidated in semi-permanent piles that, like the roads and landings, reduce the space available for a new forest to grow.
    A recent report at The Narwhal by Sarah Cox described a study in Ontario that examined the extent of such forest loss in that province. Cox reported that researchers there found “logging scars created by roads and landings…occupied an average of 14.2 percent of the area logged.” So our province’s seven percent restriction could well be an underestimation of the forest base that’s being lost. But let’s use seven percent and calculate how much forest has been lost.
    Sierra BC’s recent report, Clearcut Carbon (document at end of story), put the total area logged in BC between 2005 and 2017 at 3,597,291 hectares, which included private land on Vancouver Island.
    If seven percent of that area was covered with roads and landings, the area of forest lost over that 13-year period would be 251,810 hectares. That’s larger than Vancouver Island’s largest protected area, Strathcona Park.
     

    In this randomly selected, typical aerial view of Crown forest on Quadra Island, the permanent, ballasted logging roads occupy 8.2 percent of the area of the recent clearcuts.
     
    Sierra BC chose a 13-year period for its report because it takes at least 13 years after a clearcut has been replanted for the area to shift from being a source of carbon emissions to a carbon sink. The report grimly observed: “For at least 13 years, these areas are ‘sequestration dead zones’: clearcut lands that emit more carbon than they absorb.”
    In the case of roads, though, the forest land they now occupy has become a permanent just-plain-dead zone, and another one the size of Strathcona Park is being created every 13 years.
    While the blame for BC’s forests becoming a net source of carbon emissions has been directed at non-human causes like the mountain pine beetle and wildfires, the forest industry’s production of 251, 810 hectares of just-plain-dead zones and 3.6 million hectares of sequestration dead zones every 13 years is pushing ecological stability to the brink.
    Once upon a time, management of BC’s forests was based on the concept of “sustained yield.” It was a commonly held belief of residents of this province that this meant the annual allowable cut was restricted to no more than the amount of new forest growth each year. Many of us, including myself, have mistakenly believed that approach to managing the public forests was how the Forest Service still operated. This is clearly not the case.
    The Forest Service has turned the resource into an annual carbon bomb that has become one of the largest carbon emitters/carbon-sink killers in Canada. At more than 190 megatonnes a year (88 from premature decay emissions and 103 from loss of the forest-carbon sink), it’s well over twice the size of emissions from Canadian oil sands operations and three times the rest of BC’s emissions. Yet we cut far more than we need for our own use. That’s just plain nuts.
    The most obvious starting point for repairing BC’s broken forest-carbon sink would be to ban the export of raw logs. That would make it possible to put the 6.5 million cubic metres of trees that weren’t harvested into a protected carbon reserve each year until the provincial forest-carbon sink has been rebuilt to at least 1997’s level: 103 megatonnes per year.
     
    YOU MIGHT THINK THAT THE GREATEST CHALLENGE to eliminating raw log exports and putting that uncut volume into protected carbon reserves would be the huge loss in employment that would result. You’d be wrong.
    There were 17,800 people employed in “forestry and logging with support activities” in all of BC in 2018, according to BC Stats (9). This figure doesn’t include BC’s wood products manufacturing jobs, but eliminating log exports wouldn’t affect those jobs since raw log exports create zero manufacturing jobs in BC.
    2018 was a very good year for employment in the forest industry. The total volume cut in BC forests, including on both public and private land, was 54.1 million cubic metres. Of that, 30 percent was cut on the coast and 70 percent in the interior. Based on that split, about 30 percent of the employment in “forestry and logging with support activities” was on the coast, or about 5340 jobs. In 2018, raw log exports were at a five-year low of 5.03 million cubic metres, equivalent to 31 percent of the coastal cut. So eliminating log exports that year would have eliminated about 31 percent of those 5340 coastal logging jobs, or 1650 jobs. It would have also eliminated, or at least greatly delayed, 8.3 megatonnes of emissions.
    To put those 1650 jobs in perspective, they represented less than one-tenth of one percent of BC’s total workforce in 2018. They are amongst the most carbon-emission-intensive jobs on Earth. In the approaching low-carbon economy, employment will need to shift from carbon-emission-intensive to carbon-absorption-intensive. Any job that is part of a low-cost process for removing carbon from the atmosphere is going to be in demand. Allowing trees to grow is currently the lowest-cost process for absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. This is unlikely to change.
    When BC starts to put thousands of hectares of forest land into carbon sequestration reserves each year, optimizing the amount of carbon stored will require scientists, surveyors, mappers, planners, foresters, tree planters, thinners, pruners, salvagers and fire suppressors. It’s likely to include some selection logging. If anything, optimizing the forests’ capacity for sequestration is likely to require more workers than are provided by road building and the mechanized form of clearcutting widely practiced on the coast. Where would the money for all this employment come from?
    The Carbon Tax is slated to rise to $50 per tonne in 2021. If the 5-year-average export cut was ended and the trees left standing, a net reduction in emissions of 11 megatonnes would have an annual value of $550 million. That’s a lot more than necessary to keep 1650-2000 jobs in a transformative BC Forest-Carbon Service. Do the arithmetic yourself.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus. He is working with a group of scientists, journalists and citizens to explore the potential for conserving selected BC forests for carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation and short-distance tourism potential. He welcomes your feedback.
    Forestry and Carbon In BC by Dr. Jim Pojar: Forestry and Carbon in BC Dr. Jim Pojar.pdf3.51 MB · 75 downloads 
    Clearcut Carbon by Sierra BC: 2019-Clearcut-Carbon-report.pdf2.14 MB · 71 downloads

    Stephen Hume
    January 2020
    Scientists are now saying global climate change will usher in even higher seas and more flooding than previously predicted.
     
    FIFTY YEARS AGO, I was an indifferent student drifting through random courses. In my post-teen ennui, I mostly hung around the student newspaper office drinking terrible coffee in the hope of chatting up a girl.
    The furthest thing from my mind was that my life was actually an après nous le déluge moment; that in my lifetime I’d be contemplating floods of biblical proportions that, over the next 50 years, will likely force close to a million Canadians from their homes, including thousands in communities on the South Island, Sunshine Coast and Lower Mainland.
     

    Willows Beach and the adjacent upland area could disappear beneath the rising sea. Evidence is mounting that it might happen sooner than previously believed. (Photo by Stephen Hume)
     
    From Oak Bay to Campbell River to Port Alberni, homes, resorts, industrial sites and businesses are now at discernible risk of future flooding wherever they have been built along walk-on beach front or on the flood plains and alluvial fans where scores of streams and rivers that punctuate the coast of Vancouver Island meet tidewater.
    It seems like a science fiction scenario from that Kevin Costner sci-fi flick Waterworld. Whole city centres drowned? Previously high-demand neighbourhoods rendered uninsurable? Billions of dollars in residential, commercial and industrial real estate written off the board by the environmental consequences of climate change? Here, in our Island Eden?
    Yet that’s what new research published last October now points toward. It used advanced neural network computing to correct earlier digital models forecasting sea level rise. Earlier calculations of land elevations—and therefore of how much farther inland the high tides of the future might reach, particularly if amplified by a storm—turned out to have underestimated by 30 percent.
    The study “New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea level rise and coastal flooding” by Scott Kulp and Benjamin Strauss of Climate Central in Nature Communicationswarns that over the next 30 years, about 500,000 Canadians living on coastal lowlands may have to deal with significant annual flooding.
    And worst-case scenarios—in which atmospheric carbon emissions continue without abatement on the current trend—will make about 850,000 coast-dwelling Canadians vulnerable to annual floods by the time 2020’s first-year students are my age and wondering how their half-century flew by so quickly.
    Worldwide, the researchers warn, about 250 million people now live within one metre of sea level. Even conservative estimates point to the near-inevitability of a two-metre rise by the end of the century. Other scientists suggest—and the new research correcting older models lends credence to their alarm—that the geological record warns us that more rapid and higher sea-level rise is not only within the realm of possibility but, perhaps, even probability.
    A research team from Australia observes that 125,000 years ago under conditions similar although not identical to the present—atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were then about a third lower than today—sea levels rose quickly to about 10 metres above today’s levels.
    “What is striking about the last interglacial is how high and quickly sea level rose above present levels,” write Fiona Hibbert, Eelco Rohling and Katharine Grant, ocean and climate researchers at Australian National University. “Temperatures during the last interglacial were similar to those projected for the near future, which means melting polar ice sheets will likely affect future sea levels far more dramatically than anticipated to date.”
    They point out that polar warming did not occur simultaneously during that melt. But thanks to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, warming and loss of ice mass are now happening in both the Arctic and the Antarctic at the same time. “This means that if climate change continues unabated, Earth’s past dramatic sea-level rise could be a small taste of what’s to come,” the Australian scientists say.
    It seems reasonable, then, to consider people living up to 10 metres above present sea level to be at potential future risk from combinations of rising seas and higher seasonal tides with storm surges. Those parameters increase the number of people at risk globally to one billion.
    At 20, I couldn’t imagine being 40. So I understand how these timelines seem unimaginably long for some, even some scientists. But when the predicted events are occurring, the time between then and now will seem like the blink of an eye.
     
    BACK IN MY DAYS OF BLISSFUL IGNORANCE, I’d consider the dolorous prospect of another afternoon researching overdue essays on Greek epitaphs or Wordsworth’s view of the metropolis. Instead I’d ride my motorcycle down to Cadboro Bay and take the waterfront past Willows Beach through the Royal Victoria Golf Course to McNeill Bay. From Crescent Road, I’d follow Penzance past the Chinese Cemetery out to Harling Point, named for a local resident who famously expired of hypothermia following a tragic marine rescue in Gonzalez Bay 35 years before my visits.
    Harling Point’s real name, its first one, at least, is Sahsima—Coast Salish for “harpoon.” And it’s an important spiritual site. It was here that Xals, the transformer who mediates between the natural and the supernatural and brings order and balance to the world, changed a seal hunter to stone, simultaneously granting him power over the seals hunted by the Songhees. As Royal BC Museum curator Grant Keddie once observed, Sahsima is a place that signifies the gravity of the natural balance in maintaining the world’s order, a notion that seems ever more important as we relentlessly upset the equilibrium of local, regional and global ecologies.
    I’d clamber through a dense fringe of broom and prickly gorse and onto the inexpressibly ancient rocks. They still bore recent scars of an Ice Age, left 22,000 years ago by boulders dragged beneath glaciers flowing over the Saanich Peninsula. Those ice sheets were two kilometres deep at maximum, and over the Saanich Peninsula weighed about 250 gigatonnes. The number is incomprehensibly large, like so many in geological time. It represents 250 kilograms with 12 zeros behind it. (That immense mass of ice, by the way, would be equivalent to less than a quarter of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by us since 1850.)
    I knew this only because one of those fascinating young women at the student newspaper told me about a geography field trip. She urged me to look for the fault line where rock from ancient continents had collided.
    And so there I’d sit with an apple and a piece of cheddar on a blustery afternoon, straddling two vanished continents. The sun gleamed on the last remnants of ancient ice fields on the Olympic Mountains. I watched the endless Pacific suck and gurgle into the deep fissures that ice and moving water had carved into the basalt and chert from 40 million years ago when Wrangellia collided with what geologists call the Leech River Complex.
    On a day when the tide was right and the swells were big, bulked up by the surge from some storm beyond the horizon, the seas would boom into the rocky chutes with enough force to make the rock vibrate. Glistening white foam would jet upward, spindrift twisting away on the wind.
    My procrastination around schoolwork wasn’t wasted time. In fact, it was my first genuine encounter with the idea of time, relativity and what that might mean. There was synchronicity and yet there wasn’t. I thought of how those 2000-year-old Greek epitaphs, which had seemed so distant in the classroom, might have been written that very morning, compared to the epitaphs scrawled by glaciers 20,000 years before upon the very rocks where I sat.
    And the slow glaciers themselves—what were they, in a time frame of 40 million years? Even Wrangellia was young compared to eternal, changeless Mother Ocean, who was herself writing an epitaph for the vanished continent, grain of sand by grain of sand, even as I watched. The timeless tides come in and go out, I thought, and nothing changes except us, as ephemeral as the spindrift.
    But the ocean is changing. It’s increasing in volume as it heats, and as polar ice caps and high elevation ice sheets melt at faster and faster rates. Most of us have noted the retreat, for example, of the Comox Glacier, the dwindling snow on Island mountains, the Coast Range and the Olympic Mountains. But these are mere glimpses of something vast.
    In Alaska, about to log its hottest year ever, glaciers shed mass into the sea at record rates. Some show consecutive years of record ice loss. Others show near-record loss but can’t set new records because they’ve lost so much mass already.
    Glaciers in the St Elias Mountains of northwestern BC and the southern Yukon lost about one-quarter of their mass since I was a first-year university student. Glaciologists estimate that over the next 50 years, about 80 percent of the Canadian Rockies’ ice fields—the water supply for carbon-pumping Alberta—will melt away.
    Greenland, Antarctica, Iceland, the Rockies, the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes—ice is vanishing at a rate that now astonishes scientists used to dealing with change over millennia and geological epochs.
    “These [glacier] collapses would drive up sea levels, devastate marine life and disrupt ocean and atmospheric circulation patterns that dictate temperatures and rainfall around the world,” says one late-November report by James Temple in the MIT Technology Review. “The death of forests [from drought and fire] would release vast stores of greenhouse gases while the melting of ice would reduce the planet’s reflectivity—and raise the risk of setting off still more tipping points.”
    Thawing permafrost releases greenhouse gases. Ocean acidification caused by warming releases greenhouse gases. Burning forests release greenhouse gases. Humans show no sign of curbing their release of greenhouse gases.
     
    CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS frequently accuse science of exaggerating the threat of climate change. A report in Scientific American by three scholars, studying how scientists disseminate their findings, says it’s precisely the opposite. Not only have scientists not exaggerated, they have seriously underestimated and understated the speed and scope with which change is occurring.
    The United Nations’ much-vilified Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change turns out not to be the extremist conspiracy touted by denialists. Instead, it’s been too conservative. There is bias, it turns out, but it’s toward exaggerated caution.
    What current data really shows, the report says, is that “disintegration of ice sheets and glaciers is occurring far faster than predicted by theory—as much as two orders of magnitude faster—throwing current model projections of sea level rise further in doubt.”
    This concern seems to be corroborated by research of American glaciologists, who reported earlier this year that Antarctica’s annual loss of ice mass increased 600 percent between 1979 and 2017.
    “As the Antarctic ice sheet continues to melt away, we expect multi-metre sea level rise from Antarctica in the coming centuries,” said Eric Rignot of the University of California, the study’s lead scientist.
    Climate scientists with the World Meteorological Organization, which just released its 2019 report on the state of global climate, conclude that Greenland lost 350 gigatonnes of ice this year, that the melt is accelerating, and that it’s accelerating in the Antarctic, too.
    Another worrisome study reported in Nature during the UN summit on climate change in December stated that Greenland’s glacier was melting seven times faster than what the IPCC had predicted in the 1990s. Based on observations by 96 polar scientists using satellite imagery and measurements of flow and volume since 1992, scientists labelled it a huge concern, as tipping points might be breached sooner than expected.
     

    Greenland’s ice sheet is melting seven times faster than it was during the 1990s (Photo courtesy of NASA)
     
    There’s uncertainty about what will happen between now and the end of the century, but it’s clear that if the rate of melt on those two big ice sheets—Greenland’s and the Antarctic’s—has been significantly underestimated, all hell can break loose in the oceans.
    There is enough ice in those two sources to raise sea levels by more than 60 metres. That’s not expected to happen or, if it does, to happen over centuries, but so far expectations have regularly been confounded by events.
    As climate science writer Eugene Linden pointed out in the New York Times in late 2019, had a scientist in the early 1990s suggested that within 25 years a single heat wave would measurably raise sea levels while scorching the Arctic and producing temperatures worthy of the Sahara desert in Paris and Berlin “the prediction would have been dismissed as alarmist.” But that happened last summer. In parts of Florida, residential neighbourhoods have endured more than 80 consecutive days of ocean flooding. For some, the worst-case future has already arrived.
     
    WHAT HAS ALL THIS TO DO WITH US, living in our complacent West Coast Eden?
    Well, many on the Island, surrounded by the rising sea, already live or work at or below the two-metre elevation that’s now the conservative estimate for sea-level rise. The entire Windsor Park area in Oak Bay, for example, has two metres of elevation. The entrance to the BC Provincial Archives building is one metre above sea level.
    So, if on the evidence and given the consistency of underestimation, it seems reasonable to assume that a 10-metre rise is now a possibility, then the risks for householders, businesses and infrastructure begin to look large, indeed.
    For example, the steps of the provincial legislature building are six metres above sea level, as is the foyer of the Royal BC Museum. Bastion Square is five metres. New residential complexes around the Selkirk Waterway are four metres. The entrance to St Anne’s Academy is six metres. Esquimalt High School is four metres. Shopping centres in downtown Campbell River are all less than eight metres.
    Interactive maps created by the same researchers who found previous estimates of coastal elevations to be wrong, calculate flooding from sea-level rise at different temperatures. At four degrees of global warming, Oak Bay is bisected by a new sea channel that extends from Oak Bay Marina to Beach Drive at McNeill Bay. Willows Beach, with its multi-million-dollar homes, is inundated as far back as Beach Drive.
    Cadboro Bay Village is below the tideline as far as Arbutus Road. Much of Tsawout Indian Reserve at Saanichton Bay is under water. Downtown Sidney is almost entirely flooded from just north of the airport interchange to North Saanich Marina. Swartz Bay ferry terminal is under water. Land east of Patricia Bay is flooded inland almost as far as Pat Bay Highway.
    In Victoria, James Bay becomes an archipelago. The historic buried stream flowing from Fairfield to near the Inner Harbour becomes an inlet. Rock Bay floods up Discovery and Pembroke streets almost as far as Douglas. The sea extends up Bridge Street from Bay Street to Ellice. Along the Selkirk Waterway, all the land below Tyee Road is drowned. Properties fronting the Gorge are largely flooded.
    High-value areas in the potential danger zone near Victoria are found in Cadboro Bay, Telegraph Cove, Maynard Cove, Cordova Bay, Sayward Beach, Saanichton Bay, Ferguson Cove and Bazan Bay. Farther up Island, Cowichan Bay, the estuaries of the Chemainus, Englishman, Qualicum, Somass and Campbell rivers, Parksville, Lantzville, Rathtrevor, Saratoga and Miracle beaches would all be at risk from sharply rising sea levels combined with storm surges and seasonal high tides. For rural residents, saltwater intrusion into wells, septic fields and farmland becomes an issue.
     

    Already flooding on some high tides, sea level rise could inundate Cadboro Bay’s waterfront (Photo by Stephen Hume)
     
    Are these scenarios extraordinarily far-fetched? Is it sensationalist fear-mongering to raise them for discussion? Well, if anybody has a vested interest in figuring out what might lie ahead, it’s the insurance industry. And the insurance industry is worried.
    Several US studies conclude that real estate values in coastal risk zones already feel the impact. Researchers at the University of Colorado’s business school estimated that properties exposed to sea-level rise are already selling, on average, for seven percent less. A sea-level research group called First Street Foundation says that on the US East Coast and Gulf Coast, exposed properties have lost $16 billion in appreciation value since 2005.
    In Canada, the senior research director at the Bank of Canada’s Financial Stability Department warned earlier this year that climate change has the potential by the end of the century to reduce global annual GDP by up to 23 percent. Those who thought the recession of 2008 was bad should imagine one ten times deeper.
    Lloyd’s, a global player in insurance, carefully studied the damage claims following Hurricane Sandy, which struck New York in 2012. It concluded that sea-level rise increased flooding losses by 30 percent. During the storm,16 historical records for high tides were broken on the Atlantic seaboard. New York’s subway flooded.
    “Rising sea levels around the world could have significant implications for insurers in the context of storm surge,” Lloyd’s concluded in its 2014 report. And Munich Re, one of the corporate giants that insure insurance companies, says that significantly higher insurance premiums for property owners in areas vulnerable to sea-level rise are already emerging.
    So one prospect that Island waterfront property and coastal flood-plain property owners may face is whether their properties will in future be deemed uninsurable and possibly become unsellable.
    All this raises important questions for policy makers, provincial and municipal governments, insurers, taxpayers and property owners that deserve a robust public discussion.
    It’s time for a clear-eyed and serious exchange of views about who pays the bill for risk and damage which, it seems inevitable, will increase year by year.
    What should happen when property becomes increasingly vulnerable to a known risk? Some jurisdictions in the United Kingdom, for example, already plan to move entire low-lying coastal communities to higher ground lock, stock and barrel. Others, including Richmond on the Lower Mainland, are betting on dykes, levees and flood-control infrastructure.
    Where does future liability lie if development is zoned by provincial and municipal authorities for real estate that lies in risk areas vulnerable to flooding should the sea level rise more dramatically than current predictions?
    What about taxation? Right now walk-on waterfront is taxed at a premium, because it’s a high-demand commodity that generates high value. But what if the value depreciates rapidly because of flooding risk and an eventual inability to insure?
    Most municipal taxpayers could never afford to buy beachfront homes. Where should the burden for mitigating risk to such properties from sea-level rise fall? That is, should all taxpayers be paying for anti-flooding infrastructure that protects high-value residential districts that most of those taxpayers are financially excluded from living in?
    Should we be having a conversation about if, when, or whether provincial and municipal governments should start restricting development in flood-prone areas, or even providing incentives to shift residential and commercial occupants to safer ground, or planning to dyke areas to make them flood-proof?
    And, of course, the big question for all of us is, who pays and how?
    Stephen Hume spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island. His byline has appeared in most major Canadian newspapers. The author of nine books of poetry, natural history, history and literary essays, he lives on the Saanich Peninsula.
     
    How might future global temperature increases affect sea level in Victoria? Readers might be interested in visiting Climate Central's interactive map for this area. 

    Briony Penn
    January 2020
    Concerns over slow progress lead to questions about campaign donations from developers.
     
    SEVERAL YEARS AGO, Saanich resident Merie Beauchamp and her husband bought a large lot overrun with invasive species. It had subdivision potential but was also subject to the Environmental Development Permit Area (EDPA) bylaw. Under the EDPA, they would be required to work with Saanich planners and biologists, should they want to subdivide, in order to minimize the impact to the endangered Garry oak ecosystem.
    Both Beauchamps had biological backgrounds and were curious about what lay under the brambles and daphne. Said Merie: “We removed the invasives and the land came back to life. The native wildflowers began to reappear, the Garry oaks suppressed under the invasives started to take off, the butterflies, birds and other wildlife returned and we realized that we could help restore the natural diversity of this piece of land.”
     

    Saanich resident Merie Beauchamp
     
    The couple decided that they had an opportunity to manage this restored area, which lies adjacent to a protected area. Conventional thinking would describe them as having cost society in foregone development values. “True cost accounting,” however, would value their actions in terms of averting the rising costs of the biodiversity and climate change emergencies. Beauchamp wants people to get excited about true cost accounting and to educate people about the harm of the business-as-usual approach, but it is a hard thing to do with a council that is mostly stuck in an old paradigm.
    In May, the UN Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released a report that gave humanity a dire prognosis. A million species are now threatened with extinction, and our own species may follow if we don’t do something about the threats.
    In the District of Saanich, over 90 of those species are at risk along with the ecosystems that support them. As one of the most affluent, well-educated, and still biologically-rich urban/rural districts in Canada, Saanich could be playing a leading role in reversing this trend. However, this region has lost ground—literally and figuratively. Garry oak meadows have been blasted into oblivion for everything from swimming pools to subdivisions ever since Saanich scrapped its progressive Environmental Development Permit Area (EDPA)—a bylaw and planning tool that had, since 2012, a proven record of guiding development away from, and around, endangered ecosystems.
    A byelection in late 2017 had resulted in a pro-development majority on council, which moved quickly to rescind the EDPA—though a replacement was promised. A battle for sustainability was waged in the suburbs, with lawyered-up landowners and developers on one side, and Saanich residents who supported the bylaw on the other.
    Since then, the battle has continued with divisions growing deeper. And the casualties of the lack of regulation are evident all over Saanich—endangered ecosystems wiped off their last remaining spots on Earth: at Mount Douglas Cross Road, Rainbow Road, Ten Mile Point, Gordon Head Road, Milner Road, Holland Avenue. Until journalist Wolf Depner was moved from the Saanich News to a new beat in Oak Bay, you could read regularly about yet another endangered meadow getting ploughed under by a bulldozer.
    The public discourse has only grown more heated. The College of Applied Biology permanently rescinded the membership of Ted Lea, a key player in the opposition to the EDPA, for violation of the college’s code of ethics stemming from his role in the matter. Councillor Nathalie Chambers urged her fellow council members to reinstate the EDPA given its removal was, in part, based on faulty reports from the biologist—or at least place a moratorium on Garry oak removals. (She failed.) University of Victoria faculty and students have weighed in on the science. Citizen’s groups, like the Falaise Community Association, have gathered people at a Tree Love Town Hall this spring “because of a growing concern for the protection of the residual Garry oak ecosystems under threat.” Citizen watchdogs, like Katherine Whitworth, are tracking what appears to be the increasing control of council by developers through electoral donations to councillors— and Chambers is calling for a ban on such donations.
    A perusal of the political donors to councillor campaigns reads like a who’s who of the local development industry, studded with family names like Jawl, Miller (Abstract Developments), Mann, Vanderkerkhove, Geric, and Knappet. Though donations from corporations are prohibited, and individual donations capped at $1200/year ($2400 in an election year), there’s nothing to stop multiple family members and a company’s staff from donating (this has also been noticed in other municipalities).
    The industry benefits when it controls the land-use planning process and has every incentive to populate council with people who share their views. That is not news. What is news is that according to the authors of the UN’s IPBES report, the key driver of extinctions worldwide is changes in land use. It also notes the trend is reversible. “Nature can still be conserved, restoredand used sustainably.” The authors stress the necessity of transforming governance and accountability, so that the full costs of not conserving or restoring natural systems and of notusing land sustainably are assessed. Accountability also entails the rigorous uncoupling of politics from land use change and its biggest driver, the development industry.
    Not surprisingly, the conflict in Saanich is exacerbated by highly confusing narratives being put forward by pro-development councillors in which citizens are told that they must choose: housing versus nature; public versus private land stewardship; farming versus conservation; restoration versus conservation; wetlands over Garry oak; emissions reduction over carbon sink expansion. Claiming that one action over another is prudent and efficient is far easier to sell politically—especially if it retains the status quo.
    From where the researchers of our climate and biodiversity crisis sit, however, choice is a luxury that the world doesn’t have. If we are going to avert this emergency, then we actually have to transform our thinking and figure out a way to integrate all these components of the crisis, now.
     

    Dr Eric Higgs
     
    As Dr Eric Higgs of the University of Victoria’s School of Environmental Studies puts it, “Every effort matters. We have to stem the loss and restore. For example, if we are at roughly five percent remnant Garry oak habitat presently, what would it take to get to six percent or 10 or 20 percent? What could happen if citizens were encouraged to take action in their front and backyards, new developments had stringent offset requirements, old trees were cherished, and Saanich really took seriously the need for nature-based solutions?”
     
    BEAUCHAMP WAS AGAINST SCRAPPING THE EDPA, and says the impacts of its loss have been immediate and unnecessary. The move has also devalued and demoralized other efforts for conservation and restoration on private land. She cites as an example, the controversial 4355 Gordon Head Road property where an endangered ecosystem that had previously been protected under the EDPA (through restricting building to an already existing building footprint) was destroyed for a swimming pool by moving the development closer to the cliff to take advantage of ocean views. “Why, when an alternative existed, would we allow an endangered ecosystem to be destroyed for someone’s swimming pool? The cost is borne by the next generation.”
     

    The scrapping of Saanich’s EDPA bylaw allowed this property, which includes an endangered Garry oak ecosystem, to be redeveloped.
     
    In the Milner Road development, four city lots of Garry oak woodland were razed with the lifting of the EDPA. Lauraine Derman, former Councillor Vic Derman’s widow, wrote to Saanich, stating, “At present, we see the ‘Sustainable’ Saanich moniker being abused and ridiculed as we witness some developers flaunting regulations and racing to destroy unique, ecological sensitive areas previously under EDPA protection. A case in point (among others)…is the well-publicized Milner/Leveret incident.”
    Against this backdrop of ecological destruction, many citizens wanted to see some sort of replacement for the rescinded EDPA—and quickly. Saanich staff had been working to create the “Natural Saanich” Environmental Policy Framework—which would include polices and regulations related to addressing climate change, biodiversity and stewardship—and envisioned the Framework being completed by 2022. But they also suggested some possible interim measures to address gaps left by the loss of the EDPA. These potentially included an enhanced tree bylaw (protecting other at-risk species), an enhanced fill bylaw (stopping wetland infill), and an adjusted development application. These were considered by staff as “low-hanging fruit as they are easily achievable and relatively effective,” according to meeting minutes.
    But the Framework, particularly its interim regulatory measures, was questioned by some councillors, including the Chair of Saanich’s Environmental and Natural Areas Advisory Committee, Rebecca Mersereau. Minutes of a June 2019 meeting show she questioned the effectiveness of regulatory measures. In this, her views were at odds with the committee she chaired.
     

    Saanich Councillor Rebecca Mersereau
     
    Mersereau argued in a July Facebook post that “developing and administering regulations also consumes resources and limits our ability to use other strategies to achieve the same goals, or other environmental goals we consider important. As much as it would be nice, resources are not available in an unlimited supply to help us achieve our environmental goals. If we were more cognizant of all these challenges, and if biodiversity conservation is truly a priority in Saanich, I believe we would have long ago invested more resources into protecting and even enhancing biodiversity in our extensive protected parks network.”
    Beauchamp has disagreed on development-related issues with other members of Saanich council, but nowhere has the narrative been more confusing for her than with Mersereau, who has degrees in biology, education and water resource management; was mentored by former Councillor Vic Derman; and once supported the EDPA.
    Beauchamp now draws a clear relationship between councillors’ decisions and their financial backers, and believes that rules around conflict of interest and disclosure must be tightened to ensure land- use decisions serve wider interests. She cites four donors from the development industry to Mersereau’s campaign, and adds “politics shouldn’t be mixed with science.” 
    Dr Higgs has also responded to Mersereau on the interim regulatory measures question: “We need regulatory capacity to limit negative actions, and reward virtuous ones. This is why I support very strongly the kind of integrated package of initiatives comprising the Natural Saanich project. Stripping out the potential for discouraging or stopping heedless actions on private lands, or focusing only on remaining jewels [parks] that make up such a tiny fraction of historical habitat, will result in a future Saanich that is like every other municipality that failed to address issues sooner.”
    Higgs points to the March 1, 2019 United Nations General Assembly 2021-2030 declaration of the Decade of Ecosystem Restoration and suggests, “It would be unfortunate and ironic if Saanich were now to turn its back on the power and promise of hundreds of projects on public and private lands. Yes, environmental conditions are changing—a fact I know too well from my own research on novel ecosystems—but this is hardly an argument for letting the perfect stand in the way of good outcomes, especially those that support innovative approaches to biodiversity conservation and restoration. Every remnant patch of biodiversity that can be conserved or restored makes a difference to climate adaptation and flourishing ecosystems, whether natural, novel, or hybrid.”
    At the heart of Higgs’ analysis is the fact that 75 percent of the world’s land base has now been “significantly altered by human actions” and an international consensus of biologists advocate Nature Needs Half—a goal already in the CRD Regional Parks Strategic Plan. There is no research that comes to the conclusion that we will survive the political expediency of scrapping regulations on private land use for protecting endangered ecosystems. Landscape ecologist Jan Kirkby, who worked on Saanich’s original Sensitive Ecosystems Inventory mapping, notes “with strong, forward-thinking leadership and public education, landowners and land managers can embrace these conservation-based planning tools as they have in many other jurisdictions. EDPAs provide guidance and opportunities to enhance both natural and property values of the land. There are also tools like the Natural Area Protection Tax Exemption Program (NAPTEP) for conserving special features and sensitive ecosystems on private land.”
    Local governments are indeed free to change zoning to achieve conservation goals without compensation. But that is rarely done and only as a last resort. Kirkby emphasizes “most developers and property owners labour under a critical misconception, that there is such a thing as ‘development rights’ in Canada, that people ought to be able to do whatever they want on their land, and no local government has or should have the right to restrict development. These beliefs and views originate in the US and are supported by their constitution; however, Canada’s constitution supports the collective over the individual.”
     
    TWO YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE THE DEMISE OF THE EDPA. And now some fear that Saanich council will further delay measures that would hopefully fill the gaps left by its loss. Mersereau, however, assured Focus in an email: “Council has approved an expedited timeline for the development of the EPF, so I’m hopeful that by mid 2020 we’ll all have a better sense of at least the scope of it.”
    Yet even the original process was to take until 2022, so any further delays are worrisome to those witnessing ecosystem destruction as the development boom continues.
    For now, a technical group to advise the process has been approved. But no “interim measures” (as the staff report advocated) to protect endangered ecosystems are likely in the near future, says Councillor Nathalie Chambers, who has repeatedly asked for them to deal with the biodiversity emergency.
     

    Saanich Councillor Natalie Chambers
     
    She is also advocating tighter accountability of councillors. Under the Community Charter, council members have to declare their own personal investments and may not vote or exercise influence over them. Chambers suggests, “They should also have to recuse themselves when voting on development issues when they receive developers’ donations.” She suggests accountability might have prevented some other recent moves that were developer-friendly: a proposed new bylaw raising development cost charges (DCC) was delayed, denying Saanich taxpayers $2 million; Local Area Plans were halted in favour of fast-tracking housing; and Abstract Developments, which has eight downstream applications, was granted special privileges on the Mayor’s Standing Committee on Housing Affordability, having access where Chambers, for example, has none.
    Chambers’ concern over the development industry’s “undue influence” has led her to propose a resolution for the Union of BC Municipalities to eliminate developer donations.
    Councillor Mersereau did not address Focus’ questions regarding Higgs’ challenge of her ecological rationale or Chamber’s comments of undue influence, but referred us to her July Facebook post which asserts: “Yup —that’s right! We’re in a process to discuss a process…If we have a good process set up to objectively evaluate how effective each option will be at helping us achieve our goals—whether they are voluntary, financial, or regulatory options (which the EDPA is one example of)—I can support the options that emerge at the top, regardless of what form they take.”
    Higgs responds, “We should not be caught in the midst of spats that result in inaction, but leading with the framework, policies, legislative action, and public programs that result in the very kind of Saanich that people will value in the future.”
    What do we need to get there? Beauchamp suggests “a conflict of interest bylaw for municipal donations might be a good start. Then let’s get Natural Saanich back on track.”
    Briony Penn is an award-winning writer of creative non-fiction books including The Real Thing: The Natural History of Ian McTaggart Cowan, A Year on the Wild Side and, most recently, Following the Good River: The Life and Times of Wa'xaid, a biography of Cecil Paul (Rocky Mountain Books).

    Ross Crockford
    November 2019
    The Johnson Street Bridge undergoes one safety review after another.
     
    THE JOHNSON STREET BRIDGE is an attractive structure, especially in the evening. Resembling a giant bird’s skull, awash in the glow of blue floodlights, it’s easily the most distinctive landmark on the harbour.
    Lately, however, the bridge has been drawing the wrong kind of attention. At 11:40 pm on Saturday, October 19, a man fell over a railing near the southwest corner of the bridge and hit the shore, ending up in hospital with serious injuries. “Incidents like this serve as a good opportunity to remind people to be safe, be aware and take caution while crossing [the] bridge,” VicPD constable Matt Rutherford later told Victoria News—as if walking on the bridge requires greater caution than crossing, say, a Downtown street.
     

    A report warned that allowing the public near the moving bridge presented “real concerns from a risk standpoint”
     
    This was just the latest odd episode at the bridge, usually involving a man emboldened by drink. (VicPD said alcohol was “a factor” in the Oct 19 fall.) One Saturday last December, an inebriated man climbed a railing, fell into the water and drowned. And famously, on a Friday afternoon last July, a drunk guy ambled past a closed gate on the multiuse path, and ended up hanging 20 metres in the air from a railing as the bridge lifted for a passing ship.
    After each of these incidents, the City of Victoria announced that it would conduct a formal safety review of the bridge’s equipment and operating procedures. Then, six months later, another mishap.
    The previous bridge also saw accidents: in 2013, a 31-year-old guy died after falling from the overhead girders of the old bridge, where he’d been drinking with friends, and in 2006 a ferry skipper rescued an 11-year-old boy who’d been playing on the old bridge and fell into the harbour. But judging by the news archives, such incidents are occurring with greater frequency now.
    For sure, this is partly an unfortunate side effect of the increasing numbers of bars, condos and pedestrians in the area, which the new bridge has encouraged. With even more condos coming, though, that raises an increasingly urgent question for the City: can the bridge ever be made completely safe?
     
    JUST THREE DAYS BEFORE THE BRIDGE WAS INAUGURATED on March 31, 2018, the engineering firm WSP issued a safety audit of the structure, which Focus recently obtained. WSP identified several problems, including gaps in railings, an “increased collision risk” where the multiuse path enters Harbour Road, potential tripping hazards and deck slipperiness, the risk of debris sliding off the decks “into areas where the public will be permitted to stand,” and the fact that the bridge operator has to continually monitor a network of CCTV cameras to see all parts of the structure—increasing the operator’s workload during a lift, and “the potential for error in the complex steps associated with the process.”
    In an annotated version of the report, Taaj Daliran, the City’s manager of civic services, identified steps taken by bridge contractor PCL and the City to fix these issues. They closed gaps in the railings, installed warning signs and larger CCTV monitors, and initiated a “comprehensive training program” for the operators. (Improving the Harbour Road connection is a future project.) But WSP also identified a more general worry: the risk of “aberrant behaviours” by pedestrians, especially around the lift span and the observation deck between the bridge’s open-wheeled mechanism.
    “Standing in close proximity to a large moving object in the form of a moving portion of a large part of the structure within which observers will be standing, does present real concerns from a risk standpoint,” warned WSP—which was bizarre, considering that the publicly accessible, open-wheel concept was designed by WSP and MMM Group, which WSP acquired in 2015. “Deliberately allowing the public to expose itself to such a risk situation may not be appropriate from a general public safety policy or engineering standpoint, particularly when public behavioural aspects of that risk environment will be uncontrollable.”
    The City partly dealt with this by installing a steel gate in front of the observation deck—immediately after a skateboarder was photographed riding the curved concrete edge of the north wall of the bridge’s bascule pier in September of 2018. The gate is open only when the bridge operator is present, usually from 8 am to 4 pm. But is it wise to let the public near the machinery at all? “It has been part of the design to allow [the] public to be close and watch the bridge lift,” the City’s Daliran wrote, in response to WSP’s warning.
     

    Entry to the observation deck is usually blocked 4pm to 8am
     
    Fraser Work, the City’s director of engineering, agrees that odd behaviour has been an issue at the bridge. Even before the guy rode the lift span in July, Work told me, “a lot” of cyclists and pedestrians were rushing past closed traffic gates, because they were too impatient to wait the seven minutes it takes to clear the bridge, raise it for a passing ship, lower it and reopen it. “We even had instances where people were stopped and taking selfies, and the bridge operator had to wait, which is very dangerous as a vessel approaches,” Work said. Consequently, the City installed additional CCTV cameras, improved the lights and signage, and is considering fortifying the gate on the bridge’s multiuse path.
    “The systems are designed to code,” Work said. “These railings and these systems are designed that someone shouldn’t accidentally find themselves in harm’s way. But they’re not going to prevent someone who wants to find themselves in harm’s way from having accidents.”
    Work emphasized that the City takes safety seriously. But there are limits to what it can do. “We ask ourselves, ‘What would a prudent bridge owner do?’ Would we add more infrastructure at potentially very significant costs to reduce the risk of any accident happening in the future, or is it adequate right now? So there’s an active dialogue about this stuff. We’ve had these incidents, we take them seriously, we look at them individually based on CCTV footage that we can review and statements by witnesses, and we look at them holistically over time, so we want to make sure we’re taking all necessary action.”
    The bridge was also in the news this summer for its mechanical problems. On June 27, the City cancelled all lifts to investigate worries with the hydraulic system; marine traffic backed up in the harbour, and the City could only conduct two slow, scheduled lifts per day for two weeks afterward. As Focus revealed in September, the housings and O-ring seals of the system’s filters were breaking down, filling the hydraulic oil with particles that could permanently damage the motors. That concern hasn’t been resolved. Work says they’re still running the hydraulics at reduced pressure, so the bridge is at “about 50 percent” speed, adding two minutes to the seven-minute lift/wait/lower cycle. PCL is testing new filters, and may have to reconfigure the hydraulics. The repairs should be covered by the bridge’s warranty, which expires on April 1.
    Then there are the ongoing lawsuits by PCL and WSP against the City, for unpaid work and losses the companies say they suffered due to design changes and delays during the bridge’s construction. In June, PCL served the City with its notice of claim, keeping its lawsuit alive. PCL’s lawyer filed a document in court advising that settlement discussions with the City were “expected to conclude, one way or the other, by July 31,” but that date’s come and gone. As City spokesman Bill Eisenhauer told me, “The litigation is still in abeyance as the parties explore the possibility of a consensual solution.”
    The wheels of justice grind slowly, like the bridge mechanism. Don’t get too close.
    Ross Crockford wishes everyone a safe and merry Christmas.
    WSP Safety Audit of new Johnson Street Bridge.pdf1.52 MB · 26 downloads

    Ross Crockford
    November 2019
    Residents take the City of Victoria to court for overriding its Official Community Plan.
     
    (UPDATE: On November 22, the BC Supreme Court rendered its decision in this case. See the note at the end of this story.)
    “I’M NOT AN ACTIVIST KIND OF GUY,” John Wells says. By day, he develops instrumentation for the high-tech sector. But this autumn, he put his name on a court action that could change how developments get approved by the City of Victoria, and potentially every other municipality in British Columbia. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”
    In his case, the development in question is Rhodo, a set of 20 townhomes planned for two residential lots at 1712 and 1720 Fairfield Road, next to Hollywood Park, in the Gonzales neighbourhood. Aryze Developments first presented the project to neighbours, including Wells, in 2017. Though Aryze generated many letters of support for the project through their website, attendees at community association land-use meetings were almost universally opposed, arguing that Rhodo packed too many people into too small an area, it crowded the park and the sidewalk, and its boxy modern design didn’t fit the neighbourhood.
     

    John Wells says the terms of the OCP constitute a public trust (Photo by Ross Crockford)
     
    Victoria’s council approved Rhodo at a public hearing in August. A majority of speakers supported the project, and the majority of councillors (aside from Charlayne Thornton-Joe and Geoff Young) cited a need for diverse housing in the city and in the Gonzales neighbourhood, and claimed that increased density in such a walkable area, along a transit route, would help reduce climate change. But the neighbours didn’t accept those arguments. They got a lawyer’s opinion that the City had overstepped its authority, rallied to launch a court case to set aside the council’s decision, and Wells volunteered to become the face of the lawsuit.
    The nub of their legal argument concerns the height of the development. Section 478 of BC’s Local Government Act says that all bylaws passed by a council — such as the rezoning bylaw for Rhodo — “must be consistent with” the municipality’s official community plan. In Victoria’s Official Community Plan or OCP, Gonzales is designated “traditional residential,” defined as consisting of “ground-oriented buildings up to two storeys” and multi-unit buildings up to three storeys on arterial roads. (Fairfield is designated a “collector” road.)
    At the public hearing, Aryze and City staff said Rhodo was “2.5 storeys” tall, apparently because its top floor includes open-air balconies. Wells says Rhodo is three storeys. (The architect’s plans say it’s 11.14 metres tall, and a City planning document says residential construction between 9 and 12 metres equals three storeys.) “I deal with math a lot, and the equation for ‘up to two storeys’ is ‘less than or equal to two’,”. Wells says. “It’s not ‘around two’.”
     

    Artist’s rendering of the controversial "2.5-storey" Rhodo project
     
    City planners acknowledged the “up to two storeys” problem in their reports to councillors, but recommended Rhodo proceed anyway, noting that the OCP also contemplated a “range of built forms,” that the “appropriate scale” of a building was to be based on “an evaluation of the context,” and that the townhouses would advance the OCP’s broad objectives of diverse, transit-accessible housing.
    Wells isn’t opposed to development; like any developer, he says, he just wants clear rules, and that means the City needs to respect the clear terms in the OCP. As he points out, Victoria developed its OCP between 2009 and 2011 with the involvement of some 6,000 residents, and in 2012, council enshrined the plan in a bylaw. “With this [Rhodo] decision they crossed the line, they violated the public trust, which is what the OCP is,” Wells says. “For me that’s the nucleus of this complaint.”
    To finance the lawsuit, Wells has raised over $10,000 from more than 75 donors via gofundme.com — and in the process, he’s spoken with residents across Victoria who say they’re fed up with the City cherry-picking phrases from its policies to justify oversized developments. “I realized this isn’t isolated,” he says. “This has been going on for quite some time.”
     
    IAN SUTHERLAND CAN SYMPATHIZE. As chair of the Downtown Residents’ Association’s land-use committee, he’s been battling City Hall over developments since 2011, and he agrees the OCP should be strictly interpreted. “It’s supposed to represent a contract between the council, the development community, and the citizens.”
    Trouble is, the City keeps rewriting the contract, and frequently amends the plan for projects all over town. In May, Sutherland persuaded all of Victoria’s neighbourhood associations to add their names on a letter to Mayor Lisa Helps and council, calling on them and City staff to “follow best practices in land use planning by unequivocally upholding the Official Community Plan.” The City’s reply? “Zero. Not a peep,” Sutherland says. “It’s almost like they didn’t understand what I was talking about.”
    Sutherland’s current headache is the City’s tendency to override the density provisions of the OCP. Density often gets described in floor-space ratios, but he says it’s really about whether a development will help or hurt the liveability of an area. A particularly egregious example for him is the proposal to gut the 1892-built “Duck’s Block” on Broad Street: the OCP says that historic part of downtown has a density limit of 3:1, but the planned hotel will have a density of nearly 5:1. “All those beautiful little courtyards and back alleys, they’re part of a low-density culture that will be rubbed out, because these developments soak up every square inch of dirt.”
    Sutherland’s also been critical of the proposal for four towers at Cook and Johnson — one of which will include a new fire hall — noting that the project has an overall density of 6.8:1 in an area permitted only 5.5:1 in the OCP. At the project’s public hearing on October 24, City planning staff said they looked at a “balance” of considerations, and that inconsistency with any one policy in the OCP wasn’t enough to derail a proposal. Council agreed and approved the project — and in her comments, Mayor Helps said that she effectively considers parts of the OCP to be obsolete.
    “One of the problems with the Official Community Plan, and the way that it’s used sometimes, is that it’s wielded as a shield against change,” Helps told the audience. “And I don’t think that’s right.” She was on an advisory committee for the OCP when it was being created, before she was first elected to council in 2011, and the OCP didn’t identify the concerns Victoria faces today. “If we had declared a climate emergency, and been in the middle of a housing crisis when we approved the OCP in 2012, it probably would’ve looked like a very different document. So our responsibility now is to look at the reality around us, and amend the document accordingly as needed.”
    Wells’ case is slightly different: for Rhodo, the City didn’t even bother amending the OCP, which is a more complicated procedure under provincial law than rezoning, requiring a municipality to consult with “persons, organizations and authorities” that might be affected. (For an example of what’s involved, see Coquitlam’s manual for OCP amendments here.) Perhaps the City got lazy — or perhaps it passed on an OCP amendment for Rhodo because it believes the law is on its side.
    In its filed response to Wells’ action, the City notes that section 471 of the Local Government Actsays an OCP is “a statement of objectives and policies,” so the City considers it a “visionary” document that shouldn’t be strictly interpreted. Some judges have agreed: in 2011, BC’s Court of Appeal upheld Central Saanich’s subdivision of the Vantreight farm into residential lots, saying its rezoning bylaw was consistent with the various environmental and social goals in the OCP, and that the council acted reasonably by weighing various factors in its decision. But more recent BC court decisions say an OCP is a legal document, and when it imposes clear requirements, those should be followed.
    The case will probably be heard in mid-December. Regardless of the decision, though, the issues will soon be tried in the court of public opinion as well. Laurel Collins, one of the councillors who voted for Rhodo, is now off to Ottawa, and the City will hold a byelection for her seat early in the new year. Judging by Victoria’s ongoing arguments over land use, neighbourhood-advocate candidates are sure to emerge.
    Ross Crockford used to be a lawyer, but he’s feeling better now.

    UPDATE: On Friday, November 22, the BC Supreme Court dismissed the Wells petition to strike down the City of Victoria’s rezoning bylaw for the Rhodo development.
    Mr Justice Giaschi said Wells’s lawyers had failed to bring the petition to be heard within the two-month limit in Section 623 of the Local Government Act. He also said the bylaw was “consistent with” the City’s Official Community Plan, and the Council’s decision to pass it was sufficiently “reasonable” that it should not be struck down under the Judicial Review Procedure Act.
    The judge noted that City staff and Council had actively considered the development’s compliance with the OCP, and sent the proposal back for revisions to satisfy the Plan. Although one part of the OCP did say a “traditional residential” neighbourhood only permitted buildings “up to two storeys” on collector roads like Fairfield, the judge said that clause had to be read “in conjunction with other parts of the OCP,” which allowed for a range of building types, and identified various goals, including increasing the supply of housing.
    After the decision, Wells issued a statement on his GoFundMe page:
    “The judge's decision does not mean that the OCP has no meaning, or that City Council can make whatever decision they want. What it does mean is that the courts will give City Council some leeway in how they interpret the OCP, which in this case, and in this specific location, includes 2.5 storeys in an ‘up to 2 storey’ area.
    “During the hearing, the judge commented that if residents are not happy with how Council makes decisions, that is what elections are for. Therefore, if we are not happy with how much leeway this City Council seems to be taking with the OCP, we should be having that dialogue with our elected representatives, and future candidates, about why respecting the OCP is important.”
    That dialogue is likely to get more heated. Last Thursday, Council directed City staff to come up with policies to increase “missing middle” housing, such as townhouses — and Mayor Lisa Helps announced that she effectively wants to eliminate single-family residential zoning across Victoria to get such townhouses built. (Start at 1:51:15 in the video of the meeting HERE.)
    “I’d like to see us go at least as far as Minneapolis, where they have triplexes as of right,” Helps said. “I’d like to see fourplexes as of right. There was a big stir in the North America-wide planning community [last year] when the headline was that Minneapolis got rid of single-family zoning. From staff’s report it doesn’t seem quite that drastic, but I think we need to do more with the land that we have.”
    Victorians, get ready for more Rhodos.

    David Broadland
    November 2019
    If history repeats itself, local plans to reduce GHG emissions will come up far short of targets. Shouldn’t there be a Plan B?
     
    IS THE APPROACH TAKEN BY Victoria and Saanich to reduce GHG emissions within their jurisdictions flawed in some fundamental way that guarantees little or no reduction?
    This is a vital question to consider. Almost all local governments in the CRD have recently declared a “Climate Emergency,” yet the best local example of a well-considered climate action plan—put in place ten years ago by Saanich—has produced only a small reduction in emissions. If the action plans local governments are creating are just more of the same approach Saanich has already tried—and they are—why would the result be any different?
    In 2008, during a previous peak in public interest and concern about global climate change, the BC government introduced North America’s first broad-based carbon tax. At the same time, the municipality of Saanich began drafting a plan to reduce territorial sector-based GHG emissions. By 2010, Saanich had launched its forward-thinking “Climate Action Plan.” One of the plan’s primary goals was an “at least 33 percent” reduction in territorial emissions from 2007 levels by 2020. Ten years later, how did that go?
    Back in 2010, Saanich’s Climate Action Plan put the municipality’s 2007 sector-based territorial GHG emissions at 521,000 tonnes per year. What are they now? In 2019, after declaring a Climate Emergency, the municipality quickly developed the outline (see document 1 at end of this story) of a new climate action plan that plotted a pathway to reduce sector-based territorial emissions by 50 percent by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2050. Saanich’s new starting point, according to that outline, would be 512,900 tonnes. So nearly 10 years after launching its 2010 action plan, Saanich’s sector-based territorial emissions are only 8,100 tonnes below 2007 levels. That works out to a 1.6 percent reduction, well within the uncertainty associated with the accuracy of the 2007 estimate of emissions. Why does Saanich now expect a different result on its second try using the same approach? Victoria is using the same methodology in its Climate Leadership Plan (see document 2).
     

    "Pathways to 2050 GHG Reduction Targets" from the City of Victoria's Climate Leadership Plan. Plotting points on a graph has been tried before.
     
    According to the climate action plans for both communities, all that residents need to do is summed up in three initiatives: First, property owners need to get rid of their oil and natural gas heating and hot water systems and buy electric heat pumps. Second, car drivers need to switch to a bicycle, an electric bus, or an electric car. Third, Victoria and Saanich foresee the availability of “renewable natural gas,” although it’s uncertain where that will come from and how much such facilities would cost, both in dollars and embodied emissions. But residents should get ready to pay for it.
    All of these provisions require new consumption: of electric cars and bicycles, new heating systems, new infrastructure to create biogas, and probably new offices to house a growing contingent of Climate Emergency managers. We just need to buy our way to lower emissions.
    While the experience of Saanich’s 10-year-long unsuccessful attempt at lowering emissions should provide local governments with ample warning that it’s far easier to plot reductions on paper than to achieve them in the real world, there are other reasons to doubt substantial reductions will ever materialize.
    One example: neither community has any intention of constraining population growth or the gentrification of existing neighbourhoods. Thus, we will continue to see, as long as the Canadian economy is growing, new buildings and infrastructure created to service a growing population, and neighbourhoods becoming increasingly affluent and filled with bigger, more luxurious homes. Such growth comes with immense embodied emissions, and some of what’s being created right now is surprisingly energy-inefficient.
    In the City of Victoria, much of the growth is in the form of concrete and glass condominium highrises in the Downtown core. While emissions reduction planners might think that such modern buildings will be energy efficient, BC Hydro doesn’t. In High-Powered Highrise, a report released earlier this year, Hydro noted: “Despite the suites in newer high-rise buildings often being marketed as energy-efficient and including things like LED lighting and Energy Star® appliances, the combined electricity usage of the overall building is approximately two times more than high-rises built in the 1980s, and almost four times more than low-rise buildings built that same decade.”
    Why? According to BC Hydro, “This increase can largely be attributed to these newer, high-rise condo buildings (those with five stories or more) being equipped with high consuming luxury amenities, including pools, hot tubs, party rooms and fitness centres.”
    The strong desire for a luxurious home is also evident in many new low-rise multi-unit buildings in Victoria and Saanich. The market for luxury, it turns out, is a far more powerful determinant of what gets built than concerns about energy efficiency or carbon emissions, even in the midst of a Climate Emergency.
    The relentless demolition of perfectly useable smaller, older homes, which are then replaced with high-end single-family homes two or three times the size, doesn’t support the Climate Emergency managers’ expectation, which underpins their emission-reduction targets, that consumers of housing are seriously concerned about either energy or material conservation.
    The absence of any measures in their climate action plans to constrain population increase and physical growth in Victoria and Saanich isn’t the only reason to doubt real reductions in carbon emissions will be achieved.
    The most serious problem with both action plans is that they only address a small fraction of the emissions that Victoria and Saanich create, or cause to be released somewhere else.
    Civic governments count their emissions using what is known as “sector-based territorial emissions accounting.” In developing their climate action plans, both Saanich and Victoria have identified emissions created by the burning of fossil fuels, or the release of methane, within their boundaries using four sector-based GHG inventories: transportation (automobiles and buses), stationary energy (which includes, for example, all energy related to buildings), industrial products and processes (for example the City’s asphalt plant) and waste (solid waste, sewage, composting). Both Saanich and Victoria are acting in accordance with what is known as the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories (GPC) and their methodology aligns with the guidelines of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Using this protocol, Victoria identified 387,694 tonnes of territorial carbon emissions; as mentioned above, Saanich estimated 512,900 tonnes. The two communities’ analyses of territorial emissions yield similar per capita levels: 4.52 tonnes per person in Victoria and 4.8 tonnes per person in Saanich.
    Both these numbers, though, are far lower than the known per capita emissions of Canadians, which were 19.6 tonnes per person in 2017.
    Saanich and Victoria, then, have set their sights on addressing less than 25 percent of our known per capita emissions. Where do the other 75 percent of Canada’s per capita emissions come from?
    About 26 percent of emissions come from the oil and gas industries, releases that occur before their end-products reach consumers. Another 10 percent comes from heavy industry (fertilizers, iron and steel, cement, aluminum, and pulp and paper). The vast majority of the remaining 64 percent of emissions are created by the production and use of housing, transportation, and goods and services consumed by Canadians in their daily lives. Because 85 percent of Canadians live in cities, most of this consumption occurs in urban centres like Victoria. So cities, and how their governments approach emissions reduction, will have a large impact on whether Canada’s response to the Climate Emergency is effective or not.
    It’s only been in the last couple of years that comprehensive attempts have been made to quantify all the carbon emissions that human activity in cities creates directly or causes to be released elsewhere. Research done by the international organization C40 Cities provides some valuable insight. C40 Cities describes itself as “a network of the world’s megacities committed to addressing climate change.” Its board includes such climate luminaries as former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and current Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo. Vancouver is participating in the initiative.
    C40 Cities has developed an alternative emissions accounting approach that focuses on the consumption of goods and services by residents of a city. In this approach, GHG emissions are reported by consumption category rather than GHG emission source category.
    The 12 categories of consumption C40 Cities uses (and the percentage each category adds to emissions in a North American city) are: capital (15.3 percent); utilities and housing (26 percent); food, beverage and tobacco (7 percent); public transport (10.2 percent); private transport (7.3 percent); government (9.5 percent); clothing, furnishing and household equipment (8.8 percent); restaurants, hotels, recreation and culture (7.2 percent); communications (2.7 percent); education and health (3 percent); miscellaneous goods and services (1 percent); and “other” (2 percent).
    A C40 Cities study (see document 3), released in March 2018, noted that “consumption-based GHG emissions of C40 cities are significant, and significantly larger than sector-based GHG emissions established using the GPC.”
    How much larger? The C40 study found that “16 cities, mostly in Europe and North America, have consumption-based GHG emissions at least three times the size of their sector-based GHG emissions.”
    Although Victoria and Saanich weren’t part of this study, it’s not unreasonable to surmise that consumption-based emissions here are also “at least three times the size” of the sector-based emissions used by Victoria and Saanich in their climate action plans. It should be noted that Saanich commissioned a study of its 2015 consumption-based emissions. That report was released in 2018. It concluded that consumption-based emissions were two times higher than emissions based on sector-based accounting. The study did not include several of the categories C40 Cities uses, including “government services.”
    Let me give you just a few examples of emissions not counted by Victoria or Saanich in their sector-based territorial accounting that would be counted in consumption-based accounting.
    Emissions associated with the cement used in concrete for constructing buildings, foundations, sidewalks, retaining walls, overpasses, etc, are not counted because the cement is manufactured elsewhere. So, too, is the steel rebar used to reinforce this concrete. Saanich has an aggregate mine that provides the sand and gravel used in concrete, but Victoria doesn’t. Thus no emissions related to producing and transporting the ingredients of the concrete in Victoria’s downtown highrise boom are included in its territorial accounting of emissions.
    Another example is “government services.” While both Victoria and Saanich do count GHG emissions caused directly by the burning of fuels resulting from their own operations, they don’t include the carbon emissions embodied in the more than $500 million in funding the two governments collect each year from residential, institutional and business taxpayers.
    There are no lumber or plywood mills in Victoria or Saanich, so none of the emissions or loss of forest carbon sinks associated with the forest industry and its products are included in municipal accounts of emissions, even though these products are essential for the physical growth and maintenance of our homes, hospitals, schools, and places of business.
    Nor do Saanich or Victoria count the emissions created when their residents fly, for business or pleasure, to Vancouver, Paris—or wherever.
    Although a small amount of the food we consume is grown here, most is grown elsewhere and transported to the island. Virtually none of the emissions embodied in our food is counted by Victoria or Saanich. Missing from their tallies, too, are the emissions embodied in the cellphones, computers, flat-screen TVs and other electronic devices manufactured elsewhere but consumed widely by Victoria businesses, institutions and households.
    I won’t go on. You get the idea. In Saanich and Victoria, Climate Emergency managers are counting only a small fraction of the GHG emissions that households, businesses, institutions and governments here are actually causing, directly or indirectly, to be released into the atmosphere. Using C40 Cities’ “at least three times” multiplier, a more realistic estimate of the City of Victoria’s emissions would be 1.2 megatonnes per year. Let’s put Saanich down for 1.5 megatonnes.
    Obviously, local climate action plans will have no success at reducing emissions that they’re not even acknowledging or targetting.
     

    Focus editor Leslie Campbell admires a carbon sequestration facility on Quadra Island (Photo by David Broadland
     
    IS THERE A DIFFERENT COURSE OF ACTION that municipal governments could take to mitigate their emissions? Yes, there is. In a written response (document 1) to Saanich council’s declaration of a Climate Emergency, Manager of Sustainability Ting Pan noted there were two ways to achieve carbon neutrality. The first was to eliminate carbon emissions completely. The second was to “balance carbon emissions with carbon removal.”
    By “carbon removal,” Pan meant the sequestration of carbon by trees. The simplest form of this approach to mitigate emissions, known as “offsets,” is available to a person making a trip by airplane. Payment of an additional small fee—which, the offsetting company promises, will go towards planting a seedling somewhere on the planet—helps to expunge feelings of guilt and shame that some people experience when boarding an airplane. But this form of offsetting has been widely criticized, and rightly so. Forest scientists tell us (document 4), for example, that it takes about 17 years after a coastal BC clearcut has been replanted (which is often delayed several years after harvesting) to switch from being a source of carbon emissions to being a carbon sink. So offsetters that promise to plant a tree to mitigate emissions from, say, your flight to Stuttgart or Calgary, have no immediate effect on reducing atmospheric carbon. Moreover, if trees planted for offsets are cut down in 30 or 40 years, and that low-quality juvenile wood is then used for some short-lived product like shipping pallets or pulp for paper or biofuel, most of the carbon that tree stored is quickly released to the atmosphere. But there’s another possibility for using carbon removal, and this would be similar to that developed for the Great Bear Rainforest, which protects mainly old-growth forest.
    If second-growth trees on the south coast of British Columbia that are slated to be logged (and all Crown land currently under forestry tenures is slated to be logged, eventually) were left to grow, they would sequester more and more carbon each year for a few hundred years. If they were left until they get very old—a Douglas-fir tree, for example, can reach 1000 years of age or more—they would sequester large amounts of carbon over long periods of time.
    Saanich’s Ting Pan put the current cost of offsets at $25 per tonne. At that rate, to offset Saanich’s estimated 1.5 megatonnes of consumption-based emissions for a year would cost about $38 million, and Victoria’s 1.2 megatonnes would cost $30 million a year.
    Ting Pan noted that, while “carbon removal” was “theoretically possible,” there is “no known precedence of any Canadian municipalities taking this approach to become a carbon neutral community.” She added that such offsets “will have to be generated outside of Saanich’s municipal boundary…and would likely contribute to global emissions reduction. However, purchasing offsets have limited direct benefits to local residents, businesses or the local environments.”
    That last statement is ironic, and I’ll explain the irony later. But the only alternative to a “carbon removal” approach is to repeat the actions Saanich took starting in 2010—an approach that hasn’t proven effective and addresses only a third or less of the actual emissions it should. It seems doomed to fail. In a Climate Emergency, shouldn’t our governments be trying out different options to see what works best?
     
    THE RISK THAT CIVIC CLIMATE ACTION PLANS WILL FAIL to deliver significant reductions in community-based emissions demands a Plan B for insurance.
    Certain species of trees, like Douglas fir, Western red cedar and Sitka spruce, can store atmospheric carbon for several hundred, even thousands of years. Forest scientists tell us that coastal old-growth forests store from 750 to 1130 tonnes of carbon per hectare, all absorbed from the atmosphere over the centuries. Our coastal rainforests can contain twice as much carbon per hectare as tropical rainforests like those in the Amazon jungle.
    While old-growth forests around the Salish Sea are becoming increasingly rare, second-growth forests that have a high percentage of Douglas fir, with trees up to 80 years old, are, by comparison, widespread. Select areas of the coast that measure high for biodiversity, tourism and recreation potential, and have the capacity for growing large Douglas fir, cedar or Sitka spruce, could be set aside and managed for optimal carbon sequestration. This wouldn’t mean an end to forestry jobs in these selected areas, but clear-cut logging would end. This approach is already being employed with old growth in the Great Bear Rainforest by the First-Nations-operated Great Bear Carbon Credit Corporation.
     

    Second-growth forests on Crown land like those on Sonora Island (left) and Maurelle Island (right) are slated for clear-cutting. Municipal governments could conserve these areas’ biodiversity, tourism potential, and carbon sequestration capacity by paying fees to offset their own communities’ GHG emissions. (Photograph by David Broadland) 
     
    The Crown-owned second-growth forests around the Salish Sea could absorb many millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere and store that carbon for several hundred years. But they are being clear-cut at an unsustainably high rate, and their potential for storing carbon is rapidly being lost. Tragically, these second-growth forests are being harvested at an age when they are just beginning to absorb carbon at the highest rate per year, a pace that would continue for another 100 to 200 years if left to grow. Through a combination of government shortsightedness and mechanized-forestry corporate greed, BC is losing one of the most effective tools available on the planet for removing carbon from the atmosphere. Some of the loss is justifiable to the extent that lumber is necessary for building housing in BC. A substantial portion of that loss, however, is being exported as raw logs, which provides minimal economic benefit for coastal residents.
    Ironically, most of the rapid liquidation of both old-growth and second-growth forests on Vancouver Island and the northern Gulf Islands is being carried out by TimberWest and Island Timberlands, both of which are owned, to a large extent, by public service pension funds that provide many former government (federal, provincial and municipal) employees with good pensions. Many of these former civil servants have retired to the Victoria area. The community benefits greatly by their presence here, but some of that economic benefit has come at the cost of widespread environmental damage caused by logging of both old-growth and second-growth forests. The south coast is not just losing the potential for carbon sequestration; logging-road construction and clearcutting are blasting, filling and shredding wildlife habitat, diminishing biodiversity and the land’s ability to store water.
    Can municipal governments step forward and preserve carbon sinks as an insurance policy against the potential failure of their climate action plans to perform as needed?
    Saanich’s Ting Pan, as noted above, wrote that, “purchasing offsets have limited direct benefits to local residents, businesses or the local environments.” The irony in that assessment is that local residents and businesses have already benefitted—through money that has flowed into this community from those public service pension plans and increased government revenues—from the destruction of forest-based carbon sinks that is occurring all around the Salish Sea.
     
    HOW MIGHT THE COST of protecting the remaining old growth and selected areas of second growth be charged against consumption-based emissions in communities like Victoria and Saanich? Households would pay a fee, based on household income, to municipal governments. Municipalities would transfer that money to the Province. The Province would then allocate funds to those affected resource communities selected for carbon sequestration projects to transition them away from timber extraction on Crown land and towards carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, and development of tourism/recreation/research infrastructure.
    Why should Saanich and Victoria collect carbon sequestration fees based on household income? A new scientific study (see document 5) on consumption-based household GHG emissions provides evidence for what most people already know: The greater the household income, the higher its consumption-based emissions. This peer-reviewed research quantifies the substantial difference in emissions between low-income and high-income households in the US. Canadians and Americans have very similar per capita GHG emissions, so the data from this new study is useful in Canada. The numbers suggest that Canadian households with incomes of $150,000 have consumption-based annual emissions of about 56 tonnes; a household income of $100,000 produces 50 tonnes; $60,000 in household income produces 33 tonnes; and $30,000 in income produces 22 tonnes. At Tang’s estimate of $25 per tonne to offset emissions, a household with $60,000 in income would pay an annual emissions offset fee of $825. A household with $150,000 in income would pay $1400.
    If Victoria’s or Saanich’s Climate Emergency managers could prove that their action plans had reduced community emissions by, say, five percent, then their residents’ fees could be reduced by five percent, or whatever reduction had been achieved. If emissions go up, the fees go up, and more forest land is converted to carbon reserve.
    As Saanich’s Ting Pan noted, “there is no known precedence of any Canadian municipalities taking this approach to become a carbon neutral community.” There’s also no known example in Canada of a municipal climate action plan producing significant emission reductions. Such plans are often branded to include the word “leadership.” Victoria has called its plan the “Climate Leadership Plan.” But can following a path that’s known to badly underestimate actual emissions, and which uses an approach that has already proven itself to be ineffective, be regarded as “leadership”?
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus. He is working with a group of scientists, journalists and citizens to explore the potential for conserving selected BC forests for carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation and short-distance tourism potential.
     
    Documents referred to:
    1. Saanich Manager of Sustainability's response to Climate Emergency Declaration.pdf
    2. City of Victoria Climate Leadership Plan.pdf
    3. C40 cities consumption-based-emissions.pdf
    4. PICS Carbon Sequestration in British Columbia's Forests.pdf
    5. Scale, distribution and variations of global greenhouse gas emissions driven by U.S. households.pdf

    Stephen Hume
    November 2019
    As they are logged, whole ecosystems disappear forever, along with their superior ability to sequester carbon.
     
    GLOOM AND SILENCE lodged in my memory first. An occasional shaft of golden light lanced between immense trees. They towered like the columns of some ancient Greek temple. If there was a breeze in the foliage, its rustle was muffled by the dense canopy hundreds of feet above.
    It was 1956. I was nine. My father had taken me on my first real hike into the back country.
     

    A stand of old-growth Douglas fir on Vancouver Island (Photo by David Broadland)
     
    The temple allusion seems apt. The only other times I would feel that sudden, deep-shaded sense of sacredness—imprinting itself for the first time upon the virgin sensibility that art critic Roger Shattuck has called “the innocent eye”—occurred years later. Then I stood in the vaulting nave of an 800-year-old cathedral. Its construction began about the same time those Island trees of childhood memory were seedlings, pushing their first roots down into the decaying bole of a fallen ancestor, repeating the endless pattern of regeneration that had recurred over ten or more of their unimaginably long generations.
    The ancient forests of Vancouver Island are ancient, indeed. The south coast was one of the first places deglaciated at the end of the last ice age. Palaeobotanists studying plant pollen in lake-bottom mud discovered that more than 12,000 years ago, when most of what’s now the province still slept beneath glaciers as deep as Mount Waddington, these forests were growing here.
    On my first encounter with the ancient forest that once covered all of Vancouver Island, the trees seemed timeless, inexhaustible. And yet, that primeval forest, the living connection with our Palaeolithic origins in the natural world, was already in rapid retreat when my father took me to experience its miraculous, never-to-be-forgotten presence.
    It is utterly astonishing to think that in my brief lifetime, less than 10 percent of the life span of one of those trees, that same primeval forest has almost vanished from Vancouver Island.
    Seventy years ago, my father, now 96, was still hand-logging old growth west of Sooke with double-bitted axe and misery whip. “We thought it would never end,” he recently said—sadly I thought.
    But ending, it is.
    “We’re down to the guts and feathers now,” laments Erik Pikkila, a forester at Ladysmith who is assembling the “big data” needed for accurate, detailed analysis of BC’s practices and their consequences—what he calls “forgotten history”—both long and short term. “Here in BC we run forestry in a black box,” he says. “We need a technological revolution. The Province has run away from inventories. We don’t even know what is out there. If we don’t know what’s in the bank account, how do we manage that account sensibly going forward?”
    A decade ago, the Liberal government’s cost-cutting mania resulted in a savage downsizing of the Province’s forest service. In 2010, a BC auditor-general’s report concluded that despite high-minded declarations about preserving ecological integrity, the Province was falling short of its goals.
    “We should know where every tree is, where every log is at any given moment in the forestry cycle,” Pikkila says. “This is how you achieve real efficiency and sustainability in forest management. It’s how you eliminate waste. They can do this in Scandinavian logging. We can do it here.”
    “What is the state of the forest? We don’t really know anymore. We have to do things differently.”
    One step might be, as the Province has done with threatened grizzly bears, to boldly declare an immediate moratorium on logging the remnants of the ancient forest until we can gather the best science to determine what we should preserve, what we can preserve, and what we must preserve. Where to start? Perhaps with all trees still standing that were here before Europeans arrived—say 300 years old.
    The governments of Washington State and Canada, with the support of British Columbians, pledged more than $1 billion to attempt to save the iconic Southern Resident killer whales from extirpation. Yet BC not only tolerates, but enables and even encourages the killing of 500-year-old trees to manufacture disposable products.
    Today, probably 85 percent of the original ancient forest that covered Vancouver Island has been mowed down and turned into toilet paper, newsprint, dimensional lumber and plywood—purportedly a sustainable use, although most construction lumber goes into landfills after 50 years, the usual lifespan of a building in our throw-away culture of planned obsolescence. Tattered remnants remain in the North Island’s littoral zone and in a few parks and protected areas. Pockets survive in the most remote river valleys.
    To fly the Island from Cape Scott to Greater Victoria is to witness a landscape modified almost beyond recognition on an industrial scale. Ten thousand-year-old ecosystems have been stripped and replaced with artificial plantations that are, themselves, already in some places being stripped for a second time in less than a century. Forestry is now agriculture. Loggers, their historic self-perceptions notwithstanding, have become well-paid farm hands.
    Government, industry, academics and technicians reassure us that they can reconstruct ancient forests. Others don’t think so.
    “By treating 500 to 1,000-year-old forests as if they were a renewable resource, we are acting out a fiction and thereby making a grave mistake,” wrote Peter Raven, then-director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, in a prescient forward to the book Ancient Forests of the Pacific Northwest.
    “Once they have been removed from a particular area, the ancient forests…will never appear again, given the human activities in the contemporary world and their consequences,” Raven wrote. “We not only kill the trees that are cut, but we annihilate the possibility of such trees for all time. No manifestation of the anthropomorphic causes of tree death could be more permanently fatal than this.”
     
    NOMINALLY, GOVERNMENT FOREST POLICY supports jobs and the economies of small forestry-based communities. But this, too, is a lie of self-deception. Government decoupled forest resources from workers and their communities a generation ago.
    In 1980, says Natural Resources Canada, about 100,000—one in 10 BC workers—were employed in the forest sector. By 2018, Statistics Canada listed 18,600 as employed directly in forestry, logging and support. Over that 38 years, though, the annual allowable cut remained the same. So that 20 percent of the original work force—and the communities depending upon it—now cuts the same amount of wood. The wealth from that productivity gain did not go to workers. It went to government and corporate bottom lines.
    Industry rationalizes liquidating old-growth forests on the fiction they are “over-mature.” The real reason, however, isn’t concern for the well-being of the forest, it’s because, as Charles Little pointed out in his book The Dying of the Trees, “Plantation trees are worth only about one-tenth as much as the 500-year-old pre-Columbian veterans.”
    Ironically, liquidating what’s left of old-growth forests merely accelerates the problem for forest-dependent workers and their communities. When the high-volume old wood runs out, the replacement feedstock can only be low-volume plantation wood of inferior quality. This warning isn’t a radical idea cooked up by naive environmentalists. The Vancouver Province ran a major newspaper series more than 80 years ago warning about the coming “fall down” effect.
     
    LOOKING DOWN FROM A LIGHT PLANE cockpit upon the patchwork quilt of clear-cuts, newly replanted cut blocks, immature growth, and the few protected areas and crannies too rugged to log, and you’d be forgiven for thinking the Island is being defaced by some disastrous case of disfiguring psoriasis.
    Satellite mapping shows as shamelessly optimistic estimates that 15 percent of old-growth inventory in moderate-to-high-value forest remains intact. Image analysis shows what remains is about a third of that or less. Only about 10 percent of the biggest trees, the 1,000-year-old giants from river bottoms and lower elevations, still stand. So, 90 percent of the most majestic trees are already gone—flushed down your toilet; used to wrap fish and chips; used to make disposable forms during construction of steel and glass skyscrapers, and then discarded.
    Break it down by actual ecosystems, and the picture is grimmer yet. Of low elevation coastal Douglas fir and the Douglas fir adapted to the Island’s dry east coast rain shadow, only about one percent remains. For mountain hemlock in the very dry zone, about seven percent is left.
    “This is crazy policy,” Pikkila says. “Ecologically, we need to be leaving all those big trees. Between 60 and 80 years in the growth cycle of those trees, the volume of wood doubles. The bigger the tree, the greater the volume of wood, the more carbon captured from the atmosphere and sequestered for a thousand years.” He adds, “The best tool we have against climate change is forests—but we have to let them get old. We have to plant a trillion trees, but the catch is to let them get really old.” While vigorously growing young trees sequester atmospheric carbon, they have to grow for 500 years to match the carbon sequestered in old-growth veterans.
    On a per-hectare basis, temperate old-growth rainforests in BC sequester better than twice the carbon in equivalent forested areas of the tropical Amazon basin, whose deforestation has been so much in the news of late. More than 1,000 metric tons of carbon is sequestered in one hectare of BC rain forest, compared to about 400 tons in the Amazon.
    Ecologist Elliott Norse points out in a seminal study of the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest that timber operations in old growth “release a huge pulse of carbon dioxide in the few years after logging.”
    This doesn’t square with the carbon budget targets bloviated by the NDP in the provincial legislature.
    Based on the best current science, Ken Wu of the Endangered Ecosystems Alliance calls for a dramatic expansion of targets for protecting remaining old growth. The United Nations target is currently 17 percent. BC has achieved 15 percent. Wu says we need to go to at least 50 percent protection by 2030.
     

    Ken Wu stands beside an old-growth Douglas fir on McLauglin Ridge (Photo by TJ Watt)
     
    “To continue logging the last giants is akin to slaughtering the last herds of elephants or harpooning the last great whales,” Wu has written. “It’s unnecessary and unethical, given that second-growth forests dominate more than 80 percent of BC’s productive forest lands and can be sustainably logged.
    “Indeed,” he continues, “the rest of the Western world is focused on logging 50- to 100-year-old second- or third-growth trees. BC is one of the very last jurisdictions on Earth that still supports the large-scale logging of 500-year-old trees. On Vancouver Island alone, about 10,000 hectares of productive old-growth forests are logged each year while only 8 percent of the original is protected.”
    As with cancer patients, it’s easy to get drawn into a confused and confusing realm of contested statistics when it comes to evaluating survival rates, statistical probabilities, fretting over what the numbers actually mean—or if they mean anything. Yet for any lay person trying to sort out the facts, one thing is certain: government and industry data have gaps, sometimes large ones, and whether by incompetence or designed obscurantism, it’s opaque.
    Spending an hour trying to extract intelligible data from the equivocating, jargon-laden labyrinth hosted by the Provincial Ministry of Forests feels like the same mind-numbing paralysis that follows sucking in a Freezie too fast.
    Government, which is responsible for managing about 20 percent of timber sales (through BC Timber Sales), and industry, which has billions vested in business-as-usual, both argue that more old-growth forest has been protected than environmental groups acknowledge.
    But Wu, a long-time campaigner for expanded old-growth protection, says the spin cycle has been cranked up to high for government and industry statistics.
    He argues, for example, that provincial statistics mislead, because they include in protected old growth all the low commercial value forests growing on terrain so rugged it can’t be logged; stunted forests in shore bogs; treeless high alpine zones of rock and snow. They lump together fundamentally different ecosystems, from temperate coastal rainforest to arid rain shadow.
    Wu likens this greenwashing of provincial forest policy to a politician combining Vancouver’s impoverished Downtown East Side, where the median household income was $13,000 in the last census, with West Vancouver, where the median family income was $90,000, and then huffing that everyone, including those in the Downtown East Side, is doing just fine because median household income averages $50,000. Well, it does, but it’s misleading.
    Furthermore, he argues, if you include protected parklands in your annual old-growth inventory, the proportion of protected to unprotected old growth will appear to increase as unprotected old growth is logged. Eventually, when you’ve liquidated all the unprotected old growth, you’ll be able to claim that 100 percent of your old growth is protected, although it will represent only a minuscule fragment of what was once present.
    The fact is that at least 80 percent of the moderate-to-high-value forest—those are the big trees—has already been extirpated on Vancouver Island, Wu says. Another 15 percent is unprotected. Only about five percent is protected by parks or ecological reserves. So, the NDP government’s plan, inherited from the opposition Liberals, appears to be to adopt a legacy of having stripped 95 percent of our ancient forest from the landscape, all the while congratulating itself on its environmental commitment.
    Vicky Husband, another battle-scarred veteran of the fight to save what’s left of a vanishing ecosystem, concurs.
    “Our ancient, old-growth forest of giant tree ecosystems is seriously endangered and irreplaceable,” she says. “Less than 15 percent of the original extent of ancient forest remains. There is very little valley-bottom ancient forest. Most [of what does remain] is seriously fragmented across the landscape by rampant clear-cut logging, with no regard for protection of other values.”
     

    A typical clear cut with grapple-yarder that hauls bucked logs up to the cold deck where they are sorted into truckloads. When dragged logs disturb the surface of the forest floor they can create furrows that channel winter runoff down steep slopes, contributing to erosion. (Photo by TJ Watt)
     
    She observes that the temperate coastal rain forests never amounted to more than about 0.5 percent of the world’s original forest and yet it’s still being logged to near extirpation. “The kind of extreme mismanagement and liquidation of the last of our ancient forests is a total crime against nature. We have the best remaining ancient temperate rainforests in the world, and we are losing them so fast,” she says.
    Continuing, Husband says, “We have protected only 5.5 percent of the original extent of the ancient forest on Vancouver Island. Does anyone think that is enough? The NDP has totally betrayed us all. They have continued the Liberal regime with regard to mismanagement of our forest, no consideration or protection of other important values, only timber.…and they are massively overcutting what we have left as fast as they can.”
     
    MORE THAN 60 YEARS AGO, when my father hiked me up into the old growth, it covered the lower slopes of Mount Arrowsmith, flanked the Cameron River where it winds from Labour Day Lake under Mount Moriarty, and swept over to Cameron Lake.
    He showed me liquorice ferns, deer ferns, maidenhair ferns—a whole palette of vivid greens—offset by the pale, corpse-coloured ghost pipes that live in parasitical symbiosis with living tree roots.
    Another persistent recollection, embedded like a kind of muscle memory, is the springiness underfoot. Moss that seemed knee-deep in places moved beneath my feet like a trampoline, although it was a more fragile kind of trembling.
    We looked at nurse logs, huge trunks of ancient trees that had died, stood for another century or so, then fallen to the forest floor to begin a new cycle of growth. The moss, explained my dad, was so deep that nothing could take root, and the canopy so dense that there was little light. But these falling giants laid down a nutrient-rich bed into which seedlings had a brief window in which to push tiny roots into crevices and capture light slanting in through the opening left in the canopy.
    We gorged on the fat, red huckleberries that take root in decaying stumps and took home a couple of cups, which my mother tossed with lemon juice, some sugar and promptly baked into a tart, tangy pie—another indelible childhood memory.
    As we climbed towards the tree line, spring-fed rills bubbled up and frothed down the slope, tumbling over deadfalls and rock ledges. It was a landscape as magical and mesmerizing as any I’d found in the books at the tiny Port Alberni library where I was often deposited while my mother shopped.
    Timespans are different in childhood. Summers seem so long that their end is always a shock. But it was nothing like the shock when I went looking for that vividly remembered ancient forest of childhood. It was a ruin of debris.
    All that remains of that forest of my memory is the beautiful but ecologically insignificant postage-stamp park called Cathedral Grove, a thin ribbon of trees in the steep canyon of the Cameron River, and a few veterans here and there left to blow down in some big storm.
     

    Logging in old growth on McLaughlin Ridge. Only about 5 percent of ancient forest is protected. (Photo by TJ Watt)
     
    Provincial forest policy, and the attitudes of our elected politicians, seem maddeningly obtuse. The forest sector supports fewer and fewer people who are used to mow down the last intact bits of unprotected old growth at a time when children are taking to the streets demanding that we do something to preserve their future and their heritage.
    BC’s parks recorded 200 million visits over the last decade. Pacific Rim National Park Reserve gets about a million visitors a year. If hikers continue to reserve places on the West Coast Trail at the current rate, 75,000 will complete the arduous wilderness trek over the next decade.
    Government brochures, reports, and websites celebrate and promote these visits because they inject billions into the provincial economy—certainly more than logging does. The promotions are plastered with dramatic photos of pristine forests, hikers gazing at huge trees, and campers setting up in a pastoral paradise.
    But it’s really more of the Big Lie to which our children object. Beyond the park boundaries—and parks are now so jammed that reservations months in advance are a necessity—the landscape is still being shaved bald.
    Stephen Hume spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island. His byline has appeared in most major Canadian newspapers. The author of nine books of poetry, natural history, history and literary essays, he lives on the Saanich Peninsula.

    Briony Penn
    November 2019
    West Coast wildlife depends on herring—and there’s a model for bringing them back to the Salish Sea.
     
    THE WILDLIFE IN SPILLER CHANNEL, just north of Bella Bella, is alive and well this fall. Over a thousand bald eagles on their southward migration were feeding on the returns of chum and pink salmon alongside other top predators—black bear, grizzly and wolf. Sea lions, Dall’s porpoise, several humpbacks and northern resident killer whales worked the channel edges. 
    At the entrance, where the breakers roll in, sea otters have returned, triggering a rebound of kelp forests. Juvenile fish are surviving better in these underwater nurseries. Overwintering sea ducks, like harlequins and surf scoters, fished alongside 500 Western grebes, listed as threatened. Along the channel, small buoys and lines tied to trees mark the traditional non-kill fishery of herring roe of the Heiltsuk First Nation. The foundation for the health and well-being of everyone in Spiller is herring; Spiller Channel is famous for them.
     

    Herring spawn off the south end of Denman Island (Photo courtesy Jake Berman)
     
    Spiller is also famous for the Heiltsuk Nation’s prolonged stand-offs against the commercial “kill” herring fishery (which mostly is used for fish farm feed and pet food). It is an important place—a coastal Standing Rock—where the nation has stood up to pressures that push species and cultures to the brink: overharvesting, overhunting, overfishing and overlogging. Spiller is also close to where the Nathan E. Stewart oil spill occurred in Seaforth Channel in 2016, for which the nation launched their own emergency response.
    With their success in stopping the commercial “kill” fishery, the trophy hunts, and commercial logging, along with winning the court case against the Texas Kirby Corporation responsible for the fuel spill, the Heiltsuk have set a course for how to bring life back to the land, the sea and the culture, with herring as the foundation. They have shown the way that abundance can return here too, in the Salish Sea.
    All around the Salish Sea there are Spiller Channels waiting to rebound; bays where the open ocean has been calmed by the geography of granite and forests of kelp. People have tended these fish for millennia as they return year after year to spawn on the lush eelgrass meadows. The young fish follow the older fish back to a spawning site (what elders refer to as the scouts) and typically remain loyal to that site.
    The Salish Sea had dozens of spawning bays with different spawning windows from Ganges SYOWT, the first place the herring come in spring, according to WSÁNEĆ hereditary chief Eric Pelkey, to the late spawners of Cherry Point near Bellingham. Some herring leave on their migration to the coastal shelf, some never leave, and with this mix of diversity of locations, timing and behaviours, the rest of the coastal community can thrive all the way up the food chain, through chinook to the Southern Resident killer whales and the human communities.
    For many elders like Pelkey, whose chieftanship runs from STAUTW (Tsawout) on the Saanich Peninsula to SYOWT (Ganges) on Saltspring Island, the decimation of these herring stocks indicates a fundamental flaw with the fisheries model being used by Fisheries and Oceans (DFO). “It seemed like as soon as there was a sign that herring were starting to come back again and into Ganges Harbour, DFO would open it up commercially and seine boats would come in and just scoop them up. Eventually that just killed off that herring run.” The fight that began with his grandfather, Louie Pelke, has been long and lonely—and repeated by every coastal nation.
    In Lekwungen territory, the Gorge was their Spiller Channel until the commercial fisheries of the 1930s wiped them out. Ross Bay, James Bay and Ogden Point lost their herring to the reduction fisheries by 1938; Juan de Fuca in 1940, Hotham Sound and Redonda, pre-1950.
    In WSÁNEĆ territory, Saanich Inlet, Coles Bay, Deep Cove, Patricia Bay, Goldstream and Finlayson Arm all lost their herring to the next wave of commercial fisheries of the ’50s and ’60s, and so it continued around the Salish Sea. Howe Sound, 1966; Malaspina Strait, 1975; Jervis Inlet, 1978; Fraser River, Bedwell Harbour, Campbell Bay, Lyall Harbour and Winter Harbour in 1979; Sechelt, Pender Harbour, Cowichan Bay, Ganges and Fulford Harbours, 1983; Powell River, 1988; Boundary Bay, 1992.
    Some bays, like Nanoose and Yellowpoint, lost their spawns during the “wild west” herring bonanzas of the ’80s, rebounding temporarily in the ’90s, only to disappear again. These local extinctions usually followed the winter or spring fishery.
    In 2011, Simon Fraser University archeologist Dana Lepofsky started the Herring School forum, recording elders from Alaska to Washington who told of seiners coming into their bays at night, taking every last fish and silencing their spring.
    Today, the only place that herring have continued to spawn at any scale is Baynes Sound around Hornby and Denman Island. Yet DFO persists in its claim that it has a workable model and a well-managed fisheries maintaining “historic levels.” Few outside of DFO and industry seem to agree with the model, which is based on taking 20 percent of the total weight (biomass) of the fish predicted and comparing it to a baseline catch in 1951 to assess “historic highs.”
    Pelke lists its flaws: it treats all the herring in the Salish Sea as one big population; it targets bigger fish; it doesn’t consider the ecosystem or cultural stewardship; it uses 1951 as a baseline which, as he points out, was a low point for herring during the excess of the reduction fisheries.
    Even with an announcement this October from federal scientists that the model is predicting a decline of what they call the Strait of Georgia (SOG) population by one third, there is no move to end the winter or spring fisheries.
    The WSÁNEĆ Leadership Council (WLC) of Tsartlip, Tseycum and Tsawout First Nations, like the Heiltsuk, are inviting others to join them in calling for changes. The WLC states that, “Herring have been under increased pressure from commercial fishing interests since the 1960s when herring populations reached a critical low. Since then, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and Coastal First Nations, including the WSÁNEĆ, have been unable to agree on policies that prioritize the health of the herring population over commercial fishing interests.”
    Inspired by the Heiltsuk’s successful lobbying efforts to have DFO agree to a moratorium on commercial herring fishery in places like Spiller, the WLC are cohosting an advocacy event this November called HELIT TTE SLON,ET (Let the Herring Live) with 25 local First Nations, and 50 community organizations invited. As the WLC state: “This is the first time in the Strait of Georgia’s history that such a large and diverse group of interests have joined together to oppose the questionable practices of DFO.” Part of the gathering will be hearing elders and independent researchers who have worked together for a decade in research forums providing the evidence to refute DFO’s position. They will also explore case studies like the Heiltsuk for recovery efforts. Another historic first is that all political representatives of Saanich and the Gulf Islands from the Islands Trust up through Adam Olsen MLA and Elizabeth May MP are supporting this initiative.
    Co-hosts like Conservancy Hornby Island, which gathered over 96,000 signatures to stop the herring fishery last spring, say DFO didn’t listen to the decades of warnings, including the latest protests when stocks could have been left to recover. Director Grant Scott, an ex-commercial fisherman, states “it took a collapse of Strait of Georgia (SOG) herring to finally show up the flaw in DFO’s modelling. To be precautionary, there should be no commercial herring fishery here until the populations of herring recover throughout the SOG, not just between Parksville and Comox.” Like Scott, co-host Vanessa Minke-Marten, a fisheries scientist with Pacific Wild, is “supporting First Nations to assume their rightful control and place in herring management.” That includes the integration of traditional and Western science for the full ecosystem: fish, sea birds, mammals, and cultures who rely on herring for their survival.
    Management models that incorporate spatial population dynamics, it seems, are being used everywhere on the coast but here. When Washington State saw their 21 distinct spawning stocks, like Cherry Point, flicker out, they stopped the herring fisheries in the early 1980s. Lepofsky’s archaeological evidence backed up elder testimonies prompting a call for changes in policy to align with Indigenous inherent and legal rights. The SFU work expanded into the Ocean Modelling Forum (OMF) in 2015 with 20-plus institutions, including a DFO researcher, joining First Nations in inter-disciplinary research. DFO has responded to calls for policy changes from the Heiltsuk, Haida, Nuu-chaal-nulth, and in small closures with the Q’ul-lhanumutsun Aquatic Resources Society (QARS).
    With this sizeable body of evidence, researchers Andre Punt and his co-authors are unequivocal that the old model has “consequences throughout the social-ecological system, including loss of trust in management bodies and conflict...” Loss of trust is top-of-mind for co-host Lockhart MacLean of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society: “There is an issue here that DFO is whitewashing harvest rates based on fictional biomass. The 20 percent harvest rate is a joke with these wild predictions. DFO’s lack of precaution is driving the last viable spawn in the Salish Sea to extinction.”
    Another research team under Daniel Okomoto recently found that managing stocks the way Pelkey advises, watershed by wateshed, “diversifies community benefits.”
    And the benefits need diversifying. The herring industry is controlled by one man, Jimmy Pattison, and all profits flow to his private empire which, according to BC Business, earned $10.6 billion in 2018, padded out by fuel subsidies for his seine boats. Pattison is counting on a reallocation of tonnage from the spring to the winter fishery which is supposed to start November 21.
    The social licence doesn’t appear to be on Pattison’s side. Ocean Modelling Forum researchers have identified the variety of factors having impacts on herring, which range from pollution to climate change, but the unique threat, which only exists on the Canadian side of the Salish Sea (and is easily remedied), is the fishery; a fishery that is now proven to cause local extirpations.
    The WSÁNEĆ response is CENENITEL, which means “helping one another to restore home.” CENENITEL could look like a comprehensive herring recovery program that supports local nations and communities in recovery efforts to improve water quality and eelgrass, traditional reseeding of bays with herring roe, or assistance to displaced herring fishermen. Spiller Channel is returning, and the Salish Sea has one last chance to do the same.
    Briony Penn is an award-winning writer of creative non-fiction books including The Real Thing: The Natural History of Ian McTaggart Cowan, A Year on the Wild Side and, to be released in the spring, Following the Good River: The Life and Times of Wa'xaid, a biography with Cecil Paul(Rocky Mountain Books).

    David Broadland
    September 2019
    The new Johnson Street Bridge broke down after little more than a year of service. What else did the project’s leadership bequeath future taxpayers?
     
    ON JUNE 25, just shy of 15 months after it opened, the new $115-million-plus Johnson Street bridge was unofficially broken. The City officially acknowledged the problem on June 27. A mechanical issue—the exact nature of which has yet to be revealed—had caused abnormally high pressure in the bascule bridge’s hydraulic lift system. The bridge could not be opened for waiting marine traffic.
    Twelve days later, on July 6, the bridge was still not operating properly. On that day the City’s Director of Public Works and Engineering Fraser Work told the Times Colonist, “I’m not staring down the barrel of a huge, big maintenance burden or a huge, big replacement of gear and equipment. No one is talking about anything like that. It’s just about proving the system is working the right way and making sure we get the confidence back in the system.”
    In July, Focus filed an FOI requesting the record of Work’s communications regarding the breakdown. The partially redacted record provided by the City shows that critical elements of the hydraulic system were failing, including o-rings coming off pressure filters, plastic filter end caps degrading, and indicators designed to show when filters were clogged indicating the filters were clogged even though new filter elements had been installed. The question of whether all these elements were failing simultaneously because their manufacture had been defective, or, alternatively, that they were all failing because they were experiencing higher fluid pressure than they were designed for, is not answered by the released records.
    The records show that suppliers of the failing equipment flew in from as far away as Florida to consult on what was being referred to as the "hydraulic system failure.".
    Even after equipment that had failed was replaced, warning indicators kept triggering. The record provided by the City shows that, after new equipment had been installed, the speed of lifts and lowerings had to be reduced to slightly more than half-speed. Presumably that condition is still in effect.
    If the bridge’s hydraulic system is now operating at higher pressure than it was a year ago, the hydraulic drive motors may be experiencing greater mechanical resistance. One possible explanation for greater mechanical resistance is that the rings on which the bridge rotates have slowly deformed since the counterweights were attached in early 2018. Kiewit Construction, one of the companies that bid for the construction contract in 2012, warned the City of that possibility. They noted that the counterweight “would load the truss ring eccentrically, which could distort the ring—a highly undesirable condition.” Kiewit rejected the City’s novel mechanical lifting system in favour of a system that had proven to be reliable over many years of service.
    If the rings have deformed, as Kiewit engineers predicted they might, the drive system would encounter greater resistance than expected when the bridge was being lifted or lowered, and thus would operate at higher hydraulic pressure.
    Notably absent from the City’s public explanation of the bridge’s hydraulic system failure was the formerly high-profile Project Director Jonathan Huggett.
    Focus has raised questions over the ten years it took to build the bridge about the value of the services provided by consulting engineers like Huggett. The emergence of the hydraulic problem adds yet another layer to those questions. In a written quarterly report to City council in April 2018, soon after the bridge opened, Huggett advised councillors: “Maintenance of the new bridge is expected to be minimal, with the main item being greasing of the joints and moving surfaces from time to time. The hydraulic system is a closed system, meaning there is little opportunity for outside contaminants to enter the hydraulic system, and so maintenance is minimized.”
     

    The new bridge had been leaking hydraulic fluid for over half a year before it experienced "hydraulic system failure." This photograph was taken in December 2018.
     
    The bridge’s current hydraulic problems show that Huggett’s expensive advice was actually expensive nonsense. There are other, even more striking examples of Huggett’s advice not serving the public interest. I think of them as Jonathan Huggett’s Greatest Hits.
    In 2015, Focus published a story about a document we had obtained through an FOI request to the City. This document, titled Johnson Street Bridge Seismic Design Criteria, had been quietly created by the City’s project manager, MMM Group, in August 2012 while the City struggled to obtain a financially viable bid to construct the bridge. It was later attached to the construction contract the City signed with PCL. By accepting the provisions of the Seismic Design Criteria as part of the contract, the City accepted a much lower level of seismic performance than had been originally recomended by MMM’s own Joost Meyboom.
    For example, the Criteria stipulated that following a large Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake, access to emergency vehicles only needed to be “possible within days of the earthquake.” Yet Meyboom had advised the City to accept only a performance level that would provide uninterrupted, immediate access across the bridge for emergency vehicles after any earthquake.
    The worst-case earthquake scenario for Victoria is not a Cascadia Subduction Zone event. Provincial emergency planners know that the rupture of a fault much closer to Victoria, like the Devil’s Mountain Fault, could produce a M7+ earthquake centered only a few kilometres from downtown Victoria. Such an event would produce much stronger seismic waves, albeit for a shorter period of time, than a Cascadia Subduction Zone event. Following this type of earthquake, the Seismic Design Criteria allowed a service level of “Possible permanent loss of service.” In other words, the bridge could be so badly damaged that no vehicles, ever again, would be able to cross it. That would mean zero access for emergency vehicles. This low level of seismic performance was completely at odds with MMM’s engineering advice provided before procurement of the bridge had been committed to by the City.
    When Focus brought this issue to public attention in 2015, City councillors asked Huggett to explain MMM’s Seismic Design Criteria. City staff had never told the councillors about the document’s existence or its purpose. In response to the council’s request for an explanation, Huggett made two presentations, one to councillors and one to media. Neither provided a single word of explanation of why the document was created, what it contained, what its provisions meant, why it superseded all other bridge code requirements or what impact it had on the bridge’s contractually required seismic performance for emergency vehicle access and repairability. The councillors didn’t notice that, amongst all the irrelevant engineerese Huggett provided, there was no explanation of the Seismic Design Criteria document. For a longer description of this fiasco, perhaps Huggett's greatest hit, see "Seismic rip-off on the Johnson Street Bridge."
    What the document’s inclusion in the City's contract with the builder, PCL, means is that the City will have no legal ground to sue any of the parties involved in building the bridge if, following a major earthquake (greater than M6.5), the bridge can’t provide immediate access to emergency vehicles and/or becomes unrepairable.
    Here’s another of Huggett’s Greatest Hits: In 2015 he informed City councillors that protective fendering for the north side of the bridge had not been included in the construction contract with PCL. He told councillors it had been “clouded out” in contract drawings. As a result, he told them, this fendering would add extra millions to the project cost. Focus filed an FOI for the “clouded out” contract drawings Huggett had referenced. The City informed us that no such drawings could be found. It was made clear by several documents that did exist—including the actual contract with PCL—that the north side fendering was part of the construction contract. Yet Huggett promoted the idea that the City would have to pay several million dollars more for physical protection on the north side of the bridge. Four years later, after numerous expensive updates on the fendering issue by Huggett, the bridge continues to be unprotected on its north side.
     

    An artist's rendering of the protective fendering proposed—years ago— for the north side of the new bridge. The bridge continues to be unprotected from outgoing marine traffic, including tugs pulling loaded barges.
     
    Another great hit: in early 2018, Focus published a story that revealed the bascule leaf of the bridge had undergone a major, last-minute repair after four years of fabrication in China. Large holes had to be cut into the structure’s fracture-critical rings. Six-foot-by-six-foot steel plates had been crudely bolted over the holes. We sought an explanation from Huggett, who provided next to no information about who knew what, and when they knew it. Later, he complained to City council that we had claimed the plates were scrap steel. We had not.
     

    Bolted-on plates added in Victoria to repair a flaw in the rings that traced back to incomplete shop drawings, which were ultimately the responsibility of the bridge's designer, Hardesty & Hanover
     
    Huggett supported the position of the company that had designed the bascule leaf, Hardesty & Hanover, which blamed the Chinese company that had fabricated the bridge for the circumstances that led to the need for the plates. But documents later obtained by Focus through an FOI showed that the problem that led to the bolted-on plates had been known for over a year before any attempt had been made to address it. That long interval of no action—during which the Chinese company waited for a decision from Hardesty & Hanover but also kept building on top of the problem—had necessitated the crude application of the plates.
    The documents obtained by FOI also showed that the root cause of the problem was incomplete details on shop drawings, which were ultimately the responsibility of the designer, Hardesty & Hanover. The documents showed that Huggett had been kept informed of this serious problem by PCL, but that he had failed to inform any City official about the problem. The best option, from the City’s perspective, would have been to re-weld that section of the rings as per the intended design. But Huggett never even informed the City that the problem existed, let alone that there were options for how to fix the problem. If Focus hadn’t raised the issue, no one at City Hall would have known why those big, bolted-on plates were there.
    The visual defacement of the intended design that these plates created caught the attention of a British bridge designer, who wrote: “It’s clear from the photographs that nothing this awful should be considered acceptable as part of the finished structure.” As well, a steel fabrication expert told Focus the plates would likely lead to long-term corrosion and maintenance issues.
    Records obtained from the City by FOI regarding Huggett’s remuneration for professional services and expenses show that during the last half of 2014, for all of 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018, and for the first four months of 2019, he was billing the City for about $25,000 per month for professional services and expenses. In 2018 the Times Colonist observed that Huggett was the most highly remunerated person drawing from a municipal public purse anywhere in the CRD in 2016 ($303,087.05) and 2017 ($308,299.37).
    Of Huggett’s monthly billings, $20,000 was for “professional services.” The balance was for expenses. Itemized breakdowns of his expenses, obtained by FOI, show that he had been billing the City about $2500 per month for a monthly pass on Air Canada to fly between Vancouver (he lives in White Rock) and Victoria.
    Huggett’s May 1, 2019 billing was for $22,571.20, but by June 1 that had suddenly dropped to $6,530.80. The City was finally requiring an itemized accounting of his billable hours. The latest shows that in June, 2019 he billed the City for a total of 22 hours, three of which were spent on “calls” about “hydraulic system failure.”
    In all, up to the time the bridge broke down, Huggett had been paid $1.407 million for his services and expenses. It’s unclear whether any public accounting of bridge project costs has included that cost.
    It’s not easy to ascertain exactly what Huggett did for the City. That’s because there’s no complete public record of what he did and why he did it. Working from his home in White Rock, he wasn’t required to use a City of Victoria email account through which his City-related emails would have—or should have—been recorded and archived and accessible by FOI. When we asked the City for Huggett’s communications regarding the bolted-on plates, not a single email was provided that would show how Huggett had responded to communications from PCL or Hardesty & Hanover. Those emails, paid for dearly with taxpayers’ dollars, are in the sole custody of Jonathan Huggett.
    In the end, besides the largely boilerplate quarterly reports he provided to City councillors, he seems to have been valued at City Hall as someone who would assist them with public relations on a disastrous and embarrassing project. When Focus asked Mayor Helps if she had known about the bolted-on plates, she devised a non-response response and sent it to Huggett for his consideration first. (She accidentally copied us on that response when she sent it to Huggett.)
    In 2017, when the City staged a public “Lessons Learned” exercise about the project, then-Councillor Pam Madoff told Huggett: “I remember very specifically having this conversation [with the bridge’s designers and engineers] about the mechanics, you know, the—in simplistic terms—the cogs, the wheels, how it was going to lift. I remember at the time saying, ‘Is this basically just a larger version of the Meccano sets that we played with as kids, in terms of its actual mechanical operation?’ And, again, that was the assurance. To me it comes down to: how far does one have to go? We felt like we asked the right questions at the time. It turns out they may not have been the right answers.”
    Huggett’s response to Madoff was short: “There is no question that you were not given good advice.” On that point I heartily agree.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.
    VIC-2019-072 City of Victoria communications regarding hydraulic system failure.pdf1.21 MB · 155 downloads 
    VIC-2019-076 Jonathan Huggett invoices 2018-19.pdf2.54 MB · 43 downloads

    Briony Penn
    September 2019
    A retired physics professor ground-truths the tanker traffic at Burnaby’s Westridge Terminal.
     
    FROM HIS LIVING ROOM WINDOW above Westridge Marine Terminal on Burnaby Mountain—the terminus of the Trans Mountain pipeline—retired SFU professor emeritus David Huntley can see the oil tankers coming in to pick up or offload cargo. It’s August and Huntley hasn’t seen a crude oil tanker at Westridge since June 30. Pulling out his iPad with Vesselfinder.com, Huntley finds the large orange icon that is the closest crude oil tanker and pulls up its information—size, draft, speed, destination, location, port of origin and so on. The next anticipated one, the Nordbay, is drifting west of Juan de Fuca Strait, and is not due in until the middle of August. Nordbay’srecent port of call is Martinez, California, where there is an oil refinery.
    “California is where most oil tankers are headed,” says Huntley. He tells me only 20 crude oil tankers have left Westridge for China since 2014. Twelve of these were in late 2018 when the Canadian crude price was as low as $11 US per barrel due to a glut of oil in Alberta. When the Alberta premier ordered a curtailment in production, the price jumped back to normal and shipments to China stopped.
     

    Westbridge Marine Terminal in Burnaby
     
    Why is a professor with two degrees in engineering and physics and doctoral studies at Oxford tracking these tankers? “Because,” states Huntley, “initially what the tankers were doing was inconsistent with the rules on the Vancouver Port Authority website. Now, Trans Mountain and politicians are telling us things that are not true.” For instance, as he notes in a recent report, “The numbers commonly quoted from them are an increase from 5 [tankers] per month to 35 per month, an increase of a factor of seven. In the two years before the application, there never were five per month (i.e. 60 per year) as claimed.” It was more like 3.4. Since the application the rate has varied between a low of 1.2 per month in 2016 and 3.6 in 2018. In 2019 (to date) the rate has been 1.0 per month.
    Huntley, who built his career on facts and (amongst other things) helping reconstruct the Earth’s climate through dating sediments using the physics of sand grains, has turned his focus from understanding this planet’s paleoclimate to finding the evidence to protect its future climate.
    “What got me interested in the tankers—besides living next to them—is the lack of good solid data on them,” he says. “How can we evaluate the effects of the proposed increase of tanker traffic in the Salish Sea that would accompany the TMX [Trans Mountain Expansion Project] without this information?” he asks.
    Huntley’s findings are in direct contradiction to what we have been led to believe: Kinder Morgan’s 2015 business case presented to the NEB stated that “access to Pacific Basin markets is almost non-existent…” Implied is that being able to ship oil to Asia would realize higher prices for Alberta bitumen. As Huntley points out, “These claims about a lack of access to ‘tidewater’ are without merit since there is—and has been—guaranteed access to tidewater. And that access is—and has been—severely underutilized.”
    Huntley’s research has been rigorous, and he has appeared at NEB hearings in the capacity of intervenor, commenter and observer. He has assembled data—names, dates, and destinations—on crude oil tankers from 1974 to the present using various sources: the Pacific Pilotage Authority, Port of Vancouver annual reports, Trans Mountain submissions to the National Energy Board, a document ironically known as CRED (Conversations for Responsible Economic Development) published in 2013, and AIS (Automatic Identification System) with navigational tracking software like Vesselfinder. With these he has done that indispensable form of research called “ground-truthing,” i.e., observing first-hand which tankers use the terminal, where they are heading, and whether they leave loaded or empty.
    It should strike anyone as strange that this information has to be assembled by a retired physics professor instead of the pipeline owner, the Government of Canada, to substantiate the business case for buying a $4.5-billion pipeline that requires a further $9.3 billion for expansion, including that of the Westridge Terminal. It seems the government relied on Kinder Morgan’s own business case, which was prepared by Neil K. Earnest of Muse Stancil, a Texas oil and gas consultancy. Earnest provided no evidence for his claim that there was “almost non-existent” access to Asian markets—probably because there is no such evidence. Yet the Government of Canada seems to have bought that.
    The Westridge Terminal is currently capable of loading over 100 Aframax or 200 Panamax tankers per year. So far this year, the rate is only one per month. And on average, only 30 to 40 tankers a year are loaded, with virtually all of them heading to California, according to Huntley’s research. He notes, “It has been rare for Kinder Morgan to exceed 50 percent of [Westridge’s] loading capacity, and in 2016 and 2017 it was using less than 15 percent of its loading capacity.”
    The capacity of the current Trans Mountain Pipeline is 300,000 barrels per day. About 55,000 stays in BC, refined for BC usage. About 170,000 barrels per day—over half of the current capacity—heads south via the Puget Sound Pipeline to four refineries in Washington State. (Some of the refined products are sold back to BC.) Reportedly, the US is interested in bringing in a lot more this way. In an April 2019 podcast interview, the CEO of the new Trans Mountain Crown agency, Ian Anderson, said that new capacity of the expanded pipeline might be soaked up by markets in BC, Washington State or California. He admitted he did not have contracts requiring shipping in tankers. “I’ve got contracts to move barrels down my pipeline, but those could go to different places, not necessarily over water. So the market will decide how many ships move,” said Anderson. The oft-quoted—and for many coastal citizens, worrisome—34 bitumen-laden tankers per month plying coastal waters apparently refers to the maximum physical capacity of the terminal once expanded from its one berth to three.
    Another researcher, a 32-year veteran of the Geological Survey of Canada, scientist J.David Hughes, has shown that historically there has been no appreciable price differential between what oil commands from North America versus Asia, making the main case for expansion seem dubious. As Earnest’s report for Kinder Morgan put it, TMX “enables Canadian crude oil producers [access to] higher-priced Pacific Basin markets.” He projected Asian markets would pay $5–8 more per barrel from 2018 to 2038. Hughes, however, writes “the price in the Far East is $1–3 per barrel lower, plus the transport costs via TMX and tankers will be at least $2 per barrel higher to Asia. Hence building the expansion would mean a loss of $3–5 per barrel compared to shipping oil via new pipelines that will be built long before TMX.”
    In a recent article, Hughes explains there is a pipeline bottleneck due to the 376 percent growth in oil sands production since 2000, but that “the Line 3 and Keystone XL pipelines…will provide double the export capacity of TMX before its earliest completion date and yield higher prices on the US Gulf Coast compared to the Asian markets that TMX is allegedly being built to access.” Huntley notes, “If there were higher-priced Asian markets, the tankers would be going there.” He writes, “The existing pipeline and Westridge terminal are capable of supplying world markets with far more oil than they have been doing, at least since 2014.”
    From Trans Mountain’s perspective, one of their most strategic errors was locating a pipeline terminus on the same mountain as a university community of over 20,000 residents. There are a lot of smart people living on that mountain who like facts—starting with biochemistry professor Lynn Quarmby, who successfully led the first challenge to Kinder Morgan back in 2014, and Gordon Dunnett, a retired structural engineer who released a report on the high risk of a catastrophic fire to the 66-year-old storage tanks in the event of an earthquake, and the failure of Kinder Morgan to adequately assess them for failure. There’s also John Clague, professor emeritus at SFU, emeritus scientist for the Geological Survey of Canada, and past president of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of the Province of BC, whose work substantiates the lack of risk assessment. Huntley and these other academic heavyweights are just some of those providing contradictory evidence to claims made by the company and government—evidence which has been underreported by the mainstream media. Vancouver Sun reporting has “bordered on nonsense,” says Huntley, as do op-eds by industry shills like Stewart Muir from Resource Works, a PR arm of the resource sector.
    But if facts aren’t guiding the process, then what is? Huntley answers: “Politics and money.” If there is no plausible business case, what company is going to invest in the expansion, unless it is heavily subsidized by the taxpayer? Currently, the pipeline and some or all of the associated costs are being paid for out of the Canada Account, which allows the federal government to make large investments in higher-risk ventures if they are deemed in the national interest.
    In April 2019, the international Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) produced a report characterizing the project as “built on quicksand and clear as mud” with “no full accounting of ongoing operations” (see http://ieefa.org). It states: “The government has an obligation to tell its citizens how much the Trans Mountain Pipeline Project is costing.”
    Perhaps with the October federal election coming, Canadians will demand such answers. But the IEEFA report also notes that getting answers might prove difficult: “The Canadian government has already routed payments to fund and develop the pipeline through a maze of government agencies with different missions, reporting mechanisms and accounting standards.”
    The other question is: What exactly is in the national interest?
    Email huntley@sfu.ca for David Huntley’s report on tankers at the Westridge Marine Terminal.
    Briony Penn is an award-winning writer of creative nonfiction books including the prize-winning The Real Thing: the Natural History of Ian McTaggart Cowan, and most recently, Stories from the Magic Canoe with Wa’xaid (Cecil Paul).

    Stephen Hume
    September 2019
    The logic of a watershed, including development and forestry’s role in its demise, is playing out sadly in the Cowichan Valley.
     
    A NEAR-SILENT CURRENT SLIPS THROUGH WILLOW RUN. The jade-green swirl of eddies and back-eddies causes darker reflections of trees to ripple in the August glare. Here and there, the slick surface boils over a hidden boulder, or abruptly sucks down with a wet slurp into some bottom declivity.
    I’ve been coming to the Cowichan River for more than 60 years. It never fails to offer instruction in the mysterious, miraculous, astonishingly complex interconnectedness of the natural world.
     

    Stephen Hume looks over fast water on the Cowichan River in 2004, just before a cycle of recurring summer droughts began to affect summer flows
     
    For example, running counter to the visible river is a second, invisible stream. Comprised of air, it’s evident only by a rustling passage through dangling willow leaves. It flows uphill and upstream, graced occasionally by a gleam of dancing thistledown or a wisp of cottonwood fluff. Every river has an atmospheric doppelgänger ghosting in the opposite direction and pulsing cooler air from the ocean up the veins and capillaries of the watershed. Rivers are not just segments of perception, they are continuums; they connect the sky above the mountains where they rise to the deep sediments of the marine environment where they empty.
    Down the centre line of the watercourse, shining through a narrow opening in the forest canopy, a band of brilliant blue sky lays down the image of a third river. It manifests as silken light. Sudden shafts illuminate the slow pools and faster water, highlighting the riffles with a palette of transparencies as the river of liquid slips beneath the river of light. That light brings life to the river, to the aquatic plants and insects that support all the higher forms. It’s the seasonal cosmic switch that turns the deciduous riparian cover on and off.
    Beneath the mirrored light is yet another river, this one tangible, tactile, comprised of water-worn cobbles and smaller, smoother pebbles. It mumbles and grumbles its way imperceptibly seaward. It, too, has its back-eddies. Exposed flanks of gravel emerge from riverside shallows where they drag more slowly along the banks than does the submerged flow in the main current.
    And there’s a fifth river here. It, too, is hidden. A river of groundwater flowing parallel to the main stream but slithering beneath it like some dark salamander easing through the seams of fractured bedrock below the gravel.
    All rivers simultaneously inhabit these multiple identities. Most of us see only the one we want to see—the one that serves us best.
    In the Cowichan’s case, many see only the main current. Once it provided a chute for log drives, now it delivers 120 million cubic metres of water to a pulp mill that provides 500 local jobs (and 5,500 elsewhere in BC). It dilutes urban sewage effluent. It irrigates farmers’ bountiful fields; offers pools to swimmers; provides a route for canoes, kayaks, the drift boats of angling guides, and the inner tubes of those content with a languid float. It’s also habitat for the fish that bring anglers from around the world.
    If we cast dry flies, however, the river of air instructs us which insects are in hatch and which pattern to use. Or, if considering a well, we look to the groundwater that we can tap. Others look to the gravel that can be mined for construction aggregate.
    These many-faced reaches of the upper Cowichan River provide prime spawning habitat for chinook and coho salmon and elusive steelhead. For brown, rainbow and cutthroat trout.
    But water is dangerously low again this August, following the hottest July in recorded history. Half our summers in the last 20 years have yielded drought—a compelling signal of the “new normal” imposed by global warming. The exposed, sun-bleached flanks of gravel bars bake in the sun. The river narrows. Side channels dwindle to brackish puddles.
     

    A tributary of the Cowichan—sensitive trout and salmon habit—gone dry
     
    And so, another hot, dry season. Another bout of nail-biting angst in the Cowichan Valley for anglers, conservationists, householders, recreational users, mill workers and civic governments, as British Columbia’s blue-ribbon heritage river once again threatens to run dry.
    River flows are regulated by a one-metre-high weir at the outlet from Cowichan Lake into the river. The weir, built in 1957, is designed to hold back the water which floods into the lake all winter. This permits summer releases to maintain a flow during dry months, sufficient to sustain fish populations, provide water to the Catalyst pulp mill at Crofton, and dilute sewage discharges at Duncan. Any recreational use comes after these priorities.
     

    The 62-year-old weir, designed before global warming reduced flows
     
    The optimum flow is 25 cubic metres per second. The minimum flow for sustaining fish populations is seven cubic metres per second. That’s the nominal target. But with a prolonged dry spring and early summer, flows fell below that as early as June. By late July, they hovered around five cubic metres per second, and occasionally dipped to 4.5. If the flow dwindles to 4.3 cubic metres per second, the mill shuts down, affecting not just jobs but $20 million in annual tax revenue and the $1 billion a year it contributes to the provincial economy.
    There’s a scheme for pumping water over the weir to provide the minimum flow. Counter-arguments arise: it’s a false economy that simply delays the inevitable, trading one deficit against another, robbing Peter to pay Paul. Lowering the lake will exacerbate problems for fish stocks—a unique, endangered lamprey, for example, might be seriously threatened, triggering federal species-at-risk protections.
    Fishing guides, their double-ended skiffs beached, have already spent days desperately rescuing salmon and trout fry stranded in drying puddles where side-channels of the Cowichan River once ran. They scooped them up in buckets and carried them to the diminishing main stem of the river. Not surprising, since freshwater angling contributes $100 million a year to the Island’s economy.
    Tributaries supplying Cowichan Lake were dry by early August. Meade Creek looked like a logging road rather than a critical salmon- and trout-rearing nursery. Side channels had weeds carpeting the bottom. Wardroper Creek was the same. None seemed worthy of the forlorn habitat signs designating them “sensitive trout and salmon habitat” and enjoining the public—perhaps “begging” is the better word—to “please protect our heritage.”
     
    IF MUNICIPAL AND PROVINCIAL AUTHORITIES let things continue as they have, there’s not likely to be much heritage left to protect. The river’s dry-weather woes are just one symptom in an array of problems whose solution will require a holistic imagination regarding the river, the lake, the surrounding watersheds, and their interconnected value.
    Assessed property values in Lake Cowichan rose 16.5 percent in 2019, three times the increase for assessment rates in Oak Bay. New residents are loving the place to death. They have now disturbed more than 30 percent of the shoreline. But it’s not just householders.
     

    The lure of idyllic surroundings in the midst of the natural beauty of Cowichan Lake and its river has brought development and the swimming rafts, boat docks and retaining walls that come with it
     
    Forestry accounts for another 48 percent of shoreline disturbance. Logging in the watershed occurs on cycles vastly shorter than originally envisaged. Forest management once called for logged areas not to be harvested again until replanted trees were at least 120 years old. The plan was to let second growth mature until it, too, became old growth. Automation, efficiency and markets brought pressure to harvest on half that cycle. And now, with insufficient wood supply a looming issue, the pressure is on to reduce the logging cycle to 40 years.
    Land held for working forest at lower tax rates, and then sold to developers who bid up value for desirable beach-front has sparked a property boom. Subdivisions now sprawl along lakefront once reserved for logging every 100 years.
    New householders strip riparian cover to improve views. They install boat docks (there are now 600 of them on the lake), groom natural beaches to remove natural imperfections, and then build concrete retaining walls and embed rip-rap to stabilize banks and control erosion. Wash from powerboats and fluctuating seasonal water levels wear away the modified foreshore once held in place by vegetation.
    Joe Saysell, a retired logger who’s lived on the Cowichan River for 70 years and is one of those fishing guides who goes out with a bucket to salvage trout and salmon fry, likens the process to death by a thousand cuts. Everybody, he says, reasonably wants to make their own small modification to the landscape for convenience or esthetics, or to increase market value, and few take heed of the unreasonable incremental impacts.
    “It all adds up,” Saysell says. “Cutting down willows whose roots stabilize the banks so you can have a better view. Taking rocks out of the bottom to create a swimming hole for your kids. Putting in a boat dock and then mooring a boat with a big motor that leaves a big wake. Each one another little nick. But after a while, all those little nicks add up, and you really start bleeding big time. Then, without knowing it, you discover you’ve cut an artery.”
     

    Retired logger and fishing guide Joe Saysell rescues stranded fry in a drying side channel of the Cowichan River
     
    The river, he says, is the small canary in the bigger coal mine shaped by climate change, population pressure, and a dithering failure of political will to address critical problems before they cascade into interconnected catastrophes. “The canary is still alive, but he’s really starting to gasp,” Saysell warns. “People don’t see things until they’ve already happened. They don’t see it until it’s too late.”
    There’s a high-tech analogy. We’re all flying along at 10 kilometres altitude in a spanking-new passenger jet. But back there in the cabin, some folks are pulling rivets from the fuselage for souvenirs. The aircraft is over-designed, it’s got many redundant safety systems. It can certainly withstand the pulling of a few rivets. But pull enough rivets and eventually you’ll come to the one that ensures the integrity of the whole complicated structure. Pull that rivet and the air frame disintegrates.
    So, what’s the rivet for the ecosystem of which the Cowichan River is just one part? Nobody knows. But, Saysell says, we should now be looking at every problem as though it could be the tipping point.
    “Look,” he says, “we used to have great steelhead runs into the Englishman River, the Qualicum River, the Nanaimo. Runs that went on year after year. Year after year they went up and down. Then they started going down just a tad more than they went up. Then one year there were none. They were just gone. Overnight. Just like that. I worry that we are going to lose the Cowichan the same way. This [river] is the gem of all gems in this province. And yet we dicker and dicker and dicker over what to do. Everything can only take so much. One day it’s just going to end.”
     
    AT 82, DAVID ANDERSON, the former federal fisheries minister, still looks the rangy, raw-boned athlete who won a silver medal in rowing at the 1960 Olympic Games. Loved and hated for his tough conservation policies, he arguably had the biggest impact for West Coast salmon of any fisheries minister before or since. He’s now a member of the Cowichan Watershed Board.
    Anderson, too, thinks solutions to problems facing the beleaguered ecosystem will be found in a holistic approach. That means, he says, having a mature discussion about the connections between logging in watershed headwaters and downstream problems which, in turn, can have serious implications for industry, municipal governments, and the general public. “We have to take a new look at forest management policies,” Anderson says.
    Saysell, once a logger himself, concurs. He recently wrote to the provincial government, raising concerns. None of the accelerating changes he’s witnessed in logging practice on private lands surrounding Cowichan Lake have been for the better.
    “I now see a complete destruction of our watershed, and especially the Cowichan River, all because of irresponsible headwater second-growth logging done on private forest land,” says Saysell. “The second growth on our mountains, especially in the Cowichan watershed, is being ‘mined’ at an unsustainable rate, and is being harvested 60 to 100 years too soon. Proper regulations would require all second growth to be as least 100 to 150 years old before it can be harvested.”
     

    Second-growth timber from forest surrounding Cowichan Lake stacked up at a log sort
     
    He argues that large stands of maturing old growth are crucial for the upper catchment basins of the 53 streams feeding into the watershed, because such forest creates a vast natural blotter. It absorbs rain and delays snowmelt, releasing it gradually throughout hotter, increasingly rain-free summers.
    As climate warms, scientists point out, weather extremes are amplified. The outlook for Vancouver Island is for wetter winters and drier summers. It’s estimated that summer rainfall into the watershed will decrease by up to 30 percent over the next 30 years, while most of the annual precipitation—less and less of it snow—will occur over a few winter months.
    Reducing or eliminating clear-cuts in upper watersheds reduces downslope erosion during heavy winter rains. More old growth creates a better-balanced flow of water into the lake, the river’s vast holding tank. Equally important, Saysell says, more old growth provides a mechanism for industry obtaining the same yield but with far less environmental impact.
    By allowing trees to mature for 150 years, he says, far less timber must be cut to produce the same quantity of superior quality wood. Thus, while maintaining wood supply, the erosion footprint is greatly reduced, lake and river hydrology are stabilized and made more sustainable, winter range for deer and elk are improved—and mature forests are larger carbon sinks, another way of mitigating global warming.
    Anderson, whose great-uncle was a fishing guide on the river a century ago—he used to pole his way upstream in a dugout canoe—says evidence of the impact of watershed logging shows up in the “yo-yo effect” of rapidly rising and falling lake levels following big rain events. Spikes in runoff erode hillsides, cause side-streams to blow out, spill silt into spawning beds, wash away fish eggs, undercut banks, and push torrents of gravel downstream.
    What’s the solution?
    First, Saysell says, the provincial government should intervene. It can end a decade of dithering by corporate, municipal and private interests regarding potential liability, and raise the weir at Cowichan Lake so it holds back more winter rain for summer release.
    It’s estimated that $10 million would cover the cost of raising and modernizing the weir, although other estimates say it could be done for as little as $3 million. In any event, considering that government spent $12.5 million on three traffic signs to tell drivers to slow down when it’s snowing, the amount required to save the river doesn’t seem excessive.
    By comparison, one bridge replacement in Victoria cost $105 million, a couple of local interchanges cost $120 million, and the regional district estimates a final overall cost of $275 million for upgrading bike routes to “a standard where cyclists of all ages and abilities will feel comfortable.”
     
    IN THE BIG PICTURE, perhaps the remaining second growth would be more valuable if it were never cut. The future of the Cowichan Valley is trending to tourism and away from resource extraction. Tourism has generated more than $200 billion in revenue over the last decade in BC, growing by an astonishing 41 percent. It brought more people to BC in 2018 than there are citizens, just over six million.
    Consider this example provided by the BC Chamber of Commerce: in 2012, there were plans to log 60 hectares of old-growth timber in a coastal cut block on the North Island. A wilderness kayaking camp was operating in the middle of a proposed clear-cut. The value of the logged timber was estimated at $3.6 million, but the trees could only be logged every 60 years. So, the timber was actually worth about $60,000 a year. The kayak enterprise, however, brought in about $416,000 a year. It operated every year. Over 60 years it would generate $24,960,000—about seven times the value of the timber. The trees were worth far more, left standing, for the kayak operation, the Chamber acknowledged, than logged.
    Does government have the right to impose logging standards and practices on private land? Well it does on mine. I must obtain a permit from the municipality to cut trees, even if I deem them a hazard. And it does on Anderson’s. He pointed to a number of Garry oak trees in his back yard that are strictly protected. Similar restrictions govern most small, private property owners.
    But Saysell points out that logging companies with timber holdings on private land are not subject to the same forest management policies as those with timber rights on public land. Under the Private Managed Forest Land Act, he says, such companies pay far lower taxes than other private land holders. This is purportedly an incentive to replant for future harvesting.
    The lower taxes nevertheless represent a subsidy. The public has a right, indeed an obligation, he says, to recover that subsidy, should the company decide to sell forest land for other purposes after logging it. If they sell forest land to developers, Saysell argues, “then they should be taxed at the higher land value [for housing] retroactively, right back to the time they first purchased the land.”
    “In my experience,” says Anderson, “if somebody takes the benefit of lower taxes, then the state has a say in management.”
    Saysell, the former faller, makes a cogent argument for imposing the same management practices, guided by environmental science and rigorous cost/benefit analysis, on both public and private forest land. “Government has to enact new regulations for private managed forest lands, especially for harvesting methods and annual cut rates that will have sufficient rules and laws in them to stop these unsustainable and irresponsible practices that are destroying our beautiful Cowichan River and Cowichan watershed.”
    Stephen Hume spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the North, BC and the Island. His byline has appeared in most major Canadian newspapers. He’s the author of nine books of poetry, natural history, history and literary essays.

    Leslie Campbell
    July 2019
    Victoria boasts one of the busiest water airports in the world—some think it’s too busy.
     
    IT’S QUITE UNUSUAL—and ambitious—to have an airport smack in the middle of any city, on water or land. According to Transport Canada, which runs the harbour aerodrome, “Victoria Harbour is Canada’s only certified water airport and port that is home to cruise ships, floatplanes, passenger ferries, recreational boaters and kayakers.” And don’t forget the big yachts in the new marina. Did you know Victoria is now the busiest port of call for cruise ships in Canada? Or that the airport has earned the title of Canada’s, and sometimes the world’s, busiest water airport, averaging 100 flight movements (take-offs or landings) a day?
     

    Floatplanes coming and going on the busy Victoria Harbour Airport (Photo by David Broadland)
     
    As Transport Canada’s graphic depiction of the harbour’s transportation avenues shows (below), all of the traffic in the harbour is occurring in a small space, one surrounded by dense development of the waterfront, including hotels and thousands of condos. Note the pinch-point between Songhees Point and Laurel Point, a narrow channel that all vessels, including aircraft, must squeeze through to get into or out of the Inner Harbour. And notice that airport runways are superimposed on the lane for boats over 20 metres in length.
     

    Transport Canada’s “Traffic Scheme” for the Public Port of Victoria
     
    The airport might even get busier if recently-announced plans to convert Harbour Air’s fleet to electric motors come to pass. Harbour Air is the main airline operating out of the harbour, with flights to downtown Vancouver, South Vancouver (YVR), Pitt Meadows, and Whistler. With over 40 aircraft, it is possibly the largest seaplane airline in the world. It has won numerous awards over the years, including Canada’s Best Managed Companies (for 10 years), and Business of the Year in Victoria. Its founder and owner, Greg McDougall, was just inducted into Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame. It claims to be the world’s first fully carbon-neutral airline (accomplished through an offset program). And now it plans to become the first commercial airline to be powered by electric propulsion.
    When electrification of its fleet is complete, flight costs could come down as much as 70-80 percent, according to Roei Ganzarski of magniX, which is developing the new engines. If flight costs were reduced, it follows that fares might come down, too—certainly the offset charges would be eliminated. That would likely translate into greater demand—from tourists, business people, government employees, and even for freight. Typical fares now are over $200 to Vancouver, but imagine a $100 fare: the 30-minute trip could become enticingly convenient and affordable to a lot more folks.
    When I suggest such a possibility to Harbour Air President Randy Wright, he said, “Fuel costs will come down, but it will take a while to convert the entire fleet. There is also a significant capital cost involved in this refit. As a result, at this point, it’s difficult to say what the impact will be on fares.” He also doesn’t think flight numbers will increase.
    Residents with ringside seats on the harbour have expressed concerns for many years about the airport’s safety, noise and exhaust fumes. While Harbour Air’s electrification plans—if they are carried out—will eventually help on some fronts, the safety concerns will not go away, whether flight numbers increase or remain the same.
     
    IN THE EARY 1990s, when construction of condos began on the Songhees, floatplane flights numbered about 11,000 annually. Though they have ranged as high as 34,000, they’ve been hovering around 25,000 in recent years. (Helicopters not included—they add another 9,000 or so.)
    In 2000, the harbour aerodrome was certified as an airport by Transport Canada, which regulates the Port of Victoria—basically from Ogden Point to the Selkirk Trestle Bridge. In 2008, the City of Victoria, in response to growing citizen concerns about safety, noise and emissions, set up a committee to look at the airport. In the minutes for a meeting that included representatives from Transport Canada, the anger of residents comes through loud and clear.
    One resident, an experienced pilot with over 1600 hours of flight time, including in floatplanes, stated: “it’s an accident waiting to happen…Any experienced pilot is astonished. If it was grass between the shores there’d be no airport.” He and others commented that they had given up complaining because of the apparent futility. As one person put it, “Complaining to Transport Canada is a big black hole, nothing happens.”
    Another argued, “There has to be some limitation [of flight numbers] and some people think the carrying capacity has long been exceeded.” A Songhees resident described how “on a typical day I wipe off my balcony and the rag is filthy [from plane exhaust].”
    That committee’s final report in 2009 made clear that the City had no real power over the airport. It could ask Transport Canada to play nice, but that was about it. Among the things it “urged” Transport Canada to do were conduct an independent aeronautical study, and study the impact of noise and air quality.
    No such studies have been done.
    Former Councillor Pam Madoff, who chaired the committee on the airport, describes the issue as “one of the more frustrating files to have dealt with” over the course of her 25 years on council—largely because of Transport Canada’s “lack of responsiveness and a level of disinterest that was quite extraordinary.”
    Another key “urging” of her committee was to finalize the Water Airport Regulations and Standards, after adjusting them to address “quality of life factors and the dense urban environment.” The regulations have never been adjusted or formalized—they have been in draft form since 2000.
    Songhees resident Susan Woods has shown me an almost comical two-decade record of annual promises from Transport Canada that the final regulations, along with a 30-day public comment period, were just around the corner.
    The continuing delay led Victoria City Council, in July 2017, to pass a resolution to ask “the Government of Canada move forward with publication of Canadian Aviation Regulations and Standards for the Victoria Harbour Water Airport, to allow for public comment…and provide certainty for residents, operators and passengers.” In May 2018, after a motion by Councillor Ben Isitt, who noted the years of “runaround” by Transport Canada, the City sent another request for the regulations.
    Madoff believes the reasons for the delay—19 years now—is the legal requirement that the regulations and standards will be subject to a 30-day public notice and thereby be held up to scrutiny—scrutiny, it’s implied, that could upset the airport applecart.
    Marg Gardiner, president of the James Bay Neighbourhood Association, has been studying the harbour and the airport for decades. She uses words like “shameful” and “depressing” to describe how neglectful both the City and Transport Canada have been in addressing and protecting local residents from unhealthy levels of exhaust and noise, as well as potential accidents. She believes the City encouraged development around the harbour knowing about the liveability issues around a busy airport. She says it’s only through citizen action that airport traffic hasn’t increased more over the years: “It’s a political game.” Referring to the City’s committee and its recommendations, she adds, “There was lots of talk, but in the end nothing…no one demands anything from Transport Canada.”
     
    HARBOUR MASTER MARIAH McCOOEY, who also acts as the airport manager, assures me that, over the years, Transport Canada has developed measures to ensure all harbour users can coexist safely. Key among these measures is “a detailed traffic scheme, which has been in place for almost 20 years. It includes runways, lanes, and different zones that keep traffic flowing for all the diverse users.” She admits, “From shore it looks a bit random, but it’s actually well organized.”
     

    Victoria Harbour Master Mariah McCooey (Photo be Leslie Campbell)
     
    Besides wall-to-wall windows on the water side of her Fisherman’s Wharf office, McCooey, who holds a Masters in Maritime Management, has a number of large high-resolution video screens providing views from 23 cameras around the harbour. The Coast Guard has access to these videos as well. The data is kept for 120 days so recent incidents can be reviewed if necessary.
    Victoria Harbour Airport operates under a “Prior Permission Required” system: not just anyone can land their plane. All pilots flying into the harbour airport do special studies and take an exam, McCooey tells me.
    NAV Canada provides “flight services” including up-to-date weather and water conditions for pilots, but, unlike at larger airports, no air traffic control (though NAV Canada’s tower on the harbour looks like an air traffic control tower at a regular airport, it isn’t). Pilots can communicate with NAV’s flight service advisors and with each other.
     

    NAV Canada facility at Shoal Point looks like an air traffic control tower—but isn’t. (Photo by Leslie Campbell)
     
    McCooey oversees on-the-water patrollers—a couple in the winter and seven in the summer. The biggest safety issue, she says, are “transient” boat operators who don’t know harbour rules. Towards their enlightenment, she and the patrollers give out 2,500 brochures over the summer. These include the map, with its highlighted warning telling boaters to stay away from runways.
    McCooey is not worried about the amount of traffic. “We have a lot of coordination [among partners], with lots of safety meetings…A lot of top professionals are looking at the harbour to make sure it works and is safe,” she says, mentioning representatives from NAV, the Coast Guard, City of Victoria, and the RCMP. All the partners meet every six months to make sure everyone’s in the loop about any developments and issues. There’s also a database that includes all reports of infringements that is available to all the partners. “It’s pretty fantastic,” says McCooey. Every incident in which a runway is crossed, or there’s been a misuse of boat lanes, is included and analyzed. There were 700 such non-serious incidents last year, but no real accidents. The incidents are recorded, says McCooey, as they do pose some risk. “We’re always asking what we can do to reduce it.”
    Regular users, she says, are well-versed in proper procedures. Tug operators know they can go “right up the middle,” for instance. The whale-watching boats also use the middle lanes. Harbour ferries have to regularly traverse runways, so are heavily involved in safety meetings, she notes, telling me in all, there are 120,000 ferry movements per year. Each ferry has a two-way radio. A few years back Randy Wright described the arrangements as “working like a Swiss watch.”
    Still, there are barges coming and going and there will be, eventually, some mega-yachts. As well, the Coho and other big ships have to use the airport runway. It seems an incredible amount to choreograph.
     
    SUSAN WOODS, who lives in a condo on the Songhees and has a masters degree in marine science, is not reassured by the Harbour Master’s confidence. Her main concern is the way planes are allowed to fly close to residential buildings on the north side of the harbour. (Full disclosure: my mother lived in a Songhees condo for 24 years.)
    The allowed distance from the edge of the take-off and landing areas to the nearest building is 50 metres. She believes it should be more like that of other airports: 300 metres. She notes, “In the event of a problem with the aircraft, strong gusting winds, momentary inattention by the pilot, or some other mishap, this 50-metre gap would be closed by an approaching plane in about one second.” Something Transport Canada calls “vertical transition zoning” has been allowed to get around the fact that buildings poke into the usual amount of transitional surface required for a safe runway zone. In a document online, Transport Canada states this type of zoning “is intended to provide relief for small aerodromes in mountainous regions, used in VMC [visual meterological conditions], where river valleys, etc. are the only sites available. At other locations an aeronautical study and Headquarters’ approval is required.”
    Woods also believes pilots should be prohibited from taking off or landing while there are obstacles (i.e. watercraft) present anywhere on the take-off and landing areas.
    Marg Gardiner, who lives in a condo across the harbour in James Bay, agrees, lamenting that runways have been superimposed on the marine arterial highway used by the Coho and other large boats, which means that the unobstructed airspace for the landing and taking off of aircraft—a requirement of other airports—is not being met.
    While there have been no accidents in many years, Gardiner says, “There have been close calls.” She’s seen near-misses between aircraft and buildings or watercraft. She has also seen and reported incidents in which, during rough weather, taxiing planes seemed to lose control and come perilously close to fuel docks.
    Woods says the only incident she’s witnessed (and reported) recently was one in which “a Twin Otter landed eastbound on operating area Alpha, and the pilot had to use probably-maximum reverse thrust in order to attempt to complete the landing prior to crossing east of the line joining the N and S markers. However, it appeared that the plane had neither completed its landing nor was at or below five knots before crossing the line.”
    Woods and her fellow Songhees residents have pressed for years for an aeronautical study to identify the deviations and the remediation needed for airport safety—one conducted by a qualified, professional, independent consultant. To no avail.
     
    AND THEN THERE'S THE NOISE. Harbour Air’s eventual shift to electric planes will definitely help. Wright predicts, “The electric planes will be about 75 percent quieter.”
    Meanwhile—and it could be a long while— it’s noisy, as those living on the harbour or walking the Westsong Walkway can attest. “Especially during the busy summer period,” says Woods, “windows and doors have to remain closed due to conversation-stopping noise and the noxious fumes which accumulate inside homes.”
    A City of Victoria presentation from October 2008 suggested that noise problems were primarily due to propeller noise—not just engines—and that they were “exacerbated by proximity of aircraft to shoreline buildings.” (What Gardiner refers to as a concrete canyon over water.) I found a 1995 US study of seaplane noise that stated: “The principal factor in the intensity of seaplane noise is first the type of seaplane…, next the tip speed of the propeller (RPM’s), followed by the angle and distance that can be kept between the seaplane and the listener, and lastly the power setting (throttle).” It stated that a Cessna 206 with 300 hp engine and three-bladed propeller has a maximum of 88 dBA.
    The only noise study done by Transport Canada dates back to 2000. It found that average noise was “just below acceptable level,” and acknowledged a problem does exist. Single-event levels during one three-hour period in the afternoon exceeded 85 dBA 14 times, Woods noted. With more than 100 flight movements a day in summer, such numbers don’t seem surprising. (City noise bylaws do not apply, given the federal jurisdiction.)
    Noise is more than a nuisance; it’s a recognized health hazard, increasing stress, the risk of hypertension, and ischaemic heart disease. It also has negative effects on sleep, communication, performance and behaviour, reading and memory acquisition, and mental health.
    When I raised the question of noise with Transport Canada, Simon Rivet, a senior advisor with its Communications Group, listed the noise mitigation strategies that have been implemented: “We only allow three-bladed turbo-prop aircraft, which is the quietest version of a floatplane in existence. Best practices include the reduction of reverse thrust when landing, with sufficient room to allow for a natural slowdown, rather than having to put it in ‘reverse,’ which is quite noisy.” He also noted that rules around runway use dramatically reduce noise levels: the majority of take-offs are from Bravo runway in the Outer Harbour; while the preferred runway for landings is eastbound on Alpha, “because it also minimizes the amount of idling and manoeuvring on the surface.” Finally, he noted that no flights are allowed before 7am.
    But with no noise-level studies in two decades, how do they know if these measures have been successful, or to what degree? Harbour residents are still finding it very loud. And quieter electric planes could be a long way off.
    Gardiner feels that until things change, all prospective harbour condo buyers should be warned about the noise. As I talk with her on the phone, the Coho blasts its horn in the background.
     
    UNTIL SEAPLANES CHANGE TO E-PLANES, the city’s booming core population means that more people will notice the noxious fumes around the harbour. Susan Woods believes “unburned or partially combusted fuel from floatplane operations at Victoria Harbour Airport result in volatile organic compounds and suspended particulate matter being spewed into the surrounding environment, including the walkways and residences…The sooty, oily film which begins to coat our windows, soon after they’ve been washed, is a visible testament as to the volume of particulate matter polluting our air each and every day.” (I too have seen the greasy film that coats windows on the Songhees side.)
    Transport Canada’s last study, based on 1998 activity levels, found that VOCs being released into the harbour came from both motorboats and planes. While more VOCs were produced by motorboats (including whale-watching vessels), aircraft emissions, because of their dispersal in the air, tend to affect humans more.
    Many floatplanes run on “avgas”—a petroleum fuel with lead added to it. Lead was phased out of gasoline for automobiles decades ago because of its serious health effects. Yet small planes with piston engines still use it. Wright assured Focus that none of Harbour Air planes flying to Victoria Harbour use leaded gas. However, Transport Canada’s Rivet told me there is no requirement for planes to use unleaded gasoline. So other planes flying into the harbour likely do use it. Rivet also said the airport has no air-quality monitoring program. No one really knows just how bad the air around the harbour is these days.
    Beyond the health of locals, of course, is that of the planet. All carbon-burning craft play starring roles in warming the planet. Aviation, however, states the David Suzuki Foundation, “has a disproportionately large impact on the climate system. It accounts for four to nine percent of the total climate change impact of human activity.” The industry has been “expanding rapidly in part due to regulatory and taxing policies that do not reflect the true environmental costs of flying.” Travelling by air “has a greater climate impact per passenger kilometre, even over longer distances. It’s also the mode of freight transport that produces the most emissions,” the Foundation states on its website.
    Harbour Air has worked hard to be as green as possible under these circumstances. Its Victoria terminal has a green roof and solar panels. Most importantly, since 2007, it has had an impressive carbon offset program. All emissions of the company, 97 percent coming directly from seaplane fuel use, are “offset” through Offsetters Clean Technology, a company that specializes in both calculating carbon emissions and finding appropriate projects to invest in—both regional and international—that reduce carbon emissions. Harbour Air has information about the projects online and makes customers aware of the offsets by showing their cost on ticket receipts. It also tells them that a return flight to Vancouver produces 87 kg CO2-equivalent per passenger. Nevertheless, Harbour Air’s overall emissions have crept up over the years to 12,793 tonnes CO2-equivalent in 2017.
    While offsets may be better than nothing, critics have argued they are a bit of a shell game, allowing people to rationalize their carbon-intensive habits rather than changing them. Most experts agree they are not a substitute for directly reducing emissions, given the urgency of tackling climate change. University of Ottawa Professor, and President of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada, Ryan Katz-Rosene, told The Georgia Straight an honest definition of “carbon offset” might be something like, “a framework to enable people to continue to produce carbon dioxide and to absolve themselves of responsibility when they might not even work in the first place and, if they do work, are things that should be happening anyway.”
    So the Harbour Air electrification moves are potentially very good news for those concerned about climate change and air quality. (Unfortunately, there are no such technological fixes foreseen for larger planes.)
    How soon will Harbour air electrify its planes? Wright says, “We plan to have an eplane ready for flight testing in late 2019. But it will take a while for Transport Canada regulations to catch up. We anticipate that it will be a multi-year effort to convert the entire fleet.”
    Judging from the 19 years Transport Canada has taken, so far, to finalize the airport regulations, we may have a long time to wait for those electric planes.
     

    A shop mock-up of how magniX’s aero’s electric propulsion system would be adapted to a Cessna aircraft
     
    Marg Gardiner says she’ll believe it when she sees it. She’s seen too many failures along such lines, including aborted plans to electrify the buses going to and from cruise ships. Even if Harbour Air’s plan is realized, and electric planes reduce both health and environmentally- damaging emissions, as well as some or most aircraft noise, “it doesn’t address the safety issue at all,” says Gardiner.
    On that front, Transport Canada needs to step up, do the aeronautical studies, and finalize the standards and regulations for the airport that it has long promised.
    No one is suggesting the airport be closed or moved out of the harbour. Most agree that it provides a valued service and brings economic benefits to Victoria. But it is publicly owned. The private airlines pay nothing in port fees. Taxpayers pay for it all—the Transport Canada managers, the Harbour Master, the on-the-water patrollers and their boats and brochures, along with the frustrations, possible health issues, and benefits that come with having an airport in the middle of Victoria’s harbour. They understandably want to be assured of adequate safety measures and quality of life.
    Editor Leslie Campbell misses her regular visits to her mom’s old condo. The view of our busy, beautiful harbour is hard to beat.

    David Broadland
    July 2019
    Records obtained by FOI leave little doubt that Mayor Helps and Mayor Desjardins hid allegations of sexual harassment raised against Chief Elsner.
     
    AFTER CLAIMING FOR MONTHS that critical communications between Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps and Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins in late 2015 had been deleted, the Victoria and Esquimalt Police Board released a heavily redacted 442-page response to Focus in late May.
    We had requested the communications between the two mayors as they navigated their way through their investigation of allegations against then-Police Chief Frank Elsner.
    Our request covered the three months during which their investigation took place—September, October and November, 2015—and one month after that investigation ended. The records released to Focus show Helps and Desjardins were aware by mid-October 2015 that additional allegations made by female employees of VicPD against Elsner—of sexual harassment and bullying—had been found by the mayors’ hired investigator, Vancouver lawyer Patricia Gallivan. Yet these allegations were so well-hidden by the mayors that even after Police Complaint Commissioner Stan Lowe demanded all records related to the investigation, the women’s complaints at first remained unnoticed by OPCC.
     

     
    The allegations of sexual harassment against Elsner weren’t the most serious misconduct found during the mayors’ investigation. Within 10 days of demanding the records Gallivan created during her investigation, Lowe’s office had used those records to identify two of the three most serious cases of misconduct that would eventually lead Judge Carol Baird Ellan to decide Elsner warranted a lifetime dismissal from policing: misleading a person material to the investigation, and misleading the internal investigator. From the information in Gallivan’s report, Lowe’s office also determined that Elsner had contacted witnesses during the investigation. This later led to a third serious finding of misconduct, that Elsner had attempted to procure a false statement.
    Baird Ellan likened Elsner’s conduct during the mayors’ internal investigation to “criminal obstruction of justice.”
    Yet by the time the mayors abruptly ended their investigation with a confidential letter of reprimand quietly placed in Elsner’s file, they had apparently made little effort to understand what Gallivan’s report actually contained.
    Perhaps recognizing the serious procedural misconduct Gallivan had discovered was beyond the skills normally possessed by municipal politicians. But the allegations of sexual harassment, hidden from Lowe even after his office had demanded the investigation’s records, were a different matter.
    One might reasonably expect two female mayors to be especially sensitive to sexual harassment allegations. Why didn’t Helps and Desjardins pursue what Gallivan had found? According to Lowe, by October 20, 2015, “numerous witnesses had made allegations of bullying and harassment” against Elsner. The external investigation, which replaced the mayors’ investigation, considered allegations made by seven women. Yet the mayors have denied they interfered in the investigation or covered up the allegations of harassment against Elsner.
    Release of Lowe’s Summary Informational Report on the external investigation was delayed for over two years by Elsner’s efforts in the courts to quash the second investigation. When the report finally appeared—during the 2018 civic election campaign—Helps claimed, without providing any evidence, that Lowe had defamed her. Her claim was amplified by the Times-Colonist, which did little other reporting on the external investigation’s findings. Focus waited until after the election to file an FOI for the mayors’ communications in the hope that the mayors’ own records could confirm either Helps’ or Lowe’s account. So what did we find?
    It is unclear from the records provided to Focus when, or from whom, the mayors first heard of the harassment allegations. They show that on October 15, 2015, Desjardins emailed Helps and suggested that new allegations of harassment and bullying would require a second investigation: “I have looked into process for HR complaints and or WCB harassment procedure and process for further understanding of options to bring to the board or for us to decide on. In reality it is again an independent investigator and provision of a report to us. I would like Pat to do this if able and or to engage someone to do this asap if she feels she is ‘tainted’ by her process. I have someone in mind.”
    Half an hour later, Helps responded, “I am happy to have Pat do this. I regret that we have to do this at all.”
    The records released to Focus only suggest why the mayors changed their minds. Minutes after Desjardins had emailed Helps, she also wrote to the mayors’ legal counsel, Vancouver lawyer Marcia McNeil. McNeil emailed back a few hours later. The contents of McNeil’s communications with the mayors are protected by solicitor-client privilege, so we don’t know exactly what her advice to them was. But we can deduce part of that advice from the mayors’ subsequent response. Desjardins wrote back to McNeil and Helps: “I have an appt with him tomorrow and was going to check in anyway. Thanks for this.” Helps then replied to Desjardins, “Thanks to you both. Barb, happy to check in with you after you meet with the Chief tomorrow...”
    The rest of what Helps wrote is redacted, but no matter. McNeil appears to have advised the mayors to seek Elsner’s response to the additional allegations, and Desjardins confirmed she was going to meet with the “Chief” the next day.
    We can presume that she met with Elsner, but we don’t know what transpired. In the email record released to Focus, there are no later references made by the mayors to the sexual harassment allegations. Did Desjardins’ idea of a second investigation disappear because Elsner persuaded her that the allegations were untrue? Did Desjardins subsequently persuade Helps that Elsner didn’t do what he was accused of doing? The answers to these questions seem self-evident given what followed.
    This turned out to be a critical decision point in the course of the Elsner investigation. Had the mayors carried through on their initial, short-lived agreement to conduct a second investigation, and presuming that Gallivan had then discovered all the claims of sexual harassment that were later found by the external investigation, public acknowledgment of the women’s claims wouldn’t have taken nearly three years. As well, Elsner could have been fired for legal just cause and $1.1 million in eventual costs to Victoria and Esquimalt taxpayers could have been avoided.
    This was a serious misjudgment by the two mayors. But the record of what followed shows that once the mayors had dug that hole for themselves, they kept digging.
    The record of their communications shows that the mayors tried to maintain control of the course of the investigation—and its outcome—by providing little or no information to both Lowe’s office and the Victoria and Esquimalt Police Board. This is made evident by a letter sent by Police Board member Peter Ryan to Desjardins on October 27, over two weeks after Desjardins and Helps were given advice by McNeil on the additional allegations against Elsner.
    In that letter, Ryan, a former police officer, writing on behalf of the board’s governance committee, expressed concern that the Police Board had been “advised of a disciplinary matter involving the Chief Constable in only the vaguest of terms.” (Desjardins testified in a sworn affidavit that the board was told early on that Elsner “could be having a relationship with a woman.”) Ryan then wrote, “The Committee respectfully requests that you promptly provide the Board with copies of any completed ‘Complaint Forms’ giving rise to any internal discipline matters as defined in the Police Act that pertain to our Chief Constable.”
    Ryan’s letter, copied to the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner, led to an intervention by Deputy Commissioner Rollie Woods. In a letter to McNeil, Woods wrote, “One of [Lowe’s] conditions to agree that the matter could be handled [by the mayors] was that the Police Board members be fully informed. If the [mayors] maintain there is no need to inform the full board, [Lowe] is going to revisit his decision.”
    As far as Woods and OPCC were aware at that moment, “fully informed” meant telling the Board about the initial allegations against Elsner: that he had engaged in an inappropriate relationship with the wife of a VicPD member and that Elsner had improperly used police social media accounts. But Helps, Desjardins and McNeil had also not informed OPCC (or the Police Board) about the new allegations of sexual harassment and bullying.
    Pushed by Woods, Desjardins responded to Ryan’s dense, two-page letter noting: “We do not have details regarding the facts as the investigation has not yet concluded nor has a report been provided to us.”
    In fact, the two mayors had more details than they apparently knew what to do with.
    Ryan’s letter and OPCC’s intervention created another critical decision point at which the mayors could have reported the additional allegations to OPCC and the Police Board—but didn’t. Their secrecy was at odds with conditions Lowe had insisted on before agreeing to let the mayors conduct an internal investigation. Lowe described the basis under which he had allowed an internal investigation in his 2018 Summary Informational Report: “At the outset of my office’s dealings with the mayors and their legal counsel, there was a clear understanding among all concerned that if, during the course of the investigation, any information came to light about conduct by any police officer that may constitute misconduct, our office was to be informed...”
    The first part of that “clear understanding,” the any information aspect, has been disputed by Helps, who has told Focus, “We were authorized to deal only with the issues of whether Elsner had engaged in an inappropriate relationship with the wife of a VicPD member and whether Elsner had improperly used police social media accounts.”
    But in Lowe’s Summary Informational Report, he quotes at length a letter from McNeil to Gallivan, written in the early days of the investigation, outlining McNeil’s understanding of the mandate provided by OPCC for the mayors’ internal investigation. The letter was copied to Helps and Desjardins. Lowe used the letter as evidence that the mayors were made aware by McNeil that “your mandate is confined to issues related to any misconduct by Chief Elsner…” (Lowe underlined “any” for emphasis).
    The second aspect of Lowe’s agreement to allow an internal investigation, that his office was to be informed about any new allegations of misconduct, has never been addressed by the mayors.
    Ryan’s letter, and Wood’s subsequent intervention, should have been the moment the mayors informed the Police Board and the OPCC about the additional allegations. But that moment passed in stoney silence from Desjardins and Helps. It’s difficult not to come to the conclusion that the mayors were intent on keeping personal control of the investigation and its outcome, and if that meant ignoring Lowe’s stipulations, then they were willing to do that.
    Just over two weeks later, on November 16, 2015, Gallivan sent her “Preliminary Investigation Report” to the mayors. Gallivan’s full report has never been made public, but the covering letter for that report was released by Lowe’s office in September 2018 and was included in the records released to Focus.
    In that letter Gallivan told the mayors, in reference to the harassment and bullying allegations, “I understand that you are now considering how to address those allegations. As previously stated, should you wish to expand our mandate to include an investigation of those matters, in light of my schedule and given the need to deal with these matters expeditiously, I would need to engage the assistance of one of my partners to complete the investigation. I have discussed this matter with my partner Deborah Cushing and she advises that she would be able to set aside a week to conduct the witness interviews.”
    After that, aside from emails exchanged to set up a conference call between Helps, Desjardins, McNeil and Gallivan, there is no record in the documents released to Focus that indicates what the mayors did with Gallivan’s offer to investigate the allegations. But we know what happened from Lowe’s 2018 Summary Informational Report.
    Before giving you Lowe’s description of what the mayors did with Gallivan’s offer, it’s necessary to understand why and how he obtained records related to the mayors’ investigation. They weren’t proactively turned over to OPCC by the mayors. Following the mayors’ sudden termination of their investigation on December 3, 2015—an action that was hastened by rumours coming back to Desjardins that reporters were on the verge of confirming Elsner was being investigated—Lowe’s office confronted the mayors for having misled media by claiming no investigation was underway. When asked by a Global TV reporter the day after they ended the investigation if Elsner was being investigated, Helps had responded, “No. The Board has full confidence in our chief. He’s the best thing to happen to this town and Esquimalt for a long time.”
    Within minutes of the mayors’ misleading statements appearing in TV news reports, Deputy Commissioner Woods made a request to McNeil under the Police Act for “all records and any additional information in its entirety including all memos, notes, emails and any other relevant documents” related to the investigation. McNeil had no choice but to comply.
    So Lowe was able to determine—using documents obtained from the mayors’ records—what the mayors had done with Gallivan’s offer to investigate. In his Summary Informational Report he observed, “Despite receiving [Gallivan’s offer], the mayors chose not to expand the investigator’s mandate to include these allegations. On the contrary, the correspondence indicates that they instructed the investigator not to pursue those allegations or consider them in any respect in drafting the investigation report because they were ‘outside the scope of the investigator’s mandate.’”
    But that instruction conflicted with McNeil’s earlier description of Gallivan’s mandate as given to the mayors by OPCC: “your mandate is confined to issues related to any misconduct by Chief Elsner…”
    Lowe also noted that the copy of Gallivan’s investigation report sent to his office in response to the Police Act-mandated demand for records didn’t include the covering letter, which contained the only written reference to the allegations of sexual harassment and bullying. The implication was that the mayors were trying to hide from his office any evidence that these allegations had even been made. Helps has told Focus that an executive assistant had failed to include the covering letter following OPCC’s demand for records.
    One detail that Lowe’s Summary Informational Report did not include was the fact that soon after receiving Gallivan’s report, the mayors shared it with Elsner. They were required by the Police Act to do this. The Police Act also required them to share the report with any “complainant” mentioned in the investigation report. We know that employees of VicPD had made complaints to Gallivan, but the mayors did not provide the report to them. The Police Act also required them to “review the report and the evidence and records referenced in it.” If they had done that carefully, the evidence of the more serious misconduct—outlined above—should have propelled the mayors to OPCC for direction. The mayors were also required by the Police Act to inform OPCC of their “next steps” within 10 days of receiving Gallivan’s report. They also failed to do this. This omission confirms that they were unwilling to involve OPCC, and its expertise at sniffing out police misconduct, before making their disciplinary decision.
    After reading the report, Elsner appears to have written to McNeil, who, in response, reported to the mayors and provided them with unknown advice. To that advice Desjardins responded, “I agree thanks!” and Helps chimed in: “Thanks. Me too.” That was on November 27.
    Early on December 3, Desjardins emailed Helps: “I think this is going to pop in the next 2 days, [the Police Board] need to be informed. I will clear my calendar for it as necessary, do you have any flexibilty today. so you soon. [sic] I have written the questions we are to ask.”
    Prompted by the spectre of reporters asking questions about the investigation, the mayors hastily concluded it, apparently in order to be able to say that Elsner was not being investigated. They met later that day and made their disciplinary decision to put a confidential letter of reprimand on Elsner’s personal file.
    They informed Elsner in person on the morning of December 4. Later that day, in response to reporters’ questions, they denied Elsner was being investigated.
    Lowe reported that he first heard of the harassment and bullying allegations when they were brought to OPCC’s attention by the Victoria Police Union on December 8, 2015.
    Let me summarize the main problems in all of this for the mayors. First, they completely missed, or ignored, the most serious misconduct that was evident in Gallivan’s records—which Judge Baird Ellan later likened to criminal obstruction. Secondly, Desjardins and Helps knew the harassment allegations should be investigated. Instead, they hid them from both the Police Board and OPCC even though informing OPCC of any additional allegations had been a key element of the “clear understanding” for allowing the mayors to do an internal investigation in the first place. Lastly, they misrepresented what had taken place to reporters and the public. The mayors appear to have obstructed the proper course of justice, and their misjudgments cost Victoria taxpayers $1.1 million.
    Lowe’s summary was more concise. In his Summary Informational Report, he wrote that the mayors “had predetermined the outcome of the internal discipline process from the outset, and set about navigating a course to allow the former chief to remain in his post.”
    In the record released to Focus are emails exchanged between the mayors as news of the Elsner investigation, Lowe’s December 18, 2015 report on the investigation, and his order for an external investigation ripped through the community. The day Lowe’s report was released, Times-Colonist reporter Cindy Harnett emailed Helps a question: “What is your reaction to the commissioner’s report which heavily suggests you and Barb botched the investigation and insinuates that there was a coverup?”
    Helps forwarded Harnett’s email to Desjardins and Kathi Springer, a communications specialist who had been hired to help the two mayors weather the political storm they had brewed. Helps asked, “Are they actually serious there was a cover up? This is ludicrous.”
    Focus recently posed detailed questions to Mayor Helps. We described to her what the email record for October 15, 2015 showed, namely that she and Mayor Desjardins had initially agreed to a second investigation, and that Desjardins was to meet with Elsner the next day and raise the sexual harassment allegations with him. We asked Helps why she and Desjardins believed Elsner instead of allowing Gallivan to investigate these allegations further and checking the veracity of Elsner’s denial. We also asked her why she had misrepresented, to Focus and to other media, the mandate of the mayors’ investigation. Recall that McNeil had put in writing that the mayors’ mandate included any allegations of misconduct against Elsner.
    To those questions Mayor Helps replied, “As previously stated, we decided to finish our original investigation and hand all other allegations to the OPCC for them to investigate. We directed our solicitor to send all the information we had received, including Pat Gallivan’s report, to the OPCC.”
    As noted above, it was only through Woods’ Police Act-mandated demand for records that OPCC obtained “all the information” the mayors had received (except Gallivan’s covering letter), and their email communications. We asked Helps if she was aware that OPCC had demanded her records. She did not respond to the question.
    Recall that Helps had responded to a reporter’s question about whether an investigation was underway with this statement: “No. The Board has full confidence in our chief. He’s the best thing to happen to this town and Esquimalt for a long time.” If the mayors had an expectation that OPCC would be investigating the sexual harassment and bullying allegations, why did the mayors and the Police Board express “full confidence” in Elsner? Wasn’t that a bit premature? We put that question to the mayor. She did not respond.
    Had the Police Board even been informed of the allegations of sexual harassment and bullying against Elsner before it had expressed that “full confidence”? Mayor Helps kept digging and did not respond.
    David Broadland has asked the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner to examine the Police Board’s redactions of the released record.
    The released records can be downloaded here.

    Stephen Hume
    July 2019
    Climate change is exacerbating forest fires, including—perhaps especially—where the wild meets suburbia.
     
    FOR TERRIFYING SPECTACLE, few events match the full-throated fury of a crowning forest fire. Such a fire moves fast. Sheets of flame flash through the canopy under a seething orange wall as high as a 30-storey skyscraper, with pillars of smoke that can tower 50 times that height.
    I live in Greater Victoria’s forested fringe—the “wildland-urban interface” in Fire Boss lingo. Like many, I’m watching trees around me die from climate warming. I confess, there is now seldom a day during the still, tinder-dry afternoons of high summer when the leaves suddenly rustle in an abrupt breeze, that I don’t step outside to nervously sniff the air for that smudgy whiff of woodsmoke.
     

    Forest fires menacing Williams Lake residential district in July 2017 (Photo: courtesy Ministry of Lands, Forest and Natural Resources)
     
    Big fires make their own weather. They suck moisture out of the atmosphere, drying and heating to a flashpoint what’s already dry and hot. They create windstorms to feed their appetite for oxygen. Tornadoes of superheated flame spin away. Trees shriek as they vaporize at 1,200°C—although physics says the noise is sap transforming instantly to steam.
    Should this holocaust scenario concern most of us in our comfortable, tree-shaded city homes? Increasingly, warn scientists and emergency measures specialists, the uncomfortable conclusion is “Yes.”
    Chris Bone, an expert on the role of climate change and forest policies in driving wildfires and other events, contemplates wildfire from above a native plant garden at the University of Victoria. He thinks that like the great earthquake which may happen tomorrow—or a hundred years from now—the visitation of urban wildfire is not a question of “if,” but “when.”
    We generally live as though catastrophe weren’t imminent. In truth, conditions already exist here that make fires like those in California or Alberta possible. “A lot of people think we live in the rainforest and that’s exacerbating the problem,” says Bone, an assistant professor in geography. “We don’t live in the rainforest. We have more of a ‘coastal California’ climate. The south island does not get a lot of rain in the summers.” If climate models are right—so far, they’ve been accurate—climate warming will make this region even more susceptible to wildfire.
    He’s careful to point out that while people crave certainty in the face of uncertainty, and simplicity rather than complexity, the impact of our looming climate emergency won’t be linear in progression. There’ll be variability in seasonal weather. Trends are the concern—frequency, length, and intensity of extreme weather episodes, whether wet or dry, cold or hot.
    One consistency in those urban wildfires devastating communities in the United States for the past few decades is this: they occur during dry spells after three to four days of very hot temperatures and then, as winds tick up, they overwhelm firefighters. Since 2014, almost 50 firefighters have been killed trying to contain wildfires in the US, 19 of them one entire crew of “hotshot” specialists. They perished together in a conflagration threatening the town of Yarnell, Arizona in 2013.
    Crowning fires first flash through the dry canopy and then incinerate what’s beneath, fed by ground cover and debris. The speed with which they can accelerate is mind-boggling.
    Artist Frank Ebermann built his house and studio in a pristine, tranquil forest landscape about a 20-minute drive south of Houston on the Yellowhead Highway, midway between Prince George and Prince Rupert. At the end of May, 1983, he heard heavy equipment thundering past his studio. The trucks carried fire suppression specialists. But they weren’t going to a fire; they were running from one. Ebermann scooped up his little daughter Amai, his wife Sophia, and fled, too.
    That blaze, dubbed “Swiss Burn,” was a monster, set loose by an angler’s campfire. Eight minutes later the fire covered a square kilometre. Two hours later it was 10 square kilometres. It expanded by one square kilometre per hour. Smoke eclipsed the sun. Flaming embers showered out of the darkness. After seven hours, smouldering ash and charred snags covered an area the size of Victoria, Oak Bay, Esquimalt, View Royal and Colwood combined.
    “It was like Dante’s Inferno,” Ebermann told me. “Valleys boiling with flames. The burn made its own firestorm, uprooting the trees as it went.” In minutes, he and seven other families were homeless. The experience had one other big effect. “This fire tore me away from any materialism,” he said. “We want to own the beautiful scenery. But we never really own anything.”
     

    Aerial drop of fire retardant near an Ashcroft home (Photo: courtesy Ministry of Lands, Forest and Natural Resources)
     
    In 2018, similar fires swept through Paradise, California. They burned so hot, car tires melted. So did the sneakers of those trying to flee on foot through the streets. Images from that fire, in which people burned to death in their escape vehicles, haunt Bone—especially when he considers them in the context of new residential developments in Greater Victoria’s wildland-urban interface.
    “I think about Paradise and how trapped those people were. Those people had no way to escape. I look at an area like that [wildland-urban interface development in Langford, for example] and I have real concern. How strategic are we being?” Not very, according to a 2018 study for the B.C. government. Addressing the New Normal: 21st Century Disaster Management in British Columbia by George Abbott and Chief Maureen Chapman is a disturbing restatement of warnings provided by successive provincial auditors-general over almost 20 years. “Despite earnest efforts,” it said, “BC has made disappointingly little progress on the goal of enhanced community safety since 2003.” It said at least 80 communities have completed wildfire protection plans but half of them still haven’t done anything to actually mitigate risk by reducing on-the-ground-fuel, clearing underbrush, or thinning forest stands adjacent to residential districts.
    A 2015 study by the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, a think tank for Canada’s insurance industry, concluded that in Kelowna, where 239 homes were burned during a wildland-urban interface fire in 2003, present conditions could result in a repeat disaster. Reasons for inaction given by municipal politicians, the BC government report said, are that tax dollars are committed to building and maintaining water, sewer, roads, street lights, parks, recreation, and solid waste disposal. The infrastructure supports residential growth and thus an expanded tax base. Forests adjacent to residential development are deemed somebody else’s problem and responsibility. But whose problem does it become if a crowning wildfire rips through a city’s residential fringe?
     
    THAT'S A QUESTION WE SHOULD ALL ASK our municipal governments. In Slave Lake, Alberta in 2011, planners said that the city’s evacuation seemed unthinkable. The next day thousands bolted through flames and smoke so thick they couldn’t see where they were driving. In Fort McMurray, in 2016, thousands were again forced to run a gauntlet of fire, escaping while fire destroyed 2,400 buildings and insured losses approached $4 billion. In Portugal, in 2017, 30 people burned in their vehicles while trying to escape a blaze; 17 more died trying to flee abandoned vehicles on foot. Scores of tourists in Greece died when they were trapped by wildfire.
    And the risk here grows, it does not diminish. Research published last year in the International Journal of Wildland Fire estimates more than 55,000 square kilometres in B.C. now lie in the wildfire-urban interface. The authors of Mapping Canadian Wildland Fire Interface Areas, Lynn Johnston of Natural Resources Canada and Mike Flannigan of the University of Alberta, conclude that this danger zone both expands and becomes more hazardous with climate warming.
    In Greater Victoria, for example, expect the frequency of very hot days to reach an average of 36 per summer. Hottest day temperatures are projected to rise to 36°C. And while we’ll get more precipitation overall, summer rainfall will dwindle by at least 20 percent while days of drought will lengthen by 20 percent.
    Vancouver Island was already rated at a Level Three drought—one notch below the driest tier—before the end of May this year. In the Comox Valley, only 34 per cent of normal rainfall arrived. In Kelowna, the rainfall was 50 percent less. And it’s been hot. More than 30 daytime high temperature records were broken across the province on a single day in March.
    Furthermore, as it gets hotter and dryer, lightning storms will become more frequent. Right now, Canada gets about 2.25 million lightning strikes per year. They are responsible for almost half our wildfires—humans start slightly more than 50 percent. There will be 12 percent more strikes for every degree of global temperature rise. For every two lightning strikes today, there will soon be three.
    In BC, Addressing the New Normal found that more than 16,000 square kilometres of forest pose high to moderate risk of wildfires expanding rapidly into major residential areas. Worse, it warns that such wildfires—which are now bigger, burn hotter and move faster because of global warming—are becoming the norm.
    “The wildfire zone is not only getting closer to people, but people are getting closer to the wildfire zone,” the study points out, citing BC Auditor General Wayne Strelioff’s 2001 report Managing Interface Fire Risks; former Manitoba Premier Gary Filmon’s report Firestorm, triggered by events in 2003; and present Auditor General Carol Bellringer’s 2018 assessment of subsequent foot-dragging and inaction. This too is a concern, considering that people caused more than half the wildfires that cost BC taxpayers $3 billion between 2003 and 2017.
    “British Columbia has the highest risk of interface fires in Canada because of its climate and topography,” the report by Abbott and Chapman reiterates. The risks are increasing as a result of two key factors—the continuing growth in the number of people choosing to live in or near the forests and grassland areas and the significant buildup of forest fuels resulting from years of successful fire suppression activities. “Fire experts fear that, if actions are not taken soon to reduce the risks associated with interface fires, it is only a matter of time before these fires will exceed firefighters’ ability to contain them and that this might lead to significant loss of life and property,” the report warns.
    Clearly, it’s time we had a vigorous, engaged, adult conversation at the community level about the danger zone at the fringes of Greater Victoria, where residential districts bleed into forest land and forest intrudes into the built landscape. Often, these fringes are among the most desirable neighbourhoods. They offer shady, countrified respite from the noise, heat, traffic and pavement of downtown. Developers like them because they sell quickly. And, in the short term, revenue-hungry municipal politicians appear to discount long-term hazards against short-term revenue gains.
     

    The wildland-urban interface on the Saanich Peninsula north of Victoria, as seen from the top of PKOLS/Mount Douglas (Photo: Stephen Hume)
    Wildfire science calls it “the expanding bull’s-eye effect.” As a city expands from its centre, the fire-exposed perimeter lengthens, placing larger areas within the danger zone. Visit Greater Victoria’s tony, up-market neighbourhoods at Broadmead, Dean Park or some of the newer subdivisions in Langford, for example, and houses and gardens are deeply integrated into heavily forested slopes. Yet housing developments zoned on forested hillsides are also at highest risk. Fire moves fastest (in California they moved with explosive speed) while burning up-slope, where canopy and underbrush are close to structures.
    This forest-city interface is where risk is greatest for conflagrations like those which forced evacuations of 200,000 people in BC and Alberta alone over the last 15 years. More than 36,000 wild-land-urban interface homes and businesses have now been razed across California, BC and Alberta.
    As environmental writer Glen Martin recently observed in California Magazine: “From a firefighter’s perspective, wildland-urban interface combines the worst of both realms (suburb and forest): interface areas are not only cheek-to-jowl with fuel-rich forests, they’re also often characterized by dense housing tracts landscaped with lush, highly flammable vegetation. Today’s wildfires, in short, are not your grandpa’s wildfires; they’re usually hybrid-human started fires, involving both structures and forests, which greatly complicates the task for wildfire fighters and escalates the cost in life and property.”
     
    GREATER VICTORIA might serve as a textbook model of wildland-urban interface fire hazard. The city expanded from a 75-kilometre bull’s eye to one with a 1,650-kilometre circumference of wildland-urban interface. In addition, an urban forest covers much of its footprint. A Habitat Acquisition Trust study published in 2008 calculated that about 40 percent of Greater Victoria’s 696.2 square kilometre land area was then under tree canopy. Considering that the urban core of Victoria has 150,000 trees in a scant 19.5 square kilometres, similar density would mean perhaps five million trees over the rest of the capital region, even with declines in forested area.
    This forest is highly valued by residents—for good reason. It’s a central element in regional identity. It provides shade and greenery to offset pavement. It lessens runoff. It adds to biodiversity by offering habitat to urban wildlife. It produces oxygen, stores carbon and absorbs both air and water pollutants. Yet there’s a tradeoff. Many trees are non-native and drought-intolerant. They contribute to the deepening fire hazard. This alone warrants frank public discussion about what faces the City as summer rains diminish, temperatures rise, and very hot days and very dry spells become more frequent and last much longer.
    “We need to rethink our approach to urban landscape and start planning it in a much more holistic way,” says Johan Feddema, who studies the consequences of human actions on the environment and the effects of climate change upon society. The UVic scientist has examined the impacts of climate conditions upon severe crown fires.
    Everybody loves the urban forest, he notes, but it has a downside. During transpiration, trees extract water from the ground and transfer it to dry air. US Geological Survey scientists calculate that one large deciduous tree can extract 150,000 litres a year from surface soil—most during summer months when foliage is heaviest. And the hotter it gets, the greater the rate. Our beloved shade trees may actually be helping to dry out their surroundings faster during extended droughts.
    Does that mean we should mow down the urban forest? Of course not. Trees are important for sequestering carbon, and deciduous hardwoods like native oak and maple are among the top carbon-storers.
    Feddema says we should be aware of these natural processes and think about different kinds and mixes of vegetation—drought and fire-resistant native plants—and how to design urban infrastructure for cooling rather than for convenience or architectural aesthetic. Plan for more open green space, but with warming-appropriate vegetation. Even the shape and placement of green space and tall buildings in the urban core can enhance or inhibit circulation patterns that might be cooling other parts of the city.
    “Yes,” muses Feddema, “we need to think creatively about advocating for a holistic way of planning, designing and building our city.” Bone echoes that idea. If municipalities continue with zoning that permits residential dwellings in the wildland-urban interface hazard zone, he says, they have an obligation to engage in vigorous proactive education of residents about the dangers.
    An example of the education needed is warning people that one of the biggest risks that their house will burn down during a wildfire is as simple as needles collecting in rain gutters. And how many of us actually know our urban evacuation routes, have mapped alternative routes, or have even thought about what we will do if those carefully planned evacuation routes are blocked?
    The Capital Regional District voted unanimously last February to declare a climate emergency. It’s a worthy initiative. But, like many such programs, it seems heavy on mission statements and global plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and less emphatic about practical but painful local decisions like reforming building codes or enacting stringent zoning bylaws which address the threat of urban wildfire.
    Emergency measures planners provide clear directions about what needs to be done: reduce ground fuel; increase the allowable margin between houses and forest cover; mandate flame-resistant building materials; regulate garden shrubbery and landscaping.
    One 2010 study found that by treating 10 percent of the adjacent forest landscape as a buffer zone in which ground fuel is removed, trees thinned and limbed, and underbrush cleared, risk of wildfire loss is reduced 70 percent. Considering that between 2014 and 2017, wildfires in western Canada and the US cost insurers almost $60 billion (CAD) in structural losses, this is something to think seriously about.
     
    IN CANADA AND BC, the danger trend is relentlessly upward. Wildfire scientists don’t doubt this is a direct consequence of our developing climate emergency. Right now, on average, 70,000 people and 20 communities a year in Canada are directly affected by wildfire events. That’s a 40 percent increase since 1980. BC tops the national list. And the trend will accelerate, not slow, as climate warms and summers get hotter and dryer. Ottawa expects the annual cost of fire protection to double by 2040.
    Some experts now argue that the former worst-case looks more like a future best-case as human beings pour planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere faster than at any time in human history. Fires of once-unimaginable intensity that happened every 20 years now occur every year. And the risks today are greater because wildfire-urban interface areas are vastly larger.
    By mid-May, half a month early, the 2019 fire season was already in full swing. Almost 14,000 fire refugees had already been evacuated from a vast arc through northern BC and Alberta and culminating in northern Ontario.
    Last year, 2018, was the worst on record for wildfires, dislocated populations, secondary health effects—emergency admissions for respiratory ailments doubled in BC as smoke became pervasive—and soaring fire suppression costs. In California, 81 people were dead, 870 were missing and almost 19,000 buildings had been destroyed in four hours. The year before that, 2017, had been the worst until 2018. In 2016, more than 88,000 people were evacuated as wildfire ripped through Fort McMurray in Alberta and destroyed 2,400 buildings. The year before that, 2015, was the worst-ever fire season for the US, representing a 133 percent increase over the long-term 50-year average in wildfire burn.
    No one welcomes a bearer of bad news, but it’s obvious that some version of the fire demon is waiting to visit itself upon Greater Victoria. We can’t prevent wildfire, it’s part of our environment, but we can adapt intelligently. Time to start thinking and talking seriously about that.
    Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the North, BC and the Island. His byline has appeared in most major Canadian newspapers.

    Briony Penn
    July 2019
    An appeal before the courts should spark debate about whether Trans Mountain is compatible with a stable climate.
     
    AS THE FIRES BURN, storms rage, ice melts, and drought warnings go into effect, a rising tide of climate policy supporters from professional ranks are demanding change. Insurance company CEOs, health professionals, and journalists (like Bill Moyers) are joining scientists and academics to name the threat posed by climate change and continued burning of fossil fuels.
    Retired Vancouver civil litigation lawyer David Gooderham is one of the latest to put his reputation and his freedom on the line. He is one of the 229 arrestees who defied court injunctions to block the gates of the Trans Mountain Pipeline in 2018 and could face jail time. He is hoping to bring a novel concept to the attention of the courts—evidence of the magnitude of the threat of climate change. Gooderham, at 74, spent his career constructing cases from evidence of catastrophic losses involving flooding, fire, structural failures, and such. He discovered that no Canadian court or parliament has ever considered the evidence about whether the emissions from the expansion of oil sands production in Canada are consistent with keeping the warming of the Earth below the internationally-accepted increase of 2°C.
     

    Jennifer Nathan and David Gooderham (Photo by Holly Nathan)
     
    In other words, every large infrastructure project like the Trans Mountain pipeline has been approved without a single inquiry or environmental review considering their implications on the global emission target of the Paris Agreement—or our own national goal of reducing domestic emissions 30 percent by 2030.
    The Ministerial Panel on the Trans Mountain Pipeline of 2016, appointed by the Minister of Natural Resources, found that the question, Can construction of a new Trans Mountain Pipeline be reconciled with Canada’s climate change commitments? had not been answered. The National Energy Board never asked this question. Environment and Climate Change Canada, when tasked with reviewing emissions estimated for the Trans Mountain Expansion Project, admitted that the answer was “not clear.” Yet the cabinet still passed an Order in Council in 2016 authorizing the building of the expanded Trans Mountain Pipeline declaring, with no evidence, that it was consistent with our commitments.
    This failure to answer the question has left Canada pursuing a very dangerous course. Even for those whose concern is only around fiscal matters, it leaves us vulnerable to legal challenges or ending up with stranded assets, including the Trans Mountain Pipeline. With the June 18 federal government decision to green-light the pipeline, more of these types of appeals are inevitable. As Jessica Clogg of West Coast Environmental Law stated on the CBC about her reaction to Trudeau’s decision: “We’ll see you in court.”
    Gooderham didn’t arrive lightly at the decision to get himself arrested. He had spent the last six years engaged in lawful political activity to “encourage, persuade and induce the Government of Canada to reconsider its plans.” It was the failure of the political process to examine evidence that pushed him into getting himself arrested. At least in a court of law, where there are rules, expert witnesses, cross examination, and consequences of perjury, Canadians might at last have an opportunity to learn whether the government’s plans to continue expanding oil sands production can possibly be compatible with a world that is in dire need of cooling down.
    But there is a long row to hoe before he gets that particular day in court.
    On December 3, 2018, Gooderham made his first court appearance with co-accused, science teacher Jennifer Nathan. They informed the court, under Judge Affleck, that they wished to use the defence of necessity. This common law defence recognizes that in rare circumstances, we can be excused from criminal liability if we are faced with an “imminent peril” and where the wrong of disobeying the law can be “justified by the pursuit of some greater good.”
    Necessity is one of the few legal remedies available for climate supporters around the world, since it enables a legal exploration of what constitutes “imminent peril” and “greater good.” Encouragingly, across the border, in April of this year, the first favourable decision from a state court in Washington permitted the necessity defense to be raised in a climate protest case called the “valve turner’s case.” The conviction of US citizen Ken Ward, who shut off the oil by turning a valve in a pipeline, was reversed, and he will return to court for a new trial where he is able to bring his evidence and expert witnesses forward.
    Gooderham, like Ward, is arguing for simply that—a fair trial with the right to call evidence on matters of climate science.
    This is where Gooderham’s civil expertise teamed up with Nathan’s training as a science educator to brief an uneducated judiciary on climate science. For the December court hearing, they prepared an Outline of Proposed Evidence that includes projections over the next 12 years based on current policies, where the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will exceed 450 parts per million CO2 equivalent, bequeathing us all to “a dire future”—or in legal terms, “imminent peril.”
    The 119-page report, filed with the Court of Appeal, is persuasive and sets this global expansion within the context of Canada’s failing domestic efforts to meet the Paris Agreement of cutting 200 million tonnes by 2030.
    Their central argument is that the Trans Mountain Pipeline has a pivotal role globally in increasing emissions. Canada’s plan is to continue expanding oil sands production to 2040, but the evidence from the International Energy Association (IEA) and other reports show unequivocally that global oil consumption must start to decline in 2020, or else by 2030 the world will be irreversibly committed to warming above the 2° Celsius limit. Canada is one of the world’s six largest suppliers to the world oil market. Our country’s largest growth in emissions is coming from the oil and gas sector—offsetting most of the reductions in all other parts of the economy.
    The proposed evidence lays out oil sands production and emissions; the technology available to reduce emissions during extraction, and per barrel; proposed carbon capture and storage; political caps on emissions, gas sector emissions, methane emissions, and other additional measures proposed in climate plans. Findings are brought forward from the National Energy Board inquiry, Trans Mountain upstream emission report, IPCC reports, global oil consumption projections, mitigation scenarios, the global emissions gap with Canada’s commitment, and consequences of climate change. It isn’t easy bedtime reading but will likely illuminate “the magnitude of the threat.”
    On January 17, 2019, Judge Affleck predictably rejected their request to call climate evidence at their trial—which was held March 11, and at which they were convicted. The judge has rejected three other applications to put forward a defence of necessity, but Gooderham is the first to appeal.
    In Affleck’s 39-page Reasons for Judgement, he stated: “Despite a historical lack of initiative to curb emissions over these same decades, adaptive social measures may be taken to prevent such a dire outcome. Whether government, private industry, and citizens take these measures is a contingency that takes these consequences outside of ‘virtual certainty’ and into the realm of ‘foreseeable or likely.’”
    For Gooderham, this ruling was gold. It meant that an appeal to the BC Court of Appeal could focus directly on the crucial question. The judge appears to agree that we are on a path of a 2° Celsius rise in temperature, but asserts, with no evidence, that there is “a contingency” and that our imminent peril is not “virtually certain.”
    The contingency, however, according to Gooderham’s evidence, would require unprecedented cuts of emissions on a global scale starting in six months, including an immediate halt to the growth of global oil consumption. The question for the Court of Appeal then would be whether a contingency of that kind has, what is called in legal terms, “an air of reality.” That was enough to act on, and following their conviction, Gooderham and Nathan filed their Notice of Appeal to overturn Affleck’s decision.
    The appeal is due to be heard sometime in the fall by three judges.
    I asked Gooderham what he anticipates as success. “The best possible outcome will be that Justice Affleck’s decision will be overturned, and we can have a retrial where we call our expert witnesses.” The Crown would have the right to call their own expert evidence to try and show there is no imminent climate threat.
    If he is not granted a retrial at the provincial level, then he plans to take it to the Supreme Court of Canada. If he succeeds with a retrial with a suitable set of facts, a defence of necessity would apply. Whatever the final outcome, it will still have been a success for Gooderham “to open the public discourse on a subject that has largely been treated with silence.” If in the best case scenario, a defence of necessity is accepted, Gooderham indicates that it would not trigger “some kind of anarchy.” The most dramatic thing that could happen would be parliament abolishing the ancient common law and thus pushing climate change and the evidence for immediate action back into some messy, but better-informed, public debates—something that should have happened long ago.
    Ironically, just at the same time Gooderham and Nathan brought their case to court in Vancouver, the Federal government found itself obliged to file evidence about climate science in the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, where the Government of Saskatchewan has challenged the constitutionality of the Trudeau government carbon-price scheme. The Federal government, in order to defend its carbon tax, has had to provide the court with evidence about the risks of rising carbon emissions, and to persuade the court that it is urgent to reduce Canada’s emissions. The evidence did not, predictably, extend to the prospect of failing to meet the Paris Agreement; that would have been risky to their own climate policy on pipelines. The Saskatchewan court ruled 3-2 that the federal carbon price is constitutional. The case will be appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada.
    It appears that suddenly, the issue of climate change has found its way into the courtroom, and that it might be “our last chance to help people grasp the magnitude of the threat”…if it can all happen in the next six months.
    A funding site for the appeal has been launched at www.gofundme.com/help-fund-addressing-climate-change-in-the-courts
    Briony Penn is an award-winning writer of creative non-fiction books including the prize-winning The Real Thing: the Natural History of Ian McTaggart Cowan, and most recently, Stories from the Magic Canoe with Wa’xaid (Cecil Paul).

    David Broadland
    May 2019
    They’ve been found—all 271 of them.
     
    THERE HAS BEEN A DEVELOPMENT in Focus’ effort to determine why Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps and Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins decided to support then-Chief Frank Elsner in the face of credible allegations of sexual harassment brought against him by employees of the Victoria Police Department.
    Let me refresh your memory on what’s at issue: On December 4, 2015, the mayors were asked by reporters if Victoria Police Chief Frank Elsner was under investigation. Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps told the reporters, “No. The Board has full confidence in our chief. He’s the best thing to happen to this town and Esquimalt for a long time.”
     

    Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps (l) and Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins
     
    Over the next two weeks, however, it emerged that Elsner had been the subject of an internal investigation conducted by the two mayors under their authority as co-chairs of the Victoria and Esquimalt Police Board. The allegations against Elsner were eventually investigated by members of the Vancouver Police Department and adjudicated by two retired judges. The entire process was carried out under the authority of Police Complaint Commissioner Stan Lowe, and led to Elsner receiving a lifetime dismissal from policing.
    The details of that decision were contained in a report Lowe released just before the 2018 civic election. As well as detailing the particulars of why Elsner was banned from policing, Lowe excoriated the mayors for mishandling their investigation. Lowe reported that the mayors “had predetermined the outcome of the internal discipline process from the outset, and set about navigating a course to allow the former chief to remain in his post.”
    In an interview with the Times Colonist’s Louise Dickson following release of Lowe’s report, Helps complained it “feels like character assassination…I’m going to have someone look at the report carefully and see if it’s defamatory. It feels defamatory.”
    Perhaps the most serious of the allegations made by Lowe about the mayors—aside from the fact that they had lied to reporters and the public about whether an investigation had even taken place—was his assertion that the mayors had tried to hide from him additional allegations against Elsner of sexual harassment of Victoria Police Department employees.
    Helps and Desjardins denied this. Why, though, would Lowe make such a claim unless he had a step-by-step record of how the mayors had come to their decision that Elsner was “the best thing to happen to this town and Esquimalt for a long time”? Helps had offered that assessment in spite of knowing that sexual harassment allegations against Elsner had not been investigated.
    Focus decided to be the “someone” in Mayor Helps’ publicly expressed desire to “have someone look at the report carefully and see if it’s defamatory.”
    Following Helps’ complaint, Focus filed an FOI for all of the two mayors’ communications with each other during the three-month period of their internal investigation.
    The public has a right to know how elected officials make the decisions they do. This right is enshrined in access to information legislation, and public officials are expected to keep a comprehensive record of how they conduct themselves in the execution of their duties.
    Of course, that’s in the dream world. In the real world, none of that is true.
    In response to our FOI, the Victoria and Esquimalt Police Board released a set of records that was suspiciously incomplete. Without any prompting from us for an explanation, the Board’s FOI analyst Collette Thomson informed us, “A limited number of records were accessible due to email retention schedules.”
    By that, she meant the emails between Helps and Desjardins had been deleted; Thomson later conceded that the Victoria Police Board, in fact, had no written “email retention schedules” at all.
    What, then, had happened to the record of the two mayors’ communications as they had worked their way through the Elsner investigation? Had they really been deleted? If so, by whom, and why?
    Naturally, we filed a second FOI. In the City’s response to our second FOI were several emails that had not been provided by the Police Board’s response to our first request. One was from Helps to Desjardins answering an email from Desjardins that had been released to us earlier.
    In that earlier email from Desjardins, she had said, in effect, the new allegations of sexual harassment against Elsner required a new investigation. She suggested they could use the same investigator, Pat Gallivan. The new email showed Helps had responded to Desjardins: “I am happy to have Pat do this. I regret that we have to do this at all.” But “this”—an investigation—never happened.
    Helps’ response to Desjardins made two things evident: First, the City did have emails relevant to the Elsner investigation that the Police Board had told us had been deleted. Secondly, it’s evident that what Helps has said publicly about the second set of allegations against Elsner—that the mayors didn’t pursue these because they did not have a mandate to do so—was not the mayors’ first position. How did it happen, then, that the mayors backed away from acceptance that the new allegations had to be investigated, to later trying to hide the allegations of sexual harassment from Lowe?
    Armed with this email, Focus filed a complaint in early January this year with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner: The Victoria and Esquimalt Police Board and the City of Victoria had either wrongly deleted emails, or had wrongly claimed that emails had been deleted. Our case was assigned to Trevor Presley, a senior investigator with OIPC. Presley took our complaint to the City. About two months later, Presley informed us: “After the City received your complaint, Mr Gordon [the City’s FOI analyst] conducted a second search, including searching for deleted emails. The long and short of it is that he found 271 emails plus 152 pages of attachments which he believes are responsive.”
    Hopefully, in those 271 emails and 152 pages of attachments is the record of how the two mayors moved from accepting that a second investigation was necessary, to denying that any investigation had taken place at all.
    As of the time of this writing, Presley could not say when these records would be released. “Due to the sensitive nature of the emails,” Presley informed us, the Victoria Police Board needed time to examine and redact them. “Although the delay is unfortunate, due to these records just being uncovered, we have to give them time to process them,” Presley informed Focus. “I’m sorry I cannot give you any firm timelines here.”
    Keep in mind that Focus is trying to confirm whether or not Police Commissioner Lowe’s report on how the mayors handled their investigation was accurate or not, a question Helps raised in public. Some might deduce that if there was evidence that Lowe was wrong, it would have been produced by now. That we are now waiting for the Police Board to resurrect emails that had once been deleted might be all that needs to be understood about the truth of the matter.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

    Stephen Hume
    May 2019
    How is a metals manufacturing plant in the midst of a fish-bearing estuary even possible?
     
    WINTRY LIGHT SPLINTERED THE HORIZON above the Saanich Peninsula. A flooding tide announced itself. First a faint slurping over mud flats. Then an almost imperceptible jostling of driftwood, a stirring of the sedges and the occasional surge and splash of something off in the early morning twilight—maybe a dog otter hunting the tide line. Maybe that rarity now, a big fish.
    I shrugged deeper into my sweater, watching the lights come on at Cowichan Bay through ghostly breath, warm splashes of buttery yellow along the dark south shore. It was a cold morning reminiscent of those more than half a century ago, when I’d tempt chunky sea-run cutthroat prowling the estuary shallows.
    I never dreamed I’d one day contemplate those teenaged memories through the prism of existential risk. But that’s how I felt, talking last April to gob-smacked scientists about a plan to rezone the heart of the Cowichan estuary for development of a metals manufacturing facility on an old log sort they had naively assumed would be phased out during environmental rehabilitation.
     

    An aerial view of the former lumber loading terminal in the Cowichan estuary for which an application for rezoning to permit metals manufacturing and fabrication is working its way through local government.
     
    What was perturbing—and remains so whatever the outcome (a final decision was expected this spring)—was the process. A rezoning application was filed in 2017 after the Cowichan Valley Regional District (CVRD) noted that current use of the site was not in compliance with a land-use bylaw in force for 30 years. In 2018, the provincial government, without doing an environmental impact assessment, advised the CVRD that on the basis of “information provided” regarding the zoning change, the use would have no detrimental environmental impact. Since then, the proposed amendment has advanced through two readings by the CVRD on a tight 5-4 vote. That triggered requirement for a public hearing. One was held March 25. It was contentious. So many concerned citizens showed up that dozens couldn’t get in, which raises questions about the “public” aspect of the hearing.
    How could something so significant for the Cowichan Valley take shape on such a narrow margin of approval by elected officials without authorities concluding right from the outset that an independent, fully objective environmental impact assessment was needed, wondered the scientists with whom I talked.
    The optics—for regional governments; for the Province; for the NDP’s minister of environment; even for the Green Party—seemed remarkably adverse.
    “It’s easy to assume there’s no environmental risk if they don’t look,” said Carol Hartwig, a biologist who lives on the bay. “The regional district defines this so narrowly that they don’t take any responsibility for the broader issue of the estuary. We have a national and provincial treasure that’s being held hostage by a local process.”
     
    THE COWICHAN RIVER IS BRITISH COLUMBIA'S BLUE-RIBBON trout stream. Both a national and a provincial heritage river, it remains a premium experience for elite anglers. A hundred years ago, daily action on the Cowichan appeared in the New York Times. Catches were posted outside posh London clubs. And the river was as renowned for mighty chinook and muscular coho salmon as it was for trout.
    Chinook returns to the Cowichan once numbered more than 25,000. Coho came back by 70,000 or more. Old-timers who had bucktailed for coho and trolled for chinook with spoons hammered from sardine tin lids trailed behind dugout canoes told me that when late summer runs came to the Cowichan, you could hear them. A silvery rustle of jumping, rolling, swirling salmon sliding down the coast, holding in the bay in such vast numbers that one couldn’t look to any point of the compass without seeing a fish in the air.
    The watersheds that feed the Cowichan and its twin, the Koksilah, cover 1,200 square kilometres. The streams tumble seaward through a series of secluded canyons, waterfalls, punchbowls, rapids and the slow, shadowy pools beloved of anglers. Flanking the streams are 20 kilometres of trails. The two rivers have become marquee destinations for hikers, white-water kayakers, campers, picnickers and the tubers who gather by the thousands on sunny summer weekends to drift calm sections.
    At Cowichan Bay, the two rivers meander through the most important estuary on Vancouver Island’s southeast coast. Ducks Unlimited ranks it as one of BC’s most important. The BC Nature Trust classes it as having international significance for migratory birds. Indeed, although estuaries like Cowichan Bay comprise only 2.3 percent of BC’s coastline, they sustain 80 percent of the province’s wildlife.
    For thousands of years before European settlers arrived in 1862, the estuary—the name Cowichan is an anglicized attempt at the Halkomelem word which means land warmed by the sun—served as a feast bowl for the powerful tribes occupying seven traditional village sites.
    But, like many of these critical habitats, the estuary has been abused, brutalized and heedlessly exploited since the first European settlers came to pillage it without regard for the people already living there. Indigenous resource rights were alienated as early as 1889 when fish weirs used for in-river selective harvesting were banned under a federal Fisheries Act amendment that effectively transferred the fishery to settlers.
    The estuary has since been diked, ditched, the rivers used as sewers, the floodplain carved up into farm fields, paved over, built upon, the bay dredged, riddled with pilings coated in toxic creosote, its foreshore chewed up by log booms, the bottom littered with oxygen-sucking bark debris.
    Upstream, householders stripped riparian cover to improve their views, and loggers cleared headwaters, accelerating freshets and increasing erosion and downstream flooding.
    A pulp mill sucks 150 million litres a day from the river—its license permits it to draw down 240 million litres a day. Municipalities draw millions of cubic metres from the watershed for drinking, sewerage, commercial and agricultural use and, in return, generate nearly 50 million litres of wastewater a day. Up to now, treated effluent has been discharged into the river.
    Even seemingly benign tourists pose a threat. Last summer, concerns arose over the impact upon the aquatic insects and micro-organisms on which juvenile trout and salmon rely of sunscreen slathered on by sun-safe tubers.
    And yet, for all the ravaging, serious work has been done to remediate. An enlightened pulp mill cooperates with community watershed planners to sustain migrating fish. Fisheries specialists worked tirelessly to restore salmon runs. Guides used buckets to rescue salmon fry stranded in summer side pools. Plans are afoot for an outfall that will no longer discharge treated wastewater into the river, but into the deeps of Satellite Channel which separates Salt Spring and Vancouver Islands.
    Then, in one of those mind-boggling disconnects by which politicians recite environmental platitudes while embracing policies that appear to say the opposite, the Cowichan Valley Regional District moved ahead this spring with plans to rezone the former log-loading dump in the middle of the beleaguered estuary for redevelopment as an industrial metals manufacturing and fabricating facility.
     
    THE NEW PLAN WAS POPULAR WITH JOBS ENTHUSIASTS. Supporters for re-zoning the site showed up at a public hearing on March 12 flaunting fluorescent safety vests. Perhaps that was just tone-deaf solidarity but it’s difficult not to feel resonance with the Yellow Vests adopted by a resurgent populist right wing that takes a strident anti-environmental stance. In any event, industry supporters promptly stereotyped the opposition as NIMBY elitists.
    Critics of the plan, some of whom have lived on Cowichan Bay for more than 40 years, found themselves characterized as whiney, job-killing newcomers who built houses and then complained about the working harbour in their view.
    But others, particularly life scientists, were appalled, not so much by the proposal—anybody has a right to propose anything—as by the process. They complained that regional politicians appeared to be fast-tracking development without requiring an independent environmental assessment, something critics argued was both essential and required by the Province’s own policy.
    The historic relationship between industry and the environment in BC’s estuaries has not been exemplary. The Georgia Strait Alliance, an environmental organization focused on the Salish Sea, estimates half the Cowichan estuary has already been lost. The BC government itself observes that all estuaries in the province remain highly vulnerable. “Every estuary wetland vegetation type in British Columbia is red-listed (endangered) or blue-listed (special concern),” the government says in its own backgrounder. “Naturally rare and subject to multiple threats in both urban and wilderness areas, these tiny jewels in British Columbia’s coastline will require both protection and stewardship if they are to last.”
    Which raises a profound question. If this is true, why would the Province not insist from the outset that any proposal to change land use to allow expanded industrial development in an internationally significant estuary undergo a comprehensive environmental risk assessment?
    Among those expressing dismay at official assumptions that developing a metals fabrication site in the middle of a sensitive estuary would have no significant environmental impact were iconic names from British Columbia’s fish and wildlife management.
    Ray Demarchi, who retired as BC’s chief of wildlife after a stellar 28-year career, has lived on Cowichan Bay for more than 20 years. He suggested the process represented small-minded, small-town thinking, and an inability to conceptualize in the larger environmental picture.
    “Incredibly,” Demarchi said, “the Cowichan Valley Regional District accepted the assumption that changing the zoning from one that permitted lumber storage and shipping to one that included heavy metal manufacturing and assembly was not a significant change in land use.” He noted, “The Cowichan Valley is deeply divided on this issue. Past environmental battles, including the contaminated soils site at Shawnigan and the proposed dismantling of the Hood Canal bridge in Cowichan Bay, have eroded the faith of the public in government, and particularly those charged with the stewardship of the estuary.”
    Those were harsh words for an NDP government which, in opposition, railed against the then-Liberal government’s apparent ambivalence to complaints about the contentious Shawnigan landfill, and for the Green Party, whose Cowichan MLA Sonia Furstenau made zoning and environmental assessment key issues while campaigning against the landfill as a regional director with the CVRD.
    The process shot fault lines through municipal government itself. The community of North Cowichan, one of more than 20 in the regional district, passed motions in early March demanding a fully independent environmental assessment of the rezoning proposal before any final decision.
    Also calling for an assessment were a former president of the BC Wildlife Federation, the Cowichan Valley Naturalist’s Society, a retired BC assistant deputy minister of environment who just happened to be the Province’s former specialist in Pacific estuaries, and even David Anderson, the highly-esteemed former federal fisheries and environment minister.
    Anderson’s signature topped those of 16 scientists who wrote to Premier John Horgan in early April with a warning: approving the rezoning without first doing a full environmental assessment basically trashed the Province’s vigorously-promoted support for salvaging chinook abundance, and the southern resident orcas that eat them.
    “If we do not seize this opportunity to protect the estuary from increasing industrialization, then a critical moment for the future of chinook and orcas will be lost,” Anderson and the others warned. “And this could mean that the $228.5 million that the Canadian Federal Government has allocated for orcas and much of the $145 million now promised by the Province for salmon recovery will be wasted. In addition, it jeopardizes the $1.1 billion being targeted for orcas by Washington State. Large programs begin with difficult local choices.”
    And the citizen experts went further: The government’s own rationale for going forward without a full formal environmental assessment was “so inadequate and contradictory that it is clearly meaningless and insufficient to provide any direction or to establish whether or not there are ‘detrimental impacts.’”
    They told Horgan that contrary to how their opposition was characterized, they were not opposed to industrial metal manufacturing in the Cowichan Valley. They were opposed to the proposed location. And they argued two similar operations were already operating at a fully serviced site that was more compatible and secure for long-term industrial jobs. “Estuaries are irreplaceable,” they told Horgan. “Industrial jobs can be relocated. In short, the rezoning application must be disallowed.”
    Geoffrey Chislett, a respected former BC fisheries habitat biologist, in a letter to environment minister George Heyman in early February, criticized government for sloughing off a nettlesome issue by declaring it a local concern. “A large effort is being made through the Wild Salmon Advisory Council to try to turn the past trajectory of provincial concern for salmon around,” Chislett said. “A metal fabrication and assembly plant in this estuary will not help this. A huge amount of work has gone into rehabilitating the Cowichan to the point where chinook returns are back to sustainable levels. Regardless of assurances, this operation will degrade the estuarine habitat over time.”
    Chislett’s fears were echoed by Bob Hooton, a former provincial fisheries biologist with an international reputation as a steelhead specialist. “We have a proposal to rezone Cowichan terminal into a marine metal manufacturing centre in the middle of an estuary that can do nothing but harm to some of the most important salmon-bearing habitat we have in the only major chinook producer still on its feet,” Hooton said. “What sense does that make?”
    To make things worse, Hooton observes, Cowichan River chinook are particularly important to southern resident orcas because, unlike chinook from other rivers, they tend to stay in the Salish Sea during their ocean life rather than migrating to the west coast of Vancouver Island or into the Gulf of Alaska. “They are a potentially important contributor to orcas’ conservation and recovery.”
    Elders from the powerful Cowichan Tribes once told me that the tides “set the table” in Cowichan Bay and its estuary, providing an astonishing abundance of shellfish, crabs, herring, salmon, ducks, geese, wild fruit and edible plants.
    Today, the shellfish are contaminated—although there’s been a local goal to restore harvests—and the once-teeming salmon runs are such a faint memory that when heroic efforts to reverse salmon declines saw 8,000 chinook return, there was practically dancing in the streets.
    But it’s the shellfish and their potential contamination with metals that topped concerns for Hartwig, the retired biologist who lives on the bay. She worried that the proposed operation would create potential for metal contaminants to wash into the estuary.
    “Metal manufacturing can involve toxic materials like solvents, paints and welding slag among the obvious metals such as lead, aluminum and zinc,” Hartwig said. In fact, research now shows that copper oxide particles so small that 100,000 would fit on a human hair are damaging to aquatic insects and immature trout.
    She said runoff during more frequent extreme rainfall events, a predicted consequence of climate change, and flooding caused by more frequent storm surges during a period of sea level rise, another predicted consequence of global warming, are possible vectors for metal contaminants to enter the estuary. That alone, she said, would likely end the dream of a return to shellfish harvesting in Cowichan Bay by 2020. Federal standards governing metals contamination of shellfish are stringent and would mean any restoration plan would likely be dead before completion, she said. “As long as there is metal fabrication in the bay, we will never be able to harvest shellfish.”
    Her worries find support in a 2013 study by James Meador of the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle, which examined whether contaminants, including metals, affected juvenile chinook salmon. Meador found that the survival rate of juvenile chinook transiting contaminated estuaries was cut in half, compared with chinook moving through uncontaminated estuaries.
     
    AS I CONTEMPLATED ALL THIS, I walked through the village of Cowichan Bay which, as resource industries declined, reinvented itself as a thriving tourist destination. Like an east-coast Tofino, it offers kayaking, bird-watching, whale-watching, angling, artisan shops, a nature centre dedicated to the estuary, art galleries, quirky diners and high-end restaurants, a wooden boat museum, waterfront accommodation overlooking slips and float houses, and easy access to nature.
    I visited the Rock Cod Café, then took a croissant from True Grain Bread out on the Maritime Centre boardwalk and watched a wooden sailing dinghy extricate itself from a cramped moorage below.
    Cowichan Bay is representative of how the regional district markets the Cowichan Valley to the 4.4 million tourists who spent $1.7 billion on Vancouver Island in 2014, a whopping 63 percent of whom ranked sightseeing, nature and wildlife viewing as their primary interest. Another 40 percent came to visit national and provincial parks. And 15 percent came to fish.
    Statistics Canada found that marine manufacturing and service represented 2,500 jobs in the Pacific region in 2006. Tourism sustains 20,000 jobs on Vancouver Island, and has generated $135 billion in revenue since 2006.
    The cranes and sheds that local jobs enthusiasts wanted to expand into a metal fabricating and manufacturing site sit precisely 650 metres off Cowichan Bay village.
    How would that reconcile with the tourist pitch of “a place where people live in harmony with their natural environment” where “fish and wildlife thrive in a mosaic of natural habitat and breathtaking views are found around every corner?”
    Breathtaking views, indeed. In someone’s imagination, perhaps, tourists might throng to Cowichan Bay to share coffee and a croissant at dockside while thrilling at the view of cranes and heavy industry. My bet is that the music of welders and the smell of paint wouldn’t be high on the “Let’s come back for more of that!” list.
    Stephen Hume spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island. His byline has appeared in most major Canadian newspapers. The author of nine books of poetry, natural history, history and literary essays, he lives on the Saanich Peninsula.

    Ross Crockford
    May 2019
    Is recycling enough, or should we ban some plastics completely?
     
    YOU DON’T HAVE TO LOOK HARD, but you do have to look. To the dog walkers and strolling families, Willows Beach appears pristine. Start hunting for garbage, though, and you’ll find lots of it in a few minutes. Drink-box straws, candy wrappers, globs of styrofoam, cling wrap, bits of broken toys, zip ties — all plastic, tangled in the wood and seaweed left at high tide.
    “For many people, plastic is just a matter of convenience,” Anastasia Castro tells me, gathering bits from the sand. “They don’t see the real impact it has.” 
     

    Teen anti-plastic activists Charlotte Brady and Anastasia Castro (Photo by Ross Crockford)
     
    Castro, a Grade 11 student at Glenlyon Norfolk School, is angry about the trashed state of the planet. So she’s been doing something about it. With her classmate Charlotte Brady, she spent two years speaking with City of Victoria staff and Downtown businesses, urging them to accept a ban on plastic checkout bags, which finally became enshrined in the City’s newsmaking 2018 bylaw. (Speaking to Victoria’s Council, she said: “It is not your world you are ruining, it is ours — the generations of the future who have to live in the mess you left behind.”) Last December, Courtenay-Alberni MP Gord Johns credited Castro in the House of Commons for driving his private member’s motion M-151, calling for a national strategy against plastic pollution, which passed unanimously. “Due to the hard work of incredibly dedicated Canadians like Anastasia,” Johns told MPs, “the crisis of marine plastic pollution has reached the national stage.”
    That crisis certainly has become more apparent. The photo of the Costa Rica sea turtle with a straw stuck in its nose. The reports of whales found dead in Indonesia and Italy with kilos of plastic in their guts. The horrifying statistics, that we humans spill eight million metric tonnes of plastic into the seas every year, and at that rate, by 2050 there’ll be more plastic in the oceans than fish. 
    But as Castro and Brady point out, the problem isn’t only on the other side of the world. 
    The largest accumulation of plastic debris on the planet, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — the subject of a new exhibit at the Maritime Museum of BC — consisting of some three trillion pieces of trash, swirls off our coast, halfway between California and Hawaii. In one day last October, volunteers led by the local chapter of the Surfrider Foundation removed more than 300 kilos of garbage from 10 Victoria beaches. 
    Even more debris in our waters consists of invisible microplastics, less than 5 mm in size, the product of household laundry and storm-drain runoff. Last year, Vancouver Aquarium scientists found 1,258 particles of plastic in one cubic metre of seawater taken from Burrard Inlet. Some of the same scientists have also found that plastic fibres are being ingested by zooplankton in the northeast Pacific — meaning they are likely being eaten by shellfish, crustaceans, salmon, and ultimately by ourselves, along with any toxic compounds that have bonded to the plastic.
    Governments are starting to act. The European Union has declared that single-use plastic cutlery, plates, straws and containers will be outlawed in all member states by 2021. Vancouver is scheduled to ban styrofoam cups and takeout containers, along with straws and plastic cutlery, starting in 2020. Prince Edward Island’s province-wide ban on plastic bags, the first in Canada, goes into effect on July 1. In other words, Victoria’s bag bylaw, likely soon to be replicated in other capital-region municipalities including Saanich, Esquimalt, Colwood and Sooke, is just the beginning.
    “We can’t let everyone believe that recycling is the be-all and end-all, and that if we ban plastic bags, we’ve done enough,” Charlotte Brady tells me. “Instead the conversation should be, ‘OK, we’ve taken this great first step. Now we need to go farther.’”

     
    AFTER YOU PUT AND EMPTY YOGURT TUB IN A BLUE BOX, it gets picked up by a private waste-removal company and delivered to Cascades Recovery’s busy facility in Rock Bay. Trucks arrive from across the region, dumping glass, paper, cardboard, metals and plastics at different bays of the Cascades warehouse. Workers separate plastics from metals, Bobcat loaders push the plastics onto a conveyor belt, and they drop into a machine that packs them into freezer-sized bales, wrapped with wire. Then semi-trailer trucks take the materials off-Island. The facility handles 4,000 metric tonnes of material a month this way.
     

    Your household plastics, baled at Cascades Recovery (Photo by Ross Crockford)
     
    The Capital Regional District started its blue-box program in 1989. The Cascades facility is older; for many decades it produced corrugated cardboard for Crown Packaging. Doug Stevens, the plant manager, recalls that it once had a machine that turned scrap paper into felt backing for shingles made at the Sidney Roofing plant on the Songhees lands. “Recycling’s been around a long time,” he notes.
    It keeps changing, though. Cascades takes materials from businesses, but those volumes have been declining, while residential is increasing: Victorians are buying more stuff, and it comes with more packaging. A few years ago Cascades added an oven that melts and condenses styrofoam (collected from recycling depots) to a tenth its original size, for reuse in crown mouldings and picture frames. Lately there’s been greater concern about “contamination,” which is why you should wash your containers (leftover food attracts rats), and have to separate glass (broken glass is hard to remove from other materials). Victorians are good about this: contamination rates are only three percent in the CRD, versus 26 percent in Toronto. Materials have to be clean and dry to resell, says Stevens. “It’s not garbage, it’s recycling. If you want it to be recycled, you have to treat it differently.”
    The crisis of marine plastic has emerged alongside a crisis in the recycling industry. Until recently, 70 percent of US scrap plastic went to China. But reportedly after Xi Jinping saw the documentary Plastic China, about the poisoned living conditions of scrap recyclers, China implemented its “National Sword” policy in 2018, refusing any materials with more than 0.5 percent contamination. With few local facilities to recycle their scrap, some US cites have resorted to landfilling plastics, or burning them.
    We’re in a better position. In 1994, BC introduced its first Extended Producer Responsibility(EPR) program, under which producers and consumers paid extra eco-fees for the collection and safe disposal of leftover paint. Today BC has 22 such programs, for everything from appliances to tires. (In comparison, 16 US states have no EPR programs at all.) The EPR for paper and packaging is overseen by the non-profit agency RecycleBC, which collects per-weight fees from the 1,100 BC companies producing or importing such materials. RecycleBC then pays municipalities, regions, or waste companies to collect the scrap, sorters like Cascades bale it, and RecycleBC sells the scrap to processors. RecycleBC’s 2017 annual report says BC companies generated 234,847 tonnes of paper and packaging and paid $86 million in fees; those fees were then paid to recycling programs (like the CRD’s) that collected 174,942 tonnes, for an overall “recovery rate” of 75 percent.
    RecycleBC says the glass in your blue box gets melted into new jars and bottles in Abbotsford, or turned into sandblasting grit in Quesnel. Metal containers are sold to various North American processors and turned into road signs and window frames. Mixed paper becomes boxes and egg cartons in South Korea. But all of our blue-boxed plastic goes to one company, Merlin Plastics, and its two 180,000-square-foot recycling facilities, in Delta and New Westminster.
    “We’ve been around for 30 years, and every year, we’re expanding,” Merlin GM Kevin Andrews tells me. Merlin’s currently adding a mixed-plastics sorting line that will boost its annual capacity by 14,000 tonnes, to help handle the increasing volumes it’s getting from panicked recycling programs in Washington State and Oregon. Last year, when China’s restrictions came into effect, Canada became the second-biggest importer of US scrap plastic, after Malaysia. Since then, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and India have announced limits on scrap-plastic imports, due to complaints about pollution at recycling facilities, and Canada — thanks partly to Merlin — looks set to take first place.
    Merlin sorts various types of consumer plastics — polyethylene terephthalate (#1 or PET) used in pop bottles, high-density polyethylene (#2 or HDPE) in shampoo bottles, low-density polyethylene (#4 or LDPE) in plastic bags, or polypropylene (#5 or PP) in yogurt tubs — and processes them into pellets or “nurdles” that it sells worldwide, to be melted into new products. Andrews won’t say how much Merlin processes annually, but he assures us the company does its best to see the plastic is reused for similar purposes, instead of “downcycled” into lower-grade products. “To put a bottle to a bottle is not always easy, because you have to meet many different requirements. But you can put it into packaging that is maybe not a food item,” he says. “If it’s being reused in something that would’ve been made with virgin [plastic], there’s no downcycling.”
    RecycleBC has also started taking various soft plastics (cling wrap, mesh bags) and “laminates” (standup pouches, chip bags), collected from depots like those at Hartland and London Drugs. This is for a research project, to see if Merlin can recycle such flexible packaging; if it can’t, the plastic will be converted into “engineered fuel.” (Plastic can be melted and vaporized into gases that are condensed into synthetic crude oil.) RecycleBC reported that 4,647 tonnes of material was turned into fuel in 2017, but Andrews won’t say if Merlin’s conducting that work: “I can’t tell you whether we are or whether we aren’t.”

     
    BC DOES HAVE ENVIABLE EPR AND RECYCLING SYSTEMS, but they still suffer a lot of leakage, judging by what’s showing up on our beaches. RecycleBC posted a 75 percent “recovery rate” for paper and packaging in 2017, but dig deep into its proposed five-year plan and it turns out the rate varied greatly depending on the material: 87 percent of paper was collected and accounted for, but only 50 percent of rigid plastic and just 20 percent of flexible plastic.

    We have similar challenges keeping track of plastic bottles. Encorp Pacific, the agency that manages our beverage-container recycling, reports that BC residents bought 1,349,149,437 beverage containers in 2017, and collected 1,023,306,039. That amounts to a recovery rate of 75.8 percent — but means 325 million containers went missing that year in BC alone, despite the deposits paid on them. Some went into recycling, some into landfills, and some into the environment. In the 2017 Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup, run by the World Wildlife Fund and Ocean Wise, the third-most common item collected by volunteers from Canadian beaches, after miscellaneous bits of plastic and cigarette butts, was plastic bottles, more than 50,000 of them. Plastic bags, 22,724 of them, came seventh.
    The solution for bottles seems simple: increase the deposits. Encorp asks for only five cents for small non-alcoholic beverage containers, a rate that hasn’t changed for decades. Alberta increased the deposit to 10 cents and now has a return rate of 86 percent; Oregon did the same and gets 90 percent returned. During recent public consultations, environmentalists asked Encorp for higher deposits, but the agency replied: “We do not feel such a drastic action is warranted.” 
    Deposits work best for durable items like bottles that are relatively easy to count and collect, though. Creating a similar system would be nearly impossible for other varieties of packaging and single-use plastics.
    Plastics are miraculous compounds. Modern medical technology, aircraft, automobiles, and sporting goods would be impossible without them, the plastics industry points out, and even lowly plastic packaging reduces food waste, maintains hygiene, and saves energy in shipping. The American Chemistry Council estimates that the environmental costs would be five times greater if soft drinks, for example, were shipped in glass or metal instead of plastic. But the industry knows we have a problem. 
    Last June, the Canadian Plastics Industry Association, which represents some 2,600 companies, announced that its members have pledged to meet a new “aspirational goal” to have 100 percent of plastic packaging re-used, recycled or recovered by 2040. Achieving this “will require significant investment” in new infrastructure and packaging design, the CPIA said — and “success will also require widespread public participation in recycling and recovery programs along with changes to littering behaviour.” In other words, the industry says, we need better packaging, better waste management by governments, and better citizens. 
    (The industry has its own “littering behaviour,” it turns out. On beaches around the world, people have been finding the lentil-sized nurdles used by plastic fabricators. UVic librarians David Boudinot and Daniel Brendle-Moczuk have found and mapped nurdles at 68 sites along the Strait of Georgia, including Willows Beach, possibly spilled by one of the two-dozen companies using nurdles on the Lower Mainland. “We’re hot on the trail of the source,” Boudinot says.)
     

    High-tide trash on Willows Beach, including lentil-sized nurdles, the raw ingredient of many plastic products (Photo by David Boudinot)
     
    The industry says the search for better packaging is already underway. Multinationals such as Danone, PepsiCo and Unilever have joined The New Plastics Economy, an initiative led by the UK-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation, calling for global packaging standards and funding for “moon shot” innovations, such as the development of “bio-benign” plastics and “reversible adhesives based on biomimicry” to make laminated plastics easier to recycle. Some of the same companies are also including their products in tests of the new Loop packaging system, in which consumers pay deposits on durable containers (for, say, Häagen-Dazs ice cream) and return them via a door-to-door delivery network; Loop is scheduled to roll out any day now in New York and Paris, and later this year in Toronto.
    A skeptic can’t help wondering, though, if many companies are signing on to such initiatives simply to buy time. Natural gas, the feedstock for many plastics, is still abundant and cheap, and virgin plastic is often less expensive than recycled. Deposit systems like Loop seem too inconvenient for most people, compared to the buy-and-dispose (or -recycle) economy in place. And the consumer-products and packaging industries are so vast and varied that they’re impossible to effectively self-regulate — as proven by the current wave of so-called “biodegradable” plastics that can be neither composted nor recycled.
    “There is a strong drive for business as usual, with small tweaks,” says Susan Maxwell, a recycling consultant and former Whistler councillor who’s developed several of BC’s EPR programs. As she notes, disposable plastics are a product of inexpensive oil and gas, and the incentives our economy gives to use more of them; we need to rejig the economy so that it’s not supporting industries that largely rely on taxpayers to clean up the aftereffects of their business. 
    That means stronger laws. As Maxwell points out, BC’s Recycling Regulation, the law that governs EPR schemes like RecycleBC and Encorp, only mandates that the agencies post a minimum 75 percent “recovery” or collection rate — there is no requirement for them to achieve a target for reuse or recycling of their products. I asked RecycleBC several times what percentage of “recovered” plastic actually gets recycled, and they didn’t respond. The federal ministry of environment says that only about 11 percent of all plastic in Canada gets recycled. 
    Maxwell thinks the laws need to be stronger upstream, with greater oversight of what kinds of plastics get produced in the first place, and outright bans on those that are too difficult to recycle or likely to leak into the environment. “We shouldn’t be putting things out in the world, and then trying to figure out afterwards what we’re going to do with them,” she says. “We really need to turn off the tap. We can’t be trying to sieve the ocean for plastics.”

     
    ONE QUESTION ANASTASIA CASTRO got asked while campaigning against plastic bags is the same one Canadian libertarians ask about climate change: Why do we have to do anything about it? A 2017 study estimated that 90 percent of the plastic in the oceans comes from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa; banning plastic bags in Victoria, the libertarians argue, or even across Canada, won’t have any effect at all. 
    Castro answers with a question of her own: “How can we ask these countries to change if we’re not willing to make the simplest changes ourselves?” After all, North America created disposable culture, and we’re exporting it — literally, in some cases, along with our waste. As she points out, 103 shipping containers filled with Canadian garbage marked as recyclables have been sitting in The Philippines since 2014, and Greenpeace reported in January that Canadian plastic has turned up in unregulated recycling sites in Malaysia.
    Besides, other nations are doing something. So far, 63 countries have banned plastic bags outright, including China, India, and Kenya, which imposes penalties of up to four years’ imprisonment and $40,000 in fines for producing or distributing bags. (The bans work: San Jose, California, reported 89 percent fewer bags in its storm-drain system a year after it instituted a ban, and marine scientists recorded a 30 to 40 percent reduction in plastic bags in the North Sea after bans came into effect in countries along its shores.) The EU’s forthcoming ban on single-use straws, cutlery, and dishware is already being duplicated in several countries dependent on beach tourism, such as Barbados and Jamaica.
    We may have to wait a long time to see similar nationwide measures in Canada, though. Gord Johns’ unanimously-approved motion for a national strategy against plastic pollution now has to go through parliamentary committees; fellow NDP MP Nathan Cullen has introduced his own bill, prohibiting any packaging that can’t be composted or recycled, but it’s unlikely to pass before October’s federal election. Federal environment minister Catherine McKenna recently told the CBC that a national plastics strategy is coming in June — but stopped short of committing to any bans. “It’s not just about banning,” she said. “I think we need to focus more on the circular economy” — in other words, better package design and recycling, in line with the direction of Canada’s $24.3-billion plastics industry. 
    That’s nothing new. Last September, McKenna got most G7 countries — plus Dow, Unilever, Walmart and other multinationals — to sign an Ocean Plastics Charter, pledging to “recover 100 percent of all plastics by 2040.” (Sound familiar?) McKenna and provincial environment ministers also signed a similar Strategy on Zero Plastic Waste in November — both voluntary declarations, with distant timelines and no budgets or plans for enforcement. “Minister McKenna has been silent on the important role that bans play in tackling plastic waste reduction across Canada,” Greenpeace Canada said in a statement. “We need real leadership from Canada like we’re seeing in other parts of the world, such as Europe, and this isn’t it.”

     
    OUR PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENT hasn’t shown much leadership either. At last September’s conference of the Union of BC Municipalities, members endorsed two resolutions calling for uniform regulations on plastic packaging, and a province-wide strategy to reduce single-use plastics. The ministry of environment responded, in both cases, by citing its pride in the province’s 22 EPR programs, and said it was focused on improving and expanding them instead. “The ministry commends the actions taken by local governments to develop single-use item strategies and other related initiatives to reduce plastic in the environment.” 
    FOCUS also asked BC’s ministry of environment several direct questions about plastic pollution. The ministry told us it is “considering” increasing the deposits on beverage containers to increase the numbers of them that get recycled, but is not planning to mandate recycled content in new plastic containers, like California does, or introduce a province-wide ban on plastic bags, like the one coming in PEI. (Our questions and the ministry’s complete responses are posted HERE.)
    Consequently, any tough measures have been left up to municipalities themselves. July 1 marks the first year since the City of Victoria’s checkout bag bylaw came into effect, and Fraser Work, the City’s director of engineering, says it’s achieved nearly 100 percent compliance. “We’ve resoundingly heard a lot of positive feedback,” he says, crediting the City’s careful, two-year consultation with retailers. (Obviously, the ban doesn’t have friends at the Canadian Plastic Bag Assocation. The industry group lost its case in BC Supreme Court, claiming the bylaw is an environmental regulation and thus a matter of provincial jurisdiction, but its appeal will be heard in Vancouver on May 15.)
    Now the Victoria is preparing a ban on single-use cups and containers, as identified by the City Council in its latest strategic plan. Work admits crafting this bylaw will be more challenging, because getting customers to bring their own reusable containers also has to fit with the province’s FoodSafe guidelines. (The ministry of health told me that “Under the Food Safety Act,  restaurants and supermarkets are responsible for ensuring that their food is safe for consumers and they must not sell any item that is contaminated. At this time, it is up to operators determine if they will allow customers to use personal containers, weighing that decision with their responsibility of ensuring the food is safe for consumption from the restaurant/store to the customer’s home.”) But some retailers are already on board, judging by the numbers of customers one sees with refillable mugs in independent coffee shops, and the popularity of downtown’s Zero Waste Emporium, where you can fill your own containers with everything from milk to shampoo. Last month, the Quebec-based supermarket chain Metro said it will let customers use their own reusable containers for meat, seafood, and pastries in 131 of its stores, so the trend may be even bigger than we think.
    All these changes are part of the larger movement toward “zero waste,” placing a higher priority on reducing or reusing plastic packaging, instead of recycling or landfilling it. More discussion about it is coming soon: the CRD is currently developing a new solid-waste management plan, which includes the blue-box program, and will be putting it out for public consultation this autumn. The debates about what the plan should (and should not) include will be interesting to watch. 
    But we shouldn’t be afraid of changing it. As Charlotte Brady reminds me, back on Willows Beach: “We’re a coastal city. We see the effects before others. We have to do something about plastic pollution when our people, our culture and our economy rely so heavily upon the ocean.”
    Ross Crockford recently bought a Guppyfriend™ laundry bag, in the hope it will capture microfibres from his many fleece jackets.

    Leslie Campbell
    May 2019
    The demise of the Humboldt “Innovation Tree” leads a citizen to investigate the City’s decision-making.
     
    WHEN I HEARD THAT SOMEONE had filed an FOI request with the City of Victoria around the January removal of the Humboldt “Innovation Tree,” I was curious. Not so much about the tree, as about her. I thought her action might be a great example of citizenry—of demanding transparency and holding power to account. And, as it turns out, I was right.
    Over coffee in a James Bay café, Mariann Burka tells me that when she first heard about plans to remove the tree as part of the new cycling network improvements, she immediately contacted City of Victoria staff and council members to obtain more information and see if an alternative was possible. And she asked for a moratorium on its removal. She says, “I was provided with standard responses,” taking the form of reassurances that other options had been looked at to fix the intersection at Humboldt and Government, but “operational needs” necessitated its removal.
    But something didn’t ring true for Burka. And that Humboldt Tree had special meaning for her. Though she’s now retired from the provincial government, where she worked in senior positions (including acting as assistant deputy minister a couple of times), her last years at work were spent in the Belmont building in an office that looked out on the tree. She also confides that after the tree was celebrated as the City’s Innovation Tree and bedecked with sound-triggered lights, she and her partner would stop on their walk home and clap hands or sing to make the lights change colour. “There were always other residents or tourists who would join us,” Burka tells me. It was a welcoming presence for all: “I remember those moments of communal delight and joy.”
    As Burka witnessed the Humboldt tree being removed on January 28, someone said, “Well, that’s that.” But she thought, “No, I am not letting this go.” That same day, she filed her FOI with the City, asking for “all design options considered for changes to the intersection at Government and Humboldt; and what specific operational needs could not be met without removal of this specific tree and why.”
    She received the City’s response on March 22 (yes, it often takes that long).
    So what was in that 37-page file?
    Not very much. As Burka notes, “The drawings in the FOI appear to still show the tree…they are hard to interpret…I saw no evidence of any serious attempt to explore alternatives or to identify or evaluate alternatives in any systematic way.” 
    The closest the records come to showing any design options are rough “scratch notes” supplied by Transportation Planning and Development Manager Sarah Webb, who explains: “The team meetings and notes from October and November 2017 (sent in the scan) indicate general comparisons of the two options, but the option of the full re-design of the intersection was preferred as an overall solution and was pursued through detailed design.” There’s also an agenda for an October 25, 2017 meeting which allots all of 10 minutes to cover 3 items, including “Government/Humboldt/Wharf—full intersection as preferred.”
     

    The only record provided by the City to support its contention that it had “explored a number of alternative designs” were two pages of a staff member’s notebook.
     
    In other words, the tree was bumped out of the picture in 2017 without, apparently, a lot of thought. Council approved the “60 percent design” at a meeting in May 2018—without making a peep about the missing tree. The general public seemed to be out of the loop entirely about the fate of the healthy 40-year-old birch until January 2019.
    Once that 10-day tree removal notice went up, however, things got heated. There were media articles, letters-to-editors, and a petition to save the tree that garnered 1,200 signatures within a few days. The FOI response shows that Councillor Charlayne Thornton-Joe wrote to staff on January 18 of this year, stating: “I am not supportive of the removal of the tree on Government. Is there anything that can be done to save it?” 
    Director of Engineering and Public Works Fraser Work responded to her, copying other councillors, saying, “The design requires the removal of this tree…We tried very hard to keep the central intersection tree, but had to compromise in order to design a safe intersection, that is affordable, and effective at serving the vehicle and pedestrian volumes, with a new cycle track.” 
    When questioned, staff rely on boilerplate, non-explanatory statements that the tree had to go. As Burka put it in a draft report she shared, “The FOI material reveals that the City relies on undefined, vague and, at times, changing criteria of ‘operational requirements.’”
    Sarah Webb, in responding to the FOI, lists constraints and considerations, but as Burka notes: “In none of the documents provided is there any explanation or description of these ‘constraints/factors,’ whether they represent operational requirements, how or why they might be essential to the project, or any exploration of how these factors could be achieved in different ways.”
    And, she points out, there is no consideration of the value of a mature tree. Research shows they provide ecosystem services like water filtration, cooling shade, and carbon sequestration. They contribute to our health by absorbing such pollutants as nitrogen oxides, ammonia, sulfur dioxide and ozone; they even filter particulates out of the air. Recent research makes clear that the older a tree is, the better it absorbs carbon from the atmosphere.
    The staff of the City’s Parks department oversee all the trees on City property. The FOI records suggest their involvement was limited, but that they were fully supportive of the Humboldt tree’s removal.
     
    ANOTHER PROBLEM THAT HAD LEPT OUT at Burka in the FOI response, related to public consultation. The tree’s removal notice certainly seemed to surprise not just citizens, but some council members as well. According to Webb, “Both designs were shown to the public through consultation material in Fall 2017, with the preferred option articulated.” Those materials were not included in the FOI response, but Burka found reports about (and graphics used in) the engagement process on the City’s website.
    She notes, “Despite the City’s public assurances of detailed consultations over the past two years, there is no evidence that explicit information about tree removal (and alternatives) formed a significant component of consultations concerning the intersection.” Early engagement activities were limited to nearby businesses, service providers, and residents (very few of the latter). “Preserving mature trees and maintaining the urban tree canopy is a matter of broad public interest for all of Victoria, not just those who live and work in an area where a specific tree is targeted for removal,” Burka points out. Besides advocating the City “make more effort to engage the broader public on issues of tree removal and retention,” she states, Victorians are “entitled to explicit and full disclosure about tree removals and [should] be allowed an opportunity for meaningful consultation.” (Not just at the 10-day notice period.)
    Burka is not sure we’re going in that direction: “It’s especially troubling to me that in February budget discussions, the City agreed to accelerate implementation of the cycling network which includes ‘streamlining consultation.’” 
    Worse, she feels the City has “almost encouraged divisiveness” by presenting a false dichotomy—trees or bike lanes—when most citizens are in favour of both. “The City should be taking the lead to harmonize those goals,” she says. Instead, she says, some statements by City officials helped falsely suggest those who wanted to save the tree were against bike lanes or even addressing climate change.
    The City’s recent vote to implement its 2013 Urban Forest Master Plan, with $1.26 million in funding—along with pressure from citizens—means more effort is already being made to retain the City’s mature trees. City staff assured me that plans for the Vancouver Street section of the cycling network retain all existing trees and allow for some new ones—proving it is possible to both encourage people to get out of their cars and maintain a robust urban forest.
    In this era of media disruption and cutbacks, however, it will come to rest more and more on citizens to investigate, through FOI and other means, government decision-making and truth-telling. Let Focus know what you learn.
    Leslie Campbell is the editor of Focus. Did you know that, last measured (2012), Victoria’s forest canopy was 18 percent, and that its Urban Forest Master Plan suggests 40-45 percent is more appropriate for a city such as ours?

    David Broadland
    May 2019
    If a BC Supreme Court finding is correct, Victorians need to demand assurances from the City of Victoria about the safety of its water.
     
    DO YOU KNOW IF THERE’S LEAD in your home’s water supply? A 2017 BC Supreme Court judgment about the quality of water in the Shoal Point condominium complex provides an intriguing window into the difficulty of obtaining a reliable answer to that question. 
    The judgment followed a trial in which a Shoal Point owner, Donald Shields, sued his strata council over the poor quality of water in his home and the council’s failure to rectify the problem over a period of nine years. 
     

    The Shoal Point condominium complex on Victoria Harbour
     
    According to court records, Shields’ water had two things wrong with it. First, the liquid coming out of hot water taps was grossly discoloured. Secondly, both the incoming water to the building and the water supplied to Shields’ unit had repeatedly been tested and were shown to have unacceptably high levels of metals, including lead.
    Some of the expert testimony relied on by Justice Anthony Saunders in making his determination of responsibility for the discolouration and contamination seems clearly at odds with what CRD and City of Victoria officials say about Victoria’s water supply. If Saunders’ decision was based on misinformation, he probably came to the wrong conclusion about what entity is responsible for Shields’ water problems. But if he’s correct, then all Victorians ought to be concerned about their water and demand an explanation from the City of Victoria and the CRD. 
    Shields, a retired engineer and professor of civil engineering, bought the condo at Shoal Point in 2006, just three years after the first phase of the project was completed. Potable water is distributed to each Phase-One unit through a system that contains ductile iron pipe. To prevent internal corrosion, this type of pipe has a quarter-inch thick “concrete” lining (Justice Saunders’ description). Shields found that when he returned from being away from his luxury home for a period of time, the hot water from his taps was a “disgusting” brown colour. 
    According to Saunders’ 38-page written judgment, Shields “first noticed dirty brown water coming out of the hot water taps in the bathrooms, and sometimes the kitchen hot water as well, around 2007. He complained to the maintenance manager, who said he would flush the water supply lines.”
    Saunders then provided an extensive account of Shields’ repeated appeals for help, recommendations from experts, and actions taken by the building’s strata council or its appointees.
    In 2013, six years after his initial complaint about discoloured water, the strata council’s building committee ordered testing for metals in Shields’ water and the water in a suite on the floor above, whose owner was also complaining about discoloured water.
    The tests showed the level of lead in Shields’ suite was nearly two times higher than the maximum allowed by federal guidelines (the Guidelines). Justice Saunders noted that, in spite of that reading, “the excessive level of lead in Mr Shields’ suite was not disclosed or discussed” outside of the building committee. That is, neither Shields nor the other suite’s owner were informed.
    In response to further complaints from the suite on the floor above Shields, additional testing for contaminants was undertaken about four months later, in April 2014. That suite’s water tested high for lead again, this time about 1.5 times higher than the maximum allowable under the Guidelines. However, one sample taken in the mechanical room from the water supply line into the building showed highly elevated levels of lead, aluminum, manganese, copper and iron. The lead level in that sample, for example, was 22 times higher than the maximum allowed by the Guidelines. A second sample, taken after flushing about five gallons through the sampling outlet, showed acceptable levels of metals. 
    The expert who took these samples recommended “that independent testing for lead be conducted by the City and the CRD.”
    The expert concluded that both the discolouration of the water and the elevated metals content was coming from the City of Victoria’s water supply. He recommended that Shoal Point install a large filter on the water supply line.
    The City of Victoria’s engineering department disagreed. Justice Saunders noted, “the City’s Engineering Department was of the view that the drop-off in concentrations between the two mechanical room samples strongly indicated that the elevated concentrations were due to the building’s piping, not the water supply. (I note that evidence, of course, not for the truth of its content, but as going to the information that the defendant reasonably would have relied upon.)”
    The City did agree to flush the mains leading to Shoal Point, and a subsequent set of samples showed a reduction in the level of metals. This seems to suggest that the City’s supply was at least part of the source of the elevated metals in Shields’ and others’ suites. Otherwise, flushing the City mains would have made no difference. But Shoal Point did not act on the initial recommendation to install a large filter on the building’s water supply line until a second expert had made a similar recommendation in 2015. A new filtration system was installed and other changes were made in 2015, but did not become fully operational until August 2016.
    Those changes didn’t appear to have much effect. Returning to his home after being away, Shields found the water was still discoloured. He took his own samples that August and sent them off to a lab for analysis. They showed lead levels as high as 26 times the maximum allowable under the Guidelines. One sample contained 50 times as much iron as the Guidelines specify. This sampling was included in Saunders’ judgment.
    A set of samples taken a few months later, in November 2016, were even more shocking. Maxxam Analytics found the level of lead in Shields’ hot water lines was up to 41 times higher than the Guidelines allow. Other metals were higher than the Guidelines, too: Iron was 128 times higher, copper 34 times higher, aluminum 23 times higher and manganese 77 times higher. Although this sampling was provided as evidence at the trial, it was not mentioned in Saunders’ written judgment.
    With Shoal Point’s strata council apparently unwilling to make changes that would provide Shields with water of acceptable quality, he launched legal action. He and his wife Arlette Baker were represented by his son John Shields. 
    In his judgment, Justice Saunders found that a strata council is “responsible for the repair and maintenance of common property,” and that this obligation extends to “making good plumbing that causes discolouration” and “making good plumbing that is causing elevated heavy metal concentrations in water, relative to the Guidelines.” 
    Saunders’ decision seemed to rely heavily on the expert testimony of Martin P. Vogel, a senior chemical engineer practicing in environmental engineering with Golder Associates in Vancouver, who provided expert opinion on behalf of Shoal Point at the trial. In his judgment, Saunders wrote, “With respect to the contamination issue, I accept Mr Vogel’s conclusion that contamination of the hot water through elevated concentrations of aluminum, copper, and lead is most likely due to the corrosive effect on the building’s plumbing system of the naturally acidic water supplied to the building from the municipal water system.”
    Vogel appears to be the only expert who provided an opinion that the City of Victoria’s water supply is “naturally acidic.”
    Information from the CRD and the City of Victoria in the CRD’s Greater Victoria Drinking Water Quality Annual Report for each of the last several years puts the pH of City of Victoria water at around 7.0—essentially neutral. It’s not “naturally acidic” as described by Justice Saunders, who apparently got that idea from Vogel. Saunders’ judgment makes no reference to CRD-City of Victoria water quality reports. Neither the CRD nor the City of Victoria were called to testify at the trial.
    A year before the trial, Ted Robbins, general manager of the CRD’s integrated water service, told the Times Colonist, in an article about the potential for lead to be a problem for Victoria’s drinking water, that “Greater Victoria has neutral water with low alkalinity.”
    By “neutral water,” Robbins meant the pH was around 7—neither acid nor base. “Alkalinity” is a measure of water’s ability to buffer acidity. If alkalinity is too low, water that starts at a water treatment plant with “neutral” pH can have a somewhat different pH by the time it reaches an end user like Shoal Point or your home. But Justice Saunders’ judgment shows no indication that such a factor was considered. His acceptance of Vogel’s opinion that Victoria’s water is “naturally acidic,” and that high metal concentrations in Shields hot water were a consequence of acid leaching of Shoal Point’s plumbing system, is inconsistent with what the CRD and City of Victoria have reported about the water they provide to Victorians.
    Either the City of Victoria and the CRD didn’t know the pH of the water they supplied, or Vogel didn’t.
    What about the discolouration of the water in Shields’ and other suites? Here, again, Saunders’ written decision shows that he relied heavily on Vogel’s expert opinion: “Mr. Vogel has opined that the discolouration of the hot water in the unit is likely predominantly a result of oxidized and precipitated iron and manganese from the water supply due to low flow conditions in the hot water piping serving the plaintiff’s unit. I accept Mr. Vogel’s opinion.”
    The “low flow conditions” Saunders alludes to were the result of Shields and Baker being absent from their home for months at a time. 
    Again, in Saunders’ judgment, it’s the City’s “water supply” that’s to blame: it has such large quantities of iron and manganese dissolved in it, according to Vogel’s theory, that if the water is left to sit in the supply pipe leading to Shields’ suite for weeks or months, these two metals precipitate out, creating the disgusting brown solution that comes out of his hot water taps.
    This, too, seems suspect. A previously mentioned sample of City of Victoria water going into Shoal Point was found to have 5.9 micrograms of manganese and 137 micrograms of iron, per litre. Yet one sample from Shields’ hot water supply was analyzed by Maxxam Analytics and found to have 3,860 micrograms of manganese and 38,300 micrograms of iron, per litre. How these metals could become concentrated to that extent, in the small volume of standing water in the short length of pipe exclusive to Shields’ suite, was unexplained by either Vogel or Justice Saunders.
    Shields and Baker testified that the discolouration diminished if the water was flushed for several minutes, but the discolouration returned after a short period—a week would do it.
    Having accepted Vogel’s contention that Shields’ water quality problems were the result of the acidity of the City’s water, and metal contaminants in it, Saunders found that Shields and Baker were “entitled to damages for the loss of enjoyment of their unit, and the inconvenience of having to conduct flushes of the hot water lines.” They were awarded $15,000.
    Saunders’ August 2017 decision noted: “Serious efforts towards mitigating water quality issues through upgrading the building’s plumbing are underway.” But in April 2019, Shields informed Shoal Point that he is still experiencing discoloured water. There’s no reason to believe the suite’s hot water isn’t still contaminated with metals.
    One plausible alternative explanation for the poor quality of Shields’ hot water is that a section of the ductile iron pipe serving his suite with hot water has a damaged internal concrete liner and is corroding. Indeed, Saunders’ decision shows that he was provided evidence that a section of ductile iron pipe in Shoal Point’s parking area that had been easily accessible had been removed and the liner had been found to have “completely deteriorated.” Two experts had advised Shoal Point that failure of the pipe’s liner was the source of at least some of the water quality problems in Shields’ and others’ suites.
    Yet Saunders’ written judgment shows that he gave more credence to an expert who appears to have provided the court with information that’s at odds with the CRD’s and City of Victoria’s characterization of regional and municipal water quality. Shields has recently informed Shoal Point that he does “not rule out commencing further litigation…” 
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Stephen Hume
    March 2019
    The commercial herring roe fishery in the Salish Sea may be the final nail in the coffin of chinook, resident orca and seabirds.
     
    IN JUNE OF 1893, a small steam tug thumped past Nanaimo. Abruptly, the sea began to seethe. It was a herring school so vast it took three hours to traverse. The school was 70 kilometres across.
    A century earlier, Captain George Vancouver’s log for June 1792 recorded another astonishing sight—whale spouts at every point of the compass. They were humpback whales. Herring provide up to half a humpback’s daily energy requirements.
    The herring school reported 125 years ago was only one of many spawning in the Salish Sea. From February to mid-summer, milt turned the water milky. Each female laid up to 134,000 eggs upon eelgrass, kelp fronds and the hemlock and cedar boughs that First Nations have been placing in the water since time immemorial to harvest the sticky masses they called “skoe.”
    Herring spawned in Brentwood Bay, Esquimalt Harbour, Long Harbour, Plumper Sound, Kuleet Bay, Baynes Sound, Lambert Channel, Fulford Harbour, Squamish, Semiahoo Bay, Nanaimo Harbour, Sansum Narrows, around Puget Sound and at an unknown number of smaller locations. Even today the occasional remnant of a herring run through Greater Victoria’s Gorge Narrows draws crowds.
    First Nations herring camps were everywhere. Herring bones represent the single most abundant species found in excavations of coastal First Nations sites.
    Yet we know of that immense herring school witnessed off Nanaimo only because the tugboat crew thought it so remarkable, they told a federal official. And in 1906, he mentioned it in one of those dry reports to Parliament that gather dust.
    Today, although fisheries experts doggedly insist that herring in the Salish Sea are sufficient to sustain a roe harvest, some data are worrisome. One survey from 2009 shows 53 percent of major historic herring spawning areas in the Salish Sea now in serious decline.
     

    Seining Pacific herring in the Salish Sea near Parksville
     
    Courtenay-Alberni’s NDP Member of Parliament Gord Johns asked at the end of January for a moratorium on harvesting roe herring. Jonathan Wilkinson, the Liberal fisheries minister from North Vancouver, responded by recommending a commercial harvest quota of 25,760 tonnes from the Salish Sea (with a 30,000 tonne cap).
    Of five herring fisheries areas off the BC coast, three are closed and one is restricted to traditional roe-on-kelp harvests. Only the one in the Salish Sea is deemed to have sufficient stock to support a commercial fishery. “As I said, we make our decisions based on science,” Wilkinson said. The uninvited question, however, is this: If science is so good at predicting abundance, why are 80 percent of herring sites now closed?
    The chorus of reassurance should not surprise. We’ve fished stocks to collapse before, amid repeated assurances that the fisheries science shows harvests to be sustainable. Tony Pitcher, a scientist at the University of British Columbia specializing in aquatic ecosystems, noted the irony 20 years ago. “The failure of fisheries science, paradoxically one of the most sophisticated mathematical fields within the discipline of applied ecology, is creating both trauma and denial among its practitioners…These failures are chronic and well-documented and are commonly responded to by many of our colleagues in a range of voices that seek to deflect and deny,” he wrote.
    In the 1950s, overfishing of Japan’s herring led to a collapse. In the 1960s, the California sardine fishery collapsed. Herring fisheries in Alaska and BC were closed in the 1960s after overfished stocks collapsed. Overfishing destroyed herring stocks off Iceland, Norway and Russia around the same time. In 1972, the overfished Peruvian anchovy fishery collapsed. In 1992, Canada’s Atlantic cod went the way of the herring, sardines and anchovies. Cod stocks that had supported Newfoundland fisheries for 500 years suddenly fell to one percent of what it had been at its maximum biomass.
    Fisheries managers frequently blame predictive failures upon oceanic changes they can’t forecast. The North Pacific is often referred to as a “black box” in which mysterious things happen which affect salmon, herring, tuna and other fish. An anthropologist might describe this as magical rationalization—when the emperor of science turns out to wear no clothes, blame unseen, unknowable forces after the fact.
    Pitcher had another observation regarding colleagues who blamed environmental changes for fishery collapses: “Remember that these supposedly delicate fishes have survived 100 million years of sweeping and cyclic environmental changes, including a global catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs…!”
    What fish stocks apparently don’t survive is hubris.
    One common factor in these serial fisheries disasters is that regulators were convinced harvests were sustainable—until they suddenly weren’t.
    If that doesn’t set alarm bells ringing for British Columbians, perhaps this will. A global survey by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization concludes that 85 percent of all wild fish stocks are now overexploited, depleted, or recovering from severe depletion—and current science suggests recovery, while possible, is far from certain. “Many species have been hunted to fractions of their original populations. More than half of global fisheries are exhausted and a further third are depleted,” the UN agency reported in 2012. It suggests that our next generation may inherit barren oceans. At current rates of harvest, it notes, the world faces collapse of all wild seafood species currently being fished. Think herring. Then think chinook, coho, ling cod, rock fish, halibut, and so on.
     
    THIS SHOULDN’T BE NEWS. Twenty years ago, a team of eminent fisheries scientists at the University of BC offered a similar caution. Daniel Pauly and Johanne Dalsgaard, in a paper published in the prestigious journal Science entitled “Fishing Down the Food Webs,” wrote: “Marine fisheries are in a global crisis, mainly due to open access policies and subsidy-driven over-capitalization…The global crisis is mainly one of economics or of governance.”
    They warned that shifts in fish harvests from large predators to smaller fish, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, implies “major changes in the structure of marine food webs.” And, “It is likely that continuation of present trends will lead to wide spread fisheries collapses…”
    They argued that instead of focusing on catch—the doctrine of maximum sustained yield—fisheries management must recalibrate for aggressive rebuilding of fish populations within functional food webs left alone inside large “no-take” marine protected areas.
    Since 1935, with the full sanction of federal authorities, we’ve done the opposite with herring. Industry extracted six million tons of herring from BC waters, at first for human consumption but then mostly for reduction into fish oil and fertilizer and, for the last 50 years or so, purportedly to sell herring roe in Japan. I say “purportedly” because critics claim most herring caught in the roe fishery—100 percent of the males and about 90 percent of the females—actually wind up as feed for pets and farmed fish.
    This creates another ethical conundrum. Critics complain that federal law bans the use of wild fish for non-human consumption. Section 31, sub-section 1 of the federal Fisheries Act prohibits converting wild fish into “fish meal, manure, guano or fertilizer, or for the manufacture or conversion of the fish into oil, fish meal or manure or other fertilizing product.”
    Of course, there’s a loophole in sub-section 2. It gives the fisheries minister discretion to exempt any wild fish from the requirements of sub-section 1.
     

    Herring spawn off the south end of Denman Island (Photo courtesy Jake Berman)
     
    Just to put the total herring harvest into big picture-perspective, we’ve now prevented more than 43 billion herring from spawning. That number represents about 2.8 quadrillion—yes, that’s quadrillion—herring by eggs never laid. Of course, not all herring eggs hatch, and not all that do will survive to spawn in adulthood. But herring killed as eggs have zero chance of survival. Their genes are erased from the reproductive pool. They are not even potential forage.
    Thus we forego future herring to provide tidbits for Japanese gourmands who destroyed their own herring stocks. Meanwhile, First Nations foragers in BC are denied their own ancient traditions. This raises ethical questions about the sincerity of promises to First Nations.
    The Douglas Treaties, which govern half a dozen Coast Salish tribal groups on southern Vancouver Island, are clear. In exchange for access to First Nations lands, those nations are guaranteed the right to hunt, fish and forage “as formerly.” If access to herring and chinook are denied because the resource has been commercially over-exploited by non-First Nations, we abrogate solemn treaty promises. How does that square with the official rhetoric of reconciliation?
     
    AUTHORITIES SAY SALISH SEA HERRING POPULATIONS have returned to historic levels of abundance. Not everyone agrees. Herring activist David Ellis is a former commercial fisherman, biologist, and one-time member of the federal government’s gold-standard Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC).
    Ellis says the estimated biomass for today’s so-called “historic” level of abundance is about the equivalent of one season’s catch 50 years ago.
    He thinks the roe herring fishery should be stopped. “Yes. And banned forever. You have to look to Japan to see how destructive it is over time. And for First Nations it means cultural genocide as they lose herring eggs which are as key to their culture as salmon are.”
    “Massive overharvests in the reduction fishery era are documented. This was a massacre that we are still paying for. The roe herring fishery has knocked out [local] population after population and interviews with First Nations elders best illustrate this.”
    Ellis points to an enduring conflict within the management system—our emphasis on science at the expense of traditional knowledge.
    On the one hand, he argues, we have 10,000 years of intimate use-based First Nations knowledge regarding the herring resource. On the other, 100 years of “official” knowledge from government experts who presided over the extirpation of baleen whales from the Salish Sea, serial collapses of herring fisheries, endangered species status for eulachon and now for a dozen chinook populations. Fisheries regulators, remember, once identified orcas as threats to industry to be eradicated with .50-calibre machine guns, put a bounty on seals until they were almost exterminated, and oversaw the indiscriminate slaughter of the harmless, plankton-feeding basking shark, now listed by COSEWIC as an endangered species.
    The epicentre of surviving Salish Sea herring spawn is now off the East Coast of Vancouver Island. Since early February, seals, sea lions, porpoises and seabirds have been congregating for the feast. The predator species put on a raucous wildlife show. It brings tourists, sparks local festivals and, of course, attracts the ruthlessly efficient commercial harvesters.
    Grant Scott, a former commercial fisherman, is now an advocate for herring as president of Conservancy Hornby Island, a local organization which is leading a campaign to close the herring fishery outright. Scott urges thinking about herring as components in an ecological web that’s so important we shouldn’t fish herring stocks at all. (See their online petition.)
    Increasingly, environmentalists, First Nations, conservationists like Scott, sports anglers, and tourist-dependant communities that rely on other species for which herring is forage—chinook salmon, southern resident orcas, at least 40 species of sea birds, and, of course, the humans who make a living from whale watching and recreational sports fishing—want the Salish Sea herring fishery closed. Many argue herring’s value as forage far outweighs its value as industrial feedstock.
    BC’s tourism sector, much of it associated with outdoor recreation and wildlife viewing, generated $17 billion in 2016 revenue. Tidal sports angling, most of it directed at fishing for chinook which are dependent on herring, generated $3.2 billion. Whale watching of orcas, which rely on chinook, and humpbacks which eat herring, generates about $200 million a year in BC. The roe herring fishery was worth $33 million in 2016. On the jobs front too, the numbers are worth comparing. While commercial fishing employs about 1,100 people, saltwater sports fishing employs 5,000 and tourism on Vancouver Island employs more than 20,000. In fact, tourism in BC contributed five times more to provincial GDP than the entire agriculture and fisheries sectors combined.
     
    SINCE HERRING IS A KEY COMPONENT in the Salish Sea food chain, and since so many species which rely on herring are now either in steep decline or have begun disrupting other parts of the ecological web by switching predation patterns, the case for ending the herring fishery seems reasonable.
    Chinook, which prey on herring stocks, are now in such serious trouble that extinction for many Salish Sea populations seems possible. In its latest report, the federal science committee evaluating species at risk lists nine chinook populations as endangered, four as threatened, and one as being of special concern. About half of BC’s 28 chinook populations are now threatened with extirpation.
     

    Chinook salmon
    This is not a management crisis, it’s a looming catastrophe. It raises profound ethical dilemmas for politicians setting management policy.
    Southern resident orcas, which feed predominantly upon the now- vanishing chinook salmon, are also listed as an endangered population. It has dwindled to 74, a 35-year low, and biologists say two more are expected to starve to death by summer.
     

    Southern resident orca (Photo by MarkMallesonPhotography.com)
     
    It gets worse. A 2012 study of seabirds in the Salish Sea found that almost 40 percent—22 species—showed “significantly declining trends.” One group of seabirds, the forage fish feeders for whom herring are the most important food source, deserve special concern because of the steepness of the population declines, the researchers warned.
    The seabirds that deserve most attention (some have lost almost 20 percent of their populations)—the western grebe, the common loon, the horned grebe and the rhinoceros auklet—“feed largely on small, mid-water schooling bait (or forage) fish when in the Salish Sea. Pacific herring and Pacific sand lance (needlefish) are the two most important forage fish prey, particularly now that some species such as eulachon have collapsed.” The report says herring eggs and larvae are the two most important prey types for marine birds in the Salish Sea.
    So, is a declining abundance of herring a key in this large-scale unravelling of Salish Sea food chains?
    Ellis thinks so.
    “I believe that the loss of the local, non-migratory herring leaves the vast Salish Sea pasturage unused by large herring in the summer, and this has contributed very significantly to the decline of the orca and chinook,” he says.
    “Orcas need big chinook and chinook need big herring—and lots of both migratory and resident herring so they can use all areas [of the Salish Sea] as herring pastures.”
    One recent major study of the Salish Sea food web concludes that not enough chinook now remain to sustain orcas, seals, sea lions, sport fishing, and commercial harvests. Predictably, there’s now a clamour to cull seals and sea lions, although one study of 1,000 samples of seal scat in the San Juan Islands found that 60 percent of seals’ diet was herring. The question arises, why are seals increasing predation on dwindling chinook stocks if herring stocks, which historically provided more than half their diet, are at historic levels of abundance?
     
    SOME OF US ARE OLD ENOUGH to remember the kind of abundance that astonished Captain Vancouver 226 years ago and mesmerized that tugboat crew 125 years ago. That was before our Garden of Eden was laid to waste by greed and ignorance, scientific hubris, over-capitalization, corporate concentration, exoticized public tastes, and colonialist racism that marginalized Indigenous knowledge and Aboriginal fishing rights.
    Old-timers would advise anglers to watch for squabbling masses of gulls hovering and plunge diving. That would signal a herring ball, forced up by large chinook and coho feeding from below. Troll your cut herring strip, Lucky Louie plug, wobbly Tom Mack spoon or bucktail fly past that, the lure emulating a stunned or wounded bait fish, and you’d be pretty sure to get a strike.
    Herring in the Salish Sea were once so abundant that you didn’t have to buy bait. You took out a herring rake, a long paddle-like implement with teeth set into it like a comb, and simply swept live bait up and into the bottom of your boat.
    My father-in-law, who caught his first chinook from a dugout canoe in Cowichan Bay shortly after the First World War, used a herring rake. His is now an artifact in a museum, just as those recollections of the immense herring schools sweeping in and out of the Salish Sea to spawn each spring have been consigned to mostly-forgotten archives.
    Stephen Hume spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island. His byline has appeared in most major Canadian newspapers. The author of nine books of poetry, natural history, history and literary essays, he lives on the Saanich Peninsula.
     
    More insights about the Salish Sea herring fishery in this video by Colby Rex O'Neill
     
     
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    David Broadland
    January 2019
    The City has always denied the new bridge has any problems, thus limiting its ability to assert itself in legal fights over the project.
     
    JUDGING BY THE LEGAL SUITS claiming damages that have been filed (but not yet served) by PCL Constructors against the City of Victoria and the engineering companies involved in designing the new Johnson Street Bridge, history is about to repeat itself.
    PCL launched a similar legal maneuver against its partners on the project back in 2015, and that led to the City agreeing to “release and forever discharge” PCL, MMM Group, and Hardesty & Hanover “from all debts, claims, demands, damages, expenses and costs (including without limitation, legal costs) of any nature or kind that are in any way related to the Project and either known or which ought to be known by the [City] as of [April 23, 2016].”
    PCL now claims “The design provided by the City to PCL was not prepared in accordance with the standard of professional care normally exercised by recognized professional engineers experienced in the performance of design work such as required for the design of the New Bridge, and was not accurate and complete but rather the design information contained errors, omissions and misrepresentations.”
    PCL’s filing makes similar design-focussed claims against Hardesty & Hanover and MMM Group/WSP, the two companies that did the actual design and engineering on the bridge. PCL’s contract with the City stated that the City was legally responsible to provide the design.
    PCL’s latest claims have forced the City back into mediation. The head of the one-person company the City contracted to provide public relations for the project, Jonathan Huggett, has characterized PCL’s filings as simply placeholders to meet BC’s Limitation Act requirement of filing civil claims within two years of a construction project’s completion date. But at the same time, Huggett admits the City is in a new round of legal mediation with PCL.
    My guess is that PCL is looking to obtain a similar agreement to the one it negotiated with the City in 2016. This time it will want to rid itself of any future liability for what occurred after April 2016. One of those liabilities arises from the execution of what the original construction contract between the City and PCL called “a complicated joint.” This is the six-surface connection between each ring and each truss.
    If you watched the bridge parts being erected, you will recall that each ring was lowered into place separately and later the two side trusses with the highway deck attached to them were added as a single piece. To join the trusses to the rings, twelve different surfaces needed to meet in almost perfect juxtaposition. The mating surfaces were then fastened with internal bolts. The long-term structural integrity of these joints is dependent on all of the parts never corroding, especially the bolts and the holes through which they pass. Yet it’s obvious that oxidation at these joints is already occurring. Worse, caulking intended to keep the joints dry is already cracking away from the joints.
     

    Nine months into service, the critical joint on the south-side truss has lost caulking intended to keep water out and corrosion at bay.
     
    The bridge opened only nine months ago, but by December a section of the seal over the upper joint on the south side of the bridge had fallen out and the joint appeared to be corroding freely (photo above). Hardesty & Hanover’s design depends heavily on the durability of epoxy grout in a number of critical areas on the structure, yet the trustworthiness of that design choice is already in question.
    Kiewit Construction’s exquisite competing bid design called for this to be a field-welded joint, not a bolted joint, so there are legitimate questions about Hardesty & Hanover’s choice of how to execute this “complicated joint.”
    The City’s apologists for the project will likely deny there’s any problem and will argue that critical joints freely corroding is standard fare on such engineering projects—thus undermining the City’s legal position vis-a-vis PCL. Recall the six-foot by six-foot bolted-on plates that were needed as a result of incomplete design information being included in shop drawings. Those weren’t a problem, either, according to Huggett, just a “fabrication challenge.” Huggett’s public claim that the plates were standard fare for such an infrastructure project single-handedly defeated any future case the City could make in a court of law.
    Such “fabrication challenges” are now evident all over the bridge. My personal Top Ten would include the top chord of the trusses. In the original conceptual design by Wilkinson Eyre’s Sebastien Ricard—the dreamy image used to get a “Yes” in the 2010 referendum—the graceful sweep of the top edge of the trusses, from the top of the rings to the far western toe of the trusses, contained exactly zero abrupt changes in direction. These lines were meant to be sweeping and graceful.
     

    Wilkinson Eyre-Sebastien Ricard conceptual design, conceived for the 2010 referendum on whether to replace the old bridge.
     
    In the bridge PCL built, this sweeping line has about seven changes in direction. These range from inexplicably abrupt to “fabrication challenge” wobbles. The wobbles in the line of that top edge result in a series of bulges and dents in the sides of the trusses where there should have been a predictably straight and flat surface. Anyone with an eye for good form will perceive these deformations as serious flaws. To my eye, this aspect of the new bridge is the best example of poor design and workmanship at play anywhere in Downtown Victoria.
     

    Wobbles and abrupt changes in direction in the trusses of the design created by Hardesty & Hanover and MMM Group.
     
    This was supposed to be an “architecturally significant” structure, a “signature” bridge. What else could justify its eventual $120-million cost? Yet not a single mention of the project can be found on any of the websites of the companies involved in designing, engineering, and constructing it. None of them wants to put their corporate signature on the hodgepodge of metal confusion. But Victoria is stuck with it, the engineers claim, for the next 100 years.
    There’s a lot more that’s already gone wrong with the structure, and I don’t mean intoxicated men falling overboard. Enter the cavernous machinery room, for example, which, it was hoped, visitors would find “iconic.” Check out the cracked and spalling concrete overhangs that are supposed to keep rain off the hydraulic motors. Below them, look closely and you’ll see duct tape crudely applied to makeshift sheet-metal covers intended to keep rainwater away from the pinion shafts. After only nine months of service, the City has resorted to using duct tape to solve problems. Below the duct tape, note the pool of hydraulic oil that’s leaking from the drive motors. $120 million bought a certain style of iconic, but it’s more like Trailer Park Boys than Wilkinson Eyre. Watch for duct tape to appear over those “complicated joints.”
     

    Nine months into service, hydraulic fluid is leaking and duct tape has been employed.
     
    These are just some of the reasons why PCL is now likely twisting the City’s arm to “release and forever discharge” it from all responsibility it might have for everything that has already gone wrong, and everything that will go wrong in the future. City councillors will be told by their consultant that this is “normal” for a big infrastructure project and councillors will accept PCL’s terms, just like they always have.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

    Leslie Campbell
    January 2019
    Residents are mobilizing to protect one of the city’s greatest natural charms, increasingly threatened by development.
     
    I RECALL DURING MY FIRST YEAR HERE IN VICTORIA, as a transplant from Winnipeg, sitting in a small James Bay park noticing its many different species of very large trees. I was in heaven! It seemed so exciting, so exotic and luxuriant.
    I may have become more blasé about it 34 years later, but I still know what a blessing—and a defining characteristic of this city—all those big trees are. And I am obviously not alone. Witness the growing crescendo of concern over the city’s loss of mature trees. Pressures from development, summer droughts, wind storms, sewage pipelines, and simple aging are among the reasons residents are noticing the demise of more and more trees.
    Citizens, regional councils, and municipal parks employees all seem to recognize the central role the urban forest plays in making Victoria what it is—a beautiful, healthy, prosperous place. Many of us now understand how trees, especially mature ones, provide ecosystem services like water filtration, cooling shade, and carbon sequestration. How they contribute to our health by absorbing both air and water pollutants; they even filter particulates out of the air by trapping them on their leaves and bark, thereby reducing asthma attacks. Did you know that trees increase the value of our homes from 3-15 percent? Or that shading from trees prolongs the life of asphalt by 10-25 years? Trees also act as useful wind buffers. By sheltering many other species, they increase biodiversity.
    Look out your window and imagine the city without trees: it would be a very different, bleaker place entirely. No birds would be singing.
    Ironically, those very trees and their many charms have helped attract development, which has boosted land prices so much that trees are being sacrificed to make room for more and larger homes.
    The real estate boom and its impact on our urban forest seems to have caught us off guard, without adequate safeguards in place. As a result, every year thousands of mature trees—along with the many services they provide—are being lost throughout the Capital Region. In this article, I will focus on the City of Victoria, where a weak bylaw means, for example, that removal of non-native trees with a diameter at chest height of less than 80 centimetres—or 31.5 inches—does not require a permit. (More on this later.)
    At a City of Victoria council meeting on November 22, a half dozen speakers from the recently formed Community Trees Matter Network showed up to give presentations to the new council. Their website (housed under the Creatively United for the Planet website) contains numerous articles about the many benefits of and threats to the urban forest.
     

    Verna Stone (l), Nancy Lane MacGregor and Frances Litman
     
    Nancy Lane MacGregor, in her presentation, took Victoria council on a tour of a block in her Rockland neighbourhood: “On Moss Street, a Garry oak blew over in a storm…At Moss and Rockland, a 350-year-old Garry oak was cut down, its roots too close to homes on either side. At Langham Court, a healthy 162-year-old giant sequoia was taken down because its roots were entwined with a sewer pipe. Around the corner on Linden, apartment balconies face a wasteland through standing dead trees, the first phase of a development. At 1201 Fort Street, a luxury condo and townhouse development…will destroy 29 mature trees including a remnant Garry oak meadow, giant sequoias and other protected trees. Up the street, at Central Middle School, a large Garry oak fell in a windstorm…”
    Frances Litman, founder of Creatively United for the Planet, reminded council of the many services trees provide a city: “Trees clean and cool the air, create oxygen, decrease carbon dioxide, provide essential habitat for birds and animals, and save this city a lot of money [$2 million in 2013] by processing and filtering hundreds of thousands of gallons of water that would overtax our storm sewers.” She charged today’s developers with “scraping the land bare of every earthworm and living thing, despite the footprint of the building and without regard to how this impacts the natural ecosystem and surrounding neighbourhood.”
    Litman urged council to implement the recommendations of the City’s own 2013 Urban Forest Management Plan, and “budget for a qualified coordinator to oversee, educate and implement it department-wide.”
    A week after that council meeting, I met with Litman and MacGregor at Verna Stone’s art-filled apartment at Fort and Moss Streets. A coffee table was set with a smorgasbord of sweets and Philosopher’s Brew tea was steeping. Stone was wearing her tree dress, a lovely tunic featuring an appliquéd Douglas fir. She too is a member of the Community Trees Matter Network.
    The story of how they came together—along with a number of others—to form the Network includes the outrage they experienced as they each noticed too many trees falling victim to disease and development. Serendipity and basic networking also brought them together. When Litman was put in touch with so many other tree-lovers, she thought, “Oh my god, I’ve found my tribe.” She manages the Network’s website and email and said she can barely keep on top of the interest: “It’s exploding!”
    Indeed, soon after I talked with them, Litman was interviewed on CHEK TV about the planned removal of at least 29 mature Garry oaks—and endangerment of 20 more—on Grange Road in Saanich due to the CRD’s sewage pipeline. The neighbourhood was in an uproar over this loss. Fortunately, the ensuing publicity nudged the CRD to figure out how they could shift the pipeline a bit and preserve the trees.
    Network members have investigated what the City of Victoria has been doing and think it’s just not enough. “A barely advertised ‘Tree Appreciation Day’ draws only a handful of citizens to witness the mayor planting four trees, then pack up for another year,” said MacGregor, adding, “Trees are not considered in the push for densification.”
    Though an upbeat group, cynicism about governments near and far was apparent. In discussing how Transport Canada recently removed all the trees along the south side of the Inner Harbour at Laurel Point Park to clean up contaminated soil from a paint plant once located there, Stone suggested the federal body is just attempting to look good on the cleanup front so it can allow more oil tankers to ply coastal waters.
    The women were looking forward to hosting expert speakers, art events, speaking at other council meetings, and fanning out to various neighbourhood associations to connect with tree defenders in different areas. They want to “harness the power of an integrated network of people,” said Litman. Stone, an artist, never expected to be an activist, but, quoting a friend, said, “Activism is the price you pay for living on this planet.”
     
    THE CITY OF VICTORIA ESTIMATES there are about 150,000 trees within its borders, with 33,000 of them on City boulevards or in parks. There’s an inventory of these on the Open Data Portal of the City’s website (I found it, but only with considerable help).
    In the City’s 2013 Urban Forest Management Plan, it’s noted that the City’s “tree canopy cover ranges from a low of 3.4 percent in the Downtown area to a high of almost 34 percent in Rockland.” Overall, Victoria’s canopy was, in 2008, estimated to be 17.6 percent. Navdeep Sidhu, assistant director of Parks and Recreation, told me the City is currently in the process of planning the next canopy coverage study.
    The Urban Forest Management Plan is, at 98 pages, a wealth of information and supports the activists’ arguments for more care being taken with Victoria’s urban forest. For instance, it notes that “The Garry oak and associated ecosystems that shape Victoria’s landscape are home to more plant species than any other land-based ecosystem in coastal British Columbia. Many of these species occur nowhere else in Canada. At this time [2013], because so much habitat has been lost or degraded, approximately 100 species of plants, mammals, reptiles, birds, butterflies, and other insects are listed as ‘at risk’ in these ecosystems. Many of these species at risk are found in Victoria—from tiny poverty clover in Barnard Park to the iconic great blue herons that nest in Beacon Hill Park.” The authors also note, “Garry oak ecosystems have been dramatically affected by land development. It is estimated that in 1800, Garry oak ecosystems flourished on 1,460 hectares of the City. By 1997 that had dwindled to 21 hectares of fragmented and degraded habitat.” And certainly less now, nearly 20 years and two real estate booms later.
    Management of the urban forest in the City of Victoria falls under the Parks and Recreation Department, in particular the 20 employees of the Arboriculture and Natural Areas section. They have their hands full with the maintenance of those 33,000 trees in parks and on streets and boulevards. They prune 600 of them a year, plant 900 native plants, and give five years of extra care to young saplings they’ve planted. They maintain the tree inventory, remove invasive species, respond to over 1200 calls for service of public trees each year, and review “development-related and other various permit applications for impacts to the Urban Forest.”
    I had hoped to speak to an employee in the City’s arboriculture section, but was instead urged to send a questionnaire to Parks and Communications managers. The full Q&A is on Focus’ website.
    Parsing some of the answers provided as to why trees are “removed,” the spokespeople cited increased stress, including from drought, that increases “impacts of disease and insect pests.” Trees’ defense mechanisms fail and pests are attracted to weakened trees.
    They also noted that, “A large number of street trees planted in the 1950s and 1960s are now nearing the end of their lifecycle. They are decreasing in vigour and not as adaptable to changes in the environment around them. The last several years of summer drought conditions have put additional stress on many trees.” Additional stress on these trees comes from damage by humans: “wounds to trees from mowers and weed eaters are detrimental to tree health and can be infection points for fungal wood decay pathogens. Nailing, screwing, bolting or attaching things to trees can cause damage to the tissues within the tree and the bark.” Soil compaction is also an issue for trees lining streets where people park or store materials in the root zone of a tree.
    The Parks people assured me that “we always look for ways to retain the tree as long as possible…Generally, when dieback of the crown is above 40 to 50 percent, removal is recommended.”
    In the first 9 months of 2018, the City had removed 327 trees and planted 265 trees on City property. Since then, they have removed at least a further 29 trees in Stadacona Park, adjacent to the 1400 block of Pandora Avenue, and 12 more in Fernwood.
    Increased numbers of tree removals in the last year or two are likely due to the City’s strategy to manage high-risk trees. As the Parks people explained: “The City of Victoria completed an inventory of trees on City property in early 2014 and recorded information including species, size, condition, geographic location and maintenance needs. Trees that were identified through this process to have significant safety hazards or that were at risk of imminent failure were removed immediately. The inventory identified trees that require further assessment to determine risks, which may result in pruning, removal or other hazard mitigation techniques. Staff further assess these high-risk trees to determine if they can be retained, or if they must be removed. In 2019, 392 trees will require assessment.” Judging from recent years, these assessments will lead to a good number of trees being removed.
    Pressures on the urban forest on private property (which comprises about 75 percent of Victoria’s urban forest) are more difficult to assess. I was told Parks had an average of 111 requests annually for removal of “protected” trees over the last couple of years. About half of the requests are denied—so about 55 protected trees were removed each year by private property owners.
    That doesn’t sound like much, and seems at odds with the perceptions of many tree watchers. But one just needs to read the City of Victoria’s Tree Preservation Bylaw to understand what’s not being counted.
    This is a bylaw that most agree needs revision. It currently puts restrictions on the type and size of trees that can be cut down on private property. Certain species—Garry oak, arbutus, Pacific dogwood, Pacific yew—if over 50 centimetres in height, are “protected.” Western red cedar, big-leaf maple, and Douglas fir must be over 60 centimetres in diameter at chest height to be protected. Any tree on private property with a trunk over 80 centimetres in diameter is also protected under the bylaw and cannot be removed or altered without a permit. A lot of big trees slip through these size requirements and can often be removed without any permission, fees or civic involvement. Contrast this to Vancouver, where trees over 20 centimetres in diameter are protected.
    A permit involves getting one of the City’s arborists to assess the situation. If they agree there is a problem warranting removal (e.g. it is severely diseased or poses a danger), you’ll pay $30 for a removal permit for each tree up to three trees, then only $5 per tree after that. If you do not obtain a permit and remove a protected tree, penalties for first-time offenders are $250-$1500. Updating this bylaw is an objective of the City’s new Strategic Draft Plan.
    In my mind the biggest gap in the tree bylaw is that in practice it fails to protect any tree when their removal is deemed “necessary for the purpose of constructing a building, an addition to a building, or construction of an accessory building” or a driveway, off-street parking, utilities service connections, or “the installation, repair, or maintenance of public works.” A permit may be needed, but man-made things seem to have priority over saving trees.
    Brooke Stark, manager of Parks Operations told me that in 2018, “there were approximately 126 trees lost to development and capital projects.” The department will track these categories separately in 2019, but could not get more specific for 2018 data.
    Not included in that tally are the 29 trees approved for removal at the somewhat ironically named Bellewood Park, a 2-acre, 83-unit development at 1201 Fort Street. These include some big Garry oaks and two giant sequoias (still standing as Focus went to press). Last April, MacGregor wrote to council about these magnificent sequoias, which can live for over 2,000 years: “[They] have historic importance, planted from seed in the 1860s by the Attorney General of the Colony of BC, E.G. Alston.” In that letter, MacGregor noted some of the 22 trees being retained by the developer might not survive blasting and construction. She quoted the arborist’s report on the excavation for underground parking: “If it is found that large structural roots must be pruned…it may be necessary to remove additional trees to eliminate any risk associated with them.” The developer has agreed to plant 83 new trees, but most of those will be varieties of small trees.
     

    The ironically-named Bellewood Park development will see the removal of 29 trees, including Garry oaks and the two giant sequoias in the background
     
    ANOTHER FOUNDER OF THE COMMUNITY TREES MATTER NETWORK, Grace Golightly, has been writing thoughtful and detailed letters to City Hall about trees, often copying them to Focus, for a couple of years. She has taken particular issue with the tree bylaw’s modest requirements of planting two replacement trees and paying a token $30 fee when removal of a protected tree occurs. Among other reasons, she has pointed out that mature trees provide far more carbon sequestration than younger trees.
    The research backs her up. A 2014 study reported in Nature looked at 403 tree species and showed that “for most species mass growth rate increases continuously with tree size. Thus, large, old trees do not act simply as senescent carbon reservoirs but actively fix large amounts of carbon compared to smaller trees; at the extreme, a single big tree can add the same amount of carbon to the forest within a year as is contained in an entire mid-sized tree.”
    Golightly herself has cited Ohio State University research suggesting it would take a total of 269 two-inch-diameter trees to replace the carbon sequestration provided by a single 36-inch-diameter deciduous tree.
    Forests in general are one of the world’s largest banks for all of the carbon emitted into the atmosphere. As much as 45 percent of the carbon stored on land is tied up in forests according to NASA scientists.
    With the City of Victoria’s professed concern about climate change, maintaining a robust and growing urban forest, in large measure made up of mature trees, should be a priority. A first step would be analyzing how much total carbon sequestration is being provided by our forest. Oak Bay, for instance, has calculated that its trees sequester 3,270 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually and store 97,490 tonnes of carbon.
    On public lands, the Victoria’s Parks department told me they plan to plant only 250 to 300 new trees per year. This does not even replace on a one-to-one basis recent removals of mature trees from City-owned land. And on private land, only certain tree removals need to be accompanied with replanting of, at most, two saplings.
    At such unambitious replanting rates it’s clear that Victoria’s leafy canopy and the important services it provides, will fade away. Golightly’s and others’ advocacy for a much more vigorous replanting schedule seems warranted. She wrote, “When I mentioned the need to plant a lot more trees to one of the Parks administrators, he said there was nowhere to plant them. However, we must plant them, and a little thought can generate lots of ideas.” She mentions offering trees at a discount to residents (as Nanaimo, Saanich and Vancouver do). She points out that most schoolyards and many other institutions could also accommodate more trees. She suggests planting more trees along the Galloping Goose—and in many parks, particularly if volunteers cleared out invasive species. The other day I noticed barren parcels of land around the Johnson Street Bridge begging for trees to at least replace the dozen or so removed years ago for the new bridge.
    Golightly goes further: “I think it’s essential that the City purchase well-treed properties that come up for sale. They can either be covenanted and re-sold, or made into mini-parks where more trees could be planted to increase the carbon storage and benefits to the neighbourhood.”
    On that score, the South Jubilee Neighborhood Association has urged the City to consider purchasing a large corner lot at Leigh and Bank Streets which has never been developed and boasts 26 mature Garry oaks. “We are also keenly interested in planting more trees on the property to turn it into a true urban forest or ‘clean air’ garden,” writes board member Matt Dell.
     

    The City is being urged to purchase this private land at Leigh and Bank to preserve the Garry oaks
     
    Along such lines, the City’s own Urban Forest Management Plan (UFMP) suggests the City establish a capital fund for the acquisition and restoration of lands for new urban forest.
    Of course, it is not as simple as just plunking more trees in the ground. The Parks department told me: “All restrictions of the site, physical space, soil volumes, overhead or underground services, soil quality, site exposure, expected available water, levels of wind and sun, pest resistance and aesthetics play a part in tree selection. Selecting a tree variety which is going to be successful long term is critical.” Increasing densification and more extreme, climate-change-induced weather patterns will just make maintaining a healthy urban forest more challenging—and more important.
    The City’s six-year-old UFMP predicted all this: “Finding space for significant amounts of urban forest within these high-density [neighbourhoods] is a challenge. Other types of ‘greening’ such as green roofs and green walls, as well as smaller trees and shrubs in planters will make important contributions. However, this will not achieve the same level of benefits that large, mature trees provide. Urban planners, developers and the design community should be encouraged to find ways to incorporate large-canopy trees into these settings, such as has been done in Portland.” (In 2014, Portland had a 29.9 percent canopy cover and was aiming at 33 percent.)
    The UFMP, written before the recent real estate boom, continues: “The single greatest impact to the urban forest comes from the incremental loss of greenspace associated with development and densification. In addition to removal of large mature trees, there is a loss of soils and space that could be used for future generations of trees. It takes a significant amount of space to grow a large tree. As land uses change and neighbourhoods are redeveloped, it is critical to ensure that adequate greenspace is being reallocated on-site or elsewhere to sustain the future urban forest. Failure to do so will result in a forest that is diminished in size, more fragmented, less productive and more vulnerable to change—the antithesis of sustainability.” [italics added]
    An earlier densifying boom in the 1970s gave rise to numerous three- and four-storey apartment buildings that had big setbacks allowing for wide lawns, bushes and large trees. The more recent boom, in an effort to maximize return on high-priced land, has created buildings right up against sidewalks. The Parks people put it this way: “Most original homes in Victoria were not built to the zoning setbacks or built to maximize allowable Floor Space Ratio. New construction tends to maximize both.”
    If the powers-that-be had been thinking faster, or just more holistically, they’d have figured out a way, during the recent boom, to plan developments in tandem with urban forest expansion. This is not as unlikely as it might sound. Other cities have done it or have at least planned how to accomplish it. Duncan is aiming at a 40 percent canopy and knows that means planting 3,729 trees by 2020; Seattle is aiming at 30 percent coverage within a 30-year period; Vancouver’s 2020 plan sets a target of 40 percent canopy and calls for 150,000 new trees by 2020. Victoria’s, recall, was 17.6 percent in 2008.
    Other cities are establishing volunteer programs to assist in maintaining urban forest health. Melbourne has a very successful program involving over 400 volunteers doing meaningful work for the urban forest—mapping, creating inventories of landscape features, and eco-assessments. Closer to home, Saanich’s “Pulling Together” program involves volunteers in ecological restoration in 40 of its parks. Community members can participate in invasive removal and replanting activities on a casual drop-in basis or as “lead stewards” and “restoration assistants.” There is no similar program in the City of Victoria.
     
    IN THE RAPIDLY GROWING FIELD OF URBAN FORESTRY, trees are viewed as essential “green infrastructure” that deliver environmental, health and economic services. These include those mentioned in relation to carbon storage, pollution reduction, stormwater management, the provision of wind-buffering and shading, and public health.
    The director of UBC’s Bachelor of Urban Forestry program, Professor Cecil Konijnendijk, recently told CBC that too many cities are letting development drive city-wide growth. “Stronger planning frameworks that actually guide developments [are necessary]; cities should be stronger in really making sure development is done in the right way…” Konijnendijk has agreed to speak in Victoria in the new year—watch the Community Trees Matter website.
    Urban foresters advocate for good strong policy and enforcement, more funding to support city arborists, and education so citizens understand the wide array of services provided by a healthy urban forest. They know that a mobilized citizenry is essential to encourage the political will to get the right policies in place.
    Fortunately, Victoria has both a mobilized citizenry and that 6-year-old Urban Forest Master Plan in place. Most of its 26 recommendations have not been implemented, the very first of which advocates creating “a position for an Urban Forest Planner/Coordinator, who is empowered to work with other departments to achieve the City’s urban forest goals and to report annually to council.” That seems a good place to start—along with direction from council to make an increased tree canopy a reality.
    Leslie Campbell loves walking the well-treed streets of Rockland—just by viewing trees our stress levels drop. Note City Hall’s January sessions for citizen input on the draft budget and strategic plan at Victoria City Hall.

    David Broadland
    January 2019
    An email unearthed by an FOI request raises questions about the Elsner investigation and the Lowe Report. So do all the deleted emails.
     
    POLICE COMPLAINT COMMISSIONER Stan Lowe’s September 2018 report on the investigations into former Victoria Police Department Chief Frank Elsner excoriated Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps and Esquimalt Mayor Barbara Desjardins for the way they conducted an initial investigation of Elsner in 2015. Lowe asserted that the mayors “had predetermined the outcome of the internal discipline process from the outset, and set about navigating a course to allow the former chief to remain in his post.”
    He provided much evidence to support his contention, but the mayors disputed his conclusion. Both claimed they had been libelled and made veiled threats of legal action against Lowe. Lowe’s office invited the mayors to call for a public inquiry. Deputy Police Complaint Commissioner Rollie Woods stated, “we have a considerable body of evidence we would be willing to provide at any public inquiry so the truth would certainly come out.”
    Did the mayors have any evidence that would support their claims? They weren’t offering any, so Focus filed an FOI for the communications between the two mayors during the three months of their investigation of Elsner. The Victoria Police Board released those records to us in mid-December (See link at the end of this story).
    That release contained only one email written by Mayor Helps to Mayor Desjardins during September, October and November 2015 when they conducted their investigation. Helps’ one email consisted of three words. On September 4, 2015, shortly after the mayors had been informed about salacious Twitter messages from Elsner to the wife of a subordinate VicPD officer, Desjardins copied Helps on an email to Elsner wherein she asked him for a meeting about “a personal matter requiring your assistance...” About five hours later, Helps emailed Desjardins and asked, “Did he respond?” Within an hour Desjardins wrote back to Helps: “Got auto response he is away unt [sic] the 8th have got a phone number and will call tomorrow.” And then, for the next three months, Helps was apparently silent, never communicating with Desjardins by email on this subject.
    By way of an explanation for the scarcity of records of the two mayors’ communications, VicPD’s Collette Thomson noted, “A limited number of records were accessible due to email retention schedules.” By that she seems to mean the emails the mayors exchanged were deleted.
    The scant record that remains appears to have survived only because paper copies of a few emails gathered for a previous FOI request—made by an unknown entity—were kept by the Township of Esquimalt. All of Helps’ emails related to the first three months of the internal investigation have been deleted, even though it took place just over three years ago. All of her emails go through mailboxes hosted on City of Victoria servers and retention of the mayor’s email records is the responsibility of the City of Victoria.
    If the mayor’s emails have been deleted, that means that in less time than the 4-year term of an elected City of Victoria mayor or counsellor, critical records of what they did while in office are being destroyed by the City. That’s what Thomson’s explanation implies.
    If you are thinking, “Well, that doesn’t seem right,” you’re correct. The City of Victoria’s “Records Retention and Disposition Authority” for the Mayor’s Office requires that both electronic and paper records that are created to “document the operations of the mayor” must be “retained for 10 years overall, and then transferred to Archives for selective retention.” The Police Board has no written policy regarding “email retention schedules,” and, in any case, the emails were never in its physical control or custody. They were in the physical control and custody of the City of Victoria. Regardless, according to Thomson, those records are gone.
    It’s difficult to imagine why any City employee other than the mayor herself would delete the mayor’s Elsner investigation emails from the City’s electronic document storage system. We are left with the presumption that the mayor may have deleted these emails before they could be put into long-term storage.
    To understand in a fundamental keep-democracy-healthy kind of way why the communications between Helps and Desjardins matter—and why they should have been preserved—consider what former BC Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham wrote in her investigative report Access Denied: Record Retention and Disposal Practices of the Government of BC.
    Denham conducted her investigation in response to a case in which a person in the BC Premier’s Office “triple-deleted” emails in order to hide his conduct from public scrutiny. Her report described in detail how emails could be triple-deleted. The commissioner noted that “In conducting this investigation, it has become clear that many employees falsely assume that emails are impermanent and transitory, and therefore of little value. What this investigation makes clear is that it is a record’s content and context that determines whether a record is transitory, rather than its form.”
    Ironically, Denham released this report on October 22, 2015, right at the time Helps and Desjardins were conducting their own investigation into Elsner. At that time, Denham wrote, “Democracy depends on accountable government. Citizens have the right to know how their government works and how decisions are made.”
    Our “right to know” translates into a right to access government records, such as Helps’ and Desjardins’ emails. But, Denham wrote, “Access to information rights can only exist when public bodies create the conditions for those rights to be exercised. Government must promote a culture of access, from executive leadership to front-line employees. If they fail to meet this obligation, the access to information process is rendered ineffective.”
    If Helps deleted 100 percent of her emails, which appears to be the case, then she rendered access to information 100 percent ineffective. According to Denham, that means there’s zero accountability. With no accountability, the City of Victoria resembles more an authoritarian regime than a democratic institution. Evidently, City Hall has some vital work to do to meet its legal obligations around information access.
    The Township of Esquimalt did preserve some records of the email conversations between Desjardins and Helps. One of those emails seems to challenge a claim Lowe made about the mayors and it topples a claim Helps made about the mayors’ investigation.
    In the analysis that follows, I’m going to focus on just one aspect of Lowe’s case against the mayors, the question of whether or not they buried allegations of harassment made against Elsner by two female VicPD members. The harassment allegations were made, we later learned, soon after the existence of Elsner’s sexually-charged tweets with the wife of a subordinate officer was made known to the mayors.
    Lowe’s description of what the mayors did with these allegations amounts to a claim that they hid them from his office in order to protect Elsner from any repercussions. But Helps told Focus last August that investigation of such allegations was outside the mandate of their investigation: “We were authorized to deal only with the issues of whether Elsner had engaged in an inappropriate relationship with the wife of a VicPD member and whether Elsner had improperly used police social media accounts,” Helps wrote in an email.
    Lowe, though, has written, “It was my expectation that if the investigation revealed evidence of conduct that could constitute a disciplinary breach of public trust, the [mayors] would raise the matter with our office.” Lowe says they never did. His report shows that the mayors rushed to make a decision about how to discipline Elsner after they were informed the story would soon appear in the media. Lowe was given no information about the mayors’ decision, but requested details after both mayors made statements that attempted to mislead reporters on whether an investigation had taken place. The records the mayors turned over to Lowe contained no mention of the harassment allegations. Lowe learned about these additional allegations only after the Victoria City Police Union brought them to his attention.
    There is no doubt the two mayors emailed back and forth about these allegations. Lowe’s office secured some of those communications through its legislated power to obtain records. The full record of their back and forth communications would help us understand exactly what the mayors were thinking and whether or not Lowe’s assessment of their actions is correct. Indeed, what the Township of Esquimalt released shows the mayors did communicate by email, and I’ll get to that in a moment. But first, let’s consider whether the additional allegations were serious enough that it is reasonable to expect the mayors would have taken action, including informing Lowe, as soon as they had been made aware of the allegations.
    Three additional allegations were brought forward by two female VicPD employees. The descriptions below were included in the judgment made by retired Judge Ian H. Pitfield as part of the external investigation of Elsner’s conduct ordered by Lowe in December 2015. Release of Pitfield’s judgments had been delayed by Elsner’s legal maneuverings until September 2018, when Lowe released his report. Had the mayors followed up on these allegations themselves, presumably they would have come to a similar understanding as Pitfield did. Here are Pitfield’s descriptions:
    First allegation: “[Elsner] pressed his groin against her buttocks, and his chest against her back in what [Officer A] described as a ‘nuts to butts’ maneuver… She told investigators she was shocked that ‘my new Chief would stand behind me and from a female’s perspective it’s almost like an oppressive position in a, in a way, like just was very inappropriate, awkward.’”
    Second allegation: “Officer B said that the day of a police Mess Dinner in 2015, the former chief approached her in a hallway at the VicPD headquarters and held her by both arms with her back against or close to the wall for about a minute. She told investigators that she felt uncomfortable that the former chief was ‘in her space’ and holding her by the arms.”
    Judge Pitfield described the third allegation: “The third allegation also involved Officer B. It arose at a use-of-force training session in 2014 at which the former chief was paired up with Officer B to practice lateral neck restraints; that involved close body contact. Officer B said: ‘…when she applied the restraint to Mr Elsner, or him to her, he said things like you are so warm, don’t stop, or, I could do this all day, you’re so warm.’ She said the comments were made multiple times. She stated that while the comments were not overtly sexual, she felt they had a sexual tone as they were made at the time when their bodies are touching during the use of force scenarios.”
    In hearings before Pitfield, Elsner denied all of these allegations. But Pitfield made it clear that he believed the women, and found that “because Mr Elsner was the Chief Constable, the members were his subordinates, he stood in a position of power and responsibility vis-a-vis both members, and the three instances constituted breaches of VicPD workplace policy and the terms of his employment contract, I consider the misconduct to be well advanced on the seriousness scale.”
    So let’s circle back to the question of whether there’s evidence beyond that provided by Lowe’s report that the two mayors tried to bury these allegations.
    As mentioned earlier, the surviving record of email communications between the two mayors during September, October and November 2015 is sparse. The only surviving records were obtained from Esquimalt. From its records, one email stands out. For one thing, someone has run a black felt pen through two sections of text, hiding part of Desjardins’ message to Helps. This wasn’t an ordinary redaction permitted or required by BC’s privacy and information law. Rather, this was done by somebody trying to hide something. Even though the content of the email has obviously been tampered with and so is likely to be regarded with suspicion, it has still been brought forward. To me this suggests that someone wanted us to see the other part of the message—the part that isn’t blacked out.
     

    Mayor Desjardins appears to have wanted a second investigation into harassment allegations against Elsner.
     
    The part that’s still readable suggests that by October 15, 2015, just over a month into the investigation of Elsner’s salacious tweets, the mayors knew about the additional harassment and bullying allegations against Elsner. It suggests that Desjardins believed those allegations needed to be investigated. She wanted to ask “Pat” to take that on, but had someone else in mind if necessary. “Pat” is Patricia Gallivan, QC, the Vancouver lawyer who conducted the mayors’ investigation.
    Note how this seems to conflict with Lowe’s claim that the two mayors “had predetermined the outcome of the internal discipline process from the outset, and set about navigating a course to allow the former chief to remain in his post.” The readable part of the email seems to suggest that Desjardins was pushing to have the harassment allegations investigated. Of course, we don’t know if that’s an accurate interpretation of Desjardins’ intended meaning since part of her message has been blacked out.
    Len Statz, manager of investigative analysts for the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner, told Focus in an email that Lowe’s office had not seen Desjardins’ email previously. Statz wrote: “In the Commissioner’s view, the email provided to Focus Magazineprovides further support for his position that the Mayors were aware of the allegations of harassment, did not fulfill their duty to inform the Commissioner and, arguably, continued on a path that would see the former chief remain in his post. We note that the covering letter to Pat Gallivan’s preliminary report, dated November 16, 2015, summarized the allegations of harassment (including one of the allegations that was later substantiated by Discipline Authority Pitfield) and offered to investigate those allegations, indicating that investigation would take about a week. There is no documented action to take her up on that offer and there was no notification to our office.”
    (For the record, the email shown here was provided to the Police Board’s Collette Thomson by the Township of Esquimalt, according to Thomson. It had apparently been found as part of an earlier FOI search of Helps’ records, which were printed out in paper form and preserved by Esquimalt. Those records were originally gathered by City of Victoria employee Colleen Mycroft, which is why her name appears at the top of the email. Both Helps and Desjardins were asked to comment for this story. As of our deadline, neither had responded.)
    Six days after suggesting they should do a second investigation, Desjardins sent to Helps, without comment, VicPD’s policy papers on “Workplace Harassments & Improper Activity,” “Workplace Violence,” and “Code of Ethics.” Again, if there was a response from Helps, it has been deleted from the City’s records.
    The records provided to Focus don’t include any other communications between Desjardins and Helps for the rest of October or November 2015. But the records released by Lowe’s office show that on November 16, 2015, a full month after Desjardins suggested an investigation of the harassment allegations, Gallivan wrote in a letter to the mayors: “I understand that you are considering how to address those allegations. As previously stated, should you wish to expand our mandate to include an investigation of those matters, in light of my schedule and given the need to deal with these matters expeditiously, I would need to engage the assistance of one of my partners to complete the investigation. I have discussed this matter with my partner…and she advises she would be able to set aside a week to conduct the witness interviews.”
    To summarize, then, Desjardins apparently believed an independent investigation of the allegations should be done, she thought Gallivan should do it, Gallivan had been approached, and Gallivan had offered her company’s services to do it “expeditiously.” Yet the investigation never took place. Why? Again, Helps says now: “We were authorized to deal only with the issues of whether Elsner had engaged in an inappropriate relationship with the wife of a VicPD member and whether Elsner had improperly used police social media accounts.” But it’s now evident that neither Desjardins nor Gallivan believed that to be the case. They were both ready to proceed with an investigation into the harassment allegations.
    Why did Helps resist this direction? We don’t know for certain because her emails have been deleted. But it’s evident that Helps weighed the allegations made by the two women against something she believed to be true about Elsner. Her position on Elsner is a matter of public record. On December 4, 2015, when Helps was asked on Global TV if there was “any truth to it that there’s an investigation going on with the chief,” Helps replied, “No. The board has full confidence in our chief. He’s the best thing that’s happened to this town and Esquimalt in a long time.”
    So Helps weighed the allegations of the two women, plus the evidence of Elsner conducting “an inappropriate relationship” with the wife of a subordinate officer, against something else and decided in favour of Elsner. What outweighed the allegations of the women?
    Soon after the investigation of Elsner broke into public view in December 2015, there was talk on social media about the Twitter allegation against Elsner being a retaliation by VicPD personnel who opposed the new “community policing” direction in which he was taking the department. There was said to be opposition to Elsner’s shift away from some of the policies of former Police Chief Jamie Graham. That shift included, for example, a freeze on promotion of officers based on arrests and ticketing, and a move toward promotion based on community engagement and contact.
    Did this idea—that Elsner was being punished for being progressive—tip Helps’ judgment in favour of Elsner and against the women who accused him?
    Indeed, the two mayors had directed Gallivan to determine whether there was “misconduct by any other employee of [VicPD] or if there were any security issues with respect to [VicPD’s] information system.” The mayors apparently wanted to know if any improper action had led to Elsner’s tweets being brought to their attention.
    After investigating the matter, Gallivan reported, “I have no reason to believe that there was any misconduct” on the part of VicPD members. But even if it had been true—that Elsner was punished by VicPD members because he was progressive—it’s difficult to see how that would cancel out Elsner’s documented misconduct involving women.
    After Lowe’s report was released last September and many more details about what had happened during the mayors’ investigation circulated in the community during the civic election campaign, Helps and Desjardins both claimed they had been libelled by Lowe. To understand why Helps might not want to openly acknowledge that she had sided with an accused abuser and stood in the way of an expeditious investigation of the allegations of harassment, consider a statement made by Sonia Theroux, Helps’ campaign manager. Theroux made this comment on social media shortly before the election: “I’m a multi-time survivor; I’d never support a mayor who tried to protect an abuser. Full stop.”
    Theroux had apparently been told by Helps that a “second letter [was] on its way to the OPCC re new allegations when media intercepted,” back in December 2015. “There was no intention to ‘cover up’ the allegations,” Theroux wrote.
    Helps has never made any public statement about such a “second letter.” If such a letter had being contemplated, wouldn’t the mayors have secured a record of it in case it was ever necessary to prove they intended to pursue the harassment allegations?
    But Helps’ own words back in December 2015 make it clear how unlikely the existence of a “second letter” was. Again, recall her statement: “The Board has full confidence in our chief. He’s the best thing to happen to this town and Esquimalt for a long time.”
    How could Helps make that “best thing” claim while, at the same time, she was writing a “second letter” to Lowe to inform him that the mayors were going to begin an investigation of Elsner’s “nuts to butts” maneuver with his female staff.
    While Gallivan was investigating the salacious tweet allegation against Elsner, Elsner committed three additional acts of serious misconduct. He lied to Gallivan about what he had done, he attempted to obtain false testimony from a subordinate police officer, and he misled a fellow police officer. The first two of those actions were each judged to merit dismissal from policing; one of those was considered tantamount to an obstruction of justice by retired Judge Carol Baird Ellan. In other words, Elsner’s attempt to cover up the tweeting and “nuts to butts” maneuver were what made him forever unemployable as a police officer. One has to wonder whether Mayor Helps’ attempt to delete her way out of her own predicament will, in a similar fashion, eventually catch up with her employability as a politician.
    Focus has requested that the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner review the matter of the mayor’s missing emails. We will continue to report what we learn.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.
     
    The Victoria Police Board's full response to Focus' request for communications between Mayor Helps and Mayor Desjardins:
    Victoria Police Board 181212 FOIPPA response package.pdf11.46 MB · 128 downloads

    Stephen Hume
    November 2018
    The perils faced by killer whales forewarn of an über-threat—the unravelling of the ecosystems upon which humans also depend.
     
    EDGED BY POWERFUL RIPTIDES and the foam-laced menace of Boiling Reef, muscular currents that once bedevilled Spanish sailing masters still churn past cliffs fringed with peeling arbutus. Gulls wheel and squabble over bait fish pushed up by predators below. Vigilant eagles perch in ancient Douglas firs that were saplings when the Magna Carta was yet unsigned.
    This is the southernmost tip of Saturna Island, easternmost of British Columbia’s scattered Southern Gulf Islands, whose name is taken from the schooner captained by explorer José Maria Narvaez more than 200 years ago.
     

    An orca at sunset in the Salish Sea (Photo by MarkMallesonPhotography.com)
     
    East Point still evokes a primeval atmosphere. Yet at night the habitation glow from 6.2 million city dwellers casts its milky arc over the Salish Sea from Victoria through Seattle to Vancouver. And the throb of oil tankers, bulk cargo carriers, cruise ships and container vessels pulses insistently through the darkness.
    Oasis of the pristine that East Point may appear to be, a favoured spot for observing killer whales in the wild, it is nevertheless an illusion cocooned in the reality of the heavily modified, chemically saturated landscapes of a 21st century megalopolis.
    So perhaps it’s the ideal place from which to contemplate what some fear is a looming “orcapocalypse,” an existential crisis that threatens regional extirpation for one of the province’s most iconic creatures.
    New research suggests a perfect storm of threats now makes the extirpation of 10 out of 19 global killer whale populations an imminent possibility. The 74 that survive from the Salish Sea’s Southern Resident killer whale population are among those at greatest risk.
    The three Salish Sea pods of the Southern Residents, J, K, and L, were among the first listed as endangered under a new federal Species at Risk Act in 2003—two years before the US made the same designation. But a damning report from Canada’s Auditor-General this year points to botched, incompetent and laggardly responses by almost every federal department with responsibility for protecting them.
    While there has been plenty of high-minded talk, meetings, workshops, action plans and strategic mission statements, bureaucratic inertia was encouraged by the lack of enthusiasm for environmental issues oozing from the decade-long Conservative government of Stephen Harper. It took 14 years for Ottawa to begin to implement mitigation and recovery strategies that on the surface seemed self-evident.
    Indeed, in September, six conservation organizations launched a lawsuit asking a federal court to review two federal ministries’ failures to recommend an emergency order to protect the Southern Resident killer whales.
    The threats are wide-ranging and complex. Human activity, from industrial pollution to municipal waste water, to disruptions in the food chain to apparently unconnected activities that range from taking a shower to driving the car to the supermarket, are all driving this gathering ecological storm.
     
    EAST POINT REPRESENTS more than symbolism or a vantage point on orca. It was here, 54 years ago, that scientists harpooned the killer whale that was to become the first of its kind to be put on live public display—all done in the name of art.
    In hindsight, it seems one of those benighted schemes that reeks of an entitled craziness. Youth might have been turning to the mellow attractions of Flower Power in 1964 while the grown-ups fretted over the movement’s “get high and get out of the rat race” morality. But the grown-ups also thought it a splendid idea to shoot a large, sentient mammal for art’s sake.
    Mind you, just three years earlier, under the supervision of the federal government, a .50 calibre machine-gun had been mounted at Seymour Narrows to shred the orcas deemed a threat to commercial and recreational fisheries. The orcas didn’t show, the scheme proved a folly, and a month later the machine-gun was removed.
    A subsequent plan was to kill one of the orcas known to congregate off East Point and tow the corpse to Vancouver where an artist could use it as a model. The sculpture would adorn the foyer of the new Vancouver Aquarium. Its skeleton would provide a specimen for the science exhibit.
    The scheme went sideways fast. An orca was harpooned off East Point but then impertinently refused to die. The aquarium’s director decided instead that the wounded animal should be dragged to Vancouver Harbour and “studied.”
    But Moby Doll, as the wounded killer whale was misnamed in a testament to ignorance—it was male, not female—became such a sensation (it went viral, we’d say today) that it quickly became the first captured killer whale to be put on public display.
    Sadly, Moby Doll seemed disoriented and grief-stricken. A few months later he died. Then Seattle Public Aquarium bought a big male orca from a BC fisherman in whose nets he had become entangled. Namu, named for the place his freedom ended, was trained and became the first performing killer whale. Alas, he too died after 11 months.
    Nevertheless, the marketing teams saw a promotional gold mine.
    A two-decade rush began to kidnap ocean-ranging killer whales from their complex, tightly-knit family groups and put them on display. It reached its zenith in 1970 when the Seattle Public Aquarium’s collectors deployed helicopters and explosives to herd 80 terrified orcas into a small cove on Whidbey Island. Several whales died from the stress. As their bodies washed ashore, public opinion ebbed from unbridled enthusiasm to appalled distaste.
    The barbarity of the killer whale gold rush did have one upside. It triggered a world-spanning interest in learning more about these magnificent animals. Knowledge in turn launched an evolution in awareness. And so, over the intervening decades, orcas have evolved in the public imagination from ravening wolves of the sea, to trained circus acts, to highly intelligent, gregarious, family-centric creatures deserving of their freedom and our protection.
    Today, Vancouver Aquarium, which started the cycle, is prohibited by municipal law from capturing any cetaceans from the wild for public display. It may obtain them only from other facilities if they are either born in captivity or deemed to be so acclimatized to captivity they would not survive a return to the wild.
    The changing sentiments have been reflected in a growing desire by the public to see whales of all kinds in their natural environment rather than as dead specimens in natural history museums, or performing for treats in aquarium tanks that might reasonably be compared to prison cells.
    The so-called “killer whale”—it’s really one of the dolphins—is now the key driver for South Vancouver Island’s successful whale- watching industry, itself part of a global business that attracts 13 million watchers a year and generates more than $2 billion in annual economic activity.
    In BC, about half of Canada’s million annual whale watchers spend close to $200 million a year just to see orcas, grey and humpback whales in their natural state.
    There’s growing concern, though, that the public is loving its beloved marine mammals to death. All whales orient themselves, navigate, locate and identify food sources using highly-evolved echolocation. But marine noise from close-running whale-watching boats, along with that from more than 13,000 large vessel transits a year requiring Canadian pilots, 164,000 annual BC Ferries sailings, and almost 40,000 pleasure craft with engines larger than 10 horsepower accumulates to create a kind of acoustic fog in the water for the Southern Resident killer whales, whose numbers have steadily dwindled downward by almost 25 percent from 98 in 1995 to 74 in late 2018.
    One recent study for the Port of Vancouver assessing the effects of marine noise found that the more distant background noise from commercial vessels, combined with the foreground noise from whale-watching boats, resulted in lost foraging time for feeding orcas of up to five-and-a-half hours per day.
    The problem is of sufficient magnitude that from July to November this year, large vessels passing through the Salish Sea to and from Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, Bremerton, Crofton, Nanaimo and other points were asked to voluntarily reduce speed. Researchers hope to determine whether reduced engine speed means less marine noise and results in greater killer whale feeding success.
     
    PAIR THE REDUCED FEEDING OPPORTUNITY with historic lows in the abundance of chinook salmon which are the killer whales’ primary food source, then add the toxins carried into the sea from industrial source points, and the problem quickly begins to look profound.
    Chinook are critical to Southern Resident killer whales because they are available in the Salish Sea all year round, unlike chum, another important food source, which is available only in the late fall.
    John Ford, a scientist at Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo who has been studying killer whales for almost 50 years, says observers noticed that population loss and reproductive decline for Southern Resident killer whales tracked chinook abundance. As soon as chinook numbers rose, the killer whales bounced back, too.
    Complicating matters however, Ford says, is the fact that while Southern Resident killer whale populations have been in decline, Northern resident killer whales now number 300 and are thriving. So are the transient killer whales that feed on seals and sea lions, and resident populations in southern Alaska.
    And it gets even more confusing. Transient killer whales, which feed on seals, carry a much higher load of PCBs and other contaminants, but remain healthy. Possibly it’s because with abundant food sources, they don’t go into nutritional stress. PCBs, banned almost 50 years ago, are maddeningly persistent toxins, but can remain benignly sequestered in killer whales’ blubber. The Southern killer whales, deprived of adequate food, start metabolizing their fat; PCBs stored there emerge and suppress their immune systems, making them more susceptible to disease, parasites, and reproductive failure.
     

    Transient orcas, this one known as “T123A,” made two rare visits to Victoria’s harbour in 2018, creating a false impression of orca abundance.
     
    Yet this is just one factor among the many. There are hydrocarbons from road runoff carried by storm drains so numerous that Metro Vancouver couldn’t provide a cumulative number. There’s leakage from tens of thousands of untallied septic fields throughout the Gulf Islands, the hinterlands of Greater Victoria, and around the Georgia Basin.
    It’s a popular pastime among the green-leaning residents of Saanich and the Gulf Islands who elected the only Green candidate to the federal parliament and one of only three Greens in the BC legislature to point an accusatory finger at urban Victoria and Vancouver over sewage effluent. Yet they are a significant part of the problem, too. Almost a million people in BC dispose of household sewage and wastewater through septic fields, which can leak into aquifers and adjacent watercourses, including much of the rural Saanich Peninsula and the Gulf Islands.
    This, too, points to one of those amplifying factors in ecosystem disruption. Dispersed residential communities at the fringes of urban areas throughout the province create the dilemma of the urban-rural interface that’s most at risk from the increased frequency and intensity of wildfires caused by global warming.
    Flame retardants used in fighting increasingly intense forest fires, particularly those threatening human settlement, are flushed by the province’s great rivers from the distant Interior into the sea. The Fraser River alone, for example, drains 235,671 square kilometres, an area that dwarfs entire European countries. Another 951 smaller watersheds drain into the Salish Sea.
    Last summer, during the worst fire season on record—climate science projects much worse to come—the BC Wildfire Service dropped eight million litres of flame retardant in airborne operations. While flame retardant is an essential weapon in the fire suppression arsenal, particularly in that vulnerable urban-rural interface, it’s also bad for the fish that sustain killer whales.
    In 2014, a study by the US government’s National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration showed that although the chemicals in current use are far safer than those deployed in the past, widely-used flame retardant remains especially toxic to chinook smolts. The lethal effects linger right until the migrating smolts reach saltwater.
    These contaminants, however, pale by comparison to those from urban areas.
    Over 1.3 trillion litres of treated sewage effluent flow into the Salish Sea each year from about 100 Canadian and American treatment plant outfalls emptying into Puget Sound and the straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca. Basic treatment of sewage doesn’t remove all toxic compounds. The discharge contains heavy metals like lead, mercury, chromium and copper, but also includes persistent organochlorines and hydrocarbons. Then there are trace levels of persistent organic pollutants—now banned, but still lingering in the environment—like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
    There are pharmaceuticals that can act as hormone-disrupters which are excreted in human urine. Contaminants like plastic microparticles occur in cosmetics and sunscreens, and can affect marine larvae insect, small aquatic organisms, and juvenile fish. Some sunscreen compounds are now implicated in declines in insect and coral reef larvae. Recent research by Washington State’s Dr James Meador has shown that the survival rate of chinook juveniles smolting in effluent-impacted estuaries is cut in half compared with juveniles emerging from uncontaminated estuaries.
    A study by the T. Buck Suzuki Foundation found that untreated stormwater effluent from the Metro Vancouver region is about the same volume annually as treated sewage effluent.
    Storm drain contributions, it appears, may double that amount, the report warns. Thousands of storm drains empty into the almost 1,000 watersheds that dump road runoff, ditch effluents and, in some cases, untreated sewage into the Salish Sea. That means the vector for exposing marine organisms to toxic compounds is mind-bogglingly large.
    And there is the long-known spike in hydrocarbons that occurs in the first hour after rains wash the accumulated surface film from roads into storm drains and to the sea. That problem is getting worse, not better.
    There are 10 million motor vehicles registered in BC and Washington.
    The Insurance Corporation of BC’s statistics show motor vehicle registrations have increased at double the rate of population growth over the last five years. Incredibly, the motor vehicle population is growing faster than the number of people. Put in simple arithmetic, the province added 250,000 people to its population over that period, and it added 320,000 motor vehicles, most of which contribute hydrocarbons to the road runoff that affects the Salish Sea.
    Most important for killer whales, many of these contaminants migrate up the food chain. If one of the key components threatening orca survival is a declining abundance of the chinook salmon that provide their main food source, the T. Buck Suzuki Foundation report also points directly at chemical contaminants.
    “There is evidence,” it says, “that these chemicals can also disrupt the complex hormonal processes as juvenile salmon acclimatize to the saltwater environment. This is bad news for the billions of juvenile salmon that spend months in the shallow waters around Vancouver”—not to mention Puget Sound and near centres like Campbell River, Nanaimo and Victoria.
    “Heavy metals and persistent chemicals that stay in the body bio-magnify as they work their way up the food chain,” the report observes. “Larger fish eating large numbers of contaminated smaller fish can end up with thousands or millions of times the level of toxins than the organisms that first absorbed them.”
    This poses a double jeopardy for killer whales. Declining abundance of Georgia Basin chinook, coupled with bio-magnification of toxins in their body fat, amplifies the risk.
    The chemicals accumulate in the blubber that protects whales from the oceanic cold. But when whales are starving, their bodies consume the energy stored in their fat, and that’s precisely where toxins which damage nervous systems and other organs are not only stored but concentrated over time.
    Which, the Pacific Biological Station’s John Ford explains, is one of the apparent reasons for the health of Northern Residents and transients. As long as they can stay fat, they have a chance to thrive.
     
    ON SATURNA, East Point’s 130-year-old lighthouse presides over a stunningly beautiful littoral of tilted sandstone terraces, tide pools, and echoing galleries sculpted by epochs of wind and storm surge. The tawny rock was quarried by homesteader George Taylor more than a century ago. It was used in constructing Victoria’s new legislature buildings, a Neo-Baroque expression of Victorian colonial authority commissioned on lands the Lekwungen people had been forced to vacate.
    The choice of this Cretaceous rock for a government building seems ironically appropriate. The structure exudes a faux sense of permanence, evoking the Roman “imperitas” of which the British assumed themselves natural inheritors. But the materials actually offer only evidence of impermanence, a reminder that the present authority will prove as transient as that of Tyrannosaurus Rex, who reigned in the Cretaceous, or the Southern Resident killer whales on their tottering throne.
    East Point’s 65-million-year-old sandstone is part of a deposit that sweeps up the east coast of Vancouver Island to the Comox Valley. Paleontologists celebrate the spectacular marine fossils these ancient sediments yield: ammonites, long-necked plesiosaurs, pickup- truck-sized mosasaurs, dolphin-like ichthyosaurs, all now extinct following what’s called the Cretaceous-Paleogene Event, an abrupt extinction of three-quarters of the Earth’s plant and animal species.
    Scholars argue over whether the catastrophe was sudden, caused by abrupt climate change, an asteroid impact, volcanic eruptions, or some slowly unfolding evolutionary apocalypse that we don’t yet understand. But what’s not in dispute is that there was a mass extinction. It occurred at the beginning of the rise of mammals and, ultimately, of the recently arrived hominids—that’s us. We, it appears, so successful that anthropologists now call our era the “Anthropocene,” may also be presiding over what writer Elizabeth Kolbert calls the “sixth extinction,” a collapse in species survival unfolding around us with such rapidity and on such an immense and varied scale that it’s difficult for most people to perceive.
    Most visitors to East Point come not in search of fossils or evolutionary philosophy but simply hoping for a glimpse of killer whales. The whales have become a central symbol of the province’s self-aggrandizing mythology of tourism branding; a totem for powerful First People’s clans; and inspiration for artists and marine biologists alike. They may no longer be the marquee show-stopper at aquariums from Victoria’s Inner Harbour to San Diego, but they still command attention.
    If visitors to East Point are lucky, as I was 20 years ago, they will have a close encounter with a species that’s arguably as intelligent as ours and perhaps even exceeds human intelligence, although how or in what way remains mysterious.
    My experience came in the face of a freshening breeze out of the American islands when I heard what sounded like a rifle shot. It was followed by another and then a third. I went to investigate. It wasn’t some ignorant yahoo shooting at sea lions. It was a family of killer whales, tail-slapping. The tide was in flood and a swift, smooth-as-glass current raced past the ledge. Two females patrolled its perimeter while two calves cavorted in the swooshing jet.
    They seemed as excited as a couple of human children enjoying a water slide at the neighbourhood pool. They rode down the current, then zipped back to the top and rode down it again.
    I stood at the water’s edge mesmerized. Then I noticed a shadow in the luminous depths. Before I could react, the immense, gleaming head of a male orca emerged. It rose the full length of my body out of the water. It stopped at precisely my height, held upright by the sculling of that mighty tail. One enormous eye swivelled, scanned me up and down, and then, seemingly satisfied I represented no threat to the playful youngsters—or maybe just satisfied to have observed me with the same wonderment with which I was observing him—slid back down into the depths as silently as he had come.
    I took it as a hint, though, and moved back a respectful distance—well, considerably more than that—and watched until the whole family, moving almost as one, suddenly vanished. I considered then how I’d been granted an astonishing look into a deep, pre-human past.
    But now, reflecting through the prisms of the current news, I wonder if it wasn’t really the future I was experiencing. And not through the whales, but through the rocks from which I was watching them. Perhaps the telling moment wasn’t their arrival in my field of view, but their abrupt disappearance.
    The killer whales’ ancestors emerged into the evolutionary record not long after the sandstone ledges from which I observed them were laid down as sediments. They have been travelling these waters about a thousand times longer than the entire span in which modern homo sapiens arose.
    Orca—the now-common name derives from the scientific name for the species—is generally preferred in these more language-sensitive times to the once-ubiquitous term “killer whale,” yet the earlier term is not inaccurate. It derives from the species’ undisputed place as the alpha predator of BC’s marine environment.
    For all its power and dominance, there’s a growing risk that this iconic creature may be about to join the ammonites and Elasmosaurus in extinction. And that suggests we might be on track for an extinction event that includes us, too, because the perils faced by killer whales may be indicative of an über- threat, the unravelling of the ecosystems upon which humans also depend.
    he latest report from the Intergovern-mental Panel on Climate Change, a report by 91 scientists from 40 countries who examined more than 6,000 independent research studies, now warns that the rapidity and the massive scale of human-caused climate change is much more dire and immediate than previously thought.
    Even scientists seasoned in the bad news of climate change research expressed shock at the gathering portents, which include increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather, more and longer drought, fiercer and more extensive wildfire conflagrations, mass species die-offs, super-storms, abrupt ecosystem shifts, dwindling food security, and growing world hunger as agricultural production degrades.
    As atmospheric carbon increases, it turns out, the protein yield in key field crops decreases. To feed growing global populations, we’ll have to produce even more food than initially predicted.
    In fact, the evidence is clear. We’re already losing the race as food production falls and population grows. Researcher Leah Samberg, writing in Scientific American, says that after decades of decline, world hunger is once again on the rise. And the United Nations reports that while hunger is most prevalent in regions of armed conflict, these are also the places experiencing increasingly powerful storms, more persistent crop-and-livestock-killing drought, and more frequent flooding caused by intense and unpredictable rainfall events.
    Acidification is already affecting the foundations of ocean food chains once thought inexhaustible, from commercially farmed mollusks unable to properly form protective shells, to the fatal bleaching of coral reefs, to collapsing salmon runs, among them the chinook upon which the local orcas depend.
    The Salish Sea’s littoral is one of the world’s miracles, a gigantic salmon factory. Even now, after a century of industrial harvest, habitat disruption, and landscape modification, as many as 800 million juvenile salmon may ride the spring freshet to the sea. Up to 20 million salmon can populate the Fraser River estuary on any given day.
    But we’ve taken this gift from nature for granted. We’ve behaved as though salmon stocks were limitless. We’ve dammed spawning tributaries, logged headwaters, clogged the river with blasting debris, converted crucial rearing wetlands habitat to agriculture, mined gravel for construction, altered river flows, dumped mine tailings into watersheds, and polluted the river with industrial effluent, farm fertilizer and storm drain runoff.
    Those salmon that return run a gauntlet of commercial trollers, seiners and gill netters; a recreational fishery that itself is heavily commercialized; and First Nations’ food and ceremonial harvests. We’ve even managed to alter the evolutionary course of fish like the chinook. For a century we’ve selected the biggest fish, the trophy fish, out of the gene pool. Now chinook salmon are much smaller on average than they were historically, says scientist John Ford. Feeding orcas are paying the price.
    All this exacerbates the impact of climate change, which has been speeding snow melts, reducing summer discharges, raising river temperatures, and changing food abundance for salmon in the ocean—and the availability of salmon to other species like killer whales.
    It’s not far-fetched to wonder if the plight of our Southern Resident killer whales isn’t a harbinger of what awaits humanity, too.
     
    HERE IN THE SALISH SEA, a small resident orca population now teeters at the brink of what could quickly become a downward spiral into oblivion. Breeding populations aren’t breeding successfully. Baby whales aren’t surviving. Mature whales are more susceptible to disease, and some show signs of malnutrition. Salmon runs, upon which killer whales depend, are collapsing or have already collapsed, most prominent among them chinook salmon.
    All of these are key indicators in a larger ecosystem that sustains humans as well. Salmon are a resource for which humans compete with killer whales.
    Canada’s federal government recently intervened with closures of commercial and recreational chinook fisheries in an attempt to preserve dwindling food stocks for the declining Southern Resident killer whale population. The State of Washington struck a special task force to grapple with the problem. Some communities, where recreation fishing is big business, predictably objected.
    “Community politicians, ocean anglers and chambers of commerce from Sooke to Tofino are objecting to the possibility of closing two ocean zones to sport fishing,” Victoria Times-Colonist writer Richard Watts reported last July. “Such a closure would devastate the small towns that rely on sport fishing to attract tourists.”
    And yet, we are where we are in part because of fishing. Despite declining chinook abundance due to habitat loss, disruptions in rearing areas caused by toxic runoff from storm drains, contaminants in sewage effluent, degradation of spawning areas by logging, hydroelectric and flood control dams, gravel removal for construction and urban development—despite all of that, fishing of chinook stocks continued uninterrupted. Since 1975, when the Southern Resident killer whale population stood at close to 100, federal and state authorities in BC and Washington have supervised the harvesting by First Nations, recreational and commercial fisheries of 32 million chinook salmon bound through the Salish Sea to spawn in the rivers and streams of the Salish Sea.
    It’s a reminder that the threats to the Southern Resident orcas are complex, long-lasting and far-reaching. In any event, the chinook closures may be too little, too late.
    One day, I hope, I’ll be able to return to Saturna’s East Point and again look into the huge eye of a flourishing fellow species. If I can’t, if the orcas have gone to join the other extinct creatures buried in those Cretaceous sediments, what good will our wealth of commerce have proved? If, for all our wealth and power we can’t ensure survival of the ancient, sentient marine species with which we share this corner of the Salish Sea, what certainty is there that we can ensure our own survival?
    Stephen Hume has lived in many parts of BC since 1948. He spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island. His byline has appeared in most major Canadian newspapers; he’s written nine books of poetry, natural history, history and literary essays.

    David Broadland
    November 2018
    Did Police Complaint Commissioner Stan Lowe defame Mayor Helps and Mayor Desjardins? Or did he pull his punches?
     
    POLICE COMPLAINT COMMISSIONER Stan Lowe’s recent report on the 2015 investigation of Victoria Police Chief Frank Elsner made several damning assertions about the conduct of Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps and Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins. The mayors conducted an internal investigation under their authority as Co-chairs of the Victoria Police Board. Lowe issued his report less than a month before the October 20 civic elections in which both mayors were seeking to keep their jobs. Helps told a Times Colonist reporter that Lowe’s report “feels like character assassination.” “I’m going to have someone look at the report carefully and see if it’s defamatory. It feels defamatory,” she complained to the TC’s Louise Dickson.
    The Times Colonist’s coverage of Lowe’s report, in the weeks before the election, did not include any of the details of Lowe’s allegations against the mayors, but instead focussed on his general recommendation that BC’s Police Act should be amended to remove mayors as the designated disciplinary authority in cases where allegations are made against a police chief or a deputy police chief. Both Helps and Desjardins made a big show of their agreement with that one aspect of Lowe’s report, and that agreement was well-covered by the Times Colonist. But the paper’s focus on the mayors’ “agreement” with Lowe’s report had the effect of obscuring the stinging rebuke Lowe levelled at the mayors for several actions they took, or failed to take, during the 2015 investigation. The TC did include a short editorial before the election that noted the mayors had lied to journalists about whether Elsner had even been under investigation. But that was it. So in the absence of any responsible coverage coming from the Times Colonist, Focus will pursue this story over the coming months, starting with providing readers with the details in Lowe’s report that demand further explanation—especially from Helps and Desjardins.
     

    Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps and Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins in December, 2015.
     
    Below, I will outline several assertions about the mayors’ handling of the internal investigation that Lowe included. Together, they constitute what Lowe called a “strong arguable case” that the mayors “had predetermined the outcome of the internal discipline process from the outset, and set about navigating a course to allow the former chief to remain in his post.” I will also draw the reader’s attention to an event that occurred during the investigation—a potentially criminal obstruction of justice committed by Elsner. Lowe’s report provided little insight into whether the mayors may have abetted that obstruction. So let’s start at the beginning.
    In August 2015, Helps and Desjardins were informed that Twitter messages between Victoria Police Chief Frank Elsner and the wife of a subordinate VicPD officer had been found. (Court documents show that the messages have been characterized as being “sexually charged.”) In late August, the mayors informed the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner. The OPCC agreed to allow an internal investigation of the matter subject to certain preconditions under which the mayors committed to conduct their investigation. Taking the route of an internal investigation meant the mayors would have the authority to decide what disciplinary action, if any, would be taken following an investigation that was conducted by private lawyer Patricia Gallivan. The alternative to that course of action would have been a public trust investigation set up and monitored by OPCC. Under that arrangement the mayors would have had no control of the outcome.
    The mayors’ internal investigation seemed to go off the tracks at the first curve, in early September, 2015. One of Lowe’s preconditions for allowing the mayors to act as the disciplinary authority was that they would personally ensure that the affected VicPD officer (aka “the husband”) knew what had occurred between his wife and Elsner, and that once the officer had been fully informed, he would be asked whether he would prefer an internal or external investigation.
    But Lowe’s report notes: “In my review of the internal investigation it was evident to the mayors that the affected spouse, the husband, had been materially misinformed by [Elsner] regarding the matter, and they chose not to correct his misapprehension of the circumstance. They then confirmed [to OPCC] the husband’s decision to proceed with an internal process, without disclosing that the husband had been misinformed by [Elsner]. Furthermore, the mayors did not expand the investigation to include this apparent misconduct, nor report it to our office as required. This conduct by [Elsner] falls in the most serious range of misconduct and has resulted in his dismissal from policing by Retired Judge Baird Ellan.”
    Here we need to digress briefly from the timeline to draw your attention to an error made by Lowe in that paragraph. Lowe’s report notes elsewhere that Judge Carol Baird Ellan actually imposed “30 days’ suspension, demotion to the rank of constable and training on ethical standards,” on Elsner for misleading the husband, not “dismissal from policing.” Baird Ellan’s two verdicts of “dismissal from policing” came as a result of two other cases of misconduct by Elsner, both of which took place during Gallivan’s internal investigation. Lowe is oddly silent on these more serious cases of misconduct. Did Helps and Desjardins sweep that misconduct under the rug, too? We’ll come back to this question later. (In response to questions posed by Focus, OPCC quickly acknowledged the above error and have amended Lowe’s report.)
    So let’s go back to the timeline. We’ll include comments the mayors have made as we go along. Mayor Helps has previously provided Focus with her perspective on Lowe’s allegation about the mayors’ conduct as it related to Elsner’s misleading of the husband. She stated that the “false information” provided by Elsner was “completely beyond our control” and that the mayors had been given no mandate by OPCC to investigate this additional misconduct. We might ask ourselves, though, if the mayors were aware that Elsner had lied to his subordinate officer about his relationship with the officer’s wife, why wouldn’t the mayors have taken that information to Lowe’s office? Lowe has been adamant that his office instructed the mayors to bring such developments to his attention. Moreover, Lowe highlighted in his report an example that demonstrated “the mayors were aware of their discretion to expand the scope of the investigation.” Desjardins had asked Gallivan to investigate whether Elsner had retaliated against any other VicPD employee, which was an expansion of the investigation. So Helps’ excuse of “no mandate” seems doubly implausible.
    How, exactly, did Elsner mislead his subordinate officer? Court records show that Elsner told the officer on September 8, 2015 that “no inappropriate communication or contact of any sort” had taken place between Elsner and the officer’s wife. The private conversation between Elsner and the officer took place in an unidentified Victoria park, according to court records.
    As Gallivan’s internal investigation proceeded through that September and October, she became aware of additional allegations against Elsner: bullying, and harassment of female VicPD employees. In agreeing to allow the mayors to conduct an investigation into Elsner’s illicit Twitter communications, Lowe says “there was a clear understanding among all concerned that if, during the course of the investigation, any information came to light about conduct by any police officer that may constitute misconduct, our office was to be informed so that I could determine whether the conduct should be addressed as a public trust matter.”
    The record shows, however, that the mayors withheld from Lowe any hint about the bullying and harassment allegations until well after they had made their decision about how Elsner should be disciplined—a letter of reprimand on his file. Moreover, the mayors apparently tried to hide these allegations from Lowe even after he had asked for all their records. Let me take you through the details of that.
    In his report, Lowe recalls, “Based on my review of internal communications, notes and evidence summaries, it is apparent that by October 20, 2015, the internal investigator [Gallivan] had reported to the mayors that numerous witnesses had made allegations of bullying and harassment against the former chief. These witnesses included members and civilian staff; the nature of the harassment was characterized as ‘inappropriate comments and behaviour towards women,’ which included inappropriate physical contact. Despite receiving this information, the mayors chose not to expand the investigator’s mandate to include these allegations. On the contrary, the correspondence indicates that they instructed the investigator not to pursue those allegations or consider them in any respect in drafting the investigation report because they were ‘outside the scope of the investigator’s mandate.’”
    Mayor Desjardins published a response to Lowe’s allegations on her personal website. There she noted, “The Police Complaint Commissioner has taken defamatory liberty in respect to the honesty and integrity of Mayor Helps and I. He has found us guilty of misconduct that, if true, would be very serious indeed. He has done so from his position of high office and without giving us any opportunity to first answer his speculative accusations. The media has elected to repeat Commissioner Lowe’s highly defamatory comments.”
    Desjardins’ response focussed entirely on what happened after Lowe stripped Desjardins and Helps of their authority to discipline Elsner and launched a public trust investigation. She offered no response to the specific allegations Lowe made about what had occurred during the mayors’ investigation.
    Focus recently asked Mayor Helps’ for comment on a summary of Lowe’s numerous allegations about the mayors’ handling of the investigation. Helps wrote: “…there’s much I’d like to dispute and explain. I’m balancing my desire to fight back with the need for us to move on as a community.” Helps addressed only one of Lowe’s allegations, that the mayors instructed Gallivan not to investigate the allegations of Elsner’s bullying and harassment of women. This allegation is one of the most challenging and potentially damaging to the mayors’ political reputations. Helps told Focus she and Desjardins asked Gallivan “to document the allegations of bullying and harassment in a cover letter accompanying her final investigation report. This is what we did, with the intention that the cover letter and the final report would be handed to the OPCC for his consideration of the new allegations.” But Gallivan’s cover letter somehow went missing from the material sent to Lowe.
    Lowe’s report notes: “The first time my office learned of any allegations of bullying and workplace harassment was through the Victoria City Police Union, which provided information and materials to my office after the [December 3, 2015] disciplinary decision made by the mayors.”
    The implication here is that the mayors tried to hide the harassment and bullying allegations from Lowe’s office by not providing him with the only document that showed such allegations had been made—Gallivan’s cover letter. In her written response to our questions, Helps blamed a mistake made by an executive assistant for the circumstances that led to Gallivan’s letter not being included in the information the mayors provided to Lowe at his request.
    But, again, Helps’ explanation seems implausible, perhaps evasive. According to Lowe, Gallivan had reported these allegations to the mayors by October 20, 2015. Gallivan’s subsequent written report is dated November 16. The mayors wrote their discipline decision on December 3. So there was a 45-day period—between first being informed of these allegations and making their discipline decision—during which Helps and Desjardins knew about the allegations but did not notify Lowe’s office, as they had been directed to do if additional allegations arose.
    What had Gallivan reported to the mayors? The cover letter for her investigation report included “allegations” of “Yelling at senior colleagues and being insulting and demeaning,” and “Inappropriate comments and behaviour towards women including coming up behind a female colleague who was standing at a desk and with his body pinning her to the desk.” It seems clear enough that some action by the mayors would have been warranted.
    Gallivan’s cover letter went on to note, “I understand that you are now considering how to address those allegations.” She also offered her company’s services to investigate the allegations further. But, inexplicably, the mayors appear to have done nothing. What were they considering? Do they have written proof that they were considering anything other than sweeping the allegations under the rug? If they do, why haven’t the mayors provided that proof?
    By the way, the allegations against Elsner of bullying and harassment were eventually confirmed by an external investigation and warranted a finding of “Discreditable Conduct” by Judge (retired) Ian Pitfield.
    Most of Lowe’s allegations about the mayors’ conduct centre on events that occurred just before and just after Helps and Desjardins made their decision on December 3, 2015 on how Elsner would be disciplined.
    For example, Lowe alleges the mayors rushed to make a decision on December 3 once they were told by their own legal counsel, Marcia McNeil, that rumours about an investigation of Elsner were circulating and that reporters would soon be asking questions. It appears the mayors wanted to be able to deny that an investigation was underway—by concluding it that very same day. Indeed, each of them made statements to reporters within days that first denied an investigation had taken place, and then—when they were forced to acknowledge the investigation—mischaracterized it.
    On December 4, 2015, Mayor Helps was asked by a Global TV journalist whether Elsner was being investigated. Helps responded: “No. The [Police] Board has full confidence in our chief. He’s the best thing that’s happened to this town and Esquimalt in a long time.” Desjardins made a similarly misleading statement to Vancouver Sun reporter Rob Shaw and, a few days later, while acknowledging that an investigation had taken place, she mischaracterized the investigation to a CFAX reporter by claiming the investigation had found “there was no relationship” between Elsner and the wife of his subordinate officer. The investigation was instead, Desjardins said, about “an inappropriate use of social media.”
    In fact, the mayors’ investigator, Gallivan, had previously provided the mayors with a written report that (according to court records) concluded that Elsner “did not have a sexual relationship…but did exchange ‘tweets’ with her that were sexually charged and that the exchange constituted an inappropriate relationship.”
    Mayor Helps’ December 4, 2015 statement to the Global TV journalist is particularly worthy of attention considering what we now know she knew when she made that statement. Besides the fact that she lied to the journalist about the existence of an investigation, she added, without any prompting, “He’s the best thing that’s happened to this town and Esquimalt in a long time.”
    Think about that. Helps made this statement with the full knowledge that Elsner had lied to his subordinate officer about his involvement with the officer’s wife and had also been accused of multiple cases of bullying and harassment of female VicPD employees.
    When she made that statement, 45 days had passed during which she could have investigated—but didn’t—VicPD female employees’ claims of what some would consider to be sexual assault by Elsner. Gallavin had offered her company’s services to that end, but the mayors had declined. Helps also had 45 days during which she could have informed Lowe’s office and sought his advice, but didn’t. She’d had 45 days in which to think about whether to support the women who made the allegations. In the end, she sided with a powerful, deceitful man accused of physical and sexual harassment and characterized him as “the best thing that’s happened…in a long time.”
    Mayor Helps could now easily clear up any impression that she has acted improperly by providing written records showing, for example, that she and Desjardins were planning on doing something about those allegations besides sitting on them. Those records, if they exist, could be submitted to a public inquiry.
    Mayor Helps’ and Mayor Desjardins’ separate claims to media on December 4, 2015 of “no investigation” make it evident they were trying to protect Elsner and were willing to deceive the public to accomplish that. Lowe’s account of all the things the two mayors did to cover up Elsner’s misconduct needs to be considered in the light of that public deception. Rather than libelling the mayors, as Helps has claimed, Lowe appears to have been overly polite in describing their multi-layered cover-up as “navigating a course to allow the former chief to remain in his post.” The mayors appear to have attempted to deceive Lowe in several ways. All of these apparent deceptions amount to a perception of an obstruction of justice—not necessarily according to the Canadian Criminal Code definition of “obstruction of justice,” but certainly in the plain meaning of the words.
    Both Helps and Desjardins have complained about Lowe’s report, but neither has provided any evidence to counter Lowe’s very specific claims. Deputy Police Complaint Commissioner Rollie Woods has encouraged Helps and Desjardins to request a public inquiry. “If they think they’ve been hard done by in any way in this report, we have a considerable body of evidence we would be willing to provide at any public inquiry so the truth would certainly come out,” Woods told The Canadian Press. So far, neither mayor has requested a public inquiry.
    Considering what was revealed in Lowe’s report, it’s unlikely that either mayor would want, or support, a public inquiry. But one aspect of the mayors’ conduct that’s missing from Lowe’s report reinforces the need for a public inquiry: Were the mayors provided with enough information by Gallivan’s investigation that they should have immediately dismissed Elsner for cause?
    Lowe’s report observes that Judge Baird Ellan determined Elsner should be dismissed from policing for each of two specific actions he took: First, Elsner lied to the mayors’ investigator, Patricia Gallivan, during the mayors’ internal investigation in 2015. Secondly, Elsner attempted to procure a false statement from another VicPD employee. This, too, occurred during Gallivan’s investigation. Indeed, Baird Ellan’s commentary on Elsner’s misleading of Gallivan, which Lowe included in his report, notes: “There is authority for the proposition that providing a false statement in an administrative investigation can be a criminal obstruction of justice...” Yet Lowe’s report sheds no light on whether or not Gallivan informed the mayors of this misconduct.
    If she had—in either case—the mayors would have been in a position to fire Elsner for cause back in the fall of 2015. That would have saved Victoria and Esquimalt taxpayers close to $1M in costs that were incurred as a consequence of the mayors’ handling of the matter.
    Focus asked OPCC if Gallivan had provided the mayors with information about Elsner’s attempt to mislead her and his attempt to procure a false statement. Deputy Police Complaint Commissioner Rollie Woods acknowledged that the attempt to procure a false statement had occurred during Gallivan’s investigation, but told Focus “there is no evidence to suggest that the investigator was aware of this conduct.”
    What about Elsner’s attempt to mislead Gallivan, which earned him “dismissal from policing” and could be, as pointed out by Judge Baird Ellan, a case of “criminal obstruction of justice”? Did the mayors know about that?
    In a written statement, Woods noted that this deceptive conduct was identified after OPCC reviewed “the evidence summaries contained in Ms. Gallivan’s November 16, 2015 report to the mayors.” Woods added, “The investigator did not address this conduct as a specific allegation of misconduct in her report; it would be up to the co-chairs to determine based on all of the evidence, what if any misconduct has been proven.”
    In other words, the evidence that Elsner had attempted to mislead Gallivan was in her report to the mayors; it had been up to the mayors to decide whether that evidence warranted an additional charge of misconduct. Again, if the mayors had contacted OPCC and asked whether Elsner’s attempt to mislead Gallivan was misconduct, an early resolution of Elsner’s fate might have been had. But the mayors did not ask questions. Why not? Did the mayors not understand that Elsner was engaged in a cover-up? Later, Judge Baird Ellan determined that Elsner’s deception of Gallivan was the most serious case of misconduct, one that warranted dismissal from policing.
    While Mayor Helps and Mayor Desjardins have claimed that they were defamed by Lowe’s report, Commissioner Lowe appears to have pulled his most serious punch. During the civic election, supporters of Helps and Desjardins characterized Lowe’s report as being everything from a fascistic attack against community-based policing to the patriarchy attempting to put strong female leaders in their place. But it appears, based on the evidence available so far, that the mayors simply engaged in an expensive cover-up, and Lowe has called them on it. Is he right? A public inquiry would settle the matter. If the mayors don’t support such an inquiry, it’s reasonable to conclude that Lowe has called it correctly.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

    Ross Crockford
    September 2018
    Will Crystal Pool become an election issue? Candidates say “Yes.”
     
    LIKE THE REST OF US, Jeremy Loveday seemed confused. “Has council — did we decide to — not?” asked the City of Victoria councillor, at a July 19 update on the Crystal Pool replacement project. “I know we were going to do a referendum, and then we didn’t need a referendum. Did we make a council motion not to do a referendum?”
    The confusion was understandable. In June a letter had surfaced, from provincial Minister of Municipal Affairs Selina Robinson to Mayor Lisa Helps, suggesting the City hold a referendum if it wanted the best chance at securing federal-provincial infrastructure money for a new pool. “[L]arge-scale projects that demonstrate both public and financial support through a referendum (or some sort of public approval process) are identified as lower risk under the program assessment,” wrote Robinson. Then on June 20 the Times Colonist editorialized that the City should put the pool project to a vote. “Even if a referendum has no effect on government contributions, City officials would know whether they really do have backing from taxpayers,” the TC concluded.
    That led some to think the City might add another question to the October 20 civic election. (There’s already one seeking approval for a citizens’ assembly to discuss amalgamation with Saanich.) But when councillors met on July 19, they seemed determined to keep the pool off the ballot.
     

    The pool's new, larger design will be at least $8.8-million more expensive to build than originally budgeted
     
    Lawyers said the City would need voter approval to build affordable housing atop the new pool’s parking lot, because housing would be an unusual use for a dedicated park. Councillors quickly abandoned the housing idea, and asked staff to design a smaller lot with “no net loss” of green space. As for getting actual voter approval for the new pool — to borrow money, for example, as required under provincial law — there was no talk of that at all, until Loveday asked about a referendum.
    “Council’s direction was to explore the grant opportunities first, and then report back on options for how any remaining funding gap could be filled,” replied Tom Soulliere, the City’s parks director. The funding strategy would be discussed at the next update — in November, after the election. And with that, the councillors moved on to other worries, like bicycle parking at the new pool, and whether it would have a coffee shop.
    Nobody mentioned Minister Robinson’s letter. Wouldn’t failing to hold a referendum jeopardize the grants needed to build the pool in the first place?
    That was a “misunderstanding,” Soulliere told me later. The Province was only concerned that the City had enough money to cover any gap between a grant and the final project cost. He was right: even though Robinson’s letter recommended showing both public and financial support, her office told me that “if an applicant does not need to borrow externally to cover their share of costs, then elector approval is not required.”
    The City is hoping to get money from the next phase of the federal government’s 12-year, $180-billion Investing In Canada Plan. Under the plan, the feds will pay 40 percent of approved projects, and the provinces at least 33 percent. The pool is currently budgeted at $69.4M — although that’s sure to increase, as you’ll see below — so the City would have to come up with $18.7M, or 27 percent. Since the City has already allocated $10M from its financial reserves for the project, it would only need another $8.7M, which it can easily find in reserves. No borrowing, no referendum.
    But what if the City doesn’t get that grant?
     
    THE CITY NEEDS AT LEAST $45M from the federal-provincial plan, and getting all that might be a long shot. Such a grant would be the largest in the City’s history, bigger than the $37.5M the feds allocated, from two separate funds, to the Johnson Street Bridge. To date, the largest federal grant ever given for a rec centre is $18.8M, for Ryerson University’s facility in the former Maple Leaf Gardens in downtown Toronto. The City of Victoria will be asking for 16 percent of the approximately $276M the federal and B.C. governments will be jointly allocating to community and recreation projects, even though the City has just 1.8 percent of the province’s population.
    If the City doesn’t get all that money, the next council will face some hard choices. So I asked the incumbents and declared candidates three questions:
    1) If the City does not get ANY of the $45M it needs to build a new pool, what should it do?
    2) If the City only gets a FRACTION of the $45M, what should it do?
    3) If the City has to borrow money, how should it get voter approval—by referendum, or the Alternative Approval Process (AAP), whereby the borrowing is deemed “approved” unless 10 percent of voters sign petitions against it?
    Mayor Lisa Helps admitted that if the City doesn’t get any of the money, it can’t simply drain its financial reserves to build the pool. “If we get no money we would need to go to referendum or AAP,” she wrote. But she’s confident the City will get a substantial grant. “There is more infrastructure money than has been historically available for some time,” she noted, and said the City can make up any balance from reserves or “internal borrowing” against them. If the City had to borrow externally, she’d prefer to get voter approval via AAP, although she’s “open to hearing other opinions.” (The respondents’ complete answers are attached HERE.)
    Challengers for the mayoralty hold different views. Gary Beyer said that if the City doesn’t get any money or only a portion, it should repair the existing pool: “The project should never have gone as far as it has. Refurbishing is less expensive, and fits with core values of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.” (Beyer has recently announced that he is dropping out of the mayoralty race.) Sean Leitenberg also said the City should repair the pool if the shortfall is too great: “Let’s take care of our facility and see what the Y comes up with in the next few years.” And Stephen Hammond, speaking for the newcouncil.ca slate, called for a halt to the project until a third-party audit is conducted on the Johnson Street Bridge: “We cannot in good conscience allow [the pool] to proceed until a comprehensive review has brought to light all the facts that would inform all future decisions with regard to project management, procurement, organization, and all aspects of undertaking large-scale infrastructure projects in the City of Victoria.”
    The three incumbent councillors who responded also believe the City should take a different course if it doesn’t get a substantial grant. Ben Isitt said the City should repair the existing pool. Chris Coleman and Geoff Young favoured pursuing a partnership with the YMCA-YWCA, which hopes to build a new facility downtown with a smaller, 25-metre pool, although that could risk the union jobs of current Crystal employees. All three favoured using a referendum if the City had to borrow externally. (Coleman later announced that he is not running for re-election.)
    Among the contenders for council seats, Darlene Archibald said that if the City gets only a fraction of the grant it needs, it should reduce the scope of the project but continue pursuing a new facility, to provide greater accessibility for all users: “I don’t think it is a good idea to wait any longer to replace the pool.” Laurel Collins, Sharmarke Dubow and Sarah Potts, running together under the banner of Together Victoria, said they want a new pool, too; if the City doesn’t get a full grant, they would “proceed with the project as designed only once there is a solid plan to fill the funding shortfall.” Marg Gardiner said the public has lost confidence in the City because of the bridge project, its “almost casual” discussion of putting housing in a park, and its failure to survey taxpayers about how much they’re willing to pay for the pool. She said she’d need assurances of funding before continuing the project as is; otherwise, she’d reduce the scope of the project, or partner with the Y if there was no loss of City jobs. Grace Lore favoured collaborating with the Y, to build a flexible facility with space for needed services like childcare. Jordan Reichert favoured reducing the scope and cost of the project if the City doesn’t receive a grant. If it only receives a partial grant, his decisions would depend — as many respondents said — on how big a funding gap the City has to fill.
     
    IN SHORT, the fate of Crystal Pool hangs not just on a federal-provincial decision, but also on who sits on the next council.
    And candidates aren’t the only ones questioning the project. The Victoria Friends of Central Parkhave posted signs around the neighbourhood, calling for a complete plan for the park, and preservation of all its existing amenities, before pushing ahead with a new pool. Crystal Pool For All, the group that introduced the idea of housing atop the pool’s parking lot, has argued on Lisa Helps’ campaign website that the new pool suffers from “significant omissions and missed opportunities” by failing to include other amenities needed in the area, such as child-care facilities and a gymnasium.
    Budget watchdogs also fear that the cost is bound to increase. On July 19, City staff warned that the $69.4M budget presumed that construction would start by next February — and the Province has said it won’t make grant decisions until the spring of 2019 at the earliest. If construction doesn’t start until next October, staff said, the “likely incremental cost” of the project will be $3M higher.
    The budget is also based on a 2016 estimate that a new 50-metre pool’s construction cost would be $35.1M of the overall project cost. (See Option 3 in the 2016 estimate HERE.) In June, however, the City unveiled a more detailed design, larger by 500 square metres, with a new leisure pool, a second hot pool, and a “lazy river,” all inside a curved, glass-walled “natatorium” bulging into the park. The City hired two firms, Advicas and Ross Templeton, to estimate the cost of this new design, but didn’t present their reports to councillors on July 19. Grumpy Taxpayer$ of Greater Victoria obtained the reports, and it turns out Advicas said the new design would cost $43.9M to build, and Ross Templeton said it would cost $46.2M — $8.8M to $11.1M more than the $35.1M used in the current budget. (See the Advicas estimate HERE and the Ross Templeton estimate HERE.)
    “There is no change to budget, and we’re working with all the consultants to ensure the detailed features and systems fit within the approved construction allowance,” Soulliere wrote to the Grumpy$. “At this stage we can’t confirm whether there will be a change to the shape of the building as this is just one of the components being analyzed from a cost perspective.”
    Such shifting costs are bound to raise arguments on the campaign trail. The City won’t be holding a referendum on its next megaproject this October, but in choosing our next council, we will be voting on it anyway. ❖
    Victoria writer Ross Crockford loves swimming, but not at any cost.

    Leslie Campbell
    September 2018
    Victoria City council will soon be faced with a controversial heritage conversion and demolition project in the heart of Old Town.
     
    MOST OF US PAY AT LEAST LIP SERVICE to the value of the City of Victoria’s Downtown heritage buildings. We enjoy how they conjure the past, make Victoria unique, and attract tourism dollars. It’s up for debate, however, whether current powers-that-be—City council, staff and citizen committees—are up to the task of guarding Old Town’s heritage buildings as the continuing development boom rocks their foundations.
    I set out to examine just one new proposal—that for the 1892 “Duck’s Block” and its neighbour at Broad and Johnson—but right away, it seemed to open the proverbial can of worms.
     

    The Duck's Block on Broad Street
     
    My first call was to Stuart Stark, as he was the chair of the City of Victoria’s Heritage Advisory Panel which gave the proposed development a unanimous thumbs-down on March 13, citing concerns about the height and monolithic design “absorbing” the heritage building, and noting it was “not consistent with the Official Community Plan (OCP), the Downtown Core Area Plan and the Design Guidelines.” Minutes also state the concern that, “Block by block Old Town is being converted from three to six storeys.”
    On March 28, however, the City’s Advisory Design Panel gave the project a unanimous thumbs-up.
    To make things even more confusing, I learned that in August 2017, the Downtown Residents Association’s Land Use Committee had soundly declined to support the Broad Street development for similar reasons as the heritage panel’s. The Committee’s chair, Ian Sutherland, pointed out that the OCP is relatively new (2012), and “was compiled to the satisfaction of the public and the industry stakeholders.” The Downtown Residents Association’s position is that the maximum density of 3:1 for Old Town was a carefully considered policy and should be upheld. The Duck developers are requesting almost double that amount.
    Since making their presentations to these citizen committees, developers UVic Properties and Chard Developments have made only minor adjustments to their plan for 172 residential units plus ground floor retail. The new buildings are still seven storeys tall. David Chard told me they have now applied for rezoning and permits and expect it will reach the Committee of the Whole in the next couple of months. If passed, it will go to public hearing and City council.
     

    An artist's rendering of a redevelopment of the Duck's Block proposed by UVic Properties and Chard Developments
     
    Before I could query him about the Duck’s Block proposal, Stuart Stark informed me that he had resigned from the Heritage Advisory Panel, within a month of the March 13 meeting, and that the kind of issues the proposal raises are a good example of how heritage is being endangered by practices and attitudes at City Hall. He was willing to talk to me, he said, “in the hope that citizens might realize that their relied-on heritage program no longer exists.”
    A long-time heritage consultant in Victoria, Stark had sat on the Heritage Advisory Panel over three different periods in its history—in the 1970s, 1990s and from 2014-18; he chaired it for 6 months previous to his resignation.
    “We had a fabulous heritage program for 35 years, but for the past few years it’s been disintegrating,” he told me. He’s referring to a constellation of programs, policies, plans and guidelines that are supposed to protect both the individual heritage properties Victoria is renowned for, and the overall character of Downtown’s “heritage conservation area.” This includes Old Town, Chinatown, and the historic waterfront area. Development is allowed in these areas, even encouraged through grants and tax holidays, but there are various restrictions. It was such programs—and their visible results—that led to Victoria winning the Prince of Wales Prize for Municipal Heritage Leadership in 2001, said Stark.
    One aspect of the program is the Heritage Advisory Panel itself. Composed of 10 volunteers, all with expertise in heritage matters, along with the City’s heritage planner, its mandate is to advise council on proposals regarding heritage in the City. City Councillor Pam Madoff usually attends as a guest, though is not allowed to comment on proposals. They meet monthly to review proposed changes to heritage properties—now only commercial and multi-family ones.
    This was one of Stark’s complaints. A couple of years back, planning staff made recommendations to council on administrative changes aimed at speeding up permit approvals. Council passed these measures, perhaps without realizing that it meant quite a drastic change. “In the stroke of a pen,” says Stark, “any application for changes to a single-family house became a staff review,” rather than going through the Heritage Advisory Panel. This removed about half of what the Panel once advised council on—and perhaps explains, for instance, how a 1904 house in Rockland, connected to the Dunsmuirs, was able to be demolished. If council has no recommendation against such demolition from its Heritage Advisory Panel, it has a hard time justifying declining it itself.
    Stark, however, isn’t convinced that the Panel’s recommendations even make it to council, at least in a clear, unaltered fashion. They are “filtered through planning staff,” which sometimes disagree openly with the Panel’s recommendations.
    “The goals of the OCP are being used to trump heritage,” Stark told me. And indeed, if one reads the OCP, one can see how, despite platitudes about heritage resources being protected and celebrated, there are other goals to do with the economy and walkable cities that might well be used to justify significant alterations to heritage structures. The OCP, for instance, calls for “at least 20,000 new residents and associated housing growth,” 50 percent of them in the Urban Core.
    But it’s more than that, said Stark. “There was once an atmosphere at City Hall that heritage was important. It’s not there now.” He emphasized that “valuing heritage did not prevent development—and it shouldn’t. But heritage was a lens through which all projects were reviewed—now it seems to be viewed as more of a hindrance to development.”
    Stark understands that developers are not the problem. They are trying to do what they do best—making a profitable investment through development projects. But he feels that City staff, particularly those at the top of what’s now called “Sustainable Development and Community Planning,” no longer really care about the heritage of Old Town—there’s a lack of knowledge and/or interest.
    How else to explain the “façadism” that’s being allowed? Stark pointed to Customs House as the most visible example of this currently, with its three walls propped up and a heap of rubble inside. Plans call for Duck’s Building to be gutted and another floor added on top, with the façade retained.
     

    The façade of the Customs House building is being retained for a redevelopment at Government and Wharf
     
    The lack of value attributed to heritage at City Hall also helps explain, in Stark’s mind, the lack of timely and meaningful consultation with the Heritage Advisory Panel. “We were often the last to see a proposal,” said Stark—and, if they had issues with the proposal, planning staff would complain about the time they’d already put into it.
    Stark claimed informational presentations by staff about planned changes are relayed to council as “consultation”—as if the Panel had some say on them. After such a faux consultation on zoning changes involving height restrictions in Old Town, the Panel passed a unanimous motion that did not get relayed at all to council, said Stark.
    Stark met a few times with senior staff and once with the mayor who urged him to stay. Believing things wouldn’t change, he resigned.
     

    Stuart Stark
     
    I invited Councillor Pam Madoff to comment on Stark’s resignation. She wrote: “Stuart’s resignation from the Heritage Advisory Panel is a loss to the Panel, to City Council and to Victoria. A highly respected heritage consultant, and designer, with decades of experience, Stuart has also been a tireless and effective volunteer advocate of our built heritage for decades. As chair of the Panel he spent untold hours preparing for each meeting and ensuring that all voices around the table were heard. For Stuart to have become so frustrated with the role of the Panel, and how its opportunity to advise council had become increasingly limited, that he felt he had no option, other than resignation, should serve as a wake-up call for how the City’s heritage policies are currently being implemented.”
    When I asked the City’s Director of Sustainable Development and Community Planning Jonathan Tinney about Stark’s resignation, he acknowledged the wealth of heritage knowledge among Panel members” and said, “We want to make sure we get the benefit of that—and the feedback from Stuart was helpful. Some changes have been made as a result.” He told me more applications are now going to the Panel that formerly were handled solely by staff. An additional heritage planner has recently been hired.
    Stark remains skeptical that the heritage program has the backing of senior staff, or even the mayor, who he sees as pro-development.
    Madoff tends to lay the blame at council’s feet: “All council and the mayor have to do is apply things that were put in place earlier.” The appropriate guidelines and policies are all there, she feels. They just need to be applied with consistency. This will provide developers with the surety they need to create projects that will work in Downtown’s heritage conservation area.
    Madoff doesn’t believe that heritage needs to be sacrificed for other priorities. She pointed to earlier developments which managed to restore and revitalize heritage properties without adding extra storeys on top and devolving into “façadism.”
     
    LISTED ON CANADA'S Historical Places website, Duck’s Block is described as “an excellent example of a large-scale Late Victorian commercial building. Constructed in 1892 for Simeon Duck, a successful early local entrepreneur, MLA, and former Minister of Finance for British Columbia, this handsome Victorian building is a testament to the entrepreneurship of its original owner.” Initially a carriage works, it also housed retail outlets, entertainment venues, meeting rooms and a brothel. “Bold decoration and architectural solidity make Duck’s Block a dominant presence within Broad Street’s narrow streetscape.” Among its character-defining elements are “rusticated masonry piers at street level, and stone lintels; bold Victorian detailing, such as arched windows on the uppermost storey, … [and] intact original storefront elements such as cast iron columns.”
    Both Duck’s Block and the next door building (615-625 Johnson), which is to be demolished under the proposal, are on the Heritage Registry and in the heart of Old Town. The guidelines for this area note: “The distinctive character of Old Town, without parallel in other Canadian cities, derives from Victoria’s decline as a major seaport and centre of commerce by 1900, that protected it from the pressures of urban development that have altered the scale and character of most other urban seaports.”
    Michael Williams, the late developer and heritage afficionado, bought Duck’s and the Trounce-designed building beside it many years ago, though never developed them. As a result, they now house affordable artist studios, retail spaces, apartments and a dance studio. Williams bequested these buildings, his other numerous Downtown properties, his businesses (e.g. Swan’s Hotel and Pub) and extensive art collection to the University of Victoria upon his death in 2000.
    UVic Properties, which manages the university’s revenue-generating properties, has sold Duck’s and the corner property (also built by Duck, in 1875, as the Canada Hotel) to Chard Developments, at fair market value, according to David Chard. In 2017 the two properties were assessed at $5.7M.
    Chard will build market condos on his properties—113 in all. Duck’s will be gutted and have an extra storey built on its roof, and the old Canada Hotel building will be demolished and replaced with a seven-storey building.
    UVic’s new building will occupy the parking lot to the left of the Duck’s and house 59 non-market rental units for UVic grad students. It’s been noted that once students graduate, there is no requirement for them to move out to make room for other students.
    In all, that’s 172 residential units—with no parking. Retail shops will occupy the ground floors.
    Stark told me, “As an alumni of UVic, I am totally embarrassed that the university would inflict this on a heritage conservation area.”
    I asked Councillor Madoff what Michael Williams would think of the current proposal. Noting that Williams certainly never did anything like what they’re planning to do with Duck’s, she stated, “He was very protective of the character of Old Town. He understood the value, texture and scale of Old Town and that was what he was working to enhance.”
    Madoff said she told the developers a couple of years ago that she couldn’t see even one principle of heritage conservation fulfilled by their plans. “The storefronts didn’t relate to each other. And in taking the height up, they’d also flattened the height along Broad, when Old Town guidelines clearly call for varied heights echoing the rhythm and character of the conservation area.” Besides being too high, she warned them, it reduced the Duck to a façade.
    Before I even asked developer David Chard about this, he told me, “We’re maintaining the entire structure, so it isn’t façadism.”
    At 22.47 metres, the project is well over the 15 metres stipulated in the guidelines. Chard noted that there are heritage buildings in Old Town already over 15 metres, and Duck’s Block itself is one of them. While this is true, Madoff noted, “15 metres was chosen as the limit for new buildings because new infill developments were not intended to dominate the Old Town profile and the profile was to remain ‘sawtooth.’”
    The main reason for greater height from Chard’s standpoint (and most developers) is that it is needed to accommodate the number of units that “make the economics work.” One huge expense, said Chard, is seismic work which is especially challenging with 125-year-old buildings. With the Duck proposal, the plan is to build the two new buildings before working on the Duck—“We’ll use them to reinforce the Duck while we replace its rock footings with concrete,” he explained.
    Chard believes that what’s getting lost in the discussion is this: “Many heritage buildings are in poor shape. What will happen to these buildings if they are not redeveloped?”
    The most concerning aspect of the UVic/Chard proposal for Madoff is that the three-storey Johnson Street heritage building is to be completely demolished. Designed by architect Thomas Trounce in 1874 as the Canada Hotel, it is one of only a few of his designs left. Admittedly, said Madoff, it has been stripped of some heritage features over the years—like bay windows—but it could have been restored.
    David Chard disagreed with that. He said the poorly-constructed wood-frame building could not be saved, as it was in “very rough shape.”
    Nevertheless, the property is a registered heritage building, and demolishing it, said both Stark and Madoff, sets a dangerous precedent for Old Town.
     
    THE HERITAGE ADVISORY PANEL’S unanimous lack of support for UVic and Chard’s proposal was followed on May 8 with a similar thumbs-down for Reliance Properties’ application for the Northern Junk project. The Panel suggested the seven-storey building on that site be reduced to four or five storeys, and urged that materials be more responsive to the immediate neighbourhood. (See Ken Johnson’s letter to the editor in this edition about the companion issue of selling off City-owned lands that this development necessitates.)
    Reading through the minutes of the Heritage Advisory Panel shows it is not anti-development. A proposal to build a new eight-storey condo project on Store Street, between the Janion and Mermaid’s Wharf, was recently passed unanimously. And in June, it supported a Heritage Alteration Permit for the 1897 Hall Block at 727 Yates Street, which adds two floors on top for rental housing. Council has since approved it for a public hearing.
    The current acting chair of the Panel, Rick Goodacre, served as executive director for Heritage BC for 23 years. He told me that dealing with development proposals virtually always involves a type of deal-making or trade-off, because the developers want to get as many units as possible on a site, while the City wants to see heritage buildings maintained, as well as more residential units Downtown. He implied that sometimes a good balance is struck, whereas other times it’s debatable (he pointed to the Janion, with the huge new building behind the historic hotel).
    In the past, many redevelopments of some of Victoria’s oldest buildings earned the support of the panel, and subsequently council. Madoff can rattle off numerous examples—from Dragon Alley, to the Vogue, Chris Le Fevre’s Wilson’s Storage project on Herald, and Michael Williams’ restorations—all part of a slow and steady stream of projects that revitalized Old Town, proving that developments can add housing while not sacrificing heritage buildings.
    But can they still do so in the current market? Or have much higher land prices made those more modest, respectful developments financially impossible?
    Without developers opening their books for me, I don’t know the answer, though I do appreciate the risk they take on. The larger, more complex projects, involving heritage properties, are among the riskiest, taking years of planning and consultation. It’s hardly surprising that by the time a developer gets to the Heritage Advisory Panel, he or she might well feel that they’ve already figured out the puzzle as best as it can be—and they are not inclined to lop off a few floors just because a citizens committee suggests it. Even staff can only advise the developer. In the end, the shape of the application for rezoning and permits is up to the developer, even when they get a unanimous thumbs-down from advisory panels or community groups. The decision on their proposals is ultimately council’s, taking into consideration the reports of advisory panels and land use committees.
    Two official citizen bodies—composed of volunteers putting in serious time and study—have clearly advised council against the Duck proposal as it stands (though the Advisory Design Panel loved it). They are basing their refusal to support the project on established rules in official documents. Besides the OCP, the Core Area Plan is a principal guide for planning decisions related to Downtown.
    Madoff said the City developed its Core Area Plan in a very conscious way, allowing, for instance, buildings of 20-plus storeys on Blanshard, because it would save Old Town from such pressures. She supported it, but now states, “If [Old Town Guidelines are not respected] it puts the Core Area Plan into question for me.”
    Downtown’s heritage conservation area is a relatively small area west of Douglas Street between Humboldt and Chatham. If council doesn’t enforce the regulations around height and density in the area, developers will notice, and we can expect more precedent-setting changes to the character of Old Town.
    Madoff worries that changes, including the “façadism” trend, are going to make Old Town look like a theme park rather than a vital part of Downtown. “International visitors,” she said, “are discerning. They know authenticity when they see it. If it looks like a stage set, we’ll lose on all counts.”
    Leslie Campbell knows there are many issues to reflect on, heading towards Victoria’s October 20 civic election, but consider adding to your list the way potential council members manage growth in Victoria’s Old Town.

    David Broadland
    July 2018
    FOIed emails show engineers forgot about a serious flaw until it was too late to fix properly. They then forgot that they had forgotten.
     
    AFTER STALLING FOR SIX MONTHS, the City of Victoria finally released documents that provide details about why the lifting section of the new Johnson Street Bridge had to be repaired before it was even installed. “Repair,” by the way, is the word used by the engineers involved. The records the City released include emails from Ryan Andrews, PCL’s project manager, to private consultant Jonathan Huggett, whom the City has been paying about $300,000 a year to watch over Victoria taxpayers’ interests on the project. PCL is the Edmonton-headquartered company the City contracted to build the bridge in 2013.
    The released records show Huggett and another engineer misled public officials about the circumstances that led to the need for the premature repair. In turn, those public officials, including Mayor Lisa Helps, misled the public.
    As you may recall, our January story pointed out that a one-metre by one-metre steel plate had been bolted to the underside of each of the new bridge’s 50-foot-diameter rings at the 12 o’clock position. The plates were not part of the intended design, and appeared to be a last-minute addition needed to reinforce some structural weakness in the rings. For our story we contacted Huggett and Helps for information about what had necessitated the plates.
     

    A close-up of the large bolted-on plates that made a last-minute and unexpected appearance on Victoria's brand-new $115-million bridge
     
    Huggett’s response to our questions at the time produced little factual information. Mayor Helps ignored our questions about whether she and council had been advised about the plates. Following publication of our story, Helps issued a statement through facebook claiming our story “contained serious factual errors and inaccuracies.” Her statement had apparently been created by then acting City Manager Jocelyn Jenkins, with Huggett’s guidance. Keith Griesing, a professional engineer with Hardesty & Hanover, the company that engineered the lifting section of the bridge, wrote a letter to the City explaining how the problem that led to the repair had been discovered. Griesing denied any responsibility for the circumstances that led to the bolted-on plates and blamed the Chinese fabricator.
    In the six months since then, Helps and the City were unable to provide any examples of “factual errors and inaccuracies” in our original story. However, after receiving the records we requested by FOI, I am able to report that I did make a factual error. The size of the plates are actually six feet by six feet—almost four times as large as we reported. But the emails from Andrews to Huggett paint a rather different story than that told by Huggett, Helps, and Griesing.
    In two emails from Andrews to Huggett, Andrews appealed to Huggett to intervene with Hardesty & Hanover to hasten resolution of a serious issue that became known as “NCR 155.” That referred to four weld access holes in each ring described in a non-conformance report (NCR) by Atema dated January 4, 2017. Atema was the company performing PCL’s quality-control inspections at the steel fabrication facility in China where the lifting section was built.
    Atema’s report recorded that the weld access holes were “discovered” on December 9, 2016. The concern about the small holes, not openly stated in the Atema report, was that their location and physical nature would concentrate stress and could eventually lead to the formation of fatigue cracks in the rings. Such fatigue cracks could threaten the structural integrity of the bridge’s superstructure.
    In Andrews’ first email to Huggett about the issue, which he sent on March 31, 2017 following a meeting with Hardesty & Hanover that day, Andrews wrote: “For a brief recap, you heard H&H mention this has been a known issue for over a year, yet it wasn’t communicated to PCL…until December 2016 at which point the NCR was initiated…”
    I’ve added the italicization in that sentence to draw your attention to that point. It shows that Andrews told Huggett on March 31, 2017 that the problem created by the weld access holes “had been a known issue for over a year.” That would mean the problem had been evident to Hardesty & Hanover before March 31, 2016.
    Both Huggett and Griesing have, in their separate public explanations of the issue, implied that the problem was discovered in December 2016 as a result of Atema’s diligent inspection and quality control.
    So what’s the big deal about the eight months missing from both Huggett’s and Griesing’s explanations? During those eight months, as well as during the four months between rediscovery of the problem and the date when Andrews emailed Huggett, work had continued on the rings. That year of work made it more difficult to fix the problem properly.
    Neither Huggett nor Griesing responded to requests for an explanation of why those eight months had disappeared from their public accounts of what happened. Perhaps there is no reasonable explanation for why the problem wasn’t addressed as soon as it was first identified. It appears the problem was simply forgotten. Did someone then wake up in the middle of a dark, December night and have an OMG! moment? How embarrassing this must be for those involved: Engineers forgetting that they forgot.
    But that’s not the full extent to which Huggett and Griesing misled the City and the public.
    Andrews’ March 31, 2017 email to Huggett continued: “Now it also needs to be noted that this so called ‘non-conforming’ condition has no design details and no comments were made on the shop drawings. We have not raised issue of this prior due to our interest in just getting it repaired and over with, but being that it continues to linger it now has significant impacts for both PCL and the City—those being time and money.”
    Andrews, then, disputed that the weld access holes were the fault of the fabricator. He believed they were a result of design details and comments not being provided by the designer—Hardesty & Hanover.
    Indeed, Atema’s NCR 155 included notations that pointed out the lack of clarity in the shop drawings for the weld access holes. Ultimate responsibility for approving those shop drawings lay with Griesing.
    Martin Bache, a 40-year veteran of the heavy steel fabrication industry in Canada, described the proper procedure required for approval of weld access holes: “Weld access holes in fracture-critical members must be designed by the Engineer of Record [Griesing]. Competent detail draftspersons would be expected, during preparation of the shop drawings, to identify closed chambers where the Engineer of Record may have forgotten to show on his plans weld access holes without which the required welding cannot be performed. They would then issue an RFI [request for information] pointing this out, and asking the Engineer of Record how they should proceed.”
    According to Bache, then, Griesing would ultimately be responsible for the completeness of the design of every weld access hole that was required, since every steel member in the rings was designated “fracture-critical.” 
    But in January 2018, after publication of our original story, Griesing wrote the City of Victoria and stated, “There was no ‘design flaw’ by Hardesty & Hanover nor any other of the City consultants involved; it was assembly by the fabricator that did not conform to the design plan requirements nor to the applicable detailing and fabrication standards required in the specifications.”
    Andrews’ email to Huggett calls that claim into question.
    And now we come to the nub of why Victoria got a new bridge delivered with such highly visible repairs.
    Andrews’ email to Huggett continued: “I’m requesting your support by having a separate conversation with H&H/MMM on this subject and resolution thereof. Having to remove the cover plate to do these repairs should be the item challenged as this is what will create the delay expressed above. Or in other words, give me a repair that requires no removal of the cover plate.”
    There were three general approaches that could have been taken to address the potential for fatigue caused by the weld access holes.
    PCL’s fabricator proposed a welded repair limited to the weld access holes themselves, but Hardesty & Hanover rejected that approach.
    A second approach was to add steel to the outside of the rings, and that’s the approach that was eventually taken.
    The third approach would have been to remove steel plate (“the cover plate”) from the rings in the area around the access holes and rework the problematic area. That would have preserved the intended design. But Andrews lobbied Huggett to steer away from this latter course. Removing the cover plate at that point in the project could have created a problem that he outlined to Huggett in a second email a few days later: “[T]he whole reason the [cover] plate was installed was [because] it was continually discussed between all parties that all welding needed to be complete before proceeding [in March 2017] to vertical assembly due to concerns of the heat induced from welding causing the shape of the rings to change.”
    The implication was that if the choice was made to remove plating and rebuild the problematic area of the ring, the fit between the rings and the other major bridge components—obtained during the month-long trial vertical assembly that had just been completed—couldn’t be counted on. Andrews estimated that taking the route of removal of plate and doing an internal fix would add a “week or more” to the schedule.
    Compare that “week or more” to the year that had passed between the time the issue first became known and the point when trial vertical assembly had been completed. In that context, Griesing’s explanation to City council that “impact to schedule” was an important factor in the choice of bolted-on plates is…laughable. 
    Remarkably, the record of Huggett’s communications released by the City doesn’t include any communications coming from Huggett. He appears not to have responded to Andrews’ emails and not to have consulted with Hardesty & Hanover or with MMM as per Andrews’ request. Neither did he inform anyone at the City of Victoria about the issue or the options. It’s clear that an alternative to bolted-on plates was possible and would, by Andrews’ estimate, have added only a “week or more” to the schedule. But, according to the records released by the City, Huggett didn’t advocate for any outcome with anyone.
    Let’s reflect on the absence of any emails from Huggett in response to Andrews’ appeals. Huggett is not a City of Victoria employee. He operates what appears to be a one-man project management business in the Vancouver area. His contract with the City does not require him to use the City’s email server, which automatically backs up all City employee emails and preserves them for the purpose, among others, of being available for access-to-information requests.
    When Focus requested Huggett’s communications on this issue, the City had to ask him to go through his emails and find relevant records. In other words, the City created a situation where a private contractor could, in effect, decide what emails to provide. The problem here should be obvious. The City has no way of knowing what interactions took place between Huggett and employees of Hardesty and Hanover, PCL or MMM. The product these companies delivered was seriously defective, yet Huggett, when questioned about the bolted-on plates, provided little more than an airbrushed account of why that had occurred.
    From what I understand, the City has now entered into a similar arrangement with Huggett regarding the City’s plan to build a new $75 million swimming pool. What is that definition of “insanity” again?
    Does the City have any legal recourse to seek compensation as a result of the delivery of a defective bridge? As I noted in my story in our May/June edition, in April 2016 the City agreed to “release and forever discharge” PCL, MMM and H&H “from all debts, claims, demands, damages, expenses and costs (including without limitation, legal costs) of any nature or kind that are in any way related to the Project and either known or which ought to be known by the [City] as of [April 23, 2016].” According to PCL’s Ryan Andrews, the defects that necessitated the bolted-on plates were a “known issue” at the time the City signed away its right to seek legal recourse for anything related to known issues.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.
    The City of Victoria's full release of documents related to the bolted-on plates can be downloaded here. (9.1 MB file size)
    Related stories:
    Bridge design flaw hidden for a year, then given quick-and-dirty repair
    Victoria City Hall continues cover-up of bridge design flaw
    Why are Victoria City councillors accepting a world-class bodge?
    The Wounded White Elephant

    Judith Lavoie
    July 2018
    Indigenous communities in the path of the oil sands and its pipelines have been left with no good options.
     
    IN NORTHERN ALBERTA AND BC, anger at environmental damage and fears that traditional cultures are disappearing are competing with economic pragmatism as Indigenous leaders struggle to decide where the future lies. Is it more beneficial to fight, or take a place at the negotiating table in hopes of mitigating damage? It’s a complicated and sometimes soul-crushing balancing act. First Nations have little faith that their objections will have any effect on development decisions, given the history of approvals.
    In Alberta, out of more than 170 oil sands projects, almost none have been turned down, despite First Nations investing years of research and spending millions of dollars on court cases. “There has been 50 years of mining and there is still no protection of our rights. Governments don’t seem to care,” said Lisa Tssessaze, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation lands and resource management director.
    Around Fort Chipewyan, a hamlet on the banks of Lake Athabasca, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and Mikisew Cree are preparing to fight the massive Teck Frontier project.
    The Teck Frontier mine is a $20-billion development, which the company says would provide 7,000 construction jobs and 2,500 permanent jobs. 
     

    Buffalo in northern Alberta (Photo by Louis Bockner)
     
    It would sit 110 kilometres north of Fort McMurray and 30 kilometres south of Wood Buffalo National Park, a World Heritage Site which a UNESCO report says is already under threat from rampant oil sands development and other pressures.
    If approved after joint federal-provincial review panel hearings this fall, Teck Frontier would rip up 292 square kilometres, with much of the development on land where the buffalo roam.
    Not just any buffalo, emphasized elder Roy Ladouceur, who, for more than half a century, has lived off the land at the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation’s Poplar Point reserve, which is 16 kilometres from the Teck site. The area, explained Ladouceur, includes calving grounds for the Ronald Lake Bison Herd, the only disease-free, genetically-pure wood bison herd in the area. The herd is already in trouble because of proximity to the oil sands and poaching. He believes that, if Teck goes ahead, it will be the end of the Ronald Lake Bison Herd.
     

    Roy Ladouceur (Photo by Louis Bockner)
     
    “They say they can find ways and means of preserving the habitat and I just can’t see it happening, no way, no how,” said Ladouceur. Ideas of relocating the buffalo and caribou make no sense and are likely to result in the animals contracting diseases, he said. “You can’t do that to any animal. You are breaking Nature’s law and Nature has its own way. It’s not their home,” Ladouceur said.
    Freddie Marcel, another Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation elder, concurs with this judgement. He talks with sad resignation about the future of the land where generations of his family have hunted, trapped and fished. “That Teck Frontier development is going to happen regardless of what we say and whether we fight. The buffalo are there and the caribou are there, but that’s right where the mine is going to be,” shrugged Marcel.
     
    THE AREA HAS BEEN EXPERIENCING the environmental impacts of industrial development for decades now. Around Wood Buffalo National Park and the Peace-Athabasca Delta, pollution and dropping water levels are evident and problematic. Much of the pollution is traceable to oil sands development. The dropping water levels are largely attributable to dams on the Peace River, climate change, and industry withdrawing water from the Athabasca River. Together they have changed centuries-old lifestyles that relied on the land and water for food, medicines, clothing and shelter.
    Simultaneous with the environmental damage, however, has come a steady flow of oil money into communities, which is altering attitudes and forcing First Nations communities to examine priorities.
    Indigenous communities in both provinces are increasingly looking at benefit agreements with companies in hopes of having their voices heard and bringing injections of cash and jobs to their bands. Fort Chipewyan Metis Local 125, for instance, has already signed a participatory agreement with Teck Frontier in return for economic benefits and opportunities to negotiate traditional land use and environmental stewardship. 
    Teck Frontier spokesman Chris Stannell said the company has signed similar agreements with 11 Indigenous groups. “These agreements identify economic and social benefits and opportunities—such as employment, contracting and training—and include environmental stewardship planning,” Stannell said in an emailed response to questions.
    Even Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, though offically opposed, is involved in talks with the company on topics such as buffer zones and protection for wildlife.
    Matt Hulse, the Nation’s regulatory affairs coordinator, admits the question of how to deal with projects such as Teck Frontier is complicated. He said, “There’s a lot of grey. Everyone realizes the jobs are down there [in the oil sands] and that’s where the money comes from. People don’t want the [Teck Frontier] mine to go ahead, but, because we have so little confidence in the regulatory process, Indigenous communities are forced to find ways to benefit from the project to offset the impacts. There isn’t any good option.”
     
    THAT AMBIVALENCE IS UNDERLINED by a surprise announcement last month that Athabasca Tribal Council—made up of five First Nations, including Athabasca Chipewyan and Mikisew Cree—is considering buying a stake in the Trans Mountain pipeline in an effort to obtain Indigenous control and ensure the environment is safeguarded.
    The controversial pipeline, opposed by many British Columbians, was purchased by the federal government from Kinder Morgan for $4.5 billion to ensure a planned expansion goes ahead.
    The Athabasca Tribal Council move caught pipeline critics and some community members off guard, particularly as Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam, who is also president of the Tribal Council, has been known for campaigning against the pace of oil sands development alongside such celebrities as Jane Fonda, Leonardo DiCaprio and Neil Young.
    Athabasca Chipewyan elder Alice Rigney, who has lived off the land all her life, blames the oil industry for destroying the delta and the lifestyle that has sustained her family for generations, and she wants no part of a pipeline. “I could not believe that my community wants to be part of this pipeline. They have forced us into a corner where we have nowhere else to turn,” Rigney said sadly. “Just think 100 years from now what this planet will look like. They are destroying the land.”
    Ironically, the Trans Mountain pipeline is likely to transport oil from the Teck Frontier development, although Stannell said that, if the project is approved, the first oil is not expected to flow until 2026, so shipping plans have not yet been determined.
    So why would First Nations, who are continuing to fight oil sands projects, want to buy a piece of pipeline?
    Winds of change are blowing through First Nations communities, said Mikisew Cree Chief Archie Waquan. In Fort Chipewyan, where many young people take fly-in-fly-out shifts in the oil sands, a new affluence is taking hold and traditional activities, such as a moose-hide tanning workshop, are failing to appeal to the new generation.
    Waquan, who describes himself as a former tree-hugger, believes he must lead efforts to modernize the economy for the sake of the younger generation. “Do we remain the same and be anti or get on the boat and deal with industry and be able to be part of what is happening there? I look at what is happening south of us in the tarpits and the oil sands and, if we don’t partake in it, we will be left behind and I will be to blame,” he said.
     

    Chief Archie Waquan (Photo by Louis Bockner)
     
    If the pipeline purchase plan goes ahead, it will be the second foray into the industry for Mikisew Cree, who, last year, together with Fort McKay First Nation, bought a 49 percent interest in a Suncor Energy storage facility.
    A pipeline share is a logical next step, said Waquan, acknowledging that there are continuing concerns, but insisting that participation will help mitigate problems. “I have to look to the future, beyond my time on Earth. Times have changed and we have to realize that. We need to go to a modern lifestyle—which I think my First Nation wants—and that means we have to deal with industry. We have to keep them in check,” he said.
    Waquan believes that, despite the scars left by oil and gas extraction, the land is resilient enough to recover. “You can’t reverse it now, but in time, when all the development is gone from this territory, our land will always come back to where it used to be,” he said.
    Others see it differently and say Indigenous communities are being coerced into deals. Eriel Deranger, Indigenous Climate Action executive director, believes that economic benefit agreements, with companies promising to transfer millions of dollars to communities, amount to bribes.
    “I have watched government and industry work very diligently to wear down the leadership—the way we are allowing this to happen is absurd,” she said. “Our communities are not making decisions freely, free of intimidation and free of coercion and free of bribery. Let’s be real, these impact benefit agreements are bribes,” she said.
    Projects are approved despite admissions of irreversible and adverse impacts on the people and the land, and that can destroy the spirit of the people, Deranger said. “They are saying, in order for you to survive in the economic system we have imposed on you, you have to join us. There’s no choice any more. The rights of industry and corporations have taken precedence over Indigenous rights,” she said.
    Judith Sayers, Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council president, said the same story plays out in BC, and companies regularly try to coerce First Nations into signing agreements by telling them that they will get nothing if they don’t sign on. “So you sign on to make sure you get money and jobs and benefits for your community,” she said.
    But communities should realize that they do not have to sign agreements, especially given the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) by the federal and BC governments, and recent emphasis on the need for free, prior and informed consent, Sayers said. “Losing your right to fish and hunt as opposed to having a job is no contest. There are other ways of making money and having meaningful economic development without selling your soul,” she said.
    When Kinder Morgan owned the pipeline, the company signed 43 mutual benefit agreements with Indigenous groups in BC and Alberta, but some chiefs have since said that they do not support the pipeline expansion project and felt signing the agreement was the only way to either get benefits or ensure there was funding to clean up spills. “It’s not really support. If we opposed it, we would have no way of addressing spills because we would be disqualified from funding from Trans Mountain,” Ditidaht Chief Robert Joseph told the Times Colonist in 2016.
    Chief Bob Chamberlin, Union of BC Indian Chiefs vice-president, said the history of Canada is that government makes the final decision over lands Indigenous people have never given up. That, he said, has resulted in a sense of resignation that, whatever you do, someone else is going to make the decision. “As much as we object, as much as we point at case law and the constitution, Canada’s long history of disregarding all that is still alive and well,” Chamberlin said. “We are waiting for free, prior and informed consent to become real, but, until it’s real, First Nations are still faced with ‘the government’s going to do what it’s going to do. We might as well get what we can.’”
    Now, with the underpinning of UNDRIP, it is up to Indigenous communities to shed those feelings of resignation, and for other Canadians to educate themselves on those rights, Chamberlin said. “We are talking about human rights and that’s a big evolution for Canadians to understand,” he said.
    Judith Lavoie spent eight days in June in the communities of Fort Smith and Fort Chipewyan reporting for The Narwhal on how Alberta oil sands projects and the Site C dam are affecting the Peace-Athabasca Delta and Wood Buffalo National Park. An overflight of the delta was funded by Sierra Club BC.

    Leslie Campbell
    July 2018
    The fuzzy thinking of Canada’s mainstream political establishment is driving some good citizens to despair.
     
    DAVID DODGE, a former Bank of Canada governor, recently gave a speech in Edmonton in which he predicted “there are some people that are going to die in protesting construction” of the Trans Mountain pipeline. As reported in the Edmonton Journal, he was warning his audience to be prepared, that the deaths would be a test of will for the Canadian government and its people, but certainly not a reason to stop the pipeline. “It’s going to take some fortitude” to face the deaths and continue, he said, but continue we must: “We have to understand this is a resource where the long-term viability isn’t there, not because we’re running out of muck in the ground, but because we actually, collectively, as the globe, are going to have to stop using as much of this stuff.”
    Dodge obviously understands the dictates of global climate change. His response is to urge Canadians to continue to exploit the main source of the problem in the closing window of time we’ll be allowed to. Even if it means people die.
    Meanwhile sensible, caring people who try to stand in the way of such exploitation are viewed as fanatics and felons.
     
    MURRAY REISS, an award-winning poet who lives on Salt Spring Island, is 72 years of age, just a few years younger than Mr Dodge. Arrested on March 23 for standing in front of the entry gate to Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain expansion construction site, he told BC Supreme Court Justice Kenneth Affleck: “nothing less than the impending end of the world gets me to put my body on the line. I wish I was exaggerating. Tripling the Trans Mountain pipeline’s capacity will recklessly escalate tar sands extraction. James Hansen, who knows as much about the science of climate change as anyone, has stated, repeatedly: maximum tar sands exploitation puts civilization at risk.” 
     

    Murray Reiss
     
    “The laws of physics are non-negotiable,” continued Reiss, “the notion of selling more fossil fuels today to pay for climate action tomorrow is sheer delusion. By that ‘tomorrow’…runaway global warming will be locked into the system. Already every year—almost every month—sets a new record for heat, for flooding, for wildfires, drought.” 
    Lisa Baile of Pender Island, also in her 70s, had a long career as a medical researcher. The long-time mountaineer, wilderness educator, and author of the book, John Clarke, Explorer of the Coast Mountains, told Judge Affleck: “Knowing that climate change is reaching an irreversible tipping point, I cannot stand by and allow this pipeline to be built knowing that it will be contributing to a local and global catastrophe. I have to stand up for my home, the coast of BC and the planet—to do my utmost to leave a better world while there is still a chance—for my three-year-old granddaughter, my two grandsons and for all the youngsters and unborn children in the world. To do nothing would be irresponsible.” She is doing her 25 hours of community service at an alternative transportation organization.
     

    Lisa Baile
     
    Reiss and Baile are among the 203 people arrested and charged, mostly with criminal contempt of court, for protesting on Kinder Morgan’s construction site after the court granted the company an injunction—an injunction that now covers all BC work sites related to the pipeline. Criminal contempt is a step up from civil contempt. According to BC Civil Liberties Association, criminal contempt is “where a court order is breached, but the nature of the conduct interferes with the public’s interest in the ‘proper administration of justice.’” 
    Kris Hermes works with Terminal City Legal Collective and Protect the Inlet Coalition, helping to demystify the legal system for the protesters. He’s in court every day taking notes and reporting by email to arrestees what the judge is saying so people are more aware. He feels that from the beginning there seem to have been problems with the administration of justice. For instance, notes Hermes, “Despite being told by the RCMP that they were being charged with civil contempt of court, and signing a PTA [Promise to Appear] to that effect, arrestees were surprised to find out [later] they were being prosecuted for criminal contempt of court.”
    He also notes that “people of colour and indigenous land defenders were often treated with a heavier hand, with some being violently arrested by the RCMP.”
    Unlike other criminal court cases, arrestees are not being given access to “duty counsel” to make sure they understand the process and what pleading guilty means. As well, the vast majority of those arrested, says Hermes, fall into an income bracket that makes them ineligible for legal aid—which has a high threshold these days—yet unable to afford a lawyer.
    Thus many people are representing themselves, which makes for interesting court sessions, says Hermes. They are given a bit of latitude by the judge but “they are often pleading guilty without advice of a lawyer on how to defend themselves.” 
    “A lot of people are struggling with this process,” says Hermes. “This has been raised numerous times…but the court seems not to care.” One defence lawyer complained in court that defendants were being subjected to a “factory cookie-cutter process” geared to expediting the 203 cases through the courts. Judge Affleck admitted he was aiming for an expeditious, though fair, process and added, “the issues are narrow, and on issues of whether the pipeline is an environmentally wise structure, I will not hear that evidence.”
    Instead, the judge has ruled that people’s defence is limited to consideration of the evidence put forth by the Crown—were they standing or sitting at the gate or not? Despite that, says Hermes, there have been attempts to use unorthodox defences—“the necessity defence” for instance. The judge, however, ruled against it as there wasn’t evidence of “imminent peril,” and defendants had not exhausted all of their legal defences. They could, for instance, challenge or appeal the injunction (a costly process, no doubt). 
    The statement made in court by Barbara Stowe, a writer and movement teacher who lives on Pender Island, illustrates the gulf between the expeditious legal process and a citizen’s moral sense: “Coming to this court with no criminal record, never having been arrested before, I have been overwhelmed by this process and had much need for guidance. I recognize the fortunate position I am in, having legal counsel, and perceive that many have none and are at a disadvantage.” In pleading guilty, Stowe told the judge “if such a plea were allowed, nolo contendere would more accurately reflect what I feel in my heart, which is that I am guilty, but acted solely to oppose a greater crime. When doctors, professors, politicians and faith leaders start committing civil disobedience, it begs the question: who and what is the real danger to our society, to all that we hold dear? Are people sitting in front of a fence, putting their freedom at risk, willing to pay fines and do community work service or go to jail, displaying a greater contempt for the law than those riding roughshod over the rights and safety of tribes, communities, cities, this province, and the environment that sustains us all?”
     

    Barbara Stowe
     
    Stowe’s brother, a physician, also protested and was arrested. He was fined $500, while Barbara will serve 25 hours of community service. She and her probation officer will determine where.
     
    WHILE WE HEAR ALL SORTS OF STORIES that give the impression that our justice system is terribly bogged down and slow, they are moving through the pipeline protesters’ cases quickly.
    The efficiency is due in part to a Crown-approved roster of sentences issued on May 23. The document shows how sentencing is being used to deter those charged from pleading not guilty, and to discourage others from further protesting. As time wears on, penalties increase. Those arrested in the early days of the protest (prior to April 16) who pled guilty quickly, received a $500 fine or 25 hours of community service. That escalates to a $4500 fine or, if unable to pay, 225 hours in community service for later arrestees, as long as they plead guilty quickly (usually meaning by the first day of their trial). 
    That latter proviso meant that the sentence for Victoria resident Gordon Bailey, a retired Capilano College teacher, was ten times that of other protesters arrested on the same day as he was. Says Bailey, “I was sentenced to a $5000 fine or 240 hours community service or jail time. If I hadn’t been sick earlier and had a medical test for which I’d waited three months, I might have had the earlier sentencing. Interesting.” (He is now volunteering 10 hours a week at Our Place in order to meet his November probationary deadline.)
     

    Gordon Bailey
     
    Bailey, who has written books and articles on social theory, ideology, education, and a trilogy of eco-detective fiction, also finds it “interesting” that “the historic concept of civil disobedience carries no power or sway in the hallowed halls of our judicial system. To protest and resist injustice is now seen as not only civil contempt of a court injunction but also as criminal contempt. It’s as though the judge and the Crown prosecutors are historically illiterate. Tolstoy, Gandhi, Thoreau, and such celebrated people as Rosa Parks are deemed irrelevant to the modern intelligent consciousness.”
    Those arrested after May 8 who plead guilty face a mandatory seven days in jail—and likely higher if they plead not guilty, go to court, and are found guilty.
    The escalating sentencing appears to be giving the Crown what it wants: Few have protested since May 8. On June 19, however, 69-year-old grandmother Laurie Embree from 108 Mile House sat at the Westridge Terminal gate and was arrested. She said she wanted to tell the government: “We have the technology to make the change and to stop using fossil fuels and transition to renewables. We have the people to make these changes and there are jobs in making those changes. The only thing lacking is the political will.” She will likely be going to jail soon.
    The escalating sentences, along with the sweeping expansion of the injunction to cover all BC worksites, says Hermes, mean that “Essentially the company is using the courts to stifle meaningful protest.” (After the sale of Trans Mountain is finalized in late summer, it will be the Canadian government.)
     
    IN ALL THE STATEMENTS I READ, people alluded to their concern for First Nations. Sentenced on May 29 (the day the federal government announced it was buying the pipeline), Nan Gregory, a retired storyteller, children’s writer and lay chaplain of the Unitarian Church, told Judge Affleck: “I’ve never before been an activist…I’m here to stand up for a just and honourable reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.”
    Murray Reiss, mentioned earlier, asked, “How could I not oppose this pipeline, whose sole purpose is to gouge ever more bitumen from the ancestral lands of Lubicon, Mikisew and Beaver Lake Cree, Athabasca and Prairie Chipewyan First Nations? Whose existence would make a mockery of Canada’s pledges of climate action in the Paris Agreement and decolonization in the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Whose construction would mean turning our back on negotiating free, prior and informed consent with First Nations, with whom we must learn to share this land.”
    George Rammell, a sculptor (who assisted Haida artist Bill Reid for 10 years) and retired art teacher, told the judge, “We were there because we saw a multitude of injustices perpetuated by our prime minister and Kinder Morgan to push this reckless pipeline expansion forward at the expense of Aboriginal nations, animal species and the environment. Our actions at Kinder Morgan’s gates were necessary to help press the pause button until real justice is restored.”
    He noted, “It was under [the] Canadian apartheid system that the first pipeline was built from the Alberta tar sands to Burrard Inlet in the early 1950s. The Tseil-Wauthuth were vehemently opposed to it then as they are to Kinder Morgan’s current proposed expansion. Many Aboriginal Nations in BC were not adequately consulted or warned of the dangers of the proposed massive increase in dangerous diluted bitumen moving through their territorial lands and waters. These people’s rights are being violated by our own Federal government that espouses to be championing reconciliation, yet we’re expected to stand idly by in complicity.”
     
    FOCUS CHOSE TO GIVE THESE CITIZENS a little space here, not just because of the strength and eloquence of their words, but because of the resounding lack of coverage in the mainstream media of what’s happening to them in the courts. With the exception of the arrest and court appearance of Members of Parliament Elizabeth May and Kennedy Stewart, Victoria’s local daily hasn’t covered the protesters’ court cases at all. In fact, the Times-Colonist’s editorials have been consistently in favour of the pipeline. On May 30 it wrote: “We don’t believe [MP Elizabeth] May should lose her seat…but she should perhaps consider what would happen if everyone decided to be selective about the laws they obeyed.” This is over-simplifying things in a way that would rule out any cases of civil disobedience ever. 
    An earlier T-C editorial, shortly after Kinder Morgan threatened to pull out, urged the federal government to “fight for the pipeline.” In June, the paper ran a highly partisan op-ed on the subject by Gwyn Morgan (retired founding CEO of Encana Corp) in which he stated, “the battle has been zealously joined by [MLA Andrew Weaver’s] many local ground troops and international NGO professional protesters who share his fantasy that the end of fossil fuel era is nigh.”
    I think the protesters would protest: it’s not a fantasy; it’s a moral imperative if we want to prevent death and destruction from climate breakdown.
    Gordon Bailey wrote an op-ed, as yet unpublished, in which he cited H.L. Mencken’s observation on the subject of civil disobedience: “The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime: he is a good citizen driven to despair.”
    Leslie Campbell is the editor of Focus.

    David Broadland
    July 2018
    Is Fisheries & Oceans Canada ignoring Washington State research on chemical contamination from sewage treatment plants?
     
    ARE THREE LARGE SEWAGE TREATMENT PLANTS located on the Fraser River estuary contributing to the decline of the Southern Resident Killer Whale population? Between them they discharge 1.1 billion litres of effluent every day of the year into the estuary and nearshore marine waters. The largest, Iona Island, provides only primary treatment and has been permitted by Fisheries and Oceans Canada to continue at that level until 2030.
    We now know that the reproductive health of the orca population depends heavily on the availability of Fraser River chinook salmon, but, according to fisheries scientists, chinook runs on the Fraser are now only 25 percent of historic numbers. Recent research in Washington has found a strong link between the survival rate of juvenile chinook salmon and chemical contamination of their natal estuary. Is the survival rate of Fraser River juvenile chinook being similarly impacted by contamination from the Annacis Island, Lulu Island and Iona Island wastewater treatment plants? Currently, these three plants provide treatment for over 1.8 million people, and thatpopulation is not declining.
     

    Vancouver’s three largest sewage treatment plants all discharge into critical chinook salmon habitat.
     
    The physical processes involved in this chinook-sewage-orca death spiral have become better understood in recent years thanks to research by Dr James Meador, an environmental toxicologist with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, and Dr Samuel Wasser, a research professor of conservation biology at the University of Washington.
    Since 2013, Meador and his team of researchers have published three studies that considered the impact of chemical contamination on juvenile chinook salmon during the period they reside in their natal estuary.
    Meador’s first study found that the survival rate of juvenile chinook that smolted in contaminated estuaries of rivers flowing into Puget Sound was cut in half compared with juveniles coming from a relatively uncontaminated natal estuary. Let me repeat that: Survival rate is cut in half.
    In his second study, Meador analyzed the discharge from secondary sewage treatment plants, located upstream from chinook estuaries, for the occurrence of 150 “chemicals of emerging concern,” or CECs. These are chemicals associated with pharmaceutical and personal care products, as well as industrial compounds. Many are known endocrine disruptors, which can affect hormonal balance and result in developmental and reproductive abnormalities.
    The researchers also analyzed the tissue of juvenile chinook and resident sculpin in the estuary for the presence of the selected CECs.
    That study became widely publicized in 2016 because cocaine and antidepressants—and many other chemicals—were found in both the treatment plants’ discharge and in fish tissue. Indeed, Meador’s team found unexpectedly high levels of certain CECs in the treated effluent.
    The study’s findings suggested that chinook juveniles have a significant vulnerability to bioaccumulation of CECs. Many contaminants that were found in juvenile chinook tissue were at concentrations below detection limits in the estuary waters. The scientists also observed higher levels of contaminants in juvenile chinook than in resident sculpin, even though the latter were permanent residents of the estuary.
    Meador’s team observed that the contaminants found in chinook tissue, although present in sub-lethal concentrations on a chemical-by-chemical basis, were, in some cases, present at levels that would be expected to cause detrimental physiological effects. The scientists noted the potential for a drug-cocktail effect: “The fact that we observed multiple pharmaceuticals capable of interacting with a variety of molecular targets in our two fish species, leads to the potential for mixture interactions on critical physiological processes. These interactions can be additive, synergistic, or inhibitory.”
    Meador noted that these effects could be responsible for the two-fold reduction in survival rate found in his earlier study.
    In a third study (click link below to download), released this past April, Meador’s team found that the contaminants were also causing metabolic dysfunction, which “may result in early mortality or an impaired ability to compete for limited resources.” Again, Meador noted that metabolic dysfunction induced by CEC contamination could contribute to the two-fold reduction in the survival rate of these juvenile chinook, compared with chinook migrating from the uncontaminated estuaries, that he had found in his first study.
     
    Adverse metabolic effects in fish exposed to contaminants of emerging concern in the field and laboratory.pdf815.72 kB · 371 downloads 
     
    The US EPA has listed Puget Sound chinook as a “threatened” species, and the decline of those runs has been even more profound than the Fraser decline.
    Historically, according to Jim Myers of the Northwest Fisheries Science Centre in Seattle, Puget Sound’s chinook runs were about 25 percent greater than the Fraser River’s. But by 2010, Puget Sound chinook returns had collapsed to only six percent of the size of the greatly-reduced Fraser River returns.
    Although the link between the abundance of chinook salmon in the Salish Sea and the physical health of the Southern Resident Killer Whale population has been known for some time, Wasser’s seven-year-long study, published in 2017, provided the first confirmation that low availability of chinook is suppressing the population’s birth rate and endangering the health of reproductive female orca.
    Wasser’s team collected orca poop and analyzed it for hormone measures of pregnancy occurrence and health. The scientists also looked for chemical indicators of nutritional and disturbance stress in the poop. By making the same measurements over time, they were able to distinguish between nutritional stress caused by low availability of chinook salmon, and disturbance stress caused by the presence of nearby boats.
    Wasser’s team correlated periods of nutritional stress with the timing and strength of the two main chinook runs that are keeping the southern orca alive: the Columbia River early spring run and the Fraser River summer and fall runs. They found that—depending on the timing of those runs, and how many fish were in them—the southern resident orca experienced more or less intense famines through the winter months and between the spring and summer runs.
    The scientists observed: “Low availability of chinook salmon appears to be an important stressor among these fish-eating whales as well as a significant cause of late pregnancy failure, including unobserved perinatal loss.” The scientists surmised that “release of lipophilic toxicants during fat metabolism in the nutritionally deprived animals may also provide a contributor to these cumulative effects.”
    Not only are the orca being periodically starved, but when a starved, pregnant orca begins burning off her fat reserves in response to the lack of food, toxins bioaccumulated in her fat reserves—such as PCBs and PBDEs—begin to have more of an impact on her health, such as a reduced ability to fight infections. This could contribute to the demise of the fetus and increase the risk to the mother’s life.
    As a consequence of these conditions, the study noted, “the 31 potentially reproductive females in the Southern Resident Killer Whale population should have had 48 births between 2008–2015. Yet, only 28 births were recorded during that period. The 7 adult females in K pod have not had a birth since 2011, and just two births since 2007. The 24 females in the remaining two pods (J and L) have averaged less than 1 birth per pod since 2011, with no births in 2013, but had 7 births in 2015. One of the two offspring born in 2014 died.”
    As of this writing, with the presumed death of “Crewser,” the population has dwindled to 75 whales. As recently as 1996 there were 98 orca in the 3 pods.
    Wasser noted, “Results of the Southern Resident Killer Whale study strongly suggest that recovering Fraser River and Columbia River chinook runs should be among the highest priorities for managers aiming to recover this endangered population of killer whales.”
    Let’s make the obvious connection between Meador’s and Wasser’s findings.
    Meador’s research strongly suggests that the chemical contamination in Puget Sound rivers that’s quickly bioaccumulating in juvenile chinook is coming from sewage treatment plants discharging into their natal estuary. Removing that contamination could double the number of chinook returning to those rivers as adults.
    Wasser’s study shows the Southern Resident Killer Whale population’s decline is strongly correlated with the availability of chinook and he recommends, for one thing, that managers of the Fraser River fishery make chinook recovery amongst their highest priorities.
    A rational conclusion, based on the two groups of scientists’ extensive research, would be that Fraser River fisheries managers should be determining whether the impacts Meador measured in Washington estuaries are at play in the Fraser estuary. But that’s not happening.
    DFO recently published “A science based review of recovery actions for three at-risk whale populations” that listed 98 specific actions. DFO acknowledges that only 2 of the 98 measures are “specifically directed toward recovery of chinook salmon stocks in Canada.” None of those 98 actions include examination, let alone reduction, of the impacts of chemical contaminants on chinook juveniles in the Fraser River estuary.
     
    DFO paper on SRKW recovery efforts.pdf1.36 MB · 594 downloads 
     
    DFO has been caught flat-footed on chemical contamination of the Fraser River estuary in the past. The Cohen Commission of Inquiry into the decline of sockeye salmon in the Fraser River produced a technical report in 2011 that stated: “There is a strong possibility that exposure to contaminants of concern, endocrine disrupting chemicals, and/or contaminants of emerging concern has contributed to the decline of sockeye salmon abundance in the Fraser River.” Despite that, the technical report noted, “Due to limitations on the availability of exposure data and/or toxicity thresholds” it could provide only a “qualitative evaluation.”
     
    Cohen Comm report on chemical contaminants re sockeye decline.pdf15.57 MB · 120 downloads 
     
    That was in 2011 and the information gap was related to sockeye. With chinook runs on the verge of collapse, you would think that Meador’s published research on chinook estuary contamination, only 200 kilometres away, would have prompted DFO to narrow the gap in their knowledge. We contacted DFO, but as of our press deadline a spokesperson had been unable to confirm whether or not any DFO-affiliated scientist was investigating the impact of the Fraser River estuary wastewater treatment plants, or other sources of chemical contaminants, on the survival rate of juvenile chinook.
    The presumption may be that because sewage effluent is being discharged into the Fraser River estuary through outfalls that achieve legally required dilution ratios, no further consideration is required. But the rivers Meador considered in Puget Sound are meeting similar if not higher requirements, and he found chinook survival rate is being cut in half.
    Meador has said it’s unlikely these contaminants can be effectively filtered out of the huge volume of wastewater that’s being flushed into Puget Sound. In the case of the Fraser River it seems possible that the three plants could be connected to a super outfall that diverts the discharge away from the estuary and into deeper marine waters. But without any examination of chemical loading of Fraser chinook juveniles being conducted by DFO, there will be no public pressure mounted for such a measure. Mr Floatie ought to find a new costume (Cocaine Man?) and relocate to Vancouver.
    Victoria’s deepwater marine outfalls, by the way, are located about 70 kilometres away from the nearest chinook estuary.
    While DFO wasn’t certain about what research is being done, it’s more certain about the magnitude of the chinook decline. In its 2018 outlook for the six different populations of chinook in the Fraser Basin, fisheries managers found that only one was at a level considered necessary to maintain a healthy population.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.
     
    Related stories:
    The orca famine and Puget Sound's poisoned rivers
    Washington's phony sewage war with Victoria

    Ross Crockford
    May 2018
    The debate over density at 1201 Fort is sure to repeat itself across the City of Victoria.
     
    VICTORIANS CROWDED INTO CITY HALL on April 12. They stood in hallways, craning to hear the speakers in the council chambers, or downstairs, watching a live stream of the meeting on a TV in the foyer. The agenda package was 2,311 pages long — nearly 2,000 about a proposed development for 1201 Fort Street, the site of the former Victoria Truth Centre.
    “This has been an emotional journey for everyone,” said Mike Miller, president of Abstract Developments. In the two years since he’d bought the two-acre property, he told the council, he’d held 20 meetings with the neighbours and revised the project six times. One six-storey condo building faced Fort Street, but he’d reduced another to four storeys, and scaled down the size and number of townhouses facing Pentrelew Place at the back, cutting the total units from 94 to 83.
     

    An artist's rendering of Abstract Development's proposal (centre of image) for the former Truth Centre property on Fort Street
     
    “I’ve truly given all that I know to this application,” Miller concluded. “I do understand this can be a trying process. However, the passionate dialogue has been invaluable, and I feel has resulted in a better project.”
    Then dozens of citizens came up to speak. A large majority supported Miller’s project — a procession of architects, planners, contractors, realtors, and residents of other Abstract buildings, talking of the urgent need for more housing, and the quality of Abstract’s work — a sampling of the many allies Miller has made since he renovated his first house in Burnside 20 years ago.
    But the speakers’ list was also peppered with those who lived next to 1201 Fort, and had written many of the letters filling the agenda package. They said they weren’t opposed to development, but saw no benefit from this project, which they said would generate noise, traffic, parking conflicts, and require cutting down protected Garry oaks and sequoias.
    The main thrust of their complaint, however, was that the project violated the City’s own planning documents. According to the Official Community Plan (OCP), nearly three-quarters of the site is considered “traditional residential”, and zoned R1-B, “single family dwelling”. Abstract wanted a new site-specific zone, adding to some 650 already in Victoria’s bylaws, putting the four-storey building on land meant for houses. As Jamie Hammond, representing the Rockland Neighbourhood Association, told councillors, “If this is approved here, the question becomes for residents across the city: Where else is this acceptable?”
     

    Signs of neighbourhood discontent are sprouting up as fast as projects bringing increased density to residential neighbourhoods are being proposed  (Photo by Ross Crockford)
     
    That question is increasingly being asked by Victorians. While some of us are excited by the energy in town, others wonder if our communities are being sacrificed to simply make developers rich and expand our municipal government. Over the past five years, new construction has enlarged the City of Victoria’s annual property-tax revenue by at least $5.4 million. That’s allowed the City to keep a lid (somewhat) on tax increases, but raised suspicion that the City is tempted to amend the OCP and its zoning bylaws at the first whiff of new money.
    The OCP, drafted in 2011, envisions 20,000 more people living in the City by 2041. But the 285-page document contains contradictions. On page 25, it says “sufficient zoned capacity” already exists to meet that demand; on page 33, it warns that existing zoning won’t be enough, “running the risk that housing will become increasingly more expensive as available capacity is depleted.” The document envisions 50 percent of new density occurring Downtown, 40 percent in “urban villages” (mainly around Mayfair and Hillside malls), and 10 percent across the rest of the City. It also envisions greater density along arterial roads. That might lead one to expect towers along Douglas Street, or Shelbourne, serviced by rapid transit, but that hasn’t happened. Instead, the push is to build luxury condos on streets bordering established residential districts.
    That pressure is splitting neighbourhoods. The Fairfield-Gonzales Community Association has been attacked by some members for failing to criticize controversial developments, such as the five-storey condo block underway at Oliphant in the Cook Street Village. (Board members say such “political” activity would jeopardize the association’s charitable status, which it needs for its child-care programs.) Community associations are supposed to facilitate meetings between developers and residents, but those meetings have become so fractious that, last month, the Fairfield-Gonzales board voted to explore changing or withdrawing its involvement in the City’s development process. Some Gonzales residents have also formed their own association (gonzalesna.ca) so they can voice opposition to the City’s proposed new neighbourhood plan, which would permit row housing throughout their district, and multi-storey apartments along Fairfield Road.
     

    An almost sure sign that the City of Victoria's tax base will soon be increasing (Photo by Ross Crockford)
     
    IF THERE'S ONE THING EVERYONE CAN AGREE ON, it’s that housing in Victoria is rapidly becoming unaffordable to all but a few. The solution, say developers, is obvious: build more supply to bring prices down.
    And it’s not just developers. In Vancouver, Toronto, Seattle, and other expensive cities, a YIMBY (Yes, In My Back Yard) movement is gathering force. Mostly comprised of people in their 30s, they’re demanding that cities dump decades-old zoning laws to allow more apartments, everywhere. In their view, it’s hypocritical for owners of single-family homes to preach environmentalism and then oppose density, forcing new housing to sprawl ever farther from Downtown.
    The closest thing to a YIMBY group here (so far) is Cities For Everyone, a community organization led by alternative-transportation consultant Todd Litman. He publicly defends the 1201 Fort project — right on a transit and bicycle corridor — as exactly the kind of new density envisioned in the OCP.
    “Infill development often does require cutting down trees and paving over lawns, and may increase vehicle trips on a street,” he wrote in an April 9 letter to Council, “but these local impacts are generally offset many times over by reductions in regional land consumption and vehicle traffic that would occur if those households instead located in conventional automobile-dependent urban fringe housing.”
    It’s debatable if 1201 Fort will be for “Everyone”: its one-bedroom units start around $400,000. “Although the units in this project will not initially be affordable to low- and moderate-income households,” Litman also wrote, “they will contribute to the City’s overall affordability through what urban economists call ‘filtering,’ which means that increasing higher-priced housing supply allows some households to move out of lower-priced units, and because [construction] depreciates in value over time, so mid-priced housing becomes future affordable supply.”
    But not all academics agree that increasing supply will improve affordability. John Rose, an instructor in the department of geography and the environment at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, recently published a paper entitled “The Housing Supply Myth”. Using census data, he calculated that over the past 15 years, Victoria added 27,116 households to its population — but built 30,574 dwelling units.
    “We would think that if a market got less affordable, maybe that meant supply was getting tighter and tighter. But that’s baloney,” Rose told the Globe and Mail. “Here [in Vancouver] we’ve had more than enough supply and yet the housing costs have gone crazy.” He said the drivers of unaffordability are mainly on the demand side, such as the “pointless” construction of luxury units, largely created for part-time residents and speculators.
    Others argue that if the urgent problem is affordability, we can’t simply boost the supply of expensive condos and then wait (perhaps decades) for their prices to “filter” down to what renters can afford. Provinces and cities are trying to accelerate this via taxes on speculators and out-of-province owners, and greater regulation of short-term rentals. But some say we could also build more affordable housing by demanding greater Community Amenity Contributions (CACs) from projects — something the City has been slow to grasp.
    “In stark contrast to other BC municipalities, Victoria has launched itself into a densification plan that will never achieve its rationale of general or specific housing affordability,” wrote Doug Curran recently on Mile Zero Mirror, a local renter-advocacy blog. Curran, who worked as a community organizer in the District of North Vancouver before moving here in 2015, says his former municipality has collected $11 million in CACs from the construction of 777 residential units since 2013, charging about $22 per square foot, and using the funds to build a community centre. If the same metrics were applied to the 4,778 units in the pipeline here, Curran says, Victoria could’ve raised $40 million for affordable housing.
     

    Signs of the times (Photo by Ross Crockford)
     
    Victoria’s current density-bonus policy was only enacted in 2016, and charges $12 per square foot for developments Downtown. City planners argue that’s because real estate is cheaper here than in North Vancouver. But they do admit there are “limitations” to the current policy. If a development doesn’t trigger a rezoning, it isn’t subject to the charges; consequently, several new condo towers Downtown haven’t paid anything towards affordable housing. And if an independent economic analysis says a rezoning won’t produce a significant “lift” in the value of the land — as was the case for 1201 Fort — it’s not required to provide any affordable units. (Abstract has pledged to build 10 affordable rental units in a newly proposed nine-storey building at 1010 Fort instead — a gesture of goodwill that also improves the likelihood of council approving both buildings.)
    An improved policy is working its way through City Hall. On March 8, councillors requested an analysis of ways to further increase affordable housing built by developers — including “pre-zoning” areas feasible for affordable units, to speed up project approvals. But in the meantime, the October 20 civic election creeps closer, and Victoria’s politicians are increasingly aware that they will have to justify the current density boom to longtime residents who are likely to vote.
    “I don’t necessarily think that council or the City or the community has necessarily done the best job of managing and stewarding change in a way that everyone sees the benefits or that’s sustainable,” mayor Lisa Helps admitted to the Times Colonist in February — right after councillors voted down a 44-unit rental apartment block proposed for a residential section of Burdett Avenue, and opposed by 150 petition-signing neighbours. “That’s something that I’m grappling with right now as I kind of prepare for the [election] campaign. There’s a lot of change going on. How do we make sure that as change is happening, everyone is heard and everyone benefits?”
    Partway through the April 12 hearing, I stepped outside. Lots of people were out strolling, enjoying the evening, and I walked over to The Drake, a newish microbrew pub on Pandora. The place was packed, almost all people under 40. I sat beside three young professionals who’d all moved to Victoria in the past two years. They were from Edmonton, Toronto, and Albuquerque, working here for government, in finance, and in tech. They said they loved Victoria and wanted to stay, but it was nearly impossible to find a place to live.
    I forgot to ask if they planned to vote in October. I must be getting old.
    UPDATE: ON MAY 3, VICTORIA’S COUNCIL VOTED 6-3 IN FAVOUR OF THE DEVELOPMENT PROPOSAL. For: Helps, Alto, Coleman, Loveday, Lucas, Thornton-Joe. Against: Isitt, Madoff, Young. (Video here; click on item D4 in the agenda.)
    “This is a hard decision,” said Mayor Helps, who introduced the motion to approve. “We heard a lot of conflicting views,” she noted, echoing the two truths in the title of the article above. “We heard, on the one hand, that [the proposal] fits the spirit and intent of the OCP, and we heard, on the other hand, that it doesn’t .... We heard that it’s incompatible with the vision for the City and the neighbourhood. And then we heard from others, almost using the exact same language, that it is compatible.”
    “So when there’s this amount of direct disagreement, it makes it difficult for Council to make a decision,” she continued. “And this is where we have to use all of our own thinking and knowledge and experience that we believe and find not only about the future of cities in general but this one in particular.”
    The mayor said the current zoning wasn’t appropriate, as it wouldn’t protect the trees, and allowed eight single-family dwellings plus a four-storey block on Fort. She said the revised proposal was much better than it was when it first came to the City, and would put most of the parking underground, with an entrance off Fort. She also noted that the site was on a transit corridor, and cited Todd Litman’s letter in favour of increased density along such routes.
    Most important, though, was that advocates from “Generation Squeeze” came out to speak in support of the proposal. “They’re looking out for the people who are coming after us, who are being squeezed out of housing, who are being squeezed out of affordability,” Helps said. One opponent had pointed out that the smallest condos in the proposed development would have to rent for at least $1,600 a month, an amount far out of reach for anyone earning the median income in Victoria of $45,000. “But actually this isn’t true,” Helps said. “The general rule is that no one should spend more than 30% of their income on housing. But the other thing that’s emerging is a more nuanced approach to affordability, and that is, no one should spend more than 45% of their income on housing and transportation combined. And so if you live in this area, you can easily take transit or walk or bike, and so your transportation costs, if you work downtown, would be zero dollars.”
    Helps’ motion to approve the development passed. But it turns out the units will be even less “affordable” than she thought: the developer is now taking registrations for “pre-sales pricing”, which starts at $550,000 — far higher than the $400K the developer ballparked in 2016.
    The presumption that one’s transportation costs will be “zero” in such a location may also be more “nuanced” than the mayor allows. A new study says there’s almost no relationship between lower personal spending on transportation and neighborhoods with better bus connections; far more important is the number of adults in a household, how many children they have, and their annual income. In other words, those who can afford one of these condos are also likely to own cars.
    If the City wants affordable housing for “the missing middle”, maybe it should demand that such housing actually gets built.
    Ross Crockford is a former trial lawyer, and has received a National Magazine Award for his journalism.

    David Broadland
    May 2018
    What should Victoria's new bridge be called? We should call it what it is.
     
    VICTORIA'S NEW BRIDGE—variously dubbed “The Blew Budget Bridge,” “Fortin’s Folly,” and “The White Elephant”—opened on March 31, 2018. Notably absent from the group of officials presiding over the occasion were any of the former high-level City officials who lost their jobs as a consequence of the project’s long history of miscalculation and misrepresentation. The bridge’s original designer, Sebastien Ricard of Wilkinson Eyre Architects, who ended his connection with the project back in 2012, was nowhere to be seen. Nor was Joost Meyboom, the private engineer who first advised the City to fix the old bridge rather than build a new one, back in 2008, but then went on to become the City’s prime consultant on the new bridge project. Meyboom’s employer—formerly MMM Group, which changed its name to WSP—launched a legal suit against the City over the project earlier this year.
     

    Opening of Victoria's new bridge
     
    No wonder all these folks skipped Mayor Lisa Helps’ $42,000 opening-day celebration. Back in April 2009, when City council voted to replace the existing “historically-significant” double-bascule bridge, those officials assured Victorians a new bridge would cost $41 million and take 18 months to build. Nine years later, costs have almost tripled while major elements of the project remain unestimated, unfunded and unfinished. Millions in costs directly attributable to the project have been hidden.
    The project’s record of underestimation and miscalculation, though, may be just a prelude to greater embarrassment to come. Certain aspects of the new bridge’s design and construction are so at odds with engineers’ warnings that, although the new bridge can, at this moment, open for marine traffic just like the old bridge, it’s highly doubtful whether it will come anywhere near to matching the old bridge’s 95-year record of reliable operation and minimal ongoing expense. While “The Blew Budget Bridge” does capture the huge miscalculation in cost, and “Fortin’s Folly” makes it clear that good people made bad decisions, only “The White Elephant”—which signifies over-the-top original cost and unjustifiable ongoing expense—provides a fulsome enough characterization of the so-far nameless new bridge. But even that needs updating. Here’s why I am leaning toward “The Wounded White Elephant.”
     

    The new bridge 's opening span provides the same navigational channel width as the old bridge did, but at huge costs and with hundreds of "nonconformities" welded into its superstructure.
     
    The most eye-catching feature of the new bridge is its 50-foot-diameter steel rings. The counterweight lobes attached to the rings do happen to resemble an elephant’s ears, but that’s not the reason why this bridge should be named “The White Elephant.” You won’t find anything like those rings—or the gigantic machinery below them needed to support and rotate them—on any bridge anywhere else on Earth. Unfortunately, designing a bridge that required 1700 tonnes of structural steel in its moveable superstructure and hundreds of tonnes of machinery to support that—just to span a 41-metre-wide opening—is not the direction planet Earth needs to go. (Worse, largely unacknowledged by the project is the fact that the first attempt to fabricate the superstructure was scrapped and as much as 1700 tonnes of steelwork wasted; more on this later.)
    Good, common-sense arguments were made against building Ricard’s design by engineers, and it’s because all the decision makers over the years ignored those arguments that the bridge cost three times what it should have and took 108 months to complete instead of 18.
    Because of those officials’ dismal performance, the bridge promises to be an ongoing source of expense to City of Victoria ratepayers and hence deserving of “The White Elephant” moniker. Below, I’ll highlight just a fraction of what happened. To start with, though, let’s recall why Ricard put those rings into his design. This is key to understanding why the project flubbed.
    Just before the November 2010 referendum in which the City won elector approval to build a new bridge, Ricard explained those rings at a public presentation. He told a handful of people that the underlying design challenge, for him, was to create a moveable bridge that easily communicated to an observer how it worked. That’s it. That’s the entire argument for the rings. The rings were all about appearance and not about any substantive proven need particular to a crossing of Victoria’s harbour.
    Ricard wasn’t trying to reduce seismic vulnerability or to create a bridge less likely to be hit by a barge full of gravel and survive the blow if one did. Nor was he trying to reduce life-cycle costs or use scarce public resources more efficiently. No, it was enough for Ricard that a tourist from Iowa, standing on the Laurel Point walkway, would be able to gaze across the Inner Harbour and understand how the bridge lifted, at a glance.
    Perhaps there’s a similar, whimsical rationale at the foundation of every white elephant construction project, and maybe Victorians are no better or worse than any other community at sniffing out ideas that don’t have much merit. I don’t know. But what I have learned, after following Victoria’s project closely for 9 long years, is that there were real-life consequences that flowed from the project’s ill-considered underpinnings.
    Ricard’s whimsical central motivation radiated outward through the project with force, inflating engineering and construction costs, laying waste to political and public service careers, substantially increasing carbon emissions, straining the City’s coffers, and dividing the community. Ricard’s imagination even put a well-established Chinese company out of business. How did all this happen? Let me sketch in some details.
    Let’s start with a fundamental physical fact about the bridge that resulted directly from Ricard’s rings. Because of a quirk in Ricard’s design, every time the bridge opens, it has to lift and hold the span a full 2.5 storeys higher than it needed to. Indeed, people have observed that, when it is lifted, the new bridge is “so much higher” than the old bridge. Yet the new bridge provides the same navigational channel width as the old bridge. That extra height might be dramatic to observe—like a hopping car—but it’s otherwise pointless and that little moment of drama has come with a lot of negative long-term consequences.
     

    The mechanical design of the new bridge results in it lifting the weight of the superstructure 2.5 storeys higher than necessary, an engineering feat almost as pointless as a hopping car.
     
    For example, every part of the bridge that moves had to be stronger than it would have needed to be in a bridge that used a fixed central axle with conventional bearings located as close to the edge of the channel as possible. That extra strength was obtained by using far more steel for the bridge—in the rings and trusses—than would have been necessary in a more conventional approach. Extra steel in the trusses meant more lead and steel were needed in the counterweights to balance that extra weight. All that extra weight in the superstructure meant the machinery that supports and rotates it needed to be immense compared to the shaft, bearings and machinery needed to rotate a more conventional moveable bridge.
    The higher lift of the span also meant that it would experience greater pressure during strong winds, and so that force, too, had to be offset with more steel and heavier support equipment, all costing more than a conventional approach.
    All of these additional weights and costs affected the approach bridges, too. It meant that for a given budget, less money could be spent on the approach bridges. Originally, to satisfy high seismic performance requirements, they were going to be built of steel. Instead, because of the inflating cost of the lifting span, there was only enough budget to use less costly reinforced concrete. But in order to include the use of concrete approach bridges, City officials had to secretly agree, during the procurement process, to place a rider in the construction contract that specified much lower levels of seismic performance than had been recommended to the City.
    The rider clearly states that its stipulations of (lower) performance take precedence over the seismic performance requirements of any of North America’s highway bridge building codes. This loss of one of the fundamental objectives of the project—a legally enforceable contractual assurance of a high level of seismic performance by the bridge if Victoria is struck by a large earthquake, can be traced directly to Ricard’s choice of rings in the lifting mechanism and the extent to which they inflated the cost of the project.
    City officials, the ones who later lost their jobs, were well-warned by engineers about the risk of Ricard’s open-ring design inflating costs.
    For example, during bidding for the contract to build the bridge, participating companies were required to provide a critical review of the design MMM had developed with Ricard, and they were invited to “optimize” that design so that it could be built within the City’s $66-million “affordability ceiling.” The winning bid by PCL was the only proposal that utilized Ricard’s open-ring concept. The only other serious bid proposal received by the City, from Kiewit Infrastructure, rejected the axleless design and predicted what would happen if the City went ahead with Ricard’s design.
    Specifically, Kiewit told City managers it had contacted “a number of steel and machinery fabricators, who are experienced in movable bridge design and/or construction. All expressed the opinion that there were likely more cost effective mechanical concepts for a bascule bridge” than the open-ring design used by Ricard and MMM. Kiewit advised the City that “unknowns and/or unexpected costs” of Ricard’s “unconventional design” would “conflict with the City’s mandate to remain near or below the indicated Affordability Ceiling…Kiewit is of the view that the [design] may represent a fundamentally high risk and expensive design approach.”
    The company’s engineers noted that the counterweight in Ricard’s design was attached to the truss rings in a way that “would load the truss ring eccentrically, which could distort the ring—a highly undesirable condition.”
    The bridge proposed by PCL had the same eccentric loading of the rings that concerned Kiewit, but was going to have an added complication: In order for its bid to be within the City’s affordability ceiling, fabrication of the moveable part of the bridge would have to take place in China.
    In hindsight, it’s easy to see that the City listened to the wrong engineers, chose the wrong company to build a bridge, and built the wrong bridge. City officials were warned they were in danger of buying a White Elephant. Instead of heeding the warnings they insisted on having one as quickly as possible—and this meant hiding the critical reviews (which cost the City $150,000) from the public—and so Ricard’s whim rolled forward into the next phase.
     
    AS YOU MAY RECALL, the City of Victoria awarded a construction contract to PCL in late 2012 to build the bridge under a $63.2-million “fixed-price” contract. PCL made it clear it planned to have the moveable part of the bridge fabricated in China. This, apparently, raised no red flags at City Hall.
    At the time PCL won the construction contract, MMM Group were contracted to provide engineering, and it in turn subcontracted Hardesty & Hanover to provide engineering and design for the lifting span and the machinery used to raise that span. When PCL began construction in late 2013, the City of Victoria assured its ratepayers that the cost of the bridge could not rise since PCL had agreed to a “fixed-price” contract. But, by early 2014, PCL started to pepper the City with demands for more money.
    Those demands began soon after fabrication of the rings and trusses had started in China in March 2014. By September of that year, work in China had been halted. In January 2015, the City’s Project Director Jonathan Huggett reported that fabrication problems were so bad that “one of the rings is being replaced while the other is being repaired. The north truss steel will be replaced.”

    The first attempt to build Ricard's bridge at ZTSS's plant. Shown above are fabrication of the bridge's rings, trusses and deck components in July 2014. All of the steelwork done up to January 2015 was scrapped.
     
    Notably absent from Huggett’s reports from this era is any acknowledgment that the thing the Chinese welders were screwing up was actually very difficult to build. Neither did Huggett tell councillors that the City had been warned by Kiewit engineers that this was likely to happen if the City attempted to build Ricard’s design.
    Instead, Huggett persuaded the City that simply increasing quality control would produce rings and trusses with adequate strength and structural integrity.
    In spite of such hopes, fabrication problems in China continued to accumulate in the bridge components. Recently, Huggett admitted: “We rejected an entire bridge at one point.”
    The City’s project director seemed to see the scrapping of “an entire bridge” as a good thing, a sign that people were doing their jobs properly, that quality assurance procedures were working, and that Victorians could be confident that the project wouldn’t accept crap for a bridge.
    But think about that: An entire bridge wasted. If we take Huggett at his word, about 1700 metric tonnes of steel were scrapped. That’s the weight of structural steel for the superstructure specified in the City’s contract with PCL. (The City did not respond to repeated requests for confirmation of the amount of steel that was scrapped.)
    But we should add to that heavy burden all the human effort and other costs—including associated environmental damage—that went with throwing away the warm-up bridge. Who was going to pay for that waste? As it turned out, it wasn’t going to be PCL.
    The City had acknowledged PCL’s first demand for more money—$7.9 million in early 2014—but then demurred from providing information about subsequent demands. In early 2015, about the time “an entire bridge” was rejected, the City admitted it had entered a “legal mediation process” with the companies building the bridge.
     

    The second attempt to build Ricard's bridge, in March 2016 at ZTSS's plant near Shanghai.
     
    It wasn’t until April 2016, at the conclusion of the mediation, that the City acknowledged that PCL, MMM and H&H had demanded $27 million in additional costs.
    The details of that $27 million claim were never made public, but it is believed PCL’s share was about $25 million. After out-competing two other companies for the contract and assuring the City Ricard’s bridge could be built for $63 million, what circumstance could possibly have justified PCL’s demand for over 40 percent more money?
    The timing of the start of PCL’s demands, you may have noticed, coincided with the beginning of fabrication in China. As major components of the bridge were rejected, PCL’s claims against the City increased. The company may have realized that the lifting span being (badly) fabricated in China could carry a huge risk of future legal claims by the City. By demanding more money and halting work in China, PCL may have simply been creating the conditions for dumping all of that risk back on the City. And that’s exactly what happened.
    The City settled the $27 million in claims by agreeing to pay an additional $2.4 million and making changes to the terms of the contract. In a news report at the time, Mayor Helps claimed: “I think it’s better news than anyone could have hoped for.”
    But an FOI filed by johnsonstreetbridge.org revealed the City agreed to “release and forever discharge” PCL, MMM and H&H “from all debts, claims, demands, damages, expenses and costs (including without limitation, legal costs) of any nature or kind that are in any way related to the Project and either known or which ought to be known by the [City] as of [April 23, 2016].”
    This was hardly “better news than anyone could have hoped for.” Whatever problems have been built into the bridge by PCL, MMM and H&H are now City taxpayers’ problems. One of those problems was brought to the public’s attention in the last two editions of Focus (stories posted here, here, and here). And this is where the “wounded” part of “ Wounded White Elephant” comes into our story.
     
    MANY of the risks PCL adroitly shifted back onto the City arose directly from the bridge’s open-ring design. That such risks would have actual physical consequences became clear shortly after the rings were erected at the bridge site last December and Focus pointed out that the rings had already been repaired with metre-square bolted-on plates, apparently required because of a structural weakness in both rings.
    The bolted-on plates definitely eliminated any chance of the bridge winning any awards for excellence in engineering or construction. But much worse, they may signify a more pervasive problem with the lifting span.
    The City has refused to provide a full explanation for the plates, but we have since found a photograph taken during an open house at Point Hope Maritime’s shipyard last October that unintentionally captured details of the repair. The repair was made in Victoria after the rings had been shipped from China. The photograph (see the close-up below), taken before the bolted-on plates were added, reveals not only the make-shift nature of the repair but also at least two holes cut into the “fracture critical” steel with a cutting torch. That damage may have created the need for the plates, at least in part.
     

    This photograph shows the repair that was made to the north ring at Point Hope Maritime’s shipyard in October. The lines of small holes were drilled in China and would later allow the bolted-on plates to be attached. The trapezoidal-shaped opening cut into the ring was made at Point Hope. The holes circled with yellow are believed to be “rat holes” cut into the rings by an unknown welder in China. These rat holes may be part of the reason why bolted-on plates were added to both rings. The City’s Project Director Jonathan Huggett has acknowledged that the bridge has hundreds of such “non-conformances.”
     
    I emailed the photograph to Martin Bache, a 40-year veteran of the heavy steel fabrication industry in Canada, most recently with Canron as a project supervisor.
    About the burned-in holes that seem to have created the need for the bolted-on plates, Bache commented, “The cuts are similar to what are termed ‘rat holes’ in steel fabrication. These allow continuous welding of two members to take place through the member with the hole. But, I have never seen two rat holes coming together in two planes as these appear to be. A welder in China may have just taken a torch and cut out two large rat holes to make life easier for himself, but damaged the structural integrity in the process. But that would not seem to require such large bolted-on plates to correct, so I really don’t know what the real story is.”
    Around the time the photograph was taken at Point Hope Shipyard, someone had removed a trapezoidal-shaped section from the ring and had added some light steel supports for two edges of the bolted-on plates. Of the repair that was done in Victoria, Bache observed, “Not only this bizarre rat hole but also the other pieces of steel in the photo appear to be butchered to an astounding extent. No competent steel fabricator works this way. So, what the hell is going on here?”
    The steel members of the bridge that were cut into by both the Chinese welder and the workers at Point Hope are considered “fracture critical.” That designation, according to the US Federal Highway Administration, applies to “any steel member in tension, or with a tension element, whose failure would probably cause a portion of or the entire bridge to collapse.”
    Given the apparent low quality of the repair evident in the photograph, Bache is concerned the repair has not been executed properly. “Any modifications or repairs done to fracture critical bridge components must be performed to detailed procedures approved by the Engineer of Record (EOR) and must be inspected by the EOR or his agent to confirm 100 percent compliance with the procedures. It seems inconceivable that Hardesty & Hanover are accepting all of this butchery,” Bache wrote.
    Butchery. Wounded. Get it?
    Bache added, “With all due respect to shipyards, they are not generally expected to work to the same standards of quality and accuracy as bridge fabricators. I would have needed a lot of evidence to persuade me that a shipyard could handle modifications to a fracture critical bridge. Which party approved Point Hope as capable of doing this?”
    Bache had difficulty understanding who was/is looking out for the City’s interests: “Regarding third-party inspectors, they range from highly competent individuals with substantial levels of practical experience on fabrication shop floors, all the way down to people with absolutely no knowledge of steel and no ability to read drawings but are tasked only with receiving paper reports such as steel mill certificates and weld test reports prepared by others. In 40 years of fabrication I never heard of Atema, so I googled them. They appear to sell inspection equipment and offer to train others in how to run quality control programmes. They make no mention of having vast hands-on, shop-floor experience which would be necessary for confirming that complex fabrications are being made exactly to approved drawings and specifications. So, I don’t know how good a job Atema did in China but I have reason to be very suspicious. I know PCL very well and its hard to believe they would not have hired top level practical inspectors to go to China, but who knows? I wonder at what stage MMM ceased to be of real practical help to the City, including fabrication monitoring. After that its doubtful that [the City’s] interests were being handled by anybody.”
    Unfortunately, Focus can’t provide the answers to any of Bache’s concerns. The City has dismissed any such concerns about this repair, explaining only that it was the result of a “fabrication challenge.” This is just one of over 150 similar “non-conformities” recorded by the project, according to Huggett. The City’s idea of providing the public with information about the issue has been, in effect: “Why worry us about that one problem? The bridge contains hundreds of them.”
    The City continues to refuse to release records related to this one repair that were requested by Focus back in mid-December through BC’s access to information legislation. Until the City provides the basic communications about the issue between the City and the engineers who were responsible for resolving the issue, we will keep insisting on seeing those records.
    Martin Bache’s final comment was this: “What an absolute disaster that this bridge was not made in BC.”
    This raises an interesting point. PCL based its 2012 bid on a quote from a Chinese fabricator and that allowed it to sneak under the City’s affordability ceiling. That miracle required everyone involved to pretend that a 4 percent contingency would cover any errors in cost estimation and that Chinese labour really was “lower-cost.” If a few people had been smarter, Ricard’s rings would never have been built. Instead, Victoria got a disaster. Ironically, ZTSS did even worse.
    That company suffered significant financial losses during the time it was building Victoria’s bridge. (It was a publicly-traded company, so its financial performance is a matter of public record.) The cost of having to build the bridge twice, along with bad international publicity about “cracked welds,” no doubt harmed ZTSS’s ability to get new work. By November 2016, trading of the company’s shares had been halted.
    In August 2017, as Ricard’s wounded rings were finally arriving in Victoria and being readied for repairs at Point Hope, ZTSS announced it planned to sell the operation that had fabricated Victoria’s bridge. By January 2018 the company had undergone a corporate name change and was transformed into Beijing-Kaiwen Education Technology Co., Ltd.
    With a such a history, it’s unlikely that anyone would want their name on Victoria’s new bridge. What it deserves is a nickname that truthfully reflects its troubled 9-year-long birth. I respectfully propose “The Wounded White Elephant.”
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

    Leslie Campbell
    May 2018
     
    ONE DAY, Focus may tell you about a housing proposal that everyone in the neighbourhood is happy with, where the public process surrounding it is hailed as transparent, inclusive, effective and painless for all involved. But that day isn’t here yet.
    When it was announced last summer that Oak Bay United Church wanted to build some affordable housing on its property at Granite Street and Mitchell—just one block over from Oak Bay Village—it sounded refreshingly bold and in tune with the times. Affordable housing is the region’s number-one need.
     

    Oak Bay United Church in Oak Bay
     
    Soon afterwards “Stop Overdevelopment by Oak Bay United Church” signs popped up like mushrooms on neighbourhood lawns. A “concerned citizens” website was created, and media reports citing divisions and alarm were heard. Some early concepts for the development indicated up to five-storey buildings and 160 units could be proposed. For a 1.2-acre lot in a leafy, mostly single-family neighbourhood, it did seem perhaps too bold. 
    Now, church representatives claim they have listened, and in their recent plans—unveiled at open houses at the end of April—have tried to meet neighbours’ concerns as much as possible. We shall see how that works out.
     
    IN HER OFFICE in a 1920s-era duplex behind the church, Oak Bay United Church Minister Michelle Slater told me the idea of developing the property stems back to 1994 when the heritage church was “condemned” as unsafe, and the congregation had to conduct services elsewhere. It wasn’t clear that the church, built in 1914, could be saved, so everything was up for consideration, including selling off the whole property. Eventually, it was decided that restoration was possible, and the congregation worked hard for years to raise $1.5 million. In 2010, 16 years after its closure, the church reopened.
     

    Oak Bay United Church Minister Michelle Slater
     
    Once back in their church, congregants had little appetite for further change any time soon. But, said Slater, “it was always accepted that that was just the first step to renewal.”
    There are five structures on the 56,000-square-foot property. The church occupies 9000 square feet. There is also a large storage shed; an office building (often called the “duplex”); the cinder block, seismically-challenged Gardiner Hall (with a gym); and Threshold House, which is rented to Threshold Housing Society, and has nine studio apartments for vulnerable youth. With the exception of the church, the latest plans call for demolition of all these structures.
    Slater said that if the 200-strong congregation was dwindling, they would look at amalgamating with another church and selling off the property. But it’s actually growing, though that includes those who use the church’s many services.
    “We’re becoming increasingly aware, particularly through our ministry to children and families, of the real crisis with diverse and affordable housing,” said Slater, mentioning seniors who attend weekly coffee meetings and young parents who come to church activities.
    Sometimes congregants can’t afford a prescription they need, so the church steps in. It has also provided food vouchers, or even a funeral for those in need.
    In all, she estimates that Oak Bay United provides about $2.5 million annually in community services (calculated by a formula arrived at through research by the Halo Project at McMaster University). Some of it, she noted, comes in the form of saving the community money—for instance when members notice another congregant is unwell, and ensure they receive help before needing an expensive hospital bed.
    At this point, Slater stopped herself, noting wryly that it sounded as if she’s trying to justify the church’s very existence—perhaps in reaction to the heated atmosphere in the neighbourhood of late. The social services she alluded to have added an extra layer of complexity to the debate. Do such services mean the church deserves more right to develop as it pleases, despite neighbours’ concerns?
    Continuing the historical overview, Slater told me that a few years ago, the board asked a couple of members to look into options for developing the 56,000-square-foot property, in keeping with the mission and purpose of Oak Bay United Church. That led to them devoting $20,000 to a feasibility study led by Chris Corps, a land economist, which in turn led, in March 2017, to the church board giving unanimous support to applying for a $500,000 loan from BC Housing to do a thorough proposal involving “diverse, inclusionary and affordable housing,” said Slater.
    “We could make a lot more money if we just put up some luxury condos. But that’s not what this community needs,” said Slater. “And making the most money is not the most important thing to us.”
    The church got the BC Housing loan, and by last August, its board members had started knocking on doors to inform immediate neighbours that the church was thinking of developing its property. Some became alarmed, Slater said, and asked for a meeting. About 60 people came. They wanted to know the plans, but, said Slater, “We’re not a developer; we wanted input first.”
    In November, four sessions with “near neighbours” were held. “We asked what would you be most concerned about?’” said Slater. Feedback was all over the map, she said. “We got everything from ‘nothing’ to ‘six stories.’ [On style], we got ‘traditional’ to ‘contemporary.’ We gave all the input to the architect. In mid-December we presented four scenarios for siting and massing to test people’s responses.” (The scenarios involved three-, four- and five-storey buildings; many neighbours were aghast there were no smaller options.)
    The biggest concerns were around height, density and traffic. “We’ve worked hard to mitigate or solve the concerns people have—which are for the most part legitimate,” said Slater. However, she argued, Granite Street, running parallel to Oak Bay Avenue, is viewed by the municipality as a transition street, from the busy Oak Bay commercial zone to residential. “It is not solely a single-family-home neighbourhood,” said Slater, pointing to the boxy, 3.5-storey Granite House condos across the street towards the Village. “Our project will be much more attentive to the character of the neighbourhood than Granite House.”
    Reverend Slater is diplomatic when speaking of the resistance to the development: “I am not surprised at the depth of feeling, because everyone values their neighbourhood and wants to preserve what’s best about it. I was distressed by some of the personal comments about our consultants,” along with the level of distrust. “We feel we’re really trying to do something good,” she said. “This is a good way for Oak Bay to contribute to the region and show leadership.” She seems bewildered and dismayed that some people do not trust the church.
     
    AN INDICATION OF THAT DISTRUST, and perhaps another brick in the wall between the church and its neighbours, occurred at a meeting of Oak Bay’s Committee of the Whole on January 15. The last item on the agenda was a request from the church that council approve a process to expedite the church’s development application, once submitted, as a pilot project for affordable housing projects. It brought citizens out in force; they filled all the seats and the hallway. Numerous letters of concern had been sent in.
    Kim Fowler, the planner on the church’s team, explained that they are working on “a minimum, break even” budget, and delays would be costly. She pointed to other municipalities that have adopted streamlined processes or a “concierge”-type service with staff dedicated to ushering non-profit proposals through various hurdles at City Hall. (Fowler played a similar role at the City of Victoria when she worked as the project manager for the Dockside Green redevelopment project).
    Councillor Tara Ney, noting the evident community interest, voiced a concern that “the amount of time for making decisions, the amount of time for consulting thoroughly with the community—that those parts of the process are not compromised.” Fowler assured her that that would not happen.
    When Councillor Hazel Braithwaite warned that “it takes a long time to get something correct,” there was applause from the gallery. Braithwaite also suggested that shepherding the application through City Hall was Fowler’s job—and that it would have been “friendly” if the church had notified citizens of its request for expedited service.
    When Councillor Tom Croft asked, “Where is the extra cost of delay when the church owns the land?” Fowler alluded to an existing mortgage (it is about $300,000), and the escalation of construction costs. At 6 percent, she said, that translates to $170,000 in carrying costs per month.
    Other councillors noted that with “complicated applications like this,” the best way to expedite it is to have a good application, and to not short-circuit public engagement. Councillor Eric Zhelka advised studying the case of Oak Bay Lodge—which came to council two times with proposals that were both rejected. The lesson being: “Find a design with everyone here [meaning the audience] before you come to council, that everyone can support.”
    The Committee decided not to even vote on Fowler’s request.
    Later, Ney told Focus the request for an expedited process was “not an example of good timing.”
    On a Saturday morning in April, I met with five members of “the resistance” at Sue MacRae’s house, right next door to the church property.
    They expressed many concerns: about Oak Bay’s infrastructure not being adequate to handle another 100-plus residents on the one-acre site; about the unfairness of the church having $500,000 to put towards developing their plan and doing PR, while their group relies on volunteer time and digs into their own pockets for signs and flyers; and about the size and scale of the proposals they’ve seen and how it will impact their beloved streetscape, characterized by lots of trees and 100-year-old single-family homes.
    But they were most perturbed by the public consultation process, and the distrust they feel it has fostered.
    Both Reverend Slater and the church’s development team co-chair Cheryl Thomas have told me that what they were actually trying to do in consultation sessions in the fall was get neighbours’ input before designing anything. But it seems to have backfired, as these neighbours believed that there was a plan, but it was being kept secret. They pointed to the church’s application for a BC Housing loan, which they obtained through a Freedom of Information request. Though 90 percent redacted, it shows that as early as March 2017, the church was outlining options to BC Housing and Oak Bay municipal staff—whereas the neighbours only got notified in August that the church was considering development. Cheryl Thomas assured me that only financial models went to BC Housing, not actual designs, yet it seems clear those would have required some assumptions about size in order to project costs and revenues.
    Diana Butler, a former mayor of Oak Bay who lives on Granite Street, suggested the fall consultations were mostly for show, and as evidence, pointed to the short time lapse between the November “consult sessions” and the “reveal sessions” in December, at which the scenarios involving 101- to 160-unit buildings were presented. The development team’s unwillingness to entertain a project with a much smaller profile fuelled suspicions around the church’s motivations, as well as its strategy.
     

    Two of the church's neighbours, Wayne Todd and Diana Butler
     
    At our meeting, neighbour Wayne Randall said he believes it’s now the church’s strategy to focus solely on the wider community and ignore the neighbours. Butler concurs. She has written extensively on the Concerned Citizens’ website (ccn-oakbay.com), at one point writing: “We have spent hours and hours working with the development team to design a better consultation process. We placed our trust in the development team truly wanting to engage the neighbourhood in a meaningful discussion. We are very disappointed that they have so abruptly abandoned this route, in preference to taking their project to the wider community where they hope to get more support.”
    The development team contracted Gene Miller to help with consultations with this group of neighbours, who say he sincerely tried to help. They told me he met with them separately a couple of times, to try to work out a better process. But, they said, “he failed.” (Disclosure: Gene Miller writes for Focus. I did not know he was involved until recently, and have not had any communication with him about the project.)
    Curtis Hobson, a special education teacher who lives directly across from the church, told me, “We feel excluded, manipulated, and are being painted as against change or affordable housing.” Hobson and other neighbours I spoke with said they are in favour of affordable housing on this site, but not at the scale the church has in mind.
     

    Curtis Hobson and Sue MacRae, both close neighbours of the church's property. Threshold House (in the background) would be demolished to make room for the project.
     
    At the meeting, these residents provided me with an outline of what they would accept: A maximum three storeys, with massing along Granite Street, with some variation in height, and a more traditional design in keeping with the neighbourhood. Ideally, they’d like the buildings broken up or clustered so that pedestrians can move through the site. They want to keep Threshold House, but if it must go, they want alternative housing to be provided on the site for the nine vulnerable youth (age 16-22) now housed in its studio apartments. This heritage-style building, they argued, is only 25 years old, fits into the neighbourhood well and serves a valuable purpose.
    The main stumbling blocks towards agreement, however, will be the massing and the number of units: the neighbours’ wishlist calls for 25-40 suites, whereas the latest church plans (not unveiled when I interviewed them) call for 98.
     
    AT A MEETING WITH the Development Team co-chair Cheryl Thomas and architect Rod Windjack, I was shown rough drafts of the plans that will be unveiled at the late-April open houses. Thomas lived in Oak Bay when her kids were growing up, and got involved in the church in 2012—mostly to sing in the choir. She ended up on the board and came to realize “we’ve got to make this place sustainable.” As a congregation, she said, “we wanted to live our values and provide something that was truly needed. Obviously affordable housing is desperately needed.”
    Windjack, an architect who was involved with the design for the new Oak Bay High School, had his work cut out for him, trying to accommodate the needs of both church and neighbours. Besides the concern over size, he said, one thing that came through loud and clear from neighbours was that the development shouldn’t result in additional parking on nearby streets. This, he noted, created a burden on the church financially, because underground parking is so costly.
    After numerous iterations, Windjack eventually came up with a 3.5-storey (four floors), L-shaped building with 98 units (predominantly one-bedrooms) and tilted it, so it’s not monolithic from the street. “We’ve tried to deal with how the building responds to neighbours, through how it sits on the site and by playing with the massing of the building—using articulation in front, further extended by our use of materials,” Windjack said. Materials include some brick, echoing the church. The main building has a gently-sloped roof with dormer elements that are common in the neighbourhood. At 51 feet high, it is slightly higher than the ridge line of the church.
     

    Oak Bay United Church's 98-unit proposal, unveiled at the end of April
     
    In the location where the church office now stands on Mitchell, the project is proposing a three-storey “brownstone” building with four market-priced leasehold units.
    Parking—for 116 vehicles—would all be underground. Virtually the whole site would need to be blasted (through granite) to create a two-storey parkade, costing about $5 million of the $26-million total price tag. About half would be for church-goers and the other half for project residents. While they cannot prohibit a resident from having a vehicle, they can tell prospective renters that units do not include parking. Residents would have good bike storage and likely a car-share vehicle, perhaps even bus passes, noted Thomas.
    Everyone with the church and the neighbourhood was in agreement that a green strip, with majestic Garry oaks, that runs along the back of the property, had to stay.
    Units would be small, even by present standards: one-bedrooms approximately 420-455 square feet, two bedrooms 650-700 square feet, and three bedrooms 850-900. “That’s what makes them affordable,” said Thomas. (Brownstone units are larger.)
    Rents for the affordable units would be set by BC Housing and CMHC, and rent increases would be tied to the cost of living (not the market). A one-bedroom unit would cost about $1000 per month.
    Thomas stressed that the development team has tried to accommodate all that they heard from neighbours, but the financial realities are limiting. In their attempt to keep the height to 3.5 storeys, only 50 units will be officially “affordable,” though 44 others are characterized as “market affordable.”
    The feedback at the Open Houses planned for late April might help them “further refine what we’ve got, but we don’t see major changes,” said Windjack.
     
    CURTIS HOBSON DIRECTED ME TO an interesting 2014 article in the United Church’s Observer magazine, called “The Perils of Redevelopment.” In discussing the trends for many churches—declining congregations, rising costs, and the sale or redevelopment of their properties—it warns, “Even a plan conceived with the best of intentions can go horribly wrong.”
    The article stresses the importance of constructive community outreach, without which, it warns, years can be spent fighting with neighbours and municipal governments.
    Neighbour Wayne Todd researched every development mentioned in the article and found virtually all of them had been sold or failed, with congregations forced to rent other facilities. But he also inadvertently stumbled on one church project, not mentioned in the Observer article, that worked out well; in fact it may become Canada’s first net-zero-energy multi-family building.
    Andrew Gregory chaired the planning committee of the North Glenora Community League during the time (2013-2015) the Westmount Presbyterian Church in that Edmonton community sought rezoning for its property in order to put up affordable housing. In a report on it, he stated: “It took dozens of meetings and hundreds of hours of focused effort on both sides to get to ‘YIMBY.’”
    He mentions the wisdom of arriving at “a mutually understood definition for community engagement.” He writes: “It seems that the Achilles heel of most re-development plans in the city is that too many decisions are made too early without involving the community…committing the developer to a plan before engagement has taken place and derailing authentic dialogue before it can happen.”
    Certainly in the Oak Bay case, it does not appear that the church went to neighbours with a blank slate. It had priorities and financial realities that led it early on to think big.
    One major difference between the Edmonton church and the Oak Bay church is that in Edmonton, the North Glenora Community League’s planning committee (all volunteers)—took the reigns to negotiate a community engagement process. Then it took minutes of every meeting which were posted, hosted periodic town halls, and conducted surveys on specific aspects. In Oak Bay, there’s been no similar body providing such leadership. (The Oak Bay Community Association did host a community forum on housing affordability that both sides appreciated.)
    Another difference: the Edmonton church seemed willing to take its time—two years in total from announcement to passing at Edmonton City Hall—whereas Oak Bay United Church representatives seem in a hurry, and seem to believe they’ve already done much of the community consultation necessary—not the hundreds of hours allowed for in the Edmonton case. By the way, it too started out on shaky ground, but in the end, at the final Edmonton City Hall public hearing, two residents spoke in favour of the development, none opposed, and it passed unanimously.
    Another noteworthy difference: the Edmonton church’s proposal was for a 16-unit townhouse development for families.
     
    EVERYONE I SPOKE TO for this article seems to care deeply about their community and be in favour of some affordable housing on the church property. No neighbours expressed concerns about property values. Even the vociferous ad-hoc group I spoke with would accept a three-story building.
    Yet even if the church wins wide community support for its project, it may be embarking on a perilous journey. Its financial straits have been alluded to time and time again, in church minutes, at consultations, at council meetings, and during interviews.
    The church has a $300,000 mortgage now. To create a development on its property, it has borrowed $500,000 from BC Housing (which needs to be repaid, regardless of the outcome). If it gets rezoning approved, it will be borrowing tens of millions more from BC Housing to finance it. Yes, it will get rental income to pay down its debts, but it will also be sacrificing significant space for its activities, along with $100,000 in annual revenues from its thrift store, and $54,000 in annual rent from Threshold Housing Society. These revenues currently get fully spent on church operations and maintenance. Right now, the sanctuary needs an estimated $300,000 in repairs. When Threshold leaves, the church will also have to refund the balance of a loan the housing society provided for renovations—about $40,000 now.
    But the church is committed to the project. And as of last August, it’s doubtful the congregation could back out if it wanted to. The church board transferred all decision-making to its project development team. In church board minutes, it’s noted that the team, composed of four church representatives as well as some external advisors and consultants, has “commission status,” meaning they have “complete authority” until their mandate expires at end of the rezoning process. “The governing body or executive [of the church] may not debate the commission’s decision and come to a different decision.”
    Reverend Slater told me she hopes their proposal goes before council in May, and that it’s approved in advance of the municipal election in October. Given the usual pace of the development process, this seems wildly optimistic.
    Interestingly, the church is already permitted, under its “institutional” zoning, to build three floors of multi-family housing on the church property. But the proposed density will make it necessary to apply for rezoning. For instance, the minimum square footage for a one-bedroom apartment has to be 603 sq ft, not the 420 the church is planning. The project would also take up a far greater portion of the land than its institutional zoning allows.
    Will a majority of councillors be willing to “spot zone” the development as proposed? Will they give weight to the church’s provision of services and financial need? In light of citizens’ complaints, will they send it back to the drawing board?
    When I asked Councillor Ney about this, she reiterated the message of the January meeting, that the way to ensure success is to have a robust consultative process, developing rapport with the community and coming up with something that is amenable to all. “For whatever reason,” she said, “the consultation with this proposal went off the rails,” resulting in people being scared and nervous—especially about the massing. Historically, Ney said, Oak Bay was not planned with adequate transition zones between areas of multi-unit buildings and single-family homes. Ney noted that council often has to “soften the edges” of developments so they are not pushed hard against neighbours.
    But there appears little room for compromise on the part of the church. Thomas said, “Our reality is we’ve made it as small as we realistically can. We are now [in the late April open houses] putting all our cards on the table. This is the best we can do.”
    So what is the church’s fall-back position if rezoning is refused? Thomas said they would probably have to subdivide, selling off the Threshold building to get enough money to do the needed repairs of other buildings. “There would be no housing. And it puts the church in a precarious long-term position,” she said.
    It is admirable that Oak Bay United has stepped up to create some desperately needed affordable housing. Reverend Slater might be overly optimistic, but she’s correct in her assessment that the project proposal is “an opportunity for the community to wrestle with the ‘over-development’ issue, and how a community has that conversation.”
    Leslie Campbell attended the first open house on April 25. She overheard one gentleman saying, “Well, at least it’s going in the right direction.”

    David Broadland
    March 2018
    The City is refusing to provide records that would show who knew what, and when they knew it.
     
    FOLLOWING OUR STORY LAST EDITION about the surprise appearance of bolt-on plates on the new bridge that Victorians had been promised would be “world-class” and “iconic,” the reaction from ordinary people who don’t receive a regular cheque from the City of Victoria was consistently forthright. An English bridge designer, who has written about such projects all over the world for the past 10 years noted: “The latest reports from Focus cover issues with the bridge’s steel fabrication. They highlight the discovery of a problem with the steelwork, which appears to have been covered over with a truly awful-looking bolted plate, a real bodge if ever you see one…Focus is quite right to criticize the detail. It’s clear from the photographs that nothing this awful should be considered acceptable as part of the finished structure.”
     

    Controversial bolt-on plates on Victoria's brand-new $115-million bridge. The larger photo above shows the plate on the south-side ring.
     
    On Vibrant Victoria, a local online discussion forum, “jonny” noted: “I am absolutely gobsmacked that our NINE FIGURE shiny new bridge has two, seemingly haphazard and last minute, bolted-on steel plates that look like they were envisaged and put together by a 9th grade metalworking student.”
    “G-Man” responded, “Couldn’t agree more. It makes me want to puke. I could not care less whether or not an engineer says it’s okay. The brand new bridge should not have this. It is unbelievable. I am embarrassed as a Victorian.” Several days later, G-Man posted a photograph of the bolt-on plate on the north ring. Somehow a bolt had worked its way free from somewhere inside the ring and was trying to escape through a large gap between the ring and the bolt-on plate.
     

    A rusty bolt caught in the opening between the bolt-on plate and the defective north-side ring. Photo by G-Man.
     
    Martin Bache, a 40-year veteran of Canada’s structural steel fabrication industry, and a project supervisor with Canron in Vancouver before retiring to Victoria, wrote to Focus and commented: “I have never seen such an appalling patch.” Bache agreed that the plates would “promote corrosion” in the structure. He had contacted EGBC, BC’s association of professional engineers, which confirmed that the association’s bylaws require a third party independent review of the patches since they are on fracture-critical steel. No such review has been brought forward, or even mentioned, by either the City or the bridge’s American designers, Hardesty & Hanover.
    I covered the initial response from City Hall in a second story posted at focusonvictoria.ca. To put that response as succinctly as possible, the City claimed our story contained “serious factual errors and inaccuracies,” but was unwilling—or unable, to say what those errors and inaccuracies were.
    On January 25, Project Director Jonathan Huggett gave council his quarterly update on the troubled project. Huggett commented on the bolt-on plates: “There has been this inference by some that somebody found a piece of scrap steel, slapped it on as an afterthought, and put a few bolts in place. Whoever makes those statements clearly has no experience in engineering. As engineers we take great pride in our work. Nothing happens quickly or suddenly, and without due process and proper sign-off.”
    Huggett also told the CBC our story was "an attempt to scare people unnecessarily." Presumably Huggett meant that there was an implication in our story that the plates were a public safety issue. We didn't, in fact, say or imply any such thing. The issue we raised is whether or not the plates represent a significant decline in value to taxpayers. Will the plates promote corrosion and therefore increase maintenance costs? Will they reduce the useful life of the bridge and thereby increase lifecycle cost? Do the plates not make a sham of the City's claim to a "world-class" or "iconic" bridge and raise questions about the huge amount of money wasted in pursuit of that futile endeavour?
    The bridge engineers themselves may have metal fatigue concerns—that's why they added the plates—but Focus raised no red flags on that point other than to mention the project's own concern about fatigue. Huggett's claim of "an attempt to scare people unnecessarily" is simply deflecting attention away from the real issues.
    The “pride” Huggett claims has gone into this project is hard to see when you examine closely the two patches on the new bridge. And, if they are any indication of the pride with which the rest of the bridge has been built, Victorians could be in for more embarrassment. But it’s Huggett’s claim that “nothing happens…without due process” that is the focus of my attention this time.
    What has become evident is that Huggett may not have informed anyone at City Hall about the problem that led to the bolt-on plates, thus making it impossible to consider options that would have prevented the delivery of a defective bridge.
    With Mayor Helps and Huggett refusing to respond to our questions, Focus requested relevant records under access to information law. So far, Huggett and the City have been uncooperative and Focus has filed a complaint with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner.
    In my initial story I raised these questions: Were City councillors informed about the situation that led to the bolt-on plates? If so, were they given any options?
    It’s vital to have answers to these questions. The plates reflect an unacceptable diminishment of the expected quality of the bridge. According to Huggett, people are comparing the bridge to scrap metal. The plates also reflect a lower-cost solution to the problem they were intended to address than a proper refabrication, but the parties building the bridge would have been responsible for any additional cost. Someone’s choice to overlook the public interest and accept a defective bridge has saved the companies building the bridge a lot of money, perhaps millions of dollars. Are councillors responsible for this bad decision? Or were they kept in the dark by Project Director Huggett?
    Thus far, the only indication of what happened that led to the bolt-on plates has been the minimal response from Huggett that I reported in my first story, and a letter from Hardesty & Hanover’s Keith Griesing sent to the City on January 8, shortly after our story was published.
    After reading our story, Griesing “felt it would be helpful if I gave you a brief summary of why those plates are there and how their use came to be.” Griesing is the project’s engineer of record.
    Griesing disagreed with our characterization of the circumstance that led to the bolt-on plates as a “design flaw.” His letter stated: “There was no ‘design flaw’ by Hardesty & Hanover nor any other of the City consultants involved; it was assembly by the fabricator that did not conform to the design plan requirements nor to the applicable detailing and fabrication standards required in the specifications” that led to the need for the bolt-on plates.
    Griesing’s need to make a distinction between a “design flaw” and “assembly by the fabricator” is understandably important to Hardesty & Hanover. If the bolt-on plates resulted from some error made by Hardesty & Hanover, they could become defendants in a legal suit if City councillors realize a world-class bodge has been foisted on City taxpayers. If the cause was solely attributable to an error made by the fabricator, then the company the City contracted to build the bridge—PCL—would be the defendant.
    But Hardesty & Hanover’s concern is not equal to the public interest. Just because Griesing claims Hardesty & Hanover aren’t responsible for the weakness in the rings that required the plates doesn’t mean the City hasn’t received a defective bridge. City councillors ought to be focussed on which companies the City should consider suing, rather than resorting to talking points designed to relieve them of any responsibility for their failure to protect the public interest.
    And just because Huggett tells City councillors there was “no design error” doesn’t mean his apparent concealment of the issue isn’t an issue. Councillors need to examine carefully the role Huggett played in the delivery of a world-class bodge. An examination of what information has been provided by the project shows none of the questions about who did what—and when and why they did it—have been answered. The bridge builders seem to have the support of Victoria City council in avoiding any financial or professional accountability for providing a defective bridge. Why? 
    In his letter to councillors, Griesing attributes the need for the bolt-on plates to errors made by the Chinese company ZTSS, hired by PCL to fabricate the moveable part of the bridge. Griesing states: “In the course of our routine quality inspections in the steel fabrication plant in China, [PCL’s] quality control team [Atema] discovered a violation of fabrication and welding standards in the particular area in question. This determination was confirmed by the City’s Quality Oversight consultant.”
    According to Huggett, this discovery was made on December 9, 2016. What was found? Huggett provided Focus with a single sentence from Atema’s report. It stated: “Weld access holes in MW1 and MW3 to MF1 and TF1 at MW2 were unnecessary, not clearly detailed and may not have been evaluated to proper fatigue design category, and not fabricated to code requirements”.
    That’s largely incomprehensible to most of us, but here’s the essential part: Atema found “unnecessary” weld access holes in steel parts close to where the bolt-on plates were eventually added. Weld access holes are openings into otherwise closed chambers inside the rings that allow welders to complete welds within those closed chambers. Why would ZTSS cut “unnecessary” holes if it didn’t need them?
    With Huggett refusing to provide any information, I sought insight from the aforementioned Martin Bache, who has 40 years of experience in heavy steel fabrication.
    Bache described the process that would have been used for determining where such holes are needed: “Weld access holes in fracture-critical members must be designed by the Engineer of Record [Griesing]. Competent detail draftspersons would be expected, during preparation of the shop drawings, to identify closed chambers where the EOR may have forgotten to show on his plans weld access holes without which the required welding cannot be performed. They would then issue an RFI [request for information] pointing this out, and asking the EOR how they should proceed.”
    According to Bache, then, Griesing would ultimately be responsible for the design of every weld access hole that was required, since every steel member in the rings was designated “fracture-critical.”
    Griesing has told the City that the fabricator was responsible for the weld access hole violations. In that case, the bad holes wouldn’t have appeared on the shop drawings Griesing was required to approve. That means they should have been discovered quickly by any robust quality assurance (QA) program. If found quickly, those holes would still be accessible and could be fixed immediately. Bache noted: “Under what we must imagine would be rigorous QA on this second attempt to fabricate a bridge, we would expect an error to be spotted very soon after the occurrence.”
    But according to Griesing, “Because of its location in a critical area of the structure, this non-conformance was particularly difficult to correct.”
    Why, exactly? If the QA teams were as diligent as Huggett claimed in his quarterly reports, why would “unnecessary” access holes just cut by fabricators end up being “particularly difficult to correct.”
    From what Huggett has told Focus, we know that Hardesty & Hanover’s decision on how to address these unnecessary holes was delayed for six to seven months. During that time, fabrication of the bridge continued.
    It appears that Hardesty & Hanover dithered on fixing the unnecessary weld access holes, which were made inaccessible by subsequent work and couldn’t be fixed. Did Griesing forget to tell someone to do something?
    Bache wrote: “What amazes me is the tremendous time gap between the Atema non-compliance report and the attempted fixes. It sounds as though no one at Hardesty & Hanover could decide what to do, but the work continued and the bridge was shipped anyway to try to keep to a schedule.”
    Griesing’s explanation to the City noted: “The design team and fabrication team designed and reviewed numerous mitigation options. We even consulted two internationally known experts in fabrication and welding for their input. After reviewing all options, the project team unanimously agreed that the bolted plates were the best option, all factors considered.”
    Griesing, obviously, did not factor in jonny or G-Man. Maybe he should have. G-Man and jonny seem to represent the values and priorities of ordinary Victorians better than either Huggett or Helps.
    It wasn’t until after the rings had arrived in Victoria, late last summer, that large holes were chopped in the rings and plates bolted over the holes. That work was done at Point Hope Shipyard in Victoria. The need for these large holes is unclear. Were they needed to allow someone to get inside the rings so bolts could be inserted from the inside and tightened? If so, what happened to the tightener? Hey, we just want to know.
    Griesing’s letter provided no explanation for why a fix wasn’t made immediately in December 2016 when the unnecessary access holes would still have been accessible. So while Huggett and Griesing have successfully focussed the City on shooting the messenger, more important questions that need to be answered are being ignored.
    Let me, just for the sake of thoroughness, offer an alternative story to that being told by Huggett, Griesing and Helps. Let’s start with Atema’s report. Although we’ve been provided with only one sentence from that report, let’s presume that sentence is the whole report and that Atema did find weld access holes that were unnecessary and that those unnecessary holes are the entire reason bolt-on plates were required. All of those assumptions are leaps of faith, but let’s jump. In that case, PCL would have been responsible for the cost of any refabrication necessary to meet the City’s agreed-upon specifications defined in the contract. If the City had been given all the facts about this when it happened, the City would surely have insisted on refabrication rather than accepting a bridge that would forever wear “truly awful-looking” bolt-on plates.
    But wait. According to Griesing, the City did know about the issue. In his letter, Griesing wrote, “City Staff was fully involved in arriving at the best solution, particularly with respect to public safety, cost and schedule impacts.”
    The “was” in that sentence suggests a single person from the City was involved, but we don’t know for sure. Who did Griesing mean by “City Staff”? Did he mean just Huggett? Or did he mean Huggett and other people at City Hall? Again, we don’t know the answer to this yet, because Huggett has refused to respond to a legal request for his records on the issue, and Helps won’t respond to questions. But this is vital to understand because if Huggett didn’t inform anyone else at the City of Victoria, we would have to ask why he kept that information from his client.
    Until we see Huggett’s record of communication on the plates, no judgement can be made as to his conduct. But at this point, with Huggett appearing to have not properly informed his client, the City may need to seek advice about the implications of the plates from someone not involved in the project.
    Griesing’s claim that it wasn’t a “design flaw” that led to the bolt-on plates is an open question until detailed information about what Atema found, and why it took six or seven months for Griesing to act, is released.
    But there is a broader issue that deserves comment. In one sense there is no question that the bolt-on plates are the direct consequence of a design flaw. The design flaw was the open rings themselves. The choice of that particular design approach to creating a movable bridge made the structure unnecessarily complex, difficult to build and overly expensive. Of the three companies originally bidding for the project, two rejected the open-ring design and based their bids on designs that had proven track records. Kiewit’s engineers had concluded that the open rings posed “a fundamentally high risk and expensive design approach.” Bizarrely, the City’s scoring of the bid proposals actually penalized Kiewit and Walsh for not using the risky design.
    As part of PCL’s bid, Hardesty & Hanover embraced this risky design. Victoria taxpayers have been paying the costs ever since. For example: two additional years of construction are attributable to difficulty in fabricating the open rings and fitting them to the trusses. Those extra two years of construction have made people in Victoria frustrated. That sense of frustration, especially in an election year, is not something politicians like Helps  and her councillors want to aggravate with further delays. Their public promise to deliver the bridge by such-and-such a date meant that if any problem arose that would cause further delay, councillors were going to favour whatever solution was quickest. They telegraphed that to Huggett and Griesing. So that’s what councillors got, but in spades.
    So when Griesing tells councillors that the bolt-on plates are not the result of a design flaw, he’s overlooking his company’s responsibility for promoting a design that other engineers warned the City not to build. Hardesty & Hanover’s risky and hard-to-build design created a whole chain of connected events that led inevitably to the bolt-on plates.
    Don’t take my word for it. Huggett has already confirmed that the City's hired technical advisors have given it bad advice on the project. Last summer, in a rare moment of self-reflection in which councillors had an opportunity to openly consider why the project had encountered such difficulties, Councillor Pam Madoff offered the following: “I remember very specifically having this conversation [with the bridge’s designers and engineers] about the mechanics, you know, the—in simplistic terms—the cogs, the wheels, how it was going to lift. I remember at the time saying, ‘Is this basically just a larger version of the Meccano sets that we played with as kids, in terms of its actual mechanical operation?’ And, again, that was the assurance. To me it comes down to: how far does one have to go? We felt like we asked the right questions at the time. It turns out they may not have been the right answers.” In response, Huggett told councillors: “You were not given good advice.”
    A question councillors might ask themselves right now: Why are we still accepting bad advice? Perhaps a sloppily-executed sign with those words on it could be hung from each of the bolt-on plates. With or without such signs, though, each time the bridge lifts and the bolt-on plates descend to the level of pedestrians waiting for the bridge to reopen, those present will be reminded of the bridge’s dubious origins.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.
     
    Hardesty & Hanover's letter to the City of Victoria with its explanation of the bolt-on plates:

     
     
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    Briony Penn
    March 2018
    Or was the battle fought over an invented crisis?
     
    IN THE KEYNOTE SPEECH at a recent conference on the value of nature in urban areas, Don Luymes, director of strategic initiatives in Surrey, cited a refrain that had many of the participants, like Saanich resident Carmel Thomson, nodding. “The battle for sustainability will be won or lost in the suburbs,” said Luymes.
    The suburbs of Saanich have become one of the most watched of these battlegrounds, because the stakes have never been so high: one of the hottest high-end real estate markets in the world vs. one of the most endangered ecosystems in the country. Emotions run high on both sides. Nowhere in Canada is there a place so rare and ecologically-important pitted against a global luxury housing market so aggressive.
     

    A new house under construction in Saanich amidst a Garry oak ecosystem, the kind of property subject to Saanich's EDPA bylaw
     
    Just as Premiers Notley and Horgan face off over a fundamental disagreement on what constitutes the national interest and constitutional rights (protecting oil investments or the coastal environment), Saanich residents engage in similar clashes over what is more important: protecting their property rights, or nature. Some, like Mayor Richard Atwell, are asserting that there is agreement that nature is valued, but disagreement on the best way to protect it on private property (or if, in fact, it can be protected on private land at all). Others are arguing that the biggest problem is leadership—a failure to listen and bring opposing groups together to work out a less polarized solution.
    For people like Carmel Thomson, a local landowner who has been at the forefront of sustainability initiatives in Saanich and is one of the members of SAFE (Saanich Action for the Environment), the 33-year battle for Saanich’s “rare ecosystems and vital habitat” lost a lot of ground it couldn’t afford to lose on November 6, 2017. That night, Mayor Atwell, and councillors Susan Brice, Karen Harper, Fred Haynes and Lief Wergeland, voted to rescind a bylaw and planning tool called the Environmental Development Permit Area (EDPA). Their one-vote majority was the result of the September by-election to fill Vic Derman’s seat (Derman died suddenly last year).
     

    Carmel Thomson and Saanich Mayor Richard Atwell
     
    Adopted by Saanich Council in 2012, the EDPA bylaw identified environmentally sensitive areas like Garry oak ecosystems in the municipality, putting them under a special set of guidelines, and requiring a permit before you could alter them (for example the construction of a new building or dock). The areas—representing about five percent of the 40,000 private properties in Saanich (and 52 percent of public lands)—were determined by various inventories of sensitive ecosystems, wildlife trees, and conservation data. Though a permit for alteration was required, numerous exemptions were allowed, for everything from hazardous trees to existing gardens and landscaping to small outbuildings and slope stabilization. If a permit was required, certain guidelines were to be employed. While proponents saw it as inoffensive and helpful, critics claimed it was heavy-handed and an invasion of privacy.
    Thomson traces Atwell’s decision to rescind the EDPA back to a pledge he made publicly to represent a group of anti-EDPA landowners called SCRES (Saanich Citizens for a Responsible EDPA) who were successful in convincing the mayor, at the start of his mayoral career in April of 2015, with their claims that an EDPA designation “places an undue burden on homeowners while not protecting the environment.” Atwell defends his loyalty to the anti-EDPA side: “I pledged to give a voice to the issue at the council table. This is what we do as elected representatives.”
    According to Thomson, this loyalty has led to a “failure” in public process that might have brought some clarification to these claims, and the bylaw itself. The issue has certainly attracted a more-than-average amount of controversy. The biologist who supported SCRES’ claims is now facing disciplinary hearings from his professional association over possible conflict of interest.
    With regard to public participation, the $50,000 independent review of Saanich’s EDPA (called the Diamond Head Report) described the process as “an acrimonious social discourse” and pointed to “confusion and misunderstandings about the bylaw and its implementation.” The acrimony and confusion seeped into town halls, open houses and the by-election to replace Derman, who had been  pro-EDPA.
    Rather than clear up the misunderstandings or implement the recommendations of the Diamond Head Report, Mayor Atwell and council passed a motion to rescind the bylaw on November 6, 2017. The toxicity of the process pushed one frustrated citizen, Dr Lynn Husted (in support of the EDPA) to file a legal petition through the Canadian Charter for Rights and Freedoms, just for the right to express her concerns without interruption from Atwell and some members of council.
    According to Chris Tollefson, who is the executive director for the Pacific Centre for Environmental Law and Litigation and who took Husted’s petition forward, his rationale for supporting this case is “to stand up for due process and the rule of law when we see things going so sideways.” What he means by “sideways” can be seen on a video of that November 6 meeting, available on the Saanich Council website. What viewers will see is Husted trying to deliver her arguments for why Saanich should have waited before passing a motion to rescind the EDPA, pending results of the disciplinary hearing of the biologist. After being cut off on several occasions by the mayor and Councillor Haynes on what they perceived as a point of order, Husted was ordered to stop.
    Atwell apologized in a settlement out of court, but is not initiating any changes in the chilly climate of debate around EDPAs. According to Atwell, “The rules that currently exist have been in place since we began webcasting council meetings and remain in place unchanged.”
    When asked why he didn’t implement the recommendations of the Diamond Head Report (which was commissioned by Saanich) instead of rescinding the bylaw, Atwell stated: “The overwhelming response is that the EDPA is not working as intended, is burdensome and achieving little in the way of measurable results.”
    Thomson argues that Atwell’s position is inconsistent with the findings of the report which “confirmed the high level of interest, knowledge and passion Saanich residents have towards environmental protection in their municipality…there is support in the community for protecting the natural environment using the EDPA, but that improvement in the Bylaw is required.”
    The 77-page Diamond Head Report provides ample evidence that the EDPA is supported by the public, along with 15 recommendations on how to improve it. The consultation was extensive, and included a review of all public feedback from open houses, town halls, questionnaires, and interviews with landowners, staff members and council—as well as a review of economic impacts of the bylaw, and best practices in other local governments. Atwell’s reference to “measureable results” seems unclear, as the only measureable data available is what staff collected for 2016 on 20 permits for restoration. Those permits resulted in the successful planting of native trees and shrubs in all 20 cases, and removal of invasive species in half of them.
     
    AT THE HEART OF THE ISSUE is whether the battle for sustainability is losing ground because of the limited tools available, or the deteriorating state of public discourse—with real estate prices skewing the debate further. EDPAs are one of the few legal tools that a municipality has to influence how natural areas on private land are protected. It is the same kind of tool that has worked reasonably well for stream and tree protection, flood control, and hazardous slopes where the development permit designation provides restrictions, but also some flexibility to negotiate development design through the permit process. The tool has been available under the Local Government Act and Municipal Act since 1985, but it took Saanich Council 27 years—after a lot of lobbying from citizen groups and people like Thomson—to add ecologically-sensitive areas like Garry oak ecosystems to more conventional stream and slope protection measures.
    The Province kick-started the process in the early 1990s in the Capital region by leading the Sensitive Ecosystems Inventory Mapping project—a necessary first step to establishing this bylaw, and following on BC’s international commitment to biodiversity. The municipal role of protecting ecological values has only slowly been embraced, because the development industry has influenced, perhaps unduly, local government agendas. Understandably, those who had fought for this hard-won planning tool are not happy with the reversal, especially in light of the fact that the independent consultants found the majority of the public was in support of it.
    Part of the problem, Thomson suggests, is the misinformation that was generated by “well-lawyered landowners.” Much of the recruiting for SCRES appears to have emanated from Ten Mile Point. Eight properties that applied for removal from EDPA and were identified in the disciplinary hearing for the biologist’s “failure to undertake proper due diligence and ground work with respect to the preparation of reports” all came from two streets: Tudor and Seaview.
    Residents on both sides of the issue declined to comment, due to the toxic nature of the conflict. When trying to find a spokesperson for SCRES, Focus was directed to the biologist named in the hearings. On the SCRES website, a key resource listed is the Fraser Institute’s Stealth Confiscation: How Governments Regulate, Freeze and Devalue Private Property without Compensation, which claims that property values are lowered by these types of designations. SCRES’ campaign was launched in 2015 on that assumption. Leaflets were distributed stating “it punishes thousands of homeowners without compensation” and “Not only does it impact true property development or subdivision but it also impacts the enjoyment, use AND the resale value of thousands of private properties whose owners just want to plant gardens, add patios and build fences.”
    Yet a BC Assessment Authority report of January 2016 (obtained through a freedom of information request) stated there was no evidence that an EDPA designation devalued property in Saanich. Was this report ignored by those opposed to the EDPA?
    A January 2017 report conducted by Rollo and Associates concluded that in only a few extreme cases would the EDPA guidelines impact property values. These impacts could be eliminated by Saanich relaxing the EDPA guidelines for these very few properties. The authors noted that there was “quite a bit of confusion, uncertainty and misunderstanding regarding the impact of EDPA guidelines on land use and property development.” Again, we have to wonder whether this report, too, was ignored by EDPA opponents.
    Thomson doesn’t buy the idea that this is an unworkable bylaw. The Diamond Head Report points out that “similar EDPAs are implemented in many other BC municipalities without incident.” This includes North Vancouver, West Vancouver, Kelowna, Nanaimo, Campbell River and Surrey. Though “broadly comparable…none had the degree of protest seen in Saanich.” The consultants reviewed the use of EDPAs in nine other local governments and identified key elements that Saanich might want to adopt and improve on. Some of those strategies (outside of the EDPA), Saanich council is already endorsing.
    When mayor and council passed a motion to explore rescinding the bylaw on October 28, they also requested their staff “report as soon as possible on the potential of developing a Saanich program which includes the topics of Climate Adaptation, a Biodiversity Conservation Strategy, and Stewardship Program to serve as a policy framework for other Saanich environmental policies and programs and a new Environmental Development Permit Area be considered part of this program; and the Diamond Head Report recommendations be considered as a component of this report.”
    But by November 6, a resolution was moved by Karen Harper to rescind the EDPA. Dozens of citizens spoke forcefully on the matter—on both sides—and councillors opposed (Brownoff, Murdock, Plant  and Sanders) made the point that it was imprudent to ignore the consultants’ recommendations, throw aside a bylaw that had been years in the making, and act contrary to the goal of a sustainable Saanich.
    Throwing the baby out with the bathwater doesn’t make a lot of sense to Lynn Husted either. “How can a close vote be able to overturn a bylaw that various reports found to be at least as good or better than others studied, that has been in place for six-plus years, and where most of the recommendations for improvements could be implemented within a year.”
    Atwell, on the other hand, seems attached to his voluntary approach to stewardship: “The municipality cannot police private property in any practical way. To accomplish that, it needs an incentive-based approach towards stewardship that gains social license and can be easily understood by residents. The EDPA took the opposite approach, and failed for that reason.”
    Stewardship programs have been underway in Saanich for years, with an Environmental Education Officer who administers programs like Naturescape; Our Backyard quarterly newsletter; the Garry Oak Restoration Project that showcases best practices; workshops; control of invasive species; and a native plant salvage program.
    Saanich has been leading the pack provincially in this regard, but voluntary measures have not halted the downward decline of this vital ecosystem. The Sensitive Ecosystem Mapping Inventory was completed over 20 years ago, and at that time, less than five percent of Garry oak ecosystems still existed, with over a third of these remnants in Saanich (of which roughly half were on private land, and half in Saanich’s parks). One thing almost all municipal planners will agree on is that tracking the success of policy is essential, and that voluntary measures only go so far before laws need to kick in at a critical level—and Garry oak ecosystems are at a critical level.
    Thomson and Husted are hoping that there will be some changes in the process: more education, more use of data about the current state of the environment, and building on the information and ideas generated through earlier consultation (i.e. research and reports like Diamond Head). “We could be engaging the wider community in identifying issues, generating ideas and, together, developing workable solutions that could include notions such as tax incentives for those who have natural areas.” In the Gulf Islands, for instance, the Natural Area Protection Tax Exemption Program (NAPTEP) provides a tax rebate of 65 percent of a landowner’s annual property tax on the portion of their land protected by a NAPTEP convenant. There are lessons to be learned from the wider community.
    According to Thomson, “the battle for sustainability can be won if Saanich shows true leadership, and lives up to its Official Community Plan’s commitment to being ‘a sustainable community where a healthy natural environment is recognized as paramount for ensuring social well-being and economic vibrancy for current and future generations.’ Preservation of our fragile ecosystems depends on it—and our children and grandchildren are depending on us.”
    Briony Penn’s most recent book, The Real Thing: The Natural History of Ian McTaggart Cowan, won the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize and the inaugural Mack Laing Literary Prize. She now lives on Salt Spring Island, but she grew up in Saanich and worked on mapping Garry oak ecosystems in the Sensitive Ecosystem Inventory over two decades ago.

    Leslie Campbell
    March 2018
    Is the CRD failing to steward its only regional park in the core of the city?
     
    ALONG WITH THE DAFFODILS, new lawn signs condemning “overdevelopment” are sprouting up in abundance in Fairfield and Oak Bay neighbourhoods. Developers seem to be finding lots that have been ignored for decades or tearing down older homes to put up something grander. Churches are selling out to condo developers (Rockland’s Truth Centre), or developing their own “excess” property for affordable rental housing (Oak Bay United).
    While the condo and apartment projects add density and sometimes greater affordability to help justify the changing face of a neighbourhood, the many new single-family homes do not. Even though the battles are mostly fought on a case-by-case basis, there’s a cumulative impact on neighbourhoods: they look and feel different.
    As citizens try to modify or halt impending changes to their neighbourhood, they come face-to-face with bureaucracy. People who usually mind their own business and respect authorities blossom into activists, attending City Hall and CRD meetings, diving deep into archival research, organizing meetings and social media. While an engaged citizenry is a good thing, some unfortunately come away soured on local government, skeptical that any justice or sensibleness comes out of these bureaucracies.
    One proposed new development lies adjacent to Gonzales Hill Regional Park, a charming, bluffy paradise with stunning ocean views in multiple directions. The native satin flower can be seen between rock bluffs in early spring; quail are seen regularly. Though mostly left au naturel, atop is perched the Gonzales Observatory, its whiteness rising from the rock like a Greek villa and housing the office of The Land Conservancy of BC.
     

    The property adjacent to Gonzales Hill Regional Park for which variances are being sought by the developer of a single-family home.
    Gonzales Hill Park is the only regional park in the City of Victoria—and it’s right on the border between Victoria and Oak Bay. At 1.8 hectares, it’s small, but within walking distance of many local residents. CRD stats show 49,060 visitors in 2016.
    An adjacent, undeveloped, oblong 11,255-square-foot lot that lies along the park’s north border was purchased in 2016 by Walter and Karen Madro after the former owner died. Because she had left the lot in its natural state, it could be mistaken as being part of the park.
    The proposed 4000-square-foot house at 1980 Fairfield Place will change that perception. Much of the natural rock will be blasted and removed to construct a house with three levels (officially “1.5 storeys plus basement”), connected by an elevator. Plans show a three-car garage, wine cellar, games and fitness rooms. Despite blasting deep into the rock to create the lower level, it will loom high above its surroundings, particularly the neighbours already below the rocky hill. Six to eight small Garry oaks will be removed.
    Residents in the area began hearing about the development when Zebra Group, on behalf of the Madros, showed those closest to the lot initial plans last August. Louis Horvat, an architectural technologist with Zebra, told Focus, “We’ve welcomed the neighbours to come speak to us. We contacted all who wrote letters to the City’s Board of Variance asking them to meet with us. Only three contacted us.” Horvat says the plans have gone through about eight sets of changes, all to minimize neighbours’ concerns. “We really have made an effort to mitigate any concerns.”
    A Board of Variance hearing scheduled for January 25 to consider the Madros’ request for five variances to the R1-G zoning of the lot was adjourned to March 22 because the neighbours and CRD Parks Committee Vice Chair Ben Isitt complained about the short, 10-day notice.
    Since then, neighbours and park lovers have informed themselves more, spoken to officialdom, and organized towards protecting the park. The Madros, meanwhile, have reduced requested variances to two: one asking for a bigger total floorspace than allowed under the zoning; the other to build about 30 feet closer to the rear border.
     

    A portion of Zebra Design's application to the Board of Variance showing the proposed location the structure. The lot's border with Gonzales Regional Park is shown by the lower dashed orange line.
     
    ON FEBRUARY 21, CRD Director Ben Isitt attempted to get the CRD Parks Committee to weigh in against the Madros’ requested variances at the March Board of Variance (BOV) hearing. In introducing his motion, Isitt said, “This is probably my favourite destination for urban hikes, and I think many Victoria and Oak Bay residents would feel the same way.”
    His motion was to have the Parks Committee urge the CRD Board to communicate to the City of Victoria’s Board of Variance that it was concerned about the effect of the requested variances on the adjacent park.
    Isitt’s main argument was that a development on the border of this particular park, because it is so small and central, is more impactful than a similar development would be along the borders of the CRD’s other regional parks, which are far larger—like Thetis or Sooke Hills Wilderness Park or Elk and Beaver Lake Parks in Saanich. “The relative impact is out of proportion to what we would see elsewhere,” said Isitt.
    The proposed house, he noted, would obliterate “a highly cherished view looking to the north…[to] Haro Strait and the San Juan Islands…I think it’s indisputable that this development, if the variances were granted, would have a substantial negative impact on the use and enjoyment of Gonzales Hill Regional Park by park visitors.”
    He urged the CRD committee to provide additional comment to the one staff had already submitted to the BOV, “which indicated the CRD had no opinion on the application.” A CRD Parks staff report on the matter noted, “The main focus for visitors to Gonzales Hill Regional Park is the view from the bluffs to the south…rather than north;” and concluded the variances “would not result in adverse effects on park visitors when compared with the construction of a house on the property as currently allowed under the City of Victoria’s zoning bylaws.”
    Seven neighbourhood members and two spokespersons for the developer made presentations that day. Zebra’s Horvat explained the two variances being requested—one for total floor space, and one for the rear setback—and how the shape and topography of the site made them necessary. He said, “we feel we have produced a design that meets with our clients’ needs, minimizes the impact on the neighbours, and had the least amount of impact on the site and surrounding area.”
    Liane O’Grady, who lives near the park, took issue with Zebra’s assertion: “It may meet his client’s wants for a larger, grander house. It may maximize the profit, but it compromises the interests of the general public and all the people who live in the area.” Showing a slide of the property, she continued, “All of what you see here above would be destroyed, and it would detract from the overall experience in the park…”
    Scott Chapman who lives just below the high bluff on which the Madros house will be built, told the CRD Parks Committee: “The granting of both or either of these variances on the size of the house and the setback will intrude massively on the park, altering this space forever for future residents and users, and it also severely intrudes on the sunlight and shadowing on the adjacent property owners who expect that the bylaws for building be upheld, especially in this very sensitive region."
    Cheryl Shoji, who, with Brad Atchison, lives on the west side of the lot, called her presentation “The Rock—the Jewel of the Hill.” Noting how it provides habitat for quail and other birds, as well as some rare plant species, she said, “[it] should not be flattened and destroyed for the pleasure of a single family home.”
    Atchison, who has a post-graduate degree in biology as well as an MBA, told the Committee that even though he was “the most impacted neighbour,” he and his wife were willing to have the house move 66 feet closer to them. He implied this would be better for the  Garry oak ecosystem. “In urban landscapes, the preservation of these unique biodiversity islands is critically important…On the basis of climate change alone—which the CRD views as the most important governance and action imperative—the region needs an intact Garry oak forest ecosystem.” He suggested that the property owner would be “blasting away at least $400,000 of an ancient, panoramic landform with spiritual value to produce rubble.”
    Alternate Director and City of Victoria Councillor Jeremy Loveday also supported Isitt’s motion. He referred to a survey reported on earlier at the meeting which “showed that for those who don’t attend regional parks, the second highest reason that they don’t go to those parks is because they’re too far. For many Victorian residents, Gonzales Hill is the only regional park that they frequently attend, and for some it is the only regional park that they can access. These facts all lead me to think that it’s perfectly reasonable for this committee to take a position on this application as we are a directly affected neighbour.”
    But the Chair of the Regional Parks Committee, David Screech, mayor of View Royal, disagreed. He took issue with the matter even being on the agenda, feeling it inadvisedly “politicized” a decision that should be left to staff. “This is a City of Victoria decision. It’s not a CRD decision,” he argued. “Variances have nothing to do with us, and the Board of Variance is supposed to be a unique, independent body that does not suffer from political interference. To me, this is political interference. Just on that basis, I can’t support it.”
    Isitt had also pointed out that not only is Gonzales Hill Park the only regional park within the Victoria/Oak Bay municipalities, but that residents of those two cities contribute about one-third of all park funds, but have only  0.015 percent of the land base of regional parks located within their municipal borders.
    In response, Screech said: “The simple fact is that the vast majority of the users of regional parks come from Victoria, Oak Bay, and Saanich. It follows that those municipalities would be paying a higher proportion of it. I don’t feel that Victoria’s hard done by it.”
    When Isitt tried to respond, Screech said, “No, we don’t need to debate it, I’m the chair and I get the last word. That’s my response to your comments.”
    The vote was called; it was tied, 4 to 4 (Price, Screech, Kasper, and Seaton opposed; Isitt, Loveday, Williams, Plant for) which meant Chair Screech got to call it. The motion was defeated.
     
    THAT DEFEAT NATURALLY DISMAYED the other neighbours of Gonzales Hill Park. They had hoped the CRD would be a powerful ally standing against the variances because of its impact on Gonzales Hill Park and park users. It was also a rude awakening: it seemed the CRD couldn’t be bothered protecting this beloved park.
    A January 25 letter from General Manager of Parks & Environmental Services Larisa Hutcheson to Fairfield Place resident Atchison had bolstered this judgement. In response to Atchison’s letter pleading with the CRD to take some interest and at least be at the BOV hearing, Hutcheson stated: “After careful consideration, in staff’s view the requested changes would not significantly impact the experience of park users when compared with the existing permitted construction of a single-family dwelling on that lot.”
    Atchison questions the “careful consideration,” arguing that the CRD needs to conduct a scientific Environmental Impact Assessment along with a park user survey to really understand the development’s impact.
    Atchison also criticizes the CRD for rejecting a proposal of the Madros in late 2016 to gain access to their property from the Gonzales Hill Park parking lot, which, according to Rus Collins of Zebra Design, would have reduced the amount of blasting, and minimized the environmental impact. He wrote in a submission to the BOV that the Madros, in exchange, “were willing to donate a portion of their property to the park and work out a covenant agreement to protect the trees at the Fairfield Place end of their site.” Zebra’s Horvat also assured Focus that that access would have been over grass and broom and was “the least affecting for the habitat.”
    The CRD, through Communications Senior Manager Andy Orr, told Focus, “Access through the parking lot was declined because the request would reduce available parking by one spot. Parking is already limited at the park. The request for use of the parking space was for the construction of a driveway across the rocky bluff and meadow within the park. This request was determined to adversely affect the park.” Isitt told Focus he too was not in favour of an easement through the park. Isitt plans to try again to get the CRD to voice concern when the whole Board meets on March 14. Once again, the neighbours will attend and speak in support of the motion.
    The subsequent important date for them, and the Madros, is March 22, when the City’s Board of Variance will consider the two requested variances—one for an additional 769 square feet of total floor space (above the allowed 3229), and one for a 29.75-foot reduction in setback from its rear border. Isitt said, “A bigger house [than zoning allows for] will have more of an impact on the park.”
    But Zebra, on behalf of its client, will explain at the hearing that the lot imposes “hardships” because of its irregular shape and a very steep grade in sections due to a 30-foot ascent from Fairfield Place to the top of the hill. It will also point to the report of Julie Budgen, a professional biologist and environmental planner with Corvidae Environmental Consulting Inc. She wrote, “Considering the biophysical features, habitat and available information, Corvidae is of the opinion the proposed project is best sited on the rock outcrop. Locating the project at this location will minimize the overall impact to the existing wooded area.”
    Every municipality in BC has a Board of Variance (BOV), as mandated under the Local Government Act. It is a quasi-judicial body made up of volunteer members appointed by City Council, but independent of it. As the City website explains: “If a hardship is established, the Board may grant the minimum variance that it believes is necessary to alleviate the hardship. However, the Board may deny the variance request if it feels that the proposed variance would substantially affect the use and enjoyment of a neighbouring property, harm the natural environment or defeat the purpose of the Zoning Regulation Bylaw.”
    Minutes from past BOVs are on the City’s website, and it is easy to scan through them and notice that most requested variances are unanimously approved.
    The City states the BOV must be “persuaded that the present zoning creates an undue hardship unique to the property in question.” In one case where a variance was denied, the minutes state, “Board is sympathetic to time, money and material waste—although cannot consider these as hardships.” The Board seems to give weight to neighbours’ opinions, but even when neighbours show up to complain, variances are often approved. The BOV’s final deliberations are carried out in closed sessions and all decisions are final; there is no appeal.
    Currently chaired by Andrew Rushforth, one of the BOV’s other four members is Rus Collins, principal designer and owner of Zebra Group, the developer of the Madros’ property. He will recuse himself from the deliberations on this property. But for Atchison, it’s still a bit too cozy to not potentially influence the BOV. He and other citizens exposed to the BOV process feel it is time for some serious revisions. One Rockland citizen, about a different development, noted in an exasperated email to Focus, “The BOV has no accountability and there is no oversight. Who ensures they comply with the BOV bylaw? Who defines ‘minor’ variance, who defines ‘hardship?’”
    The City of Victoria too has expressed concern about the Board of Variance process. On February 8, City council unanimously passed a resolution (moved by Councillors Isitt and Madoff) to the Union of BC Municipalities to ask “the provincial government to review the provisions of the Local Government Act relating to Boards of Variance and consider amendments to ensure that the issues of public accountability, transparency and local democracy are upheld.” The prelude to this motion noted that “deliberations of local Boards of Variance provide minimal opportunities for public comment on the requested variances, and provide no role for comment from the elected council of a municipality or the board of a regional district in unincorporated areas.”
    Even if the Madros’ variances are denied, it’s doubtful that neighbours will be happy with the situation. Virtually any house on that site will reduce the privacy of neighbours, involve noisy blasting and construction, and block some views from the park. But it’s one of very few official avenues they have to speak against it.
     
    WHY DIDN'T THE CRD BUY THE LAND ITSELF? It would have enlarged Gonzales Hill Park in a significant way, providing more of a wildlife corridor, retaining views, and certainly keeping the neighbours and numerous park users happy.
    The lot in question was listed at $1 million, but there is plenty of money in the CRD’s Land Acquisition Fund, which gets an injection of about $4 million every year through a $20 levy on all CRD households. In the past two years, land purchases totalling $2.62 million have been made, but a healthy fund remains—and grows annually— at least until 2019 when it’s up for review. It can be used for no other purpose than park land purchases.
    Focus asked the CRD why it hadn’t bought the land. An emailed response from the communications manager stated: “The Oak Bay/Victoria part of the Capital Region was not one of the priority areas of interest for park land acquisition. Details about specific land acquisitions are confidential.”
    Interviewed in his home at the base of the steep hill on which the Madros will build, Atchison said it is a shame that the CRD did not purchase the lot when the opportunity presented itself. The CRD’s land acquisition strategy report notes that “To be effective, the land acquisition strategy needs to account for opportunistic acquisition of important lands.”
    Atchison told Focus he’d lead a fundraising campaign in the community, though he believes the CRD should pay for part of it, with the City of Victoria helping. The CRD should, if necessary, even expropriate the lot, he said; and the Madros should be “made whole,” by which he means reimbursed for their lot at fair market value.
    While it seems unlikely, he hasn’t given up hope yet.
    Atchison is clearly disgusted with the CRD’s lack of good stewardship of Gonzales Hill Park, noting among other things, “They have spent squat” on the park’s maintenance.
    However, he is most vociferous in his condemnation of the governing body’s disengagement around the zoning issue. As he stated in a letter to Screech, “the way the CRD has reacted to-date in handling this situation reinforces, unfortunately, the commonly-held perception of the CRD as an unaccountable, unelected local government, largely unresponsive to community needs with a costly staff complement of about 1200 people.”
    He and his neighbours are now linking up with concerned citizens in other Fairfield, Rockland, and Oak Bay neighbourhoods to fight what they see as disrespectful “overdevelopment.”
    Leslie Campbell lives within walking distance of Gonzales Hill Park.

    David Broadland
    January 11, 2018
    Did Mayor Helps conceal a serious bridge design flaw from other councillors and the public at a critical moment? Only the expeditious public release of pertinent records will show what happened.
     

     
    TWO BOLT-ON PLATES DEFACING THE FRACTURE-CRITICAL RINGS of the new Johnson Street Bridge aren’t a problem, according to Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps. The real problem, Helps stated in a Facebook post, were “a number of serious factual errors and inaccuracies” made by me in my story about the issue in the January/February edition of Focus.
    Below her Facebook statement Helps endorsed comments posted anonymously on the social media site reddit. On reddit, anyone can call themselves an “engineer” by providing an email address to a computerized registration system. Helps’ and her Facebook fans were moved by the assurances of reddit “engineers” HollywoodTK and thisguy86 that there was nothing unusual about a new $115-million bridge sporting repair patches before it even opened. My own article on the issue, on the other hand, even though it is likely subject to the careful scrutiny of libel lawyers working for the companies and professionals named in the article, is, according to Helps, untrustworthy.
    I will come back to Mayor Helps’ role in the City’s response to the issue, but first let me report on information that came in after publication of my original story.
    Firstly, City of Victoria Councillor Jeremy Loveday confirmed that he had not been informed about the issue before he read our story. Loveday’s statement seems to suggest that Project Director Jonathan Huggett, a professional engineer, did not properly inform his client—the City of Victoria—about a significant structural issue that had arisen during construction of the rings in China. However, it’s also possible that Loveday is the only person at City Hall that wasn’t told.
    Secondly, photos taken in Victoria show the work of cutting steel out of the rings and then adding the bolt-on plates took place at Point Hope Shipyard in Victoria in October.
    Thirdly, engineers and experts in steel fabrication have expressed concern that the bolt-on steel plates will likely create a corrosion problem that could increase maintenance costs and shorten the useful life of the bridge. While social media comments have focussed on the way in which the steel plates diminish the structure’s aesthetic value, the plates may end up costing City of Victoria taxpayers tens of millions of dollars as a result of premature loss of use.
    Professional engineers and steel fabrication experts that have contacted Focus have confirmed that the concerns we identified in our story are reasonable. Even with only one sentence of the Atema report that first identified a weakness in the rings during construction in China, engineers confirmed that at least partial responsibility for the issue likely lies with the rings’ designers, Hardesty & Hanover. Until the full Atema report is released, the full extent of Hardesty & Hanover’s responsibility for the weakness in the rings is unknown.
    If the City had insisted on rings that did not have bolt-on plates, whatever additional costs were incurred would have been borne by the various parties to the extent they were responsible for the weakness in the rings. The extent of blame assigned to each of the parties involved is unknown.
    What we do know is that Hardesty & Hanover’s Engineer of Record for the project was able to sign off on a cheap, bolted-on plate solution even though he was the Engineer of Record at least partly responsible for the structural weakness that needed to be addressed. The record of how all this played out needs to be made public since there seems to be an inherent conflict of interest at work in what occurred, with City of Victoria taxpayers coming out on the losing end.
    Following publication of our story, a concerned steel fabrication expert asked Engineers and Geoscientists of BC (EGBC) to confirm that the addition of bolt-on plates to the fracture-critical rings needed to be approved by an engineer other than the Engineer of Record. The EGBC confirmed that such an approval would have been required and directed the expert to Hardesty & Hanover’s Keith Griesing, the Engineer of Record, for Griesing’s confirmation that such a review took place.
    In response to advice from one professional engineer, we checked EGBC’s online membership directory to confirm that Griesing is a registered professional engineer in BC. The EGBC did not confirm his membership. Griesing has not yet responded to a request for information from Focus. The expert in steel fabrication told Focus, “I believe it is not necessary for the Engineer of Record to be registered as a member of EGBC provided that he is registered as an Engineer in a jurisdiction acceptable to EGBC.”
    Lastly, we have learned that the public statements issued separately by Helps and Loveday—the same statements, word-for-word—were provided to them by City Manager Jocelyn Jenkins. Since Jenkins is not an engineer, the claim Loveday and Helps made that what we reported in our story as a “design flaw” should have been called a “fabrication challenge” had to come from Huggett. (Loveday has since apologized for not making it clear that his statement was copied from a briefing note. Mayor Helps’ has made no such clarification.)
    The entire attempt to build architect Sebastien Ricard’s unproven design has definitely been a “fabrication challenge,” but the specific way in which a structural weakness had been engineered into the rings remains a design flaw until further, more complete information proves otherwise.
    Aside from the important issues of safety, lowered life expectancy and diminished aesthetic value, there are other questions involving professional and political conduct that need to be examined. If it isn’t clear to you already, let me outline why the City’s characterization of our story as “a number of serious factual errors and inaccuracies” ought to be seen as obfuscation—a non-denial denial, as I predicted in my initial story.
    The weakness in the rings was first identified on December 9, 2016 in China. At the time, the rings were still being fabricated. Reinforcing the problematic section of the rings in a way that would not create long-term corrosion problems or diminish the aesthetic value of the bridge was still possible. Since the cost of that refabrication would have been the responsibility of those companies whose work had contributed to the structural weakness in the rings, the best interests of the City of Victoria would have been served by refabrication. But that didn’t happen. Why not?
    On the surface, it appears that no one in Victoria was told, so there was no opportunity for the City to consider its options.
    If the City had been told, and it had insisted on refabrication—and why wouldn’t it?—who would have had to pay? Hardesty & Hanover and/or PCL.
    Somehow, Victoria got a defective bridge and PCL and Hardesty & Hanover got a free pass. What happened?
    Huggett should have been informed about the Atema report’s findings shortly after December 9, 2016. If he was, it’s not clear whether he even notified the City. The evidence that he didn’t tell his client, so far, is the absence of any mention of the issue in his public reports, and Councillor Loveday’s public statement that our story was the first he had heard of the issue. So let’s pursue—cautiously—the hypothetical case in which Huggett told no one at City Hall. What would be the implications of that? Keep in mind that Huggett is paid approximately $300,000 each year by taxpayers to watch over the City’s interests on the project.
    If Huggett had told no one, the main beneficiary of such a concealment would have been Hardesty & Hanover and/or PCL. But Huggett’s client is the City of Victoria. If this was how things happened—Huggett telling no one—how would we expect a sensible mayor to act when the existence of the design flaw was publicized by Focus?
    A sensible mayor would see that if Huggett had kept the City in the dark, that would have allowed Hardesty & Hanover and/or PCL to avoid the higher cost of refabrication as compared with bolt-on plates. A sensible, cautious mayor would, on first hearing of this issue, understand that Huggett’s apparent failure to inform her would require the immediate production of all the records that could show exactly what took place during the nearly eight months between the Atema report and shipment of the rings to Victoria. Otherwise, public trust in civic government would plummet. A sensible mayor would demand: “Release the records.” But that didn’t happen.
    Rather than acting swiftly to push for release of those records, Helps parrotted Huggett’s statement, assuring the public that the real problems plaguing the bridge project were serious factual errors and inaccuracies in the observations of the guy who first noticed the bolt-on plates.
    So, given that Helps is a reasonably sensible mayor who is perfectly capable of sniffing out corruption, we can likely reject the hypothesis that Huggett didn’t tell anyone at City Hall.
    That leads us, inevitably, to the only other reasonable hypothetical possibility—that Huggett informed one or more officials at City Hall, and that between them they decided that the best course of action was to keep the issue concealed from Loveday (and probably other councillors) and settle for a quick, cheap fix that kept the bridge on schedule for completion well before next November’s civic election, bolt-on plates and all.
    Let’s cautiously explore this possibility. As a reporter, I’ve found that when public officials won’t answer direct questions, they are usually trying to avoid public embarrassment. It’s awful to be publicly embarrassed, but public embarrassment is a powerful and legitimate tool that has been traditionally used to hold people accountable for their actions when they screw up some decision they had to make.
    In preparation for my initial story, after Huggett declined to say whether he had informed the City, I emailed questions to Mayor Helps, including whether she had been filled in by Huggett on the issue. The questions were simple and could have been answered with a “Yes” or a “No.” I also asked her for important dates when things might have happened. The mayor did not respond to any of five emails sent over a one-week period.
    Then, following Helps’ release of the Huggett-Jenkins statement on her Facebook page and her implicit endorsement of the anonymous reddit engineers, I emailed her a request to itemize the “serious factual errors and inaccuracies” she had referenced in her statement. Normally, a public official that makes such a claim would have proactively provided that information without being asked. That’s the process: We make a mistake, the official tells us about the mistake we made, and if they are correct we acknowledge our error. So I asked the mayor to make those mistakes clear.
    Then something peculiar happened. Mayor Helps’ inadvertently copied me on a “proposed response” to my questions that she had meant to send only to Jenkins and Huggett and one other City staffer. “Do you see any downfalls in this approach?” the mayor asked Huggett and Jenkins. Later, realizing what she had done, Helps emailed me: “David there you have my response. Sent before my morning meditation and copied to you inadvertently. But truth may walk through the world unarmed. So please feel free to use what I have said.” She had written: “I trust all of the reporters at the Times Colonist. I trust all of the reporters at Vic News. I trust all of the reporters at CBC and CFAX. I trust all of the reporters at CTV, CHEK, and GLOBAL. This trust has come through hard conversations, good reporting and relationship building. I do not trust you. As such I feel that however I answer your questions you will use the answers to suit your own needs, not to serve the public good.”
    Mayor Helps made no attempt to point out even a single error or inaccuracy.
    The mayor’s insistence that Focus needs to negotiate stories with her before she will provide factual information is an interesting issue all by itself, but it’s not the issue at hand so let’s not be diverted by it.
    Why wouldn’t the mayor respond in a straightforward manner and provide the “serious factual errors and inaccuracies”? Added to her failure to answer questions for the first story, my reporter’s nose tells me Mayor Helps is hiding something.
    Here’s what now appears to me to be the most likely chain of events: Atema issued its report in December 2016. Huggett informed then-City Manager Jason Johnson. Johnson informed Helps and perhaps City engineering staff. Between them they decided to accept the quickest fix to the weak-rings problem and to conceal the issue from the other councillors and the public, perhaps thinking that no one would notice the bolt-on plates. Now the City is busily trying to hide their miscalculations and errors in judgement to avoid embarrassment.
    If I’m wrong, and neither Helps nor Huggett have anything to hide, all they need to do to prove that is to release the full Atema report, the record of all Huggett’s communications about that report and the bolt-on plates, and the required independent third-party review of the proposed fix, if that was done. Then all local media can share that information with the public, which will then be better able to gauge whether the public interest—or a corporate, political or personal interest—was served by the actions of whoever was involved. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine. He has been, reluctantly, following the bridge issue for about nine years.

    David Broadland
    January 2018
    The latest cover-up on the $115-million project raises the question: What needs to change at Victoria City Hall?
     
    LIKE MANY VICTORIANS, I visited the Johnson Street Bridge construction site in early December to check out the newly-erected rings. My attention was immediately drawn to two large, heavily-bolted plates attached to the underside of each of the rings at the 12-o’clock position. Uh-oh.
    As you may know, I have been watching this project closely, for nine years. No such plates had ever appeared in any of the detailed construction drawings or project photographs that I had seen over the past five years of construction. I snapped a few photographs. At home, blown up, the photos showed that the welded steel rings—which took three years to fabricate in China—had recently been cut open. Steel plates, angle steel and hundreds of bolts had then been placed over the openings. This assemblage had a “quick-and-dirty” appearance, the kind of short-term repair you might expect to see on a bridge deemed to be near the end of its useful life—not at the start.
     

    As a result of a flaw in its structural design, the signature feature of the new bridge—the rings—required the addition of external bolt-on plates (inset).
     
    I sent my photos to Project Director Jonathan Huggett and asked him for an explanation. Over Huggett’s nearly four years on the job, I’ve sent him questions several times. Before this, he hadn’t answered a single question. In his last non-response, he had explained, “I am very busy trying to deal with a multitude of issues right now.” I didn’t expect to hear from him this time, either, but he surprised me.
    In an email, Huggett revealed that Atema—the quality-control company hired by the City of Victoria to monitor fabrication in China of the large steel parts of the bridge—had issued a “non-compliance report” (NCR) on December 9, 2016 after an inspection of the rings. Atema’s report indicated the structure contained a design flaw that could leave the rings vulnerable to metal fatigue.
    In response to discovery of the design flaw, Huggett says, “Lengthy discussions occurred in China and North America during the first half of 2017 and a number of different options to remedy the comments in the NCR were presented and reviewed. After discussions involving many experts in steel fabrication, the Engineer of Record agreed to design a bolt-on steel plate to ensure that the rings had not only the required strength, but also met the fatigue design requirements for the opening and closing of the bridge. This amended design was carried out and signed off by the Engineer of Record.”
    Wow. That’s a dramatically understated admission that the project had gone dangerously off the rails. After three years of fabrication, the rings had to be hacked into with cutting torches and hastily repaired. Yet not one of Huggett’s public reports to City councillors even hinted at such a problem. Huggett apparently had no intention of publicly acknowledging the design flaw, or the repair, unless someone else brought it up. Were those his instructions from the City?
    One question that immediately occurred to me: Is this the structure’s only design flaw?
    Huggett, a private engineering consultant, was appointed project director in 2014 by the City of Victoria after a report he authored condemned the project for its lack of leadership. He billed the City about $300,000 for his services, including expenses, in 2017.
    When pressed for more information, including the date he had informed City of Victoria officials about the design flaw, Huggett simply responded: “We have no additional information to provide.”
    If Huggett had informed anyone at City Hall about the design flaw, it most likely would have been City Manager Jason Johnson, who hired Huggett in 2014. But Johnson was fired by City council shortly after the rings arrived in Victoria, so I was unable to confirm whether Huggett told Johnson about the design flaw and repair. Five emails to Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps asking her to confirm whether or not Huggett had informed City councillors all went unanswered.
    I’ll come back to the question of why City Hall is reluctant to acknowledge what has happened, but first let me describe more exactly what was done to the rings after the design flaw was discovered. (If some readers have a hard time wading through this account, my apologies. I am hoping that an engineer with bridge design and/or bridge construction experience will come forward to comment on the repair that has been done to the new bridge.)
    I provided Huggett with a written description of what appears to be a hastily-executed repair that has been made to both rings and asked him to correct any part of my description so that it would accurately reflect the “amended design” for the public record. Huggett provided no correction.
    Sometime after the trial fit-up of all the major parts of the bridge in China in March 2017, significant, identical alterations were made to each ring. This included cutting out a section of steel plate from the inside flange of each ring. Steel appears to have been removed from the centre of each ring right out to their outer edge. This removal included about one metre of steel along the edge of the rings, including the weld.
     

    This project photo of the south ring in March, 2017 shows the intended design. Despite having known about the design flaw for over three months, the project then proceeded in such a way as to make it impossible to back-track and properly address the issue. Later, a large section of steel (in the area indicated by the yellow circle) was cut away from both rings and then covered over with bolt-on plates.
     
    These cutouts in the rings would have allowed access to the interior of the ring. Work may have been done inside the rings to address the fatigue issue identified by Atema. A photograph of the rings taken during their fabrication (see below) shows an abrupt narrowing of the structural steel in the same area where, later, the bolt-on plates were installed. This abrupt transition in the structure, along with an internal access port, may have prompted Atema’s report.
     

    The south ring during fabrication in China in July 2016. The yellow circle indicates the area of the ring later red-lined by Atema’s non-compliance report.
     
    Whether or not any steel was then added to the internal structure of the rings is unknown. If not, the next step would have involved attaching the external plates, which are about two metres by two metres in size. That required drilling 180 approximately three-quarter-inch-diameter holes into each ring, with matching holes in the plates. The plates are bolted along the edge of each ring to a steel angle that protrudes from the gap cut in the rings. The angles are bolted to the inside of the rings’ side webs. Filler pieces roughly support the plates at their forward edges where the plates span an uneven surface. The plates appear to be deformed (bent) across this uneven surface.
    One question that arises: Wouldn’t drilling a large number of holes, in a small area that had already been identified as having a weakness, further weaken the rings? The rings are considered “fracture-critical,” which implies their failure could lead to collapse of the bridge.
    As well, gaps and joints between the rings’ original steel and the bolted-on steel parts, evident in photographs, seem to make it possible for moisture to get between the steel surfaces and from there into the bolt holes. If that happens, corrosion would occur. The plates, angle steel and bolts introduce the need for careful, ongoing inspection, additional maintenance and future repair that would not have been required if a properly fabricated structure had been delivered.
    While many questions require answers from the City, what is known seems straightforward and damning: The design flaw was pointed out by a company whose actual job was to certify the grade of steel being used, monitor the quality of the welding, and ensure fabrication proceeded according to drawings that originated with Hardesty & Hanover, the company that engineered the steel lifting section of the bridge. Its drawings were supposed to be checked and approved by the City’s project manager, MMM Group, which has billed the City for close to $20 million for its services on the project since 2009. Fabrication of the lifting section began in China in early 2014. So it took nearly three years before anyone noticed this flaw in Hardesty & Hanover’s design, and then it was discovered by someone not responsible for the engineering of the structure. The structural integrity of this part of the bridge was judged to be so far below standard that an extraordinary intervention was required. It then took, according to Huggett, another six or seven months before a decision was made about how to address the flaw. Part of that decision included choosing to conceal the problem from the public. Another part of the decision was to do a quick-and-dirty repair. Is that because the rings had already been shipped to Victoria, precluding a proper repair at the steel fabrication plant in China?
    So many questions with no answers.
    While the Engineer of Record may have “signed off” on the bolt-on plates, the Engineer of Record works for the same company—Hardesty & Hanover—that engineered the structural flaw into the design in the first place. As engineers, their work is now suspect and their stamp of approval on their solution to a problem they created seems fraught with potential for conflict of interest. Wouldn’t City of Victoria councillors have wanted to obtain an independent, disinterested assessment of the proposed fix? Did they?
    If councillors had been made aware of this flaw and its proposed remedy, and agreed to accept a substandard bridge anyway, they have a lot to answer for—public oversight of the project appears to have failed.
    Until the City of Victoria makes it clear whether or not Huggett informed City officials of the circumstances related to the design flaw, it ought to be assumed that he did. If that’s the case, City councillors will need to explain the basis for their decision to accept a  bridge that needed to be repaired. At the very least, they ought to provide public answers to the following:
    1. When were City councillors informed about the design flaw?
    2. When were they informed about the proposed fix?
    3. Did the City of Victoria obtain an opinion from an independent  professional engineer—one with no previous involvement with any of the parties undertaking the project—as to whether the City should agree to the proposed fix?
    4. In return for accepting a substandard bridge, has the City of Victoria obtained a long-term guarantee from the builder (PCL), beyond the limited two-year warranty previously agreed to, that the damaged rings will be replaced by the builder if the repair shows any sign of deterioration or failure over the expected life of the bridge?
    5. Were councillors planning on informing the public of the design flaw and repair before the coming civic election?
    It has taken 9 years and, if we’re honest, about $115 million to build a 156-metre-long bridge that needed to be repaired before it could be opened.Why has this happened to our city?
    Long before this particular design flaw emerged and its cover-up commenced, the project had repeatedly reduced the value of the bridge being built, each time concealing that fact from the public. Focus has documented this sad history, right from the project’s origins in 2008. This seems an appropriate moment to recount why this troubled project has turned out the way it has.
     
    THE LONG RECORD OF CONCEALMENT OF PROBLEMS with the bridge’s design and construction seems to be a natural consequence of the project’s controversial origins, and the haste with which a conceptual design was chosen. The project was born at the height of the world financial crisis in late 2008 and early 2009, when governments around the planet rushed forward with gigantic plans for infrastructure spending to stimulate the global economy. In Victoria, the possibility of a big federal-provincial grant appeared just after the City had received an engineering assessment of the condition of the 86-year-old Johnson Street Bridge. This unfortunate coincidence determined the fundamental nature of the project that followed: It was hurried, and therefore ill-conceived.
    To justify going after a big grant, whose application deadline was only weeks away, City officials had to quickly manufacture a plausible rationale for replacing the Johnson Street Bridge. They did that by abruptly announcing that the Johnson Street Bridge had a serious seismic vulnerability. On top of that, the City claimed that repairing the bridge would require lengthy closure—at great economic cost to Downtown businesses. Since that repair would be only marginally less expensive than building a new bridge at $40 million, the City argued, building a new bridge was the best choice.
    But before the City took that position, it had been advised, unequivocally, by two professional engineers on two separate occasions, to repair the double bridge rather than replace it. The first engineer to provide that direction, Joost Meyboom, told the City in 2008 that an adequate repair, including seismic upgrading, would cost $8.6 million. The second engineer, Mark Mulvihill, gave the same advice in 2009. Mulvihill based his recommendation on the structure’s “high and significant” heritage values. But Meyboom’s and Mulvihill’s professional recommendations were concealed by the City, and were only revealed through FOIs filed well after City council had committed to a new bridge.
    That’s how the project started. Founded on a fundamentally deceptive approach to providing information about the project, City managers went on to repeat—for the next nine years—that same pattern of misrepresentation and concealment in response to every major challenge that came along.
    Instead of following Meyboom’s and Mulvihill’s recommendations, the City placed its bet on a back-of-the-envelope concept created by Sebastien Ricard at the British architectural firm Wilkinson Eyre. Inexplicably, Ricard’s design depended on a novel open-ring (no axle) lifting mechanism that had previously been used for only two small bridges in the Canary Wharf development in London. Just a few years old, the bridges had almost no record of performance or durability. Nor was there any proof that the open-ring design could be successfully scaled up to the size proposed for Victoria. By July 2009 the City was estimating the project would cost $63 million.
    When it tried to proceed without electors’ consent, a counter-petition—mounted in the middle of a cold winter by indignant Victoria citizens—successfully forced the City to put its plan to a referendum. The City’s response to that setback, in preparation for a vote, was to spend heavily on creating the perception that building a new bridge would be less expensive than repairing the existing structure, and that Ricard’s design would allow a number of highly desirable features: dedicated bicycle lanes, rail, a high level of seismic protection, a wider navigational channel and a “signature” structure with high-level architectural qualities that would make the bridge “world class” and “iconic.”

    Sebastien Ricard’s glamorous, but hastily-conceived, 2010 design was approved by voters in a borrowing referendum. 

    Critics of the project, like Ross Crockford, a director of the watchdog organization that had forced the City to hold a referendum, pointed to the unproven, experimental nature of the design. To Crockford— who, unlike the City, had sought out the advice of bridge engineers not involved in the project—the design presented an unnecessary financial risk to City taxpayers. The design flaw discovered by Atema is exactly the kind of risk critics like Crockford warned the City about, before and after the referendum. The City ignored those warnings, and so did the majority of City voters. In the November 2010 referendum, electors approved the City’s now-$77-million-plan.
    Soon after the referendum had been won, project engineers and City staff quietly began stripping away most of the promised elements of the project’s scope, even as the project’s cost continued to climb.
    The first things to go were rail and a wider navigational channel.
    Ricard’s renderings of the bridge from 2010 all show a bridge wide enough to accommodate rail and long enough to allow a navigational channel 47 metres wide. But records obtained by Focus showed that project engineers suspected Ricard’s open-ring design couldn’t actually accommodate either. By early 2011, MMM engineers were gathering evidence to help convince City managers, behind closed doors, that the City should build a much smaller bridge.
    By mid-2011 the City had signed a design contract with MMM that, contrary to promises made before the referendum, eliminated rail, reduced the opening span from 47 to 41 metres, and reduced the required life expectancy of the approach bridges from 100 years to 75 years. There was no proactive disclosure of these latter two reductions in quality and scope. They only became known to councillors and the public later, through FOIs filed by Focus.
    The shortage of truthfulness wasn’t confined to the engineers. Just before the civic election in 2011, City Manager Gail Stephens  announced that the project “continues to be within the budget of $77 million and the March 2016 timeline.” But, as we learned much later, she was hiding the truth from both councillors and the public. An FOI filed in 2012 showed Stephens had been warned months before by City staff that the project was definitely over budget. Those staff advised her that councillors should be informed. Stephens failed to do so. As for her claim of being on schedule for completion by March 2016, the truth of that is now evident.
    In mid-2012, while the City was working with three companies short-listed to bid on the bridge’s construction contract, two significant changes were made to the project’s scope. Each of these changes was made to lower the cost of the project after the three companies bidding on the contract made it clear the City’s recently-expanded $93-million budget would not cover the cost of even the shrunken bridge it wanted them to build.
    The first of these changes was a decision to leave the support piers of the existing bridge in place. That would eliminate the cost of removing and disposing of the piers, but this also resulted in losing one of the primary objectives of the project: a wider navigational channel under the bridge. The width of the channel was limited by the existing piers which were 39 metres apart. Leaving them in place meant the navigational clearance would be virtually the same, with no reduction in the risk of marine traffic hitting the bridge. Project managers hid this change, too, from councillors, who were left to learn about it from the pages of Focus.
    At the same time, in mid-2012, City managers secretly accepted a lower standard of seismic performance for the bridge. While no engineer can, with great certainty, guarantee that a bridge will be accessible to traffic after a large earthquake, MMM engineer Joost Meyboom had convinced the City that it should buy the highest level of seismic protection possible. Meyboom put the cost of that protection at $10 million and, during the 2010 referendum, electors were told the bridge would include that high level of protection.
    However, after it had been established (in secret) by the three companies bidding for the construction contract that MMM’s estimate of cost was too low, MMM introduced a document into the procurement process that accepted a much lower level of seismic performance than Meyboom had previously advised the City to accept. This document’s reduced seismic design criteria allowed for the replacement of the planned all-steel approach bridges with more economical—but more seismically vulnerable— concrete structures.
    Again, councillors were left in the dark. I’ll come back to the lowered seismic design criteria in a moment, because the way this issue was manipulated by the City when it was made public in these pages is a good indicator of how the City will respond publicly to the design flaw issue. But first, let me refresh your memory about the warnings about the design that were provided by the companies in their bids for the construction contract.
    Two of the bid proposals rejected Ricard’s open-ring design outright as too risky in terms of cost, reliability, and repairability. The third bid, from PCL, rejected a part of Ricard’s design and altered what remained in a way that allowed PCL to meet the City’s price ceiling. But that alteration also resulted in material changes that PCL expected would reduce the life of the bridge before major repairs would be needed. PCL admitted its proposal would result in a bridge in which parts that were “subject to wear” would last only 30 years.
    Senior City managers kept all these warnings out of sight of elected officials. Records obtained by Focus show that at a critical in camera meeting soon after the bids were received—a moment in which councillors could have been fully apprised of the companies’ warnings before committing to Ricard’s design—City staff didn’t even mention them.
    In light of the design flaw discovered by Atema and its warning of the risk of metal fatigue, it now seems possible that one of those parts “subject to wear” is the entire section of the bridge built in China.
     
    LET'S GO BACK AND PICK UP THE THREAD about the project’s reduced seismic design criteria. The document mentioned above later became part of the City’s contract with PCL. Its presence in the contract protects PCL from any future legal claim from the City of Victoria in the case that the bridge suffers unrepairable damage—or is unusable by emergency vehicles—following a much smaller seismic event than that for which Meyboom had recommended the City prepare.
    Keep in mind that Meyboom had put the value of that additional protection at $10 million, and the City had agreed to pay for this extra protection in exchange for an implied guarantee that the bridge would stand up well in a large earthquake. That $10 million had been included in the “$77 million” estimate in 2010. That extra $10 million was meant for such features as all-steel approach bridges, which have much better seismic performance than concrete.
    Recall that questions about the seismic vulnerability of the existing double bridge had been the primary rationale for replacing it. Ironically, all four of its approach bridges were steel. But inclusion of the Seismic Design Criteria document in PCL’s contract meant the City had, in effect, agreed to a lower level of seismic performance, so concrete approach bridges could now be used in the new bridge. None of this was divulged to councillors when they were asked to approve a contract with PCL.
    When the issue was brought to light by Focus in 2015, Huggett, by then project director, provided an extensive non-denial denial that carefully avoided even acknowledging the existence of the contract document that contains the lowered seismic design criteria. For readers unfamiliar with the expression “non-denial denial”: This is a term coined by journalists to describe a response from a subject that sounds like a refutation of facts, but, on careful examination, doesn’t actually refute anything specific in the reporting and doesn’t provide any evidence that disproves the report, yet isn’t, itself, untruthful.
     
    EACH OF THE ABOVE DECEPTIONS was first divulged to the public in the pages of Focus. The City has never presented any evidence that what we have reported was inaccurate or untrue. Yet, in almost every case, some City official—often the mayor of the day—has appeared at other Victoria media outlets with vigorous non-denial denials of our reports.
    The City hasn’t limited its defensive tactics to traditional obfuscation, though. They’ve been ground-breakers on keeping the record opaque. When Focus filed an FOI that sought evidence that Stephens had been advised the project was already over-budget in 2011, the City employed a legal maneuver—used against a media outlet only once before in BC’s history—that allowed it to delay responding to our FOI. On the very day the City was required to provide evidence to the Office of the Information Commissioner to support its tactic, the City withdrew its claim. Such self-inflicted wounds to the City’s credibility have not been without cost.
    One cost of the serial deceptions has been a continuous loss of top-level City managers closely associated with the project: City Manager Gail Stephens, Director of Operations Peter Sparanese and Director of Engineering Dwayne Kalynchuk all “resigned” suddenly—or were fired. Others, too, have disappeared.
    As well as that huge loss of senior personnel, the serial deceptions have had a corrosive effect on the community’s trust in its civic government. Why didn’t City councillors put a halt to the repeated cycle of beating down the value of the project and concealment of their actions?
    The majority on council went along with the original rushed decision in 2009, and concealment of the project’s problems provided those seeking re-election in 2011 and 2014 with cover for their original error in judgment.
    To be fair, in many of the cases in which City staff reduced the scope of the project in significant ways just to keep Ricard’s open-ring design alive, councillors were simply not informed. In some cases, once those issues were made public, senior staff soon resigned or were fired. But getting rid of project managers didn’t have any effect on the basic underlying problem: The initial decision to proceed had been rushed, and in that rush a difficult-to-build and under-priced design had been chosen.
    That brings us back to the current issue of the design flaw discovered by Atema and concealed by…well we don’t know who yet, but when we do, we’ll let you know.
    What we will likely hear from the City now, if past behaviour is any predictor, is an adamant non-denial denial. Regardless, Victoria is now stuck with a badly degraded version of Ricard’s problematic design, and the only recourse for electors seeking accountability is to get out and vote in November’s election.
    UPDATE: A follow-up story has been posted here: Victoria City Hall continues cover-up of bridge design flaw
    (This story was edited in June 2018 to reflect information about the physical size of the plates obtained by FOI. The plates are each about two metres by two metres in size, not one metre by one metre as we originally reported.)
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

    Pamela Roth
    November 2017
    The organization appears to offer addicts a needed route to recovery, while preserving farmland. What’s the hold up?
     
    RYAN COLWELL WAS ONCE ON THE FAST TRACK TO DEATH. Addicted to heroin and fentanyl, the former Surrey resident found himself living on the streets of Victoria at the age of 24, bouncing from shelter to shelter for a place to lay his head. Every day was the same routine—search for more drugs and money, which he’d steal and rob from people in order to get his next fix.
    “It’s pretty sad,” said the soft-spoken Colwell, sitting on a pile of hay bales at Central Saanich’s Woodwynn Farms. “You do whatever you have to do. You just want to be blissful.”
    Eventually, friends and family lost their patience, and cut ties with Colwell’s drug-fuelled life. He started seeking fentanyl to get high, even though he knew the dangers of using the deadly and highly-addictive opioid that’s 100 times more potent than morphine and 20 times more potent than OxyContin. Even one dose can be fatal.
    So far this year (October, 2017), 1,013 people have died of suspected illicit drug overdoses in BC compared to 547 deaths at the same time last year. Fentanyl was detected in more than 80 percent of the deaths—an increase of 151 percent over the same period in 2016.
    Colwell never overdosed on fentanyl, but has seen plenty of people who have. He just never thought it would happen to him.
    “You see people around you die, but you think that you’re not going to die because ‘I don’t do as much’ or ‘I don’t shoot it with a needle,’” said Colwell, who’s watched many acquaintances receive multiple injections of naloxone—a prescription medicine that blocks the effects of opioids and reverses an overdose. “It’s scary, but you’re mostly scared for that person. You think they’re going to die.”
    Battling his addiction since the age of 18, following the death of his father, Colwell has been in and out of numerous treatment facilities, but none of the tools he learned from them ever stuck long- term. Last January, sick of life on the street, he wound up living at Woodwynn Farms, waking up every day at 5 a.m., slinging hay bales to feed the livestock, and whatever else is required among the lengthy list of daily chores.
    The 193-acre organic farm has been operating for eight years now, providing those struggling with addictions, homelessness or mental health challenges with a therapeutic community that gives them the tools needed to integrate back into society. Those who come to the farm are mainly men, ranging in age from 19 to 60, and stay for an average of 18 months.
    Although the facility has attracted a large crew of volunteers, and thousands of donors, service clubs and church groups to help out, it’s still trying to get fully off the ground, due to an eight-year battle between the Creating Homefulness Society (Woodwynn’s operator) and municipal authorities over the housing and operations of the farm.
     

    Woodwynn Farms' Richard Leblanc (Photo by Pamela Roth)
     
    RICHARD LEBLANC, WOODWYNN’S FOUNDER and executive director, worked as a contractor for much of his career, but couldn’t help notice that Victoria’s homeless problem was spiraling out of control. Feeling like there had to be a better solution, he stumbled upon a free therapeutic community in Italy called San Patrignano, which has become the largest therapeutic work community in the world with 1,800 participants at a time. In 30 years, San Patrignano has helped more than 20,000 people. Seventy percent of them are still drug-free years later.
    “Everybody has something meaningful and purposeful to do here every day,” said Leblanc about Woodwynn. “Over and over again you’re watching people that might die. You help them out and they move on with their life.”
    Each day begins with a morning yoga session at 5:45 a.m., followed by a healthy breakfast from food grown on the farm, then a group meeting. The rest of the day is spent tending to the daily duties of running a farm that has 400 livestock consisting of chickens, cows and pigs; food crops (60 different fruits and vegetables); and a woodworking shop that’s helped spruce up the property immensely.
    The goods created there, which range from salad dressings, jams, pickled zucchini, soaps and herbal teas to meat and produce, are sold in a market at the farm, providing what Leblanc calls an “incredible showcase” of what those who work there can do.
    But it’s only scratching the surface of the farm’s potential. Most of the property is currently used to grow hay, noted Leblanc, who wants to use more of those hay fields for even more food crops and livestock, with a small portion devoted to housing farm workers.
    A dozen donated recreational vehicles for housing are parked in a meadow on the farm, but only eight people can be housed on the property at a time, due to Central Saanich zoning restrictions. In mid-September, four people were living at the farm, but the average is closer to eight.
    Leblanc’s vision is to house 96 people at a time, who would arrive through a gradual process in order to build the necessary staff and management required. First they detox for seven to nine days at Royal Jubilee Hospital, and then go to Woodwynn, as long as they’re willing to commit to the farm’s long-term abstinence-based program for a minimum of 90 days.
    Leblanc has worked with an architect to design a cluster of eight small dorm buildings (housing up to 15 each), along with a communal dining room that will sit on 1.5 acres (.08 percent) of the large site so it wouldn’t detract from the amount of land available for farming. But first he needs a zoning permit from the municipality in order to proceed.
    Despite the society’s commitment to farming, some people and politicians are still firmly opposed to Woodwynn. Central Saanich council has refused to amend bylaws to permit the facilities necessary to house the labour force needed to grow more produce, and has even taken the matter to BC Supreme Court. Effort is now being made to settle the matter out of court.
    Most recently, council requested that the Agricultural Land Commission (ALC) review the Society’s application for temporary housing for up to 40 farm workers, to ensure it is consistent with uses allowed on the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR). The matter remains under review by the committee, with no timeline set for the decision. And the final outcome still lies in the hands of council, which rejected the society’s 2012 application to the ALC to spot-rezone a couple of acres for housing.
     
    CENTRAL SAANICH MAYOR RYAN WINDSOR has been watching the matter unfold ever since he was elected to council in 2013. He understands the concerns around the opioid crisis, but noted the issue at Woodwynn simply revolves around land use.
    According to Windsor, the municipality has communicated many times that farming is the primary purpose of that land, and it’s what he believes it should be used for as well. Windsor acknowledges the Society’s plans to increase farming on the Woodwynn property, but noted the problem still lies with the number of people the organization wants to house. Regardless of what the ALC recommends, he suspects the application will likely lead to a public consultation process. When that could happen is anybody’s guess.
    “Agricultural land has a very specific use and we want to see it used for productive farming. It wasn’t reserved for housing or other uses,” said Windsor, noting it’s up to Woodwynn to gather support from the community—something that will be seen when the matter proceeds to public consultation.“It’s important when you have a significant piece of land like this that farming remains the primary use and a couple of acres for housing and therapeutic activities that maybe are beyond farming, I don’t think are in the spirit of the agricultural land use. I think most of my council feels that way too.”
    Comprising just five percent of BC’s total land base, the ALR is a provincial land use zone where agriculture is the priority use, but regulations do not require the farmland to be farmed. ALR regulations also stipulate any housing “must be necessary for farm use,” but what’s seen as “necessary” is influenced by what the local authority advises.
    About 60 percent of the land base in Central Saanich is designated as farmland. But how much of that is actually farmed? Central Saanich’s CAO told Focus they do not track such usage, but a 2011 report by the Agricultural Area Plan Steering Committee District of Central Saanich noted that “The farmland base used for crops, other than tame hay, represented less than 30 percent of the total farm area. About 21 percent of the farms did not have any land in crops and were kept in tame seeded pasture, natural pasture, woodlands and wetlands.” Over half of the cropped area, it stated, “is in tame hay grown for the local livestock and equine feed market.”
    The 2011 report spelled out the pressures leading to a “deteriorating” use of farmland, and made a number of recommendations. Key among them was reducing non-agricultural demand for farmland by limiting the size of housing through bylaw amendment and other disincentives to non-farm use. Central Saanich has never done that, though maximum heights of structures on agricultural land are specified.
    Though focused on the Lower Mainland, a May 2017 Postmedia investigation explains why such disincentives are important as farmland crucial to BC’s future food needs is “increasingly falling into the hands of speculators and builders of luxury property.” Stories of huge houses—often 12,000-square-feet-and-up—abound on farmland in the Richmond area. With minimal effort, such investors (showing $2500 in farm revenue) claim major (often 50 percent) tax breaks, which are prompting politicians to look for ways to crack down on the trend of farmland being used for trophy estates.
    Meanwhile, Leblanc feels Woodwynn has already bucked the trend: Since the Creating Homefulness Society took over Woodwynn’s 193 acres, more food crops are coming off its land than in previous decades.
     
    THIS YEAR THE PROVINCE IS ON PACE to lose more than 1,500 people to drug overdoses, compared with an average of about 200 from 2000 to 2010. Last year there were more than 900 overdose deaths, with fentanyl at the root of the epidemic.
    Victoria is among the three cities in BC experiencing the highest number of illicit drug overdoses this year, with 65 deaths recorded so far this year. A supervised injection site, to be located on Pandora Avenue next to Our Place, was recently given the green light from Health Canada, but won’t begin services until the spring or summer of 2018. Four overdose prevention sites have been set up in the meantime and continue to be heavily used, but they don’t provide any treatment.
    Victoria police started noticing fentanyl creep into the city’s drug culture in 2012, and now officers see it on a daily basis. Staff Sargeant Conor King said the drug seems to be replacing heroin as the opioid that’s available on the street due to its powerful, euphoric affect that users are becoming accustomed to. Drug dealers are also seeing there are profits to be made, since fentanyl is relatively easy to procure.
    One of the most concerning things for King is that the drug is now being detected in samples of other drugs, such as cocaine and methamphetamine, but the user is likely unaware it’s there.
    In response to the crisis—King believes it will only get worse—police are now targeting dealers selling the deadly drug. Those who go through the court system are also getting slapped with tougher sentences. A recent investigation by Vancouver police resulted in a 14-year prison sentence for trafficking fentanyl.
    “Every two to three weeks we are laying new charges in our ongoing fentanyl operations plan, so it’s a regular occurrence. We have a good basis of knowledge for who the traffickers are on the South Island,” said King. “Where we get frustrated is that we will arrest one trafficker and incarcerate them, but another trafficker will fill the void. Where we feel there is some light at the end of the tunnel is there has been some very stiff sentences handed out in BC.”
    As police and paramedics continue the fight against fentanyl on the front lines, addicts keen on transforming their lives are still left with few options. A handful of detox facilities exist in the capital region, but they only last for a week or so. The only long-term recovery programs are privately run and can cost thousands of dollars, putting them out of reach for those eking out an existence on city streets.
    Seeing a need for more solutions, Our Place Society is proposing to set up a long-term, live-in, locked-down treatment centre for addiction and chronic homelessness at the former youth custody centre in View Royal. The facility is owned by BC Housing and is currently being used as temporary housing for the homeless, but it’s slated to shut down at the end of the year.
    According to Our Place spokesperson Grant McKenzie, the society plans to model the proposed centre after the same therapeutic community program in Italy as Woodwynn does, housing up to 50 men at a time for a minimum of 12 months and up to two years. The facility already has a gymnasium, a woodworking shop and an art room, which could allow for some social enterprise. The days will be busy, with various programs taking place to change criminal thinking and street mentality so people have a higher chance of success. Some participants could also be bussed to Woodwynn to work on the farm during the day.
    The plan is to have the facility up and running by early 2018, but the matter has yet to go to View Royal’s council for rezoning. So far McKenzie said that council has been supportive about the proposal, along with the provincial government, which would provide funding for operations during the first seven years.
     
    DESPITE THE HURDLES HE CONTINUES TO FACE, Leblanc feels a facility like Woodwynn is needed more than ever, as the ballooning homeless and opioid crises continue to show no sign of slowing any time soon. Every day he receives calls from people in despair about the risk of losing their loved one. He’d like to help, but continues to be challenged with the number of people Woodwynn can accommodate, due to government restrictions.
    Leblanc received pushback from some neighbours at the get-go, even though police have only been called to the property twice to deal with two minor incidents involving program participants over its eight years. But he feels like he’s gaining support, noting some key people at the provincial level are doing their best to make things happen.
    “It’s frustrating. The doors should be flying open. People should be tripping all over themselves to rewrite zoning, to rewrite bylaws and [issue] permits to make the obvious rational decision of helping us in any way possible to bring more people here,” said Leblanc, noting the services are free, depending on an individual’s financial situation.
    “We have a solution to an enormous public health crisis and we are not being allowed to even give it a try.”
    Current Woodwynn worker/resident Ryan Colwell admits life on the farm, with its structured routines and hard physical labour, hasn’t been easy. But after watching many of his acquaintances overdose and die from fentanyl, he knows staying at Woodwynn is necessary if he wants to save his life.
    “Conquering any addiction is hard work,” said Colwell, who’s not sure he would have been ready for it a couple of years ago. He understands that “there is no magic pill, no special fix. You have to find a different way to cope and to live.” Now, after nine months at Woodwynn, he feels he has never been in as good shape physically, emotionally or mentally, though he said he still has a lot of soul-searching to do. “There’s a lot of solidarity, peacefulness, just being in the moment and being okay with that. It’s always been go-go-go, excitement and chaos for me. You have to be super-willing to change and put in the work.” Woodwynn is giving him the space, time and training needed to do just that.
    A journalist since 2003, Pamela has spent the bulk of her career covering court and crime for various newspapers in western Canada, including five years at the Edmonton Sun. An avid traveller, Pamela also specializes in travel writing and recently published a true crime book called Deadmonton.
    Editor’s Update:
    On November 9, 2018, Woodwynn Farm’s application to house up to 40 worker/rehabilitation participants on its 193-acre property was denied by the Agricultural Land Commission.
    The Commission’s executive committee, led by Frank Leonard, stated: “Based on the current and proposed agricultural activity…the Executive Committee finds that the level of agricultural production, both current and proposed, is insufficient to justify the placement of 40 farm worker accommodations. Furthermore, the Executive Committee finds that the addition of 40 farm worker accommodations would increase the residential footprint and non-farm based infrastructure on prime agricultural land that is currently in production.” It also noted that “the Proposal could be located on lands outside of the ALR.”
    As noted in Pamela Roth’s Focus article, Woodwynn’s proposal for housing only involved 1.5 acres of the 193-acre property. A prime purpose of the Creating Homefulness Society is to offer therapeutic rehabilitation to people recovering from addictions and homelessness—and it does this by engaging them in farming the land.
    In a press release after the ruling, Richard Leblanc stated: “As the founder of this project, I cannot quite articulate my oh-so-deep level of disappointment. While our Board of Directors and our core funders are somewhat at their wits end, my own resolve is only temporarily shaken. Daily, our phones ring and our email inboxes fill with desperate requests for help.” He referred to the latest record-breaking number of overdoses in BC: 1,100 as of the end of September for 2017.
    It seems worth noting that if the Creating Homefulness Society gave up their fight to provide a sorely needed rehabilitation program and sold the Woodwynn property, the ALC would be powerless to stop a new buyer from completely ignoring all the farming (and rehabilitative) potential of the land and merely using it as a trophy estate. This has happened to many properties in the Agricultural Land Reserve.

    David Broadland
    November 2017
    Recent scientific studies show how resident orca populations are affected by diminishing chinook runs and—critically—why the chinook are disappearing.
     
    RIVERS RUNNING INTO PUGET SOUND have perennially low returns of chinook salmon—currently estimated at just 10 percent of their historic levels—even though many of them are enhanced with hatcheries. Last year, scientific research connected this decline to secondary sewage treatment plants discharging partially-treated effluent into Puget Sound.
    Last June, a group of Washington scientists published a study showing the extent to which the decline in the birth rate of the Southern Resident Killer Whale population, listed as “endangered” by both the Canadian and US federal governments, is linked to the precarious state of the Salish Sea’s chinook salmon. Puget Sound chinook, which were given “threatened” status under the US Endangered Species Act in 1999, have become a cross-border issue.
    Recovery of both Puget Sound chinook and the Southern Resident Killer Whale population would require investment of many billions of dollars by Washington State in new sewage treatment infrastructure. While taking action to protect both the orca and chinook is required by US federal law, Washington State currently has no plans to make that investment. Is our southern neighbour ignoring its responsibility to be a good environmental steward?
     

    Killer Whales can be long-lived (“Granny,” above, lived past 100), but their birth rate is dependent on chinook salmon, a threatened species in Puget Sound. (Photo: markmallesonphotography.com)
     
    LAST JUNE, A BRILLIANT SEVEN-YEAR-LONG STUDY that correlated the declining birth rate of the Southern Resident Killer Whale population with falling chinook salmon numbers, mercilessly compared what’s happening to the remaining orcas to the mass starvation of the Dutch population at the hands of German Nazis during World War II.
    The authors stated: “The Nazis closed off the borders of Holland between October 1944 and May 1945, causing massive starvation over a 5–8 month period, with good food conditions before and after. There was a one-third decline in the expected number of births among confirmed pregnant woman during the under-nutrition period. Conceptions during the hunger period were very low. However, women who conceived during the hunger period had higher rates of abortion, premature and stillbirths, neonatal mortality and malformation. Nutrition had its greatest impact on birth weight and length for mothers experiencing hunger during their second half of gestation, when the fetus is growing most rapidly.”
    The inclusion of the word “Nazis” in a peer-reviewed scientific study on the reproductive dynamics of an endangered whale population may strike some as odd, but the Dutch Famine, as the above events are known, was highly unusual: it took place in a well-developed, literate population that kept excellent health records and the vast majority of those affected survived. Thus it was one of the first events in human history for which scientists had accurate, reliable records to help them understand what health impacts occur when a population of mammals is starved.
    The orca scientists found that a similar dynamic between food availability and birth rate has been impacting the Southern Resident Killer Whale (SRKW) population, but with one big difference: For the orca, this is not a one-time event. For them, a months-long famine now occurs almost every year.
    Dr Samuel Wasser, the study’s lead author, is a research professor of conservation biology at the University of Washington. Wasser’s team gathered evidence from 2008 to 2014. They found that 69 percent of detectable pregnancies in the SRKW population failed during that period. Of those failed pregnancies, the scientists found, “33 percent failed relatively late in gestation or immediately post-partum, when the cost is especially high.” That high cost included an increased risk of mortality for the would-be mother.
    The scientists observed: “Low availability of chinook salmon appears to be an important stressor among these fish-eating whales as well as a significant cause of late pregnancy failure, including unobserved perinatal loss.” They added: “However, release of lipophilic toxicants during fat metabolism in the nutritionally deprived animals may also provide a contributor to these cumulative effects.”
    In other words, not only are the orca being starved, but when a starved, pregnant orca begins burning off her fat reserves in response to the scarce supply of food, toxins bioaccumulated in her fat reserves—such as PCBs and PBDEs—begin to have more of an impact on her health, such as a reduced ability to fight infections. This could contribute to the demise of the fetus and increase the risk to the mother’s life.
    As a consequence of these conditions, the study found “the 31 potentially reproductive females in the SRKW population should have had 48 births between 2008–2015. Yet, only 28 births were recorded during that period. The 7 adult females in K pod have not had a birth since 2011, and just two births since 2007. The 24 females in the remaining two pods (J and L) have averaged less than 1 birth per pod since 2011, with no births in 2013, but had 7 births in 2015. One of the two offspring born in 2014 died.” As of this writing, the population has dwindled to 76 whales. As recently as 1996 there were 98 orca in the 3 pods.
    How did the scientists determine that 69 percent of all pregnancies failed? After all, many of the pregnancies terminated early on, and there would have been no visible signs that the females had been pregnant. How does one detect whale pregnancies? Detection dogs.
     

    Tucker, one of Wasser’s orca poop detection dogs (Photo: University of Washington)
     
    Over the seven years of the study, the scientists intermittently followed J, K and L pods through the Salish Sea and used specially-trained dogs stationed at the bow of the research vessel to sniff for orca poop, and then point out its location to the scientists. The poop was collected and later genotyped (associated with a known individual whale) and analyzed for hormone measures of pregnancy occurrence and health. The scientists also looked for chemical indicators of nutritional and disturbance stress in the poop. By making the same measurements over time, they were able to distinguish between nutritional stress caused by low availability of chinook salmon, and disturbance stress caused by the presence of nearby boats.
    Fisheries scientists had previously estimated that 70 to 80 percent of the SRKW population’s year-long diet consists of chinook salmon. The whales are thought to prefer chinook over other species of salmon partly because they use echolocation to find their prey. Since adult chinook are physically larger (they can weigh as much as 55 kilograms) than adults of other salmon species, chinook might be easier for orca to find. As well, there are runs of chinook returning to spawn in different river systems in the spring, summer and fall (sockeye, coho and chum return only in the fall). In the past that meant a reliable, almost year-round supply of chinook. And chinook may be preferred by the orca simply because of its higher fat content compared to other salmon. Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) estimates that reliance on chinook rises to 90 percent during July and August as the resident orca target returns to the Fraser River and rivers flowing into Puget Sound.
    Although the link between the abundance of chinook salmon in the Salish Sea and the physical health of the southern resident population was known, Wasser’s research provides the first confirmation that low availability of chinook is suppressing the population’s birth rate and endangering the health of reproductive females.
    Wasser included comparison over the seven years of the study of the two main chinook runs that are keeping the southern orcas alive: the Columbia River early spring run and the Fraser River summer and fall runs. Depending on the timing of those runs, and how many fish were in them, the southern resident orca experienced more or less intense famines through the winter months and between the spring and summer runs.
    Estimating how many more chinook would need to be in the Salish Sea to make up for the southern orcas’ nutritional deficit wasn’t part of Wasser’s research. But in 2010, DFO estimated the nutritional requirement of the southern resident orca population, which then numbered 87, at about “1200 to 1400” chinook per day. Over the five-month period the orca occupy their critical habitat in the Salish Sea each year, that would amount to 180,000 to 210,000 chinook.
    Wasser’s research shows the whales weren’t catching enough chinook in 2010 and the deficit is threatening the population. Yet in the Salish Sea in 2010, the total number of chinook caught by commercial and sport fisheries, plus the number of chinook that escaped to spawn, was about 500,000 fish. (These numbers are from the US EPA and the Pacific Salmon Commission.) Of those, 320,000 returned to their natal rivers to spawn. The 180,000 fish taken by commercial and sports fishers were split roughly in half between Canada and the US, even though 94 percent of the spawning fish were headed for the Fraser River in Canada. Only 6 percent were headed for rivers in Puget Sound. Note that the total catch taken by humans is roughly equivalent to the catch required by orca.
    The quickest way to end the orca famine would be to end the commercial and sports fisheries for chinook in the Salish Sea, and  Canadian scientist David Suzuki called for that action following the release of Wasser’s study. To recover chinook populations, however, will require a deeper understanding of why they are declining. A comparison of the Southern Resident Killer Whale population with their northern cousins helps in that understanding.
    Wasser noted the “significantly lower” fecundity rate of SRKW compared to the Northern Resident Killer Whale (NRKW) population. From a 2011 study by Ellis, Tower and Ford, we know that in 1974 there were 120 whales in the NRKW population; by 2011 that had risen to 262. According to Canada’s Species at Risk Registry, the population grew to 290 by 2014. DFO used this number in its 2017 reports.


    Above: Both NRKW and SRKW populations feed primarily on chinook, but one population of whales is growing while the other has stagnated since 1974. Data from DFO and The Center for Whale Research.
     
    Over that same period, though, the SRKW population went from 70 to a high of 98 in 1996 and then dropped to the current 76. Although both resident groups experienced a decline in population after 1996-1997 following significant declines in chinook runs, the northern population then recovered and grew steadily while the southern population has languished.
    As mentioned above, scientists have determined that both orca populations prey heavily on chinook as they return to spawn. It’s also known that, while their territories overlap, the northern orca rely on chinook returning to spawn in rivers north of the Salish Sea. The relative strength of the northern population compared to the southern, then, suggests the low availability of chinook that’s limiting growth of the southern orca population is a result of something that’s happening to the southern chinook that’s not happening to the northern chinook. What could that be?
    The most dangerous period in a chinook salmon’s life, according to fisheries scientists, is its first year. Research scientist Dr James Meador, an environmental toxicologist with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Fisheries) in Seattle, estimates the current first-year survival rate of Pacific Northwest ocean-type juvenile chinook salmon at 0.4 percent. That’s four-tenths of one percent. Another way of stating that is that 99.6 percent of ocean-type chinook salmon die in their first year. That year is spent in their natal river, their natal estuary and marine waters not too far from that estuary. Since this is where almost all of the mortality occurs, it follows that any substantial recovery of chinook numbers would require conditions in these areas to improve. A doubling of the current rate of survival in that first year—so that only 99.2 percent of them die—could double the number of fish that return to spawn. We’ll come back to Meador later.
    Wasser and his University of Washington team concluded their paper with this noteworthy comment: “Results of the SRKW study strongly suggest that recovering Fraser River and Columbia River chinook runs should be among the highest priorities for managers aiming to recover this endangered population of killer whales.”
    What about Puget Sound, where chinook runs are listed as “threatened”? Historically, according to Jim Myers of the Northwest Fisheries Science Centre in Seattle, the Puget Sound chinook runs were about 25 percent greater than the Fraser River’s. But in 2010, according to the US EPA and Pacific Salmon Commission, Puget Sound returns were only 6 percent of Fraser River returns. The much bigger hole in chinook numbers is in Puget Sound. Shouldn’t international attention be focussed there?
    Instead of accepting responsibility for the role it has played in the orca famine, Washington State has shifted public attention away from its lack of action, thereby reducing the chances of the Southern Resident Killer Whales’ survival. Now the situation is getting critical. The EPA recently downgraded the endangered whales’ survival status from “neutral” to “declining.” Time is running out.
    Wasser, on sabbatical, was unavailable to explain why the recovery of Puget Sound chinook stocks shouldn’t be a priority in the effort to recover the southern population of killer whales. However, an examination of two scientific studies published by Meador shed light on why Wasser and other fisheries researchers might not regard recovery of the Puget Sound runs as a likely prospect to save the orca.
     

    The decline of the Southern Resident Killer Whales may be linked to the low survival rate of juvenile Chinook salmon in contaminated Puget Sound estuaries. (Photo by Roger Tabor, US Fish and Wildlife Service)
     
    IN 2013, DR JAMES MEADOR published the study “Do chemically contaminated river estuaries in Puget Sound affect the survival rate of hatchery-reared chinook salmon?” Meador was with the Ecotoxicology and Fish Health Program at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. NFSC is a division of NOAA.
    In that study, Meador observed: “Ocean-type chinook salmon that rear naturally or are released from a hatchery migrate in the spring and summer to the estuary as subyearlings (age 0+) and reside there for several weeks as they adjust physiologically to seawater and increase in size and lipid content before moving offshore to marine waters… Conversely, juvenile coho salmon spend their first year in freshwater and migrate to the estuary in the spring or summer as yearlings (age 1+), generally spending only a few days in the local estuary before proceeding to more open waters. This major difference in life history can have a large effect on the degree of toxicant exposure in contaminated estuaries, which can affect fish in several ways, including impaired growth, altered behavior, higher rates of pathogenic infections, and changes to physiological homeostasis, all of which can lead to increased rates of mortality.”
    The physiological process of a juvenile salmon acclimatizing to saltwater is known as “smolting.” The juveniles become “smolts.”
    Meador examined the records from hatcheries on major rivers flowing into Puget Sound over the 36 years between 1972 and 2008. Some of the rivers had contaminated estuaries while others were considered uncontaminated. He determined the difference in the chinook smolt-to-adult return rate between rivers with contaminated estuaries and those with uncontaminated estuaries. Meador noted that the smolt-to-adult return rate is the “primary metric to assess life-cycle success.”
    He did the same analysis for hatchery coho in these rivers. Coho pass quickly through their natal estuaries and so would be far less impacted by contaminants in that estuary. The coho data, Meador clarified, “was used as another line of evidence to test the hypothesis that contaminated estuaries are one of the main factors determining the rate of survival for chinook.” And that’s what he found: Coho survival was not substantially impacted by contamination in their natal estuary.
    Meador noted that “Salmonid survival is dependent on a large number of factors, many that co-occur. The analysis presented here is simplistic, but highlights an important relationship between hatchery chinook survival and contaminated estuaries. Because this analysis examined the smolt-to-adult survival rate in fish from a large number of hatcheries and estuaries over several years in one geographical location, many of these factors were likely accounted for and therefore had less of an effect on the overall results.”
    As mentioned earlier, mortality in the first year of an ocean-type chinook is high. Meador described this as follows: “Survival for first-year ocean-type chinook in the Pacific Northwest has been estimated at 0.4 percent. Rates of survival over successive years are considerably higher for 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old fish at 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent, and 90 percent, respectively. Clearly, first-year survival is important for chinook, and most of the mortality for first-year ocean-type chinook is attributed to predation, poor growth, pathogens, starvation, and toxicants.”
    Meador determined whether or not a particular estuary was “contaminated” or “clean” based on existing records of contaminants found in juvenile chinook tissue in that estuary, records of sediment contamination, and whether or not the estuary had been listed as a contaminated site.
    He noted that most of the data on contaminants he was able to access had focussed on polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).
    The scientists did not make their own measurements of contaminants in the estuaries, nor did they speculate on the possible sources of such contamination. They simply compared the statistical differences in survival rates for chinook smolts between apparently contaminated estuaries and apparently uncontaminated estuaries.
    Meador concluded that “when all data were considered…the mean survival for juvenile chinook released from hatcheries into contaminated estuaries was 45 percent lower than for fish outmigrating through uncontaminated estuaries.” In other words, a contaminated  natal estuary causes a nearly two-fold reduction in survival compared with uncontaminated estuaries.
    Wow. That was quite a discovery: A single factor that doubled the mortality of a threatened species of fish that was known to be the cornerstone of the diet of an endangered species of whale.
    Meador’s data was confined to juveniles that came from hatcheries. Does his conclusion apply to river-reared chinook? Meador’s study reported that, except for the Skagit River, Puget Sound rivers are all dominated by hatchery-bred chinook. But, for juveniles whose parents spawned in rivers, the effect of contaminants may be even greater than for hatchery-bred fish. Meador noted that “wild juvenile chinook spend approximately twice as long in the estuary as do hatchery fish, which would likely increase their exposure to harmful chemicals.”
    If the incidence of a contaminated natal estuary was limited to one or two of Puget Sound’s smaller rivers, this effect might not be of too great consequence. But that’s not the case. Some of the Sound’s largest river systems have contaminated estuaries. For example, the Snohomish and Puyallup rivers have the second and third largest drainage areas in the Puget Sound Basin, an indication of their potential for rearing chinook. Two forks of the Snohomish—the Skykomish and the Snoqualmie—have, according to Washington fisheries scientists, the potential for up to 84,000 spawners. But over the last four decades these rivers have been averaging only 4,500, a mere 5 percent of this river system’s potential. Meador’s research suggests this and other rivers’ collective capacity to provide nourishment for a healthy Southern Resident orca population is being cut in half, year after year, by the contamination in their estuaries. But what contamination?
     

    The Puyallup River—which once hosted one of the largest chinook salmon runs in Puget Sound—now hosts the Tacoma Central Wastewater Treatment Plant, which is permitted to discharge up to 10,000 kilograms of suspended solids per day into the river’s estuary, habitat critical to juvenile chinook.
     
    IN 2016, MEADOR PUBLISHED “Contaminants of emerging concern in a large temperate estuary” in the scientific journal Environmental Pollution. The CECs targeted in the study included a long list of pharmaceutical and personal care products, hormones, and a number of industrial compounds. Many of these substances, the authors observed, “are potent human and animal medicines.” They considered their targets to be just a “representative subset” of CECs in the environment, not a comprehensive list of what’s actually there. The scientists estimated there are over 4000 CECs leaking out into the ecosphere.
    Meador referenced his earlier study, noting that “juvenile chinook salmon migrating through contaminated estuaries in Puget Sound exhibited a two-fold reduction in survival compared to those migrating through uncontaminated estuaries.” His choice of targets suggests that he suspected secondary sewage treatment plants might be the source of the contamination that is causing that two-fold reduction in juvenile chinook survival. He noted that “some CECs are poorly removed by wastewater treatment plant processing or are discharged to surface waters, including streams, estuaries, or open marine waters due to secondary bypass or combined sewer overflows.” Having found no other research by other scientists along this line of investigation, Meador noted that “bioaccumulation and comparative toxicity to aquatic species constitutes the largest data gap in assessing ecological risk” posed by CECs.
    Meador’s team targeted 150 contaminants. They focussed on three estuaries, two considered to be contaminated and one uncontaminated. The two contaminated estuaries (Puyallup River and Sinclair Inlet) each had one or more secondary sewage treatment plants discharging treated effluent into the rivers on which they were located. The third, the Nisqually River estuary, which doesn’t have a sewage treatment plant above it, was intended as a reference—an uncontaminated estuary to establish the extent to which the other two were contaminated.
    The researchers took water samples from the estuaries and effluent from the treatment plants and analyzed each for the 150 target contaminants. As well, they netted juvenile chinook and Staghorn sculpin from the estuaries and whole-body tissue analyses for contaminants were performed.
    Eighty-one of the CEC’s were found in effluent being discharged from the treatment plants; 25 were detected in the estuaries. To the surprise of the researchers, nine (9) of the CECs were detected in the water column of the Nisqually estuary, which they had supposed was uncontaminated. Their data indicated an even more disturbing situation: “Collectively, we detected 42 compounds in whole-body fish. CECs in juvenile chinook salmon were detected at greater frequency and higher concentrations compared to Staghorn sculpin.” Finding more CECs in fish tissue than estuary water meant juvenile chinook were quickly bioaccumulating the CECs. Moreover, the chinook were absorbing a higher dose of toxins in just a few weeks than were the Staghorn sculpin, which spent their entire life in the estuary.
    Of the targeted contaminants, 37 were found in chinook. This included, from A to Z: Amitriptyline, Amlodipine, Amphetamine, Azithromycin, Benztropine, Bisphenol A, Caffeine, DEET, Diazepam, Diltiazem, Diltiazem desmethyl… well, you get the picture.
    How might multi-contaminant doses lower the survival rate of juvenile chinook? The scientists found “several compounds in water and tissue that have the potential to affect fish growth, behavior, reproduction, immune function, and antibiotic resistance,” all of which could lead to early mortality. But they also noted that even if individual contaminants weren’t at a lethal level in tissue or organs, the cumulative effect of so many different contaminants in the juvenile chinook at the same time could very well be lethal—the drug-cocktail effect that so many humans experience, sometimes with fatal results.
    The scientists put this finding in the context of Puget Sound as a whole: “The greater Puget Sound area contains 106 publicly-owned wastewater treatment plants that discharge at an average total flow about 1347 million litres per day (Washington Department of Ecology (2010)). Our study examined two of these with a combined total of 71 million litres per day. The output for these two wastewater treatment plants alone was on the order of kilogram quantities of detected CECs per day into estuarine waters of Puget Sound. Considering the low percentage of commercially available pharmaceutical and personal care products analyzed in this study and the amount of effluent discharged to Puget Sound waters, it is possible that a substantial load of potentially harmful chemicals are introduced into streams and nearshore marine waters daily. If the concentrations from the two studied effluents are representative of that from other wastewater treatment plants in Puget Sound, then it is reasonable to assume that inputs to streams and nearshore waters are substantial and likely on the order of 121 kilograms per day (approximately 44,000 kilograms annually) and even higher if secondary treatment bypass, permitted flows, maximum outputs, unmeasured compounds, septic system contributions, and transboundary contributions are considered.”
     

    Some of Puget Sound’s largest secondary sewage treatment plants. There are 106 publicly-owned sewage treatment plants in the Puget Sound Basin. Many are located on or near to the natal estuaries of threatened chinook salmon runs. All of Puget Sound is considered to be an estuarine ecosystem.
     
    The data the scientists collected contained another ominous finding. The concentrations of the targeted contaminants found in the effluent from the treatment plants were unexpectedly high, by American standards. Meador found that “a large percentage of the chemicals detected in Puget Sound effluents are among the highest concentrations reported in the US, which may be a function of per capita usage of these compounds or the treatment processes used at these wastewater treatment plants.”
    One final, noteworthy point: In the estuary that was thought to be uncontaminated—the mouth of the Nisqually—the researchers found 9 of the targeted contaminants in estuary water and 13 in chinook. Meador observed, “Based on our water and fish data, the Nisqually estuary was more contaminated than expected, which highlights the difficulties of establishing suitable non-polluted reference sites for these ubiquitously distributed CECs.”
    This observation has an interesting implication with respect to Meador’s earlier study, mentioned above, in which he was comparing the survival rates of juvenile chinook between contaminated estuaries and those considered uncontaminated. The Nisqually estuary was on the “uncontaminated” side of the ledger in that study, but on investigation it was, in reality, merely less contaminated. Would Meador’s finding of double the rate of mortality have risen if he actually had a number of pristine estuaries to compare with those that are contaminated?

    IN AN EARLIER STORY (“Washington’s phony sewage war with Victoria,” Focus, May 2016) we reported on the 32.4 million kilograms of suspended solids permitted to be discharged by 77 of Puget Sound’s largest wastewater treatment plants each year. Attached to those solids are many contaminants, including PCBs and PBDEs, not targeted by Meador’s study, but known to have a negative impact on the health of fish and their sources of food.
    The additional impact on chinook smolts, after they leave their natal estuaries and migrate through this near-shore chemical soup—dubbed “Poisoned Waters” by the 2005 PBS film of that name—is hinted at by the Puget Sound Basin’s 10-fold decline in chinook returns from historic numbers. As the urbanization of Puget Sound’s shores has spread, and the daily recontamination of marine and estuarine waters has grown, the chinook and the Southern Resident Killer Whales have been pushed closer and closer toward extinction.
    This intense urbanization—right beside the critical habitat of both whales and their prey—is not occurring for the Northern Resident Killer Whale population, and that difference may be the deciding factor in the  different birth rates of the two populations.
    Given the seriousness of the situation and the headlines in the media about drugged fish in Puget Sound, one might have reasonably expected that Washington State’s political leaders would respond to Meador’s findings. After all, what Everett-Seattle-Tacoma residents were flushing down their toilets into Puget Sound by way of sewage treatment plants was doubling the rate of mortality of a fish already listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
    They did respond, but apparently only to deflect attention away from Puget Sound’s contamination from sewage plants. To do that they pointed at…Victoria.
    Just two days after an embarrassing drugged-chinook story appeared in the Seattle Times, Washington State Representative Jeff Morris boldly announced a proposal to ban Washington State employees from claiming travel expenses for trips made to Victoria until Victoria built a sewage treatment plant just like the ones around Puget Sound.
    A week later, Morris sent a letter to Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps claiming that “chemical loading” from Victoria’s marine-based sewage treatment system poses a “long-term risk” to “our shared waters.” Morris’ letter was signed by 36 other Washington legislators whose districts border on Puget Sound.
    The legislators’ letter informed Helps: “We recognize the shared risk in short-term loss of tourism activity on both sides of the border from publicity surrounding [Victoria’s lack of secondary sewage treatment]. However, we believe the long-term damage to marine mammals, in particular, but all marine wildlife, does more long-term damage to ecotourism.”
     

    Washington State Representative Jeff Morris
     
    Morris’ idea that extinctions should be prevented because they’re bad for tourism highlights the gap between a politician’s level of understanding of this critical issue and the depth of knowledge that has been created by scientists like Wasser and Meador. If State legislators were drawing up an action plan for the recovery of Puget Sound, they could do worse than to put on their list: “Read some science about contamination.”
    The Washington legislators’ proposal to discourage State employees from travelling to Victoria—a move they didn’t follow through on—wasn’t the only action precipitated by Meador’s science.
    There was a bureaucratic response as well. The Puget Sound Partnership (PSP), which describes itself as “the State agency leading the region’s collective effort to restore and protect Puget Sound,” undertook two related “actions” after Meador’s study had been published. One of those was “Action 0156,” which directed the University of Washington to conduct an “analysis of impacts…from Victoria, BC sewage.”
    Nowhere to be found on PSP’s long list of actions was any analysis of the impacts from the 106 publicly-owned sewage treatment plants around the Sound that are permitted to discharge over 32.4 million kilograms of suspended solids each year.
    The PSP also committed to “Action 0048,” which was “Identifying sources of contaminants harmful to juvenile salmon.” PSP reports that after the expenditure of $273,000, the project is “off-schedule.” Contacted by Focus, the Washington State Department of Ecology—the agency responsible for undertaking the analysis—clarified that the study “was not actually funded.”
    It appears that little else on the “Action” list for the Sound’s recovery is funded, either. PSP estimated its list of “Actions” for 2016 would cost $130 million, but acknowledged that only $17 million of that had been found.
    Washington’s Department of Ecology confirmed that, as of 2016, the State had no plans to upgrade or relocate any of the existing large sewage treatment plants on Puget Sound.
    Washington State says it’s commited to the recovery of Puget Sound. That would require the State to act on its scientists’ findings about the ecological impacts of ongoing contamination from its sewage treatment facilities. Unfortunately, the State’s current course doesn’t appear likely to produce anything that the Southern Resident Killer Whales will be able to chew on.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Briony Penn
    September 2017
    The practice may have played a leading role in creating some of BC’s most high-profile environmental blunders.
     
    FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, as a reporter for CHUM TV (aka The New VI), I got a call from a professional wildlife biologist in Port Alberni called Mike Stini. He’s an Island guy to the core—understated, drives a pickup, knows the bush like the back of his hand and, more than anything, loves this place and isn’t afraid to share his knowledge. 
    He was clearly upset. The BC Liberals had changed all the rules on forest management, and suddenly wildlife experts like him, who were hired by government prior to harvest plans to identify the old growth where elk and deer overwintered, or find and map the bear dens and the goshawk nests, were being shoved out the door. His concern wasn’t about losing the work; he could always go back full-time to taxidermy. It was about what was going to happen to his habitat on McLaughlin Ridge, the forested mountains that were about to be levelled by industry.
    But the government seemed to reason that biologists like him were dispensable. If what was standing between a company and profit margins was a bear den, an ungulate winter range, or a goshawk nest, then the best thing to do was to get rid of the people who have that knowledge.
    My reporting crew travelled all over McLauglin Ridge to do the story, looking at the hard-won designations of old-growth management areas, riparian zones, wildlife trees, and habitat for species at risk. We even crawled right up to one bear den that Stini had been monitoring for years, to check out the condition of the bear who looked out at us in a torpid state from the old-growth tree that served as his home for six months. Stini had data stretching back decades on the bear dens that he had found in the region. Up on the south-facing slopes of the ridge, under the big old Douglas-firs laden with arboreal lichens, he pointed out the signs of the deer and elk that overwintered there, surviving on lichens that blew down from their canopies in each winter storm.
    All these areas, under the old designations, were about to be put under the control of logging company biologists—in a system that was referred to as “professional reliance.” The Forest Practices Code had been gutted, and the discretion to manage 45 million hectares of our public forests for the public’s interest, which included the protection of wildlife, water, recreational opportunities, cultural sites, subsistence hunting and so on, was now in the hands of industry.
    Under the new regime, there was no legal requirement to have the forest surveyed for ecological or cultural values prior to logging; it was up to the professionals hired by industry to judge. If the public wasn’t happy with “the results” in this “results-based system,” they could take issue. But what use would taking issue be after the fact? And how did one assess results when the evidence for what had been there was gone? Especially when no one had been mandated to collect it.
    Stini forecast that all the places that we visited would be logged under the new system. In 2015, I revisited those sites and he was right—everything was levelled, from the bear den to the winter range. Even worse, under the current designation of working forest, there is no chance the forest can even recover. In an industry-led cutting cycle of under 50 years, the trees will never mature long enough to produce a tree with a suitable diameter for a bear den, goshawk nest, or arboreal lichen to grow.
     

    Logging on McLauglin Ridge
     
    As Stini said in 2002 for the TV show, “Basically the wildlife is being punished by changing the rules all of a sudden. We are removing the checks and balances and turning it over to industry that is in the business of making money. All the habitat biologists feel strongly that this is backwards; they need to review the plans prior to logging, because once an area is logged, the habitat is gone forever. The real big danger is we are going to lose so much and no one will know. This legislation is so far-reaching that it will make it difficult for future generations to rebuild wildlife habitat. It is going to be a major problem. This legislation is wrong. It shouldn’t be happening.”
    The government extended the practice of relying on resource extractors’ own professionals to evaluate the environmental aspects of mining and other projects.
     
    “SILENT BUT DEADLY,” is how Green MLA Sonia Furstenau describes professional reliance. “Most people have no idea what it is. It’s only when you encounter it that you recognize it for what it is.”
    What is professional reliance for those who haven’t encountered the beast? After 17 years in the media following this slippery, seemingly innocuous monster that couldn’t make a headline if it drove itself off a cliff, I describe professional reliance, at best, as an elegant euphemism for deregulation and privatization. At its most egregious, it is this century’s master weapon for white-collar crime. Those who utilize these weapons—knowingly putting the public interest at risk—are referred to by David O. Friedrichs, a Distinguished Professor of Criminal Justice, as “trusted criminals.” Wendell Berry, land reformer and activist, calls them “professional vandals.”
    How do the proponents of professional reliance define it and defend it? And why is reviewing it one of the top four priorities in the 2017 Confidence and Supply agreement between the BC Green and NDP caucuses? With all the issues they could have picked, why did it push its way to the top?
    Forest Practices Board legal counsel Mark Haddock, who was with the UVic Environmental Law Centre in 2015 when he did a lengthy analysis of the failures of the professional reliance “experiment,” says it is a grey term and has multiple interpretations that can easily mislead. His definition is “the substitution of professional opinion from experts inside of government for that of professionals in the employ of the [resource development] proponents.” He suggests renaming it “decision-making reliance.” Furstenau thinks it should be rebranded for what it is—conflict of interest.
    British Columbians are not unfamiliar with how deregulation, with a loosening of standards around conflict of interest, can spiral into corporate white-collar crime. The Mount Polley disaster is a case in point of how badly it can go wrong with no third party oversight. The fact that the company, Imperial Metals, can continue to operate with no penalties, after destroying a lake for generations, clearly pushes citizens to the edge. Citizen groups are pursuing private prosecutions, and Premier Horgan has now committed to determine why a deadline was missed by the BC Liberals to lay charges against the company. 
    Furstenau feels the blame should lie in the failure of government to protect the public interest by handing over the responsibility to industry.
    Over the years, corporate spin-doctors have found devious new ways to shed rules and government oversight, but professional reliance was a stroke of pure genius. Many were lulled into thinking that handing the management and oversight of our public lands and interest to a coterie of smiling, reliable professionals, with their reputations and professional associations hovering above to keep them in line, was a grand solution. After all, it was expensive to fund government-hired professionals.
     

    MLA Sonia Furstenau
    Furstenau’s close encounter with professional reliance was over the issue of South Island Aggregates and Cobble Hill Holdings filling an active quarry in the Shawnigan watershed with contaminated soil. She realized that not only could industry legitimately hire people who had a personal stake in that business (as employees, business partners or shareholders) to assess the environmental impacts of their activities, but there was no way to stop harm as long as those people were “up front” about their relationships. If the case hadn’t found a “deliberate concealment” of the discussion of ownership with the company hired to conduct the environmental assessment, South Island Aggregates might still be shovelling dioxins, hydrocarbons and furans onto what an independent hydrogeologist warned was fractured limestone “that provides no natural protection for the established drinking water sources in the region.”
    In the last 17 years, virtually every news story about damage to  public forests, lakes, rivers and oceans, affecting wildlife, water, air, soil, climate, and First Nations rights, with repercussions on every aspect of our health, can be traced to flaws in professional reliance. The big issues like Mount Polley, the Testalinden Creek landslide, and Shawnigan Lake are what catch the headlines, but they represent a fraction of the damage to our forests, communities and wildlife that Mike Stini predicted.
    Citizens’ only recourse is to take the matter into their own hands, which is what they did in Shawnigan Lake. Haddock summarizes this state of affairs this way: “The deregulation takes government out of the picture and leaves health, safety and environmental protection outcomes to the ‘social license’ to operate for a given proponent or industry.”
    Removing that “social license” at Shawnigan Lake cost local citizens $2 million in legal fees and thousands of volunteer hours with the very real possibility, still, of a contaminated watershed. As Furstenau says, “I want to be able to live my life without having to monitor and watchdog every aspect of my life from the water I drink, to the bridges I drive over. This is the main reason I got into provincial politics—to build trust in government again to protect its citizens.”
    The lack of trust pervades not just government, but the professional associations themselves. As Furstenau points out, it isn’t their job to look after the public interest. And in a deregulated environment, with narrow terms of reference, there are virtually no laws to break, therefore no disciplinary actions to be taken. 
    The whole thing is a Machiavellian bag of worms. Haddock, along with a recent report by Evidence for Democracy, both revealed the level of concern that many professionals themselves have with provincial decision-making on natural resources. Few professionals are willing to talk openly. But, under protection of anonymity, they told Haddock of the many problems: “expert shopping”; clear conflicts of interest, but no way to address it; lack of checks and balances; loss of expertise in government; lack of confidence in government monitoring; problems with independent monitoring; lack of confidence in the disciplinary process of professional associations; reduced formal public involvement; greater user conflicts; no one out in the field who knows what is going on; filtering of information by proponents; too many grey areas; inexperienced crews operating; cavalier approach to risk…and the list goes on.
    With the professional reliance model no longer being tied to the public interest, many professionals found it intolerable to work in an environment in which the term “stewardship” has largely been stripped out of their duties.
    And now, at least one has resorted to legal action: Professional forester Martin Watts has accused the Province of blacklisting foresters for raising concerns over the quality of inventory data. Watts is spending his retirement savings to fund a case he might not win, but which will certainly lose him clients.
    Furstenau, now overseeing the professional reliance file for the Green caucus, is at the information-gathering stage, helping Minister of Environment and Climate Change George Heyman set out a direction for the review. For her, citizen involvement is essential. It is important to hear from everyone who has been impacted by professional reliance, both within the professions and as citizens who have fought these issues. As she says, “this needs to be a robust review.”
    As for predicting the outcome of the review, she can’t speculate, but one thing is certain: She wants an outcome in which she can return to her community and not feel as if all the responsibility for safeguarding the environment is in the hands of volunteers like herself on the Shawnigan Lake issue. It is a powerful motivator, and biologists like Stini will be cheering from the sidelines.
    Briony Penn has been reporting on regional environmental issues for over 20 years. In the 2000s, she hosted the TV show “Enviro/Mental” which was nominated one of the top three magazine shows in Canada. She lives on Salt Spring Island.

    David Broadland
    September 2017
    To create a realistic pathway to a low-carbon regional transportation system, science—not activism—needs to lead the way forward.
     
    IT HAD LONG BEEN MY UNDERSTANDING that cycling—all on its own—would become a significant part of the solution for reducing local transportation emissions. However, when I used the Capital Regional District’s most recent comprehensive travel survey to estimate the relative amount of work done by each form of transportation at the regional level, I was flabbergasted to find that cycling accounts for such a tiny share: 1.5 percent in 2011.
    The amount of work done by each transportation mode can only be compared when you consider the total distance travelled each day by CRD residents using each type of transport. Replacing the work done by fossil-fuelled automobiles is essential if we’re going to reduce emissions. But how much of that work can be replaced by humans exerting themselves by cycling or walking instead of driving?
    More than is currently the case in our region, no doubt. But when we consider how to shift enough of the work done by automobiles to more energy efficient modes of transportation, like walking, cycling, and transit, the magnitude of the challenge facing us becomes clear. There has to be a huge shift in how people move around, quickly. Why time is such a critical part of the equation should be obvious, and the Trudeau government’s announcement late last year of a mid-century emissions goal establishes the rate of descent for making reductions. The perplexing question is: What do we shift to?
    Cycling and walking are part of the solution, but there needs to be a massive shift of the work done by cars to public transit. If other places that have already made this change are any indication of what Victoria will choose to do, the role of cycling and walking will largely be for making the first short leg of a trip made by public transit. While we’re seeing local governments create isolated pockets of inordinately expensive improvements for cycling, there’s little evidence that the region is on the verge of making sensible (let alone massive) investments in public transit.
    I pointed this out in the last edition in “Mayor Helps’ 1.5 percent solution,” which was subtitled, “Local government’s response to reducing transportation emissions may be wishful thinking. Or foolish.”
     

    New two-way protected cycling corridor in Downtown Victoria
     
    Responding at a local level to the existential threat posed by climate change, rising sea level and ocean acidification—all caused by carbon emissions—will be a transformative, Herculean task that requires constant, difficult conversation about the path we should be on. If we Earthlings don’t do this work—including the conversations—we’re cooked.
    What is the task facing us? According to the CRD, 55 percent of emissions generated in the region come from fossil-fuelled vehicles. Unless there is a significant and quick decline in their use, the planet will be at increasing risk of runaway warming. We simply can’t take a long-term approach to this shift. How rapidly do we need to act?
    The Trudeau government’s overall emissions goal is to lower them by 80 percent (compared with 2005 levels) by 2050. As yet, no targets have been set for individual economic sectors, but it’s reasonable to assume that the transportation sector’s contribution would have to be on the order of 80 percent, give or take a few percentage points. To be on the most gradual descent that would get Canada to that goal, transportation emissions, and those from other sectors, would need to be reduced by about 34 percent over the next 12 years.

    Canada’s mid-century emissions target, announced in late 2016, means an overall emissions reduction of 34 percent by 2030—12 years from now.
     
    To put that time frame into perspective, consider that the City of Victoria started the process to replace the Johnson Street Bridge in 2008. It will, hopefully, open for traffic in 2018, ten years later. The amount of time left before 2030 is only a little longer than the City of Victoria needed to build a 156-metre-long bridge.
    What would this rapid transformation mean for drivers of fossil-fuelled cars in Victoria? Collectively, over the next 12 years, we will have to either drive 34 percent less distance each day, get new vehicles that use, on average, 34 percent less fuel, shift 34 percent of our travel to non-fossil-fuel modes of transportation, or employ a strategy that combines some or all of these.
    What is the CRD’s plan for responding to the goals announced by the Trudeau government in late 2016? In its already-outdated 2014 Regional Transportation Plan (RTP), the CRD noted: “Long-term transportation planning efforts and investments are therefore needed to help reduce GHG emissions and adapt to a changing climate—both requirements are fundamental principles to all of the themes elaborated in this RTP. This means focusing on integrating land use and transportation planning to support sustainable transportation choices and reduce trip distances.”
    The CRD’s short-term plan is to double ridership on public transit by 2030 and build more cycling and pedestrian infrastructure.
    Will this suffice to meet our national emission reduction target? The short answer is a definite “No.” I’ll show you the arithmetic for that conclusion later on.
    In “Mayor Helps’ 1.5 percent solution” I used the CRD’s most recent and most comprehensive survey of the region’s transportation system, done in 2011. It showed that autos accounted for 88 percent of the distance travelled in the CRD each day. By comparison, public transit accounted for 7.1 percent, walking 1.7 percent, and bicycles 1.5 percent. I questioned whether the CRD’s plan would be able to significantly shift the share of the work being done by the various modes of transportation enough to significantly reduce emissions.
    These numbers baffled cycling advocates, who were more familiar with “mode share” to describe cycling’s contribution to our transportation needs. Mode share is a way of comparing the number of individual trips made by each form of transportation in a day. Using mode share, both a 3-kilometre trip on a bicycle and a 10-kilometre drive in a car are given equal weight. Although the CRD’s 2011 information shows bicycling had a mode share of 2.8 percent in the region, in certain places and for certain trip purposes, such as commuting to work in the City of Victoria, cycling’s mode share can be considerably higher. The Victoria area isn’t much different from Vancouver, where cycling accounts for about 1 percent of total distance travelled. Notably, Metro Vancouver’s equivalent of the travel study done by the CRD includes such information, whereas the CRD does not.
     
    Share of total distance travelled by each mode of travel (Source: 2011 Metro Vancouver Regional Trip Diary Survey Analysis Report)
    Presenting basic information about the work done by components of transportation systems in this way might be discouraging to cyclists. However, when the primary consideration is reduction of emissions, “mode share” provides no useful information. As laid out in the CRD’s emissions reduction plan, the task will be to shift some fossil-fuelled auto use to a combination of transit, cycling and walking. Only by including the distance travelled, which reflects all the current realities about where people live, study, work and play and how far they have to travel each day to accomplish what they need to do, can we gauge how much energy needs to be shifted from autos to other modes. To put it as plainly as possible, a 34 percent reduction in emissions would require, after factoring in small increases in fuel efficiency and a small shift to electric vehicles, a shift of about 25 percent of the distance travelled in fossil-fuelled autos to non-fossil-fuelled modes over the next 12 years. I’ll elaborate on this later.
     
    AS MENTIONED ABOVE, my use of “total distance travelled” to compare the current energy contribution of different modes baffled cycling advocates. Former City of Victoria councillor John Luton, who has played a lead role in promoting cycling infrastructure projects in the region, wrote on Facebook, “Stories emerging from unreliable sources claim that CRD numbers show that only 1.5 percent of trips in the region are bicycle trips.” Luton went on to state, “Promoters of this theory are dishonest or unable to understand statistical information…The premise used to sell this fairy tale is that total mileage equals number of trips. That is false.…lying about the numbers is not a useful contribution to these discussions.”
    Edward Pullman, president of the board of directors of the Greater Victoria Cycling Coalition, responded to Luton: “Spot on John. By focussing exclusively on total distance travelled, folks that commute long distances become more important than those that live closer to their destinations. It’s a bizarre perversion of commuter choices.”
    Contacted by email, neither Luton nor Pullman could explain what their comments had meant. The story did not propose that “total mileage equals number of trips,” as Luton claimed.
    Former MLA and cycling advocate David Cubberley asserted: “There are no useful analytics involved in focussing on total distance travelled.”
    In a letter to Focus, Paul Rasmussen wrote, “Using the percentage of total miles travelled by mode… seems designed to minimize the positive impact of cycling.”
    The idea that our story was intentionally “designed to minimize the positive impact of cycling” occurred to other readers, as well.
    Transportation planning consultant Todd Litman wrote a lengthy response to our story in an online blog in which he claimed I had written that bicycle lanes were “wasteful” and “unfair to motorists.” On the basis of those claims—neither of which were made in our article, or intended—Litman continued on to assert what possessing such beliefs must indicate about the writer, including this zinger: “Critics like Broadland imply that cycling facilities only benefit a small number of serious cyclists—those who ride expensive racing bikes wearing lycra.”
    Nothing like that, though, was either stated or intended in our story.
    Luton, Pullman, Cubberley, Rasmussen and Litman are all in a position to influence the CRD’s plan for reducing emissions and the expenditure of many millions of dollars in public resources, yet none of them seemed able to understand what the CRD’s own numbers say about the magnitude of the energy shift that will be required to meet the federal target. Instead, they mounted a defense of cycling on the basis of other details we reported—or didn’t report—about the new Pandora Avenue protected bike lanes.
    Litman complained: “By extrapolating the Pandora bike lane cost to other Downtown arterials, Broadland estimates that Victoria’s cycling program will cost $16 million, which is almost certainly an exaggeration since the first project is always more costly than those that follow.”
    But the City’s record of underestimating and hiding project costs is a matter of public record. For example, when City councillors voted to replace the Johnson Street Bridge in 2009 they understood the project would cost $40 million. It’s now close to triple that. A more prudent reporter would have pushed the City’s bike lane estimate much higher. I simply extended the City’s actual cost per kilometre for the Pandora lanes—which was higher than the City’s budget estimate—to the full length of the protected corridor it plans to build.
    Merely reporting the likely cost of the planned Downtown protected  network was, it seemed, enough to set the cycling advocates’ sense of fairness on fire. Rasmussen wrote, “Broadland criticizes the cost of the project—which he claims will be $16 million—over twice as much as the City says it will cost. In the eight years I’ve lived in Victoria, this is the first time that any entity has spent any significant amount of money on bike infrastructure. Meanwhile, just off the top of my head, I can count three significant projects for automobile traffic within the CRD in the last few years—the McTavish Interchange at $24 million, the Johnson Street Bridge project at $100 million and counting, and the McKenzie Interchange project at least $85 million. So that’s at least $210 million for car infrastructure just in major projects. Maybe even $16 million for something that promotes a clear social good isn’t so much?”
    Rasmussen could have included the $30-million Leigh Road Interchange (aka The Bridge to Nowhere) in Langford on that list, but let’s examine his claim a little more closely. The cost of the new McKenzie interchange, for example, includes the cost of space for cyclists, pedestrians and public transit. The new Johnson Street Bridge also includes space for those three non-car modes. In fact, 53.5 percent of the bridge’s available deck space is dedicated to pedestrians and cyclists. If the final cost of the bridge is $115 million—which it will be once hidden and as-yet undetermined costs for landscaping and additional protective fendering are included—should 53.5 percent of that cost be assigned to cycling and walking? That would be $62 million. Moreover, the public record of how this project unfolded shows that cycling advocates greatly overstated the extent to which the old bridges were being used by cyclists and their exaggerations helped to inflate the project into the public works nightmare it has become (See “Juking the stats,” Focus November 2011).

    Comparison of the space for autos (red) and cyclists and pedestrians (green) on the new Johnson Street Bridge (Source: PCL drawing)
     
    In Litman’s response to our story he wrote, “Cyclists just want a fair share of public resources (transportation funding and road space). What would be fair? You could argue that it should be about equal to cycling’s mode share: if 5 percent of trips are by cycling then it would be fair to invest 5 percent of public resources in cycling facilities. But this is backward looking since it reflects the travel patterns that occur under current conditions, ignoring ‘latent demand,’ the additional cycling trips that some travellers want to make but cannot due to inadequate facilities. To respond to these demands it would be fair to invest the portion of money and road space that reflects the mode share after those programs are completed; if comprehensive planning is likely to result in 10 percent cycling mode share, it would be fair to invest 10 percent of transportation funds and road space in cycling facilities.”
    Litman’s point isn’t particularly relevant to a discussion focussing on whether proposed bicycle and LRT infrastructure will effectively address emissions reduction, but it’s worth exploring. The record at the City of Victoria shows that transportation infrastructure decisions have been wonky, but not in the direction Litman claims. Again, consider the new Johnson Street Bridge. In the only reliable survey comparing trips across the bridge—published in a 2010 economic assessment used by the City to promote a new bridge—cycling and walking accounted for about 6 percent of mode share during periods of the year when those modes are at their peak. In the winter that share drops. Yet the new bridge will provide them with over 53 percent of the available deck space. So far there is no evidence to suggest mode share for cycling and walking will ever reach 53 percent, but they got it anyway.

    The City of Victoria Engineering Department's traffic counts on the Johnson Street Bridge used in a 2010 economic impact analysis to support a new bridge: Autos on left, buses centre, bicycles on right.
     
    Reading the various responses to our story, I got the strong impression that cyclists were not willing to consider the story’s core idea: Transportation infrastructure decisions need to more strongly reflect the urgent need to reduce transportation emissions, and we need better, more timely information on vehicle use in the CRD in order to gauge the effectiveness of the strategies that are being employed to reduce emissions. By “better” I mean more trustworthy information, the gathering of which is insulated from the influence of special interest groups like the Greater Victoria Cycling Coalition, engineering and project management corporations, or current and former politicians.
    In email exchanges with Litman and others, it emerged that, in their minds, Focus had written the wrong story. The cycling advocates were furious that our article focussed so narrowly on the issue of emissions reduction rather than fully explaining all the other benefits that more cycling infrastructure would bring, such as cleaner air, greater personal safety for cyclists and a reduction in vehicle congestion.
    Litman wrote, “Public investments should be evaluated based on total benefits and costs. My report, ‘Evaluating Active Transportation Benefits and Costs’ (vtpi.org/nmt-tdm.pdf ) provides a framework for doing just that: it identifies about a dozen categories of impacts (benefits and costs) that should be considered when evaluating walking and cycling policies and programs, including direct impacts on users, and indirect impacts on society. Your column only considered two benefits: increased user safety and climate change emission reductions. That is grossly incomplete and undervalues cycling improvements.”
    Our story, in fact, made no attempt to examine “increased user safety” beyond presenting Mayor Helps’ publicly stated position. Nor was it our purpose to present any of cycling’s other benefits. Our focus was on emissions reduction and getting better information.
    Litman encourages us to evaluate cycling infrastructure on the basis of total benefits and cost, but this would be an exceedingly speculative endeavour. Consider cost. The 2011 CRD Pedestrian and Cycling Master Plan—the only plan for building cycling infrastructure in the member municipalities of the CRD—estimated the cost of a region-wide bicycle network at $275 million. But that plan didn’t include any cycling improvements on Pandora Street. Yet it’s still the “Master Plan.”
    Indeed, the plan estimated costs of $3.3 million for 22.7 kilometres of “priority” bike lanes in the City of Victoria. But that’s a lower cost than the actual cost incurred for only 1.4 kilometres of protected bike lanes on Pandora (which wasn’t in the plan). And, optimistically, the plan estimates the cost of “all projects” (54.7 kilometres) in the City of Victoria at $12.4 million. Yet that won’t even cover the four legs of the 5.3-kilometre-long protected network in the Downtown core.
    The plan’s estimates for other municipalities seem even wilder, if that’s possible. For example, it put the cost of 26.5 kilometres of bikeway in View Royal at $36 million. Why would $36 million be spent way out in View Royal and only $12.4 million in Victoria? By the way, the consultant who wrote the CRD’s Master Plan lived in Oregon.
    Even if we did have a good grasp of the benefits an advanced cycling network might provide, the cost estimating that has been done so far is deeply flawed. So how can a useful cost-benefit analysis be conducted? Again, the CRD needs more trustworthy information gathered by a process that’s insulated from special interest groups.
    In any case, cyclist-centric claims about mode share, costs and fairness—and the backlash from other parts of the community those claims generate—are diversions for which we no longer have time. Shouldn’t the choice about how to transform our transportation system be simpler than that? Shouldn’t it be: Are we going to make a serious attempt to meet the federal emissions target or not? If we are, what do we need to do to accomplish that? Personally, I’m not interested in writing about all the benefits of a “sustainable” transportation system if that system won’t come anywhere close to meeting our 2030 emissions reduction target.
    So here’s the crux of the problem: The emissions reduction potential of an improved cycling network, if that’s all that’s executed, is limited. A paper published by Litman quoted results from “a detailed study of five US communities with active transport improvements” which found the improvements resulted in a reduction of “one to four percent of total automobile travel.” A “one to four percent” reduction would be the equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs as the ship is sinking. We need a 34 percent reduction in 12 years.
    Let’s shift back to what our regional transportation system would need to look like by 2030 so that we could meet that target. To get a clearer picture, let’s start in the Netherlands.
     

    The Netherlands has invested billions of dollars in public transit and infrastructure for bicycles and pedestrians. Is this a solution for Victoria?
     
    STATISTICS NETHERLANDS REPORTS that, in 2015, with 1.1 bicycle for each of its nearly 17 million inhabitants, that country had “the highest bicycle density in the world.” Featured prominently in its depiction of that country’s transportation system is a chart showing the percentage that each different mode contributed to transportation of people on land—bicycles, cars, buses, trains, walking, etcetera. Percentage of what? The percentage of the total distance travelled:

    Domestic distance travelled by transport mode in the Netherlands (Source: Statistics Netherlands)
     
    According to Statistics Netherlands, cars accounted for 73 percent of the total distance people travelled within their country. Public transit provides 12 percent, bicycles 7 percent and walking 3 percent.
    The City of Amsterdam, considered to have the greatest regional participation in cycling of any large European city, also publishes comparisons of the extent to which each transportation mode is used within that city, both by mode share and total distance travelled:

    Mode share (left) and share of total distance travelled (right) in the City of Amsterdam (Source: City of Amsterdam)
     
    The combined mode share for cycling and walking amounts to 54 percent (30 + 24). Yet when the total-distance-travelled lens is applied, together they account for 14 percent (12 + 2). The Dutch, rightfully proud of their extensive use of bicycles for transportation, have no problem being transparent about how much of the work of transporting people is done by each mode. Cars, at 54 percent, still account for the majority of the work done. (According to TomTom, an Amsterdam-based company that measures vehicle congestion all over the globe, Amsterdam’s traffic congestion is increasing; it’s already at a level higher than many American cities.)
    In the CRD, 88 percent of that work is being done by cars. The 34 percentage points of difference between Victoria’s and Amsterdam’s reliance on fossil-fuelled cars to transport people is, completely coincidentally, equal to the shift Victoria would need to make by 2030 to be on a path that would meet the federal mid-century goal.
    In other words, Victoria would need to become Little Amsterdam (Amsterdam has a metropolitan population of 1.6 million, Victoria’s is 368,000) within 12 years—the equivalent of a moonshot.
    Amsterdam’s achievements, it should be noted, include extensive bus, tram, metro and railway networks which provide the means to extend the length of a trip that a person starts and ends as a pedestrian or a cyclist. This achievement has taken many decades and many billions of dollars. For example, the city’s 73 kilometres of underground metro lines have a current value of $30-40 billion.
     

    Amsterdam’s highly developed public tramway, metro and railway system. Bus routes aren’t shown. Estimated cost? Unknown, but the 9.5-kilometre North-South Line (shown by the blue line), a new metro line currently under construction, will cost the equivalent of $4.6 billion CAD.
     
    What would Victoria need to do to knock 34 percent off its emissions tally? Let me take you through that exercise, but keep in mind that this is an arithmetical exercise performed only to provide you with a sense of the magnitude of the challenge we face. To do it we need to start with some basic assumptions.
    First, let’s assume 4 percent of fossil-fuelled auto travel in the CRD shifts to electric cars over the next 12 years (it’s currently less than 1 percent). That would take care of 4 percent of transportation emissions and our reduction requirement would fall to about 30 percent. If there’s a quick breakthrough in super-capacitor technology, which could replace the lithium ion batteries currently used in electric vehicles, this shift could eventually be much higher. But even such an unexpected breakthrough wouldn’t have a big impact over the next 12 years.
    Secondly, let’s assume there will be only minor emission reductions as a result of people using cars with higher fuel efficiency. In the USA earlier this year, Trump ordered a review of Obama’s regulations requiring much greater fuel efficiency by 2025. There’s broad expectation in the US that those standards will be rolled back, partly because car manufacturers have made the case that Obama’s regulations can’t be met without making cars unaffordable. Canada harmonizes with the US on such matters, so higher fuel efficiency seems like a long shot. Still, let’s include a conservative five percent reduction in car emissions due to fuel efficiency gains by 2030. Now we’re down to the need for a 25 percent reduction from taking other actions.
    Most people are aware of the need to reduce emissions and believe they already limit their travel to only what’s essential. That leaves government only one option: somehow persuading drivers to replace 25 percent of their current auto travel with a combination of public transit, bicycling or walking. How will we be persuaded? There would be no need for a carbon tax if people would voluntarily limit their auto use to the level governments told them was necessary. But we’re not like that, so implementation of a much higher carbon tax to start pushing the most cost-sensitive drivers out of their cars would have to occur soon. The Province’s account of BC’s emissions shows the current level of the carbon tax doesn’t appear to be having much bite, especially with gas prices as low as they are. So our last assumption is that much more serious fuel-cost persuasion will begin soon.
    With current total travel by autos in the CRD running at approximately five million kilometres each day, 25 percent of that—or 1.25 million kilometres per day—would need to be shifted from cars to buses, walking and cycling. However, in reducing the distance driven by autos by 25 percent, we would also likely displace 25 percent of the 1 million kilometres travelled in autos by passengers each day. So the shift to public transit, walking or bicycles would need to amount to about 1.5 million kilometres per day.
    Doubling the mode share of buses by 2030—the CRD’s stated goal—would cover about 500,000 kilometres of the required shift. The remaining 1 million kilometres of the shift would fall to walking and cycling. When added to their current levels, that would mean that cycling and walking would account for about 1.2 million kilometres each day, or about 18 percent of the total distance travelled—in just 12 years time.
    Now compare that with Amsterdam. Its combined total for bicycles and walking is 14 percent of the total distance travelled—a level that has taken several decades and billions of dollars invested in infrastructure for walking, bicycles, buses, subways, trams and commuter rail. Moreover, Amsterdam has packed 1.6 million people into an area about the same size as Victoria’s metropolitan area. That high population density, over four times Victoria’s, is essential for the financial viability of Amsterdam’s expansive, complex and costly public transit system.
    For the CRD’s vaguely-outlined plan to work, the distance travelled by cycling and walking would have to increase by about 600 percent (over levels in 2011) within 12 years. For a City with a steadily aging population and a so-so transit system, is this realistic? Has the CRD come up with the moonshot plan that will reduce the region’s transportation emissions by 34 percent within 12 years?
    So far, only minimal information has emerged into public view about how the region’s public transit system will evolve so its mode share doubles by 2030. What seems evident is that the rationale stated in the CRD’s Regional Transportation Plan for very expensive rapid transit is much more of a response to brief periods of traffic congestion—along the Trans Canada Highway out to Langford, and the Pat Bay Highway out to Sidney, during peak commuting periods—than it is a response to the need to cost-effectively reduce emissions throughout the day.
    The assumption that such congestion will continue on the Trans Canada, even after the new McKenzie Road interchange is complete, is founded on the debunked theory that most future growth in the region will occur in Langford. The 2016 census data shows that over the past 15 years—Langford’s glory years—the Core’s share of the metropolitan population has hardly changed, dropping from 68 percent to 65 percent. That strongly suggests the best place to focus future investment in public transit is where most of the people already live—in Victoria and Saanich. Instead, the CRD could be the first government in history to plan for an LRT to Nowhere.
    After the next 12 years, of course, the same rate of shift from autos to public transit, cycling and walking would have to continue—right through to 2050. Keep in mind, too, that transportation emissions in Canada amount to about 24 percent of total emissions, so to be on the most gradually descending path to 2050, all the other sectors would need to be reducing their emissions as well. That will impact all of our lives in ways that, at this point, we haven’t yet imagined. But unless we do it—according to the world’s best scientific minds—we’re cooked.
    Is Victoria’s political culture up to the task of getting us through this daunting challenge? The short answer may lie in the record of the attempt to build a new Johnson Street Bridge. An even more chilling possibility is hinted at by the misplaced effort to convert Victoria’s safe, source-controlled, low-cost, tidal-powered marine-based sewage treatment system to a land-based system that will cost Victorians billions of dollars over the life of the infrastructure that’s being built. According to DFO scientists, land-based sewage treatment will have negligible effect on environmental conditions in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The existing marine-based system was endorsed by an overwhelming number of Victoria’s marine scientists and current and former public health officials.
    One of the DFO scientists I spoke with during those deliberations was Sophie Johannessen, the lead author of the peer-reviewed study that found land-based treatment would have a negligible environmental effect on environmental conditions in the Strait.
    I asked Johannessen if there was anything the community could do that would have a more positive effect on marine ecosystems than moving Victoria’s marine-based sewage treatment system onto land.
    “I think so, yes,” Johannessen said. “We could reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, enact source control for persistent contaminants, and reduce other local pressures on the marine biota.”
    The local political culture didn’t listen to the scientists. Instead it followed Mr Floatie to Seattle and started the never-ending process of flushing billions of dollars down our toilets. On atmospheric emissions, the scientists have spoken loudly and clearly: there’s a pressing need to act. In response, will our politicians be led by special interest groups? Or will their decisions be based on science and evidence?
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Judith Lavoie
    July 2017
    The project faces stiff opposition from a new government and legal challenges by First Nations and others.
     

     
    KINDER MORGAN CANADA’S President Ian Anderson seems confident his company will soon break ground on the Trans Mountain pipeline running from Alberta’s oil sands to a coastal terminal in Burnaby. The federal government approved the pipeline following a National Energy Board recommendation. And Alberta Premier Rachel Notley is acting as if the pipeline’s a done deal and dismissing BC’s right to control its coasts.
    But is it a done deal? Many BC citizens are adamantly opposed, with First Nations leading the resistance. And on May 9 the ground shifted beneath the $7.4-billion project when the BC Liberals lost their majority in the provincial election. In one of their first post-election statements, leaders of the NDP/Green partnership announced they would “immediately employ every tool available to the new government to stop the expansion.”
    It was a far cry from former Premier Christy Clark’s agreement that, subject to conditions and a 20-year revenue-sharing deal, worth up to $1-billion, construction of the 1150-kilometre pipeline could go ahead. But even under a Clark government, there were growing doubts about the viability of the plan to triple the capacity of the pipeline to 890,000 barrels of diluted bitumen a day, with the number of tankers in the Salish Sea increasing seven-fold to about 400 a year.
    Now, with a new provincial government, an aroused public, and perhaps most important, strong First Nations opposition, the battle lines are being drawn.
     
    AT LAST COUNT there were 19 legal challenges to Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project wending their way through the courts. These court cases will test the power of First Nations to demand meaningful consultation, along with the extent of Federal powers. They will also assess claims by First Nations and others that Canada’s environmental assessment process is fatally flawed.
    “It’s not going to happen,” said BC Green Party leader Andrew Weaver. He suggests pipeline supporters such as Alberta Premier Rachel Notley and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau look at Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution which protects aboriginal and treaty rights, including those of “meaningful consultation,” and is increasingly used as a legal tool by First Nations arguing that they have not been adequately consulted.
    As an example of consultation-gone-wrong, Weaver pointed to the case filed by the Coldwater Indian Band, whose territories are in BC’s southern Interior region, challenging the National Energy Board’s approval of the pipeline.
    “It’s an incredibly compelling case. The proposed pipeline sits right at the top of the aquifer which is their only supply of water and it is not as if there was not an alternate route. It was discussed and deemed to be more expensive,” Weaver said.
    Prime Minister Trudeau also has to figure out how pushing through the pipeline over First Nations objections could possibly square with his commitment to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. That declaration requires consent for such developments, Weaver noted.
    Previous governments resisted signing the declaration because of fears it would effectively give First Nations veto power over major projects. But Eugene Kung of West Coast Environmental Law legal counsel said there is a difference between consent and veto and, with the shift in aboriginal law in Canada, the distinction needs to be publicly clarified.
    “Think about another place where we use that term ‘consent’—in the context of sexual assault and harassment,” he said. “No one would ever say in that context that, by a victim denying consent, that it would be vetoing the perpetrator’s decision, because the perpetrator doesn’t have rights over the victim’s body. You need mutual consent for advancement.”
    Sixteen judicial review cases, which include challenges by seven First Nations, the City of Vancouver, City of Burnaby, Raincoast Conservation Society, Living Oceans Society, and Democracy Watch, have been consolidated and will be heard by the Federal Court of Appeal, likely this fall. If there are appeals, the issue could be heading for the Supreme Court.
    Another challenge has come from two Washington State tribes over the effect that vastly-increased tanker traffic will have on endangered southern resident killer whales.
    Even though the judicial review cases have been consolidated, each First Nation challenge is based on unique facts, according to Kung. “Each First Nation has an independent right to be consulted and accommodated in projects that affect their territories…Success on any one of the First Nations legal challenges could delay or stop the project,” he said. Enough delays, and Kinder Morgan could find it all too expensive to proceed.
    Kinder Morgan says it has agreements, amounting in total to over $300 million, with 40 First Nations, though it will not identify them. It’s presumed many of these are at the Alberta end of the pipeline. At the crucial and densely-populated Lower Mainland part of the pipeline, opposition is strong. Most of the First Nations there are involved in the court cases (e.g Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam, Squamish, Sto:Lo, Kwantlen).
    On Vancouver Island, some First Nations, like the Ditidaht, Pacheedaht, and Pauquachin, have signed agreements with Kinder Morgan in order to be eligible for spill response funding.
    In all, though, at least 13 First Nations in BC are formally opposing the project.
    The legal climate around aboriginal rights and title has undergone profound changes since the 2014 Tsilhqot’in decision that, for the first time, recognized aboriginal title. Combined with other recent court decisions that have favoured First Nations, including the scuttling of Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline, the game has changed. In the Enbridge case, the Federal Court of Appeal overturned the Harper government’s approval of the project, after finding the Canadian government failed to properly consult the First Nations affected by the pipeline.
    As Kung noted, “I think the provincial and federal governments have been slow to respond meaningfully to the direction the Supreme Court of Canada and the courts have set, and the companies have really underestimated the importance of these cases.”
    While the Province of BC under Christy Clark formally approved the Trans Mountain expansion, it is contingent on 37 conditions being met, in addition to 157 from the federal approval. Any of these may provide First Nations and the Province with more ammunition in their resistance to the Trans Mountain project.
    John Horgan, NDP leader and premier-designate of BC, has indicated he’s prepared to go to court over the pipeline expansion project, and will likely join one of the legal challenges. The Alberta government has already been granted intervener status in the judicial review—advanced by municipalities, First Nations and environmental groups—challenging the National Energy Board’s recommendation as well as the federal Order in Council approving expansion.
    Reflecting a growing confidence in the power to win in the courts, Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, Union of BC Indian Chiefs president, sent a strong message to Premier Notley, who, in a much-quoted statement had said: “Mark my words, that pipeline will be built, the decisions have been made.”
    Phillip immediately responded: “Mark my words, Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain expansion project will never see the light of day.” He continued: “We do not accept the unscrupulous liability of dirty oil coming through any pipeline system to benefit some Texans or multinational interests at the expense of our inherent responsibilities to our grandchildren’s grandchildren.”
     
    CHIEF PHILLIP, however, is not relying solely on the courts. He believes it may well be financial pressures that finally put visions of a pipeline expansion to rest. Noting that the price differential between selling to Asia and selling to the US has shrunk, he said, “When this project was first being developed a number of years ago, oil was $100 a barrel and we all know oil is never going to go back to those prices again…A lot of underlying assumptions have been debunked.”
    Phillip continued, stating that investors must be concerned about the court cases, especially in light of the Rio Tinto ruling last year that gave aboriginal communities the right to sue for compensation if their rights are infringed. Investors, he noted, will also be concerned about the likelihood of protests.
    Phillip feels that there is no doubt that, if the pipeline proceeds, there will be civil disobedience. “I think, in many ways, Burnaby Mountain was a warm-up that demonstrated that, when push comes to shove, there will be strategies on the ground to prevent the project from moving forward,” he emphasized. “I think what needs to be understood is, when those activities begin to take shape, it will not just be aboriginal, First Nations and indigenous people on the front line. The vast majority of the [126] people arrested on Burnaby Mountain were not indigenous.”
    Weaver, too, believes that if the company starts building the expansion despite the pending lawsuits, it will head into trouble when construction reaches the Lower Mainland. (The company’s construction schedule anticipates that tunnel-boring through Burnaby Mountain will start in March 2018.)
    “It does not have a social licence and it will never have one in British Columbia,” said Weaver. “I would suggest that if they start drilling under Burnaby Mountain…this will create a crisis like this country has never seen before,” he predicted. Some in the resistance movement are saying it will rival Clayoquot protests or those at Standing Rock.
    Weaver is carefully watching Kinder Morgan’s finances in the wake of the initial public offering, noting that stock prices have dropped from the initial price of $17. Financial questions are also being raised by a coalition of more than 20 indigenous and environmental groups. Their coalition is warning 28 major banks—including 14 that underwrote the initial public offering for Kinder Morgan Canada—to stay away from funding the pipeline. The open letter says that the organizations involved will use their influence to urge local and foreign governments to divest from banks that fund the pipeline. Lindsey Allen, Rainforest Action Network executive director, stated in a news release, “Any bank that decides to participate in this project will be implicated in indigenous rights violations and will knowingly feed fuel to the fire of climate chaos. They won’t be able to claim that they didn’t have all the relevant information.”
    Kinder Morgan, in its prospectus released to raise $1.75-billion for the project, acknowledges that court actions could delay or even halt the project. Yet the company also says all financing is now in place and it is starting to move ahead with contracts and benefit agreements with the aim of starting construction in September.
    In a statement emailed to Focus, Kinder Morgan’s media spokesman said the final investment decision has been made and the company is “seeking and receiving permits from the necessary regulatory agencies…Trans Mountain has followed every process and met every test put before us…Taking into account all the scientific and technical studies, input from communities and a variety of opinions, we were given approval from the National Energy Board and the Government of Canada, as well as our environmental certificate from the BC Environmental Assessment Office.”
     
    EVEN THOUGH the Province of BC cannot block a federally-approved project, there are a number actions that can be taken by BC, according to environmental lawyers.
    A legal toolkit for provincial action released by West Coast Environmental Law suggests that BC could impose more conditions and/or prohibit any new provincial approvals or permits, and suspend existing approvals until new conditions have been met. It points out the constitutional obligation of the Province to protect First Nations’ rights.
    “And there may be injunctions filed. I am sure that the First Nations involved have considered that option,” Kung said.
    Jessica Clogg, West Coast Environmental Law executive director, suggested that the Province could also require that Kinder Morgan demonstrate that all indigenous people affected by the project have provided their “free, prior and informed consent”—as required under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
    That free and informed consent would certainly not be coming from the Tsartlip First Nation whose territory lies along the east coast of Vancouver Island, and from which Tsartlip residents would be able to watch tankers carrying diluted bitumen through the Salish Sea.
    The Tsartlip, like other First Nations on southern Vancouver Island, had a “middle depth of consultation” according to the federal government. Tsartlip Chief Don Tom said, “We are fundamentally opposed to any increases in tanker traffic that would affect our rights out in the Salish Sea.” The Douglas Treaties, he noted, protect their right to hunt and fish as they did before European settlement.
    A particular concern, Tom added, is the health of the resident killer whales, which are considered relatives by his people.
    “There’s no chance this is going to happen. Based on today’s political landscape, it’s dead in the water,” he said.
    Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith.

    Leslie Campbell
    July 2017
    Affordable housing—for low- and moderate-income people working Downtown—should be a City of Victoria priority.
     
    VICTORIA'S CURRENT HOUSING SCENE is now recognized in official circles as in “severe crisis”—both in terms of affordability and availability. The Capital Region Analysis & Data Book shows 50 percent of households can only afford 13.7 percent of the region’s homes.
    The City of Victoria has responded to the crisis in numerous ways. It has removed the necessity of rezoning for garden suites. It has given preliminary approval to a moratorium on granting demolition permits for rental housing, as developers salivate over replacing those three-story 1970s-era apartment blocks that form the bulk of the City’s affordable housing. It is considering special taxes on vacant and derelict properties. It is fast-tracking applications for rental developments and encouraging developers to include some non- market “affordable” units in their buildings.
    And, upon learning that at least 300 Downtown housing units had been diverted from their intended purpose of housing to money-making tourist accommodation, it started debating ways to restrict that practice— those developments, after all, got building permits on the basis of supplying housing, not hotels.
    These are all necessary, but wholly insufficient steps to turning the tide on the affordable housing crisis.
    But promises of help are coming from both the feds and the NDP-led, Green Party-supported provincial government. The NDP promised to build 114,000 affordable rental, non-profit and co-op housing units over 10 years, and to provide social housing to middle-class workers who have been priced out of BC cities. The Greens were willing to spend $750 million per year building and renovating social housing, to construct about 4000 affordable housing units per year. And the feds’ new $180-billion infrastructure funds are geared, in part, to affordable housing projects (some of it in the form of federal land to build on).
    It’s timely and crucial for local communities to make concrete plans for projects in the region that will attract federal and provincial funding. It’s clear that the private sphere will not, and likely cannot, build the homes that are truly needed.
     

    Centennial Square Parkade. A seismically-vulnerable and low-value use of Downtown space?

    ONE POPULATION THAT IS ESPECIALLY ill-served by the housing market is Downtown workers of modest income—the folks who cook and serve us in cafés and restaurants, who clean hotel rooms, who are the helpful receptionists in offices we visit, and who help us find the perfect shirt or gift in Downtown’s stores. There are over 24,000 people working Downtown, about half of them in the hospitality (4183), restaurant (3834), and retail (3225) sectors (2013 figures).
    Despite the building boom throughout the city, but especially in or near Downtown (see the slide show at www.focusonvictoria.ca), none of the newer and under-construction buildings, with one notable exception, offer “affordable” rents for those making the low-to-modest living that many thousands of Downtown workers earn.
    Downtown employers are paying competitive wages, but tell me they have trouble finding and keeping good employees simply because of the difficulty and expense of parking and travel from their far-flung homes—in Shawnigan or Langford or Sooke. Transit and cycling are both often highly inconvenient for someone who is forced to work two jobs, as many do. But owning a car—and parking it Downtown—is prohibitively expensive for these workers. (My 1-hour-40-minute visit to the dentist the other day resulted in a $7 parkade charge. Double ouch!)
    A minimum-wage job currently pays $10.85/hour. If the BC NDP government keeps its promise around minimum wage, this will rise incrementally to $15 per hour by 2021. Many Downtown employers already pay above minimum wage, so let’s take the example of a worker currently making $15/hour. At 40 hours/week, he or she makes about $2500/month before taxes and deductions. That means their affordable rent would be $750/month. (The accepted definition of “affordable housing” is housing that costs no more than 30 percent of household income before tax.)
    What can one find now in that $750/month range?
    When I looked at online ads for apartments in or close to Downtown, I did find one “$750 Downtown loft apartment.” On further inspection, however, it turned out to be a 10-foot-square room within a loft apartment. And when I stumbled on a fully-furnished “large one-bedroom” in Esquimalt for $650, and emailed to ask if it was just the bedroom (I thought I was getting wise to the scene), I was soon contacted by Used Victoria to let me know it might well be a scam. It was: I was sent photos of the lovely interior, saying I should drive by 1194 Esquimalt but wouldn’t be able to see inside since they were out of town. Verbatim: “If you are interested. I want you to remember that I’m in (Portland, Oregon.). and the keys and documents are here with me, so you will not be able to see inside the apartment, you can only view from the outside. I will send the keys and documents to you via FedEx and you will receive it within 48hrs…” Of course, with the application, I was to send $950. Besides the too-good-to-be-true price, the brackets every time they mentioned “Portland, Oregon” gave it away.
    But I digress.
    There were actually quite a few of the second-bedroom-for-rent type ads. In Esquimalt that might cost you $600; closer to Downtown (e.g. on Pembroke) it’s more likely to cost $750. (And these were not “short-term vacation rentals”—those are about twice as much.)
    There are a lot of folks advertising themselves as great tenants in the “apartments for rent” section—everything from “professional couples” willing to pay $1400 to $2400/month, to a “sober nerdy vegan” who can afford $475-$625/month. Craigslist has a whole department devoted to “rooms & shares.”
    If you really want your own, albeit tiny, apartment Downtown, expect to pay a lot more. For example, a 452-square-foot studio (with a 50-square-foot balcony) at Hudson Walk One on Caledonia is asking $1510 per month—certainly not affordable for the Downtown worker making $15/hour, or even $20/hour. That price tag is also about 50 percent more than rents at Hudson Walk One were when it launched a year ago.
    The Janion has an even smaller pad—350 square feet—for $1280. Again, unaffordable for a full-time worker at $15/hour. In fact, at the 30 percent definition of affordable, one would have to make $4300/month—about $26/hour—to rent 350 square feet. If you are determined to have your own space for just shy of $800 then you might find one at the Dominion Rocket—but it might be only 179 square feet.
    While the City sometimes demands developers include some non-market units in new buildings, they are usually only just a small handful per complex.
     

    The Greater Victoria Rental Development Society’s Azzurro project across Blanshard from the arena
     
    One non-profit thankfully stepped up recently to help more workers of modest means. The Greater Victoria Rental Development Society, paired with Realhomes Development Corp to develop the 7-storey, 65-unit Azzurro right across Blanshard from the arena. Forty-three of its units are non-market: $925 for a one-bedroom and $860 for a studio. Despite the low rents, Alanna Holroyd, the executive director of GVRDS, says she can make it work financially. It helps that she was able to do much of the work herself, and that the $5 million in development costs were waived. She has assembled a great team, including locally-based builders Knappett Projects. She also credits BC Housing financing—100 percent financing [of 14.8 million] through construction at 1.6 percent, interest only—as making housing lower- income people a feasible business model. Holroyd notes, “The lower two levels of commercial also played a significant role in getting financing from BC Housing. After the sale of the commercial spaces, a further $2.5 million will be raised.” While grants of $495,000 from the CRD and $544,000 from the City helped make Azzurro happen, Holroyd believes she can do such developments without any grants in the future.
    If we want a liveable, vibrant Downtown, we need more such creative, bold moves. By supplying affordable housing in the core for the the core’s workforce, they will also reduce greenhouse gas emissions—and help make the heart of our city more truly liveable.
     
    AMONG THE RECOMMENDATIONS of the City of Victoria’s Housing Affordability Task Force last year was one urging the contribution of City-owned land at no cost or at reduced market value for the development of affordable housing projects. The Task Force report noted that “Under current law, the City can donate land or enter into long-term lease agreements with organizations that commit to providing affordable housing. The City can also enter into land swaps with other public institutions or the private sector and use those properties for affordable housing purposes.”
    The most visible form of City-owned property Downtown, besides City Hall, are parkades. Could we develop a plan to transform one or more of them into affordable rental apartments—a Downtown workers’ paradise?
    The City of Victoria owns five parkades. We can rule out the one below the Central Library, so that leaves four, all above ground. Most were built in the 1960s when seismic standards were much lower. From past research via FOIs, we know that City-owned parkades have not been seismically evaluated. It’s highly likely that once they are assessed for seismic vulnerability, they’ll have to be replaced, otherwise the City would be faced with a huge liability issue if an earthquake did strike.
    In that case, do we simply put up replacement parkades? That seems crazy in light of land values, needs for housing, and climate change.
    Why not consider replacing them with affordable homes for Downtown’s service workers? Start with the one which has the fewest parking spaces—it just so happens that’s the one adjacent to Centennial Square. You could retain some or all of its 188 spaces by putting them underground. They can be designed with smaller parking spaces to match the smaller cars we’ll be driving, as well as outfitted to provide charging for the electric vehicles we’re expected to drive. The main floor would have space for retailers paying market-based rents. Above, build a high-rise of varying-sized suites, all rented on an affordable basis to those who are eligible: people who work at jobs Downtown and have incomes in the target range suggested by the City’s Housing Affordability Task Force: $18,000-$57,000/year.
    Oh, but what about losing precious parking spaces, you ask? It’s surprising how many parking spots might be available underground. Under the Central Library, for instance, there are 544 parking spots. (It’s worth noting that there are also 11 privately-owned parkades and 40 parking lots Downtown.) There might even be a net gain in parking spaces if Downtown workers no longer need to drive a car to work.
    This means there’s an important added benefit: a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. (In BC, transportation accounts for 37 percent of our total annual emissions.)
    Another possible objection: That particular parkade, and the attached one-storey part of the building on Douglas, were designed in 1963 by renowned architect John Di Castri. It’s a heritage building. Yet that same pedigree belongs to the Crystal Pool, which Victoria council seems determined to replace (see story, page 22). In the case of the Centennial Square parkade, the seismic issue alone will mean its eventual demise. Let’s make sure what we build there is beautifully designed (perhaps incorporating or echoing Di Castri’s work), durable, and aimed at a higher purpose like affordable housing. Think how such a transformation would enliven Victoria’s central plaza, especially if families with children are housed there.
     

    The Centennial Square side of the John Di Castri-designed parkade
     
    But why stop at one parkade? There are three other above-ground City-owned parkades, each seismically questionable: at Bastion Square, View Street, and Johnson Street. The City should be planning now for how to deal with them over the next decade, in ways that will best align with our future needs—around housing, transportation, and climate change.
    Most likely, the City would and should involve one of the local non-profits involved in building low-income housing—the Greater Victoria Rental Development Society and the Greater Victoria Housing Society, for instance, have each built quality apartment buildings throughout the city in which units rent at non-market rates. Those in the social-housing industry can figure out the details, including eligibility criteria and precise rental rates, but all of the apartments should be geared to Downtown workers of modest means. The buildings will ideally house 300 or more residents per building.
    Our theoretical full-time worker, with a $2500/month income, could get a decent studio or small one-bedroom for $750. A couple, perhaps with a child, working Downtown with a monthly income of close to $5000, could get a larger suite for up to $1500. Incomes would be reviewed annually and rents reassessed. Sure there’s nitty-gritty details like “what happens if a person leaves their Downtown employ for a job somewhere else?” But surely we can dream up some fair-minded policies to deal with such situations. Perhaps they are given six month’s notice.
    I like this parkade-to-housing concept simply for the compassion it shows to those who enliven Downtown through their work, not to mention how it places value on homes over cars. But other benefits would also flow. Besides the already-mentioned reduction of green house gas emissions, it would help local businesses retain employees, a crucial ingredient of stability and success. And that would help the City’s economy, as those businesses would be far less likely to pull up stakes for the suburbs. It might even cool the housing market a tad, a good thing, as one glance at real estate ads will attest.
    Since the City owns the land, that cuts out a huge cost of development. According to GVRDS’s Holroyd, “if the site has a Certificate of Compliance [from the Ministry of Environment[, it could be worth $250 per square foot and up depending on what density is allowed after rezoning.” But, she warns, “the variables are massive.” Regardless, “it could easily be half the cost of construction…without a development fee of course.” Holroyd agreed that having land donated makes a lot more things possible.
    So the City supplies the land, perhaps waiving some fees, and other levels of government provide funding, and non-profits take care of the rest.
    Unless we are willing to have our governments step up and provide non-market housing, we’ll face a city bleached of its diversity and  vitality, and we’ll witness more lives, especially young ones, stunted by unbearable costs.
    Remember Portland, once held up as a shining example of how to deal with homelessness? It now has 4000 homeless, including many families living in shelters, and is currently working on a pilot program to supply government-constructed “pods” of 200 square feet, placed in the backyards of willing homeowners. And they are not cheap; the pods cost about $75,000 each (but here too the land is free). Victoria has the opportunity to avoid such drastic measures by moving more aggressively to actually initiate development and put up the land.
    If this community is willing to tear down a di Castri-designed swimming pool and spend $70 million to replace it (even though it could be fixed for far less), I think we have a moral obligation to affordably house the people who work to make the Downtown experience so fine.
    Leslie Campbell invites other dreamers to send us your ideas on how to create a liveable, green, compassionate city.

    David Broadland
    July 2017
    Local government’s response to reducing transportation emissions may be wishful thinking. Or foolish.

     
    IS THE CITY OF VICTORIA’S STRATEGY to create protected bike lanes in the Downtown core a well-thought-out strategy to make bicycling safer, relieve vehicle congestion and move Victoria in the direction of a low-carbon future? Or is it another case—like the Johnson Street Bridge Replacement Project—of the City unintentionally displaying its proven tendency toward decision-based evidence-making?
    The first component of the strategy—a $3.5-million, 1.2-kilometre-long corridor on Pandora between Cook and Store—became operational in May. By mid-June the City’s PR team announced “the number of cyclists using the new bike lanes is very encouraging” with “nearly 40,000 bicycle trips” made along the corridor in its first month of operation. That timeframe, and the numbers, included Victoria’s Bike to Work Week, an annual outpouring of temporary enthusiasm.
    A second protected bicycle corridor—1.2 kilometres of Fort from Cook to Wharf—was approved by City of Victoria councillors on June 8. Construction is scheduled to begin in September.
    The City plans to expand these corridors to Wharf, Humboldt and Cook. At the cost per kilometre of the Pandora corridor, the 5.3-kilometre-long Phase 1 would cost about $16 million—and depends almost entirely on the availability of grants from the Gas Tax Fund.
    The rationale behind the protected lanes—as opposed to cyclists sharing the existing infrastructure with automobiles—is to increase the safety of cyclists. But creating protected lanes has resulted in removal of auto parking space, already in short supply in the Downtown core much of each day. The Pandora corridor removed 43 auto parking stalls; another 30 will be removed on Fort Street. At that rate of parking space removal, Phase 1 would see about 175 spaces disappear. Before construction of the protected corridors began, the City had less than 2000 on-street parking spaces Downtown. So Phase 1, originally planned to be complete by the end of 2018, will see the loss of nearly 10 percent of on-street parking in the Downtown core. The City’s aim appears to be to quickly replace a significant fraction of motorized individual transport with unmotorized individual transport.
    For people who drive a car, truck or van Downtown and don’t see themselves as likely to ever switch to a bicycle, the new situation feels like an attempt to force them to make a change they can’t or don’t want to make, and carries a whiff of social engineering. Some Downtown businesses have expressed concern that making vehicle parking Downtown less available will discourage potential clients and impact their businesses. But Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps has argued that protected bicycle corridors will make auto parking more available, not less. Her theory is that by making biking around Downtown safer, people who in the past would only travel there by auto will now be encouraged to come by bicycle. Victoria’s 40-ish mayor is an avid cycle commuter and she now has a protected corridor that runs most of the 1.4 kilometres from her home in Fernwood to her place of work at City Hall.
    Implicit in the City’s decision to proceed along this course is the belief that the number of cyclists, especially those commuting to work, needs to be encouraged and allowed to grow far beyond current levels. Why are they doing that? Here’s the City’s official position on “why”: “Encouraging cycling, along with walking and transit use, is an important strategy to manage expected population growth and support community health, affordability, economic development, air quality and climate action objectives. As the City grows in population, we will need to shift some of our trips to transit, cycling and walking because these are much more efficient modes of transportation than single occupancy vehicles.”
    The City supports its position with data that it attributes to the 2011 Census that indicated 10.6 percent of people living within the City of Victoria cycle to work. That’s Canada’s highest per capita incidence of commuting by bicycle. It’s hard to argue with federal census data that counts (almost) every single person in the country and has a margin of error close to zero. The City is hoping to build on that encouraging number and calls its plan “Biketoria.”
    While the City’s vision sounds progressive and smart, the best available data about transportation in Victoria calls into question the City’s emphasis on cycling and walking—and perhaps transit, too.
    Let’s start with Victoria’s claim to fame, that 10.6 percent of Victorians who cycle to work. It turns out that number wasn’t obtained directly from the 2011 Census. Instead, the “10.6 percent” figure comes from the 2011 National Household Survey, which was voluntary and produced data with a margin of error much higher than zero. Since good transportation planning requires good transportation data, it’s important to understand why one of the fundamental numbers supporting the City’s Biketoria initiative is probably flawed.
    The National Household Survey asked participants only one question about transportation: How did the person filling out the survey “usually get to work.” There were 11 modes of transportation listed (auto driver, auto passenger, transit, walking, bicycle, etc...) and the respondent could choose only one. How did multi-modal commuters decide how to respond? We don’t know, but it’s well-known that commuter cycling ebbs in the darker, colder, wetter half of the year, so it’s reasonable to assume that some cyclists must be using other forms of transportation to get to work at least part of the year: walking, transit, some might even drive an auto. But the National Household Survey didn’t allow for such complexity. Nor did it attempt to gauge the distance people had to travel to work. As a guide for transportation planners, then, the National Housing Survey doesn’t really qualify as a reliable tool for making multi-million-dollar transportation decisions. Yet it is attributed as one of the primary sources upon which the City based its case for building protected bicycle corridors.
    The other source the City cites is the 2011 CRD Origin-Destination Household Travel Survey. But a careful read of the data in that survey, especially when compared with the data the survey produced in 2006, raises questions about the City’s direction.
    According to the CRD’s 2011 survey, only 3.8 percent of trips within, into and out of the City of Victoria over a 24-hour period were made by bicycle. When the average distance of trips made by different modes of transportation are factored in, bicycles accounted for less than 2.5 percent of the total distance travelled using all modes. Moreover, the Origin-Destination survey didn’t capture trips that were made to move goods or to provide services—like taxi drivers, social workers, delivery services, healthcare providers, transit drivers—it’s a long list and almost none of it is done by bicycle.
    If bicycles currently account for only a tiny fraction of the total distance travelled each day in the City of Victoria, how realistic is it that large numbers of Victorians will soon become cyclists?
    While Copenhagen’s large contingent of cyclists is held up as a model for Victoria to aspire to, the average age of a person living in Copenhagen is 35.9 years and has been falling for many years. In the City of Victoria, the average is 44.5 and is projected to rise for many years. As people get older, they generally spend a lot less time on bicycles, especially in hilly places like Victoria. Perhaps that’s one reason why the Origin-Destination surveys for 2006 and 2011 show that, for the whole CRD, the daily mode share for bicycles dropped slightly over those five years, from 3.2 percent to 2.8 percent. Yet the official goal in the CRD is to raise that to a regional level of 15 percent by 2038.
    Is this realistic?
    The answer to that becomes clearer when we consider the cumulative distance travelled each day by residents of the Capital Regional District (see table below). According to data in the 2011 Origin-Destination survey, about 6.6 million kilometres are travelled within the CRD each and every weekday (note that’s each day, not week). Of that travel, 72.7 percent was as the driver of an auto and 15.6 percent as a passenger in an auto. That means that about 88 percent of all travel within the CRD relies on autos.
     

    Share, by transportation mode, of total distance travelled within the CRD on a weekday
    Source: 2011 CRD Origin-Destination Household Travel Survey, conducted by Malatest and Associates Ltd. The survey did not capture commercial traffic or traffic originating outside of the CRD. The 2011 survey is the most recent data available.
     
    Only 1.5 percent of the distance travelled is by bicycle. As noted above, the survey does not capture commercial trips made to move goods or to provide services. If commercial traffic was included, bicycles would likely drop to little more than one percent.
    So bicycles currently account for a tiny fraction of the actual distance people cover in getting from point A to point B in the CRD. Again, is it realistic to think that bicycles—currently providing about 1 percent of the work being done by our regional transportation system—will supply 15 to 20 times as much work in 20 years?
    Without improving the cycling network, City and CRD transportation planners won't know whether their long-term goal is achievable. Unfortunately, though, as they experiment, the protected lanes may unintentionally increase emissions by delaying vehicles making right-hand turns off Pandora, resulting in hours of additional engine idling each day (see the short video below). Unless use of the corridor increases dramatically, it could be argued it's doing more harm than good most of the day.
     
    The Pandora Avenue protected bicycle corridor includes new traffic signals that delay right-hand turns off Pandora by 25 seconds at each of six intersections. As is shown in this video, this will increase emissions from autos even though there are few cyclists using the lane.
     
    You might be wondering why I am quoting a study done in 2011. The Origin-Destination surveys are done every five years, but the 2016 survey has been delayed. John Hicks, senior transportation planner at the CRD, told Focus the 2016 version, which would normally have been released about now, was pushed back a year so that 2016 federal census data could be used more directly in determining required sample sizes.
    A call for credentials was issued by the CRD in April and the survey will be conducted during the same months as the 2011 survey. It should be released in March 2018. So, for now, we are dependent on the 2011 data, and that shows bicycles only provide a tiny fraction of the travel needs of people throughout the CRD.
    Regardless of whether the loss of nearly 10 percent of the Downtown core’s on-street parking is or isn’t a reasonable trade-off for a greater level of safety for bicyclists, the claim that these corridors will play a significant role in reducing carbon emissions seems like a refusal to accept the obvious: Most people prefer to use four-wheeled motorized personal transport. So at least some of the CRD’s and the municipalities’ efforts in transportation planning ought to include how that strong preference can be incorporated in a transportation system that evolves toward a low-carbon future. For example, why not incorporate charging stations for electric cars into the protected bicycle corridor infrastructure? Providing electricity for free would create an incentive for electric vehicles Downtown. Even so, such ideas would be little more than civic acknowledgment of the need to reduce emissions since the vast majority of motorized vehicles depend on fossil fuels and likely will for many years to come, according to auto industry experts.
    To produce a significant reduction in CRD transportation emissions, a more sophisticated approach than painting bicycle lanes on roads will be needed. That will, at least to begin with, require helping auto drivers and auto passengers reduce their use of fossil-fueled vehicles, while accepting their choice for how to get around. How can that use be downsized? The data the CRD has collected, if it’s accurate, contains some interesting possibilities. Comparing the 2006 and 2011 surveys, it appears two shifts in the use of autos were underway. One was good news, the other bad.
    First the bad news. According to the CRD’s Origin-Destination surveys, between 2006 and 2011, about 78,000 fewer trips were taken as auto passengers each day. Where did the passengers go? It appears that many of them might have become drivers. In 2006, drivers accounted for 59 percent of non-commercial trips. But by 2011 that had climbed to 64 percent. If nothing else had changed, this would have meant more vehicles travelling each day—and higher emissions.
    But—and this is the good news—regional transportation emissions per person may have declined in spite of the trend of passengers becoming drivers. That’s because the average number of daily trips per person in the CRD decreased after 2006 by 4.8 percent. That translates to CRD residents driving about 43,000 fewer kilometres each weekday than in 2006.
    These two factors—the incidence of single-occupancy vehicles and the average number of daily trips taken by CRD auto users—suggest  possibilities for emissions reduction that don’t involve converting car drivers to cyclists. (Again, this is only true to the extent that the data collected for the Origin-Destination surveys for 2006 and 2011 is accurate.) The CRD needs to gather more data that provides decision-makers, elected officials and media answers to basic questions, such as: Why did CRD residents reduce the number of their trips between 2006 and 2011? Is there some way to incentivize that shift in behaviour? If the City of Victoria can spend $16 million on safer bicycling for a few thousand bicyclists—using money collected from auto drivers through the Gas Tax Fund—why can’t the CRD refund a few million a year back to auto drivers who can prove a significant reduction in the miles they travel each year or switched to an EV? And what were the factors that turned auto passengers into auto drivers? What would it take to reverse that trend? Can local government, especially the CRD, play a role in facilitating that reversal? With the huge growth in the use of cell phones, ipads and apps, why does the CRD not have its own high-profile regional rideshare system in place that can connect car drivers who are about to make a similar trip?
    The absence of timely, deep, reliable data on transportation in the CRD will make it difficult for the community to make sensible decisions based on evidence. One example of how badly politicians can steer the public interest—when they make a decision and then look for evidence that supports it—is the CRD’s controversial LRT initiative. That began in 2009 as the provincial NDP’s response to the then-Campbell government’s transit initiatives in Vancouver. Local NDP MLA Maureen Karaganis stated back then: “The Campbell government’s transit plan focuses almost entirely on projects in the lower mainland while the rest of BC, including Victoria, has been ignored. The Capital Region seeks to avoid sprawl by building an innovative, high quality public transit system with LRT between Downtown and the western communities.”
    By 2012, that we-want-one-too logic had ballooned into a live, billion-dollar proposal to build an LRT between “Downtown and the western communities.” Note that the western terminus of such a system wouldn’t have been the “western communities,” but rather Langford.
    When politicians start pounding the drum for some large infrastructure project, which they hope will distinguish themselves from their political competitors, the only thing that might prevent them from making a big, expensive mistake is credible, accurate, up-to-date information. With the LRT proposal, if a billion was going to be spent anywhere, should it really be used to connect Downtown with Langford?
    The 2011 Origin-Destination survey included a graphic of the “Desire Lines” in the CRD (see graphic below). These represent the most heavily-travelled routes people take in moving around the CRD each day. In the illustration, you can see that, by far, the strongest flows are between Downtown and south Victoria, from Downtown to Uptown, and from all three of those areas out to the University of Victoria. Notice the feeble desire line out to Langford.
     

    Desire Lines in the CRD, from the 2011 Origin Destination survey.

    The illustration excludes trips that originate outside of the CRD. For example, trips from anywhere north of Langford, which contribute much of the traffic on the at-times congested Trans Canada Highway. The LRT the NDP was proposing would likely not be used by such travellers.
    The most prominent desire lines show where an LRT should be located if the goal was to reduce emissions and create a more compact community. A 19-kilometre-long loop that connected Downtown, Oak Bay, the Shelbourne Valley, UVic and Uptown would follow arterial roads that already pass within a kilometre or so of tens of thousands of existing homes. Over time, the presence of a transit line would encourage even greater population density in those already-developed areas.
    According to the desire lines, a 15-kilometre (one way) route from Downtown to Langford wouldn’t make sense. Yet the Regional Transportation Plan’s rationale for LRT sees that route “as a possible means to significantly curb pressure on auto infrastructure in high growth areas.” By “high growth area” the CRD means Langford, which has the highest relative population growth rate in the CRD. But in terms of absolute growth—which includes growth in population, commercial and institutional development and employment—the area of Victoria and Saanich already heavily criss-crossed by desire lines is experiencing more than twice the growth of Langford.
    With the NDP about to become government, will an LRT to Langford be resurrected? Quick! Using Google Earth, someone needs to count all the dwellings and places of employment within walking distance of the above two routes. Why isn’t that information already available?
    Choosing the wrong first route for LRT would have a devastating effect on the long-term prospects of reducing emissions in the CRD. What the CRD really needs, before spending countless millions on pet transportation projects that address a tiny fraction of the CRD’s emissions problem, is credible and comprehensive information about what it would take to get people who live here (as opposed to Danish twenty-year-olds) to change their travel behaviour. Obtaining that information would cost money, of course. One way to fund such data gathering would be to use the Gas Tax Fund.
    Unfortunately, that huge chunk of cash—which is taken from drivers of vehicles that run on fossil fuels—is used almost exclusively for cycling infrastructure or non-transportation-related projects in the CRD: an agricultural strategy here, a tennis court there, water system upgrades all over the place, even a fire hydrant in Shirley. The tax isn’t being used, however, for any initiative that might one day seriously lower carbon emissions. Perhaps that’s because actually reducing the use of fossil-fuelled vehicles would diminish the flow of money to the Gas Tax Fund, and that, in turn, would start to dry up funding for local politicians’ pet projects. It’s an interesting dynamic, one addiction feeding another. How do we get free of it? Please let me know what you would do.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Leslie Campbell
    May 2017
     
    A DEEP VEIN OF MAGICAL THINKING here in BC is the idea that political parties can accept vast sums of money from industry without being influenced by it. Or, in reverse, that corporations and unions can donate millions with no expectation of access or payback. While it applies to many different industries, donations from the coal, oil and gas industries seem especially worrisome. The climate has already changed in dangerous ways; if we are to have any success at maintaining a liveable planet, we must leave most known fossil fuel reserves in the ground (68-85 percent, according to Oil Change International, to avoid going beyond a 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius temperature increase).
    But BC’s industry-friendly policies won’t get us there. At the very least, the next government must remove the extraordinary ways we’ve allowed the fossil fuel industries (and others) to have influence over public policy.
    BC has no limits on how much donors can give to political parties. And it’s all tax deductible. The real estate, pharmaceutical, tourism and fossil fuel industries have fuelled the Liberals for decades, and unions have donated generously to the NDP. Besides the lack of limits on amounts, unlike most other provinces and the federal government, BC has not banned corporate and union donations. Worse, political parties in BC are allowed to accept unlimited generosity from outside the province and country.
    It’s truly scandalous. And it’s earned BC a lot of negative attention. A recent story in the New York Times was titled “British Columbia: The ‘Wild West’ of Canadian Political Cash.” A Globe and Mail investigation showed that lobbyists were breaking one of the few lax rules that do exist—often being illegally reimbursed by corporations for donations made under their own names (some felt they’d be blacklisted if they didn’t give regularly). That led to an RCMP investigation, and to the BC Liberals returning $174,000.
    This spring, Postmedia investigated the connection between Liberal Party donors and government-awarded contracts, and found that “Among the top 50 donors to the BC Liberals—who have collectively given more than $30 million in the past decade—more than half have received supplier payments or transfers from the BC government.” The Dogwood initiative also did impressive analysis on the relationship between top donors and road-work contractors. Laughably, or perhaps magically, both Liberal politicians and corporate donors dismissed as “ridiculous” the idea that donations could influence contracting.
    Integrity BC has reported on donations from Chinese and Malaysian state-owned companies, international cruise lines, and other generous foreign corporations—and, for the NDP, foreign-based unions.
    The Wilderness Committee recently noted that “donations to the BC Liberals from fracking, gas pipeline and LNG companies have totalled $1,007,456 since the last election.” The Committee’s Peter McCartney stated, “This industry receives billions of dollars in Provincial tax breaks and subsidies from the very government they’re paying to elect.” Local concerns lose out as a result. “We see time and time again this government side with frackers and LNG companies over the people they represent. All this money in our politics sooner or later costs local communities and the global climate.”
    Democracy Watch and the PIPE UP Network have gone to court (the case will start to be heard a few days before the election), claiming that $560,000 in political donations from project proponent Kinder Morgan and other companies connected to the pipeline sector tainted the Province’s environmental assessment so it should be overturned. Their lawyer, Jason Gratl, told the Globe the facts are not in dispute so “The legal test is whether a competent, informed observer would consider the amount sufficient to taint the decision making so as to lend the decision making a conscious or unconscious bias.”
    Well here’s a hint about what that “competent, informed observer” might think: A March 2017 Angus Reid poll found that 76 percent of British Columbians felt that the Liberal government “is only interested in helping its political donors and big business.”
    The Liberals, however, seem blinded by the money they rake in. They’ve had lots of opportunity to change things in the last 16 years, but all they are willing to promise if elected is to establish an independent panel to “recommend” possible revisions to the rules. Fortunately the two other main parties are ready to overhaul the rules quickly, banning corporate, union, and foreign donations and setting a limit on individual ones (e.g. the federal limit is $1550/year). The Green Party voluntarily refused to accept corporate and union donations starting in September 2016.
    As I write at the end of April, I don’t know who will form the next BC government. But the chorus for change on the donation front—and the evidence for its need—is loud and consistent. So there is room for cautious optimism that the rules around donations will change.
    Unfortunately, a lot of damage has already been done. And, as a new report notes, lobbying rules are also working to corrupt governance on the climate action front, so they too must change.
     
    “MAPPING CORPORATE INFLUENCE,” released in March by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) and the Corporate Mapping Project, zeros in on spending-for-influence practices of the fossil fuel industries. It found “a remarkable and disturbingly close relationship between industry and the provincial government—one that not only contradicts the Province’s stated aim to fight climate change but also undermines democracy and the public interest.”
    On the donations front, its team of researchers combed through the Elections BC database, taking a line-by-line approach, explained Nicolas Graham, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Victoria. This was very time-consuming but necessary because, as Graham told me, “a lot of companies give under different names, so you can easily miss companies.”
     

    UVic Professor Bill Carroll and doctoral student Nicolas Graham comment on Mapping Corporate Influence
     
    The researchers found that, since 2008, the fossil fuel sector donated $5.2 million to political parties in BC—92 percent of which went to the BC Liberals. “The top 10 fossil fuel industry donors account for more than three-quarters (78 percent) of total donations, with the two top firms—Teck Resources and Encana—contributing nearly half.”
    A “distinct geography of giving” was noted, with the majority of the top 10 firms headquartered in Calgary. Only two of the companies are headquartered in BC.
     


    Their generous donations to BC parties allow fossil fuel firms to be heard by key political decision-makers. As Graham told me, “If you have a political party that feels heavily indebted to political donors, it’s certainly going to help [donors] gain access or at least develop this familiar relationship.”
    Like so many others who have looked at the facts, Graham and his co-authors recommend simple, straightforward fixes: banning corporate and union donations to political parties outright; and limiting individual donations to people whose primary residence is in BC—“and these should be capped at a modest level that prevents those with deep pockets from skewing the democratic process in their favour.”
    What’s not so simple to fix, and constituted the second half of their report, is the undue influence fossil fuel corporations have on public policy through lobbying. Donations and lobbying work hand-in-hand, said Graham, and “paint a troubling picture, a kind of troublingly close relationship between the sector and the government and raise concerns about the ability of the government to regulate the industry in the public interest.”
    Lobbying activity was more difficult to research than donations because, said Graham, “there are major transparency issues” to contend with. Still, going on the basis of what information was available, the team came up with 22,000 lobbying contacts between fossil-fuel companies and government officials between 2010 (when the lobbyists registry was set up) and 2016. By comparison, environmental organizations had only 1324 contacts over the same period. Almost all of the corporate contacts (19,517) were made by 10 firms—many of them the same as the top donors.
     

     
    Graham found the sheer volume shocking, especially when he realized that it worked out to 14 lobbying contacts per business day from that sector alone. Ministries lobbied by the fossil fuel corporations and associations include Energy and Mines, Natural Gas Development; Environment; Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation; Finance; Forests, Lands and Natural Resources; as well as the Oil and Gas Commission.
    Rich Coleman is the most targeted cabinet minister, but as the report notes, “Twenty-eight percent of lobbying by the top 10 most active lobbyists is with cabinet ministers—an unrivalled level of access.”
    And then there are all the bureaucrats (48 percent) and MLAs (24 percent)—both NDP and Liberal—who are also lobbied. NDP leader John Horgan is one of the top three lobbied MLAs.
    Remember, this is just from the fossil fuel industries. The real estate industry is even more active. Which means BC’s public servants are spending a lot of their precious taxpayer-funded time listening to skilled pitches from corporate lobbyists.
    As the report states: “Considering that a handful of organizations and state officials are the target of most lobbying by the fossil fuel industries, the network amounts to a small world, dominated by the few large corporations that control much of this economic sector. While it is not possible to determine the extent to which a given lobbying effort directly influences a specific policy outcome, what shines through is the extent to which well-funded and well-organized corporations (and their industry associations) exert continual pressure on, or work in tandem with, key decision-makers to develop policies that align with their interests.”
    Co-author Bill Carroll, a UVic Sociology professor and co-director of the Corporate Mapping Project, drew my attention to the fact that the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP)—with 29 registered lobbyists in BC—is the most active lobbyist, bar none, at both the provincial and federal levels.
    This helps explains a number of things. Like why the provincial government ended up endorsing a weak climate plan despite their Climate Leadership Team’s recommendations for a more aggressive  lowering of emissions. CAPP alone, in an 11-month period, made 200 lobbying contacts with government in relation to development of its Climate Leadership Plan—a plan condemned by environmentalists for doing little to reduce global warming.
    It’s also now clearer for me why pipelines have been approved despite so much opposition and their role in fostering climate change. One of the Liberals’ most generous donors and most active lobbyists is pipeline promoter Encana.
    The lobbying efforts—combined with hefty donations—also explain how LNG became so central in the 2013 election and why in spite of everything, the Liberals continue to beat that drum. If proposed LNG processing and export facilities come to fruition, they would represent a major new source of emissions. Christy Clark said it was about jobs, but maybe that’s because so many gas promoters had her ear long enough and often enough to help her figure out the way to sell it. They also had the ear of the Oil and Gas Commission, which was heavily lobbied, including by its former CEO Alex Ferguson.
    The corporate largesse and lobbying pay off in policies favourable to the extractive industry. Issues such as royalty rates from hydrocarbon extraction, land access, corporate taxation, consultation processes with First Nations, greenhouse gas emissions, and LNG development, are among the areas lobbyists weigh in on. “The influence can most clearly be seen in the government’s strong advocacy for the development of an LNG export industry,” writes the Corporate Mapping team. Cited as examples are credits provided to industry for deep drilling and road infrastructure assistance. It notes too that natural gas royalties have plummeted in BC since 2008/09 despite substantial increases in production levels, and that in 2014 the Liberal government cut its proposed LNG income tax in half (from 7 to 3.5 per cent). “This made its already highly unlikely claim of a $100 billion ‘Prosperity Fund’ arising from LNG over 30 years (Office of the Premier, 2013) even more far-fetched. In addition to a reduced LNG income tax, companies can deduct the full capital costs of their LNG plant investment before they pay the full tax (locked in at 3.5 percent).”
     
    IT’S HARD TO SHOCK PROFESSOR CARROLL. He’s done scads of research over the years on corporations and their influence. He knows corporate power is highly concentrated. Still, he admitted, “It was interesting to see the extent of overlap between the top lobbyists and the top corporate donors. Seven out of ten are the same company, and these companies account for three quarters of all the lobbying and all the corporate donations coming from this key sector. So it’s an extreme concentration of corporate influences. And, obviously, that’s very worrying from a democratic perspective because the logic of this runs against the grain of one person, one vote.”
    When I asked about the Liberals’ promise to set up an independent panel to review the situation, Graham characterized it as “dancing around the issue” and “ a bit of delay tactic.” The only argument proffered by the Liberals in defense of the current donation free-for-all is that without corporate and union donations, taxpayers would have to fund election campaigns. Carroll dismissed this as perplexing if not hypocritical, especially in the face of glitzy pre-election-period  government ads—paid for by tax payers. The government spent $15 million, in fact, of taxpayers’ funds blanketing TV airwaves and social media bragging about their 2017 budget; the auditor general expressed her concerns, though had no power to stop it.
    In terms of what to do about lobbying, Mapping Corporate Influence advocates an overhaul of the Lobbyists Registration Act, “which creates major loopholes that impede true transparency.” At minimum, it recommends lobbyists be required to report who they have lobbied—rather than to list who they expect to lobby—including the specific date of communications and a more detailed description of the type of contact that occurred, and its subject matter. “Lobbyists should also be required to disclose meetings initiated by public officials. And disclosure of the costs of lobbying—fees paid to professional lobbyists and firms by clients—should be reported.”
    It’s not rocket science; and many others have recommended similar interventions. Who knows—maybe we’ll have a new party in power come May 9. Both the NDP and Green Party have promised to change the rules around donations at least. That would give developing a good climate change strategy a fighting chance, despite the baggage left behind by all the cozy corporate-cash-for-access-and-influence of past decades.
    In the words of the Mapping Corporate Influence authors, “At this climate crossroads any realistic strategy for tackling climate change must involve a gradual wind-down, rather than expansion, of fossil fuel industries, leaving the majority of oil, gas and coal reserves in the ground and fully transitioning to renewable energy sources.”
    In an atmosphere befogged by carbon and money from the fossil fuel industries, that’s just not possible.
    The Corporate Mapping Project hopes to encourage dialogue on this subject. On May 10, it will present David Lavalleé’s award-winning documentary To the Ends of the Earth. 7pm and 8:45pm at Cinecenta at UVic. www.cinecenta.com. 
    Leslie Campbell is the founding editor of Focus. See www.corporatemapping.ca for more information on this topic. For another instance of provincial magical thinking, see Briony Penn’s article in this edition.

    David Broadland
    May 2017
    The project seems to be a complete fiasco. But is that just a perception created by something in the air?

    IN A REPORT HE DELIVERED to Victoria City council in late March, Johnson Street Bridge Project Director Jonathan Huggett did a 180-degree flip-flop on one of the project’s costly screw-ups. Before I tell you about that, though, I have to provide the reader with a caveat-emptor kind of warning about my story. The fact is, I may be suffering from a mind-altering overdose of carbon dioxide. I don’t think I’m making this up, but I might be.
    I came to realize this was a real possibility after coming across a 2015 study by research scientists at Harvard, State University of New York, and Syracuse University. I was earnestly googling away for what might be in the air that could possibly explain the widespread mental confusion we’re seeing south of the border these days. Is it something in the water? No, it’s in the air.
    These scientists reported that human cognitive abilities are significantly and adversely affected by the concentration of carbon dioxide that we are now regularly exposed to inside many buildings. Their work confirmed two previous but smaller studies that had come to much the same conclusion. The cognitive functions most severely impacted, the research found, were the ability to use information and the ability to strategize.
    So I need to warn you: I wrote this story while sitting inside a building. Moreover, my subject—Mr Huggett’s flip-flopping report—was presumably also written while the author was inside a building. Even worse, because of the likelihood of elevated levels of carbon dioxide wherever you are right now, your ability to process my potentially confused reporting of a potentially confused report could be compromised. By the end of this story, you may be completely dazed and confused.
    Before venturing into that minefield, consider this: The only real solution to adverse levels of indoor carbon dioxide is thorough ventilation with fresh, outdoor air. But, as the level of carbon dioxide outdoors continues to increase as a result of carbon emissions from human activity, ventilation will increasingly fail to make any difference. How bad could this get?
    The worst-case scenario is that global concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide will one day reach the levels that significantly affect human cognition. Confusion begins around 800 to 900 parts per million. Currently, outdoor levels are about halfway there and rising. Donald Trump seems eager to get all of us fully there, but being even halfway seems to allow for craziness enough.
    So reader beware, and let’s look—for the billionth time—at the Johnson Street Bridge project, whose nine-year history so far provides plenty of circumstantial evidence that carbon dioxide levels during City council meetings in Victoria need to be carefully investigated.
     
    JONATHAN HUGGETT, it turns out, is the most highly-paid official currently working for the City of Victoria. At $20,000 per month, he’s making more than even City Manager Jason Johnson, who hired him. Including expenses and taxes, Huggett is billing Victoria taxpayers approximately $295,000 per year. Not bad for a guy who lives in Surrey, only needs to report to City council four times a year, and isn’t required to answer questions from reporters.
    Since he’s so highly paid—by taxpayers—and since some of his claims about the project have seemed to be at odds with the public interest, Huggett’s reports beg for a detailed examination by local media. He has told Focus he’s too busy to answer our emailed questions, although he has made frequent appearances on local talk-radio programs.
    As Huggett’s open-ended contract with the City notes, the City also has a highly-paid “designer and project manager,” MMM Group. Since 2009 the City has paid MMM about $16 million for its services. As the “owner’s representative,” MMM, supposedly, would insure the City’s interests were given top priority by the company building the bridge, PCL Constructors Westcoast Inc. So why does the City need Huggett? Can’t MMM be trusted to do its job?
    According to his contract, Huggett was brought in by City Manager Johnson in April 2014, to “undertake an independent review of the Project, including assessment of the relationship between the City, MMM and PCL, to evaluate the current status of the project and potential risks to its successful completion.” But after undertaking that review and providing a report in July 2014, Huggett was appointed “Project Director.” He has spent the time since then providing quarterly reports formerly written by City employees in collaboration with MMM.
    The breakdown in trust between the City and its project manager became public in 2014 when both PCL and MMM began to present the City with claims for additional costs even though the City had been assured that project costs had been capped by a “fixed price” contract. Huggett’s first report to City councillor’s assured them that the City didn’t have a fixed-price contract. For some reason, councillors liked what they heard and Huggett’s monthly cost then escalated.
    With an extended period of legal battles likely to follow physical completion of the bridge, Huggett can expect to receive a monthly cheque from the City at least through 2018. If that’s the case, his own work on the project will add roughly $1.3 million to the cost of the new bridge. It’s unclear whether that amount has been fully included in any of the quarterly updates Huggett has delivered to City councillors. It should also be noted that Huggett does not track the bridge’s costs. That’s done by the City’s finance department. As well, the City is represented by an outside law firm—as well as its own highly-paid legal staff—on legal issues related to the project.
    Huggett has stated publicly a number of times that his job is to make sure the project gets completed. But Huggett has sometimes presented opinions to City council and the public that haven’t been based on facts. His use of—let’s call them alternative facts—have had the effect of protecting the reputations of professional engineers who have screwed up on this project rather than protecting the public interest.
    One good example of Huggett’s use of alternative facts was his response to a story Focus published about how the level of seismic protection stipulated for the bridge—the seismic design criteria—was secretly downgraded from the level that MMM had recommended.
    The essential facts of that story are these: MMM recommended to the City in 2010 that the new bridge be able to withstand a magnitude 8.5 earthquake and the City agreed to pay an additional $10 million for that recommended higher level of protection. However, after initial estimates from the construction companies bidding to build the bridge were received in 2012, project engineers realized that the bridge would cost much more than they had hoped. At least one of the companies also expressed concerns about the unusual design’s inherent seismic risk.
    For whatever reason—whether it was to reduce costs in an attempt to save a failing project or because the engineers realized the peculiar design could not withstand a magnitude 8.5 earthquake without irreparable damage—the project’s target seismic protection level was lowered. The decision to build the bridge to a lower seismic standard was made in secret—that is, without City council’s knowledge—and that broke the agreement City managers had made to seek elected officials’ consent to change the project’s scope. More importantly, the downgrading of the seismic design criteria meant the bridge could be more easily damaged by an earthquake. It also made it more likely the bridge would be unrepairable following a smaller earthquake.
    When Focus published a story pointing this out, Huggett’s response was to obscure what had occurred. His explanations never acknowledged the existence of the Johnson Street Seismic Design Criteria document which proved the change had been made. This document was an integral part of the construction contract the City signed with PCL. Instead, Huggett provided City councillors with a report in which a critical paragraph of the building code governing construction of bridges had been altered so that it appeared that the lower standard to which the bridge had been built was in accord with the requirements of the (altered) code.
    This was a truly remarkable sleight of hand, and I have wondered whether carbon dioxide might have been involved. What else could explain Victoria City council’s utter lack of ambition to look more closely at the issue? The City was in a position to demand that MMM return $10 million of its $16 million payment for its failure to provide a bridge with the level of seismic performance it had recommended. And what explains Huggett’s course of action? Instead of pursuing MMM, he misquoted the bridge code.
    A partially-redacted email (it was obtained by FOI) from an MMM employee to Huggett following the creative rewrite of the seismic code, expressed MMM’s relief “since the seismic issues appear to be contained for the time being.” Huggett never publicly admitted that such “issues” even existed, but it’s apparent that MMM expected the issue might resurface.
    So now we come to Huggett’s 180-degree flip-flop.
    (Also see the slideshow: Seismic rip-off on the Johnson Street Bridge) 
     
    I RECENTLY REPORTED WHAT HUGGETT has said about the issue of fendering on the north side of the bridge. Fendering is the protective barrier placed around the support piers of a bridge to minimize the damage that could be done if a ship or barge accidentally hit the piers. Huggett told councillors in July 2015 that more extensive fendering was needed on the north side of the bridge than had initially been planned because, as it turned out, “The new bridge is somewhat less robust than the existing structure.” In explaining why this would add significantly more cost to the project than had been stipulated in the so-called “fixed-price” contract, Huggett told councillors that the north-side fendering had been “clouded-out” in a contract drawing. That indicated, he said, “It is not in the original contract.”
    But a review of the “fixed-price” contract by Focus strongly suggested that the cost of the fendering had been included, even if the final design of the north side fendering had not been fully worked out.
    In response to an FOI request from Focus, the City said it could not find the “clouded-out” contract drawing that Huggett had referred to, further eroding the credibility of his claim that the contract did not include the north side fendering.
    In spite of these facts, Huggett continued to maintain that the additional cost of the north side fendering could be substantial and would have to be borne by City taxpayers. The cost has been rumoured to be as high as $10 million.
     

    A rendering of fendering on the north side of the new Johnson Street Bridge from Jonathan Huggett’s March 2017 quarterly report to Victoria City Council, in which it was described as “one option.” One Victoria engineer estimated the installation could add $10 million to the cost of the project.
     
    Who was Huggett representing by taking this position? He is being paid $20,000 each month by Victoria taxpayers. Shouldn’t his positions reflect that? Let me boil this down to two points.
    First, why would Victoria be getting a bridge that was “less robust” than the existing bridge? Questions raised about the ability of the existing bridge to withstand the forces exerted on it by even a minor earthquake was the very rationale used for building a new bridge. Yet, according to Huggett, the new bridge would be less robust than the old bridge. Rather than openly accepting this apparent project failure, shouldn’t Huggett have been advocating for a better outcome?
    Secondly, why didn’t Huggett take the position that the cost of all fendering was in the PCL contract?
    In his report to City council in March, Huggett reversed his position and admitted that PCL’s fixed-price contract was “supposed to cover all fendering costs.” Huggett also provided details about the issue that have been kept secret for two years.
    Huggett revealed two errors that were made. One was made before the construction contract was negotiated with PCL and one afterward. Both subsequently “impacted” the design of the fendering, and hence its cost, Huggett reported.
    The first error was the relocation in early 2012 of an underwater duct bank containing numerous telecommunications cables, including fibre optic cables connecting CFB Esquimalt to the world. That $1.6 million project was engineered and overseen by MMM. According to Huggett, though, the duct bank “was not moved sufficiently far enough to allow for easy construction of fendering systems. Without additional protection measures, piles cannot be driven close to the duct bank as in the event of a ship collision the piles might move and damage the duct bank.”
    Unbelievable, but—according to Huggett—true.
    By the way, the duct bank was relocated even before the City had a final bridge design, let alone a signed construction contract. At the time, City managers insisted such work needed to proceed in order for the project to meet its March 2016 completion deadline so that federal funding would not be lost. (Arbitrary deadlines and high levels of carbon dioxide are a truly awesome combination of conditions under which City councillors are asked to make important decisions, don’t ’ya think?)
    The second error identified by Huggett involved the City’s property at 203 Harbour Road. According to Huggett, “The City sold 203 Harbour Road to Ralmax as it was assumed the land was not needed for the construction of the bridge. This impacts an economical design since access to the water side frontage of 203 Harbour Road must be preserved.”
    That’s not quite true, though. The City actually transferred 203 Harbour Road and other adjacent properties to the Province in 2014 in exchange for the Crystal Garden property on Douglas. The Province then sold the Harbour Road properties to Ralmax.
    Regardless, Huggett is implying that whoever negotiated the transfer of 203 Harbour Road to Ralmax apparently neglected to obtain an agreement that would have allowed a minor intrusion on its riparian access to 203 Harbour Road to allow economical fendering for the bridge project. Wow. I bet the negotiating room had poor ventilation.
    Following delivery of Huggett’s March report to councillors, he appeared on CFAX. Among other things, Huggett told listeners the City hoped to recover, through legal action, the additional cost of fendering from the bridge’s “designer.” In Huggett’s contract with the City, the bridge’s “designer” is identified as MMM.
    A review of what MMM committed to in writing on the design and cost of fendering suggests that the City will have little chance of recovering that cost from MMM. But still, this is a complete flip-flop from Huggett’s previous position that the cost of north-side fendering was explicitly excluded from the original contract—and so the City would have to suck it up.
    Could he also flip-flop on the seismic issue and assist the City in getting MMM to return $10 million for that fiasco? Not likely. To flip-flop on the seismic issue would require that Huggett explain why he rewrote the bridge seismic code for a council report. That would be awkward for him to explain. Perhaps he could invoke a carbon-dioxide defence.
     
    SPEAKING OF CARBON DIOXIDE, one of the original premises used to justify building a new bridge in 2009 was that the existing double-bascule bridge presented a daily discouragement to thousands of would-be cyclists who, promoters claimed, were just waiting for a new bridge so they could abandon their daily commute by car. That would reduce carbon emissions, they said.
    Bicycle access across the railway bridge was eliminated in April 2011. If the bridge was a choke point before then, it has been even worse in the six years since. The prolonged disruption of vehicle traffic—with long waits on both sides of the bridge only adding to overall vehicle emissions—was never part of the bridge promoters’ calculations. The longer the bottleneck lasts, the more ridiculous the claim of reducing carbon emissions becomes. When will it end?
    The project has been on hold for months, waiting for completion in China of the lifting part of the bridge, which will span the remaining 41-metre gap. So far, fabrication of that one section of the bridge has taken over three years. How is that going? Explaining the project’s schedule—and why the bridge won’t be finished anytime soon, has been a major part of Huggett’s $20,000 per month assignment.
    In his September 2016 report to the City, Huggett said that Chinese fabricators had been working at fitting the rings to the trusses in preparation for a “trial fit-up.” “Painting of the structure will commence shortly,” Huggett reported. Three months later Huggett’s report noted that Chinese fabricators experienced difficulty fitting the first ring to the first truss, but Huggett expressed optimism that what the fabricators had learned would speed up fitting the other ring and truss together. It didn’t. Almost four months later, Huggett presented photographs that showed most of the major components had been fitted together, although there was no photographic proof that the north-side truss and ring had been matched.
     

    Photos published by the City showed Chinese workers apparently ready to lift the north-side truss into place on March 16.
     
    The photographs suggest painting of the bridge parts might be weeks—if not months—away. Yet Huggett had reported six months earlier that painting would “commence shortly.”
    So when is Victoria getting its new bridge?
    According to PCL’s original construction schedule, it would take slightly more than six months between the date the steel components were delivered to Victoria and the date the bridge could be opened for traffic. It would take another three months after that before the Blue Bridge could be removed and the project completed.
    So far, PCL hasn’t completed any of the tasks on its original schedule in less time than predicted. So, with the final shipment of steel components not expected to get to Victoria until September—according to Huggett—six months after that would put the bridge opening for traffic in February 2018, and project completion in early May 2018.
    One has to wonder: If those Harvard scientists are right about carbon dioxide affecting human cognitive function, did Shanghai’s notoriously dirty air play a role in the Chinese fabricators’ stumbling performance on Victoria’s new bridge? That seems possible. And there’s plenty of evidence of mental confusion at play on this project right here in Victoria, too. If there’s something in the air that’s making it more difficult for people to make good decisions, it’s a global phenomenon. Which means, of course, I, too, could be dazed and confused on the Johnson Street Bridge. How about you?

    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.
     

    Briony Penn
    May 2017
    Management of public forests by the forest industry isn’t in the public interest.
     
     

    BC’s forests have become a vast patchwork of roads, clearcuts and mainly young trees. Of the latter, critics say, there has been no reliable inventory. As well, the Province has relied less on its own scientists and more on forest industry professionals to conduct management of public forests, blurring the distinction between public and private interest.
     
    FORMER GOVERNMENT FOREST SCIENTIST Andy MacKinnon’s battle cry, as he knocks on doors as a Green Party candidate in the upcomming provincial election, is: “Wake up British Columbians!” He’s one of an increasing number of scientists who are getting into politics to raise the alarm about what happens when proper government oversight is put at risk through budget cuts and political interference.
    MacKinnon believes the threat to BC’s greatest public asset—tens of millions of hectares of forests—should be one of the election’s foremost issues. “We have rapidly disposed of it for too few jobs and too little money,” MacKinnon says, “and this is all happening within our provincial model of ‘professional reliance,’ as the BC government sheds scientists of all sorts—professional foresters, biologists, engineers—and hands responsibility to professionals employed by the forest companies. Some have called this ‘the fox guarding the henhouse’ model.”
    This apparent loss of ability to properly manage BC’s forests isn’t just Green Party rhetoric. “We were hearing this from scientist after scientist,” says Katie Gibbs, one of the co-authors of an April 2017 report, Oversight at Risk: The State of Government Science in British Columbia. The report, commissioned by Evidence for Democracy, an Ottawa-based watchdog for promoting the transparent use of evidence in government decision-making, interviewed scientists across BC ministries. The aim was to assess their independence and capacity to produce and communicate reliable data. Highlighted in this review was the scientists’ response to the BC Liberals’ Orwellian term “professional reliance,” which is described in the report as “outsourcing both research oversight and decision-making activities that were formerly done by government.”
    Evidence for Democracy chose the BC situation for its first provincial review, says Gibbs, “because there had been lots of rumours that BC’s public sector was particularly dysfunctional in Canada and badly in need of an independent review.” When she and her co-author started interviewing, she says, “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing from these scientists: That monitoring was outsourced to the professionals who were contracted by the very companies that they were monitoring? Was this for real?”
    It appears to be. The 64-question survey was circulated to 1159 government scientists this past November, with most of the responses coming from the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations (FLNRO). The report provides the historical context for the survey, which includes the dramatic reduction of provincial staff-scientists starting in 2001. BC now has the smallest public sector per capita of all Canadian provinces, despite its wealth of natural resources.
    Of those government scientists still working for the Province who were allowed to participate in the survey (and not all were), around half “believe that political interference is compromising their ministry’s ability to develop laws, policies and programs based on scientific evidence.” One FLNRO scientist wrote, “The reduction in staff and financial resources has caused us to not be able to conduct the scientific work that would best support changes in policy. Instead, policy is most often developed as a result of political pressure from select interest groups, in particular forest industry stakeholders.”
    The survey didn’t include scientists who are members of the BC Government Employees Union which, according to Gibbs, denied a request to distribute the survey to their members because “it was not in line with their priorities at the time.”
     
    IN A BRISTLING REPORT delivered to the Coastal Silviculture Committee this spring, authors Anthony Britneff and Martin Watts, non-partisan forest professionals, dug deep into the structural details of how “professional reliance” without independent third-party oversight has set off a domino effect of poor policy decisions affecting everything from stumpage rates, tree planting and water quality to the health of moose and grizzly populations. Britneff describes the resulting and ongoing grab of timber as “the rape of the land.” A 40-year career forester with the provincial government, Britneff says that during his last ten years in government, “[I experienced] radical budget cuts and changes in policy that I saw as being detrimental to the forests and to the life within them.”
     

                 Katie Gibbs                            Anthony Britneff                    Diane Nicholls                      Andy MacKinnon
    The biggest problem, according to Britneff, is the corrupt data and unreliable models for determining the inventory of the forests—known as the “Timber Supply Review”—that’s used by the Chief Forester to determine how much forest can be cut each year, the “Annual Allowable Cut” (AAC).
    “If this information is wrong, which it is,” Britneff says, “then we put whole communities at risk. Job losses, mill closures, community hardships, very little stumpage [royalties] flowing back to the community, have all resulted because there is no reliable inventory or analysis to determine [appropriate] rates of cut.”
    One of the clearest indicators that there is a problem is the discrepancy between the allocation of timber in the AAC and what is actually cut. As Britneff puts it, “Industry can’t even find the wood allocated to them for the cut because the Timber Supply Review is an economic fiction, supported and informed by unvalidated computer models. Companies are pushing further and further into previously protected areas like the wildlife habitat areas and right up to the edge of provincial parks. They are making no provisions for climate change, and have used beetle kill to escalate the cut. To add insult to injury they are giving it away at 25 cents for a telephone pole.”
    In response to Britneff’s allegations, Chief Forester Diane Nicholls told Focus: “The people of BC can have complete confidence in Allowable Annual Cut (AAC) determinations as they are based on robust complex analysis of many factors that pertain to timber supply and other forest values. The process that supports my AAC determinations is open to public and First Nations for review and comment. All documents generated, including a detailed description of how I arrived at my decision, are available online.”
    Nicholls also noted, “The uncertainties in the analysis and data are managed through sensitivity analyses that allow me to assess the impact of these uncertainties on my decision. We continuously improve and update our data and analysis based on field audits and assessments and new or additional information.”
    But Britneff takes issue with Nicholls’ defence. He notes that “uncertainty” is a technical term used in the international accounting world when measurements “are based on estimates, judgments, and models rather than on exact depictions.” The absence of independent auditors to verify the data means there is no sound basis upon which to trust Nicholls’ numbers. Britneff and Watts also believe that the sensitivity analyses to which Nicholls refers are incorrectly applied.
    Remarkably, there is no legal requirement for Nicholls to conduct an actual inventory of provincial forests. That used to be a statutory responsibility of the chief forester, but changes to the Forest Act in 2002 transferred the inventory function to what was then called the Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management. When that ministry was disbanded, inventory staff returned to the Ministry of Forests and Range but the legal requirement to conduct inventories didn’t. It simply disappeared.
    Both Oversight at Risk and Britneff point to problems beyond the uncertain timber supply, including insufficient capacity and budget within the Ministry to do an inventory. There is also no legal requirement for foresters working outside of government to maintain their data and records.
    There is also evidence that a political agenda at least partially determines the Annual Allowable Cut. This is perhaps best illustrated by an historic directive issued in 2006 by then Minister of Forests Rich Coleman to “maintain and enhance” the timber supply. This directive is still in force and, in effect, means that the AAC would never go down. This approach has left towns like Merritt with no timber and a long wait until the trees grow back.
    As Britneff notes: “It isn’t AAC that’s ‘maintained and enhanced,’ it is forests!” Foresters on the ground are the only ones who can determine whether what grows—or doesn’t grow—lines up with what the models predict. As Britneff argues, “When one has a centralized high priesthood of timber supply analysts, inventory gatekeepers and ivory-tower computer modellers, most of whom are out of touch with what the forestry staff on the ground are observing, then, by convenient omission, timber supply estimates and AAC determinations become economic fiction and AACs are maintained fraudulently high to align with Coleman’s directive—to keep raising the cut.”
    While Gibbs and her co-authors don’t use the word “fraud” to describe what they found, they do note, “The results from our survey show that around half (49 percent) of government scientists surveyed across ministries believe that political interference is compromising their ministry’s ability to develop laws, policies and programs based on scientific evidence.”
    As Gibbs states, “This ‘professional reliance’ system is a huge public interest issue but it hasn’t received the attention it should because it is a difficult thing to communicate precisely. It sounds all fine, and people think that qualified professionals are looking after their interests.”
    But the growing record of scrutiny of professional reliance—by bodies including the Centre for Public Policy Alternatives, the Environmental Law Centre, and the Auditor General in his scathing 2016 report—suggests otherwise. Professionals aren’t able to look after the public’s interests when they have no legal requirement to do so; they are employed by the companies they are expected to monitor; and their professional organizations are not at arm’s length from the forest companies that employ them. Last year, only one disciplinary case was brought to the Association of BC Forest Professionals—and it was thrown out. The year before, five cases were brought forward; three were thrown out and two are still in play.
    The findings of Oversight at Risk suggest that the professional reliance experiment has not only failed but should be scrutinized for fraud. Industry and government remain complicit and unaccountable to the public. Fifty-seven percent of BC government scientists are concerned that government’s reliance on external professionals compromises the ability of their Ministry to use the best evidence or information in decision-making. One forester wrote: “Decisions and objectives are fettered to the industry interests due to government/industry working groups. The industry-sympathetic administration does not always permit us to assess evidence, and even when we have evidence it does not easily accommodate providing direction to industry or changes in policy that may negatively impact (even in a small way) existing mainstream industry and their interests.” Another scientist working in FLNRO reported, “government rarely or perhaps never suppresses scientific findings. They do, however, by way of lack of funding, suppress research and data collection which are necessary for proper science based management.”
    Cases like the Mount Polley disaster, the green-lighting of the Site C project through exemptions of the Wildlife Act, and Elk River selenium risks are cited in the report as the most egregious examples of the failure of professional reliance, so the problem extends well beyond forest management.
    On the issue of being free to communicate their concerns to media, only 3 percent of scientists stated they could do so without approval from their bosses; 32 percent said that they were not able to communicate at all with media; 42 percent had to seek approval; the rest didn’t know. During my own 16 years of writing on the subject, no permissions have ever been granted to speak to a government scientist without public relations approval, even for data as seemingly apolitical as the population of black bears.

    COURT CHALLENGES—at both federal and provincial levels—are tackling the issue of scientific muzzling. A recent court case initiated by Martin Watts against the Province of BC is over “blacklisting” professional foresters for raising concerns with the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations over the quality of inventory data, and being excluded from contract opportunities and given only limited access to information. On May 11, a judge in the Supreme Court of BC will decide if the civil claim will proceed. As Britneff states: “Couple this apparent negligence with the fact that the chief forester is operating without a statutory mandate to maintain an inventory of the lands of the province, and one has a pernicious boondoggle of proportions sufficient in seriousness to cut rural jobs, close mills and harm forest-dependent communities, which is exactly what has been happening over the last 15 years.”
    Another insider scientist, who spoke to Focus on condition of anonymity due to fear of being fired or blacklisted, makes even stronger allegations: “Industry and government are inextricably bound, providing the conditions and potential for monkey business at every level. This failure has gone unseen for 16 years by bullying the civil servants who found problems with this model. Untouchable teams moved, fired and ignored people who did not support this model. Some districts simply suspended all staff meetings for years to hide this fact. One need only look as far as the way that volumes used for cutting permits are calculated. The Province uses outdated tables, ‘Loss Factors,’ which date back to the sixties. The more precise ‘Call Grade Net Factor’ volumes are also collected, but not used to assess stumpage volumes because business prefers lower taxes. This speaks to the influence that business has over government policy.”

    WITH LITTLE ABILITY TO GET EVIDENCE, no jurisdictional oversight to even enforce against fraudulent activity, and little confidence that the current government wants to change the status quo, some scientists like Andy MacKinnon are turning to the political sphere.
    Yet, strangely, the management of public lands (94 percent of this province) is not a big election issue. Raw log exports have grabbed more attention, but their revenue impacts are small compared to the scale of the economic problems created by the diminishment of proper government oversight.
    NDP leader John Horgan, who comes from a forestry background on the island, released his party’s forestry platform in April. Aimed more at top-of-mind issues like curbing log exports and job creation, it doesn’t mention reforming the professional reliance system, raising stumpage, or bringing back the scientific research branch—not surprising because it is hard policy to explain.
    MacKinnon admits the communications challenge of this issue. “What I have found works, though, is that if you tell someone that our vast provincial forests and wildlife are being looked after by just a handful of foresters who work for the companies that cut them down, they get that there is a problem.”
    Katie Gibbs, a scientist herself, feels a better job needs to be done in connecting the dots for people. “Public science affects all of us—from clean drinking water to making sure bridges and roads are safe—it’s in all of our best interest to ensure that government science is independent, robust and openly communicated.”
     
    Briony Penn’s most recent book, The Real Thing: The Natural History of Ian McTaggart Cowan, won the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize and the inaugural Mack Laing Literary Prize.

    Leslie Campbell
    March 2017
    America is slamming its door on refugees. Will Canada open its wider?
     
    MY ROUTE THROUGH THIS STORY is circuitous. It sprang from my growing unease about the refugee situation as news arrived almost daily through the early months of 2017—news about the US Administration’s plans of mass deportations, a de facto Muslim ban, and stories of desperate people risking frostbite or worse to escape the US and claim asylum in Canada. Along my meandering path, I interviewed a law professor, immigration workers, private sponsors, and a refugee and his daughter. But any meandering of mine is simply trivial compared to the stories of the refugees themselves.
    Suliman Dawood and his family—wife Eman, son Fidel and daughters Samah and Salina—hail from Iraq, near Baghdad, though Dawood himself was born in Palestine; he is a refugee twice over. A university graduate, Dawood had taught history, and then, for 25 years, ran a small furniture-manufacturing business. But when more and more civilians in Iraq started losing their lives in 2005, he began making plans to get his family to safety.

    Dawood tells me, “It was no longer safe for us.” The last straw was when seven of their good friends and neighbours were killed by a bomb while walking nearby streets: two adult sisters and their five children. His daughter Samah, now age 20, tells me a bit more about the fateful decision: “If Dad had stayed, they would have killed him.” Besides being Sunni, Dawood, as a Palestinian, had another strike against him. He had to walk away from his business.
    In 2006, they made their way to Aleppo in Syria, another dangerous, war-torn place, staying for two years. Dawood says the children became traumatized, developing phobias to any loud noise. He was especially concerned for Fidel who has a disability. “He had no chance in Iraq or Syria” where there are no schools for those with disabilities. As a family, they decided to head to a refugee camp in the hope of a better life elsewhere. They ended up living in Al-Hawl refugee camp in the desert on the border of Iraq and Syria for over two years.
    In the refugee camp, run by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the family made it clear to authorities it was willing to go to any country that would take the whole family. They were thrilled when Canadian Embassy officials told them Canada would accept them. They were sponsored by the United Church and the Islamic Association, arriving in Canada five-and-a-half years ago.
    In 2016, Suliman and Eman Dawood became proud Canadian citizens. The family lives in a modest townhouse in Fernwood. He works for Chix Poultry and has only good things to say about his employer, Victoria, and Canada. His son Fidel attends Garth Homer daily; his daughter Samah attends Camosun and is looking forward to earning a diploma in Community, Family & Child Studies. Dawood’s older daughter has settled with her husband in Alberta; Suliman and Eman are now proud grandparents.
    “In Canada, one can keep going forward,” says Dawood. In parts of the world he is familiar with, he explains, “you can move forward a bit only to go back to zero.” Samah explains that the rules everyone follows here are good and applied equally—unlike in parts of the Middle East. Dawood says, “Everybody is equal…all people have the same opportunity if you want to work, study, or to get medical care.”
     
    ONE ASPECT OF LIFE that isn’t so rosy for refugees such as Dawood is that family members end up scattered around the globe. Eman’s family is in Cypress and Sweden; Dawood’s many siblings live in Australia, Texas, Turkey, Tunisia, Norway, and Iraq. Fortunately, none of his siblings are living in refugee camps.
    But his cousin Mohammed’s family is.
    They have been stuck in a refugee camp in Lebanon for three years. The Dawoods last saw their cousins years ago in Damascus. One of the young cousins subsequently got arrested after taking part in a political protest against the Syrian government. Subjected to torture, after six months in prison he died. “His mom, she cried until now,” says Dawood.
    Shortly after that tragedy, in 2013, almost all of Mohammed’s extended family in Syria was killed during a chemical weapon attack in Damascus. Fearing for their safety, the family fled, eventually arriving at a UN refugee camp in Lebanon.
     That was three years ago. Since then the father Mohammed managed to make the lengthy journey to Denmark with one daughter. Though he had hoped to be able to bring his whole family there, there is no guarantee that even he will be allowed to stay (he entered illegally, and his asylum claim is in limbo). One thing that is clear: Denmark is no longer accepting any young adult males, so even if Mohammed is accepted, the two older sons, Rasheed, 26, and Tareq, 19, need to find a different place to call home. (I am using only first names for security reasons.)
    Mohammed was understandably relieved when Dawood agreed to help the two older boys come to Canada.
    Meanwhile, the young men, their mother and 11-year-old brother Omar continue to reside in Chabriha, the refugee camp, in a tiny apartment roughly the size of Dawood’s kitchen. While safe, the camp’s refugees tend to be resented by the local community and there are few opportunities for work, though Rasheed has found a part-time job. The hope is that the mom and Omar can join the father sometime in Denmark, after she’s assured her older sons will be given refuge in Canada.
    As Suliman, Samah and I sit contemplating the choices and compromises this family must make, and the uncertainties they face, we all shake out heads in sadness.
    Dawood has informed the boys that “we don’t know how long it will take…it all depends on our government.” He tells me Rasheed says it’s ok, as long as things are moving forward.

    NATALIE HUNT, A YOUNG VICTORIA MOM who got to know Fidel Dawood and then the whole family when she was working at the Garth Homer Centre, decided to help bring Rasheed and Tareq  to Canada. Last summer she, Dawood, and a few other friends formed the Salish Sea Refugee Sponsorship Group, to sponsor the young men in partnership with the Inter-Cultural Association (ICA). As Carla Funk, one of Hunt’s neighbours and a member of the group puts it, “when you learn the histories of these families, it’s like peeling back the onion. There are so many stories of loss, and such epic journeys.”

    Hunt, whose current job is at the Access Justice Centre, shows me the thick raft of paperwork she’s just finished working on—for the third time. Despite the fact that the young men are approved through the UN Commission on Refugees and have been vetted by the Canadian government, there is still a lot of vetting going on it seems. Says Hunt, “You have to present a coherent story from A to Z; it’s really hard to do!” This means accounting for their individual whereabouts and activities for their whole lives, with no gaps, which can be particularly difficult to do for people fleeing dangerous regimes. And, she noted, because paperwork in the past was sometimes filled out inconsistently by officials, each of those inconsistencies—whether it be dates or name spelling—have to be reconciled.
    “When we started the process, we were told it would take about six to eight months [to get the men here],” says Hunt. The group has now been informed it could take one to four years and are concerned it will likely be at the longer end of the spectrum because these are young adult males. While they are near the top of the pile of the local ICA-approved sponsorships, there are about 16,000 ahead of them Canada-wide.
    Meanwhile, members of the sponsorship group keep in touch with Rasheed and Tareq almost daily by Whatsapp or Skype. “It’s important for them to know we care,” says Hunt, “especially now that it might take longer.” The women admit they haven’t had the heart to tell them the latest time estimates.
    While the group has raised $17,000 towards the $40,000 required  to help them through their first year here, they are also raising a smaller contingency fund to help right now, mostly with the boys’ English lessons and dental work (much lower in Lebanon than here). They sell the book Stepping Stones for $20 (pocketing $10) and they have a facebook page (search “Salish Sea Refugee”) which will be announcing upcoming fundraisers. They’ve even got potential jobs lined up.
    “We also have to be realistic,” says Hunt sadly. “They may never be able to come.” Says Funk, “That’s why we’re developing a solid plan B. If they can both hone their English skills and get work experience, and get a certificate of some kind for the younger brother, those are marketable, and their resilience in the world, no matter where they end up, will be improved.”
    If the boys don’t manage to be accepted into Canada, the tax-deductible funds raised under the ICA umbrella will go to another refugee family who is.
     
    SINCE NOVEMBER 2015 when the recent surge of refugees from Syria started to arrive in Canada, Greater Victoria has welcomed 415 refugees (170 of which are at least partially privately sponsored)—not a lot, but more than usual. Sabine Lehr, manager of private sponsorship of refugees with the Inter-Cultural Association, like others on the frontlines of refugee resettlement, understands how important it is to help bring refugees’ families together. She says, “Almost every person recently resettled to Victoria has other family members that had to flee their home countries and who are now living in neighbouring countries in difficult circumstances.”
    For that reason, the Canadian Council on Refugees is calling for Express Entry Family Reunification, noting that though refugees in Canada can apply to bring their immediate family members to Canada, “sometimes they are forced to wait years to be reunited with their spouses and children overseas, who can be in situations of danger and persecution.” The delays caused by bureaucratic barriers obviously take a particularly high toll on children.
    The Council, a national non-profit umbrella organization, also complains that Canada’s plans for 2017 are disappointing. For one thing, Canada is taking only 7500 Government-Assisted Refugees (GARs)—which is less than the average of years from 2000 through 2015. GARS are financially assisted by the government for one year. Canada will accept 16,000 Privately Sponsored Refugees (PSR) in 2017—but there’s already an estimated 45,000 PSR applications in process with 6400 of those now waiting for more than three years. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has said that their goal is to eliminate the backlog of private sponsorship applications by 2019 and reduce wait times for new applications to about 12 months.
    Unfortunately, as the Council points out, the 2017 targets “[cannot] accommodate applications submitted to respond to the many requests for family reunification for recently arrived Syrians and other refugees.” It predicts that it will be 2018 or later before recently-applied-for refugee family members (such as Rasheed and Tareq) will be able to come to Canada.
    This is despite family reunification being a stated goal of Canada’s federal government. The reality on the ground is often heart-breaking. Even in the “economic immigrant” category, I know of many women working as caregivers here who have waited for 4, 5, or 6 years after they spend 2 years becoming Permanent Residents to be allowed to have their children and spouse join them here.
    Donald Galloway, a UVic law professor who specializes in immigration, warns me to be wary of the government’s numbers on family reunification. While the official stats, he says, show 65,000 “family class members” admitted last year, about 45,000 of them are spouses or common law partners sponsored by permanent residents or citizens here. “It operates primarily to allow citizens to select their spouse from the global pool and be able to bring that partner to Canada.” This is very different than the type of reunification needed by many refugees, torn apart as they flee conflict zones.
    Recently the Council on Refugees launched the “Wish You Were Here” campaign, along with issuing a manifesto on family reunification, now signed by over 80 Canadian organizations. In part, the manifesto states: “We deplore any immigration or refugee system that is indifferent to the hardships caused by separation of families, and we call for the removal of any and all barriers to family reunification. We underline the costs of family separation, most importantly for those kept separate, but also for society at large which is also the loser when families are kept apart by the immigration system.”
    Says Galloway, “We encourage people to apply but the government is not providing adequate infrastructure to consider their applications in a timely manner.” In both Canada and the US, says Galloway, the vetting of refugees is “incredibly rigorous,” involving a two-year detailed examination of identity, work history, relatives, connections, and medicals for all family members. Our aspirations, he continues, clash with the bureaucracy’s ability to implement a way to realize them in a humanitarian and fair manner. The result, he says, is “huge backlogs and family rupture rather than reunification. We put people through horrific trials.”
     
    ALL THIS IS PLAYING OUT against the backdrop of a US Administration apparently bent on criminalizing immigrants and refugees. Dawood says his brothers in Texas have asked him if they should come here. As we chat over tea, Dawood asks me what I think about their well-being in the US. Hmmm. We both try to reassure each other that, since they were accepted by the US as refugees years ago, they must be safe, mustn’t they?
    Professor Galloway is not surprised that there is panic in the US, resulting in frightened people risking life and limb to cross over the US-Canada border.
    Because of the dangers to these already traumatized people both in their homelands and now in the US, 240 Canadian law professors, Galloway among them, have urged Canada’s federal government to “immediately suspend directing back refugee claimants at the Canada-US border under the Safe Third County Agreement.”
    This Agreement, explains Galloway, applies only at official ports of entry. In effect, it encourages people to sneak into Canada (potentially endangering their lives) in order to claim asylum.
    Options to suspend temporarily all or part of it are built into the Agreement in order, says Galloway, to “allow time to take stock of what’s going on. It also…allows each country to admit refugees from the other on a discretionary basis, and that discretion can be exercised on a case-by-case basis or…[by government directive] to border officials.”
    Given the new US measures, and the chaos and panic there, Galloway and his fellow legal scholars feel a three-month suspension of the Safe Third County Agreement by Canada is the most rational response.
    Harvard Law School also wrote to Prime Minister Trudeau in February, asking for suspension and citing a report the School compiled showing that the US was no longer safe for many refugees: “Based on erroneous assumptions about the criminality and extremist tendency of the immigrant population, President Trump’s Executive Orders represent a dramatic restriction of access to asylum and other immigration protections in the United States. They call for a new regime of large-scale detention, expanded expedited removal without due process, deputizing of state and local officials to detain individuals suspected of immigration violations, and aggressive criminal prosecution of unauthorized entry, a means by which many seek access to asylum protection, as recognized in Article 31 of the Refugee Convention.”
    The Trudeau Government, however, has so far indicated it has no intention of suspending the Safe Third County Agreement.
    Galloway predicts a legal challenge of the Agreement in the courts. He tells me that it won’t be the first. In 2008, the Canadian Council on Refugees went to court arguing that the situation then in the US was not safe. The judge agreed, says Galloway, “citing the US detention conditions, expedited removal, and the way the Americans interpret their international obligations.” That decision was ultimately successfully appealed on procedural grounds, which have since changed (it was ruled inappropriate for the courts to hear the case because no particular individual was involved). “As the Harvard report indicates, things are even more serious than they were in 2008,” says Galloway, and the question of safety could easily be addressed again.
    A more welcoming stance to US asylum seekers might well burnish Canada’s already good reputation on the global refugee front. Our acceptance of 25,000 Syrian refugees last year—and allowing them to become Permanent Residents on arrival—was, says Galloway, a beacon of light as other countries push refugees away or refuse to give them any status. He also praises Canada’s rather innovative approach of allowing private sponsorship of refugees, something the UNCHR has recommended other countries emulate.
    Certainly many Canadian citizens have become more aware and empathetic, understanding both the need for greater humanitarian assistance, and the enrichment that flows to Canadian society from opening our doors to more refugees like Suliman Dawood and his family.
    Up against the 65 million people who are currently displaced world-wide by conflict and persecution, however, we need all the innovative measures and good will we can dream up.
     
    Leslie Campbell is the founder and editor of Focus. Her grandparents all immigrated to Canada from Scotland.

    David Broadland
    March 2017
    Project promoters are still claiming the new bridge will be “world-class” and “iconic.” Unfortunately, they may be right.
     
    IN A RECENT RADIO INTERVIEW, City of Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps described the new Johnson Street Bridge as “iconic” and “world-class.” Those words were optimistically attached to the project back in 2009 and Helps’ use of them eight years later is a bit like Donald Trump describing his popular-vote loss as “a massive landslide victory.” Both are ignoring, or don’t know, the factual history of their respective projects.
    So far, nearly four years of bridge construction has produced what looks like an ordinary concrete highway overpass with the middle missing. If the bridge is going to be “iconic” and “world-class” in the way that Helps meant, the missing piece will have to be so architecturally stunning and engineeringly remarkable that it’s able to lift the dull heaviness of what’s been built out of mediocrity.
    Unfortunately, evidence is mounting that the City has committed a world-class blunder.
    Fabrication of the missing part of the bridge—which will span a gap of 46 metres (151 feet)—has proved to be extraordinarily difficult for Chinese welders. They began work in early 2014 on a much-simplified version of the span originally designed by noted bridge architect Sebastien Ricard of WilkinsonEyre Architects in London, England. Not simplified enough, apparently. By mid-2014, quality control inspectors found the fabricated sections of the bridge had been made of such poor-quality steel, or so badly welded, that they had to be scrapped. Three years after starting, the Chinese welders were reported to be struggling to fit the pieces together. According to project reports, once the Chinese fabricators get the parts to fit, and assuming everything else goes smoothly from that point onward, both in China and Victoria, construction of the new bridge will be completed by early 2018. If that projection holds up, the 156-metre-long, 15-metre-wide (1) bridge will have taken five years to build. The City announced (2) the start of construction on May 17, 2013.

    Compare that with the indisputably “iconic” and “world-class” French bridge, the Millau Viaduct (photo below), completed in 2004. The 2460-metre-long, 27.6-metre-wide bridge (3) floats 270 metres above the Tarn River. It took three years to construct.

    A comparison of the project costs (4) (5) is also revealing. A standard method of comparing the cost of bridges is to divide the project cost by the area of the bridge’s highway deck (which are the dimensions given above). Doing that arithmetic (6) for the Millau and Victoria projects, we find that each square metre of bridge deck on the new Johnson Street Bridge will cost five times as much as a square metre of bridge deck on the Millau Viaduct (adjusted for inflation to 2016).
    So, in a way, Helps could be right. Victoria’s new bridge could very well be judged an “iconic” and “world-class” example of how not to build a bridge.
    The project’s problems go deeper than mere extreme cost and long construction delays, though. Many of the original objectives of the project—like architectural significance, a wider navigational channel, and seismic protection up to magnitude 8.5—had to be ditched as the project’s real costs became unhinged from consultants’ promises. But the story of why the project kept costing more, even as its promoters secretly stripped away promised benefits and features is, at its core, the story of what happens when old blunders are covered over by new blunders.
    The project was originally justified on the basis that the existing 1924 Joseph Strauss-designed bascule bridge had not been built to any seismic standard, and might collapse in an earthquake. Focus learned through freedom of information requests that City officials had been advised—in writing—by both of the first two engineers involved in the project, Joost Meyboom and Mark Mulvihill, that the City should seismically upgrade and rehabilitate the existing historically-significant bridge rather than replace it. Meyboom told the City that work could be done for $8.6 million (7). What followed was a long series of blunders and misrepresentations by City officials and private engineering consultants that, piled one on top of another, has led to a spectacular design failure and a series of cover-ups that have attempted to hide that failure. A full account of all the misrepresentations is beyond the scope of this article, but one particular misrepresentation, the impact of which is now working its way into the local economy, is worth exploring in depth.
    This particular misrepresentation was the inevitable consequence of rushing a poorly-understood design through a competitive bidding process in which all the bidders were warning the City that the project was risky in terms of cost and engineering considerations. Instead of doing the right thing—pausing the project to thoroughly assess the design—its promoters ignored the warnings and hid these concerns from elected decision-makers and the public.
     
    IN MID-JANUARY 2017, a letter (8) from Seaspan Marine to the City of Victoria was leaked to media outlets in Victoria, including Focus. Seaspan is a prominent tug and barge company operating on the West Coast. It frequently pulls barges and guides other vessels through the narrow channel spanned by the Johnson Street Bridge. In the letter, Seaspan told the City that recommendations to lower the speed at which it and other operators could make such transits, coupled with the “doubling of the transit distance”—a result of the project’s hasty decision to leave the concrete support piers of the existing bridge in place—“undermines safety rather than enhances it.” As a result, Seaspan’s Vice-President of Operations Paul Hilder wrote, “we will have to curtail barge service to businesses above the bridge and cease performing bridge assists to other operators.” Hilder requested that the City “reconsider their position to seek a reduce[d] speed limit from Transport Canada and the Victoria Harbour Master.”
    The current speed limit past the bridge is five knots. The City would like that reduced to 3.5 knots. Interviewed on CFAX radio, current Johnson Street Bridge Project Director Jonathan Huggett was asked if the speed change was being brought forward because a lower speed limit would allow the use of less robust fendering on the north side of the bridge. Huggett said that the issue was one of whether spending more money on fendering would be an appropriate use of public resources. More robust fendering would cost more money.
    The public resources at stake are not insignificant. It’s rumoured that more robust fendering, which would allow the current maximum recommended speed of five knots to be maintained, could cost in the neighbourhood of $10 million. The commercial interests of the Middle and Upper Harbour customers that Seaspan serves are also significant. Whose interest should prevail? Lost in the ensuing public discussion of whether the City should pay for more fendering protection so that barges could be pulled at the speed the mariners thought was safest, were two underlying questions.
    First, why was the cost of fendering on the north side of the bridge left out of the construction contract—if in fact it was—when councillors were asked to approve the contract in December 2012? Secondly, why would the new bridge not be able to withstand a five-knot collision on its north side if it was protected with the same kind of fendering that has protected the existing bridge on its north side? The existing bridge has been able to withstand hits by vessels moving at five knots over its 93-year life without it incurring damage to its lifting mechanism. It continues to provide reliable service.
    The City has avoided providing factual answers to these key questions. No wonder. Factual answers backed by evidence would reveal why the Johnson Street Bridge Replacement Project will likely be an engineering case study on how not to build a bridge. To understand why, we need to go back to when the fendering issue first became public.
    Project Director Huggett brought the bad news about the north-side fendering into the public realm at a City council meeting on July 16, 2015. Back then, he had a slightly different story.
    At that meeting, Huggett told councillors that fendering for the north side of the bridge needed to allow for a five-knot speed and would add an additional $3 million—more or less—to the cost of the bridge.
    Councillor Ben Isitt asked Huggett: “Could you remind us why the fendering isn’t included in the scope of the contract with PCL?” PCL is the company building the bridge. Isitt was at the critical December, 2012 in camera meeting at which councillors were given the details of the contract and urged to approve it by City staff.
    In response to Isitt, Huggett asserted the existence of a contract drawing, one that Isitt apparently hadn’t been shown, in which the north-side fendering had been “clouded out,” signifying that it was not part of the agreement between PCL and the City. Huggett stated, “At the time we went forward with the contract it was left as an issue to be resolved.” A few moments later, again referring to fendering on the north side of the bridge, Huggett was even more definite: “It was not in the original contract.”
     
     
    After that meeting, Focus filed an FOI request for the document Huggett referred to as proof that the north-side fendering had not been included in the 2012 construction contract. The City was unable to locate any such document (9). Indeed, the PCL contract seems as explicit about the design and cost of fendering as it is about any other detail covering construction of the bridge and related structures.
    In its response to our FOI request, the City informed us it had “eight fendering drawings created in 2013 for the north side of the new bridge” that they said “do contain three drawings in which portions are clouded to identify portions of the fendering system that were put on hold.” But that was well after the councillors were shown the details of the contract and asked to approve it.
    In other words, there was nothing in the PCL contract itself to signify that north-side fendering was not included, but, as the project advanced, changes to the proposed fendering were contemplated.
    The City also informed us that it would not release those 2013 documents because the fendering was part of an ongoing legal mediation with PCL and release of the documents “could compromise the City’s negotiating position at the mediation table.”
    In other words, north-side fendering was included in the 2012 construction contract approved by councillors, but it has since become a bargaining chip in the unfolding legal dispute between the City and all of the other parties involved in the troubled project.
    Focus has obtained records (10) from the City that show Huggett had been made aware that senior City staff had agreed to a deal with PCL with respect to the cost of fendering, a deal which apparently didn’t include seeking approval from Councillor Isitt and other elected officials. Huggett was informed of this before he told councillors at the July 16, 2015 meeting that north-side fendering was “not in the contract.”
    Focus contacted Huggett for his explanation but he did not respond to repeated emails. So let me back up a bit and address the other fundamental question about the fendering issue that the City doesn’t want to answer: Why would the new bridge not be able to withstand a five-knot collision on its north side with the kind of fendering that has been protecting the existing bridge?
    At the council meeting at which Huggett first made this issue public, he also explained to councillors why fendering was so vital: “The new bridge is somewhat less robust than the existing structure,” he told councillors. Bingo. He continued: “The last thing I need is a barge to hit the rest pier and knock it two inches out of alignment. For one, I don’t know how I’d get it back again having knocked it out of alignment and then I’m faced with an inoperable bridge. You’ve got $100 million invested in the water here and I’ve got to protect it.”
    What Huggett was saying, in effect, is that if an outgoing barge loaded with scrap metal hits the new bridge, it is more likely to be made inoperable than would be the case if the same barge hit the old bridge. By “inoperable” we mean unable to lift or lower the moving part of the bridge.
    For a project that was originally justified on the basis of the existing bridge not being robust enough to survive the forces imposed on it by a significant earthquake—and thus posed a threat to public safety—this is an extraordinary admission of project failure. Huggett’s admission, by the way, apparently went right over the top of councillors’ heads.
    What characteristic of the new bridge makes it “somewhat less robust” to marine collisions than the existing bridge? We put that question to Huggett but he didn’t respond. But it’s not difficult to understand what’s really at issue.
    The first thing to note is that the north side of the main pier has been left unprotected since it was completed. This structure is called the “bascule pier.” It will house all of the machinery used to lift the bridge, and it supports the weight of the “bascule leaf”—the moving part of the bridge being fabricated in China. If protecting the pier itself was so critical, wouldn’t that have been put in place as soon as the pier was finished? Many loaded barges have been towed past it already. From the absence of protection, it’s not unreasonable to infer that it’s not the pier itself that’s vulnerable, but the bascule leaf that the pier will support. But why would that be so vulnerable?
    Imagine a tug pulling a barge full of scrap metal headed south from  the Upper Harbour toward the new bridge—which in real life is a regular occurrence. The bridge would lift to its upright position to provide clearance for the tug and barge. But imagine that a strong tailwind suddenly catches the barge and the combination of wind, an ebb tide and a narrow channel result in the barge swinging around and striking the main pier of the bridge with great force. What would happen to the bascule leaf?
    Try to picture it: the erect span projects 50 metres into the air above the bridge deck—as high as a 15-storey building. When the barge hits the pier, how will that heavy steel projection behave?
    This is a particularly crucial design issue for this bridge, which has a one-of-a-kind feature: The bascule leaf’s 15-metre-diameter rings float on steel rollers and are not attached to the bascule pier. There is no central axle that’s bolted to the pier that will hold the leaf in place if the bridge is hit by a barge or an earthquake. There’s nothing but the leaf’s own weight to keep it in place. And, bizarrely, when this bridge is in the fully erect position, it’s top-heavy.
    As the bridge lifts, its centre of gravity actually rises. When it’s in the fully-raised position, more than half of the weight of the moving part of the bridge is above the highway deck and there is nothing—other than the wide stance of the rings—to keep the bascule leaf from being tipped to one side in reaction to the pier being hit by a barge. If the bridge were hit in a strong northerly wind that was already pressing the top-heavy leaf sideways, what would happen? Would there be enough momentum from the loaded barge transferred to the upright bascule leaf to tip it over sideways or shift it enough to damage the lifting machinery? Could the bridge get stuck in the upright position with no way, as Huggett put it, “to get it back again having knocked it out of alignment”?
    You might think that all of this would have been worked out years ago. But it wasn’t.
    Only in 2016, seven years after the open-ring design had been chosen, did the project evaluate “the severity of forces on the bridge and its associated structures resulting from impacts during tug and barge transit through the waterway between the Upper and Lower Harbors passing through the new Johnson Street Bridge when open.” The study, undertaken by Seattle’s Pacific Maritime Institute, determined that the worst probable impact would occur to the north side of the bridge’s main pier. The force of such an impact was estimated to be 1200 tonnes. What effect would that have on the bascule leaf in the open position? The City isn’t saying, but what we do know is that the project proceeded in 2013 without such an evaluation. Now the City faces the additional cost of ensuring that a 1200-tonne impact never occurs.
    Let me summarize: The City can’t provide any evidence of Huggett’s assertion that the fendering for the north side of the bridge was explicitly excluded from the 2012 PCL contract. And, although the City and Huggett would not answer questions about the positional stability of the unattached bascule leaf in a barge collision, what is known suggests the project realized—after construction had begun—that the experimental design created an unforseen vulnerability.
    This has been the modus operandi of the project since 2009. At critical moments, when it was realized the open-ring design would produce a construction-cost risk or a seismic risk or an operational risk, the project’s promoters hid the risks. They misled councillors and the public about the flawed design to get more money to keep the project moving forward. The most iconic, world-class moment on this long downhill slide occurred in November 2012 when City managers made their recommendation to councillors on the three construction bids.
    At a closed-to-the-public meeting, the managers urged councillors to allow them to begin negotiations for a contract with PCL, even though the company had produced a design in which every single element of the bridge had changed significantly from the design envisioned by the City’s project manager MMM, and WilkinsonEyre. Even though it wasn’t in the interest of any of the three bidding companies to alienate the City’s influential project manager, all had produced polite but scathing criticisms of the design and supporting engineering done by MMM. Two of the companies’ bids were based on completely different mechanical lifting concepts. PCL’s quickly-produced adaptation was the only option left to City managers for proceeding with the project. The City officials failed to relate any of the information in the critical reviews to councillors. Rather than accepting the realities exposed by the companies’ critiques—that MMM had greatly under-priced and under-engineered the design—the officials instead hid these concerns, and the accompanying financial risks, from councillors.
    Many of the senior City managers who played a direct role in this deception later departed abruptly as the implications of a hastily-conceived design on cost and construction duration became clear. Their replacements have been kept busy ever since hiding the ways in which the project had to be scaled back, including seismic protection, fendering, and the original architectural vision. WilkinsonEyre has now removed all traces of its association with the project from its website.
    As for the deceived, although then-Mayor Dean Fortin was removed by voters, most of the councillors who had the wool pulled over their eyes are still sitting around the council table, asking Mr Huggett polite questions about pathways and the kind of grass being planted on the bridge approaches.
    At a December council meeting City Manager Jason Johnson told those councillors that a “mid-term lessons learned” exercise on the project had been completed by City staff. Focus asked Johnson whether that exercise had included public input and whether the results were available to the public. In his response, Johnson didn’t answer either question directly but said the City “will release all of the findings when the bridge is finished.”
    More likely, the project will be protected under a shroud of legal advice for years to come, and making the “lessons learned” public would—and I’m just taking a wild stab in the dark here at what the City will say—“compromise the City’s negotiating position.” Thus City officials, former and current, will be spared public exposure of the role they played in the building of Victoria’s iconic, world-class blunder—and will be free to move on to other projects.
     
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

    Leslie Campbell
    January 2017
    The Capital Region’s population is expected to grow to 442,000 in the next 20 years. Where are we going to put everyone?
     
     

    ON NOVEMBER 23, 2016 a majority of the Capital Regional District directors agreed that it was time to accept the long-time-coming new Regional Growth Strategy. The Province requires regional districts to have one of these planning guides, but it also insists that it be unanimously endorsed by each of the affected municipalities and electoral districts involved.
    So it’s not done yet, and in fact indications are that some municipalities—likely the Highlands and Victoria, and perhaps others—will reject it by the end-of-January deadline. If that happens, the legislation allows the Province to step in and order binding arbitration.
    From the start, the task has been both incredibly important to get right, and incredibly difficult—some would say impossible given our region’s history, present shape, and contrasting visions for the future among its “fiefdoms.” Over the years, it has morphed from a Regional Sustainability Strategy back to a Regional Growth Strategy.

    Compromise may be central to governance in a region such as ours, but some lines in the sand seem to have been drawn and were in evidence at the November 23 meeting, when a key clause about water services was being finalized.
    Delivery of water services—in the form of piped water—is viewed in urban planning circles as a crucial tool for shaping growth patterns. Where infrastructure allows water to flow, development follows. And that of course engenders more traffic and increased demand for other expensive services, whose cost is born by taxpayers throughout the region and Province. Here’s what UVic’s Environmental Law Centre wrote in a submission on the Regional Growth Strategy: “The primary way to maintain effective growth management is to limit both sewer and water servicing. It is well proven that once servicing is extended into rural areas zoning follows and densification occurs on a case-by-case basis.
    There is no justification for extending servicing within the context of a regional sustainability strategy that is focusing on decreasing GHGs, creating compact complete communities, and connecting the green infrastructure of the region, when plentiful opportunities exist to accommodate development in serviced areas.”
     Mike Hicks, director for the vast Juan De Fuca Electoral District, doesn’t share that perspective. At the November meeting, he was focused on the rights of his Port Renfrew-area residents to water—and to development. The Port Renfrew area sits on rock, he said, so well water is unreliable. “Without water...there’s no development.”
    Several members of Port Renfrew’s development and business community made presentations at the meeting citing their problems with water and how that made their investments risky and endangered jobs and growth of the community.
    Victoria councillor and CRD Director Ben Isitt, a long-time opponent of urban sprawl, in explaining why he couldn’t vote for the clause extending water services, noted that “entire hillsides have been blasted away [in the Port Renfrew area]...it’s been anything but a light touch that’s appropriate in rural areas…The [development] model being pursued there needs to be reigned in.” Isitt noted “the Province, through the legislation, has recognized that there’s a regional interest in land use patterns, in protection for biological diversity and ecological systems, and that decisions around how infrastructure expands, how development occurs, should be made at the regional level.”
    Hicks, obviously emotional about it, replied: “Director Isitt brings it on home for me. [His objections have] got nothing to do with water; it’s got to do with land use, and Regional Growth Strategies, and having a big whip from Victoria down to Port Renfrew. We’ve got a little town that’s trying to make it. People say it’ll be the next Tofino, and they struggle with these meetings and this water and big developers…I don’t know how we can embrace David Suzuki and talk about water for everyone and turn around and say we won’t give it to the people of Port Renfrew.”
    He asked CRD directors to “Please recognize the right of Port Renfrew residents to control their destiny.” In the past Hicks has threatened to challenge the RGS in court if it refuses to allow for piped water to these communities.
    Perhaps such threats influenced the framers of the new Regional Growth Strategy (RGS). While CRD staff gave a report in which they stated, “Ultimately, [extending water services] is a political decision,” they still made a recommendation allowing for significantly more access to water than the previous RGS, despite, they noted, the opposition made clear at a public hearing in October.
    Saanich Councillor and CRD Director Vic Derman, another opponent of sprawl, described himself as “flummoxed by the staff recommendation,” when other compromises existed. He said it almost guarantees the RGS will have to go to arbitration.
    Alice Finall, mayor of North Saanich, noted that some are already calling the RGS the “Rapid Growth Strategy.”
    After some discussion, a slim majority of the CRD board voted to accept the RGS with the new provision for water services in the Juan de Fuca lands. As mentioned, the refusal of any one council in the region to endorse it could send it to arbitration.
     
    AT THE NOVEMBER MEETING, Vic Derman condemned the RGS on climate change grounds: “This document and the supporting document of the proposed climate change plan for the region are very tepid and very mild…We have mortgaged future generations—we are making it impossible for them to meet their needs. We are putting them into a hideous situation. This document doesn’t recognize that. It doesn’t take us far enough fast enough. It doesn’t canvas the tough questions. This document doesn’t meet our needs...not even close.”
    Derman, who recently authored a report on climate change for the CRD environment committee (which he chairs), met me for tea at a White Spot within walking distance of his Saanich home.

    He feels there has been a lack of leadership in terms of letting the public know clearly the consequences of failing to act boldly enough on the region’s growth, especially in relation to climate change. The original RGS, adopted in 2004 after years of deliberation, set the course, he feels. It did attempt to limit growth to eight major centres—only one of which was in the West Shore. But in order to get it passed, compromises were made. The obvious example of such a compromise was agreeing to Langford’s demand to make its municipal boundaries its “urban containment boundary”—meaning all of its 42-square-kilometres of land was able to be developed and serviced. Recall that in 2002 Langford’s council was pursuing rezoning for Bear Mountain, allowing for up to 1500 housing units and necessitating a new connector from the Trans-Canada Highway up Skirt Mountain. It hasn’t ended there.
    Mayor Stew Young, exercising power continuously since 1993, and his pro-development council have approved big box stores that draw traffic from all corners of the region. They’ve offered fee reductions and tax holidays for developers. The result? Langford’s previously forested and agricultural lands, along with the many ecosystem services they provided, have been extensively blasted apart and paved over.
    Most recently Young announced a 10-year tax holiday for any provincial office or tech company that opens in Langford. “I’m going to push this so hard. We need to put businesses where the people are,” Young told the Times Colonist.
    Allowing Langford its rampant growth strategy in 2004, “was the price to getting an agreement,” reflects Derman.
    Perhaps in light of what happened in Langford, this time there seems less willingness to compromise.
     The new document (already about six years in the making) doesn’t fully recognize the urgency of climate change, says Derman. “Pretty much all the scientists agree we have already put enough carbon in the atmosphere to cause a 1.6 degree increase”—meaning we need to suck carbon out of the atmosphere in order to meet the Paris Agreement target. Moreover, notes Derman, at one degree of warming, you start to get feedback loops, like the melting of the permafrost which jacks up the temperature more. He tells me of a new study in Nature showing how soil will release more stored carbon as global temperature increases—another feedback loop. New data on the West Antarctica ice shelves, reviewed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, indicate that sea level could rise by three metres by 2050—spelling catastrophe for many cities around the world, not to mention inland cities as they try to cope with an influx of sea-rise refugees.
    Over tea, Derman reiterates what he told fellow CRD directors at the November meeting: “The only thing that could possibly be more urgent to act on would be if a large asteroid was hurtling toward us.”
    While cities don’t have as much authority as upper levels of government, they can set policies that will reduce automobile traffic, which in the CRD’s case is the source of 55 percent (and growing) of its greenhouse gas emissions. Under the business-as-usual scenario, the CRD’s Regional Transportation Plan (2014), a companion to its RGS, projects 100,000 new auto trips in peak periods. “[C]urrent travel patterns are not sustainable and current trends are not encouraging,” it states. Automobile use was found to be increasing, particularly between the West Shore and Core. In the West Shore, “87 percent of peak-hour trips are currently made by car.”
     Yet such auto-dependent patterns seem assured by the RGS’s own population projections. It forecasts that the West Shore’s share of regional population will grow from 20 percent in 2011 to 26.7 percent by 2038, while the Core communities shrink from 69 percent to 62.6 percent. (The Saanich Peninsula holds steady at 11 percent.)
     Derman feels the Regional Growth Strategy “fails to ask important questions—and probably the biggest one is where should we put people in the future? I don’t think the answer is in the Western Communities.”
    I ask Derman about Mayor Young’s determination to bring jobs to Langford. “That just won’t work…The worst growth pattern is obviously sprawl,” he says, “but the second worst is nodes of density that are dispersed, because everybody doesn’t live where they work…as soon as you have dispersed nodes that are quite far apart, all you do is have a lot more travel between them. So it becomes much more expensive, it becomes more energy intensive, it’s bad for climate change, and it’s also bad for the second real big problem, congestion.” Derman says the congestion problem is a direct result of the land use pattern we chose. “Doubling down on it—by allowing more growth in more dispersed areas—is not a particularly good idea.”
    Indeed, given that the CRD’s core communities—Oak Bay, Victoria, Saanich, Esquimalt and View Royal—have a population of 240,600, odds are very good that any ministry or larger business has far more employees among them than in Langford (population 35,000) or even Langford/Colwood (population 54,000 total).
    The risk of “solving” the congestion to the West Shore, says Derman, is that it may encourage more people to drive. “The highway was supposed to last 30 years,” recalls Derman, “but it filled up in 11.” And it, along with the infrastructure services for residences, are all subsidized by all the Province’s taxpayers.”
    If you really want to address both climate change and local quality of life, including congestion, he argues, the aim has to be a truly regional compact form of community.
    He knows it works—on a number of levels—and can be done. He spent part of September in Amsterdam, a city of close to a million. “It’s three or four times the population size of our region. I was staying on the Western edge of the more developed area, and for me it was 8 minutes of rather easy cycling to the centre of town…They have a much, much more compact form.” He never saw a traffic jam either.
    In his report to the CRD’s environment committee, Derman got specific about where development should be directed: “In our region, the Shelbourne Valley, the Douglas Corridor, the Fort Street Corridor and corridors between the City of Victoria and Esquimalt offer excellent opportunities to develop expanded complete communities in close proximity to the Downtown core.” Derman wishes the $85-million devoted to the Mackenzie interchange had been been used instead to help finance some sort of LRT or modern streetcar on the Douglas Corridor. Over our tea, we discuss a bigger public transit idea, a circular core route that hits UVic, Downtown and Uptown. This is where the vast majority of people in the CRD already are. Helping them manage comfortably and affordably without a vehicle seems more logical than an LRT to Langford.
    Derman says he might support an LRT to Langford, but only in return for guarantees of serious restrictions on development. “If we spent the better part of a billion on LRT and it caused a huge new expansion of roads, and only lasted 10 years, what a disastrous waste,” he says.
     
    WHILE THE REDUCTION OF GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS is a huge benefit of compact, complete communities, it certainly is not the only one. To more fully grasp some of the others, I met with Todd Litman. Fittingly, I can walk to his home office. We both live in the central core—he in Fernwood and I in Rockland. It’s a pleasant 15-minute walk on a sunny, crisp day.
    Though he lives in Victoria, Litman works all over the world as a transportation and smart growth consultant. The author of numerous research papers, he has focused on analyzing the many socio-economic benefits of compact communities. His latest report, “Selling Smart Growth,” lists improvements to fitness and health, personal finances, real estate industry profits, local economic development and property tax revenues among them.

    As we sip jasmine tea, he tells me, “People who live in compact neighbourhoods, besides spending a whole lot less on transportation, have much lower traffic fatality rates. Since traffic fatalities are the main cause of death of people in the prime of life—that is between 5 and 50 years of age—there really is a huge public health and safety benefit if people are able to live in a more compact, walkable community.”
    Unfortunately, our policies contradict our aims to be more sustainable and liveable.
    In particular, governments at all levels tend to do a poor job of charging people the full costs of living in rural areas, says Litman. “It costs far more to get services to rural areas. And people who move out there…complain they are not getting their fair share when in fact they are getting more than their fair share.”
    Changing expectations have a lot to do with it. In the past, Litman points out, “people knew that if they moved out to the countryside, they wouldn’t have quick emergency response times, and they’d have to drive their kids to school, and the local school wasn’t going to have as many services. And a lot of the roads would be gravel roads—and you’d accept that.” People now tend to expect urban-type services throughout the region—and complain about it when that doesn’t happen.
    He gives the example of someone commuting from Sooke to a job in the core and expecting the government to spend millions to add capacity so he or she can avoid the Colwood Crawl. “They complain because the roads are congested and the funny thing is they don’t recognize that they are the cause of that congestion.”
     Creating and maintaining more distant roads, sewers, water, community centres, and libraries, providing fire protection, policing, and public transit costs all taxpayers significantly more per rural household than delivering them to core residents. “In practice,” says Litman, “we usually split the difference—providing somewhat inferior services but spending more on them.” In a recent study, Litman enumerated the costs: “sprawl increases annualized infrastructure costs from $502 per capita in the smartest growth quintile cities up to $750 in the most sprawled quintile cities. This analysis indicates that sprawl’s incremental costs average approximately $4556 annually per capita, of which $2568 is internal (borne directly by sprawl location residents) and $1988 is external (borne by other people).”
    Another set of policies that “contradict” the aims of growing in a smart way, and which Litman has done a lot of research around, is parking regulations. While we have no laws requiring a home for every person, we do have laws requiring one for every vehicle—in fact, between two and six spaces per vehicle when you factor in what businesses are forced to provide.
    Typically, parking accounts for about 10 percent of the cost of a house, says Litman, while each parking space in the community costs $500-$1500 per year for surface parking, and twice that in underground or structured lots. “Many cars are worth less that the space they are provided,” he says.
    And it’s worse out in the suburbs. In one of his reports, Litman writes: “In high density urban areas each automobile requires about 80 square metres of land for roads and off-street parking facilities. In lower-density, sprawled areas each automobile requires about 240 square meters of land for roads and parking, which significantly exceeds the amount of land devoted to most urban houses.”
    “Zoning codes, in effect, assume we’re all drivers and this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he tells me. The highest amount of parking per square metre is generally demanded of restaurants and bars. “On the one hand,” says Litman, “we have all these programs to discourage drunk driving…On the other hand, virtually all municipal governments assume that most people who are going to a bar will drive there.” The parking requirements force pub developers to move further out to the fringe where land is less costly—thereby further encouraging car travel.
    “The very thing we want,” Litman laments—“that is, more compact, infill development—becomes economically infeasible due to the parking requirements.”
    Downtown Victoria is the exception. Its commercial buildings aren’t required to provide parking. And this very lack, claims Litman, helps make the Downtown “the most valuable, attractive, walkable...vibrant” area of the region. When I mention the grumbles about parking Downtown, he insists, “People can find parking—they just can’t find free parking.”
    He’s also encouraged that Downtown’s residential developments are averaging only .4 parking spaces per unit (very low by North American standards). By contrast, in suburban areas, he notes, each single-family dwelling is averaging 2 or 3 parking spaces (even multi-family apartments and condos in these areas average 1.5 per unit).
    We need a mind-shift, he says, that it’s not OK to subsidize parking. “If we were rational, we would manage parking space more efficiently, and free it up for affordable housing.”
    Litman feels that another mental shift we need to make is to recognize that the ideal family home is not necessarily a single family house. Families can live well in apartments. It’s only in the past 50 years or so that compact housing types became stigmatized.
    This rings true for me. As a teenager in 1970s Winnipeg, I had friends who lived with their families in big, old, inner-city apartments. I thought it was cool.
    Our new RGS includes “improving housing affordability” as a goal. But municipal development policies tend to deny families affordable housing in urban environments—we force them to “drive until they qualify” and then spend hours and dollars commuting on roads we all have to subsidize, says Litman. The majority of the land available for development is zoned only for single-family housing, he says, adding, “Neighbourhood associations work very hard to exclude compact, affordable housing types, including townhouses and especially apartments.”
    The most cost-effective housing (taking into account land, construction and operating costs), says Litman, tends to be wood-frame, mid-rise multi-family buildings, without elevators. “If we wanted affordable housing for families, we would make it really easy for developers to build these. Instead, zoning codes make it virtually impossible in most neighbourhoods.” We sometimes allow high-rises, which certainly add density but these are more costly per square foot due to concrete use and elevators, so generally cannot provide the larger, affordable suites needed for families. Townhouses, low and mid-rises (up to 6 stories) and garden suites are the best bets in his view. He’s in favour of secondary suites as well, though given the amount of housing needed, they are not going to make a big dent. “We’re talking about a shortage of tens of thousands of housing units. If you already own a home, you are OK. It’s the young people who are just trying to get started—especially families with children that we do a terrible job of welcoming,” says Litman, adding that it’s also difficult for university students, artists, seniors living on a pension, or anyone without a lot of money. “Unfortunately we’re just not adding to the stock.” He says the type of infill development needed has become almost impossible due to the success of the neighbourhood associations that oppose that kind of development.
    He believes the majority of new housing should be in the core, and that all housing should be developed in accordance with smart growth principles—“which means that the vast majority of houses are within walking distance of services and schools and parks and there’s good sidewalks…and good transit services.”
    Like Derman, Litman likes the idea of a more efficient core transit system, whether LRT or more bus lanes. “The big benefit of buses [or LRT] is they can save families from owning a second car,” he says, which not only saves them a lot of money, but saves all those car-related expenses that taxpayers absorb. “Anything we can do to create a community where the typical household doesn’t need two cars…makes it better for everyone in the whole region,” he stresses.
     
    IN SOME WAYS THE NEW REGIONAL GROWTH STRATEGY appears to acknowledge both Derman’s and Litman’s concerns. After noting projected growth of the CRD by 94,900 people to 441,800 in 2038, it states: “It continues to be clear, however, that even modest population growth would undermine the regional vision if it were accommodated as it has been since the 1950s, through further urban expansion into farms, forests and countryside. Further, an expanded regional footprint would significantly contribute to increased greenhouse gas emissions.”
    It’s in the lack of details and specific implementation measures that it fails. At the October public hearing, Vicky Husband, a long-time resident of the Highlands who accepts the limitations of living in a rural setting, characterized the RGS as “weak and unenforceable.” She said, “It must include clearer targets and criteria for CRD board and municipal decisions to realize the vision it describes.”
    Vic Derman agrees, saying it reminds him of New Year’s Resolutions: “I should lose weight; pass the chocolate pie. There’s all these motherhood statements.”
    To transform away from a car-centric region, certainly what’s needed are bold new measures, rather than motherhood statements.
    Yet even the RGS’s population growth projections express a willingness to let growth blossom in the West Shore. Combined with the provision of piped water to the Juan de Fuca district, critics like Husband say the RGS is boldly heading in the wrong direction. As mentioned at the outset, one of the main tools available to control growth is limiting water (and other services) to outlying areas. Appeals to fairness and “water as a human right,” however, have led to “more permissive” water servicing allowances.
    I asked Todd Litman about this “human right” rationale. He said, “That’s actually an insult to anyone who deals with true human rights…what we’re talking about is the difference between having a pipe of water coming into their house or a truck. It’s not like they’re going to be dying of dehydration. They are relying on wells; they moved out there and knew that at some times of the year, their well is insufficient and so they need to get a truck to come in...There are people in the world who really have a shortage of water and for people of Juan de Fuca to claim that that’s a violation of their human rights is really kind of silly.”
    After the 2004 RGS, it was Langford that, by getting its way, ended up taking the region for a rapid and dispersed growth ride. Derman told me some have suggested that because of that “the horse is already out of the barn.” So why not let Juan de Fuca have it’s piped water? Derman put it this way: “So you had 25 horses in the barn. You left the door open and 10 escaped. Does that mean we should let the other 15 escape as well?”
    Leslie Campbell can’t help noticing all the possible sites for infill development in her long walks around Victoria. She welcomes your comments and input on this story and the issues it raises.

    David Broadland
    January 2017
    Justin Trudeau linked approval of Trans Mountain to Alberta’s “100-megatonne cap” on oil sands emissions. Independent analyses suggest that cap has already been exceeded. Further expansion of oil sands exports could give Alberta a stranglehold on Canada's allowable emissions by 2028.
     
    WHEN PRIME MINISTER TRUDEAU announced approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project, he linked that to Alberta’s goal of limiting emissions from oil sands production. “We could not have approved this project without the leadership of Premier Notley, and Alberta’s Climate Leadership Plan—a plan that commits to pricing carbon and capping oil sands emissions at 100 megatonnes per year,” Trudeau told Canadians.
    The prime-ministerial logic here is challenging. Just ten days before, his Environment Minister Catherine McKenna had announced Canada’s emissions goal for 2050 would be 150 megatonnes—for the whole country. To accomplish that would require reducing national emissions by increments of 18 megatonnes every year from now until 2050. Yet Trudeau’s first action following McKenna’s announcement was to approve a project that would allow Canada’s annual emissions to grow by 18 megatonnes.

    Even though they pull in opposite directions—one to higher emissions and the other to lower—Notley’s promise and McKenna’s goal amount to the same thing. They’re both paper-thin promises that can be broken at any time depending on who is governing Alberta and Canada. At the Trans Mountain announcement Trudeau said, “Climate change is real. It is here. And it cannot be wished or voted away.” On his assertion that climate change is real, a majority of British Columbians would probably agree. But both Trudeau and Notley can be voted away, and so can their legislation.
    An expanded pipeline from Alberta to BC’s south coast, on the other hand, will create a permanent increase in risk to both the environment and southwest BC’s economy. Many Vancouverites and Victorians won’t let it happen without a fight—a physical one if it comes down to that.
    But Trudeau’s linking of Trans Mountain with Notley’s pledge of “capping oil sands emissions at 100 megatonnes per year” creates a challenge for the prime minister. Where is the proof that limit hasn’t already been exceeded? If it can be shown that oil sands emissions are already over 100 megatonnes, would he rescind approval of the project? And on whom should the burden of proof fall?
    Trudeau also said that Trans Mountain—by allowing oil sands production bound for export to grow substantially—would be good for Canada, economically. While that assertion might have been true in the economic paradigm in which continuous growth in fossil fuel emissions was assumed to be a sign of economic health, in the new paradigm in which Trudeau and McKenna hope to lead Canada— one where national emissions must shrink by another 18 megatonnes every year—does it make any sense at all?
    Let’s start by examining the fundamental premise behind that “100-megatonne cap,” which is that it hasn’t already been exceeded.
     
    WHERE DID JUSTIFICATION FOR a “100-megatonne” cap come from? Was the concept dreamed up by the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission? Consider why the number “100” might have been chosen. Who wouldn’t celebrate reaching 100? But is there any scientific evidence that supports that cap? None has been offered. Indeed, there are strong indications Alberta’s oil sands projects have long passed that symbolic mark.
    Let’s begin with what Environment Canada claims. In 2014—the most recent year for which it has published figures (“Greenhouse Gas Emissions, April 2016”) describing oil sands-related emissions—they were put at 67.8 megatonnes. A “megatonne” is a million metric tonnes.
     Environment Canada provides only three numbers in its inventory of greenhouse gas emissions to support that figure: one for “Oil sands—upgrading,” another for “Oil sands—in situ” and a third for “Oil sands—mining and extraction.” That’s it. That’s Environment Canada’s entire breakdown of emissions for an industry regularly described as the “fastest-growing source of emissions in Canada.” Again, those three numbers added up to 67.8 megatonnes in 2014.

    The unavailability of information from the federal government around this highly controversial industry is startling. But because of the controversy—the oil sands have an international reputation as being a “dirty” source of energy—several independent analyses have been conducted to determine oil sands emissions intensity.
    By “emissions intensity” we mean the amount of greenhouse gases released for each barrel of bitumen produced. Such analyses include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other GHGs.
    The independent analyses—which have had varying levels of independence from the Alberta government and the oil sands industry—were conducted to compare the emissions intensity of fuels derived from oil sands bitumen with fuels refined from other sources of crude oil. Most of the studies divide the entire life cycle of a fuel into stages and assign an emissions intensity value to each stage. The stages include extraction, upgrading, transportation by pipeline to a refinery, refining, delivery from refineries to distribution terminals, and so on through to combustion.  The emissions that Environment Canada attributes to the oil sands industry in Alberta are limited to those from extraction, upgrading and pipeline transportation. Very little of Alberta’s bitumen is refined in Canada, and refining emissions are inventoried by Environment Canada in a separate category.
    So when Trudeau approved Trans Mountain because Alberta promised to cap “oil sands emissions,” it’s only those first three steps—extraction, upgrading and pipeline transportation—that are included.
    The independent studies have arrived at different values for the overall carbon intensity of those first three steps. Using an average of those values, along with the oil sands production records of Alberta Energy Regulator and the National Energy Board, we can determine a reasonably good estimate of emissions attributable to those first three steps.
    What stands out in doing that arithmetic is that only by using a value for emissions intensity from the very bottom of the range produced by the independent studies could a value of “67.8 megatonnes” be obtained for oil sands emissions in 2014.
    In our effort to confirm Environment Canada’s oil sands emissions, we used the average values for “Canadian Oil Sands” “extraction” and “crude transportation” determined by a 2014 study conducted by the US Congressional Research Service (US CRS). That office describes itself as “providing policy and legal analysis to committees and Members of both the House and Senate, regardless of party affiliation.”
    Its report was a meta analysis of six previous studies that determined emissions from the oil sands. The US CRS determined an average emissions intensity of about 20 grams of carbon-dioxide-equivalent for each megajoule of bitumen produced, including extraction, upgrading and pipeline transportation.
    That works out to 122 kilograms of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions per barrel of bitumen produced. To cover the additional energy required for upgrading, we used a standard 10 kilograms of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions per barrel. When those numbers are applied to the oil sands’ 2015 production volumes recorded by Alberta Energy Regulator, emissions from Alberta’s oil sands operations grow to about 116 megatonnes. That suggests oil sands emissions could already be significantly higher than Notley’s 100 megatonne cap.
    To obtain Environment Canada’s much lower, official level of emissions for the oil sands projects, carbon intensity values about one-half of that determined by US CRS would need to be used (11 grams of carbon dioxide for each megajoule of bitumen produced). A study done by the Jacobs Consultancy in 2012 placed oil sands production emissions in that range. (This study was not included in the US CSR’s analysis.) But that study’s authors noted, “Jacobs Consultancy has not made an analysis, verified, or rendered an independent judgment of the validity of the information provided by others.”
    The Jacobs study was commissioned by the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission. That Alberta government organization’s mandate includes responsibility “for exploring new opportunities for building new markets for oil and gas products within North America and abroad, and improving access to current and new markets for oil sands products…” Do I need to point out that APMC are trying really hard to sell more bitumen?
    An earlier study done by Jacobs for the Alberta Energy Research Institute in 2009 was included in the US CRS study. That study determined values much closer to 20 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent for each megajoule of bitumen produced.
    A 2013 scientific study, “Historical trends in greenhouse gas emissions of the Alberta oil sands, (1970–2010)” by Jacob Englander et al, also provides data that challenges the Alberta/Environment Canada version of emissions. It considered data from each of the oil sands projects and put production emissions intensity at 20 to 22 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent for each megajoule of bitumen produced. It estimated emissions related to extraction, upgrading and pipeline transportation in 2010 were about “70 megatonnes.” Applying the large increase in daily production that has occurred since 2010 to Englander’s estimate, annual emission from the oil sands in 2015 would be approximately 117 megatonnes.
    Additional scientific research published in 2015 by Sonia Yeh et al on the net emissions associated with land-use impacts resulting from oil sands production helps to illustrate the significant undercounting of emissions that is occurring. The authors note: “We found that land use and GHG disturbance of oil sands production, especially in-situ technology that will be the dominant technology of choice for future oil sands development, are greater than previously reported.”
    Based on expected production levels out to 2030, the authors estimated emissions as high as 10 megatonnes per year just from land use impacts. The 2013 Englander study put land-use impact for in-situ production at zero, so even its finding of emissions intensity is likely an undercount of actual emissions (Englander contributed to the Yeh study). Yet Englander’s value for emissions intensity translates to overall oil sands emissions being nearly twice as high as Environment Canada admits.
    The current scientific evidence and level of uncertainty, then, conflict with information created by industry and government marketing organizations. Yet that clash is invisible in Notley’s vaunted Climate Leadership Plan. In the 97-page “Report to Minister” that launched the plan, feel-good aspirations about possible reductions in oil sands emissions intensity abound, but there isn’t a single direct account of current oil sands emissions. There is an indirect reference—in a pie chart—that, if a reader does the arithmetic, suggests emissions might have been 58 megatonnes in 2013. But the avoidance of a rigorous accounting of current oil sands emissions in Notley’s plan is a flashing yellow light: What are current emissions and what does that include?
    Focus requested a detailed inventory of all greenhouse gas emissions from Alberta’s Climate Change Office. The only data it could provide was collected under Alberta’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reporting Program. That information covered only half of Alberta’s acknowledged overall emissions and was limited to “facilities” that emitted 50,000 tonnes or more each year. The most recent report that’s available covers 2013 and doesn’t reflect significant increases in oil sands production since then. It put 2013 emissions at 58 megatonnes, just like the pie chart in Notley’s Climate Leadership Plan.
    Since 2013, Alberta oil sands production has increased by about 629,000 barrels per day. That increase alone, at the US Congressional Research Service’s carbon intensity average of 20 grams of carbon-dioxide-equivalent for each megajoule of bitumen produced, would have added close to 30 megatonnes. Added to Environment Canada’s dubious 2013 account of oil sands emissions, Alberta would now be at 94 megatonnes.

    Let me sow a little more doubt about Environment Canada’s account of emissions. In the same publication as it provides its brief three-number summary of oil sands emissions mentioned earlier, it also summarizes “fugitive emissions” for all of Canada’s oil and gas industry, including the oil sands. Fugitive emissions are the greenhouse gases that escape from tailings ponds, oil sands mine faces, oil and gas valves, pumps and pipelines, and so on.
    Environment Canada claims 30.5 megatonnes of oil- and gas-related fugitive emissions for 2012 (see its Table A.4. above). Yet provincial breakdowns of emissions data from Canada's National Inventory Report of emissions filed with the UN for 2012 show that fugitive emission produced by the oil and gas industry were actually 61 megatonnes. In other words, there’s 30 megatonnes of fugitive emissions from Canada’s oil and gas industry that are missing from Environment Canada’s description of the industry’s emissions. The lion’s share of oil and gas fugitive emissions, by the way, are released by Alberta—35 megatonnes each year.
    That missing 30 megatonnes largely makes up the difference between  the public perception of where oil sands emissions are currently (68 megatonnes) and Notley’s Cap (100 megatonnes).
    When questioned by Focus, Environment Canada was unable to explain why fugitive emissions from the oil and gas industry were not fully counted in its depiction of national oil and gas sector emissions. It noted that the missing emissions were included in Canada’s National Inventory Report as submitted to the UN.
    Trudeau and McKenna know that Canada’s emissions reporting procedures need to be improved and have proposed legislation to accomplish that. Under Stephen Harper’s climate-change-skeptical government, the reporting threshold for an industrial emitter had been 100,000 tonnes per year but was lowered to 50,000 tonnes in 2010. Now Environment Canada is hoping to move that down to 10,000 tonnes.
    But on the day Trudeau approved Trans Mountain, he expressed certainty that the facts and figures were on his side. “This is a decision based on rigorous debate, on science and on evidence,” Trudeau said. “We have not been and will not be swayed by political arguments—be they local, regional or national.”
    Prime Minister Trudeau linked approval of Trans Mountain to oil sands emissions not exceeding 100 megatonnes. But the best analysis that’s been applied to measurement of those emissions suggests it could already be as high as 120 megatonnes. That’s not a political argument. It’s a serious question about the “evidence” Trudeau is using.
     
    NOTLEY'S CAP, the promise to somehow hold oil sands emissions to no more than 100 megatonnes, presumes they’re currently either 58 (Alberta) or 68 (Environment Canada) megatonnes. Through the cap, Alberta is giving itself permission to ramp up oil sands production by about 50 percent above current levels. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers’ 2016 projection to 2030 show oil sands production climbing to around 3.5 million barrels a day by about 2028 and then beginning to accelerate.

    At the same time, the Trudeau government is acting on its commitment to significantly reduce Canadian emissions by imposing an escalating price on carbon for any province that doesn’t follow its lead.
    The contradiction of facilitating oil sands growth while discouraging the use of fossil fuels with a carbon tax or fees is jarring enough. But the bizarre, long-term consequences for the Canadian economy of these two initiatives, if they both play out as hoped for by Trudeau and Notley, seems to have been overlooked.

    As national emissions decline, emissions caused by production of bitumen destined for export will come to dominate Canada’s carbon budget. If Alberta’s fossil-fuel exports have a stranglehold on allowable emissions, its oil and gas industry could choke off economic opportunity in the rest of Canada.
    Oil and gas extraction have high emissions per dollar of economic value that they create. Other industries in the same boat, like electricity and heat utilities, construction, manufacturing, forestry and agriculture, will be required to pay the same level of carbon fees for their activities even though their products—electricity, heat, infrastructure, housing and food—are essential to the well being of Canadians. Are exports of fossil fuels to the US necessary for Canadians to have a good quality of life? Where is the proof of that?
    How soon might the strangling of the Canadian economy begin? For the analysis below, we start with Environment Canada’s numbers.
    Environment Canada reports that, in 2014, 192 megatonnes of emissions were attributable to the oil sands and conventional oil and gas industries. As noted earlier, however, Environment Canada had removed 30 megatonnes of fugitive emissions from that account. If we put them back in, emissions related to Canada’s oil and gas industries were 222 megatonnes. How much of that was attributable to exported fossil fuels?
    That year, according to the National Energy Board, 77.5 percent of crude oil and 47.5 percent of natural gas was exported. If those percentages are applied to the appropriate components of Environment Canada’s 222 megatonnes, emissions related to net exports of natural gas and oil, including bitumen, total 146 megatonnes.
    So, two years ago, using Environment Canada’s suspect numbers, just emissions resulting from production of fossil fuels destined for export were already pushing McKenna’s mid-century goal of 150 megatonnes for Canada’s entire emissions budget.
    If oil sands production continues to grow at the rate projected by Alberta Energy Regulator, then emissions from producing fossil fuels for export will climb at about the same rate. You might ask: Won’t there be improvements in emissions intensity?
    The previously-mentioned study by Englander et al indicates the industry has flat-lined on improvements in emissions intensity since about 2005 and the increase in the extent of in-situ extraction, which is more emissions intensive than surface mining, could cancel out any efficiency gains that might be possible through improvements in technology. In-situ extraction involves injecting steam into the ground deep below the surface and, in effect, melting the bitumen out of the sands that contain it. It’s a process that involves burning a lot of natural gas to heat up water for steam. That form of extraction is expected to account for 60 percent of all bitumen production by 2025.
    By 2035, emissions from production of fossil fuels destined for export could eat up more than 50 percent of all allowable emissions as Canada reduces its national emissions towards McKenna’s goal of 150 megatonnes. By 2045, producing fossil fuels for export could consume all of Canada’s allowable emissions.
    If oil sands emissions have been underestimated to the extent suggested by the US CRS emissions intensity finding and other studies, emissions related to fossil-fuel exports could consume half of Canada’s carbon budget by 2028—and all of it by 2040.
    Not included in this analysis is the potential for a large increase in emissions that would result from an increase in export of natural gas from Alberta, not covered by Notley’s Cap. The province’s vast and largely untapped reservoir of shale gas—estimated by Alberta to be 110 times larger than its conventional gas reserve—could come under intense development pressure if natural gas production in the US begins to falter.
    The inevitable consequence of allowing oil sands production to grow—rather than starting to cut it back now—will be that Canada’s allowable emissions will be dominated by production of low-value bitumen for export, mainly to the US. Canada would never be able to turn off our powerful neighbour’s supply. Our country’s economic role in the world would then be to serve as America’s pump jockey.
    When Trudeau announced approval of Trans Mountain he told his audience: “I have said many times that there isn’t a country in the world that would find billions of barrels of oil and leave it in the ground while there is a market for it.” The prime minister is apparently stuck on that idea and is unable to see that it no longer fits with the more fundamental need to lower carbon emissions and prepare properly for the low-carbon economy that Canada needs to build. Meanwhile, as Alberta’s premier flails about in a sea of low-value hydrocarbons, her promises threaten to pull the rest of Canada under with her. Trudeau has thrown her a life-ring, but to what end?
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Judith Lavoie
    November 2016
    While most citizens oppose the bear trophy hunt, BC’s politicians seem reluctant to offend hunters.
     

     
    IT'S AN INCREASINGLY POPULAR CAUSE that, in BC’s politically sensitive, pre-election months, should have the two major political parties tripping over each other in an effort to adopt it as their own.
    Instead, provincial Liberals are literally sticking to their guns in support of the controversial grizzly bear trophy hunt while the NDP has not yet settled on a position.
    Polls have consistently shown that British Columbians dislike trophy hunting, a blood sport that sees foreign hunters paying upwards of $16,000 for the chance to shoot a grizzly bear for the sake of a head on the wall or a furry rug on the floor.
    An October 2015 Insights West poll found that 91 percent of British Columbians and 84 percent of Albertans oppose hunting animals for sport. The margin of error for BC is plus or minus 3.1 percent.
    But, so far, with the exception of the BC Green Party, those numbers are not enough to spark political support. Instead, a proliferation of diverse non-profit groups are taking up the challenge to protect the grizzly, which has been listed as a species of special concern by the federal Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.
     

     Organizations such as Raincoast Conservation Foundation and Pacific Wild have approached the hunt from a scientific perspective for decades, while the newly-formed Justice for BC Grizzlies is appealing to would-be politicians to look at the ethics of killing for sport. Nine area First Nations, who comprise the Coastal First Nations, want to end the commercial grizzly hunt in their traditional territories and, together with Raincoast, have been buying up hunting tenures in the Great Bear Rainforest to reduce the threat to the bears.
    Another unusual approach is being taken by the fledgling Grizzly Bear Foundation, headed by philanthropist Michael Audain. The Foundation has launched a board of inquiry, holding meetings around the province, looking at threats such as habitat loss, food supply and climate change as well as hunting. The panel will submit a report to government by February.
    For those who are uncertain how to get involved, the University of Victoria’s Environmental Law Centre, on behalf of the David Suzuki Foundation, has prepared a legal toolkit “Facilitating Public Participation in Grizzly Bear Hunt Management in BC.” The toolkit first addresses the question: Why are grizzly bears important? Grizzly bears, it asserts, “are a vital ecological, cultural and economic resource in BC. They are apex predators that interact with other plant and animal species in their habitats and their population health is therefore a key indicator of the overall ecosystem’s health.”
    Lush Fresh Handmade Cosmetics is the latest business organization to become involved and will be launching a campaign this November at its 240 stores around North America. Lush is also producing a 30-minute documentary on the hunt. “I think people will be appalled that, in BC, trophy hunting of grizzly bears is still happening,” said Carleen Pickard, Lush ethical campaigns specialist.
    Meanwhile, Auditor General Carol Bellringer is looking at whether the government is “meeting its objective of ensuring healthy grizzly bear populations throughout BC.” Bellringer’s report is due this spring, but it is not known whether it will be released before the May election.
    While the Liberal government is showing no sign of changing course, the NDP is having internal discussions.
    “A couple of caucus meetings are coming up. Stay tuned…We know this is important and it’s on our radar,” said NDP Environment spokesman George Heyman.
    Back in the dying days of the last NDP government, in 2001, a three-year moratorium was imposed on the grizzly bear hunt. Immediately after the election, however, it was almost immediately rescinded by Gordon Campbell’s Liberals when they swept to power.
    Martyn Brown, Campbell’s chief of staff in 2001, said he believes the moratorium was probably lifted by ministerial order, rather than after any in-depth discussion or cabinet debate, and was likely the result of pressure from rural MLAs, many of whom were ardent pro-hunters.
    “It certainly wasn’t something that was a broad discussion that I can recall,” said Brown, who suspects the issue got lost in the many policy decisions and budget cuts made immediately after the Liberals came to power.
    Brown believes the grizzly hunt should no longer be ignored and he wants to see trophy hunting banned throughout the province, for grizzly bears and all other species.
    “It’s [because of] uncertainty about the management of the population and principally the ethical concerns,” he said. “Precious animals and wildlife are being taken for nothing but a trophy. They are not being taken for food or ceremonial purposes, they are simply for people’s self-aggrandizement and whatever twisted, distorted satisfaction they get from killing an animal,” he said.
    Brown is surprised the NDP are silent as he believes they have little to lose by coming out against the hunt. “If they really thought about it I think they would realize there’s a very small percentage of seats that might be at risk, if any,” he said. “The risks are so minimal and the rewards would be so much greater if they would just stand up and say and do the right thing and say this is a barbaric, out-dated hunt that needs to be stopped,” Brown said.
    Premier Christy Clark would also have little to lose by restoring the moratorium, Brown said. “But I don’t think the BC Liberals are even slightly interested in revisiting their position because of the likes of [Energy and Mines Minister] Bill Bennett particularly and others from rural BC who are defenders of the trophy hunt ostensibly for its economic value and its importance to rural lifestyle,” he said.
     

    Another factor is that the Guide Outfitters Association of BC (GOABC) is a generous contributor to the Liberals, with records showing that between 2011 and May 2015 GOABC contributed almost $37,000 to the Liberals compared to $6,000 to the NDP.
    The government position is that there is no need to halt the hunt as the grizzly population is healthy, with an estimated 15,000 bears, and the hunt puts money into the economy.
    “A Scientific Review of Grizzly Bear Harvest Management System,” commissioned by the Province and written by three biologists, concluded that, despite difficulties in monitoring and a lack of sufficient funds, BC’s procedures “have attained a high level of rigor, with a solid scientific underpinning.”
    The review, released October 18, recommended that there should be more opportunities for public consultation, increased cooperation with adjacent jurisdictions, and that BC should investigate whether conflicts exist between bear hunting and viewing.
    The Province should regularly be looking at elements such as habitat conditions and food availability and should provide additional funding, according to the review. “The future of grizzly bears in the coming decades will be challenged as the human population in the province increases. Rigorous planning, habitat monitoring, conservative harvest levels and a predictable level of research, monitoring and data research is essential for the continued conservation of this species,” says the report.
    Steve Thomson, Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations Minister, said the recommendations “will further improve grizzly bear management decisions in BC.”
    The notion that the province makes its decisions based on the best available science is challenged by critics who question both the Province’s population estimates and the economics of the hunt.
    Estimates of the number of bears in BC’s 57 individual grizzly bear population units usually rely on models, using known population densities from other areas, or the number of bears expected to survive in that particular habitat.
    The methods inevitably lead to uncertainty and some researchers believe numbers could be as low as 6,000, with kills much higher than the approximately 300 grizzlies killed by licenced trophy hunters each year that the Province reports. In addition to such hunting, a toll is taken by poaching, road kills, destruction of “nuisance” bears, and loss of habitat.
    A study by Raincoast, Simon Fraser University, the University of Victoria and Hakai Institute found kill limits are regularly exceeded and several sub-populations of grizzlies are on the verge of disappearing.


    On the financial front, research shows that bear viewing is far more profitable than bear hunting. A study by the Center for Responsible Travel, in conjunction with Stanford University, found that, in 2012, bear viewing groups in the Great Bear Rainforest generated “more than 12 times more in visitor spending than bear hunting.”
    The same researchers found that bear watching sent $7.3-million to government coffers, compared to $660,500 from hunters, and created 510 jobs, compared to 11 jobs created by guide outfitters.
    Retired university professor Craig Smith said such facts make the government’s stance completely inexplicable; bear viewing and hunting industries cannot co-exist. Smith recently threw his support behind Justice for BC Grizzlies. “Every bear you shoot is one you can’t view, so they’re killing the viewing industry,” he said.
    The Province maintains that BC has 100,000 resident hunters—and that hunters and guide outfitters combined put $350 million into the economy each year, a figure involving multipliers questioned by critics—and likely far lower than any comparable number for wildlife viewing. (Minister Thomson admitted in a 2014 legislative committee examining budget estimates that direct revenues from the grizzly trophy hunt amounted to $414,000.)
     Most hunters are not trophy hunters, of course. “I am a hunter, but I have never shot a bear,” said David Lawrie, a retired Provincial forests engineer and member of Justice for BC Grizzlies.
    Even the pro-hunting BC Wildlife Federation, with 50,000 members, is against trophy hunting. The Federation supported a bill, introduced last year by Green Party of BC leader Andrew Weaver, requiring all hunters to pack out edible meat from grizzlies and all other animals—which, in a round-about way, would ensure few grizzlies were hunted. “I suspect many a trophy hunter would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pack out several hundred pounds of trichinosis-laden grizzly bear meat across international borders,” he has written.
    Weaver’s bill died when the session ended and he has since clarified that he is against trophy hunting—making him one of the few MLAs clearly opposing the hunt. Trophy hunting is a “cruel, selfish and barbaric practice that is packaged and sold as sport,” he wrote, explaining that his bill—which was not supported by the guide outfitting industry—aimed to protect the rights of First Nations and resident hunters.
     Alan Martin, BC Wildlife Federation director of strategic initiatives, would like to see a similar bill reintroduced. “The BCWF only supports hunts that are sustainable and, when the animals are harvested, that the edible parts are taken out. If they don’t do that then it’s not appropriate to hunt grizzly bears or any other animal,” Martin said. “If you are going to utilize fish or wildlife then it should be consumed appropriately and not done just for sport,” he said.
    Martin also feels there needs to be more work in areas where there is uncertainty about populations and a close look at the effect of non-hunting mortality and changes in habitat, such as in the aftermath of the mountain pine beetle infestation. “If you don’t vary the harvest rates and manage accordingly, it will catch up to you as it has done in the south-east part of our province,” he said.
    Although grizzly bear meat is often thought to be inedible, as it sometimes carries the parasite that causes trichinosis, BCWF spokesman Jesse Zeman finds it tasty and healthy. The meat has to be cooked to a high temperature, which is why it is best in sausage, pepperoni or burgers, said Zeman, who lives almost entirely off wild fish and game.
    However, Zeman admitted, there are questions that need to be answered about the sustainability of the grizzly bear population. “That’s the big concern. That’s what keeps people up at night now,” he said.
    Chris Genovali, Raincoast executive director, however, is not in favour of Weaver’s type of pack-the-meat-out bill, calling it “daft.” “It is simply an endorsement of killing grizzly bears as long as we turn them into sausage or soufflé,” he said. “That’s nothing but a way to hoodwink the public into believing the trophy hunt is a food hunt…That would be worse than doing nothing,” he said.
    Genovali feels that the growing proliferation of organizations opposing the hunt, including business and tourism groups, shows that it is an issue that resonates with the public and crosses political lines. He finds it disheartening that, towards May 2017’s provincial election, neither the Liberals nor NDP are opposing the hunt. Unless political parties, or individual candidates, come out strongly and loudly against the hunt, there will be limited opportunities for voters to get their views on the subject across on election day.
    Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith.

    David Broadland
    November 2016
    The choice of the controversial site over Rock Bay will lead to hundreds of millions in costs that could have been avoided.
     
    UNPUBLICIZED WARNINGS from the engineering company Stantec to the Seaterra Commission in 2013 show there’s a big difference between what the public has been told and what CRD bureaucrats and their corporate proxies know about a wastewater treatment plant at McLoughlin Point. Simply put, a plant squeezed onto the tiny McLoughlin site is going to present regional taxpayers and the environment with big problems. Soon.
    Within a few years of the plant’s commissioning, costly new treatment capacity will have to be built elsewhere to avoid the expense and environmental impacts resulting from the heavy use of chemicals that will be needed to keep the plant operating to federal regulation standards. Senior CRD bureaucrats aware of these circumstances failed to disclose to the public McLoughlin’s serious limitations during a 2-year-long reconsideration of the site’s suitability.
    As a result of these circumstances, and the CRD’s recent move to start planning for a second wastewater facility in Colwood, Victoria taxpayers will likely be facing a bill for three widely separated treatment plants at an additional cost of hundreds of millions of dollars above what it would have cost to construct a single expandable plant at the relatively spacious Rock Bay site.
     

    Above: The relative sizes of the McLoughlin Point site (left) and the Rock Bay site. Rock Bay is 2.7 times larger than McLoughlin. Stantec told the CRD in 2013 that Victoria’s sewage treatment needs could exceed the capacity of a plant at McLoughlin by 2018. CRD staff failed to inform the public of that limitation.
     

    A 35,000 kilogram/day treatment plant located at McLoughlin Point (left) and Rock Bay (right). The McLoughlin plant couldn’t be expanded to meet future population growth. The Rock Bay site has abundant room for expansion (red areas). Thus a treatment plant at McLoughlin will result in a much costlier system of decentralized plants, a situation CRD elected officials have said should be avoided.
     
    Below I will describe a number of issues that arise from the diminutive physical size of the McLoughlin Point property, which a peer review had warned the CRD in 2009 was “extremely small” for a sewage treatment plant. It would appear that issues vital to the public’s understanding of this project have been deliberately hidden from both elected officials and the public. At the end of this article I will examine the question of whether the withholding of this information may have created an avenue for a court challenge of the project.
     Let’s start here: In September 2013, Stantec engineers responded to what they called “pointed questions” about the capacity of a proposed wastewater treatment plant at McLoughlin Point to handle expected liquid flows and organic loads.
    The engineers’ written response to these questions, submitted by the Seaterra Commission then overseeing the project, included the distinct possibility that the plant’s design capacity could be exceeded by the time the plant was expected to become operational in 2018. But, if that happened, the engineers told the commission, “CEP operation would most likely be implemented to maintain adequate capacity until 2040.”
    Focus was given a tip that led to the Stantec memo. A search of CRD records indicates Stantec’s September 2013 warning was never shared by CRD staff with elected officials in a public meeting.
    By “CEP operation” the engineers meant “chemically-enhanced primary treatment,” (CEPT) a costly and increasingly contentious add-on to primary treatment that is sometimes employed to reduce the level of phosphorous and/or nitrogen being discharged to waters that are particularly sensitive to eutrophication, such as lakes. During CEPT operation, three different chemicals are injected into the influent as it flows through a wastewater plant, increasing the rate at which solids are removed.
    But those chemicals end up in the sludge produced by sewage treatment and create a big problem: The sludge can’t be incinerated, used as fertilizer, or recycled in any useful way. UBC engineering professor  Dr Don Mavinic, an expert on sewage treatment, told Focus in 2014: “This is a huge problem in Ontario right now. It’s become very contentious. Very few landfills will accept the sludge now. Most incinerators won’t touch it. Ontario has ended up with this chemical soup that has to be stored somewhere because you can’t do anything with it.”
    In Victoria’s case, DFO scientists have determined that eutrophication isn’t a concern. But CEPT is also used in plants that have reached the upper limit of their design capacity. The aging Lions Gate treatment plant in North Vancouver—slated for replacement by 2020—began using CEPT in 2014 as it bumped up against its capacity limit. That a new plant at McLoughlin Point would need to implement CEPT soon after it had been constructed in order “to maintain adequate capacity,” as Stantec acknowledged in 2013, is extraordinary.
    In the recent 18-month-long consideration of optional sites, McLoughlin wasn’t on the table. As a result, questions about the site’s suitability lay dormant and Victorians were never informed that the excess capacity of a treatment plant there could be used up as early as 2018.
     Prompted by a letter to CRD directors from this reporter, the issue of McLoughlin Point’s limited capacity was raised at a CRD Board meeting on September 14. At that meeting, elected officials voted to proceed with the McLoughlin treatment plant. But before that vote, CRD directors were given an opportunity to question members of a “Project Board.” The Project Board’s Chair, Jane Bird, and Vice Chair Don Fairbairn—both Vancouver residents who have no previous experience directly related to sewage treatment—took questions about the Project Board’s choice of McLoughlin Point over other options.
    CRD Director Colin Plant asked whether the McLoughlin plant would have sufficient excess capacity. Fairbairn told Plant, “We have the highest level of confidence that under a low, medium, high population growth scenario, this plant will have adequate capacity for a minimum of 20 years…It can be very difficult for a non-technical person, such as myself, to understand. That’s why we do have to rely upon the expert opinions of firms like Stantec, as well as on the years of expertise with your staff.”
    Fairbairn’s response ignored the advice Stantec had given the Seaterra Commission in 2013. Its expert opinion then was: “At an increased growth rate of 2.1 percent, the plant capacity is reached much sooner by the year 2018…To cope with the high growth rate scenario, CEP operation would most likely be implemented to maintain adequate capacity until 2040.” Now Fairbairn was claiming Stantec’s expert opinion was that, under any population growth scenario, capacity would last “for a minimum of 20 years.”
    For clarity, the organic loading capacity of the plant referred to by Stantec in 2013—35,000 kilograms per day—was exactly the same as the plant Fairbairn was referring to. Various documents authored by Stantec and other consultants show the critical limiting design factor for a McLoughlin plant is organic loading—referred to by wastewater engineers as biochemical oxygen demand—not hydraulic flow. Stantec’s 2013 projection that peak organic loading in Victoria’s sewers could reach McLoughlin’s limited design capacity by 2018 was based on a population growth projection of 2.1 percent per year. At a growth rate of half that (lower than the CRD is currently using for its projections), Stantec’s arithmetic shows the McLoughlin plant could run out of capacity by 2023. That date is within a few years of the CRD’s hoped-for completion date of 2020.
    Bird and Fairbairn did not respond to requests from Focus for information. The CRD refused to answer questions related to McLoughlin’s capacity limitations.
     CRD directors have been told that CEPT would be employed during significant “wet weather events,” but they have never been told—in public—that its regular use could be needed as early as 2018 as a result of the plant’s capacity being exceeded.
    Yet Mavinic’s 2014 concern that CEPT chemicals create sludge that “you can’t do anything with” seems to have been incorporated in the Project Board’s two recommended options for dealing with McLoughlin’s sludge. Both options included perpetual storage of the sludge in “biocell reactors,” which would be, essentially, permanent hills of toxic poop composting beside Willis Point Road, waiting for someone to figure out what to do with them.
    Residents in the area worried about the impact of the piles on air and groundwater quality will have to hope that a safe way to dispose of the sludge will be found one day. The Project Board only suggested they could be “mined” for a “beneficial use” once such a use had been discovered.
    The evidence indicates, then, that three vitally important pieces of information about a plant at McLoughlin Point were hidden by CRD staff from both elected officials and the public while the community evaluated other site locations: Its very limited excess capacity; the consequent need for ongoing use of CEPT soon after it is completed; and how CEPT limits what can be done with the sludge produced by the plant. Obscuring of these facts continues.
     
    THERE ARE TWO OTHER CONCERNS arising from McLoughlin’s limited capacity that have also been kept out of view by the CRD: First, how McLoughlin’s small size limited what treatment technology could be used there; and second, the huge additional cost that will result from the need to provide additional capacity using a system of decentralized treatment plants. Let’s look at the former first.
    The same 2009 peer review that judged McLoughlin to be “extremely small” questioned the CRD’s initial choice of membrane bioreactor (MBR) technology for secondary treatment and suggested the CRD assess biological aerated filter (BAF) technology as well. That’s the secondary treatment process the CRD eventually chose and, in 2013, the Seaterra Commission, in its “pointed questions” start-up phase, asked for an explanation of that choice.
    Stantec engineer Dr Bob Dawson’s reply to the Seaterra Commission described the physical process involved in a BAF plant, and he made a number of observations. Dawson wrote, “BAFs are relatively recent proprietary systems developed in Europe over the last 15 to 20 years and have been gradually introduced into North America over the last 10 years—a similar development timeline as membrane processes.”
    But if the technology was so new—Wikipedia calls it an “emerging technology”—then why would the CRD risk using it in Victoria?  That’s covered by a second observation made by Dawson: “[BAF] is particularly applicable for locations where there is limited space for construction of a plant…” In other words, McLoughlin Point’s tiny size dictated the use of a highly compact form of treatment for which there was a very short track record.
    So what is the experience with BAF in Europe, where it has been used for five or ten years longer than in North America? Here’s what AECOM engineers who were making a comparison of wastewater treatment technology options for Jersey, one of the Channel Islands, in 2014, said about BAF: “Biological Aerated Filters are not recommended for consideration due to the associated high capital and operational costs. Generally, BAF technology produces effluents with very low suspended solid concentrations. However, after backwash cycles, this can deteriorate resulting in poorer quality effluent, which will reduce the effectiveness of the UV disinfection plant.”
    AECOM, by the way, is the global wastewater engineering company that’s one of three partners in Harbour Resource Partners. That’s the consortium that won the contract to build a BAF plant at McLoughlin Point in 2014, a contract recently resurrected by the Project Board.
    So, because of McLoughlin Point’s tiny size, Victoria is getting an apparently problematic treatment technology that, compared to more proven technologies, has higher capital and operating costs.
     Stantec’s explanation of BAF technology to the Seaterra Commission included information about the filter bed media utilized by the process. Stantec’s memo contained a photograph of expanded polystyrene beads, the filter media used, for example, in one of the few other BAF plants in Canada at Kingston’s Ravensview treatment plant. Polystyrene beads are a soft, friable plastic and since the polystyrene filter bed would be eroded over time by the effluent passing through it—especially if it contains fine, gritty precipitate introduced by CEPT—one can easily imagine a BAF plant being a perpetual source of microplastics flowing into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. When asked by Focus what filter-bed medium would be used at McLoughlin, Stantec replied, “The filter media for the BAF has not been selected yet as design is not complete.” The contract, however, has been awarded and the CRD would have no real control over what filter bed media is used.
    A search of CRD records indicates Stantec’s August 2013 explanation of BAF technology to the Seaterra Commission was never shared by CRD staff with elected officials at an open, public meeting.
     
    NOW LET’S LOOK AT how McLoughlin’s small size will lead to a system of decentralized treatment plants and huge additional costs. Stantec’s 2013 warning to the Seaterra Commission about the site’s limited capacity to accommodate future population growth in the region offered a mitigating strategy—the ongoing use of CEPT. But there’s another solution that would avoid the use of CEPT—building a second treatment plant at a different location. That strategy is actually incorporated in the CRD’s current Liquid Waste Management Plan. CRD staff have said, in several reports, that a second plant should be built in the West Shore because that’s “where most of the growth is occurring.” I’ll show later that this prognostication is demonstrably incorrect, but first consider how the strategy of building a second plant at a different location completely contradicts what the CRD has been saying all along about economy of scale.
    If a second plant location could be avoided, wouldn’t taxpayers stand to save many millions—perhaps hundreds of millions—of dollars on capital, operating and borrowing costs? That had always been the position of CRD staff and pro-McLoughlin politicians when they were dismissing the idea of distributed treatment plants as being uneconomical compared to a single plant at McLoughlin. Indeed, the Project Board’s final report states that splitting McLoughlin’s capacity between two plants would increase the capital cost by $245 million. So, by the Project Board’s own reckoning, decentralization would have increased capital costs by 32 percent. That, in turn, would result in higher borrowing costs. Presumably, operating costs would be higher as well.
    Paradoxically, then, although the Project Board’s report confirms there is a very high cost that comes with a decentralized system, its choice of McLoughlin Point guarantees that Victoria will get a decentralized system—and the higher costs.
     Once McLoughlin’s capacity has been reached, what would an additional plant cost? The Urban Systems-Carollo options analyses, done earlier this year as part of the 18-month-long consideration of optional sites, estimated that by 2030 an additional $250 to $310 million would need to be spent for additional capacity. That estimate didn’t include additional conveyancing costs, which would likely add another $100 million. So with McLoughlin Point as the first step in a decentralized system, the experts are predicting additional costs of $350 to $410 million by 2030.
    It’s noteworthy that an outlook to 2030, as was included in the Urban Systems-Carollo analyses, doesn’t appear anywhere in the Project Board’s final report, and isn’t reflected in its estimates of cost per household.
    What’s readily apparent from the engineers’ estimates of the high cost of decentralization and the high cost of additional capacity is that a single expandable treatment plant could save the community hundreds of millions of dollars in capital costs compared to two widely-separated treatment plants located at McLoughlin Point and in Colwood or Langford. To save those hundreds of millions, though, a site larger than McLoughlin Point would have needed to be available.
    As we know, such a site is available—at Rock Bay. Yet the Project Board’s comparison of McLoughlin with Rock Bay gave not one iota of value to Rock Bay’s ability to accommodate expansion far into the future. This, too, is extraordinary.
    The Rock Bay site is 2.7 times larger than McLoughlin. Stantec’s rudimentary positioning of a treatment plant at Rock Bay for the Project Board’s report shows just how much of the Rock Bay site was left unused. That room for expansion would have completely eliminated the costly and environmentally-problematic reliance on CEPT “to maintain adequate capacity.” That advantage, too, was given zero value by the Project Board.
    It’s also possible that Rock Bay is large enough to accommodate a form of treatment that has lower capital and operating costs than BAF. The Project Board’s comparison of McLoughlin Point with Rock Bay used essentially the same BAF plant on both locations. That must have made for an easy comparison of cost (they should be close to equal), but did Stantec consider a technology with lower capital and operating costs for the much larger site at Rock Bay? It claims, without providing any evidence, that Rock Bay wasn’t large enough to accommodate conventional activated sludge technology. But the new Lions Gate plant in North Vancouver will be sited on a smaller parcel of land than Rock Bay, will be able to process a greater liquid load than the McLoughlin plant, has enough room for on-site anaerobic digesters—and uses lower-cost activated sludge treatment. It’s expected to be expandable to meet the needs of the North Shore well past 2100.
    While Fairbairn advised Plant to rely on “the expert opinions of firms like Stantec,” the expert opinions of Stantec have had a habit of selectively disappearing into the bowels of the CRD. Is there a memo somewhere in those depths explaining why Stantec never looked very hard at options other than a BAF plant at McLoughlin Point?
     
    LET'S BACK UP TO CONSIDER THE CRD'S PLAN to build a second treatment plant in either Colwood or Langford. If you think this is unlikely, or not particularly imminent, consider this: When CRD directors voted to go ahead with a treatment plant at McLoughlin Point, they also committed to spend $2 million on initial planning for a second treatment plant in Colwood. Why would the Project Board have made this recommendation if, as Fairbairn put it, “under a low, medium, high population growth scenario, [McLoughlin] will have adequate capacity for a minimum of 20 years…”?
    The Project Board, CRD staff and Stantec know that building a plant at McLoughlin Point with limited capacity for future growth means the development of a plan for a second plant needs to start immediately, and that’s what the CRD is doing. The extra business is obviously good for Stantec, but why would the CRD prefer that course instead of choosing Rock Bay, where hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars could be saved by avoiding a decentralized system?
    The Project Board claimed a plant at Rock Bay would cost $155 million more than one at McLoughlin. Much of that difference is in the higher cost of land at Rock Bay. The Project Board said the cost difference was “material,” meaning significant, but it didn’t give any material value to the highly valuable room for expansion at Rock Bay. No, the relatively small difference in capital cost doesn’t explain the Project Board’s choice of McLoughlin over Rock Bay.
    If Rock Bay had won out over McLoughlin, that could have been construed as a professional and political defeat for all those CRD staff and elected officials who have insisted that the $80 million spent on planning and 10 years of talking had correctly identified McLoughlin as the best location. With careers in the balance, McLoughlin was the emotional favourite.
    Other than that, though, there doesn’t appear to be any real justification for the choice. In fact, when the question of why the CRD would choose to put a second plant in Colwood is examined carefully, it becomes clear that a third plant—likely located in Victoria—will be needed in about 20 years.
    Even though Colwood and Langford contribute little more than seven percent of the current wastewater load, the CRD plans to put a second plant there anyway. Why? The CRD’s rationale is based on an out-of-date belief that “most of the growth is occurring” there. But over the last six years this belief has proven to be a delusion. The CRD’s own figures show that the increase in the number of people living in the “Core” municipalities has been almost twice that of Langford and Colwood combined.
    Moreover, when all sewage-generating development is considered—residential, commercial, institutional and industrial—the wrong-headedness of the CRD’s strategy is even more evident. Over the past 6 years, based on the value of building permits issued in each municipality, the core has seen 2.5 times as much growth in long-term wastewater-producing development as Langford and Colwood. The vast majority of that growth is occurring in Victoria and Saanich. Witness the numerous construction cranes in the Downtown core right now. There is nothing like this happening in Langford and Colwood.
    This recent reversal in the focus and form of development, from the suburbs to urban cores, from low density to high density, is taking place elsewhere in North America, including in cities like Vancouver and Toronto. Inevitable changes in public policy around  energy, housing and transportation in response to the threat of climate change and ocean acidification will accelerate this phenomenon.
    As a result of the CRD’s miscalculation of where most growth will occur, putting a limited-capacity plant at McLoughlin and planning for a second plant in the West Shore will put taxpayers in jeopardy of having to pay for three plants. There’s two reasons for that.
    First, a second plant on the West Shore won’t be able to serve future growth in Saanich and Victoria without a hugely-expensive reconstruction of the sewer trunks. That’s never going to happen.
    Secondly, after a plant is built in Colwood or Langford, the small portion (about seven percent) of McLoughlin’s capacity that would be freed up would soon be gobbled up by growth in Victoria and Saanich. So, 20 years from now, Victorians will be looking for a third treatment site—one that will have to be located in either Victoria or Saanich, where most of the region’s growth is occurring. Where will it go? Clover Point is a likely candidate.
    If the cost of decentralization—going from one to two plants—is about 30 percent of the project cost, as the Project Board’s numbers indicate, what would be the additional cost of building three plants instead of one? Forty percent? Fifty percent?
    A far more logical, less expensive alternative would have been to put one central plant at Rock Bay—followed by incremental expansion of capacity there as required. The remediated contaminated site at Rock Bay was identified during extensive public consultation as the location for treatment most preferred by the public. Its First Nations owners were eager to sell. The site is already surrounded by industrial operations that provide essential building materials for constructing a city—gravel, concrete, asphalt and beer—businesses that are unlikely to go away in the future. The location was also supported by the mayors of Victoria and Esquimalt.
    In spite of all those strong positives, the previously rejected McLoughlin site magically became the recommended option—even though it wasn’t even part of the recent 18-month-long consideration of options. But wait…by not being on the table, the CRD avoided examination of any of McLoughlin’s strong negatives (see above).
     
    THE CRD HAS HIDDEN FROM THE PUBLIC many significant aspects of this project: McLoughlin’s limited capacity, the need for the use of CEPT, the way in which CEPT would restrict what could be done with the sewage sludge, the known problems with BAF technology, the need for—and cost of—additional capacity, including the certainty of a second plant and the likelihood of a third plant. Yet the provincial Environmental Management Act allows the CRD to proceed with its flawed plan without the need for elector consent through a referendum. In ordinary circumstances, such issues as I’ve outlined here would have been hashed out in public by opposing sides in a referendum.
    A citizen’s right to be asked by a municipal government for permission to borrow large sums of money to provide that citizen a service is a basic right in Canada. The Environmental Management Act takes that right away in the case of implementing a Liquid Waste Management Plan. But the Province’s published guidelines promise that electors will be “adequately” consulted. Given the circumstances I’ve described above, there is grave doubt that consultation has been adequate.
    With the failure of Victoria’s political representatives to address these issues— they, too, have been kept largely in the dark—do Victoria electors have any avenue through the courts?
    I outlined these issues to Victoria lawyer John Alexander, a litigation partner with the law firm Cox Taylor. I noted the EMA’s promise of adequate consultation and asked Alexander if there was any avenue for a judicial review of the Province’s expected approval of the CRD’s McLoughlin-based Liquid Waste Management Plan (LWMP).
    Alexander replied, “From a legal perspective, the question would be stated: Does the Province’s published non-statutory consultation requirement create a legitimate expectation that an Order imposing a LWMP would not be made without consultation?”
    Alexander pointed to a 1990 Supreme Court of Canada ruling which states, in part, “[the doctrine of legitimate expectations] is simply an extension of the rules of natural justice and procedural fairness. It affords a party affected by the decision of the public official an opportunity to make representations in circumstances in which there otherwise would be no such opportunity. The court supplies the omission where, based on the conduct of the public official, a party has been led to believe that his or her rights would not be affected without consultation.”
    “In other words,” Alexander wrote, “the court sets aside the decision on the basis that [it was] as if some required procedural step was not properly taken.”
    Focus readers interested in supporting a legal challenge of the Province’s approval of the CRD’s plan for McLoughlin Point can express that support by contacting us at 250-388-7231, email at focuspublish@shaw.ca, or by using the "Contact Us" form on this website. If a legal challenge is organized by Victoria electors, Focus will connect you with the organizers of that challenge.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

    Rob Wipond
    November 2016
    Some people say that our province’s strong mental health laws save lives. A constitutional court challenge says they lead to discrimination, abuse, fear and the flight of psychiatric refugees.
     
    THE PSYCHIATRIC NURSE held out a paper cup with pills. Sarah clasped a handwritten note. Having learned not to protest loudly, the 24-year-old gave the nurse her note that read, “I have a right to my mind and my body.” Then, she reluctantly put the pills in her mouth.
     Sarah knew that she had to execute her escape out of British Columbia quickly, before the drugs seized control of her mind again.
     Sarah (she requested her name be withheld) is sharing her story to show support for a constitutional court challenge recently launched by Community Legal Assistance Society (CLAS). The Vancouver non-profit is arguing that a key part of British Columbia’s Mental Health Act, called “deemed consent,” violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
     “At CLAS, we’re routinely told that people are either considering leaving BC to avoid our deemed consent laws, or that they’ve done so in the past,” says Laura Johnston, one of the lawyers representing three plaintiffs in the case.
    CLAS has many concerns about BC’s Mental Health Act, explains Johnston. However, this case is focused on how the “deemed consent” provision violates rights to security of the person and equality before the law. “This case isn’t arguing that forced treatment can never be constitutional,” says Johnston, “But it does say that forced treatment which is imposed unilaterally by a doctor with no checks or balances and no recourse to anybody else is unconstitutional.”
    Every Canadian has the right to allow or refuse medical treatments, even if our choice could cause injury or death—such as choosing whether to undergo risky surgery. We can write advance directives about what we will and won’t accept if we lapse into a coma or otherwise become mentally incompetent, and appoint a “substitute” to make decisions for us. However, in BC, the moment we become an involuntary psychiatric patient, those rights are eviscerated. Mentally competent or not, and regardless of what’s in our advance directive or what our substitute says, we are “deemed” to consent to any treatments a psychiatrist recommends.
    “I was shocked when I came across these sections of [BC’s] Mental Health Act. I thought I was misunderstanding things,” says Melanie Benard, a lawyer with the Council of Canadians with Disabilities (CCD) which is one of the plaintiffs in the case. “There’s a blatant violation of the equality and liberty rights of people with disabilities,” she says.
     

    Left to right: Melanie Benard, Irit Shimrat, Francesca Simpson
     
    Benard says psychiatric patients’ rights were clarified in constitutional law 25 years ago and implemented in every province—except BC. For example, in other provinces, after being involuntarily committed, a person still cannot be involuntarily treated until a competency test is conducted. “You look at things like, does the patient understand their diagnosis? Do they understand the treatment that’s proposed, the risks and benefits of undergoing the treatment?” says Benard.
    “It’s really discriminatory to assume that everyone with a mental health problem is mentally incapable of making their own treatment decisions,” says Johnston. She says it’s also important to understand how “wide-sweeping” involuntary treatment has become. “A lot of people believe that you have to be a danger to yourself or others to be involuntary, and that’s just not true.” In BC, anyone can be committed if a physician believes that the person has a mental disorder and that committal could provide “protection” or prevent the person’s “mental or physical deterioration.”
     “It gives a lot of discretion to the doctor,” comments Johnston.
    According to government statistics, BC psychiatrists have been involuntarily committing people at unprecedented rates: 13,641 people last year—a doubling since 2002, or 73 percent increase per 100,000 people.
    Though statistics weren’t available, it’s widely believed that the use of “Extended Leave” has increased even more dramatically. This occurs when someone is considered well enough to be released from hospital and live at home, but is still being forcibly treated. And there seem to be more people like Sarah who voluntarily seek help, only to get committed if they disagree with recommended treatments.
    Jonny Morris, the Canadian Mental Health Association’s (CMHA) provincial policy director, says involuntary treatment has been “a long-standing issue” of polarized contention among patients, family members, service providers and community groups. Morris hopes that this constitutional challenge will “raise public awareness about an often hidden part of the system” and promote “respectful” dialogue about how things could be managed differently.
     The initial court submission from Community Legal Assistance Society provides a glimpse into this hidden world.
     
    The dangers of psychiatric treatments
     Plaintiff Louise MacLaren is a 66-year-old retired nurse from Victoria. She’s been frequently treated against her will in hospital and at home over the decades. According to the submission, MacLaren experiences “extreme anxiety” when forced to undergo electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which causes her “confusion and disorientation” for weeks afterwards, and permanent memory losses. While a typical ECT treatment involves 12 rounds of shocks over three weeks, MacLaren has received 300 rounds. “In 2010, staff administering ECT forgot to place a mouth guard in Ms. MacLaren’s mouth during the treatment,” says the submission. “Ms. MacLaren shattered her teeth due to the convulsions in her jaw[.]”
    The other plaintiff is a 24-year-old Vancouver man with a Master’s degree in music and piano. Since 2015, he’s been forced to take antipsychotic medications at home that cause “involuntary movements, muscle stiffness, muscle pain, and loss of dexterity, all of which impede his ability to play the piano.” These side effects, the submission states, cause him deep suffering “because playing piano is such a fundamental aspect of his life.”
     Apart from Council of Canadians with Disabilities, the plaintiffs aren’t speaking to media. Other people, though, paint an equally grim picture of involuntary treatment.
    After what she calls a “bad event” in her life, Sarah went to a Lower Mainland psychiatric hospital seeking help. She asked for a sleep medication, but didn’t want anything more. “I wanted to be able to manage what was going on for me, especially relating to the emotions that I was feeling, and the negative feelings, without medication…That was very important to me.”
    However, she was also given an antipsychotic. “It was an ugly, ugly feeling,” says Sarah, describing how the antipsychotic dulled her thinking and emotions. “If a family member came to visit me, I wouldn’t feel that happiness that they were there. Which was terrifying.”
    Sarah asked to stop the antipsychotic. Instead she was made an involuntary patient and told that if she didn’t take it, then security would inject her. So she continued to take the drug orally, which was almost equally repugnant to her. “The fact that I had to do this to myself…It’s you actually taking the pill and putting it in your mouth.”
    For many, involuntary treatment is often violent.
     Irit Shimrat is the Vancouver-based author of Call Me Crazy: Stories from the Mad Movement, and editor of a magazine published by the recently shuttered West Coast Mental Health Network—BC’s only charitable non-profit service organization run by and for people who’ve experienced psychiatric treatment. (WCMHN had its $100,000 in annual funding axed by the BC government without explanation, while hundreds of millions in new funding has gone to conventional services run by mental health professionals.) Shimrat has twice gone for over a decade without any psychiatric involvement, but in between those periods has been forcibly treated over a dozen times. The last time that she “went crazy,” says Shimrat, was after both her closest friend and her mother died. “I was shattered emotionally, and I was behaving in ways that were very disturbing to my neighbours.” When in acute distress, Shimrat’s been apprehended after throwing her belongings out the window, and after running around naked yelling “Emergency!”
    Shimrat says many people like her experiencing intense mental turmoil become afraid and “loud and feisty and angry and irrational” when threatened with forced treatment. In response, staff can become “mean,” she says. During one admission, Shimrat says she fought as she was stripped in front of male police and orderlies, tied to a gurney in four-point restraints, injected with an antipsychotic, and locked in isolation. “The experience of being locked up is brutal,” comments Shimrat. “But the experience of being locked up and then debilitated with antipsychotics is much worse.”
    Antipsychotics are tranquilizing medications that are the most commonly used drugs in situations regarded as short-term “psychiatric emergencies” or long-term “psychosis.” While some people can find a tolerable dosage that quells their mind but leaves them still functional, for others—especially when they’re not allowed to participate in treatment decisions—antipsychotics can be debilitating.
     “The whole time that I was ever on antipsychotics I sort of fluctuated between wanting to die and thinking that I had died and gone to hell,” says Shimrat. “All colour was drained from the world, like everything was grey, and I couldn’t remember where I was from moment to moment or why I was standing where I was standing, what I had been planning to do. There was just a sort of sense of grinding, endless tedium and pain, physical pain as well as the pain of not being able to think.”
    Shimrat says she has also experienced akathisia, a restlessness and agitation that 30 percent of antipsychotic users sometimes experience and that can, in extreme cases, cause suicidal feelings and violent rages. “It’s horrible,” she says.
    “I’ll never recover completely from the trauma of it,” says Shimrat. Her experiences of being involuntarily treated, she says, have been “infinitely worse than even the worst moments of my so-called mental illness.” Shimrat believes that many psychiatric patients are becoming worse and not better because “they’re having their brains tampered with” in these frightening and damaging ways.
    For her part, Francesca Simpson says she’s “feeling pretty good” on medications because they “bring me down and take the edge off.” However, she wants more control over the types and amounts. She’s currently being administered a long-acting antipsychotic injection, plus two antipsychotics and a mood stabilizer daily, which she finds excessive. Since 2010 she’s been almost continuously involuntarily treated in her home by an Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) team. Simpson describes it as “intrusive,” “humiliating” and “demeaning.” She must be at home at certain times every day to have her meds “witnessed.” For the injections, she must pull her pants down. ACT staff change constantly; she prefers women but can’t refuse the “strange men” entering her home. Staff probe her personal life while looking for signs of any emerging need to re-hospitalize her. “Everything that I do is pathologized,” says Simpson.
    The whole experience “used to just make me furious,” says Simpson, “but I’ve given up on that.”
    Many people raise concerns that, over the long term, treating people against their wills dissuades even those who want help from seeking it, because it undermines trusting relationships with mental health practitioners. “It’s dangerous to ask for psychiatric help,” Simpson concurs. “Certainly when I get through this, if I’m ever in trouble again, I will go nowhere near that system.”
     
    Trust and distrust of psychiatry
    Several health authorities declined to provide interviews about involuntary treatment. The BC government issued a written statement saying that some patients “may not understand or realize that they need psychiatric care.” That’s also the concern for Deborah Conner, provincial director of the British Columbia Schizophrenia Society, who says BCSS could intervene in the CLAS case.
     Conner bristles to hear words like “outdated” linked to BC law. “The reality is our Mental Health Act is actually leading the charge in doing the least harm.” Conner says the “safeguard” that BC law provides is that people don’t “languish” in hospital but get treatment quickly and continually, which she claims prevents brain matter loss. “That’s been proven,” she says. “When you have early intervention which includes medication, those treatments actually prevent ongoing brain damage.”
     “There are very many people in this world of psychosis who have no way—they don’t share the same reality—they have no way of stepping outside their illness and having insight into what’s happening to them,” says Conner. “We have lots of people who said, ‘Thank God you treated me forcibly, because if you didn’t, I would be dead.’”
     I mention that others describe forced treatment as traumatizing.
    “Unfortunately, in some cases that’s the only way to save that person so that they can get treated and get on a path to recovery,” says Conner. “Just painting [with a broad] brush, saying in all these cases it should be treated this way and nobody should be traumatized, that’s like seeing with rose-coloured glasses.”
    BCSS shares a little common ground with CLAS. “We’ve always supported family or caregiver involvement in any situation,” says Conner. The BCSS wants policies allowing people to have psychiatric advance directives and to appoint family members or others to participate in admissions and discharge planning. But BCSS stops short of wanting anything legally binding. Conner says psychiatrists must retain powers to exclude appointees who aren’t “appropriate” and to bypass advance directives.
    What about people seeking help at hospitals just for depression or anxiety at levels that might not unduly interfere with their competency to make treatment decisions? Conner points out that long-term involuntary treatment requires two psychiatrists to agree. “If people are involuntarily committed, it seems to us that there’s a reason why that happened.”
    I suggest that it sounds like Conner is putting a lot of trust in psychiatrists. “When you have two psychiatrists who’ve done a thorough review and assessment and where they have family input, that’s the trust,” responds Conner. She concedes that such assessments can be difficult, but believes that medically-trained psychiatrists are best qualified to make them.
    In contrast to Conner, Shimrat argues that involuntary psychiatric treatment is primarily a means for policing very upset and/or very socially disruptive but otherwise law-abiding people, that has become culturally acceptable because it is masked as science-based health care. “Psychiatry is seen as a branch of medicine and distress is seen as a form of illness,” says Shimrat. “And so with the mindset that they’re saving lives and improving things for people, the practitioners feel that they’re morally in the right.”
    Certainly, pharmaceutical industry money and influence have had profound impacts on psychiatry and our cultural beliefs. Governments, families and patients alike are often swayed by psychiatrists’ assertions of “proven” and “evidence-based,” where more accurate would be “some studies seem to suggest…” Barely a day goes by, for example, that we don’t hear about blood tests for depression, brain scans for anxiety disorders, the genetics of schizophrenia, brain damage caused by psychosis, and unequivocally “safe and effective” psychotropic pharmaceuticals. If any one of these “discoveries” were ever truly validated, though, it would be Nobel Prize-worthy. However, the last time psychiatry garnered a Nobel was for lobotomies—since then, Nobel committees have apparently more rigorously vetted psychiatric claims.
     Instead, the widely promoted “chemical imbalance” theory of mental disorders has been so resoundingly debunked that prominent psychiatrists like Ronald Pies have taken to insisting that it was only an “urban legend” which no “well-informed psychiatrists” ever believed. The American Psychiatric Association recently clarified that no mental disorders can be detected through any biological tests. “Anti-anxiety” drugs are just addictive sedatives. “Antidepressants,” “antipsychotics” and “mood stabilizers” are marketing names for drugs with clinical pharmacology descriptions stating that their “therapeutic mechanism of action is unknown”—while their known harmful side effects are legion, including sometimes brain damage. And there’s a growing body of research suggesting that, over long-term use, most psychiatric medications are doing most people more harm than good, while being extremely difficult to withdraw from.
    The ultimate recourse for involuntary treatment proponents is to argue that disordered people “lack insight” while, as BCSS board member John Gray has written, “[C]ompulsory treatment will usually restore someone’s freedom of thought from a mind-controlling illness…”
     Though superficially compelling, these are philosophical—not medical—assertions that provoke many questions. How often and for how long do we keep aggressively “freeing” someone’s mind, exactly, before the person becomes free enough to refuse our interventions? Who among us has the rightful authority to determine who has “proper” insight into reality? Is it crazy to be driven mad by an insane and destructive society, or is it a sign of sensitivity that should be nurtured and supported rather than drugged away? Meanwhile, if we simply claim that the answers are “obvious” to anyone “sane,” then we cut off an important human legacy and potentiality—our ability to deeply question ourselves and our culture.
     
    Stigma, stereotypes…sanism
    If final judgments to psychiatrically treat people against their wills are not truly being driven by indisputable medical science, then what is driving them?
     A person in BC can appeal a committal to a three-person tribunal. Hearings are not open to the public, not bound by rules of court process, and notoriously erratic. Patients are often forcibly drugged during hearings. Though every patient has a right to a legal aid lawyer, hundreds annually cannot get one because government hasn’t provided sufficient funding. Less than one-fifth of patients win.
     In August, a patient sued to push the BC government to fund enough legal advocates. “It’s very troubling that despite numerous calls on the government to increase funding to ensure that everyone who is entitled to legal aid gets it, that they’ve pretty much ignored the problem,” says Kate Feeney of the BC Public Interest Advocacy Centre, co-counsel in that case. (Government began negotiating, so the case adjourned until December.) Many argue that this whole farce is but one example of how prejudiced society is against psychiatric patients—pointing to how even the BCSS and CMHA have done little over the years to raise alarm about this legal representation crisis.
     Lawyer Benard believes stigma, stereotypes and sensational news stories about rare cases of violence drive much of society’s support for involuntary treatment. “We feel like we need to be protecting these people at all costs and that we know what is best for them better than they can themselves.” Benard notes that organizations run by people with disabilities or with experience as psychiatric patients, like Council of Canadians with Disabilities, often take different positions from most mental health organizations, which are typically run by mental health professionals and family members of patients. “Sometimes there is a conflict between protecting the rights of a person in crisis and the desires and wishes of those around them,” says Benard.
    Because of these ubiquitous prejudices, Shimrat says that she’s “really happy” about the constitutional challenge but also skeptical. “Whatever is going to be on paper is unlikely to change what happens on the ground.” Indeed, Ontario’s rate of involuntary treatment seems to be only slightly lower than BC’s.
    A former BC tribunal chair says she saw appeal panels frequently exhibit a “deference to” and “over-reliance on” psychiatrists’ perspectives. Michael Perlin, an expert on US mental health law, blames it on “sanism.” Perlin’s books show, in encyclopaedic detail, that a near all-permeating deference to psychiatrists exists within judicial processes, coupled with an “irrational prejudice of the same quality and character of other irrational prejudices” towards people diagnosed with mental disorders.
     
    Sarah splits BC
    Sarah requested an appeal. Her psychiatrist didn’t have to, but chose to stop forcibly medicating her. Faculties back intact, Sarah researched and discovered that Alberta’s laws were different. She began preparing an escape plan, just in case.
    The review panel for Sarah’s appeal reached a 2-1 split decision—leaving Sarah incarcerated. She began a silent protest, giving staff handwritten objections when they handed her drugs. For two days, her tight-lipped protest also provided a cover for tonguing and not ingesting the pills. But her psychiatrist soon proposed an antipsychotic injection that would keep Sarah drugged for weeks. Sarah worried that her thinking would become so foggy she’d never be able to execute her plan. “I knew I had to leave,” she says.
     Into a small satchel bag she stuffed a change of clothes. Cash she’d been withdrawing to avoid using a trackable credit card. Her iPad. She acted like she was going for a smoke break, walked to where she could get a taxi, and got out where she could disappear into a crowd. She changed her clothes in a public bathroom and threw out the ones she’d been wearing at the hospital. She cut off her hair. Then she bought a ticket for a red-eye bus to Alberta.
    “It was the most nerve-wracking bus ride of my life,” says Sarah. “I had a feeling every time we stopped that there would be RCMP waiting for me.”
    The driver announced when the bus had crossed into Alberta and begun the descent from the mountains. “I actually got very emotional as I crossed the border,” says Sarah. “I’d spent the entire night in the dark…It was really beautiful, early in the morning, the sun was coming up…I was crying, and there was somebody sitting a couple seats from me, said ‘Are you okay?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’”
    But as the bus sped into Calgary, she saw her picture appear on the RCMP website as a “missing person,” along with a warrant for her arrest.
     
    There are other ways
    Media coverage of the CLAS constitutional challenge has been sympathetic, and there seems to be mounting support for possible mental health law changes in BC to remove “deemed consent” and allow people to have competency tests, advance directives, and substitutes.
    The CMHA’s Morris says there should be general equality between the way people experience both physical and mental health care. “What would it take to ensure that people with mental illness are afforded all of the similar rights and protections [as everyone else]?” Morris also notes that forced treatment is often related to a late-stage crisis that might have been prevented with more voluntary supports in our communities, and improvements in other “social determinants of health” like housing, income, employment, and education.
    Similarly, Chris Summerville of the Schizophrenia Society of Canada says that his organization is recognizing advances in understanding of how people can recover through self-empowerment and assistance in meeting their biological, psychological, social, spiritual and communal needs. In contrast to the BC Schizophrenia Society position, Summerville feels BC law could be updated to have “a little more care and caution” built into it.
    Francesca Simpson and Irit Shimrat suggest that if we at least made our psychiatric hospitals warm, respectful places that provided plenty of options and supports for people to voluntarily explore enhancing their own wellness, we wouldn’t have to worry much about people not wanting to go for help, or “languishing” in them. Offering robust counselling and psychotherapy services in our hospitals would seem to be a logical start—rather than relying almost totally on drugs and ECT, as is now the case.
    Shimrat points to alternative approaches such as exercise, arts, mind-body practices, and non-drug emergency response methods like peer respite homes and Open Dialogue family interventions. “There are other ways,” says Shimrat. “But that knowledge is suppressed and disrespected because of the strength of the status quo.”
    Johnston says she’s “under no illusion” that the constitutional challenge will cure the mental health system or society. But she hopes that at least the BC government will “engage with stakeholders and many different people and organizations to craft a new, fair legal framework for treatment for involuntary patients.”
     
    “Not detainable”—in Alberta
    Sarah turned herself in to Calgary police. She overheard the officer explain to her psychiatrist in BC that, under Alberta mental health law, Sarah didn’t appear detainable. “It was a good feeling,” she says. “But I knew it was a very scary next chapter of my life, starting it completely from the ground up.”
    Sarah is now in Ontario, where she has supportive family, and is studying natural ways of improving well-being. “I’ve been very fortunate in certain respects,” says Sarah. “What am I missing? My friends. My family… I was seeing somebody, that was a positive thing in my life, and that’s gone now.”
    She finds the term “psychiatric refugee” strong, but also feels it’s in some ways apt. “I would love to come back,” says Sarah. “If the laws change, I probably would.”
    Rob Wipond has been reporting on the lack of civil rights in the BC mental health system since 1998. He is the recipient of a number of journalism awards for his writing in Focus.

    Katherine Palmer Gordon
    September 2016
    The Province’s failure on First Nations burial sites is leading to more Grace Islets and potentially another Gustafsen Lake.
     
    ON THE EVENING OF March 17, 2015, the Tseycum longhouse in Saanich was permeated with a sense of profound relief. The desecration of 18 ancestral graves on Grace Islet, a First Nations’ burial site in Saltspring Island’s Ganges Harbour, had finally been stopped. 
    Hundreds of people gathered together in the longhouse not only to express their thankfulness that the desecration had ended, but to share their grief over the spiritual insult done to their ancestors. Provincial Minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations Steve Thomson was also there, but for a different reason: to apologize for the fact that the violation of the burial ground not only occurred under his watch, but with his approval. 
    Nine months earlier, with a Heritage Conservation Act (HCA) permit in hand issued by staff at Thomson’s Archaeology Branch, a property developer had begun building his retirement home in the midst of Grace Islet’s graves. First Nations, horrified at the wilful destruction of their ancestral cemetery, pleaded repeatedly with Thomson to revoke the permit and protect the site instead, which the government had the authority to do under the HCA. Their protests were brushed aside, however, and onlookers watched in acute dismay as building materials were piled on the tiny islet and construction began in mid-2014. 
    Threatened with an Aboriginal title lawsuit, Thomson finally caved in, paying more than $5 million to buy the island and stop the building work from continuing. That was too late, however, to prevent significant damage occurring to the graves, and searing emotional and cultural injury to the people whose ancestors had been so disrespected. An apology was the least that Steve Thomson could offer. 
    Thomson also promised: “I give you my sincere commitment to work with you to ensure that something like this never happens again.” He reiterated the commitment to Focus shortly after the Tseycum event, stating that he had instructed his staff to review how the HCA is implemented with respect to First Nations burial grounds, specifically to avoid any future “Grace Islet-type situations” (see “Saving Grace,” Focus, April 2015). 
    One might think that—faced by a roomful of people hanging on his every word, and by such palpable grief—Thomson would keep his word. But, 18 months later, it looks very much like he hasn’t. 
    Thomson’s communications staff did not respond to requests for an interview with him. Focus received only a short email instead, insisting that a review has taken place and that as a result, the Archaeological Branch has “tightened up procedures” and “is paying closer attention to areas that may contain burial sites.” That closer attention may include “more frequent site visits by a branch archaeologist, and greater detail required from proponents for any planned development.” 
    In other words, as far as anyone can tell, nothing has been put in place to ensure a “Grace Islet-type situation” cannot be repeated. It also seems no First Nations were involved in the “review,” despite Thomson’s promise to work with them. 
    Dr Judith Sayers, a member of the Hupacasath First Nation, is co-chair of the Joint Working Group on First Nations Heritage Conservation, established in 2007 by the provincial government and First Nations Leadership Council to help improve the protection of First Nations cultural and heritage sites. You’d think Sayers of all people would have been involved in a review. But Sayers says: “As far as I am aware, nothing has happened.”
    Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs President Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, who witnessed Thomson’s promise at Tseycum, says he is also not aware of any review at all taking place, let alone one that involved First Nations: “That’s very disappointing to me.” If Thomson’s goal was to prevent another “Grace Islet-type situation,” Phillip believes Thomson’s failure to keep his promise makes the opposite outcome inevitable.
    Indeed, there may be more than one such situation already brewing. In New Westminster, a school built over a burial site which is believed to contain the remains of a Tsilhqot’in chief is about to be torn down. Tsilhqot’in Nation has already put the Education Ministry on notice that they will not permit any desecration of his grave to occur. 
    Further east, in the Similkameen Valley, the ancient remains of five people were uncovered and seriously damaged on February 29 this year when an unsuspecting Cawston property owner began clearing part of his land. He reported the incident immediately, and the Lower Similkameen Indian Band (LSIB) was called in to recover what they could of the scattered bones—fewer than half to date, according to LSIB Chief Keith Crow. “We’ve been able to repatriate maybe 400 bones so far, but that means there are at least 600 left there, if not more.”
    Crow says that the existence of burials on the Cawston site has been known to government since as early as 1952. Despite that, efforts to have the area protected under the HCA have been unsuccessful to date. “I just want to take care of our poor ancestors,” he says in frustration. “These are our great-great-great grandparents. They were properly laid to rest on that place and it is our sacred duty to ensure we look after them.”
    On April 25, Crow’s frustration at the lack of action by government to help protect the site boiled over. In a scathing letter to the Premier, Crow aimed a warning shot across the government’s bows: “Oka, Ipperwash, and Gustafsen Lake all proved very costly and involved the deployment of hundreds of police and the Canadian military. LSIB is prepared to begin a highly publicized protest unless you take immediate action.”
    The 1990 Oka crisis involved a land dispute in Quebec that lasted more than ten weeks and resulted in the death of a police officer. In 1995, it was Ojibway protester Dudley George who was killed by police at Ipperwash. The Gustafsen Lake standoff in BC, a protest by First Nations over an ancient sacred site, took place the same year and lasted a month. The cost of RCMP involvement was the highest of its kind in Canadian history.
    Crow’s implied threat that the government faces a similar scenario at Cawston didn’t achieve the result he hoped for. On June 7, LSIB issued a further press release stating: “Premier Clark told Chief Crow that her government would engage in a meaningful and responsive way. That has not yet happened. Our patience is running thin. Failure to act is not an option.” Nonetheless, by the last week of July there was still no movement. To his dismay, Crow was told by a provincial official that nothing would happen “this close to an election.” (The next BC provincial election is in May 2017.) 
    On July 27, the Okanagan Nation Alliance (ONA)—of which LSIB is a member and Stewart Phillip Chair—wrote again to the Premier, as well as Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation Minister John Rustad and Steve Thomson, urging them to re-engage on this “escalating” matter. This time they left no room for doubt about their intentions: “Direct action is the next step in moving this issue forward.” 
    Asked by Focus for the government’s response, Thomson’s ministry staff replied by email: “The Province shares the concerns about the recent discovery of human remains and is currently working with the LSIB, the ONA and the landowner in a collaborative manner on solutions to protect the remains. The next meeting between all interested parties is scheduled for the end of August.”
    If it’s aggravating for journalists to receive that kind of non-response from government, it must be triply so for Crow. He says LSIB is committed to finding a solution to protecting the remains and is using every effort to engage government, but doesn’t feel it’s reciprocated. It was LSIB who organized and planned the August meeting, not the government, and if he’d had his way, the meeting would have been held much sooner: “I find it frustrating that it seems no-one else is taking this seriously except for the LSIB.” 
    Crow did not comment on the likelihood of protest action occurring if discussions at the August meeting failed, but as things stood at time of writing, the potential for a positive outcome was not promising. 
    Grace Islet wasn’t the first situation of its kind—think Bear Mountain, Nanaimo’s Departure Bay, and Musqueam’s Marpole site in Vancouver. Given the government’s apparent unwillingness to respond to First Nations and implement any meaningful changes to the way the HCA is implemented, it seems likely that it will not be the last. And the next one, whether it is at Cawston or elsewhere, could have even more serious consequences for government. 
    Stewart Phillip believes that direct action may be the only alternative left to First Nations pushed to the wall over the mistreatment of their forebears: “It seems there will have to be a full-pitched battle before the Province will act to find a resolution and protect these ancestral remains.” 
    Katherine Palmer Gordon is a former BC Chief Treaty Negotiator and the author of six books, including We Are Born With the Songs Inside Us (Harbour, 2013). She is currently working on New Zealand’s final treaties with First Nations there.

    Leslie Campbell
    September 2016
    The gap between incomes and housing costs has grown so wide that bold action is long overdue.
     
    WHEN I MOVED HERE from Winnipeg 30 years ago, I quickly found myself a modest one-bedroom apartment on Quebec Street in James Bay. A three-story walk-up, my pad featured hardwood floors and a southern exposure. It had a tiny galley kitchen, a balcony, and a parking space. I loved it; it was the perfect nest from which to fly about my new city and start my life over. It cost me $315/month. 
    Having settled the housing facet of my life, I moved on to finding a job, doing freelance writing, taking some classes, and volunteering with local organizations. I couldn’t have done any of it without a secure home whose rental rate allowed me to afford the other basics along with a few frills, like writing and art classes, and listening to some great music at Harpo’s.
    Contrast my welcoming environment to what people at the low end of the income spectrum face now: a rental vacancy rate of 0.6 percent—one of the worst in Canada—along with out-of-reach rents. My Quebec Street home was torn down years ago to make way for a strata-titled townhouse complex. But a search of rental listings yielded a similar apartment—without the hardwood floors and free parking—for $1250/month. 
    The tales of woe I am hearing personally range from students losing a shared rental house when the owner decided to cash out, to a family from the Comox Valley with two university-age children struggling to find a house to rent. Lisa Morgan says she is hoping for something around $2000/month, but after months of looking, she’s found the only suitable homes in terms of location and space all fall in the $2800-3000 price range. As the search continues, the family is camping out at the grandparents’ home in Brentwood Bay. Daughter Morgan will commute to UVic.
    Another, much younger family, with their infant, was “renovicted” from their rental home recently. Unable to find an affordable replacement despite both parents working, they are moving into the unfinished basement of their parents. With only one kitchen and bathroom, “adjustments” are having to be made by all parties.
    At another end of the spectrum is an active  septuagenarian who owns a home with reasonable mortgage fees, but is considering selling and moving to Mexico because there seems no other solution in the face of needed costly repairs and rising utility bills. 
    Sixty percent of Victorians rent their home. Renting is the only way many young people, singles, seniors and families can afford to house themselves. They all add to a city’s diversity, vibrancy and potential. So it seems in everyone’s interest to help them feel more welcome in our city.
     
    IN RESEARCHING THE ISSUE of affordable housing, I kept coming across the name of Marika Albert—the author (often with others) of reports for both the CRD and the Coalition to End Homelessness. She also served on the City of Victoria’s Housing Affordability Task Force and is currently the managing director of the Community Social Planning Council of Greater Victoria. 
    During an August meeting, Albert and I discuss this community’s housing challenge, focusing particularly on rentals.
    Together we look at the graph (below) from the 167-page Capital Region Housing Gap Analysis & Data Book that Albert helped compile. The graph puts the problem into stark relief, illustrating a fundamental mismatch between where our population is in terms of income, and the cost of available housing. Only 13.7 percent of the region’s homes are affordable for 50 percent of its households. The income at the upper end, just left of the dotted red line is $59,999. Put another way, there are only 22,000 units priced at 30 percent of the gross income of 79,000 households. And there’s an oversupply of housing for those in upper income groups. Since these figures are from data from 2011 to 2014, the gap is likely even more dramatic now.
     

    The lower-income people who cannot find housing that “matches” their income are, says Albert, therefore overspending and experiencing a lot of stress and its attendant problems, and in some cases homelessness.
    Albert and other members on the City of Victoria’s Housing Affordability Task Force looked particularly at ways to generate more housing for households in the $18,000-$57,000 per annum range. 
    “We really focused on immediate need and trying to resolve the real crisis or the tension that we have now. We talked a lot about inclusionary zoning, densification and diversified densification. How do we fit more people in an area, but without necessarily having to build massive towers? How do we fill in the corners of our neighborhoods a bit more?”
    The task force came up with a list of things the City should consider, and these have informed the City’s Housing Strategy 2016-2025. Among the recommendations already prioritized in the Strategy are removing the minimum unit size (currently 335 square feet); reducing parking requirements for units (which can add $25-40,000 in costs to developers, which is passed on to tenants); removing the rezoning requirement for garden suites; and reviewing the Housing Reserve Fund guidelines for grants to developers of affordable housing projects. (Non-profit providers have expressed concerns that the $10,000 per unit cap on grants may soon limit their ability to build units that are affordable for people in the low-to-moderate income bracket.)
    Other recommendations of the task force that will be looked at further down the road  include fostering the conversion of older motels to apartments, and contributing City-owned land at no cost or at reduced market value for the development of affordable housing projects. (The City of Vancouver recently committed to building 400 affordable rental suites on its city-owned lands.)
    Albert says, “I think that municipalities are in a position to be a bit more assertive [with developers] around what they see as their community needs. We have developers wanting to build here. Ultimately, it’s going to be lucrative for them.” She feels some progress has been made, but too often it’s just not enough. “It’s sad. It’s like, ‘Really? Just 10 [affordable units in a large complex]? What’s that going to do?’ I find it frustrating because I think a lot of effort has been put into lobbying for more units, changing how we do that whole process and then it’s just, ‘Oh, we’re just going to do this fast route, 10 units and then that’s it.’” 
    She is, however, excited to see that the City of Victoria is endorsing the creation of an “inclusionary housing density bonus policy” for the Downtown core. Inclusionary zoning essentially means that if housing is built in that zone, it has to represent the income distribution of the area—thereby maintaining its diversity. Albert believes, “The more diverse your community is the more it thrives. Jane Jacobs has talked about that a lot in her work.”
     
    DESPITE HER WORK AND ADVOCACY at the civic level, Albert admits cities do not have the tools or money available to them that upper levels of government do. When it comes to the bolder measures needed to address the profound disconnect between incomes and housing, those upper levels need to come to the table.
    On the income side of the equation, she notes, household incomes have been stagnating. “We are losing our purchasing power. Income assistance rates haven’t gone up since 2007.” Another graph we examine shows that the rate of the increase in shelter costs and the rate at which wages are going up have decoupled in the past decade. On the ground, this translates to a person working full-time at BC’s minimum hourly wage of $10.45 spending 50 percent of their income to rent a bachelor apartment at the 2015 regional average of $716/month. Looking at another scenario, a family of four would require both parents working full-time at $20.05/hour to afford the basics, including a 3-bedroom apartment with utilities and insurance amounting to $1488/month all-inclusive. Those wages, by the way, would not allow for vacations, savings, or debt servicing.
    “We can’t just address one side of the coin,” says Albert—“especially for people who are on low incomes, who are living on disability, who are trying to scrape by in a rental market that has no vacancy and is becoming more expensive.”
    Increasing minimum wage, income assistance and disability rates, of course, points us in the direction of the Provincial government.
    With an election in May, the Liberals—along with both the NDP and Green parties—do seem to be paying attention to the dearth of affordable housing, which a recent poll found to be the top concern of British Columbians. The government’s actions thus far, however, have been aimed at cooling the over-heated real estate sales market, especially in Vancouver (e.g. a tax on foreign buyers) or, as in Victoria, funding much-needed new transitional supportive housing to address homelessness, a crisis made so visible by the tent city on the Province’s Law Courts grounds.
    The Province is also the level of government where rent controls can be enhanced and legislative measures to deal with burgeoning renovictions can be implemented. The Province’s Tenancy Branch has received almost 5000 applications to dispute eviction notices in the past year, which likely represent the tip of iceberg (who has the time and money to file a complaint when hunting for a new place?). The penalty for landlords who are found to evict someone “in bad faith” is two months’ rent, which they can make back in no time, given the market and the loopholes in the Residential Tenancy Act. 
    The Province has far more tools at its disposal than the City to help those caught in the squeeze illustrated by our graph. With a provincial election come May, citizens have some influence as well. 
     
    THE OTHER DIRECTION TO LOOK FOR BOLD MEASURES to tackle housing affordability, of course, is the federal government.
    In one of the reports Albert worked on, I had noticed a graph showing the age of this region’s rental apartments. It made clear that between 1961 and 1980 there was a building boom in purpose-built rental apartments; in fact, the ones still standing represent 43 percent of all rental units in the CRD. In the City of Victoria itself, of the current 17,000 or so purpose-built rental apartments, “nearly 70 percent of these units were built between 1950 and 1975 under a series of Federal tax measures and construction incentives,” states the City’s Task Force report.
    Albert explains that during that era, “We had a national housing strategy. The federal government through CMHC was investing in the building of purpose-built rentals—both market rentals, but also subsidized units…There was actual incentive for developers to build them.”
    By the mid-1980s, however, the feds had lost interest in subsidized housing and discontinued funding any social housing projects. Then came the Province’s turn to lose interest and halt their funding. One result: Where homelessness was virtually unheard of in the 1980s, by the 2000s people were sleeping in doorways and parks. There are now 235,000 people homeless in Canada.
    The Trudeau Liberals, during the election campaign, acknowledged the need for the feds to re-engage on the housing front in a bold way: They promised to “prioritize investments in affordable housing and seniors’ facilities, build more new housing units and refurbish old ones, give support to municipalities to maintain rent-geared-to-income subsidies in co-ops, and give communities the money they need for Housing First initiatives that help homeless Canadians find stable housing.” They also said they’d remove all GST on new capital investments in affordable rental housing. And “conduct an inventory of all available federal lands and buildings that could be repurposed, and make some of these lands available at low cost for affordable housing in communities where there is a pressing need.”
    In all, the federal Liberals promised that $20 billion would be invested in social housing over the next decade.
    In Victoria recently, federal Minister of Families, Children and Social Development Jean-Yves Duclos said a national housing strategy could be in place before the end of the year. He also announced $150 million in federal funding over the next two years for housing in BC, $51 million of it for repairs and upgrades to social housing units.
    So the feds are re-engaging with the issue—though with many promises to keep. And the Province, heading into an election next spring, is starting to engage as well. But in those years in which they were both missing in action, things got awfully difficult for many Canadians.
    Leslie Campbell is the founding editor of Focus. She now lives, almost affordably, in a co-op heritage house in Victoria.

    David Broadland
    September 2016
    The city was once targeted by Sierra Legal Defence Fund for the level of "harmful" chemical contaminants in its wastewater. 12 years later, advanced source control has reduced those contaminants to a level lower than is allowed in Canada's drinking water.
     
    IN MID-AUGUST, Victoria architectural firm D’Ambrosio Architecture + Urbanism released drawings of a design created by “an international team” for a wall around a sewage treatment plant on McLoughlin Point at the entrance to Victoria’s harbour. Writing in the past tense, as though the idea might have already been superceded by some better one, the firm stated:
    “The architectural strategy embraced the industrial nature of the facility. It consisted of a series of 184 concrete columns forming a palisade around the process and operation buildings. The buildings housing operational and administrative functions engage the columns, creating a visually calm and collected interface between the industrial facility and the sensitive harbour waterfront.”
    Aside from obscuring the plant, the 184 sturdy concrete columns in D’Ambrosio’s design don’t suggest any utilitarian purpose. Instead they seem to be there simply to memorialize something big: A war, perhaps, or some other sad outcome of human misjudgement. Considering the evidence challenging the wisdom of moving the region’s marine-based treatment system to land, D’Ambrosio’s vision is, intentionally or not, one of the most honest public statements made about the treatment project so far.
     

    D’Ambrosio Architecture + Urbanism's vision of how a sewage treatment plant at the entrance to Victoria Harbour could appear
     
    Later in this story I’m going to follow D’Ambrosio’s lead and be creative, but in a different direction. Rather than artful, I’m going to be practical and answer these questions: What’s wrong with the current marine-based treatment system, and how can we fix that?
    First though, I want to tell you about one of the great strengths of the current system, a very progressive approach to wastewater treatment that obviously has much potential but will likely be one of the first casualties of land-based secondary treatment: the CRD’s  Regional Source Control Program. The best way for me to describe its potential is to show you what it has achieved since 2003.
    Back in 2004, the Sierra Legal Defence Fund (now called Ecojustice) petitioned the federal government “to effectively address the pollution of the marine environment by persistent organic pollutants including PCBs.” Ecojustice targeted Victoria’s outfalls in their petition and named ten different contaminants it identified as “harmful”: Polychlorinated biphenols (PCBs), oil and grease, mercury, lead, silver, cadmium, copper, zinc, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and “halogenated compounds.”
    For each contaminant, Ecojustice provided an estimate of the amount being discharged over a two-year period. It based its numbers on CRD data obtained through an FOI, but some of those numbers now seem unsupportable—either too high or too low—based on data since made public by the CRD. (Contacted by Focus, Ecojustice did not explain the numbers it used in its petition.) 
    Using data collected by CRD scientists between 2003 and 2014 for the substances named in Ecojustice’s petition, reductions can be estimated: The discharge of oil and grease has been reduced by 93 percent, mercury by 95 percent, silver by 94 percent, cadmium by 72 percent, lead by 62 percent, and PAHs by 28 percent. Although there are several halogenated compounds found in the CRD’s effluent, consider the case of pentachlorophenol, once commonly used by homeowners in Victoria as an insecticide and a wood preservative. In 2004, PCP was detected in 100 percent of the CRD’s samples. By 2014, the CRD could no longer detect PCP in the effluent.
     

     
    What about PCBs? Ecojustice took a single sample from each outfall in both 2001 and 2003 and included those in its 2004 petition. That 2001 figure was 2100 grams per year and was well-used in campaigns to discredit the marine-based, source-controlled system. In 2015, DFO scientist Sophie Johannessen published a peer-reviewed study that estimated the annual discharge of PCBs at 340 grams per year. Based on those numbers, there has been an 83 percent reduction in the amount of PCBs being discharged, even while the residential population using the outfalls increased.
    The 95 percent reduction in mercury since 2004 is the strongest affirmation of the potential of source-controlled treatment. Victoria’s effluent now has even less mercury per litre than the Annacis Island secondary treatment plant on the Fraser River. But Victoria has done this without the immense cost of land-based secondary treatment or any of the environmental risks associated with land-based disposal of the chemically-contaminated biosolids that Annacis Island and other secondary and tertiary treatment plants produce.
    CRD scientist Chris Lowe, who has overseen the region’s wastewater monitoring program for many years, credits the reductions to the Regional Source Control Program and to reductions in the general use of certain materials in our culture. Digital photography has largely replaced silver-based photography, for instance.
    To put the current level of chemical contamination from Victoria’s wastewater in some perspective, I compared the CRD’s 2014 data for the substances Ecojustice identified as “harmful” with Health Canada’s current Drinking Water Guidelines for those substances. That’s right, I compared Victoria’s sewage with Canada’s drinking water. The result is surprising (see table below).
     

     
    Health Canada’s Guidelines specify an upper limit for the allowable concentration of contaminants for water to be safe for humans to drink. For example, the concentration of mercury allowed in Canadian drinking water is .001 milligram per litre. That turns out to be 100 times higher than the average concentration of mercury in the sewage that passed through the Macaulay Point outfall during 2014. Health Canada allows 25 times more cadmium and twice as much lead in drinking water than can be found in Victoria’s sewage.
    Not all of the contaminants targeted by Ecojustice are limited by Health Canada’s Guidelines. For example, copper and zinc are considered beneficial to human health and the Guidelines set no health-related limits for these. The US EPA’s National Primary Drinking Water Regulations, however, has established a limit for copper in America’s drinking water. That level is 10 times higher than the level of copper currently found in Victoria’s wastewater.  
    Similarly, Health Canada’s Guidelines don’t give an allowable limit for polychlorinated biphenols (PCBs), but the EPA does. It allows PCBs in drinking water at a concentration that’s 50 to 60 times higher than is currently found in the effluent passing through Victoria’s two marine outfalls.
    Two of the contaminants on Ecojustice’s list, copper and zinc, both of which come mainly from deteriorating domestic water supply pipes and fittings, have seen only minor reductions since 2004. Does the failure of source control to limit the amount of copper and zinc warrant the investment of billions in public resources over the life of a land-based treatment system?
    Ecojustice might think it does, but environmental protection policy in jurisdictions around North America doesn’t reflect that view. Let me tell you about copper, zinc and “the initial dilution zone.”
    While both copper and zinc are considered essential for human health, they are potentially harmful to aquatic life even at low concentrations. To protect organisms against such contaminants in wastewater discharged to bodies of water, the BC Ministry of Environment has developed “Water Quality Objectives” that are orders of magnitude more stringent than Health Canada’s Drinking Water Guidelines. These objectives must be met, but the undiluted effluent from secondary and tertiary treatment plants simply can’t meet them. In fact, sewage treatment is known to increase the amount of dissolved copper, which makes copper more immediately available to cause harm to aquatic organisms. This amplification effect is even more pronounced for zinc. None of BC’s secondary treatment plants meet the Province’s standard for either copper or zinc. For example, Vancouver’s Annacis Island secondary treatment plant—located right on the migration route of Fraser River sockeye—exceeds BC’s water quality objectives by factors of 4 and 10 for zinc and copper respectively. How does the Province get around this conundrum?
    It does that by incorporating into its environmental regulations what’s known in wastewater treatment policy as “the initial dilution zone.” What is that? It’s an imperfect place, a volume of water where conditions are moving from not-so-good to better. The BC Environmental Protection Branch, responsible for overseeing the appropriate implementation of BC Water Quality Objectives, states: “Objectives do not apply within an initial dilution zone, which is the initial portion of the larger effluent mixing zone. The extent of initial dilution zones is defined on a site-specific basis, with due regard to water uses, aquatic life, including migratory fish, and other waste discharges.”
    In other words, the effluent inside an outfall isn’t required to meet water quality objectives. It doesn’t have to meet the objectives a second or two after being discharged, either. It’s allowed a certain distance away from the outfall—usually 100 metres—to become diluted enough that it effectively meets the regulation water quality objectives. Notice that all of this is determined on a “site-specific” basis. Once the effect of the initial dilution zone is taken into count, the CRD’s discharge of copper and zinc meets the Province’s stringent water quality objectives just as well as Annacis Island’s secondary treatment plant does.
    Why does the Province take this approach? The Environmental Protection Branch’s explanation is blunt: “If initial dilution zones did not exist, it would mean that effluent quality would have to meet water quality objectives, which would be costly and impractical.”
    Costly and impractical. Say those words a few times, roll them around your mind and try to get a feel for why the Province, the US EPA and every other jurisdiction in North America—except one—has adopted the initial dilution zone (aka “mixing zone, “zone of initial dilution,” etc) as a fundamental policy tool for making practical decisions about environmental protection and wastewater. That one exception, of course, is Environment Canada’s Wastewater Systems Effluent Regulations, brought into being by Stephen Harper’s government.
    Those regulations judged that Victoria’s effluent, before being discharged into the initial dilution zone, had too high a concentration of “suspended solids,” which, to translate as accurately as possible, means “digested food.” Obviously, “food” is not one of the substances that can be successfully source controlled by the CRD. As contaminants go, this one is all appearance and no cause for concern. According to marine scientists, the amount of digested food Victorians discharge to the ocean does not constitute an environmental risk. DFO’s Johannessen put it in context in her 2015 study: The discharge of digested food from the two outfalls represents .03 percent—that’s three one-hundredths of one percent—of the total suspended solids discharged by all sources to the Strait of Georgia and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Yet that’s the only factor Environment Canada’s regulation used to push Victoria in the costly and impractical direction it’s now headed. There’s the appearance that something necessary has been done, but there’s no evidence that there is a problem that needed fixing.
    The CRD’s highly-effective source control program will likely be one of the first victims of Environment Canada’s unhelpful regulation. The serious financial burden of a land-based secondary treatment system will inevitably result in a quest for cost-saving measures at the CRD. Other communities with secondary sewage treatment don’t have advanced source control programs, so why should Victoria? Chop.
    Victoria’s unique approach to wastewater treatment—reducing contaminants by keeping them out of the environment in the first place—is a challenge for many to understand and appreciate. It has remained Victoria’s big secret. Why? Because the CRD has done a terrible job of communicating its successes to the community, and media here have largely ignored the story. The CRD’s unwillingness to toot its horn has likely reduced the impact of the program over what would have been possible with a better-funded, more broadly understood and supported initiative. That dearth of communication also applies to the marine-based treatment system’s strengths and weaknesses and its ability to protect public health.
     
    IN A 2008 EDITORIAL in the scientific journal Marine Pollution Bulletin, nine Victoria and Vancouver marine scientists refuted the basis on which then-Environment Minister Barry Penner had ordered Victoria to abandon its carefully-engineered and smoothly operating marine-based treatment system. The scientists noted, “The concept of natural sewage treatment has been criticized in the media, but in fact waste treatment is well recognized as a useful ecosystem service contributing to human well-being. The focus of environmental protection is changing to preserving such ecosystem services to the benefit of both human beings and the natural environment. It makes no sense to replace a natural ecosystem service with a human creation that is energy inefficient and has other harmful environmental consequences.”
    Let me remind you, briefly, how Victoria’s “natural treatment system” works. Many people know there are screening and settling plants at Clover Point and Macaulay Point where a lot of solids are removed, but they don’t seem to know what happens out in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
    The plants on the points remove from the wastewater anything solid that’s larger than 6 millimetres in diameter, which is roughly the size of a pea. Oil and grease are scrapped off in the settling tanks and the remaining effluent—99.9 percent water—flows by gravity down a pipe to the outfall. The outfalls consist of a pipe sitting on the seabed leading to a specially-engineered section called a diffuser. Located 55 to 60 metres below the surface, the diffuser has carefully spaced and oriented ports that direct the effluent upwards. Macaulay Point’s diffuser is 135 metres long and about 1700 metres from the nearest shoreline. Clover Point’s diffuser is 196 metres long and 1100 metres from the nearest shore. The ends of both outfalls are capped and the effluent is forced out of 28 small ports at Macaulay and 37 ports at Clover. It’s not “dumped,” as the Times Colonist relentlessly claims.
    At Clover Point, the effluent is dispersed from 37 small jets into a 200-metre-wide by 60-metre-high wall of cold, turbulent, highly-oxygenated salt water that’s travelling at speeds of up to one metre per second, depending on the strength of the tides. At that speed, as much as 12,000 cubic metres of water passes over the diffuser in a single second, quickly diluting the effluent and beginning the physical process of killing off bacterial contaminants. Victoria’s treatment system harnesses a tremendous source of renewable energy—almost twice the peak spring flow of the Fraser River—to do that work. DFO’s Johannessen describes the turbulent river of water off Clover Point as “like a giant washing machine.”
    The “plume,” as the rising effluent is known, is washed in the direction of the current. CRD monitoring of the plume shows it seldom reaches the surface of the water (four times in 2014), and then only during periods of intense winter or spring rains. But the top of the plume is generally trapped five metres or more below the surface. At that depth, while bacteria are rapidly dying as a result of the harsh physical conditions, there’s little possibility of contact with humans. The testimony from knowledgeable, local experts about the efficacy of this approach to killing bacteria is unequivocal: Six past and current public health officers—Dr Richard Stanwick, Dr John Millar, Dr Shaun Peck, Dr Brian Emerson, Dr Brian Allen and Dr Kelly Barnard—have stated: “There is no measurable public health risk from Victoria’s current method of offshore liquid waste disposal.”
    In spite of their assurance, though, there are some pertinent questions about what might happen in the future as the region’s population grows and there’s more sewage. Would the plume break through to the surface more frequently? And what happens when the tides change? Doesn’t the current passing over the diffuser slow down, stop, and then change direction? Then what happens to the plume at slack tide? Does the rapid rate of dilution stop?
    I’ve spoken with many local engineers, scientists and interested residents over the past several years about these questions, and they’ve provided all sorts of creative solutions. I’ve knit some of what they’ve told me into what follows.
    According to these experts, there’s a way of improving the physical characteristics of the outfalls’ plumes that would make Victoria’s treatment system even more effective at dispersing chemical and biological contaminants and extend its life far into the future. The improvements become possible if a completely different problem—contamination of near-shore waters by the release of sewage during significant rainstorms—is solved first. Let me take you through these ideas, starting with solving a real problem for $50 million.
    The nine local marine scientists who wrote the editorial in Marine Pollution Bulletin in support of Victoria’s “natural sewage treatment” system noted that, prior to Penner’s 2006 order to the CRD, “an independent expert scientific review had been completed under the auspices of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC). This independent review made an important point that appears to have been overlooked by the Minister and others in favour of secondary treatment. Specifically, stormwater, sanitary and combined overflows, and other discharges, particularly into the surface waters in Victoria’s harbours, present more pressing environmental issues than the current offshore submarine sewage discharges.”
    None of those “more pressing environmental issues” have been addressed, and that has created bizarrely unpredictable results.
    In March of this year, Washington State Representative Jeff Morris and 36 of his fellow legislators threatened an economic boycott of Victoria. The incident that triggered their outrage was an article in the Times Colonist about what’s called a “combined sewer overflow,” or CSO. Morris thoughtthe paper’s story was about Victoria’s deep-water marine outfalls, but it wasn’t. It was about a very ordinary problem, common even in Morris’ 40th District. During heavy rainfalls, sewage collection systems that don’t have enough hydraulic capacity—the ability to absorb liquid—spill the excess through short beach outfalls into near-shore waters. When such events occur in Victoria, there’s a big fuss in the TC as CRD officials warn residents of the possibility of contamination of beaches. It’s common to blame these spills on the two deep-water marine outfalls, but there’s no connection. CSOs are a problem unto themselves, and land-based treatment plans developed by the CRD so far would only address a fraction of the problem.
    Seattle is currently fixing a much worse CSO problem than Victoria’s, partly by increasing the hydraulic capacity of the Murray Basin collection system. That involves building a big storage tank that can absorb surges in the amount of liquid in the sewers during storms. Once a storm has passed, and liquid levels in the collection system have dropped, the contents of the tank can be slowly released, and a CSO is avoided.
    The CRD’s McLoughlin Point plan included building such a tank in Gordon Head—the so-called Arbutus attenuation tank. Construction of that tank would have allowed the CRD to put a screen on one of three remaining unscreened beach outfalls on the East Coast Interceptor. Unscreened beach outfalls have given Morris and Mr Floatie much material to work with—“floatables” is the usual euphemism—in their misleading campaigns against Victoria’s marine-based treatment system. But only increasing the hydraulic capacity of the collection system will eliminate floatables, Mr Floatie and Representative Morris from the region’s politics. The cost of accomplishing that can be estimated from the projected cost of the Arbutus attenuation tank project.
    The CRD and its consultants predicted the Arbutus tank would cost $9.5 million and its construction would eliminate all overflows in the East Coast Interceptor portion of the system for all downpours up to a “one-in-five-year storm event.” That’s the CSO standard required by the Province. To bring the whole system up to that standard would require a total of five Arbutus-like tanks scattered strategically around the core area. The total capital cost of such an increase in hydraulic capacity would be in the neighbourhood of $50 million. Imagine if the CRD decided to listen to the scientists and actually solved the CSO problem.
    Doing that would also allow improvement of the marine-based treatment system. Here’s how that would work.
    Those tanks, if used only to absorb downpours and eliminate CSOs, would be empty almost all of the time. According to the CRD, over a six-year period the region experienced 160 CSOs. This means that having the capacity to reduce CSOs down to the Province’s standard would result in storage tanks that would be empty about 90 percent of the time. During that time, they could safely be used for another purpose: controlling the outfall plumes. Let me describe how that would work.
    The volume of liquid flowing to the outfalls as a result of human activity varies through a 24-hour period in a pattern that’s very predictable. See the oscillating line in the graph above, which shows how the flow to the outfalls varies over eight days. The consistent pattern of our daily use of sinks, showers, bathtubs and toilets results in a peak flow around breakfast, after which it falls off until mid-afternoon and then rises to another peak just before we go to bed. The flow falls to a minimum while we sleep, and then the cycle repeats itself.
     

    Imagine if we could even-out the flow so that’s it’s more or less constant throughout the day (indicated by the red line in the graph above). That would reduce the maximum flow from the diffusers and that would be like going back several decades in time to when the maximum flow was about 65 percent of what it is today. The plume would then be even less likely to reach the surface.
    How could the flow be evened out? The experts say that could be accomplished by using the CSO tanks to hold back some of the flow generated between breakfast and bedtime and then letting it go in the wee hours of the night. 
    Those tanks would also allow reducing or pausing the flow of effluent from the diffusers during the period when the tidal current slows, stops and then reverses direction. This would further reduce the likelihood that the plume could break through to the surface. It might also lessen the amount of organic material that’s deposited in the footprint of the initial dilution zone during slack tide.
    There could even be bells and whistles: Large tanks full of sewage would contain a lot of thermal energy. The Southeast False Creek Neighbourhood Energy Utility in Vancouver, for example, uses thermal energy captured from sewage to provide space heating and hot water to nearby buildings. Perhaps the False Creek example points to where such tanks could be located: below the car-parking level in new Downtown condominium towers. In exchange for providing that service, or as an inducement to provide it, the City could allow a couple of extra floors on a limited number of new buildings.
    These tanks could also act as a catchment for particles of lead, zinc and copper coming from corroding plumbing pipes and fittings upstream, thereby keeping those materials out of the marine environment. It would even be possible to fit the tanks with standard water-oil separators that would further reduce the amount of oil and grease discharged to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, allowing the oil to be recycled.
    Why isn’t Victoria going to do this—or something along these lines?
    Perhaps Franc D’Ambrosio’s grand vision of 184 decorative concrete columns hints at the answer to that question. His project isn’t meant to be a response to a compelling physical issue. Same with the treatment project. It’s an opportunity for some people to make money and for others to make a name for themselves as architects, political fixers, activists—even as journalists. Mostly it fulfills a promise made  ten years ago by former BC Premier Gordon Campbell to former Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire. Whatever the original objective might have been, the actual environmental impact of what will be chosen has since become of little consequence. In fact, knowing the impact has been carefully avoided. Here’s a telling example of how pervasive the avoidance of truth has been on this issue.
    Recall that at the beginning of this story I referred to a 2004 petition by Ecojustice to the federal government. The information Ecojustice used to press its campaign against Victoria’s treatment system turned out to be flawed, and in the years since, scientists have confirmed the CRD’s source control program has removed a big chunk of the contaminants. During that time, many local marine scientists publicly questioned the value of land-based treatment and expressed concerns about its associated environmental risks. By late 2012, enough doubts had been raised about the CRD’s direction that motions were put forward that would have provided time for seeking further input from the scientific community on the actual risks, if any, posed by Victoria's marine-based system.
    One might expect that an organization like Ecojustice would have been in full support of such an exercise. Who wouldn’t want to confirm that the best direction was being taken?
    Apparently, Ecojustice didn’t want to know. In a letter sent to CRD directors before they voted on the motions, Ecojustice lawyers implicitly threatened the CRD with legal action under the Species at Risk Act if it approved any further consideration. The motions failed.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

    Roszan Holmen
    July 2016
    A First Nation’s claim to Vancouver Island’s rail corridor could spell the end of the E&N revival.
     
    RUN A TRAIN, OR LOSE THE CORRIDOR. That’s the latest message from the Attorney General of Canada, in its response to a First Nation’s lawsuit. The Snaw-Naw-As is calling for a return of the land taken from its reserve more than 100 years ago for the purpose of extending the E&N rail line to Courtenay. In December, it filed a civil claim in the BC Supreme Court against the Island Corridor Foundation and the Attorney General.
    This spring, the AG filed its response, sending a clear message to the ICF: the clock is ticking to fix the tracks and revive the railway.
    When the Right-Of-Way through Snaw-Naw-As territory ceases to be used for “railway purposes,” the land reverts to Canada in trust for the Snaw-Naw-As, reads the AG’s response. If successful, the lawsuit could remove a 1.4-kilometre section from the midpoint of the 225-kilometre railway line, ending any hope of reviving passenger service from Courtenay to Victoria. The ruling could also set a precedent for the other 12 First Nations whose reserves the corridor intersects.  
    “The Island Corridor Foundation says it was founded to protect the Corridor. Unfortunately, they’ve also inherited a bunch of historical grievances,” said Snaw-Naw-As Chief Brent Edwards. 
    These grievances date back to the creation of the reserve.  
    In 1877, the Joint Indian Reserve Commission carved out the boundaries for what is now the Snaw-Naw-As reserve on the south shore of Nanoose Bay. At the time, a wagon road intersected the reserve. In 1912, the reserve was sliced a second time when the Canadian Pacific Railway was granted a 10.79-acre Right-Of-Way through the 140-acre reserve for $650.
    Today, that sleepy dirt road has grown into  a four-lane, divided highway, effectively cutting the community in two, without so much as an intersection to connect both sides. Adding to the frustration is the E&N’s current state of limbo.
    It’s been five years since the emergency suspension of the E&N’s passenger rail service, and almost two years since the last freight train travelled this section of rail. For the 250 members of the Snaw-Naw-As, the unused corridor represents nothing but an opportunity cost.
    “That railway is in our way,” said Chief Edwards. “For us it’s really simple. That piece of property is not being used for what it was expropriated for…so the civil claim is basically asking to have that portion of property returned to us so we can make better use of it.”
    Hypothetically, the same logic could apply to the road: “If they invented flying cars, and they stopped using Highway 19, we would expect them to give that property back,” he said. 
    “Snaw-Naw-As is really pushed to its limits of its ability to develop,” said Robert Janes, the lawyer representing the Snaw-Naw-As. For instance, the rail corridor monopolizes highway-side land that could be commercially developed. Where the tracks split off from the highway, they create a wedge of unusable land. Also, the Nation is working on building a new traffic light to better connect the community, but the adjacent rail crossing adds complexity and expense, Janes explained. 
    “Snaw-Naw-As needs are such that it cannot just stand by and wait until some day somebody decides to do something about the railway,” said Janes. “My hope is the political actors behind the Island Corridor Foundation use this (case) as an opportunity to evaluate what really are their needs…We don’t anticipate there will be any significant rail traffic between Nanaimo and Comox at any time in the future.” 
    To win its civil suit, the Snaw-Naw-As must convince the judge of a two-point argument: first, that rail is dead, at least running north of Nanaimo; and second, that in this scenario, the Snaw-Naw-As has an historical claim to the corridor within its reserve boundaries. We’ll look at the case for both. 
     
    IN ITS NOTICE OF CIVIL CLAIM, the Snaw-Naw-As argues the Right-Of-Way through its territory is no longer being used for the railway, and there is no reasonable prospect that railway infrastructure will be restored to a condition sufficient to operate trains.
    It’s an argument the Island Corridor Foundation rejects entirely. 
    “The railway continues to operate” according to its filed response. The ICF continues to maintain tracks and crossing signals, and continues to consult with stakeholders, it argues. Further, the ICF says it intends to refurbish the rail corridor, and has raised more than $20 million to do so. 
    On this issue, the Attorney General takes no position, claiming no knowledge of the state of rail operations. 
    It’s a conspicuous silence, considering track upgrades have been waiting on federal approval for more than four years, thereby tying up a matching provincial grant. To quickly recap: In April 2012, Infrastructure Canada pledged $7.5 million for the E&N, pending completion of five conditions. For instance, the ICF must confirm no further federal investment will be required, and must pass a federal project review. 
    To this day, Infrastructure Canada will not say which of the conditions have been met, or give a timeline for a funding decision. Instead, it says only that it “is reviewing the (Snaw-Naw-As) lawsuit to understand any potential impacts,” according to a written response. 
    It’s a bit of a circular argument: The federal government won’t hand over the money because of the lawsuit, and the lawsuit could win because of the lack of federal funding required to kickstart track upgrades.
    Meanwhile, regional funding commitments are now starting to unravel, poking holes in the ICF’s $20.9 million plan to upgrade the tracks. What’s more, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest the upgrade plan does not pass muster to begin with, and may not pass a federal review.
    So is rail dead? Officially, no. Realistically, maybe. 
     
    IF THE ISLAND CORRIDOR FOUNDATION is eventually forced to abandon its mission to revive the rail line, the future of the corridor depends on whom you ask. 
    According to the ICF, the answer is straightforward. 
    “The corridor is owned by the Island Corridor Foundation as fee simple,” said ICF chair Judith Sayers. “I’ve never seen a court take away fee simple lands from anyone…If we ever get to that point where we can’t get the train going…then of course we’ll continue to use it as bike paths and trails.” 
    This Plan B might not be realized without a fight, however. If the Right-of-Way reverts to Canadian ownership in trust for the Snaw-Naw-As—as the AG argues—it’s clear the First Nation will have little appetite for cycling trails. 
    “How can we support people utilizing that as a recreational thoroughfare when we administrate poverty?” asked Chief Edwards. “One of the reasons we administrate poverty is our access to infrastructure and lands…are being hindered by a corridor that’s not being used.”
    Resentment toward the E&N is not unique to the Snaw-Naw-As. 
    “Songhees does not support the Island Corridor Foundation,” said its Chief Ron Sam in an email. “We share the same frustrations of Snaw-Naw-As and other Nations whose lands this rail line impacts.” 
    Judith Sayers says she can sympathize, though she doesn’t agree. She has a unique insight into the issue, as chair of the Island Corridor Foundation, but also as a former Hupacasath Chief and former chair of National Aboriginal Economic Development at UVic. 
    “The E&N land grant has been a huge issue for most of the First Nations on Vancouver Island; it’s an outstanding issue that needs to be resolved,” she said. However, Sayers insists the federal government created these problems and needs to be the one to resolve them—not the ICF. 
    “We’ve always looked at this as an opportunity for First Nations to have a say in the rail running through their communities,” Sayers said, adding the E&N promises new economic opportunities. 
    Now, her challenge is to prove the case for rail, and convince her funders. It will be no small job and time is running out. 
    Roszan Holmen, a producer for CFAX 1070, has covered the E&N and ICF’s challenges in previous Focus articles, including her Webster award-winning feature “More Red Lights Ahead?” (Dec 2014) and “Critical Crossroads for Rail on the Island” (May/June 2016).

    David Broadland
    July 2016
    Contamination of local politics by a false pretence and a toxic promise may require primary treatment at the ballot box.
     
    ENVIRONMENT MINISTER BARRY PENNER ordered the CRD to shift to land-based sewage treatment in 2006. His claim that Victoria’s outfalls were contaminating the seabed has since been proven untrue.
    As well, Washington State legislators have provided evidence that Penner’s action was prompted by an unpublicized agreement between then-Premier Gordon Campbell and then-Washington Governor Christine Gregoire. Was the legislated right of Victoria electors to control their own financial resources stripped from them under false pretences?
    Are there other reasons why the Province is justified in preventing Victorians from making a democratic decision through a referendum about what form of sewage treatment would be best for the community?
     
    OVER THE NEXT 30 YEARS, Victoria-area households will pay somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1.2 to $2.2 billion to fund borrowing by the Capital Regional District for land-based sewage treatment. The costs of operating those facilities over that period will add another $650-$900 million to the cost of treatment—a service that numerous local marine scientists and health officials have said will provide little or no measureable health or environmental benefit.
    Once initial annual costs have been settled, electors will be expected to keep paying for this service in perpetuity. The legal right of Victoria electors to choose by a referendum whether or not they are willing to incur the debt those billions in payments would finance was taken from them in 2006. That right is generally protected by provincial legislation, but in this case the need for consent was overturned by a never-before-used section of the Environmental Management Act. That protected right now appears to have been taken under false pretences.
    At the time, the Province claimed an area of the seabed around each of the city’s two marine outfalls was so contaminated that they could each be designated a “contaminated site” under BC’s Contaminated Sites Regulation. It was widely accepted in the community at the time that the pollution had to be stopped and recalcitrant taxpayers could not be allowed to stand in the way of environmental protection. Then-BC Environment Minister Barry Penner justified this action on the basis of what came to be known as the MacDonald Report. That report has since been exposed as fundamentally flawed and its main conclusion just plain wrong.
    Commissioned by the Province, environmental scientist Donald MacDonald had analysed four years of data gathered by the CRD about what was in the sediment on the seafloor in the area adjacent to each outfall. Although MacDonald admitted he had “insufficient data” to “thoroughly evaluate sediment quality conditions,” he felt he could do “a preliminary investigation.” Based on this preliminary evaluation, MacDonald reported that sediments at the outfalls “are sufficiently contaminated to warrant designation…as a contaminated site.” His report didn’t include an analysis of the source, or sources, of the contamination suggested by the CRD’s data. The outfalls were assumed to be the source. MacDonald included in his report a flow chart that showed the five steps in the process of determining whether such a site was “legally contaminated.” He noted that the second step had not been completed. To determine whether a site is “legally contaminated” would have required completion of the second step followed by three additional, onerous steps.
    Penner didn’t bother to complete even the second step. MacDonald’s report was dated May 2006, but by that July Penner had ordered the CRD to create a plan for treatment. His order was made under Section 24(3) of the Environmental Management Act. Its use implied that a significant environmental harm was occurring and suspension of the basic principle of elector assent was therefore justified. This allowed Penner to run around the step-by-step requirements of the Contaminated Sites Regulation, and it allowed him to order treatment without having to specify what, precisely, sewage treatment needed to stop.
    Penner could have used the Abatement of Municipal Pollution section of the Environmental Management Act to order the CRD to address potential contamination, but that section would have limited such work to that “reasonably necessary to control, abate or stop the pollution,” or to remediation.
    Under that section, the legal requirement for electoral approval would also have been suspended, but the changes that the CRD would be required to make would have been limited to what was “reasonably necessary” to meet provincial regulations. Penner’s ministry would have been obligated to detail precisely what was “reasonably necessary.” He didn’t do that. Instead, he used Section 24 and opened up Pandora’s box. In his order to the CRD Penner stated: “To ensure value for taxpayers, I encourage the CRD to consider new technologies and alternative financing and delivery options, including the potential for private sector development.”
    Given that vague direction, it was perhaps inevitable that, 10 years later, the cost of the CRD’s considerations would have mounted to $70 million and the community would be divided into three camps over what action needed to be taken. But during that time, two facts have emerged that challenge the right of the Province to enable the CRD to proceed any further without seeking elector approval.
    First, over the past ten years the CRD has continued to monitor the sediment chemistry at the outfalls. Report after report has shown that, aside from occasional exceedances of permitted levels of a few substances, neither outfall would have qualified as a “contaminated site” under the Provincial regulation.
    Specifically, in 2011, environmental scientists with Golder and Associates completed an extensive study that looked at the trend in contamination at the outfalls between 1991 and 2009. They concluded the data “does not provide strong evidence that toxicity or other biological responses are expected.”
    In 2012, a scientific study authored by Mark Yunker, Avrael Perreault and Chris Lowe presented information that has explained the presence of unexpectedly high levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in sediments to the east of the Macaulay outfall. In a wonderful piece of scientific detective work, their analysis eliminated both Penner’s theory—contamination by PAHs from wastewater—and a subsequent theory that the contamination was the result of the sinking of the collier San Pedro off Brotchie Ledge in 1891. By analysing the chemical signature of the predominant PAHs in the contaminated sediments, the scientists were able to determine a more likely source: “dredged sediment containing pyrolised coal waste from a former coal gas plant in Victoria Harbour” that had been dumped there long before the outfall was even built.
    At Clover Point, it turns out, there is so little sediment on the rocky bottom to test that reliable samples are difficult for scientists to even obtain. Nevertheless, the data from the last sediment survey conducted there in 2012 showed only a single reading in one location for only one substance—copper—that was above the Province’s guidelines. CRD scientist Chris Lowe told Focus that the as-yet unpublished data for the 2015 sediment survey showed the latest reading for copper at that location was a little more than one-half of the 2012 reading.
    In other words, although there is seabed contamination near the outfalls, the contribution from the outfalls to that contamination is limited and there’s no evidence of worsening environmental conditions. This is what local marine scientists have been saying for several years.
    The second piece of evidence that has emerged that challenges the Province’s removal of the requirement for elector consent originated in Olympia, Washington. A letter written to Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps by Washington State Representative Jeff Morris and signed by 37 other Washington legislators confirmed that Penner’s order to the CRD was, in fact, motivated by an unpublicized agreement made between then-BC Premier Gordon Campbell and then-Washington Governor Christine Gregoire in June 2006. Campbell and Gregoire and their respective cabinets had met at that time as part of a process “to enhance trade opportunities and create stronger ties between the two jurisdictions.” According to the legislators, during discussions relating to Vancouver’s hosting of the 2010 Olympics, Gregoire told Campbell her government was unhappy about promises made about sewage treatment in Victoria that had not been kept. As a result of that, the legislators claim, Penner ordered the CRD “to make good on those promises.”
    According to Morris, then, Penner’s order to Victoria was part of a trade deal. The contamination claimed by the MacDonald Report provided Penner with a plausible rationale for ordering Victoria to shift to land-based treatment. Invoking Section 24 ensured that Victoria electors would not be able to stand in the way of Campbell’s promise to Gregoire.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.
     

    Leslie Campbell
    July 2016
    BC’s Seniors Advocate Isobel Mackenzie makes the case for more government intervention on behalf of seniors.
     
    I MEET WITH BC SENIORS ADVOCATE Isobel Mackenzie weighed down by personal experience of aging parents and relations, and complaints about “the system” from friends and fed-up professionals in the health and homecare fields. Much of my baggage points to at least some systemic dysfunction and an apparent disconnect between what is claimed about the government’s respect for seniors and what’s happening on the ground.
    After reading through most of the eight reports produced by Mackenzie’s office over the past two years, I discover the data largely dovetails with my experiences. It certainly makes clear that we are not doing enough for a significant number of seniors, particularly those with lower incomes or who reside in rural and northern areas of the province. 
    Mackenzie was appointed BC’s Seniors Advocate—the first such in Canada—in 2014 after an 18-year career with Victoria-based Beacon Community Services. As Beacon’s executive director, she led the implementation of a new model of dementia care that has become a national best practice. 
    In her office on the main floor of the Blanshard Street Ministry of Health building, Mackenzie is keen to talk about anything and everything related to seniors. 
    We get right into her recent response—in no uncertain terms—to a June 7 column by Globe & Mail writer Margaret Wente. In “Time to Soak the Seniors,” Wente suggested the federal government is throwing too much money at seniors. Mackenzie described the column as a “generationally divisive and stunningly inaccurate generalization of a group of people based on their age.” Contrary to the image painted by Wente of seniors who use their Old Age Security (OAS) “to pay the air-conditioning bill for the winter place in Florida,” Mackenzie points out that “fully half of single Canadian seniors are living on less than $26,000 a year.”
    She tells me she does not disagree with Wente’s questioning of OAS payments made to those who do enjoy a high income: “People with $100,000 in income don’t need…OAS. I agree with that.” And in fact, she says, many BC seniors are doing just fine. “But offices like this don’t exist for the majority,” she comments.
    And she certainly takes issue with Wente including seniors’ health care costs in her calculations of government largesse towards them: “Before we go blaming seniors for the fact they need a new hip or bypass surgery, we should first thank them for the billions, yes billions of dollars they save the health care system by taking care of each other.”
    BC seniors, she tells me, “have the lowest median income of any age cohort. Median is a much more meaningful number than average, because average is skewed if there are some high income earners, and conversely if there are some low income earners. So we know that half of the seniors in this province live on less than $26,000 a year. We know that they disproportionately live alone, relative to the rest of the population, so it’s one income for the household.”
    Mackenzie’s research shows that it’s income that largely influences other determinants of health. A low income can play out in many ways, from not being able to afford hearing aids, which in turn cuts one off from others, which leads to depression, to forcing a senior out of a beloved home when maintenance costs mount.
    BC has a host of programs aimed at helping low income seniors—programs like the Shelter Aid for Elderly Renters (SAFER), Medical Service Plan Premium Assistance, Fair Pharmacare, Property Tax Deferment Program, and Home Adaptations for Independence. Ironically, Mackenzie’s research indicates, it is exactly the people most in need who are least aware of them. 
     
    Hurdles with home support
    The Seniors Advocate’s 2015 Seniors’ Housing in BC report provided a snapshot of the places seniors call home: A rather surprising 93 percent of seniors live independently. Twenty-six percent live alone. Twenty percent rent. Eighty percent are homeowners, four-fifths of them mortgage-free. Only three percent live in assisted living facilities and four percent in “residential” or long-term care (LTC). Among those over 85, 15 percent live in LTC. 
    BC seniors who are living independently constitute by far the largest group of seniors. Some need and receive subsidized support services to be able to remain independent. They’re charged a reduced rate based on income. This might mean a care worker dropping by daily for an hour or two to help a senior get up and dressed, do regular meal preparation, medication checks, weekly showers and other personal care. Housework is generally not provided.
    Despite the rising population, such assistance, Mackenzie tells me, is decreasing. The number of hours of home support went down in three out of five health authorities (Island Health was one of them), while the number of clients increased in four out of five.
    Yet she acknowledges that all the research shows that helping people stay in their own homes not only keeps them happy, but helps save taxpayer dollars. And, she says, “I believe the government is genuine when it says ‘We want to keep people in their homes.’”
    So why the apparent disconnect? Why are home care hours being cut back or limited when a bit more might, in the end, save the government money? 
    The delivery of services, she notes, is driven by funding decisions and human resources. “I think what happens is there are so many layers and people involved, and different perspectives, and different values…” Case managers are people, after all, and each applies their own values at least to some degree; the evaluation process for care, making a judgement about what is safe, is not an exact science, she says.
    And clients are living longer, with complex needs and evolving expectations. To illustrate, Mackenzie says, “I looked at the assessments of our home support clients and found 53 percent meet the clinical complexity of people in residential care. When I started 20 years ago, that number was about 10 percent.” Additionally, she points out, we’ve “fragmented the system.” Even something as simple as approving the installation of a raised toilet seat for a client can now mean home visits by two professionals with attendant communications—and delays.
    In keeping with Mackenzie’s penchant for fact-based decision-making, a survey was recently completed by her office of the 22,000 people receiving subsidized home support 9000 surveys came back. Results will be reported on later this summer, but she gives me some hints about what it shows. 
    “I think about 79 percent say that the program is usually or always meeting their needs. When it’s not meeting their needs, the number one thing that people want is housekeeping, followed by meal preparation.”
    She was surprised that while the survey results point to some frustration with the multiple workers sent out to provide care, it wasn’t “to the degree we expected to find.” 
    “The other thing it shows is about medications. Some of the good news is most people knew the medications they were taking and why they were taking them, but they didn’t know the side effects. And so, we have to remember that part of the job is to say, ‘Okay, Leslie, this is your statin pill, this is your blood pressure pill. This is why you’re taking them.’ The other half is to say, ‘Now, some potential side effects from these drugs could include…mental confusion, or dry mouth, or lethargy…” This is particularly important with seniors as many drug side effects could be mistaken as just another challenge of aging. 
    Mackenzie has now visited communities all over the province and thinks those of us in Victoria and the lower mainland have it pretty good on the home support front—at least compared to rural areas where just finding people to do the work is a big problem. It was, she tells me “an unbelievably eye-opening experience when I started to go to other parts of the province.” 
    Home support programs are supposedly province-wide, but she’s found stark differences across BC. She tells me one part of the province has cut meal preparation from care plans whereas others include it. Even between South Island and North Island there are “different approval processes for maximum hours.” She explains, while there’s no formal maximum hours, the general rule of thumb was always 120 hours a month, or 4 four hours a day, of subsidized care for lower income seniors. 
    But some health authorities aren’t doing that, she says. “In some health authorities, the discharge nurse will come in and say, ‘Well, you need four hours of home support a day. We can provide two. How are you going to provide the other two?’”
    Which leads to the matter of affordability.
     
    Tapping into home equity
    As mentioned, 80 percent of BC seniors are homeowners. For low income senior homeowners, Mackenzie is advocating the BC government come up with a plan—two plans actually—that would allow them to access the equity in their homes. 
    Together they would give such seniors needed funds to fix the furnace or roof, and afford more care services. The Office of the Seniors Advocate has already calculated that the average monthly cost of homeowning, without a mortgage, is $1000. Some seniors, especially when single or widowed, are being forced to move simply for lack of funds—while their home could easily be worth $500,000 or a million, at least in the hot markets of Victoria and Vancouver.
    To force someone to sell such a home for want of the cash to pay for a new furnace or to keep up with utility and insurance payments seems absurd. Where could they go in such low vacancy times and pay less than their mortgage-free home? Some could well be forced into subsidized assisted living or residential care facilities.
    To address such realities, Mackenzie has asked the government to establish a “Homeowner Expense Deferral Account” which would allow seniors to tap into the equity in their homes to pay for housing costs such as hydro, home insurance and major repairs. The government is thinking about it.
    Meanwhile, she’s thinking about a broader application of the concept of tapping into home equity. “The question is, in my mind, does government have an interest in allowing seniors to access as much equity as possible to support their independence? I think they do. Any of that equity that they’re paying to commercial interest charges [with reverse mortgages], is money they can’t spend on themselves. And so, if we had a provincial program, under similar financial rules as property tax deferral, it doesn’t make the Province money, but it doesn’t cost the Province money, either.”
    Regarding the broader program, she notes, “By the time you need full-time live-in care, you’re not talking 20 years of life, right? You’re not talking about 20 years of financing. You might be talking about 5, maybe 10.”
    This type of program, she feels, would allow a more sustainable way for seniors to access their equity than do commercial reverse mortgages. 
    Both the Expense Deferral and this broader  program could be offered at no cost or risk  to taxpayers. And given the cost of subsidized care—for example, LTC costs are $7000/month, with clients charged a maximum of only $3157—the plans should ultimately save the government money.
    Mackenzie believes the government is receptive, but cautious. “The government’s concern is, number one, they want to make sure that there’s enough equity left in the house to pay off what’s owed when the house is sold. Fair enough. Certainly you shouldn’t allow it at 55, like we have started to allow property tax deferral, but you may want to say these are the triggers for accessing it.” She says the government tends to like simplicity and prefers to not interfere with the market. “So it’s my job to remind government that [it could put] an income test on accessing this money. These are folks you’re going to be taking care of one way or another, and it’s convenient, it’s serendipitous that what people want actually happens to be what will cost the government less.”
    Mackenzie is also concerned about appropriate housing in rural areas. Think of a widow, she suggests, who wants to move from a farm into the nearby town—or just wants to downsize to a more manageable home.  “There are no condos. There are no patio homes. There’s no assisted living,” she says. “Because the private sector isn’t going in there and building these kinds of things because there aren’t enough people. So, for those folks, the government’s going to have to look at its role in the supply of suitable independent housing.”
     
    The “FAB” system not so fab
    Once an elder is deemed, through a formal assessment process, to have needs that make it impossible for that person to be safely cared for in the community or assisted living, his or her name goes on a waitlist for one of BC’s 300 publicly subsidized LTC facilities. They are told to choose a facility—referred to as “Preferred Bed” (PB)—but are also informed they must take the “First Appropriate Bed” (FAB) in their chosen geographical area. They are warned to be ready to move within 48 hours of approval for a bed. 
    Time spent on the waitlist seems to vary wildly among regions, and Mackenzie’s numbers appear rosier than the present day realities that have come to my attention. Those statistics, for 2013-14, show Island Health seniors spent an average of 41 days on the waitlist before getting a bed. Caseworkers have told me it’s now averaging six months in Victoria.
    Mackenzie believes that 5 to 15 percent of BC seniors living in residential care may be incorrectly housed—they are more suited for assisted living or being back in the community with supports. She has called for a reassessment of certain residents, allowing them—if desired—to move elsewhere. This could free up needed LTC beds as assisted living facilities have a 10 percent vacancy rate.
    This May, a 600-page downloadable Residential Care Facilities Quick Facts Directory was published on the Seniors Advocate website. It provides standardized, easy to read, comparative information on each long-term care facility in BC—definitely not a marketing brochure, says Mackenzie. For each facility it indicates the number of beds, shared rooms, percentage of the residents on antidepressants and antipsychotics, the number of reported “incidents” (falls, aggression, etc), when it was last inspected, and what percentage of the residents get recreation and other therapies. 
    Given my own experience with elders on LTC waitlists, this knowledge is a mixed blessing. Stated preferences seem to count for nothing. Mackenzie’s own data is a little less grim. During 2013/14, clients got their “Preferred Bed” 23 to 45 percent of the time, depending on health authority. Even after they accepted the “First Appropriate Bed” (FAB) and applied for a transfer, only 4 to 22 percent of the time—depending on health authority—did they get to move to their desired facility.
    Mackenzie says her office hears from many frustrated seniors and their families about this. “Some seniors in more rural and remote regions of the province can find their spouse placed hundreds of kilometres away under the FAB policy.” The FAB system was to be used in tandem with “a fair, equitable and transparent transfer process that would ensure seniors got to their preferred facility as soon as possible.” But that, says Mackenzie, is not happening. 
    She has recommended health authorities “be diligent” in filling available beds first from the preferred facility transfer list. She knows this is a bit more work for everyone, as it can mean multiple domino-like moves, but if it’s “implemented, monitored and enforced in all health authorities, then seniors and their family members will have greater certainty. They will know exactly how many people are ahead of them on the transfer list and there will be a general idea of how often a bed becomes available in a certain facility. The current situation gives no ability to predict because beds are getting filled first by people on the waiting list, not from the transfer list.”
    Mackenzie has also asked the government to ensure that by 2025, 95 percent of all residential care beds in the province will be single room occupancy. Meanwhile she’d like to see those seniors who end up—through no choice of their own—sharing a room, get a rate adjustment. 
    Mackenzie and her team are currently gearing up to do a massive survey on long term care facilities from the user’s point of view. Her office’s biggest undertaking to date, trained multi-lingual volunteers will interview all 27,000 seniors in care and their most frequent visitor. The survey, says Mackenzie, “[will let us] see if and how the quality of experience is different depending on which care facility, which health authority, which area within the health authority. Are there differences? We’re going to find out.”
    But again, I wonder how that knowledge will serve seniors if they cannot choose a facility with much certainty of ending up there. Finding themselves placed in a facility they purposely avoided choosing because of negative reviews might actually be quite worrisome and depressing.
     
    Funding all over the map
    Some of BC’s 300 subsidized facilities—two-thirds in fact—are operated by non-profits or private companies on contract to the health authorities. The 27,000 residents in these facilities pay 80 percent of their income towards their care to a maximum of $3157. Asked why there are only 2000 BC elders in totally private beds, Mackenzie notes simply, “Because it costs them eight grand a month.” 
    The government calculates funding for operators of LTC facilities on the basis of 3.36 hours of care per resident daily for such tasks as toileting, feeding, medication management, and bathing. When compiling information for the Quick Facts Directory, says Mackenzie, “we asked every facility what their funded direct hours of care were, and we found out that 82 percent came up short of the recommended 3.36.” 
    Yet, she points out, there is no penalty. “Right now, if you run a care facility and you aren’t meeting standards, or you have licensing infractions, [inspectors] come on-site, and it’s embarrassing, and you [generally] fix it, right? But there’s no financial penalty if you don’t. The ultimate penalty is they’ll close you down…But [the government] doesn’t really want to do that because where are they going to put the people who are living there?” She believes there should be a financial incentive for compliance. 
    The funding, she says, is all over the map. “We’ve done the analysis seven ways to Sunday. We’ve looked at the resident assessment instrument…to see if there is a pattern of higher complexity with higher funding. But there’s nothing.”
    Mackenzie says the ministry is looking at it. “I’ve said I believe the 3.36 is what everybody should be funded for, and then you do something called ‘case mix adjust,’ which is you look at the profile, you look at the assessments of the folks, and if there’s higher complexity than norm, you would staff more. If there was lower complexity, you might adjust the staffing downwards. But that’s not happening right now.” 
    When she hears health authorities making arguments claiming they will look at increasing their staff as funding allows, she says: “Whoa, wait a minute. We’re not talking about when we can afford to upgrade the car…We’re talking about the people in the care facility today who aren’t going to benefit from that tomorrow. They’re the ones who are not getting the [correct level of services].” She cites recreational therapy as an example, noting that BC’s residential care facilities provide less per person than Alberta’s do. Moreover, “We use more antipsychotics and antidepressants in BC for people who don’t need them than they do in Alberta.”
    While admitting that, at this point, a causal link isn’t established, she does say, “A population that is more sedated is going to be less likely to engage in recreational therapy [which] does require resources, staffing. And so if you’re lower on the staffing, and you’re higher on the drug use, yes, they could be linked.”
     
    47 percent on antidepressants
    The statistics show that the use of antipsychotics has come down from roughly 50 percent of all BC’s LTC residents several years ago to closer to 30 percent—still high considering that they are being used “off label” on a group of frail elders who can experience severe side effects.
    “The good news is, it’s coming down,” says Mackenzie. “It’s coming down everywhere. People are becoming aware of this. The not-so-good news is BC is still one of the highest. Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario are all better than we are.”
    Asked about the doctors’ role in prescribing these powerful drugs for so many elders, she says she has talked with them and, “depending on the doctor…many will acknowledge that there’s over-prescribing—but they don’t over-prescribe.” She also points out that “within the medical community, there is ageism. Again, I don’t like generalizations, so not all doctors. But a lack of either awareness or understanding of alternatives, a lowered expectation for seniors around life experience, maybe. I think families play a part in this as well: You know, ‘mum’s not happy, or mum’s behaviour is [problematic]. What can we do?’ It’s no different than you and I seeking antibiotics—just give me the pill I can take to feel better, right? We do this at any age. It doesn’t stop when we get older. When we get older, we sometimes have our family members [making requests as well].”
    “The antipsychotics are about wanting to regulate their behaviour…On the behavioural front in care facilities, there’s a desire for compliance. It’s communal living, and maybe we need to be more tolerant of different behaviours. Not dangerous behaviours, but different behaviours.”
    And on the antidepressant side, she says, “maybe we need to be more tolerant…and recognize that unhappiness and clinical depression are not the same thing.” Still, it’s disconcerting to learn that, on average, 47 percent of residential care clients are being prescribed antidepressant medications—especially when only 24 percent of them have been diagnosed as depressed.
    Mackenzie’s staff is examining the data to figure out what medications people were on prior to entering a facility. She wonders if it isn’t a completely “normal” reaction for a person entering a care facility to feel unhappy, even upset. The desire to “fix” the situation, she feels, sometimes overrides accepting that an elder may simply need time to adjust.
     
    Keeping government on the ball
    Given the rising tide of the elder demographic, the time seems ripe to adjust “the system” to be more efficient, effective, compassionate and fair at helping seniors navigate the last decade or two of their lives. Seniors already represent 17 percent of Canada’s population, and according to Statistics Canada, by 2031 they will be closer to 24 percent. 
    Being Seniors Advocate means Mackenzie is in a key place to help us change the system. But is the government listening?
    Mackenzie points to at least two areas where the government has taken action: First, it has relaxed the rules that in the past would have forced a senior to move from his or her assisted living unit into a residential care home. For instance, they can now, up to a point, have more assistance with eating, dressing, personal hygiene, medications and rehab therapies without rocking the boat. Secondly, the government has increased the number of seniors who qualify for a subsidy for MSP payments.
    But, as her numerous reports attest, there’s much more that can and should be done.
    Armed with all the data she’s gleaned over the past two years, Mackenzie will keep at it. She recognizes the need for both patience and persistence when it comes to dealing with the government and existing institutions. “You’ve got to get their attention, you’ve got to keep their attention. I’ve learned that lesson. You may think you’ve got them, but, then there’s a shiny red ball over there and they’ve moved on. So you’ve got to go back and say, okay, we haven’t forgotten about this. We gave you some time. Where is this? And keep harping on about it.”
    Leslie Campbell recommends that readers visit www.seniorsadvocatebc.ca for further information on the seniors situation in BC.

    David Broadland
    May 2016
    Puget Sound is a mess of sewage and toxic chemical discharges. Should Victoria taxpayers have to pay for Seattle’s sins?
     
    WASHINGTON STATE’S OPPORTUNISTIC WAR OF WORDS against Victoria’s science-endorsed form of sewage treatment reopened on a new front in February. With the cost of placating Washington’s claims of environmental damage to international waters now hovering near $1 billion, Victoria could have lobbed some scientific evidence across the border. As usual, however, Victoria taxpayers were deserted by their own elected representatives, who backed down without uttering a contrary word.
    Yet the timing and substance of Representative Jeff Morris’ stun-grenade attack were so suspect that anyone with a pen could have poked them full of holes.
    On February 23, the Seattle Times reported that researchers had found 92 chemicals of concern, some associated with drugs—from caffeine to cocaine—in the tissue of juvenile Chinook salmon netted in Puget Sound estuaries into which sewage treatment plants discharge effluent. The researchers also found the chemicals in the effluent from these plants. The Times story noted that scientist James Meador’s earlier research had shown that juvenile Chinook salmon swimming through contaminated estuaries in Puget Sound die at nearly twice the rate of fish elsewhere. Other scientific research has linked nutritional stresses experienced by endangered southern resident orca to the decline in abundance of chinook salmon
    Then, just two days after the embarrassing drugged-Chinook story appeared, Morris announced a legislative proposal that would ban Washington State employees from claiming travel expenses for trips made to Victoria until Victoria builds a sewage treatment plant. Meador’s research was pushed off Seattle front pages and replaced with one that linked the Sound’s sewage problems to Victoria.
    A week after that, Morris sent a letter to Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps claiming that “chemical loading” from Victoria’s marine-based sewage treatment system poses a “long-term risk” to “our shared waters.” Morris’ letter was signed by 36 other Washington legislators whose districts also border on Puget Sound. 
    Was the legislators’ initiative greeted with guffaws in Victoria? Not at all. A press release from BC Environment Minister Mary Polak stated, “Washington state residents can rest assured that Greater Victoria will have sewage treatment in the near future.” Meanwhile, Helps wrote a letter to a Victoria newspaper stating: “I want the public and our colleagues in Washington to know we take their actions seriously.”
    Morris’ letter to Helps outlined the 23-year history of BC politicians being “forced”—that’s the word Morris used—to accept Washington’s position that Victoria’s treatment system is somehow affecting Puget Sound’s environmental health. Morris’ letter provided point-by-point proof that BC’s acceptance of Washington’s claim had been obtained either by threat of economic boycott or the offer of a deal too good to refuse. That deal-making included, according to Morris, BC Premier Gordon Campbell agreeing in 2006 to command Victoria to build land-based treatment in exchange for Washington Governor Christine Gregoire’s support for Vancouver’s 2010 Olympic bid.
    Morris neglected to include in his timeline the 1994 findings of a joint panel of eminent BC and Washington marine scientists. Their report, The Shared Marine Waters of British Columbia and Washington, noted that “waters off Victoria theoretically could contain about 20 times as much dissolved sewage effluent from Vancouver and Seattle as from Victoria itself.” The scientists also noted that, in Puget Sound, Victoria’s contribution to the concentration of sewage effluent would be slightly more than one percent of Seattle’s.
    Morris’ demand that Victoria get on with construction of a sewage treatment plant was apparently precipitated by a fuzzy February 15 Times Colonist story headlined: “Heavy rain prompts health advisories at capital’s outfalls.” The story seemed to report that Victoria’s outfalls were unscreened and, following a period of heavy rain, were discharging “floatables, including plastics” that were washing up on local beaches.
    Based on his understanding of that story, Morris predicted widespread damage to the economy and environment: “We recognize the shared risk in short-term loss of tourism activity on both sides of the border from publicity surrounding this issue. However, we believe the long-term damage to marine mammals, in particular, but all marine wildlife does more long-term damage to ecotourism.”
    Morris finished his letter by asserting: “We can no longer tolerate the long-term risk that the chemical loading caused by Victoria CRD’s inaction has brought to our shared waters.”
    I wrote to Morris inviting him to answer questions about his letter and the issue, especially his claim about “chemical loading” of “shared waters.” He wrote back but refused to respond to questions about chemical loading because I had used the words “marine-based treatment.” That’s the expression 10 prominent BC marine scientists have used to describe Victoria’s current treatment system. Morris wrote: “Using the term ‘marine based treatment’ to describe dumping raw sewage into our shared waters is demonstrative of a story bent that I do not want to participate in.”
    Even as Morris refused to participate, though, he dug himself a deeper hole: “The straight-face test was the [Times Colonist] article pointing out that several outfalls were not even screened. My impression is that you don’t have a separate surface water collection system from your dumping of raw sewage in the Straight [sic] of Juan de Fuca. In the USA it is a requirement that surface water be a separate collection system from the primary and secondary sewage treatment systems.”
    Morris’ impression is wrong and so is his understanding of US requirements. Victoria’s separation of storm drains and sewers is just like Seattle’s and 10 other Puget Sound communities, including Anacortes, Bellingham and Mt Vernon, all of which are wholly or partly in Morris’ 40th Legislative District. Each of these cities have storm drains and sewers that have some interconnections, usually by design but sometimes through deterioration. During periods of heavy rain, sewage can flow from sewers into storm drains and this results in what sanitary engineers call “combined sewer overflows” (CSOs). CSOs act as a relief valve to prevent sewage from backing up into homes or overflowing land during peak rain events. This condition exists throughout North America, but construction of a treatment plant in Victoria would have no direct impact on CSOs here. That’s because the flow of sewage into storm drains occurs upstream of sewage treatment plants.
    Not only is Morris’ impression about Victoria wrong, he doesn’t seem to be aware of the current policy about CSOs in Washington State or the extent to which they are an issue there. In 2010, after years of trying to get King County to address discharges of raw sewage from over a hundred CSOs in central Seattle, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the State of Washington referred the case to the federal Department of Justice. In 2013 the US District Court for the Western District of Washington entered a consent decree to address King County’s failure to implement a long term control plan to reduce CSOs to meet the state standard of no more than one overflow per outfall per year.
    At the time, Seattle and King County agreed to spend $860 million for upgrades that will address most of their CSO problem—about 5.6 billion litres of raw sewage dumped into Seattle-area waterways each year. In 2015, a final agreement was reached that will see CSOs in King County largely eliminated by 2030—14 years from now.
    According to Washington State’s Department of Ecology—the equivalent of BC’s Ministry of Environment—there are a total of 126 stormwater outfalls in King County and the City of Seattle that discharge raw sewage each year. Most of those discharge into Lake Washington, the Lower Duwamish Waterway, and Puget Sound’s Elliot Bay, all in the most highly urbanized areas of Seattle. 
    The Department of Ecology’s records show there are 168 known CSOs discharging into the Puget Sound area, including 7 in communities in Morris’ own 40th District.
    For Morris to honestly claim that “In the USA it is a requirement that surface water be a separate collection system from the primary and secondary sewage treatment systems,” he would have to be ignorant of his state’s official policy on CSOs, know nothing about the seven CSOs in his own district and have missed the spectacular EPA lawsuit over the perennial mess in Seattle. Morris’ claim doesn’t pass his own “straight-face test.”
    Victoria’s decades-old treatment issue has long been an irresistible punching-bag for Washington  politicians. When bad news about orca or harbour seals or salmon comes over their horizon, Victoria is within easy smacking distance.
    In 2014, current Washington Governor Jay Inslee and King County Executive Dow Constantine wrote BC Premier Christy Clark after Clark’s cabinet refused to override Esquimalt’s decision to limit the size of a treatment plant that could be built at McLoughlin Point. Inslee and Constantine told Clark, “We are very concerned by the lack of progress in treating wastewater and protecting the health and habitat of Puget Sound.” After listing the steps Washington was taking to “improve the health of our waters and restore habitat,” the two contrasted their efforts with Victoria’s: “However, the continued lack of wastewater treatment in Victoria—at the entrance of Puget Sound—means Greater Victoria is not doing its fair share. This is of significant health concern for the health of the rest of the region’s waterways.”
    Like Morris’ claims, the position of Inslee and Constantine is sorely challenged by the evidence.
    First, Puget Sound’s many sewage treatment plants may be providing secondary treatment, but they’re still dumping large volumes of partially-treated sewage—and the chemicals used to kill pathogens—into constricted Puget Sound. Those plants consistently fail to comply with the requirements of the US Clean Water Act and are of a type that is inadequate to address the Sound’s growing risk of eutrophication and hypoxia.
    Secondly, the American claim that Victoria’s discharge is adversely influencing the health of Puget Sound—and so American interference in internal Canadian politics is justified—is at odds with the state’s own science on where the vast majority of toxic anthropogenic chemicals going into Puget Sound comes from: stormwater runoff.
    Washington’s most recently published (2014) “Marine Waters Condition Index” showed a downturn in the environmental health of many Puget Sound basins. The most dramatic decline was in Bellingham Bay, part of which is in Morris’ 40th District. Morris, Inslee and past Washington politicians have pointed their fingers at Victoria’s toilets as the Sound’s health has declined, but the record shows they have been largely ineffective at addressing the fundamental issues driving the deterioration: too many people living on the shores of Puget Sound and inadequate regulations and infrastructure to support that population.
     
    Washington’s dismal sewage treatment
    According to the Department of Ecology there are “about 100” publicly-owned secondary treatment plants discharging sewage effluent into Puget Sound. The two largest plants, which serve approximately 1.5 million Seattleites, discharge nearly half of the 1.2 billion litres of sewage effluent that flows into Puget Sound every day. For perspecetive, that 1.2 billion litres is 13 times more than Victoria’s 91 million litres per day.
    According to the EPA’s enforcement and compliance history database, the West Point and South plants didn’t have a single 3-month period during the last 3 years in which they fully complied with the requirements of the Clean Water Act. The largest, at West Point, was in “significant violation” of the Clean Water Act 75 percent of the time during the last three years. Even Brightwater, the new tertiary-level treatment plant serving northeast Seattle, has a solid record of either non-compliance or significant violation of the Clean Water Act over the past three years. The Anacortes plant, in Morris’ 40th District, hasn’t had a single quarter over the past three years in which it fully complied with the Clean Water Act. Likewise with Bellingham’s Post Point plant, also in Morris’ district.
    Even having a relatively good record with the EPA does not guarantee that a Puget Sound treatment plant will not have a serious negative impact on wildlife habitat. The Central Tacoma plant, the third largest on the Sound, achieved “no-violation” 60 percent of the time during the past three years—the best record of the Sound’s largest plants. Yet it was one of the plants where scientist James Meador found higher than expected levels of chemicals of concern in both the plant’s effluent and in the tissue of juvenile Chinook found immediately downstream from the plant. In previous research Meador had found that juvenile Chinook passing through such contaminated estuaries had an overall survival rate 45 percent lower than that for Chinook moving through uncontaminated estuaries.
    For this story Focus reviewed the operating permits of 77 Puget Sound treatment plants to determine their cumulative permitted discharge of suspended solids, a number that the Department of Ecology admitted it had not determined. An Ecology spokesperson said “it would take many hours by several staff to pull all of the data for each wastewater treatment plant.” Our examination revealed that the 77 plants are permitted to discharge over 32.4 million kilograms of suspended solids each year—more than five times Victoria’s current (2015) annual discharge of 6.35 million kilograms. Most of that 32.4 million kilograms is for Seattle plants and those at the south end of the Sound. If that large mass of suspended solids isn’t expected to create a problem for the constricted waters of Puget Sound, why would one-fifth of that be a problem in the rapidly changing, highly-oxygenated waters off Victoria?
     

     
    Indeed, Canadian scientists have determined that the biological oxygen demand of all sewage solids being discharged into the Salish Sea is inconsequential compared with natural sources of oxygen demand. But those treatment-related solids do create a pathway for PBDEs to get into marine waters. PBDEs—polybrominated diphenyl ethers—are a family of chemicals commonly used as flame retardants in many objects in our homes and workplaces. PBDE molecules attach themselves to particles and any suspended solids passing through a sewage treatment plant allow PBDEs to enter an aquatic environment. Canadian scientist Peter Ross’ 2005 study “Fireproof killer whales” revealed the impacts of PBDEs and PCBs on the health and reproductive capacity of orca and other marine mammals in the Salish Sea. Washington’s Department of Ecology notes that PBDEs “can affect the development, reproduction, and survival of many species. They build up in the food chain and are found in people as well as other organisms including fish and orcas in Puget Sound.”
    Since Puget Sound secondary treatment plants are permitted to discharge five times as much suspended solids—and consequently five times as much PBDEs—they represent five times the risk of Victoria’s outfalls. But solids aren’t the only part of human sewage that’s impacting the health of the Sound. One of the most troubling sewage-related problems there is the trend towards diminished dissolved oxygen. If levels fall past a certain point, fish can’t breathe.
    Several of south Puget Sound’s basins already experience at least seasonal oxygen impairment as a result of the high level of dissolved inorganic nitrogen introduced by sewage treatment plants. That nitrogen provides a ready source of nutrients for phytoplankton and could lead to eutrophication, harmful algal blooms and hypoxia.
    According to data from the Department of Ecology, secondary treatment does little to lower the amount of dissolved inorganic nitrogen discharged from Puget Sound plants. The West Point and South plants that serve central Seattle have concentrations of nitrogen in their discharges just as high as the Clover Point and Macaulay Point outfalls in Victoria. But there are two big differences in the situations of the two cities that put the waters south of Seattle at greater risk. First, Puget Sound treatment plants are discharging over twelve times as much nitrogen as Victoria does. Secondly, Victoria’s outfalls discharge to rapidly replenished, highly-oxygenated waters in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, while Seattle’s plants discharge to highly-constricted waters that take two to three months to replenish and benefit little from the energetic tidal mixing that occurs in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
     

     
    Unless Puget Sound communities spend heavily to add a higher level of treatment—such as biological nutrient removal—to existing plants, the already problematic level of anthropogenic nitrogen in the Sound will increase as fast as the population increases. That increase could be dramatic.
    In the last 10 years alone the population of Puget Sound communities grew by 420,000 to nearly 4 million. That increase is considerably more than the Capital Regional District’s entire population of 370,000. At 2015’s rate of growth, a new population as large as the CRD’s would be added to the shores of Puget Sound in just 6 years. Some Washington State projections put the population of the Puget Sound region at 8 to 9 million by 2070. By comparison, the CRD’s residential population in the area currently served by the Macaulay Point and Clover Point plants is expected to grow to a total of 457,000 by 2070, according to CRD estimates.
     

     
    While the rapid growth around Puget Sound is enriching that region’s economy, the growing impact of those people is threatening the long-term prospects of the southern resident orca. That population was protected by the US Endangered Species Act in 2005, which designated all of the waters of Puget Sound as critical habitat. With the orca’s nutritional health dependent on the abundance of Chinook salmon, and the abundance of Chinook salmon being challenged by the sewage treatment practices of Puget Sound communities, it’s hard to keep a straight face when Governor Inslee and Representative Morris wag their fingers at Victoria’s sewage treatment. Even more of a challenge to keeping normal Canadian politeness in play is Morris’ assertion that “chemical loading” caused by Victoria’s sewage treatment practices presents a serious “long-term risk” to the health of Puget Sound.
     
    Poisoned Waters
    The history and sources of chemical contamination in Puget Sound were laid bare in PBS’s 2009 Frontline documentary Poisoned Waters. That film took a hard look at Washington’s failure to clean up Puget Sound 44 years after enactment of the Clean Water Act and 36 years after creation of Superfund designations for the cleanup of sites where major chemical contamination has taken place. Poisoned Waters included only one Superfund site on the Lower Duwamish Waterway, but there are 22 Superfund sites around Puget Sound and some of the largest remain unremediated. The documentary also provided chilling insights about the source of the greatest ongoing chemical contamination of the Sound. Chilling because what Frontline found in Seattle also applies to Victoria. Journalist Hedrick Smith summed it up: “What’s making this water so sick is what scientists have now labelled the number one menace to our waterways—stormwater runoff.”
    At one point in the film Smith interviewed a diver incensed about a stormwater outfall across Elliot Bay from downtown Seattle. The diver told Smith: “The end of the pipe creates a brown noxious soup of nastiness that is unbelievable…”
    Smith responded, “Unbelievable because the water looks so good from up here. So we’re looking at something we think is clean and underneath, you can see, diving there…” The diver interrupted Smith and said, “It’s not clean. When we see that [outfall] running in full flow, we turn around and we swim the other way. Quickly. There is just this unbelievable gunk coming out the end of this pipe. This is our front yard. Would you allow your front yard to be sick?”
     

     
    Christine Gregoire, who was then Washington’s governor, quantified the “unbelievable gunk” for Smith: “We put in about 150,000 pounds a day of untreated toxics into Puget Sound. We thought all the way along that it was like a toilet, to be honest with you. What you put in you flush out, and it goes out to the ocean and gets diluted. We know that’s not true; it’s like a bathtub. So what you put in stays there.”
    Much of the “unbelievable gunk”—about 98 percent by weight—is oil, grease and petroleum, most of which is connected to the use of cars and trucks. In the film, Jay Manning, director of the Department of Ecology, tells Smith that as much oil as was spilled by the Exxon Valdez goes into Puget Sound via stormwater every two years. Gregoire’s estimate for the total weight of “untreated toxics” being flushed each year into Puget Sound from runoff works out to 23,277 metric tonnes. That’s a lot. Was she right?
    “Poisoned Waters” aired roughly in the middle of the five-year-long Puget Sound Toxics Loading Analysis (PSTLA) led by Washington’s Department of Ecology and the EPA. By the final report in 2011, the total estimated weight of “toxic chemical loading” of Puget Sound each year—from runoff, atmospheric deposition, sewage effluent and groundwater—was estimated to be in the range of 9,024 to 11,823 metric tonnes. That’s a lot less than Gregoire had told Hedrick Smith. What happened to the other half? 
    For one thing, an accounting of industrial discharges—included in the first two phases of the process that began in 2007—had magically disappeared from the final analysis in 2011. With five petrochemical refineries, three pulp and paper mills, a metal smelter and hundreds of other industrial operations discharging either directly or indirectly to Puget Sound, this was an obvious shifting of responsibility away from industrial polluters. That raises questions about the integrity of the process. Were the Americans serious about understanding what’s happening to Puget Sound? Or was political influence exerted on the final numbers to protect the economic position of such operations as refineries?
    How extensively the figures were manipulated is unknown, but there are indicators that massaging went beyond removing numbers that could be used to focus blame on specific industrial sectors. The acknowledged loading for PBDEs and PCBs seems low considering the assessment’s findings for the total annual release of these two chemicals into the Puget Sound Basin (the “Basin” includes all watersheds draining into Puget Sound). The Department of Ecology estimates 2200 kilograms of PCBs are released into the Basin each year but decided that only 3 to 20 kilograms actually find their way into the Sound. That accounts for only a tiny percentage—0.1 to 1 percent—of the acknowledged release. What is the fate of the remaining 99 to 99.9 percent?
    Likewise, Ecology estimates 700 kilograms of PBDEs are released into the Basin each year but only 28 to 54 kilograms go into Puget Sound. Comparison with the release of PBDEs from Vancouver’s Annacis Island secondary treatment plant suggests Ecology’s estimate is less than half what it should be.
    In spite of those concerns, the PSTLA numbers do allow us to compare toxic chemical loading from Puget Sound communities with toxic chemical loading from Victoria’s outfalls. The relative amounts for every chemical of concern undermines the claim by Morris and other Washington politicians that Victoria’s treatment system is posing a significant risk to shared marine waters. Even if Victoria’s outfalls emptied their contents directly into the centre of Puget Sound, their contribution to chemical loading in the Sound would be relatively small (see table below).
     

     
    The PSTLA study also considered “ocean exchange” of toxic chemicals and estimated the net outflow or inflow into Puget Sound of those chemicals. For copper, zinc and PBDEs, Puget Sound was a net exporter. On the other hand, the amounts of arsenic and lead coming into Puget Sound from ocean waters overwhelms the amounts deposited through all other pathways. According to the analyses, there is a small—approximately 1 kilogram per year—net inflow of PCBs into Puget Sound from ocean exchange, 0.3 kilograms of which is brought to Puget Sound by returning salmon. Coincidentally, Victoria’s outfalls produced a total of about 0.3 kilograms of PCBs in 2014.
    (By the way, the level of PBDEs and PCBs reported by the CRD in its Marine Environment Program 2014 Annual Report were both down from levels reported in previous years.)
    With Washington planning for a large increase in Puget Sound’s human population over the next several decades, the main threat to the Sound’s environmental health—the amount of toxic chemicals entering it through stormwater runoff—seems likely to accelerate. If the state’s own numbers show Victoria plays no significant role in the Sound’s decline, why do Washington politicians continue to use the Sound’s deteriorating health as an excuse to involve themselves in Canadian politics? Is it to deflect attention away from their own apparently intractable problems?
     
    The Governor’s concern
    I asked Department of Ecology spokeswoman Sandy Howard what Governor Inslee’s exact concern was about Victoria’s impact on “the health and habitat of Puget Sound.”
    In marked contrast to Morris’ concern about “chemical loading,” Howard responded, “The letter from Governor Inslee cites a general concern for the health and habitat of our shared waters. Our studies indicate that water masses are highly connected and cross our shared border. Our position is that we all need to do our part, and we should not be sending the wrong message regarding environmental stewardship, especially in light of population growth.”
    The first part of that concern is that stuff from Victoria is crossing into Puget Sound waters. But the Department of Ecology’s own study of toxics shows the Sound is a net exporter of some chemicals of concern and a net importer of others, and those balances have little to do with Victoria’s outfalls. They are overwhelmingly determined by chemicals of concern—arsenic, lead and cadmium for example—already in the ocean or originating in Washington. As well, that 1994 report by a joint panel of three BC and three Washington marine scientists, mentioned earlier, had agreed that the discharge from Victoria’s outfalls would have far less impact on waters off Seattle than Seattle’s outfalls would have on waters off Victoria. I asked Howard if Washington now disagreed with that finding or had done any new analysis of the issue.
    “We have not revisited the relative impacts from Victoria, as was reported in this 1994 effort,” Howard replied. “We are in the process of refining a more detailed computer model to address questions that focus on US impacts on our shared waters.” Then Howard repeated her previous point about environmental stewardship and population growth. “Our position is that we all need to do our part, and we should not be sending the wrong message regarding environmental stewardship, especially in light of population growth.”
    Absolute population growth around Puget Sound, as mentioned earlier, has been, and is expected to continue to be, far greater than Victoria’s. Washington may be projecting its fear about what is happening there on Victoria, but the statistics don’t support that. Howard’s emphasis on “environmental stewardship,” though, will resonate with some Victorians who think that it’s a “no-brainer” that Victoria’s current system would be causing environmental harm compared with secondary sewage treatment. But that’s not the view of marine scientists in Victoria, who have endorsed the existing system—with the caveat that further studies on chemicals of emerging concern should be conducted.
    I told Howard about the Victoria scientists’ endorsement and asked her if the Department of Ecology agreed with the principle of making decisions about environmental stewardship using science-based information and knowledge. She responded, “Our treatment standards are based on science and require that all dischargers apply a basic level of treatment. That basic level of treatment has been defined as secondary treatment.”
    A comparison of how science is used in the operation of Victoria’s treatment system with how it is used in Washington is revealing. Victoria’s system appears to have two advanced features of environmental stewardship that are missing in Washington. 
    Environmental stewardship—as practiced by governments—requires frequent measurement of chemicals of concern being discharged into the environment and transparent public reporting of the results of that monitoring. With sewage treatment, Victoria is doing this and Washington isn’t.
    One of the chemical groups of greatest concern in Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca are PBDEs. I had noticed that the Department of Ecology had only published estimates for the total amount of PBDEs released to the Sound through wastewater treatment plants. Yet the CRD does very precise measuring, monitoring and publication of the amount of PBDEs—and all other chemicals of concern, found in its discharges. For example, the CRD reports right down to a hundredth of a gram the total weight of each of the 40 different PBDEs it discharges from each of its two outfalls, every year. Accurately making those measurements, monitoring the results, and releasing that information to the public represents a high level of environmental stewardship. I asked Howard about Washington’s estimates for the release of PBDEs. Her answer confirmed the difference: “Washington treatment plants are not required to monitor and report PBDEs on an annual basis,” she said.
    An examination of the operating permits for the Sound’s wastewater treatment plants shows a low level of monitoring, in both frequency and the number of chemicals measured, compared with that done for Victoria’s two outfalls. The monitoring requirements for Seattle’s West Point plant—the largest secondary treatment plant on the Sound—don’t include PCBs, for example.
    There’s another vital difference between Victoria’s treatment system and those of Puget Sound: source control. Source control refers to the practice of keeping chemicals of concern out of the sewers in the first place, through a program of regulation, registration, installation of collection equipment to isolate and store chemicals of concern, proper disposal, inspection and monitoring.
    In Puget Sound, institutions, businesses and industries that discharge toxic chemicals are required to self-report those releases to the EPA’s Toxic Releases Inventory only under certain conditions. For example, a business must have 10 or more full-time employees to be required to report. Many operations in Puget Sound come in under that threshold, are not required to register, and discharge toxic chemicals directly into sanitary sewers. Since treatment plants aren’t required to measure or report their release of many toxic chemicals, such as PBDEs, Washington has no hard evidence of the plants’ cumulative contribution to the chemical loading of Puget Sound. 
    In Victoria, the CRD instituted a region-wide source control program in 1994 and since then has become a nationally-recognized leader in that practice. The CRD reports that 97 percent of region businesses whose activities fall within the program’s regulations have proper waste treatment systems installed that keep chemicals of concern out of Victoria’s sanitary sewers. Seattle does have a source-control program for the Lower Duwamish Waterway—a highly contaminated federal Superfund site—but otherwise has no city-wide source control program.
    While building a hundred sewage treatment plants on Puget Sound has allowed a reduction of suspended solids and reduced biological oxygen demand, the plants’ effectiveness at removing chemicals of concern is largely unmeasured and unknown.
    Given Washington’s failure to monitor chemicals of concern and  employ source control, the argument that Governor Inslee is entitled to pull Victoria’s chain to avoid sending “the wrong message regarding environmental stewardship” doesn’t seem credible. But even a cursory examination of Washington’s internal politics shows there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence that Washington legislators simply use Victoria to cover their own asses during times of stress.
     
    The phony toilet war: politically-motivated scapegoating
    Following the airing of Poisoned Waters in 2009, Washington state legislators moved to increase the state’s hazardous substances tax to fund measures that would reduce toxic chemical loading from stormwater runoff. But the bill, the Washington Clean Water Act of 2010, was withdrawn in April 2010. Ironically, Jeff Morris was seen by some in Washington as influential in the bill’s demise. John Burbank, executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute, a non-profit public policy research organization in Washington, linked the measure’s withdrawal to personal lobbying—wining and dining—of Morris on six different occasions by BP lobbyist William Kidd. According to Burbank the proposed legislation would have added at least $200,000 a day to BP’s cost of doing business in Washington.
    Not only were Morris and his fellow Puget Sound legislators unwilling or unable to deal with the stormwater issue, it’s easy to find specific cases where they continue to tolerate direct contamination of Puget Sound by their constituents. Consider Morris’ record, for example.
    A 2014 report by the Environment America Research & Policy Center  described Puget Sound as having the third highest level of “toxicity-weighted” materials released into large watersheds in the USA on an ongoing basis. The study used data from the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory.  That report highlights a case of ongoing release of known carcinogenic substances, which just happens to be in Morris’ 40th District. A wood preservative company in Bellingham, registered with the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory, reported in its last three filings an annual discharge of .5 kilograms of pentachlorophenol (PCP) and dioxins directly into Whatcom Creek, which flows into Bellingham Bay. By comparison, Victoria’s source-controlled outfalls discharged zero PCP in 2014, according to the CRD’s detailed report on chemicals released.
    Other corporate constituents of Morris’ district have records that raise questions about the legislator’s actual level of concern over chemical contamination. Tesoro, one of several fossil-fuel-related donors to Morris’ last election campaign, operates a refinery in Anacortes that, according to the EPA’s enforcement and compliance history database, has been in “significant violation” of the Clean Air Act every quarter for the last three years. It fully complied with the Clean Water Act only 17 percent of that time. Tesoro representatives openly testified against the Washington Clean Water Act of 2010 before it was withdrawn. Now Tesoro is planning a significant increase in the output of its Anacortes operation. Yet there’s been complete silence from Morris and other legislators about “chemical loading” from the  refinery. Recall that about 98 percent of the toxic chemical loading of Puget Sound comes from petroleum, oil and grease, according to the Department of Ecology.
    Given the failure by Morris and his fellow legislators to protect the Sound from such impacts, their claim that “We can no longer tolerate the long-term risk that the chemical loading caused by Victoria CRD’s inaction has brought to our shared waters,” seems more like a line from Wonderland than Washington.
    Their threatened boycott of Victoria included other claims worthy of the rabbit hole. In his letter to Mayor Helps, Morris said “…we believe the long-term damage to marine mammals, in particular, but all marine wildlife does more long-term damage to ecotourism.” With about one whale-watching business based in Puget Sound for every three surviving orca—most operating out of Morris’ 40th District—the pressure these operations put on their prey was found by DFO scientist Christine Erbe in 2001 to be damaging the orcas’ prospect for survival.
    Yet for all its absurdity, Morris’ campaign has been effective. Just after BC Environment Minister Barry Penner’s approval in August 2010 of the CRD’s plan for a secondary treatment plant at McLoughlin Point, Penner told the Journal of San Juan Islands: “I know there’s been a concern in Washington state about the lack of sewage treatment in the Victoria area. I certainly hear about it from time to time, particularly from Representative Jeff Morris, who has not been shy about letting us know that his constituents are concerned about that.”
    Morris hasn’t been the only Washingtonian deflecting attention away from the state’s dismal performance on reducing chemical contamination of Puget Sound and international waters.
    In a 2014 column, Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer wrote: “While delivering a speech in Bellingham last fall, I fielded a question that comes up pretty much every time I address an audience south of the border. ‘When are you folks in Victoria going to start treating your sewage?’ The shame of my hometown—dumping millions of litres of untreated sewage into the Strait of Juan de Fuca every day. Or, as columnist Joel Connelly wrote in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer 25 years ago, ‘the BC capital believes in using an international waterway as its toilet.’”
    Palmer’s “shame” button has been pushed repeatedly by Connelly over all those years. In a March 30, 2016 column on Seattle PI, Connelly repeated, for the umpteenth time: “Victoria is still using an international waterway as its toilet.” Over the years Connelly had plenty of opportunities to write about the international toilet in his own front yard, but he never did.
    When contacted by Focus, Connelly said, “I keep returning to Victoria sewage because promises were made, promises have not been kept, and our political leadership is perplexed. Site your treatment plants and I will very gladly go on to something else.”
    That BC political figures like Mike Harcourt and Gordon Campbell made “promises,” however, seems a flimsy rationale for spending $1 billion on treatment if BC scientists are saying it will have a “negligible effect” on environmental conditions in the Salish Sea. Worse, Connelly’s focus on Victoria has stunted the growth of knowledge in both Victoria and in Puget Sound. By holding up Victoria’s system as shameful, Victorians have been discouraged from learning about how it works, why it works, and how it could be made to work better. Instead, Victoria’s political discourse has been held hostage for 10 long years by what scientists say is a “non-problem.” Meanwhile, Connelly has provided cover for a poorly-functioning system of treatment plants in Puget Sound that are producing cocaine-spiked salmon smolts and fireproof orca. 
    The lesson for Victoria?
    The opinions of Washington legislators about the Capital Region’s sewage treatment system are highly suspect. When challenged for details, they can’t provide them. The legislators’ uninformed portrayal of Victoria’s treatment system as “backward” is little more than an attempt to deflect attention away from their own inaction as Puget Sound deteriorates.
    Victoria’s political leaders shouldn’t take Washington politicians seriously on this issue. Instead, those tasked with deciding how to spend that “billion dollars” need to take their responsibility more seriously. They need to get outside the Where-to-put-it? box they’ve been stuck in since 2009 and allow themselves to be guided by local marine and human health scientists who have precise knowledge of the environmental and health impacts of the current system.
    In Washington, scientists say stormwater runoff is the most pressing threat to marine waters. Unless that’s solved, conditions in the Salish Sea will continue to deteriorate. In Victoria, scientists are saying additional sewage treatment here—and in Vancouver—will provide little or no environmental benefit. One initiative that would provide a benefit has been identified. Victoria’s stormwater runoff is likely as toxic as Seattle’s, albeit on a smaller scale. The deterioration of near-shore Victoria-area waters that local citizens have blamed on the deep-water outfalls is more likely due to deposition of the “incredible gunk” from storm drains that disgusted the diver interviewed in Poisonous Waters. That’s a problem that everyone agrees needs to be fixed.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

    Roszan Holmen
    May 2016
    Island politicians support rail—but not rail management.
    WITH ITS ICONIC ROUNDED NOSE, the vintage Canadian Pacific F-unit locomotive cut a striking figure, parked outside the Nanaimo train station on Selby Street. 
    For the volunteers who poured years of energy and millions of dollars into rebuilding the historic station, the sights and sounds of a working train were cause for celebration. 
    On a July-feeling weekend in early April, families, train enthusiasts and politicians gathered to check out the train, take turns on the pumper cars, and enjoy some cake to mark the 130th anniversary of rail on Vancouver Island. Twenty-five dollar tickets quickly sold out for the hour-long amble to Wellington and back.  
    “Really what made it special was seeing reaction from people along the highway,” said Chris Alemany, a councillor in Port Alberni. “People were stopping on the side of the road and waving and hanging out of their sun roofs.”
    Of course, the train isn’t here to stay. It’s just a loaner, barged in from the mainland for the special occasion, but the weekend celebration served as a happy reminder of the potential and promise of a tourist train once again. The pitch: a new Central-Island excursion train for Nanaimo cruise passengers, bringing more than $20 million in economic development. 
    And the target audience arrived just on time to catch the message, along with a free ride on the train. Municipal politicians from across the Island gathered in Nanaimo April 8-10 for an annual general meeting to debate and vote on issues of common concern. 
    Many of the special invitees, however, were unmoved by the publicity stunt.
    “If you need all that money to fix the rail, why are you spending all this money foolishly?” opined Langford councillor Denise Blackwell, in the media.  
    Others described it as a distraction from the facts: It’s been more than five years since the last train ran on the E&N, and there is no good-news funding announcement in sight. 
    While the anniversary event may have been designed to whip up nostalgic support for rail, our political representatives sent a very different message when they got down to business at the Nanaimo conference centre. A strong majority supported a resolution from Langford calling for an audit of the Island Corridor Foundation, the non-profit society mandated to manage the E&N corridor and to preserve and develop the railway. 
    While the resolution may be toothless, it makes clear that long-simmering frustrations with the management of the corridor have reached a boiling point. It’s also the latest in a series of attacks against the ICF, which have the potential to unravel all the efforts to revive rail on the E&N. The future of rail is at a critical juncture.
     
    THE FIRST ATTACK CAME IN THE Fall of 2015, when Langford tired of paying ongoing corridor fees and rail-infrastructure charges despite having no train running the tracks. The municipality pulled its permissive tax exemption to the ICF, which responded in kind by charging the municipality $50,000 for the right of way to build a bike trail. The tit-for-tat quickly escalated into a pissing match in the media. Soon after, Langford handily passed a motion calling for a financial and governance review of the ICF. The same motion passed at the Capital Regional District before making its way to the AGM of the Association of Vancouver Island and Coastal Communities (AVICC) in April. 
    The second blow came in December, when the Snaw-Naw-As First Nation launched a civil claim against the ICF. It argues that land once taken from the reserve to build a railway should be returned, now that it’s no longer being used for that purpose. If successful, the suit could effectively cut the rail corridor in half. But even if the suit doesn’t win in court, it could still prove fatal by triggering more delays to long-promised federal funding to upgrade the tracks. Without this signoff, matching provincial funding remains locked up indefinitely.
    The third setback arrived in March. That’s when the Regional District of Nanaimo pulled the plug on its contribution agreement with the Island Corridor Foundation. 
    “We don’t think the train is ever going to run North of Nanaimo,” said Bill Veenhof, RDN board chair. “We’ve requisitioned tax dollars for that…and if we don’t believe that the taxpayers’ money is going to be used for what it was intended, then it’s time to move on.”
    The regional district withdrew its $945,000 pledge, and went public with their list of grievances. Among them: a lack of communication and transparency by the ICF; a lack of faith that $20.9 million is adequate to upgrade the tracks as the ICF claims; and disappointment in the train schedule as proposed by the ICF.  
    “We were told we were going to get daily service north of Nanaimo to Victoria,” said Veenhof. “That’s not happening…we understand that it’s weekend service for some time.” 
    The official response from the ICF was strangely muted. A written statement said it is disappointed but optimistic federal signoff is close at hand. “The ICF Board will investigate other funding and operational alternatives,” it read. 
    Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. The five regional districts that share the corridor signed contribution agreements contingent upon the participation of all five. When Nanaimo pulled out, it invalidated the contribution agreements signed by the Capital, Cowichan Valley, Comox Valley and Alberni Clayoquot regional districts. That resulting shortfall equals $3.2 million, unless all these districts recommit their funding under new terms. 
    “We understand all of that; we know what’s in front of us,” acknowledged Judith Sayers, co-chair of the Island Corridor Foundation board. While the board hasn’t had time to formulate a strategy, Sayers said “it is urgent and we will be addressing it.” 
     
    THE PROSPECT OF RE-OPENING a debate on funding contributions is far from the minds of Barb Desjardins and Jon Lefebure, chairs of the Capital and Cowichan Valley regional districts respectively. Both are rail advocates, and both are pinning their hopes on Nanaimo reconsidering its decision. 
    Lefebure calls the regional-funding issue a moot point, given that federal funding is on hold for the near term. He preaches patience.
    “In local government, we often have to wait a long time to accomplish something we want to accomplish,” Lefebure said. “If you have something that’s worth doing, you have to have perseverance.” 
    Barb Desjardins argues the opposite. 
    “The snail’s pace of government decisions for this is really shocking,” said Desjardins, who is also the Capital Region’s member representative on the ICF board. “Either you’re going to give us the money or you’re not.”
    The federal government agreed to contribute $7.5 million in April 2012. The delays have thrown the business case into question, she argued. In the meantime, municipalities have invested millions of dollars in rail crossings that may never be used.
    “It’s not fair to…withhold your funding for the number of years this has occurred,” said Desjardins. She agreed it’s time to move on, one way or another.
    The annual general meeting of the AVICC provided a gauge on the political climate. On the one hand, politicians clearly voiced a lack of confidence in the management of the rail. On the other hand, a solid majority expressed strong support for rail itself, noted Chris Alemany, from Port Alberni. 
    As evidence, he pointed to the success of his own municipality’s resolution: To petition the federal government to release funding for track upgrades. Similarly, politicians struck down a proposal to explore alternatives to rail on the corridor, such as recreational trails. 
    Desjardins said the Island-wide resolution to audit the ICF provides direction. “These are protest moves to make them understand that we are very serious,” she said. 
    The motion leaves Judith Sayers at a loss.
    “What are we auditing?” she asked. “We’ll be producing our next audit at the end of the month, if you’re talking about a financial audit.” To the politicians who have lost confidence in the ICF, Sayers says she would love the chance to hear them out. “What are their questions? I have no clue what it is they’re disturbed about.” 
    Already, the ICF has taken steps to better communicate with municipalities. Mayors have all received invitations to appoint someone to a new local government liaison committee, giving them a chance to ask questions and air concerns at two meetings annually. 
    Desjardins called it a huge step. “I think this is great news,” she said. But the reception hasn’t been so warm across the board. It might prove too little too late.
    The Regional District of Nanaimo won’t be won back into the funding agreement so easily. The RDN rejected the invitation, and passed a motion saying it “does not support the retention or continuation of Granneke Management by the ICF Board.” 
    Graham Bruce is the polarizing executive director of the Island Corridor Foundation, and the head of Granneke Management. He has staunch supporters and vociferous critics, who accuse him of running nothing but a gravy train for the contractors paid, year after year, not to run a real one.
    Bruce’s contract is up May 30, and directors will decide whether to renew the contract by consensus. Recently, the board signalled its intention in a press release: “The governance of the ICF is sound and is managed according to the goals and objectives the stakeholders originally agreed to.” 
    Sayers explained: “We work with management; we direct the management. If anybody looks closely at what the ICF has accomplished over the years, we’ve done a lot.”
    But can management win back the trust of its members? Without it, the ICF cannot be successful in its mandate to revive the train.
    “So the question is, [are the trust issues] just about not getting the federal funding in a timely manner?” asked Sayers. “Is that something we can blame on one person? Those are hard questions and it’s a question the board will have to deal with. It’s not going to be easy to figure all this out.”
    Roszan Holmen is the talkshow producer for CFAX 1070. Her feature report “E&N railway: more red lights ahead” in Focus’ December 2014 edition won a Jack Webster Award for Community Reporting.

    David Broadland
    May 2016
    On the sewage treatment issue, Mayor Helps and the CRD seem to have lost sight of whom they are serving.
     
    I WROTE HERE LAST EDITION about my two-year battle with the CRD to get two sentences of a 2009 staff report released to the public. I believed the sentences would show that CRD staff greatly underestimated, either intentionally or by honest mistake, a significant cost related to the development and construction of a secondary sewage treatment system for Victoria.
    As ordered by the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, the CRD released those two sentences in March. Since the cost to taxpayers of the CRD’s refusal to release the two sentences was significant—I estimate $20,000—I am going to provide you with every single word. The two sentences that the CRD—and the engineering consulting firm Stantec—were determined to keep secret were these: “The program management consultant service fees are estimated at 3 percent of the total project construction value and will be shareable under the federal and provincial planning agreement. Stantec’s hourly rates are up to 40 percent lower than the next ranked firm.”
    On the basis of that estimate, CRD directors decided to award a major 6-year contract to Stantec. The cost to the CRD was to be based on those very competitive rates.
    Here’s why the CRD and Stantec didn’t want to give up those two sentences. Stantec’s estimate for the cost to build a secondary treatment plant at McLoughlin Point was $783 million. Of that, about $410 million was for construction costs. Applying the “3 percent” from the two secret sentences to that cost, Stantec’s expected fee over the life of the project would have been just over $12 million. But by 2013 the CRD and the Seaterra Commission were estimating Stantec’s eventual cost would be $39.6–$43 million. That’s a 3-fold increase over Stantec’s 2009 estimate.
    This is significant for two reasons.
    First, those two sentences were written by two CRD employees, Dwayne Kalynchuk and Tony Brcic. Both just happened to be former Stantec employees. It’s evident in the second sentence that they promoted Stantec’s hourly rates as being considerably lower than those of Stantec’s two competitors for the contract. Yet once Stantec was awarded the contract, the expected cost to taxpayers ballooned. Naturally, one wonders if Kalynchuk’s and Brcic’s former employment with Stantec played any role in their recommendation of Stantec and the subsequent escalation of Stantec’s fee. I can make no comment on that. I would wager, though, that most CRD taxpayers would want to see more stringent care taken by the CRD to protect the interests of taxpayers in the awarding of contracts than was practiced in this case.
    Secondly, the underestimation was apparently based on information provided to the CRD by Stantec. Did it deliberately provide the CRD with a low estimate to get the contract? Or was it just bad at estimating costs?
    Either way, the three-fold underestimation raises questions about Stantec’s $783 million price tag for the project. Has Stantec been underestimating the overall project cost, too? Or, if Stantec couldn’t accurately estimate its own portion of the overall project cost, should anyone have confidence in its ability to estimate the overall cost? This is critical. The support for McLoughlin Point by some CRD representatives, including Nils Jensen, Ben Isitt and Geoff Young, has been based on the validity of Stantec’s estimate.
    Stantec’s 6-year contract with the CRD will expire in December, and the CRD seems determined to keep working with the firm. This is the most perplexing part of this story. Even though Stantec’s expected fee had inflated far beyond its initial estimate, the CRD argued against releasing those two sentences, partly on the basis that revealing them might result in Stantec’s competitors under-bidding it if the contract were reopened. That is, taxpayers might get a better deal. The CRD, funded by taxpayers, seems to be opposed to that. Instead of being appalled by the huge increase in Stantec’s expected bill, they chose  to protect its interests. Shouldn’t the CRD be focussed on the interests of the people in the community who fund it?
     
    THAT RELEGATION OF THE PUBLIC INTEREST to second-class status is also playing out on a much larger scale in the sewage treatment issue. A peer-reviewed scientific study by DFO scientists showed that higher levels of treatment would have a “negligible effect” on environmental conditions in the Salish Sea. Detailed analyses have been made by marine scientists and public health officials showing that the current marine-based treatment facilities at Clover Point and Macaulay Point are safe and effective and are doing no harm to the environment. Those scientists have argued that new regulations being imposed by Ottawa do not take into account the physical circumstances that have allowed this system to function safely for many years.
    At the same time, crucial aspects of the system proposed to replace it have not been worked out—how biosolids would be safely disposed of, for example—so the environmental risks of those unknown details can’t be weighed. Since a replacement system will likely cost local taxpayers $1 billion or more, you would hope that the default position of Victoria’s elected officials would be to insist that Ottawa and BC provide exacting proof that the local marine scientists and health officers are wrong before the community is forced to go to such great expense.
    Sadly, the opposite is true. When the federal government recently sent a letter to the CRD reiterating its crude, formula-based determination that Victoria’s tidal-powered, organic and self-disinfecting approach was “high risk,” Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps said, “Very clearly, they’ve taken 2014 data that shows all the things which are not good for the marine environment are way over the threshold. So I am very happy we have received this letter. I hope this will completely quash the debate.”
    Helps, who led an expensive, year-long debate to a complete failure at Rock Bay, doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Under Ottawa’s point system, Victoria fails because the test puts so much emphasis on total suspended solids and oxygen demand, characteristics of sewage effluent that local marine scientists have said has negligible impact on the environmental health of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
    Instead of accepting the wisdom and professional experience that scientists and health officers have obtained after years of observing Victoria’s marine-based system, Helps has accepted the authority of Ottawa to make an arbitrary and unreasonable decision. In doing that, she has put the community at greater risk of having to spend an unbelievably large sum of money unnecessarily. She’s failing to serve the public interest, just like CRD staff did when they chose to protect Stantec’s interest.
    The part of the community that Helps supports, that wants to build something without even knowing whether it will provide a net environmental benefit, can’t find a place to put their project. No wonder. Without a proven need for replacing the existing treatment system—a system the community has already bought and paid for—any location that’s considered will always appear to have a higher value as something else. Even a parking lot has a higher value than an unneeded treatment plant. That’s been true for Haro Woods, McLoughlin Point, Viewfield Road, Rock Bay and now Clover Point. A bureaucratic formula that has nothing to do with the public interest is going to remain unconvincing to the other part of the community that wants to see hard evidence that the scientists and health officers are wrong.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

    David Broadland
    March 2016
    Scientists recently confirmed an active seismic fault that could generate a large earthquake lies within 5 kilometres of downtown Victoria.
     
    LAST JUNE THE Geological Survey of Canada quietly released a report on a previously unexplored deformation in the bedrock below the Strait of Juan de Fuca—the Devil’s Mountain Fault. When I first read the report a few weeks ago, Sir James Douglas’ well-mythologized first impression of this place leaped to mind. On his arrival in 1842 Douglas had pronounced it “a perfect Eden.” It now appears he was profoundly mistaken.
    Lurking in the strait just 5 kilometres from downtown Victoria, according to scientists, is a physical imperfection so great that one day this “perfect Eden” could become—over the span of 10 or 20 seconds—hell on Earth.
    Before the scientists’ report was put on Natural Resources Canada’s website, John Cassidy thought it would be best to alert Emergency Management BC. Cassidy is the head of the Earthquake Seismology Section of the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) at the Pacific Geoscience Centre in Sidney. What was in the report that Cassidy thought EMBC should know about? The alert to EMBC was titled “Discovery of potentially active submarine faults near Victoria, BC.”
    The senior scientist on the study, the GSC’s Dr Vaughn Barrie, assisted by marine scientist Dr Gary Greene, had analyzed sediment cores and multibeam bathymetry scans of bedrock below the strait in an area just southeast of Victoria. From this data Barrie was able to create a 3D map of a short section of the Devil’s Mountain Fault Zone. The Devil’s Mountain Fault is a deep crack in the Earth’s crust that runs for about 125 kilometres from near Darrington in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains in Washington to just south of Victoria. Before Barrie’s analysis, any estimate of the danger the fault might pose to Victoria would have been speculative. Previous calculations based on the presumed length of the fault had suggested that if it ruptured along its full length, an earthquake of magnitude 7.5 could be generated. But did the fault actually come close to Victoria?
    The work of Barrie and Greene confirmed a potentially grave risk for Victoria. In the summary of their report they stated, “Based on recently collected geophysical and sediment core data, the western extent of the active Devil’s Mountain Fault Zone has been mapped for the first time, offshore the city of Victoria. The occurrence of this active fault poses the real possibility of an earthquake, similar to the devastating 2011 Christchurch, New Zealand earthquake, occurring near the city of Victoria.”
    Barrie noted that the 2011 Christchurch earthquake killed 185 people and caused damage assessed at $40 billion (NZ). He observed that earthquake “had an effective magnitude of 6.7 and was approximately 5 kilometres from central Christchurch at its closest approach…” The scientist noted that “the Devil’s Mountain Fault Zone is less than 5 kilometres from central Victoria” and “appears to have the potential of producing a strong earthquake adjacent to Victoria, perhaps as large as magnitude 7.0 or greater.”
    Barrie's confirmation of the close proximity of an active fault to central Victoria was alarming news. Previous loss estimates for a hypothetical magnitude 7.0 earthquake on the Leech River Fault—located further away from Victoria than the section of the Devil’s Mountain Fault that Barrie had mapped—predicted 1500 fatalities in the CRD, with close to 20,000 injuries, many of which would require hospitalization. Over six million tons of debris would be generated by collapsed and damaged buildings and other structures. But the Leech River Fault has shown no signs of activity during the last 10,000 years. Living beside it is like having a bomb in our basement, but a bomb which we believe has had all the explosive material removed. Barrie, in effect, confirmed the Devil’s Mountain bomb is in our living room and could go off at any moment.
     

     
    To put Barrie’s finding in perspective, consider the so-called “Big One.” That’s the commonly-used expression to describe what geoscientists call a great-plate boundary earthquake; it’s also known as a “Cascadia Subduction Zone event.” Scientists estimate that a full-length rupture of the 1100-kilometre-long subduction zone along North America’s west coast could produce a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. Although a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the west coast of Vancouver Island would release over 1000 times more energy than a magnitude 7.0 earthquake, because of its much greater distance away from Victoria, such an event would cause only about half the casualties and property damage that a magnitude 7.0 shallow crustal earthquake immediately adjacent to Victoria would cause. A rupture of the Devil’s Mountain Fault could have twice the impact on Victoria as the Big One.
    Although Focus has been unable to obtain a loss estimate (casualties and property damage) for Victoria from Natural Resources Canada for “the Big One,” a study done by BC geoscientist Martin Zaleski reported that Victoria would sustain much greater damage from a nearby magnitude 7 earthquake than from a magnitude 9 Cascadia subduction event. When asked about Zaleski’s finding, Cassidy said, “That’s about right.”
    So Cassidy and his colleagues at GSC knew that when Victorians heard about this nearby existential threat, there would be questions.
    Before Dr Barrie’s report was placed online, Cassidy contacted EMBC and outlined the potential threat—what was known and what wasn’t. EMBC then arranged a conference call with about 100 participants—primarily emergency management organizations and local governments from across the South Island and Lower Mainland regions. Cassidy explained to Focus that this step was taken because of “potentially significant interest.”
    The information Cassidy shared with those emergency management stakeholders included caveats about the scientists’ report. For example, the study has not been internationally peer-reviewed and more research would need to be done to confirm Barrie’s conclusions.
    The “potentially significant interest”—beyond that expressed by the 100 or so participants in the conference call—never materialized. That’s probably because no one outside of the conference call ever found out about the report—until now.
     
    Living with the bomb
    Cassidy told Focus that the results of additional research on the Devil’s Mountain Fault Zone will be ready “in about a year.” One of the unresolved issues Dr Barrie noted in his study was the possibility of a connection between the Devil’s Mountain Fault and the Leech River Fault. Barrie’s report stated, “The data here does not suggest any connection between these faults, though they are separated by only five kilometres. Further data are required to the west of our survey data set examined here to determine any relationship between these fault zones.”
    On a large-scale map the two faults appear to run directly into each other and the concern is that a longer fault could generate an even more powerful earthquake. But Cassidy said there is no on-the-ground evidence that the Leech River fault has been active since the last period of glaciation ended, about 9,000 years ago. That, he said, makes it less likely that the active fault Barrie confirmed would be connected to the Leech River Fault.
    Dr Barrie’s report includes excerpts from previous studies and one of the most interesting of his references is this: “Hyndman et al (2003) estimated a recurrence interval for large upper-plate fault earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 and greater in the Puget Lowland-Georgia Strait region to be about 200 years…They suggested that additional large earthquakes in the upper plate may occur in this region shortly after great-plate boundary earthquakes.”
    Translation: Magnitude 7.0 and greater crustal earthquakes in the region where we live are not that uncommon. And, a rupture of the Cascadia Subduction Zone could be followed “shortly” afterward by a rupture of the Devil’s Mountain Fault. 
    Talk about a nightmare scenario. The Big One would cause widespread damage throughout the Pacific Northwest, including Vancouver and Seattle, so Victoria couldn’t expect help from nearby communities. Then comes the Really, Really Big One...
    The BC Earthquake Immediate Response Plan doesn’t cover that scenario. The plan is the responsibility of the previously-mentioned Emergency Management BC, a provincial agency that falls under the control of Attorney General Suzanne Anton. EMBC’s plan is contained in a 127-page document that  lists actions to take when a damaging earthquake occurs, such as activating the “Mass Fatality Plan.”
    The plan’s scenario for a magnitude 7 shake in Victoria considers the “worst case” to be a mid-afternoon shallow crustal earthquake in January following a 3-day Pineapple Express. The ground would be saturated and prone to liquefaction. Here’s what the planners imagine would happen:
    “For many, the earthquake is heard before it is felt. The low, rumbling sound is similar to that of a freight train, immediately followed by 10 to 20 seconds of violent shaking that knocks people located closest to the epicentre from their feet—except for those who remember to ‘drop, cover, and hold on.’ Taller buildings sway with the high intensity shaking. Unsecured objects fall or fly through the air. Roads crack and the ground ruptures in some areas. Buildings on softer soils lose support through liquefaction. Landslides and rock falls are generated in many areas, cutting off transportation routes. Flooding is increased by the recent wet weather event with some dikes failing. Several fires start throughout the impact area from damaged electrical power and gas lines. Some buildings collapse, many shift and crack, and others are destroyed by fire.
    “Windows break and glass scatters across the pavement. Debris is strewn throughout roadways, cutting off access to areas. Entire walls from unreinforced masonry buildings fall into the streets. Many of those who try to run outside suffer extreme injury or death from falling and flying objects and thousands are trapped or injured. Dust, smoke and sirens fill the air.”
    Hopefully, The Plan itself won’t be buried under broken blocks of granite and marble at the seismically vulnerable legislative buildings on Belleville Street before the Mass Fatality Plan can be activated. But don’t count on it. The Province committed $1.5 billion in 2005 to an upgrade of vulnerable schools in Victoria and Vancouver but has taken no steps on the estimated $300 million seismic rehabilitation of the 118-year-old Parliament Buildings. Local governments may have plans, but they have little or no money for making this region more seismically safe and resilient.
    Although one might think that making the region more seismically safe and resilient would be a simple matter of applying science and common sense to the problem, recent events illustrate that there's not much of either at work.
     

     
     
    Confused public-safety priorities
    A genuine and concerted effort to reduce Victoria’s exposure to seismic risk—significantly higher than any other city in Canada (see table below)—will require public investment in education, prioritization, emergency response and infrastructure renewal. It’s astonishing, then, that Barrie’s dramatic and revelatory report on the Devil’s Mountain Fault was relegated to an obscure corner of Natural Resources Canada’s website even while Victorians struggled to respond to a controversial “high risk” classification of a different sort.
    Under federal regulations imposed on Victoria’s marine disposal of liquid waste, the region is contemplating spending upwards of $1 billion to convert to a land-based system. Yet six past and current public health officers have stated: “There is no measurable public health risk from Victoria’s current method of offshore liquid waste disposal.” Those health officers are Dr Richard Stanwick, Dr John Millar, Dr Shaun Peck, Dr Brian Emerson, Dr Brian Allen and Dr Kelly Barnard.
    A recent peer-reviewed study by DFO scientists found that spending billions of dollars upgrading sewage treatment in Vancouver and Victoria would have “negligible effect” on environmental conditions in the Salish Sea.
    If there’s no risk to public health or the environment from a marine-based treatment system—but the Devil’s Mountain earthquake could hit at any moment killing or injuring thousands of Victorians—what are we to make of the federal government’s priorities?
    The challenge to making the region more seismically safe and resilient isn't just a question of correctly prioritizing seismic vulnerability in relation to other needs, however. The evidence accumulated during the Johnson Street Bridge Replacement Project is illustrative of how difficult it can be for local government to properly assess seismic risks for different structures, and then to ensure that the risk for any one structure is adequately addressed. 
    In the case of the bridge project, where the City of Victoria was responding to the existing bridge's apparent seismic vulnerability, City Council chose to build a new bridge before it had addressed the known seismic vulnerability of its main fire hall. The City had been told the fire hall would collapse in an earthquake and trap emergency response vehicles. At the same time, councillors justified replacing the bridge partly on the basis of ensuring that emergency vehicles would be able to circulate immediately following an earthquake. Common sense eluded councillors:If rescue vehicles were trapped in a collapsed fire hall they wouldn't be able to use the bridge. The political attraction of building a glamorous signature bridge designed by an internationally-renowned architect won the day.
    At the same time, a seismic assessment of 16 City-owned buildings showed many were potential death traps. The engineering assessment by Read Jones Christoffersen was kept secret during the bridge decision-making process and wasn’t made public until Focus obtained it in an FOI and published the details here. The assessment didn’t even look at some of the most vulnerable structures, including Downtown parkades and City Hall. The potential for loss of life from the collapsed City-owned buildings was much greater than from a collapsed Johnson Street Bridge.
    Unbelievably, the bridge the council choose to build—in response to the existing bridge’s seismic vulnerability—will, it turns out, likely suffer “permanent loss of service” in an earthquake generated by the Devil’s Mountain Fault. The story of just how a project aimed at increasing seismic safety could, instead, produce a seismically vulnerable design, is a warning that local governments are badly in need of an independent, trustworthy, publicly-funded agency to help guide the region toward seismic safety and resilience. In light of Barrie's warning about the Devil's Mountain fault, the failure to create a seismically resilient bridge is a cautionary tale that needs to be thoroughly understood. In this case, the devil really is in the details. 
     
    How Victoria got a “less robust” bridge
    In 2009, following receipt of an engineering report that recommended the Johnson Street Bridge be seismically upgraded, Victoria City council voted to replace the bridge instead. In seeking federal funding for the project, then-Mayor Dean Fortin wrote then-Federal Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure John Baird, telling him: “Any seismic event will bring it down.”
    In 2010, after being forced to seek approval for its proposed bridge in a referendum, the City was advised that, whether it chose to repair or replace the bridge, it should spend additional money to insure both would withstand a “magnitude 8.5” earthquake. A presentation to City of Victoria councillors by MMM engineer Joost Meyboom on June 14, 2010 stated there was a “35 percent probability of a major quake (magnitude 7.0 to 7.9) in the next 50 years.” Meyboom recommended that a new bridge “be designed for a magnitude 8.5 earthquake.” He told councillors, “If you’re going to spend $100 million on a facility, the premium to pay for a very high seismic performance is a relatively low price for insurance.” The City agreed to buy this level of seismic protection.
    A few months later, just before a referendum on a new bridge, a study by scientist Chris Goldfinger noted that Cascadia subduction zone earthquakes could be as strong as magnitude 9.0. Meyboom wrote the City and suggested it should consider protecting the bridge to magnitude 9.0; he told the City that a higher level of protection would cost more money. This was a highly revealing moment. Meyboom equated the maximum seismic vulnerability of the bridge to the Cascadia subduction hazard, an assertion that was untrue. I’ll come back to this later. Shortly after Meyboom's attempt to upsell the City on higher seismic protection, the referendum on the new bridge passed.
    Fast foward to mid-2012. The City had needed to raise the bridge project's budget from $77 million to $93 million and was in the procurement phase. Councillors were adamant the budget would go no higher. There were three potential bidders. As part of the procurement process, the City asked each company to provide an initial opinion on whether it could build the bridge to the specified criteria on the City’s budget. All three said “No.” A short time later, MMM Group provided the companies with a document that established a lower level of seismic performance for the new bridge, thereby reducing  expected costs. This document eventually became part of the contract the City signed with PCL, the winning bidder, but its addition to the bid process was kept secret from all but senior managers. Councillors were not informed.
    The document described how the bridge was expected to perform in three different earthquake scenarios. The strongest earthquake covered by the design criteria was approximately equivalent to a magnitude 7.5 earthquake. For that event, the seismic performance specified was “possible permanent loss of service”—which implies damage so great that the bridge would need to be replaced.
    The time between when an earthquake occurs and when emergency response vehicles can circulate is critical to rescue and recovery operations. The revised seismic design criteria specified this time for earthquakes smaller than magnitude 7.5, but no level of access was described for a magnitude 7.5 shake. The document provided no information whatsoever about the allowable outcomes—damage or emergency vehicle access—for a magnitude 8.5 earthquake, the level of seismic protection the City had agreed to buy.
    (The Seismic Design Criteria document does not express earthquake strength as “magnitude.” Rather, it uses “return period.” But during the decision-making process on the bridge, engineering firm Stantec linked specific magnitudes with specific return periods. I am using Stantec’s conversions in this article.)
    The revised seismic design criteria were kept secret until Focus obtained the document in an FOI. About a year ago, I wrote a story about how the new bridge had been designed and constructed to a much lower level of seismic protection than had been recommended to the City by Meyboom in 2010. I related the fact that the bridge could suffer permanent loss of service in a magnitude 7.5 earthquake.
    Two months later, I filed an FOI for the communications between the City and MMM that resulted from my article. The documents obtained showed that the company that designed the lifting portion of the bridge, Hardesty & Hanover, did not deny the bridge could suffer permanent loss of service from a magnitude 7.5 earthquake. The record of communications showed no one seemed to know how the seismic design criteria had been lowered, or who had promised what. Confusion reigned over the project. One MMM official called the matter a “debacle.” (This is perhaps the most accurate statement made by an MMM employee about the seismic issue in the 7 years the project has run.)
    The City’s former director of engineering, Dwayne Kalynchuk, confirmed for Focus that Hardesty & Hanover had used the reduced seismic design criteria to design the bridge.
    Several months later, the bridge project director Jonathan Huggett informed councillors that the new bridge would be “somewhat less robust” than the existing, 93-year-old bridge.
    Recall that at the beginning of this account, then-mayor Fortin had described the existing bridge to John Baird, writing “Any seismic event will bring it down.” Taking Fortin and Huggett at their words, we would have to conclude that “Any seismic event” would bring down the “less robust” new bridge, too.
    So there’s strong evidence that, after spending $140 million (this is the most likely current price based on information provided by the City about cost increases) on a new bridge because the old one was seismically vulnerable, there will be little or no increase in the seismic safety of the bridge.
     
    Issue too complex for local politicians?
    Dr Barrie’s discovery of a large, active fault just a few kilometres from the Johnson Street Bridge highlights the need for more effective management of Victoria's seismic vulnerability by elected officials and civil servants. A better understanding of seismic issues by everyone involved in making decisions about critical public infrastructure seems key.
    The primary misstep in the case of the bridge was the choice of a seismically-risky design. The section of the new bridge that lifts—the bascule leaf—is not permanently attached to the bridge’s foundation. It floats on steel rollers and depends on intermittently-engaged span locks to hold it in place during an earthquake. Who would build a house in Victoria without ensuring it was permanently anchored to its foundation?
    Although at least one of the companies competing to build the bridge red-lined the seismically risky design to City staff in its bid, that company’s proposal was heavily penalized for not sticking with the flawed design concept. Those staff also hid that criticism from elected decision-makers. So bad design and failure to listen were factors in the debacle.
    What else? Several paragraphs back I mentioned that the City's consultant, Joost Meyboom, had suggested to the City that since a Cascadia Subduction Zone event could produce a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, the City should consider spending more money to protect against that.
    That incident seems to suggest Meyboom thought a subduction event—the Big One—was the defining seismic design consideration.
    But a couple of years after Meyboom’s magnitude 9.0 pitch, an MMM document noted: “Given the location of the bridge, the Cascadia Subduction Earthquake was also considered as an important event. A comparison of site specific response spectra, however, showed that the spectral acceleration for the Cascadia event are lower than the 1 in 475 year earthquake and this is therefore not a critical design consideration.”
    Meyboom misunderstood, apparently, what kind of seismic event the bridge needed to be designed to withstand.
    The big problem with that was that when Meyboom first made recommendations to City councillors about seismic protection, councillors relied on his advice to make critical decisions. Unfortunately, councillors made no attempt to insure they were getting solid advice. They should have asked for at least one other opinion from a source unaffected by whether the project went ahead or not.
    Once the lowered seismic design criteria were made public by Focus, the City ought to have pursued the matter with an independent investigation. Instead, it simply sought reassurances from Meyboom’s company. The City’s unwillingness to properly investigate whether the bridge had been built to a lower level of seismic performance than it had agreed to pay for could, one day, have serious consequences for public safety and economic recovery. In that respect, City managers and councillors abrogated their fiduciary responsibility to the public.
    Barrie’s report brings into public view the need for much more attention being paid to seismic safety and resilience in the region. One possible solution to the kind of problems experienced with the bridge project would be for the region to develop its own seismic safety planning and prioritization agency. The work of such a body would need to be informed by science, not engineering companies working in the construction industry. Until the region develops such capacity, it’s unlikely to make progress toward reducing the number of casualties and property loss that will come one day when Devil’s Mountain Fault ruptures.
    David Broadland’s father Bob was on his parents’ farm 30 miles from the epicentre of the magnitude 7.3 Vancouver Island Earthquake in 1946. Bob’s mom thought an atom bomb had been dropped. Bob’s father Tom experienced the magnitude 7.2 Vancouver Island Earthquake in 1918. So far, David’s biggest earthquake was the magnitude 5.3 shake Victorians felt in 1976. But the party ain’t over yet.
     

    Leslie Campbell
    March 2016
    Mayor Helps’ forceful push to a billion-dollar sewage facility at Rock Bay takes some twists and turns—and ain’t done yet.
     
    LATELY, A NUMBER OF PEOPLE, from seniors to sewage activists, have wondered aloud if Mayor Lisa Helps is moving too fast. Her penchant for “getting things done” is one she readily admits to, from planting potatoes in February to “stampeding” her fellow CRD colleagues towards a decision on a sewage treatment plan.
    I met with Mayor Helps on Sunday, February 21, at City Hall. I had requested an hour for an interview but was given 30 minutes with the assurance by her executive secretary that, “The Mayor is extremely good at covering a lot of information within 30 minutes.” She was right.
    In her casual, commodious office Helps told me she tries to spend 75 percent of her time on “getting things done.” That means “working with council, getting decisions made, and then really working on the execution of our mission and mandate of the strategic plan.”
    Asked what she finds most satisfying about being the City’s chief, she said, “the partnerships formed in the past year.” She mentioned the Province, neighbourhood associations, Tourism Victoria, the Greater Victoria Development Commission, the Chamber of Commerce, and then returned to theme: “If you have strong partners you can get more done, you can get more resilient change made...”
    And the hardest thing? “I move very quickly, both in my thought processes and I’ll say, ‘let’s do this and let’s get going,’ so one of my challenges is, going at a pace…where there’s actually that room for collaboration…I understand that if we want to bring people along it does take time. I just like to march full on ahead, but it can’t always work.”
    Turning to her role as chair of the CRD’s Core Area Liquid Waste Management Committee, I asked her how she feels about the charge in that morning’s paper by Brian Grover, a Victoria resident who has prepared and appraised large water sanitation projects for the World Bank. He wrote that she is “stampeding” her fellow directors towards a sewage treatment plan involving Rock Bay. 
    She embraced the characterization with enthusiasm: “We’ve been working on this since 1989. Anyone who says it’s rushed, I don’t buy that…yes I am ‘stampeding’ us to a decision. I absolutely am, because we need to make a decision and we need to get something done. There’s still room, after we make a decision, for all sorts of innovation—especially if we can show the Province and the federal government that we are moving in the right direction. We will get more flexibility, but we can’t do nothing and we can’t say it’s moving too fast.”
    Her next “to do” on the sewage front is to secure $83 million in PPP Canada funding. The deadline is March 31, and prior to that the Province has to approve the CRD’s amended plan.
    Towards that “Amendment #10,” a decision on siting for the sewage treatment facilities needs to be made, and that’s what Helps intended to get done at the next meeting of the sewage committee.
     
    DOCUMENTS FOR THE February 24 sewage committee meeting showed that CRD staff were recommending using Rock Bay lands for a central tertiary treatment plant. Capital cost: $1.13 billion.
    Things have been headed towards Rock Bay since the last civic election, which resulted in a change in the make-up of the CRD board and committees. How the Rock Bay site became a possibility, let alone the preferred one, is murky. Much of the decision-making about it likely took place at in camera meetings and have something to do with First Nations claims. In February 2015 it was announced the $138-million remediation of toxic soil on Rock Bay lands owned by BC Hydro and Transport Canada were almost completed, clearing the way for their transfer to local First Nations. At the time Helps said, “The City looks forward to partnering with the First Nations as they move forward with economic development…This area holds the key to the future of our city.” By November 2015, Rock Bay had become the “it” site for sewage treatment on the east side, with all of the seven options put forward involving at least some sort of plant at Rock Bay.
    People have complained about such a key area for urban growth being devoted to sewage treatment, predicting that the result will be industrial and repelling. But Helps is an optimist. “Whatever happens at Rock Bay, there will be rezoning required and rezoning will be for wastewater, commercial, retail, residential,” she told me. “So you can think about something like Dockside 2.0. I see huge benefits to the residents of Victoria and to the residents of the Burnside Gorge neighbourhood who will be very involved in whatever is developed.”
    As critics and some CRD directors have pointed out, however, Rock Bay is far from any existing wastewater infrastructure. So $250-million worth of new pipes will be needed, causing years of disruption along Cook Street and other arteries between Rock Bay and Clover Point. Businesses along the route are already worrying about bankruptcy, according to City of Victoria Councillor Geoff Young. As well, the land at Rock Bay has been priced at a hair-raising $67 million. Unlike McLoughlin Point, it’s neither owned by the CRD nor zoned appropriately. There are many hurdles to leap before it’s approved by the community.
    Oak Bay Mayor Nils Jensen made all these points and then some when he led the charge to reintroduce McLoughlin Point into the equation at a February 24 sewage committee meeting. He cited the dramatic cost differences—two to three times per household in each municipality—between the two plans. McLoughlin has been costed at “only” $783 million. The additional hundreds of millions for the Rock Bay options would, argued Jensen, “suck capital out of this region” for years to come. And that’s before factoring in what he called the “$200-million footnote” of the Rock Bay proposal. Its costs were calculated only to 2030, whereas McLoughlin was costed out to 2045. 
    Anticipating objections about Esquimalt having rejected McLoughlin, Jensen asked, “What’s more important: process or taxpayers?” 
    Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins called Jensen’s initiative to reoccupy McLoughlin Point “appalling” and “sad,” and predicted such a motion would be confusing to the public and funders: “I can’t imagine what they are thinking.” 
    In a stroke of political genius Director Colin Plant suggested an amendment that broadened Jensen’s motion, allowing for McLoughlin or Macaulay, plus Clover Point and another plant on the Westside as possible sites for treatment plants. It passed with a clear majority (voting against it were City of Victoria Councillor Marianne Alto, Desjardins, Chief Andy Thomas and Chief Robert Sam). 
    Besides derailing the simple Rock Bay versus McLoughlin plan of the “McLoughlinuts,” this maneuvre opened a can of worms for Helps’ plan to “get it done.” It was clear Rock Bay might not be as popular as the new list of options in the Plant-amended-Jensen motion. Resistance to Rock Bay in the community has been firming up for months. But, determined to keep Rock Bay in the mix and find something a solid majority of her committee could agree on, Helps came back a couple of days later with a brand new motion, one she believed “captured the mood” of her committee.
    It certainly captured the confusion of her committee, which increased as directors attempted to wrestle it into a shape they could “get to yes” on. At times, directors confessed to being lost in the thicket of amendments. No one seemed to know whether the original motion or amendments were being referred to staff or what was being voted on. Helps has no trouble maneuvering her mind through all the layers and intricacies of this kind of grinding committee work, but an outsider might well see it as too clever by halves.
    The end result was a bulky, amorphous set of motions, the main one of which directed staff “to undertake value engineering and come back to the CALWMC with more detailed cost estimates” on six sites for various forms of treatment. ASAP. There was a sense that this might be progress. Or it might be where the process was in April, 2010 or almost anytime in the last seven years. Options up the ying yang.
    If you have that dizzy, going-in-circles feeling, you’re forgiven. 
    One thing was clear, even to directors. This new “plan” wasn’t in good enough shape to impress the federal government. As City of Victoria Councillor Ben Isitt said, “I don’t think it would be prudent to communicate the fairly eclectic state of the plan” to funders at this point. 
    Stay tuned for the next meeting of the Core Area Liquid Waste Committee on March 9. (The motion is posted at www.focusonline.ca at the end of this article; you can also watch the two 4-hour-plus meetings on the CRD’s website—I dare you.)
     
    FEAR AROUND THE LOSS OF FUNDING is driving the agenda on sewage treatment. Besides Helps’ expressed anxieties around coming up with a new plan for the March 31 deadline, Desjardins, who is also chair of the CRD, warned her fellow directors: “We are being watched by the funders.” 
    Coupled with Mayor Helps relaying Tourism Victoria’s fears around Washington State possibly restricting state employees from being reimbursed for travel to Victoria until the completion of a “primary” sewage system, the fear-mongering—bordering on paranoia—stood in stark contrast to the fighting words of those citizen-activists who speak at the opening of every committee meeting. 
    Mehdi Najari, for instance, referencing the “mandate” of the committee, pointed out: “Your job is not to be an enforcer for senior government wishes. Your job is to protect the citizens of your region…Prime Minister Trudeau said of infrastructure, it has to be environmentally beneficial, it has to be based on science…the most economical…and it has to be based on innovation. This proposal that you are suggesting is none of them.” He labelled the public participation process “fraudulent” and leading to fewer and fewer people attending the events. “We are tired of being used as props for your propaganda [for a decision you have already made],” he concluded.
     
    AT THE FEBRUARY 26 MEETING, Teresa Coady, chair of the Technical Oversight Panel, presented that body’s final report. It’s big surprise was recommending against anaerobic digestion as the way to reduce sewage sludge. This type of treatment has been part of the plan for years—so much so that PPP Canada funding seemed to be tied to it. Yet no one at the meeting raised any questions in this regard. The TOP, instead, suggested “energy efficient drying” of sewage coupled with gasification or some other thermal processing option after tertiary level treatment.
    TOP only looked at the Rock Bay plan. Coady’s other surprise was an allusion to the Jensen/Plant motion a couple of days earlier allowing for treatment at McLoughlin or Macaulay and Clover Point. She said if McLoughlin or Macaulay is back on the table—that is, a large site near outfalls—this would be preferable as it would save money and disruption. 
    Further obscuring a clear direction forward is whether the CRD will commit to “integrated resource management.” Helps, as chair of the sewage committee, was instrumental in the formation of a task force on IRM and establishing the tight timelines it had to investigate options and issue a report.
    IRM would bring together sewage sludge with solid municipal waste (food scraps, yard waste and whatever else ends up at the Hartland Landfill) into one “stream” subjected to a treatment like gasification. Theoretically, it has the advantage of creating usable resources—water, heat, energy—that could potentially offset some operating costs while reducing pressure on Hartland.
    Chaired by Saanich Councillor Vic Derman, the IRM task force report was presented at the February 24 sewage committee meeting. Described by task force member Young as “flimsy,” the report outlined four presentations by private companies, all with limited (or no) experience integrating municipal solids with liquid waste. Young labelled them “experimental,” while Isitt called them “emerging rather than proven technologies.” One company had done only “lab scale” tests on kilograms of material. Another, the Ark Reformer, “has no completed projects in operation,” according to the report. Yet Derman and other directors were impressed  and believe such technologies might result in $250 million in savings and significant reductions of greenhouse-gas emissions.  
    The CRD staff report on the task force’s report was less enthusiastic, as were some directors. Isitt raised concerns about how IRM would interfere with realizing the goal of zero waste because the technologies all require solid waste to be blended with the sewage.
    View Royal Mayor David Screech observed, “When we formed a task force I presumed that we would not just be getting feedback from politicians who had listened to private industry make pitches and that we would be getting solid professional advice back. It’s absurd we are even thinking of making a decision based on that.”
    A motion to receive the report for information was rejected by five directors, including Screech. In at least one past meeting Screech  called rejecting such motions “absurd.” Watching democracy in action, it does seem, at times, a bit absurd. Absurdly pointed.
    Helps had earlier told me she thought IRM was “the way to go,” that “the next step is to do a request for statements of interest to the private sector…What we’ll be looking for from the private sector is financially-backed innovative solutions. Someone might say I’ve got the best technology for gasification that can integrate all these resources. Great but we’ll want to know what’s your financial backing? If it’s financially backed it’s almost the same as proven; if there’s someone willing to lend, to invest…so that will be one of the tests.”
    Helps is an optimist on the tech front, too. She’s sure the price of a single tertiary plant in Rock Bay will come down from its estimated price of $1.13 billion. In our conversation she told me, “That’s what the original plan was costed at in 2007 and through refinements and design optimization it came down to $783 million.” When I pointed out that was mainly due to the project simplifying from several plants to one, she responded: “Think about how much a cell phone cost in 2009 and how large it was and how little it could do. There are new technologies that have been designed and developed and financially proven since the original plan was costed.”
    Isitt, too, has used the cell phone analogy in reference to sewage treatment’s unpredictable but no doubt glorious future. After many years of waiting for that glorious future, a lot of us are doubtful.
     
    THE JOSTLING AND UNCERTAINTY around sites and technology at the CRD should raise larger questions about exactly why we are going along with federal regulations that scientists say don’t take Victoria’s unique circumstances into consideration. 
    Why don’t our political leaders fight harder for evidence-based policy making? What unspoken fears, agendas and partnerships are at work? Whose agenda, for instance, was behind Washington State’s threatened mini-boycott? It could have been met with a blast of science, but instead Helps cowered.
    Along with marine scientists saying Victoria has been mistakenly classified as “high risk,” a recent peer-reviewed scientific study found that increasing treatment level to secondary treatment at five plants between Victoria and Vancouver would have a “negligible effect” on environmental conditions in the Salish Sea (see Focus, January 2016). 
    The evidence raises other questions about land-based treatment. Our waste cannot be “disappeared.” No matter what technologies we subject it to, there are effects on the environment, including unintended ones. Dismissing those who raise the lack of an evidence-based rationale for land-based sewage treatment with clichés like “That train has left the station,” fails to note that trains almost always return to the station. A more useful dictum would be: “Follow the evidence wherever it leads.” 
    When I asked Helps about the high risk classification, she said, “I’m not really interested in the debate about ‘do we need to do it, do we not need to do it?’…The mandate from Ottawa is you’re high risk, get it done by 2020.” She’s accepted her marching orders.
    Yet if that billion-dollar mandate is derived from a mistaken classification, isn’t it the responsibility of CRD officials to point out the mistake, to lobby strenuously for a reassessment of the risk level—and isn’t it time to commit to a comparative, environmental cost-benefit assessment of different forms of sewage treatment? In 2012, Nils Jensen put forth a motion at the sewage committee asking for “a full environmental study that will assess the comparative environmental impact of the current process and proposed process for disposing of liquid waste before the CRD plans are finalized.” (He flip-flopped on this later.)
    It was viewed as a delaying tactic and defeated. The people at the table then were as fixated on getting it done as they are now. But isn’t it a missing piece of the puzzle—a foundational piece—without which citizen distrust festers?
    Helps told me, “I sat face to face with Minister Sohi and said ‘there is some debate locally about whether it is a high risk receiving environment; what do you think?’And he said, ‘Well, I’ll defer that to the Minister of the Environment, but my opinion is you have a mandate to get this done.’ We haven’t received anything from Minister McKenna to the contrary, so my imagining is we have a mandate to get this done.”
    My imagining is that Mayor Helps could exert her impressive will and smarts and get us a science-based mandate. That would be worth getting done.
    Leslie Campbell interviewed Mayor Helps about a number of issues and had no intention of focusing solely on the sewage question—until she witnessed the February sewage committee meetings. This story is an unintended consequence of that.

    David Broadland
    January 2016
    A study by DFO scientists found that secondary sewage treatment will have a negligible effect on environmental conditions in our waters.
     
    THE CRD IS POISED to spend upwards of $1 billion on sewage treatment for Victoria in response to new Fisheries Act regulations aimed at protecting fish, yet a recent study led by DFO research scientist Sophie Johannessen says upgrading the level of treatment at two plants in Vancouver and two in Victoria will have a “negligible effect” on environmental conditions in the Strait of Georgia and Juan de Fuca Strait.
    Is a mistake of grand proportions about to be made?
    Reading between the lines, Johannessen’s peer-reviewed study challenges the narrow basis on which Victoria’s two outfalls were rated “high risk.” Environment Canada’s new regulations provide a laboratory-based formula by which the effluent from sanitary sewers can be assessed using four specific measurements. Municipal treatment plants that don’t meet the formulaic requirements are being forced to upgrade. The regulations do not provide any avenue for evaluating water conditions immediately after the effluent has been discharged from an outfall.
    The Johannessen study also raises the profile of one of the contaminants of concern in effluent from all the outfalls considered: polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), otherwise known as flame retardants. The study’s authors predict that secondary treatment could significantly reduce the amount of PBDEs being discharged into the Straits “depending on how the sludge is sequestered.” As it turns out, though, this is a big if. So far the CRD hasn’t identified how it would deal with sewage sludge and if current practices for disposing of the sludge elsewhere were used in Victoria, the PBDEs could be recycled through the environment. Johannessen told Focus that unless the CRD found a way to remove the PBDEs from biosolids after treatment, they could eventually make their way to the Strait.
     
    THE NEW FEDERAL Wastewater Systems Effluent Regulations in the Fisheries Act that triggered a high risk rating for Victoria’s two outfalls are unrelated to the PBDE problem. The regulations are only intended to protect fish in the water immediately adjacent to the outfalls from effluent that is “acutely lethal.”
    Those regulations require measurement of chlorine, ammonia, total suspended solids, and biochemical oxygen demand at the point at which effluent is discharged from the diffuser ports on the outfalls. In Victoria’s case, it’s the combination of total suspended solids and biochemical oxygen demand that resulted in the outfalls at Macaulay Point and Clover Point being red-lined. The regulations require the effluent to be measured in its most highly concentrated form before it is discharged, and that measurement obviously doesn’t reflect actual conditions a short distance from the outfalls. Nor do the regulations have anything to say about other contaminants in the effluent, such as PBDEs, metals, plastic microbeads, or the thousands of chemicals in all sewage that derive from pharmaceuticals, detergents and other substances. The effect of the Regulations, then, is to protect a fish able to hold its position in the strong tidal currents, with its nose and gills stuck inside one of the outfall’s ports.
    Many Victorians will have seen images provided by the CRD that show fish swimming beside—and crabs clambering over—the Macaulay Point outfall, apparently happy to be there. These don’t appear to be conditions lethal to fish.
     

    Macaulay Point outfall


    Macaulay Point outfall
     
    That is, the good health of ecosystems near the outfall doesn’t seem to be predicted by the allowable range of total suspended solids and biochemical oxygen demand set out in the regulations.
    How could Environment Canada have got this so wrong?
    The fundamental inadequacy of Environment Canada’s regulations as a tool for making sound decisions about sewage treatment is captured in a quote from the study: “To predict the likely effects of management action on any point source discharge into the coastal ocean, it is essential to understand both the composition of the effluent and the environmental conditions in the receiving waters.”
    While Environment Canada’s regulations consider the former, they completely ignore the latter. In stark contrast, the Johannessen study accounts for the actual differences between physical conditions in the Strait of Georgia or Juan de Fuca Strait and, for example, physical conditions in Lake Ontario or the North Saskatchewan River. The authors state: “In some parts of the world wastewater discharge has led to eutrophication [an excess of nutrients], harmful algal blooms, hypoxia, extinctions of bottom fauna and fish mortality. However, the effects of wastewater discharge are not the same everywhere. For example, phosphates in household wastewater can have dramatic effects on lakes, causing eutrophication and harmful algal blooms, while anthropogenic phosphate has little effect on marine ecosystems, where productivity is more often limited by nitrate. Similarly, wastewater can affect one coastal sea differently from another, depending on processes occurring in the receiving environment. Consequently, management actions that are developed for one area, such as introducing a particular level of wastewater treatment, might not have the anticipated effect when applied to another.”
    Johannessen, and one of her co-authors, Rob Macdonald, are both research scientists with DFO’s Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney. Both are also adjunct professors at UVic.
    Regarding the danger of eutrophication and harmful algal blooms, the authors note, “The nitrogen discharged through all the municipal wastewater outfalls combined represents only approximately one percent of the total influx [of nitrogen from other sources]. In addition, for most of the year in most of the Strait, phytoplankton are limited by light, not by nutrients.” The authors discuss physical conditions particular to the Straits that limit growth of phytoplankton and conclude,“wastewater is unlikely to cause eutrophication or harmful algal blooms in the Strait of Georgia or Juan de Fuca Strait.”
    Impacts on the Straits from the discharge of organic carbon from wastewater are also quantified by the authors, who note “the municipal outfalls represent approximately 0.2 percent of the total of the sources. This is negligible in the context of the whole Strait.”
    The scientists acknowledge that the discharge of organic carbon does have “local effects in the area immediately surrounding each outfall.” Their description for the Macaulay Point outfall states: “[O]rganic deposition results in a high sediment concentration of organic carbon and greatly elevated sulphides, but no evident oxygen stress within sediments (due to high bottom currents and sandy substrates). Organic biomass appears to be normal relative to background in sediment around the Macaulay outfall.”
    The study’s authors note that there is some metal contamination in the Straits but attribute this to past mining activity, noting that core samples from the footprint of the Iona plant outfall show “little indication” of contamination by lead, zinc or copper. Elevated levels of cadmium at some outfall sites are attributed to sulphides in the footprint of the outfalls sequestering dissolved cadmium already in the water.
    In terms of biochemical oxygen demand, the study notes that wastewater represents only “one percent” of the demand. “On a basin scale, therefore, municipal wastewater does not add significantly to the pressure on oxygen in the Strait. In the sediment near the outfall, however, the biochemical oxygen demand of the effluent has measurable chemical and biological effects...” Even so, the authors single out the energetic ocean conditions and rapid mixing of the effluent with seawater that exist at the Macaulay and Clover outfalls as mitigating the effect of the effluent’s oxygen demand.
    Although the study did not consider various contaminants in wastewater that are present at very low concentrations in the Straits (detergents, pharmaceuticals, fragrances, pathogens, caffeine, etc.), the authors note that most of these substances would be expected to either break down or be consumed within one or two weeks of entering the ocean, after which time anything that remained of them would be exported out of the Straits by the net outflow of water produced by rivers flowing into the Straits. The authors note that secondary treatment could reduce those contaminants but offer no judgment on whether that would benefit the health of the Straits. The concentrations of these materials in local waters are known to be very low—below our ability to detect them.
    As mentioned above, the one category of contaminants in sewage that the Johannessen study predicts could be significantly reduced by secondary treatment are PBDEs.
    PBDEs are thought to be endocrine disruptors and may produce adverse reproductive, developmental, neurological, and immune effects in both humans and wildlife. There is broad concern that PBDEs, like PCBs, may be bioaccumulative. (See the 2014 US EPA fact sheet for more information on the language scientists are using regarding these effects.) Environment Canada and Health Canada have stated it’s their objective to reduce the concentration of PBDEs in the Canadian environment “to the lowest level possible.” Consequently, the manufacture and use of PBDEs have been banned in Canada.
    The Johannessen study notes, “Secondary treatment will decrease the direct input of PBDEs considerably, but it is not designed to break down persistent organic pollutants. Consequently, the effect of increasing the level of treatment will largely be to move PBDEs from marine effluent into sludge that will have to be further managed to prevent its potential re-entry into the aquatic environment.”
    This is a critical point. If the only significant environmental benefit of treatment is to divert PBDEs away from the ocean, but our management of sludge and biosolids then allows them back into the environment, what would be the point of spending any public money for that initial diversion?
    We can predict the likely fate of CRD biosolids by looking to the Annacis Island secondary treatment plant on the Fraser River that serves metro Vancouver. The data in the study shows the Annacis Island plant removes approximately 80 percent of PDBEs, which, after the sludge is processed in anaerobic biodigesters, end up in biosolids. Those biosolids are, according to Metro Vancouver, used as “cover material at landfills, fertilizer on grasslands and hay fields, for land reclamation at copper and molybdenum mines, as soil for city parks and recreation areas.” Metro Vancouver also notes that “innovative” methods for disposing of biosolids include “deep ocean dumping” and “incineration.”
    Consider the possibility of biosolids being used for “landfill cover” at Hartland Landfill, for example. Rainfall would eventually wash the PBDEs into the landfill’s leachate collection pipeline, which feeds into Victoria’s sewer system. The PBDEs would then return to a sewage treatment plant where about 20 percent of them would escape to the ocean. The other 80 percent would then return, via sewage treatment, to become landfill cover at Hartland. Over time the amount of PBDEs circulating through the landfill would increase, as would the flow of PBDEs that escape to the ocean. An investigation of PBDEs in landfill leachate headed by UBC scientist Monica Danon-Schaffer shows some cities in Canada with greatly elevated levels of PBDEs emerging from their landfills.
    Similarly, if the biosolids were incinerated, the low temperatures at which municipal incinerators operate would result in the PBDEs passing through the incinerator into the atmosphere, only to be washed out later by rain onto land or water.
    For those who hope that gasification of the biosolids would destroy PBDEs, think again. There is only one facility in Canada—the controversial Swan Hills Treatment Centre in Alberta—that is licensed to process such hazardous materials as PBDEs, and it employs very high temperatures relative to municipal incinerators or gasifiers. 
    What is the CRD’s plan for the biosolids produced by secondary or higher levels of treatment? In 2010 the CRD avoided providing the Province with its plan for biosolids when they submitted, and received approval for, their current wastewater treatment plan for McLoughlin Point. That plan stated that an environmental assessment of the CRD’s biosolids plan had been completed, but an FOI filed by Focus shows the environmental assessment wasn’t actually carried out until 2015. That document simply notes that biosolids “will be used in a beneficial manner consistent with CRD Policy.”
    So far, no one knows what that is.
    Let’s sum up what we know so far. The only environmental benefit of secondary sewage treatment—according to scientists who have considered the actual in-the-water situation for Victoria—is the opportunity to permanently divert PBDEs away from the ocean. Yet the CRD has not established a plan for how it will dispose of biosolids let alone sequester the PBDEs they would contain. 
    To explore this further I contacted the study’s lead author, Sophie Johannessen.
    Johannessen highlighted the complexity of the PBDEs issue by describing to me a hypothesis she has developed. It’s surprising. Her research suggests that the benthic community—the creatures that live in and on the surface sediments of the ocean bottom— have a lower level of PBDEs at the Macaulay Point outfall than those at the Iona Island outfall, which has a higher level of treatment. Johannessen thinks that’s because there’s more carbon available to eat at Macaulay compared to the amount of PBDEs. In terms of reducing the amount of PBDEs entering the marine food web, less treatment may be better. How could we expect regulators in far away Ottawa to know this?
    Johannessen agreed that unless the CRD found a way to remove the PBDEs from biosolids after treatment, they could eventually make their way to the Strait. “Moving persistent contaminants into sludge, which is then spread on land, might actually increase the length of time over which the environment—groundwater, streams and eventually the ocean—is exposed to the contaminants,” she explained. “Source control would be far more effective. For PBDEs, we have already undertaken source control by banning their import or manufacture, although it is going to take a long time for the existing stock of PBDEs in our furniture, toys and electronics to stop draining into the ocean. Source control is likely to be the most effective solution for any trace contaminants, because they do not make up the bulk of the effluent and because they tend not to be destroyed by sewage treatment.”
    I asked Johannessen if the CRD’s plan for sewage treatment—ill-defined as it is at the moment—seemed to her to be a good way to spend a billion dollars, especially in light of her finding that the opportunity to remove PBDEs was the only significant environmental effect that might be obtained from sewage treatment. “As a scientist,” she said, “it isn’t  for me to say. That’s a political decision.” 
    Fair enough, but is there anything we could do that would have a more positive effect on the marine ecosystem than upgrading Victoria’s sewage treatment system?
    “I think so, yes,” Johannessen said. “We could reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, enact source control for persistent contaminants, and reduce other local pressures on the marine biota.”
    How would reducing our emissions help? “Anything that would reduce our greenhouse gas emissions would help to slow the rate of change in the ocean, which would give marine biota more time to adapt to the changes,” Johannessen said. “Reducing carbon dioxide emissions, specifically, would also reduce the rate of ocean acidification, which is considered a major threat to a wide range of marine life, including shellfish.”
    What other ocean effects are scientists seeing that are related to climate change? “The local ocean is already changing fast, as a result of global-scale climate change,” Johannessen said. “The temperature of seawater and river water is increasing; the concentration of oxygen in the deep water of Juan de Fuca Strait and the Strait of Georgia is decreasing; the abundance and nutritional content of zooplankton—food for juvenile fish and seabirds—is decreasing; the timing of Fraser River flow—which drives the physical circulation in the Strait—is changing; and the frequency of short-term events such as windstorms and short intense rainstorms is increasing.”
    How ironic is it, then, that just as countries around the globe are marshalling the skills and knowledge of their best scientists to find a path to decarbonization, Victorians are poised to trade in their tidal-powered sewage treatment system (Johannessen likens it to “a giant washing machine”) for one that has an immense emissions burden attached? In 2013, for every million dollars of economic activity in Canada, 416 tonnes of CO2 were emitted. So the emissions burden associated with the $1 billion capital cost of this project is on the order of 416,000 tonnes.
    Scientists have already made it clear that the current treatment system is not causing harm to the environment. This latest study can also be seen as a warning to all of us that a carelessly-conceived treatment system could end up doing considerably more harm than good.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Leslie Campbell
    January 2016
    The encampment at the law courts grounds provides evidence of our collective failure to meet the need for housing.
     
    THE HOMELESS CAMP at the Provincial law courts grounds might be getting most of the attention these days, but the whole latter half of 2015 experienced gusts of action on the homeless front, starting with Mayor Helps’ and Councillor Ben Isitt’s proposal last summer to devote a corner of Topaz Park to a regulated tenting area for the homeless—something angrily rejected by local residents.
    Then the mayor hosted a shelter workshop in September with the somewhat controversial idea of paying homeless people $20 to participate; over 350 showed up. Next, she and Victoria council urged the CRD Hospital Board to approve borrowing of up to $30 million towards housing the estimated 400 chronic shelter users in Greater Victoria. After some hesitation, the Board approved the motion in December, conditional on obtaining similar funding from the Province. 
    Also in December, Cool Aid obtained an option to purchase the old Mount Edwards Court Care Home, hoping to convert it into supportive housing for 100 homeless people. It is seeking government and community funding towards the $9-million cost. Rob Reid, who chairs Cool Aid’s “campaign cabinet,” is optimistic, believing  there’s been a “maturing of understanding” about the issue. 
    Such maturation may help explain why the Province declined to call in the cops to dismantle the camp as it blossomed forth tents and tarps. Instead, when it hit a population of 40 in November, the Province installed three portable toilets and came up with $400,000 for a four-month shelter. The City has now provided a vacant building along with $45,000 to renovate it, and the United Way is putting $25,000 into services. 
     
    I VISITED INTENT CITY, as some are calling it, several times in December. There seem to be two huge benefits of the camp for residents: First, it means they can stay in one place and not have to sneak around in the dark to set and break camp. In City parks, a bylaw allows camping only from 7pm to 7am—and that right was only clarified after a long legal battle. It’s hard for us non-winter campers to fully appreciate the difficulties implied in the bylaw. Sherman Sherwood says it’s so dark at 7am during winter that he often loses crucial belongings—a hammer, some rope for his tarp—simply because he can’t see them. Another camper, 61-year-old Doug, tells me he’d been sleeping in local parks including Beacon Hill for years now despite his arthritis and police harassment. But packing up and getting on the move before the 7am curfew is “just too much.” 
    The second blessing the residents enjoy—and probably the most important—is community. Instead of being alone in some bushes in the dark, they are together, making connections and decisions about how to conduct their lives together and also in association with the wider community; they are interacting and feeling part of something bigger. It’s safer as well. One camper’s life was saved by his neighbours when he overdosed.
    Intent resident Chris Parent, who had been sleeping outside without even a tent, using cardboard and finding places “slightly secured from the elements,” prefers to be outdoors, “as close to nature as possible.” But the camp allows him to also be in a community. “It’s full of good people,” he says. “Their lights are beginning to shine a little bit more,” because of the help they are giving each other.
    Joseph Reville, too, says, “This is kind of awesome because we’re learning to connect with each other. Not every one is on the same page,” he admits. “Drugs are a part of what’s out here…Without the security of a home and all the good things that come with it, it’s easy to slip really quick…and people [on the street] have no way to hide their addictions.” Reville is in recovery from an addiction to hard drugs. He lives in the “clean” zone of the camp and for the most part it’s working well. After a stabbing and fatal overdose in late December, however, he hinted he’d be happier if the hard drug users left. 
    Reville is one of Intent City’s residents who are “trying to raise a voice for housing.” An artist, Reville’s been homeless off and on since 1994. Bed bugs drove him out of his last home. He views the camp as providing “a platform for a long overdue conversation in Victoria” and is excited by the possibility of developing a template for other cities.
    Reville thinks clusters of microhousing on public lands would be ideal. “They could have cool little themes, different flavours to go along with the neighbourhoods they adjoin. Microhousing could be a tourist attraction,” he says. What’s needed in general, he says, is “out of the box thinking …and something that doesn’t take two years to implement. There are buildings all over the city sitting vacant. Let’s restore some heritage buildings and some old real estate and get people housed and start some crazy programs. What if we handed over some of the jobs to people who wanted to transition from [street life]…cleaning parks, removing graffiti…we’re capable.”
    Don Evans, executive director at Our Place, at one of Intent’s daily morning circle meetings, updates residents on plans for the new shelter. He mostly listens, assuring the campers he wants to work with them. Some who speak at the circle are adamant about staying out of shelters. They’ve had bad experiences. They cite the drug users and dealers—“triggers” for their own addictions.
    Later, at a press conference announcing the location of the new shelter, Evans says the campers will select who goes into it. It will be open and staffed 24 hours a day, meaning residents won’t have to worry about packing up or losing their belongings. Meals will be provided. Tents may be set up to provide private spaces. Pets will be allowed. There will be a lounge area, TV and showers. Security will be put in place. Some residents will get hired to do some of the work.
    As far as shelters go, it sounds like an out-of-the box approach—but it is only for four months. 
    And many are disinterested in going into this or any shelter. For himself, Reville dismisses shelter use as “a merry-go-round” instead of real progress towards stable housing.
    Given Victoria’s .6 percent vacancy rate, he says, a lot of workers are ending up homeless. “This city runs on blue collar workers…my tent mate wakes up everyday at 6am and trucks off to Sidney to go work in a café.”
    Kathryn, on the other had (she prefers to not publicize her last name), will forego any shelter because she likes living outside. A veteran of the street at 60, she has raised children she’s proud of and operated a business in the past. She tells me she initiated the camp after setting up her tent there for four days and realizing no one had asked her to take it down. “It doesn’t belong to the City—it’s Crown Land. I was jubilant,” she recalls. She viewed it as a way to help her street community come together. However, she now feels it’s grown completely out of her control, with too many young people who “haven’t worked things out” moving in. “It’s become something I didn’t envision,” she says.
    She’d like to create a small community of about 30 people on some acreage outside the city, basically a campground with hookups for electricity. The 30 could pool their housing allowance ($375) to lease the land, create a garden and a common kitchen house. She’s actively looking for the ideal site.
    But Kathryn is worried about those who are not doing well outside. Besides those in the camp, city parks and doorways, she tells me there are a lot of seniors living in their cars in Victoria, isolated, afraid of exposure, and too proud to ask for help. 
     
    REVEREND AL TYSICK of Victoria Dandelion Society characterizes the 40-bed shelter as “a political smokescreen.” He notes there are 80-100 people in the camp and another 200 on the street. The total 370 beds or mats offered by local shelters are full. “The answer is housing and the government knows it. A new shelter is not even close to a real solution,” says Tysick. What’s being offered by the Province, he says, amounts to “the crumbs that fall off the rich man’s table.” He points to the abandoned Central Care Home on Johnson Street with 147 rooms—“the government could buy it and move people in tomorrow.”
    Meanwhile, Cool Aid is trying to do something along those lines for 100 homeless at the old Mount Edward care facility. But the “Dr. Joe Haegert Centre” will need both government and community support. It has raised $1.5 million from donors already and is aiming at another $500,000 in donations by the end of March and is applying for the balance from municipal, regional and Provincial governments.
    Government involvement in providing housing is essential. Victoria has the lowest vacancy rate in Canada. That and BC’s low minimum wage ($10.45/hour) and social assistance rates ($527 for a single adult) point to obvious structural barriers to finding people stable housing in the private market. Even rent supplements (part of the mix these days) are seen as a band-aid. Stephen Portman of Together Against Poverty Society points out landlords have legions of people to choose from so are unlikely to rent to those showing up pushing a cart and looking rough, without references or with a criminal record. And subsidized housing in the CRD has a waitlist of 1500. The picture is not encouraging. Budgets for all levels of government suggest their priorities lie elsewhere. (Think bridges and sewage treatment locally.)
     
    INTENT CITY RESIDENTS enthuse about the kind-hearted Victorians who have visited and donated food and other supplies. One day when I visited, a group of students from Reynolds Secondary came with their teacher to deliver hot baked potatoes (donated by Galey Farms and cooked by the students) wrapped in foil. They were a big hit. Chris Parent says he has actually gained weight because so much healthy food has been provided by Victorians. He tells me of Janice and her husband who decided to give up their personal Christmas in order to help the campers.
    Then there’s neighbour Dale Seibel who, at one of the daily circle meetings, announces he is organizing a hot lunch as well as blankets from a Downtown hotel. He had already rounded up donated goods from businesses in Cook Street Village.
    At the same circle meeting, Kelsey, a graduate student at UVic, consults with the campers on a wishlist that university students and faculty can supply. Mary from Christ Church Cathedral checks in, reminding campers of the pre-Christmas lunch coming up.
    Yet, there are also signs of intolerance towards the homeless. The parent advisory council of Central Middle School has expressed opposition to having the new shelter across the street; and worries have been vocalized about Cool Aid’s proposed supportive housing facility being so close to Christ Church Cathedral School.
    Another test of acceptance will come when the chosen 40 campers move into the temporary shelter. It’s expected the rest of the campers will be evicted and forced to scatter to city parks and doorways. But the City of Victoria could choose to not enforce (or even rescind) the camping bylaw that criminalizes homelessness. It could recognize that the camp serves its residents’ need for safety and community and provides the rest of us (including the Province) with evidence of our collective failure to address the need for housing for all citizens.
    It took Leslie Campbell a couple of days to thaw out after one two-hour visit to Intent City. She admires the hardiness, compassion and intelligence of the people she spoke with there.

    David Broadland
    December 2015
    As the cost for a new bridge marches ever upwards, explanations from City Hall seem designed to distract rather than inform.
     
    IN A RECENT Times Colonist op-ed about the new Johnson Street Bridge project, ironworkers union spokesperson Eric Bohne stated, “Deficient steel fabricated in China helped lead to a $63-million project estimate in 2009 ballooning to $100 million today and counting.”
    Bohne’s message is compelling: Building the steel part of the new bridge in China has taken jobs away from Canadians. Defective steel has caused the cost to swell. He’s partly right. A union-friendly NDP-led council didn’t prevent a few bridge jobs from being shipped to China. On the second count, though—that deficient steel has caused project costs to balloon—Bohne is slicing pure baloney.
    At a November 19 meeting of Victoria City council, Project Director Jonathan Huggett said that City costs related to problems at the Jiangsu Zhongtai Steel Structure Co Ltd factory amounted to “at least $1 million.” For a project that appears headed for an eventual cost of at least $135 million, $1 million is the proverbial drop in the bucket.
    That fact hasn’t prevented Huggett from constantly highlighting the faraway Chinese problem ever since he was parachuted in to save the project in early 2014. Since then, Huggett’s choice to focus on Chinese fabrication has made it appear to be the central demon plaguing the project. Bohne’s op-ed indicates that strategy is working. On November 19, Huggett continued with that message when he told councillors that, because of new fabrication problems at the Chinese factory, PCL, the company contracted to build the bridge, had changed the project completion date to early 2018. But in a contradictory statement Huggett reassured councillors the steelwork in China would be completed in “three to four months.” According to other schedules previously provided by PCL, that would allow time for delivery of the six major steel parts of the bascule leaf to Victoria in September, 2016. Based on PCL’s schedule, that would put project completion in late 2017, which is the same general ballpark Huggett was batting into last July.
    Huggett’s amping-up of problems in China with crack-by-crack accounts of the welding—and the impact those cracks might have on delivery dates—has had the effect of distracting attention away from deeper, more troubling issues with the project.
    For example, one of the fabrication challenges Huggett related to councillors on November 19—an unsuccessful attempt to fit together large steel plates that form the 50-foot-diameter rings on which the lifting part of the bridge will rotate—actually stems from the strange design of the bridge, not the skill of Chinese welders.
    A conventional lifting bridge rotates on an easily machinable shaft. The existing Johnson Street Bridge, for example, which has operated reliably for 93 years, rotates on simple trunnion bearings that support a shaft about 10 inches in diameter.
    Nothing so elegantly simple and easily manufactured can be found in the new bridge. Its original designer, Sébastien Ricard, told Victorians in 2010 that he chose to mechanically rotate the bridge using 50-foot-diameter rings rolling on steel bearings placed beneath them because he wanted an observer of the bridge to be able to readily discern how the bridge mechanism worked. So, because of Ricard’s whimsical choice, the bridge that’s being built doesn’t have a fixed shaft through its axis of rotation. Instead, it has, in effect, a 50-foot-diameter “shaft” that rolls on 24 massive 4-foot-diameter steel rollers placed beneath it. Because of the extremely tight tolerances needed for this heavy machinery to function reliably over many years, the 50-foot-diameter “shaft” of the new bridge needs to be almost as perfectly circular as the 10-inch-diameter shaft of the current bridge. The result is that Ricard’s design doesn’t make much practical sense. It’s much more difficult and expensive to make a perfectly circular steel ring that’s 50 feet in diameter compared to one that’s only 10 inches. Hence the latest difficulty in China.
    If the cost to the City of the problems in China can be summed up as “at least $1 million,” as Huggett put it, then what actually accounts for the ballooning of the City’s “fixed-price” with PCL? The answer to this question is complex, but once again it works back to Ricard’s design.
    Ricard’s design was considered too risky to build—in terms of cost— by PCL’s two competitors for the construction contract, Kiewit and Walsh. Both rejected it outright in their bids and suggested more conventional designs. PCL, however, based its bid on Ricard’s wacky 50-foot-diameter shaft and got the job. Now here’s an all-important fact to remember about this project: The dissenting opinions of Kiewit and Walsh were never shared by senior City staff with City councillors. Why was this vital information withheld from them?
    When Councillor Ben Isitt asked, at an open council meeting in September, 2012, why councillors couldn’t be shown the contents of the three bids, including the critical design reviews that were a requirement of the bids, City Solicitor Tom Zworski wouldn’t even allow his explanation to Isitt to be heard in public. So we don’t know what Zworski’s reasoning was and Isitt isn’t allowed to tell us. All we know is that Zworski successfully thwarted councillors—and the public—from learning about Kiewit’s and Walsh’s concerns until Focus obtained the bids two years later through an FOI request. By then it was too late and the project was already stumbling over Ricard’s impractical concept.
    Not only were councillors kept in the dark about the engineering concerns with Ricard’s design, they weren’t told that Kiewit and Walsh had submitted significantly higher bids (for simpler bridges) than PCL did, which should have been a warning sign that PCL’s low bid price might not hold up as the project proceeded. But Zworski’s move to isolate councillors from vital information about the project kept them from knowing this and that kept them from making an informed decision. This sealed the project’s fate.
    The key moment for the project, at which the council’s lack of information fully asserted itself, occurred on December 31, 2012, at a closed council meeting at which councillors were shown the PCL contract and asked to approve it before they left. It was New Year’s eve.
    PCL’s low starting price in the contract presented to councillors was, in fact, the highest price the councillors had been willing to approve. Their approval of an increase in the project budget from $77 million to $93 million 10 months earlier had been made on the condition that the cost would not go up “a single penny more,” as Councillor Marianne Alto put it back then. This condition was to be implemented through a “fixed-price” contract.
    On that New Year’s eve, with the PCL contract in front of them and needing only their approval, councillors were given the impression that the contract with PCL was essentially “fixed-price” in nature, even though the term “fixed-price” doesn’t appear in the contract and the contract provides for change orders and increased costs. Again, councillors weren’t told about Kiewit’s and Walsh’s rejection of the design and they were told nothing about the companies’ significantly higher cost estimates for more conventional bridge designs. On very incomplete information, and under pressure to say “yes,” all of the councillors except Lisa Helps and Ben Isitt voted to approve the PCL contract. An eventual ballooning of costs was a certainty. Here’s why:
    PCL based its bid on a modified version of a barely-developed version of Ricard’s design that had been provided by the City’s project manager, MMM Group. Unfortunately for taxpayers, MMM’s design turned out to be little more than a sketch on a napkin. As PCL’s altered version of MMM’s preliminary design was re-engineered in preparation for construction in the real world, it changed. PCL knew this could happen. They had prepared for that possibility by negotiating a contract that put all of the financial risk for both material changes to the design and delays in delivering the design squarely on the City’s shoulders. 
    One of the first significant changes to the design involved the need for perfectly circular 50-foot-diameter steel rings. Rather than accomplishing that by using precision-milled bearing surfaces on the rings—too champagne-y for the City’s beer budget—engineers had to rely on the untried concept of pumping 4000 gallons of epoxy grout between the rings and a series of small “support segments” to create a more circular bearing surface for the 50-foot-diameter rings. To this day those engineers have been unable, or unwilling, to identify a single moveable bridge that uses epoxy grout in such prodigious quantities, and so the long-term viability of the design is in question. The grout could fail long before the Chinese welding does.
    In any case, that and other changes to PCL’s bid design, all changes dictated by MMM which was responsible for engineering the design through to construction, have allowed PCL to change its price for building the bridge—considerably.
    The City made public the first big change order request from PCL in April 2014. This was $9.5 million for “design delay” and “increases to the scope of the project.” (The net amount of the change order was $7.9 million because PCL offered to reduce its request by $1.6 million if the City agreed to thinner highway deck steel.) Since then the City has refused to provide any details about subsequent change orders. Focus has learned that there have been at least two additional change orders, but attempts to obtain details of these through FOI requests have been rebuffed by the City.
    In early September, 2015, Focus filed an FOI with the City for the “Issued For Construction” (IFC) drawings that would show the final design of the bascule leaf (the section of the bridge that lifts), the main support pier, and the machinery that will be used to lift the bascule leaf. Photos of the anchor bolts in the bascule pier suggest that significant additions to the design of the bridge’s lifting machinery have been made. That would support PCL’s claim of “increases to the scope” in its first $9.5 million change order. It would also add to the evidence accumulated since mid-2012 that the bridge’s experimental design had only been minimally engineered by MMM during its first four years as the City’s project manager. Those IFC drawings will be critical in sorting out conflicting claims for more money, whether through mediation or in court.
    The City’s response to our FOI request reflects the chaos in which the project now finds itself. Although the IFC drawings are a strict requirement of the City’s contract with PCL, and the drawings should be in the custody and control of the City, it told us the drawings couldn’t be found. The City was unsure if they even existed.
    Huggett’s willingness to shift blame away from City officials to faceless Chinese welders is, no doubt, a relief to the City officials who hired him to find a way through what Isitt calls “this disaster.” But the project appears to have enough serious problems right here in Victoria without having to go to China. If even the most basic project documents can’t be found, then the City doesn’t have much hope of prevailing in any legal process. It is, of course, possible that the City does have the documents we requested but is willing to break BC information access law in order to hide the true nature of the mess it has got City taxpayers into and thus avoid accountability. We have an example of that, too.
    Back in July, Huggett told councillors that fendering on the north side of the new bridge would cost millions of dollars that weren’t included in the City’s agreement with PCL. At the time, Isitt asked Huggett, “Could you remind us why the fendering isn’t included in the scope of the contract with PCL?” Huggett told the councillor that the north side fendering had been “clouded out” in a contract drawing, indicating that north side fendering was not included in the agreement.
    Following that meeting, Focus filed an FOI for the “clouded out” contract drawing Huggett had referenced. Several weeks beyond the legal deadline for the City to respond, and only after serial prompting by Focus, the City’s FOI office told us that it couldn’t find Huggett’s drawing. When we asked that office, repeatedly, if it had asked Huggett for the drawing, it didn’t respond. After we sent a written complaint to Mayor Helps and councillors, the FOI office sent us a letter making it clear that there was no “clouded out” drawing of the fendering that was part of the contract with PCL, raising serious questions about Huggett’s version of the issue.
    Recently, Huggett told media the north side fendering would cost “upwards of $4 million.” That’s about four times the cost that he’s attributed to problems with Chinese steel and welding. With the bridge project now looking like it has a realistic chance of topping $135 million, councillors might want to consider whether Huggett should be spending so much time on China.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Rob Wipond
    December 2015
    A surprise government announcement could lead to the resolution of long-standing controversies about police secrecy.
     
    THE BRITISH COLUMBIA PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENT has pledged to pass legislation to make the BC Association of Chiefs of Police and BC Association of Municipal Chiefs of Police “public bodies.” The announcement came from Bette-Jo Hughes, Chief Information Officer and Associate Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Technology, Innovation and Citizens’ Services, speaking in mid-November to MLAs reviewing the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. The amendment to FOIPPA could resolve many concerns about how the associations operate—concerns that Focus has been reporting since 2012. 
    “I will be prepared to celebrate when the ink is dry,” commented Micheal Vonn, policy director for the BC Civil Liberties Association. Vonn has reason to be concerned. For years, members of the associations have sidestepped transparency and accountability by ping-ponging between claims that they were acting as “private citizens” or “public servants.” For example, the BCACP and BCAMCP successfully asserted that they were not subject to freedom of information laws because they were private groups. Conversely, the associations didn’t have to register as private lobby groups, because their members successfully argued that they were public servants just doing their public duties.
    Over the course of reporting on the subject, I eventually obtained some heavily censored minutes of BCACP and BCAMCP meetings on file at police departments. I learned that, aside from police officers, members of the BCACP included senior representatives from public bodies as diverse as the BC Ministry of Justice, Conservation Service, CSIS, FBI and Canada Post, along with representatives from the private sector such as banks. 
    And what were they doing? On the “public” side, for example, the associations were developing policing policies, coordinating police forces, crafting legislation, signing commitments for all police departments, and appointing officers to public agencies. On the “private” side, they were raising funds, speaking to media, and lobbying. The conflicts of interest in this unusual setup were many: The police officers took thousands of dollars from the banking industry while pledging to improve police responses to crimes at banks. Some chiefs and their police boards were taking positions in support of medical marijuana, while the same chiefs, through these associations, were lobbying government against medical marijuana. 
    Was all of this ethical? Or legal? BC Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham held an inquiry and determined that the associations acted like public bodies. In April 2014, Denham recommended that the government pass legislation to clarify that the associations were public bodies. The government did not do that, and the ping-ponging has continued since Focus last reported on the topic.
    Commissioner Stan Lowe declared that the police chiefs’ activities were “not within the jurisdiction of the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner” because the associations were “private organizations.” Mayors Lisa Helps and Barbara Desjardins, co-chairs of the Victoria and Esquimalt Police Board, declined to become involved and stated that “this Board does not play any direct governing role” over the associations. Staff Sgt. Julie Moss dismissed my complaints about RCMP officers taking money from banks, on the grounds that the BCACP was a private society and the RCMP officers were acting “in accordance with their responsibilities listed under the Society Act.” Moss didn’t even mention the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Act requirement “to avoid any actual, apparent or potential conflict of interests.”
    One time, I got a jail-like grip on the ping-ponging ball: I caught a chief in the act of switching hats, moving my letter and personal contact information from his public police department to the private BCACP, and then sharing it with the BCACP’s diverse members. With this careless dispersal of my confidential personal information, he must have breached laws covering public or private bodies—surely one or the other or both? This June, Patrick Egan at the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) dismissed my complaint. Despite my explanations that most of my investigations into these associations were occurring in my personal time as a private citizen, Egan took the position that I was actually working in my public capacity as a professional journalist when I wrote that letter. Therefore, concluded Egan, “the information about you in the letter is considered ‘work product’ and not personal information,” and could legally be shared far and wide. Essentially, Egan seemed to think that I was just trying to pull a fast one on an innocent police chief: Imagine Wipond believing he can simply switch hats at any time between his public and private roles and get away with it! 
    I tried using the associations’ vague status to aid me in a complaint to the OIPC about the censored sections in the associations’ minutes. I pointed out that all of the supposed confidential information in them had been openly shared by the chiefs with a diverse array of public and private sector members and guests affiliated only by virtue of their participation in these unofficial groups, all of whom had apparently also received unredacted copies of the minutes without any clear confidentiality policies in place. Therefore, I argued, the police departments who’d given me copies had no right to censor the records now as if they were the minutes of highly confidential internal policing operations. But in November, OIPC adjudicator Elizabeth Barker upheld virtually all of the redactions, as if the associations were public bodies operating confidentially. “In my view,” Barker wrote, “there is nothing to suggest that [the members] are acting in their private or personal capacity when participating in BCACP and BCAMCP activities.” Pong!
    Like me, Pivot Legal Society lawyer Douglas King said he felt frustration with much of Barker’s decision. King and Vincent Gogolek of the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association had provided an intervenor submission. “In some ways, it was the easy decision,” said King. “But it didn’t really get to the heart of the matter.” King pointed to how Barker ignored the associations’ own claims in other contexts about their private status, downplayed the fact that some members weren’t public servants, and uncritically accepted assertions that the associations operated with an implicit “understanding” of confidentiality. 
    “It’s like creating two tiers of members of the public,” said King. “You’ve got members of the public who are part of these police organizations, who are in the favour of the police, and they have access to these documents that the other part of the public doesn’t have…It’s almost like it gives the police the ability to invite whoever it wants to be part of the government for the day.”
    This became secondary, though, after Hughes’ surprise announcement of the plan to bring clarity. “[G]overnment is drafting an amendment that will change the definition of a ‘local public body’ to include a police association,” stated Hughes. “This change will cover the BC Association of Chiefs of Police as soon as the amendment is passed and will allow the BC Association of Municipal Chiefs of Police to be covered once it is a legal entity.” 
    “It’s exactly what we asked for right at the outset,” commented Vonn.
    “I’m happy to see it,” said King. “Our fear always from the beginning with these organizations was that they were downloading decision making and authority to private bodies away from the public eye. Making them public bodies obviously prevents them from doing that…It’s the correct decision.”
    At a press scrum with OIPC Commissioner Denham and Assistant Commissioner Michael McEvoy, I asked: Other than finally having to respond to information access requests, what changes in information handling and sharing practices will the associations have to make once they’re legally identified as public bodies? 
    “They will have to figure that out,” answered McEvoy.
    “They will have to figure it out, because they’re going to be under a legal obligation to,” said BC FIPA’s Gogolek. “They’re now on notice.” Gogolek noted the amendment would allow the OIPC to investigate the associations. “Given the ambiguity around these bodies, it might be a useful thing after 12 or 18 months for the Commissioner’s office to go in and take a look and see how they’re doing in terms of compliance.”
    Could this also affect the associations’ policing policy and governance activities? “I think the police had it pretty easy…in being able to run some of their more controversial and difficult policy decisions through [the associations] so that the public didn’t really have much of a say in them,” said King. “Maybe this is the beginning of the end of that.” And it should prompt public debate about “docile” police boards, added King. “Unfortunately, over the last few years, from our experience, the BCACP seems to have more power and control over actually setting police policy than the democratically appointed police boards. That’s concerning. The fact that police boards seem to be all too willing to allow another agency to step in and play their functional role—it shows how ineffective the police boards have been.”
    Moving ahead, King suggested organizations like Pivot be allowed to participate at BCACP and BCAMCP meetings. “If that’s where policy is being created, in a democracy, the public has to have a say.”
    At deadline, the BC government told Focus that there was “no timeline” to actually pass the amendment. Vonn advised remaining vigilant. “I have every reason to think they wouldn’t want to do this; they’ve resisted it so far,” said Vonn. “I think this is only voluntary insofar as a certain amount of attention has been brought to bear on the issue.” 
    Rob Wipond won a Webster journalism award last year for his writing in Focus on the police chief associations. He’s currently working on a book.

    David Broadland
    November 2015
    Was the surveillance software installed on the newly-elected mayor’s computer by Saanich staff a case of tit for tat?
     
    LATE LAST MAY I received an interesting phone call from Dr Gerald Graham. Graham had made a presentation to an August 14, 2013 CRD Board meeting at which an extraordinary incident had occurred minutes before he spoke. When Graham phoned, he told me he had filed an FOI for whatever investigation of the incident had been undertaken by the CRD. He told me there was no doubt at the CRD about who was responsible for the incident and that the FOI records he obtained showed this. When I asked if he would share those records he was non-committal. In the end he didn’t share them. I’ll come back to Graham and draw a connection to the infamous installation of surveillance software on Saanich Mayor Richard Atwell’s computer, but first let me tell you about what happened at that 2013 CRD Board meeting.
    The matter being discussed was the CRD’s proposed $783-million sewage treatment plan. Twenty-one individuals had pre-registered to address the board on the merits of a motion by Saanich Councillor Vic Derman. Derman was proposing that the CRD “Initiate an extensive, independent review of the current [McLoughlin Point] project.” His motion set out specific objectives for that review. 
    The very first presentation on the schedule of speakers was a video by East Sooke fisherman and diver Allan Crow, a proponent of sewage treatment. Crow’s video had been previously uploaded by CRD staff to a laptop used to include visual presentations from the public at such meetings. At that point in the meeting the presentations of all the participants who were going to use the overhead projection system had been loaded onto the laptop. Crow started his video. The CRD’s minutes for the meeting provide a brief outline of what happened: “During the presentation it became apparent that the video had been tampered with. The Chair asked that Mr Crow return at the end of the delegation list to play an original version of the video.”
    Times Colonist reporter Rob Shaw’s account of the incident was  more fulsome: “A local diver tried to play a video for the board of underwater conditions near a sewage outfall. But unknown opponents secretly altered his file on the CRD computer, so the words ‘misleading’ were superimposed on the video.” Shaw went on to observe: “CRD chairman Alastair Bryson stopped the presentation and asked the perpetrator to step forward. But no one did.”
    Gerald Graham was scheduled to speak immediately after Crow’s aborted video and then his presentation was followed by 20 others, including Crow’s unaltered video at the end. In between, among the speakers who used the CRD’s laptop to provide a visual component to their presentation, was Richard Atwell. At the time, Atwell was a community activist well known for doggedly critiquing the CRD’s every move on its sewage treatment plan.
    Let me go back to Graham’s phone call. As I mentioned above, Graham told me he had filed an FOI for any investigation conducted by the CRD into the incident. Graham said the CRD knew who had tampered with the video. He volunteered this information after obliquely referring to the Saanich spyware stories I had written. I was intrigued. Was the incident involving Crow’s video somehow linked to the installation of spyware on the newly-elected mayor’s computer?
    I eventually filed my own FOI with the CRD for the records Graham had received. What the CRD released included an email sent on August 15, 2013 to several CRD staff that described what they believed had happened: “We suspect the person downloaded the video from Youtube ahead of time (they knew the video was there), made the edits, and then deleted the version we had on our laptop and replaced it with their version. Not nice.”
    The records also show that, two weeks later, a second CRD employee stated, “…the delegation simply came up to the laptop and did what he wanted to under the guise of getting ready, even though his presentation had already been placed on the laptop.”
    It should be mentioned that the CRD emails do not name who “he” was, but with careful consideration of the short list of people who made presentations involving the CRD’s laptop at that meeting, and knowing a little about each of those people, it would be challenging to not come to the conclusion that “he” was Richard Atwell. Given the context of Graham’s phone call to me, it was evident that Graham himself had come to that conclusion. How many other people believed that Atwell had tampered with Crow’s presentation? The email records show that upwards of 13 CRD employees were made aware of the details of the CRD’s investigation into the incident.
    I recently spoke with Mayor Atwell and told him about the CRD’s investigation and Graham’s FOI. I asked him if he’d switched Crow’s video files at that 2013 CRD board meeting. Atwell was unwilling to either confirm or deny that he was the person who made the switch.
    The records provided to me by the CRD also show that on the day after the video incident, Saanich Councillor Judy Brownoff asked CRD staff about what steps they would be taking to secure the presentation laptop. It’s not hard to imagine that other CRD directors made similar inquiries and that with so many CRD staff aware of the details of the investigation, Richard Atwell, citizen activist, had quickly gained a level of notoriety amongst local government civil servants and politicians as—to use Rob Shaw’s words—“the perpetrator.”
    Just 15 months after the video incident, Atwell was—to the astonishment of many—elected mayor of Saanich.
    Within six days of that election, employee monitoring software had been installed on the mayor-elect’s designated computer, ready to record every single keystroke he made. As well, his computer was configured to prevent him from accessing the District’s corporate intranet. On top of that, access to the departmental drives that were formerly available to Mayor Frank Leonard were denied to Mayor Atwell.
    Why did Saanich staff feel such an urgent need to isolate, confine  and monitor the new mayor’s computer activity even before he’d spent a minute in office? Had they been warned about Atwell’s suspected involvement in the video tampering incident?
    The official answer to that question came after the spyware had been outed. The District’s Director of Corporate Services Laura Ciarniello was asked by BC’s Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham why the software had been installed. Denham reported: “According to Ciarniello, the motivation for this renewed focus on IT security was the perception by District Directors that the new mayor was experienced in the area of IT and would be able to identify and criticize current weaknesses in the District’s IT security.”
    But that rationale has been limp from the beginning. It requires a suspension of common sense to believe that such a hostile initiative—secretly installing spyware on the newly-elected mayor’s computer—was put in place to avoid criticism. On the other hand, with rumours about Atwell’s involvement in the 2013 video incident circulating from CRD staff to Saanich politicians and then to Saanich bureaucrats—well it’s not so difficult to understand that the real motivation could have been the fear that Atwell might exploit those “current weaknesses.”
    This theory is lent credence by the report of “Whistleblower,” a Saanich IT division employee involved in installing the surveillance software. Concerned about the unethical nature of such covert surveillance, he wrote down his recollection of what he’d been told by Saanich’s Assistant Manager of IT John Proc: “John Proc came to us…with a directive that had just come down to IT in regards to installing monitoring software on the mayor’s computer. He said, ‘They are nervous about the new mayor. We’re installing it on the directors’ computers as well to make it [look like] it is not targeted’…”
    After repeatedly asking his managers if the mayor had been informed about the spyware, and not receiving an affirmative response, Whistleblower took his concerns—and that recollection—to a former colleague, who then contacted Atwell. On January 12, 2015, the mayor announced at a press conference that, among other things, he was being spied on by his own staff.
    Atwell’s claim was immediately countered by a press release issued by Saanich councillors on January 13, which stated: “This installation was in response to the conclusions of a May 2014 independent, external audit of the District of Saanich computer system. Recommendations from the May 2014 audit included the installation of security software.”
    It was later revealed by Denham, however, that the security audit’s author “did not make any such recommendation nor did he intend to make any recommendation that could be interpreted to recommend the installation of monitoring software such as Spector 360.” Indeed, Denham’s investigation concluded that the installation of the monitoring software had likely lowered the security of the District’s computer network.
    All this raises questions about transparency on everyone’s part, including Atwell, but it also raises the question of whether any elected Saanich official played a direct, supportive role in Ciarniello’s decision to install spyware on the incoming mayor’s computer. If so, that would have represented the kind of politicization of a civil servant’s role that was, by all accounts, common in East Germany in 1984 but which most people, one would hope, would agree has no place at all in Saanich.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Judith Lavoie
    October 2015
    Rankin acted on behalf of an American mining corporation in its successful bid to sue Canada using NAFTA.
     
    A STARTLING RULING by a North American Free Trade Agreement tribunal last March could force the Canadian government to pay Delaware-based Bilcon more than $300 million because an environmental assessment review panel rejected a massive basalt quarry and ship-loading facility on the Bay of Fundy that scientists believed would threaten endangered right whales.
    At issue for Victorians in this case is the involvement of Murray Rankin, who acted as an expert witness for Bilcon at the NAFTA hearings. Rankin, currently Member of Parliament for Victoria, is an NDP candidate in the federal election. His 2012 report and 2013 testimony in the Bilcon case helped influence the tribunal’s decision to find against Canada, in what the dissenting tribunal member called “a remarkable step backwards in environmental protection.”
    Others too have expressed concern. Groups such as the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Council of Canadians, and Sierra Club Canada Foundation argue that the implications of the NAFTA ruling on Bilcon go far beyond that one case and threaten the rights of Canadians to enforce their own environmental laws, whether it’s a quarry in Nova Scotia or a pipeline in BC. All Canadians should be concerned that taxpayers will be paying Bilcon, a US company, hundreds of millions of dollars because Canadian environmental rules were enforced, they say. “These international trade agreements are designed for corporate interests, with the collusion of government, to limit the authority of the state,” said John Bennett, Sierra Club Canada Foundation national spokesman.
    Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions in NAFTA and other trade agreements—such as Canada-South Korea, Canada-China (Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement), Canada and European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (not yet ratified) and the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership—mean corporations can sue governments for compensation when they feel a policy or decision has interfered with their expected profits.
    “Someone who comes along and wants to do something is suddenly entitled to compensation if people don’t want it. Investors have more rights than the state,” Bennett said.
    Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives researcher, agreed that independent tribunals, deciding the outcome of disputes, create a parallel quasi-legal system. “It is a threat to the democratic process in Canada and elsewhere. It puts corporations on the same level as the state,” he said.
     
    THE BILCON CASE goes back to 2004 when a Joint Review Panel (JRP) was appointed to review the company’s proposal for a 152-hectare quarry on the shores of the Bay of Fundy with a marine terminal that could host 225-metre-long ships to transport the mined rock. The JRP was to determine the potential effects on the environment and community before recommending whether the government should approve the project. After three years of extensive community consultation, hearings, and review of documentation, the JRP recommended against approval, which was followed by a similar decision by the Nova Scotia and federal governments.
    Green Party leader, MP and candidate for Saanich-Gulf Islands Elizabeth May, in her former role as Sierra Club executive director (1989-2006), fought against the plan because of environmental concerns and community opposition. “It was the first environmental assessment panel ever to say ‘this project is so bad, it simply cannot be mitigated,’” said May, pointing out that scientists believed that, among other adverse environmental effects, the quarry and marine terminal would threaten the highly endangered right whale population. There are less than 400 of these whales left in the Atlantic, with the Bay of Fundy serving as an important nursery for their calves.
    When both levels of government, as a result of the assessment, decided against the project in 2007, “It was a great victory for the whales and a great victory for communities and fishing organizations,” May said. 
    However, Bilcon, instead of asking for a federal court review of the panel’s findings, chose, in 2008, to go to a NAFTA Investor-State Dispute Settlement tribunal. After seven years of legal claims, counter claims, reports and hearings, in March 2015 that three-person tribunal ruled two-to-one that the environmental assessment panel had violated Canadian law, at least in part, by using the criterion of “community core values.” Bilcon has claimed at least $300 million in damages; the final amount for damages will be ruled on in 2016.
    Rankin, an environmental lawyer and former president of West Coast Environmental Law, provided services as an administrative law expert witness on Bilcon’s behalf. The NAFTA suit was fought for Bilcon by Appleton & Associates. Appleton has served as lead counsel for investors in a large number of investor-state disputes under the NAFTA and Bilateral Investment Treaties.
    As an expert witness for Bilcon, Rankin wrote a 78-page report. It concluded: “In my view, the entire environmental assessment process of the Whites Point Quarry was a violation of Canadian administrative law. The JRP’s manifest disregard for its jurisdiction led it to a spiral of errors. By not confining itself to the parameters of its enabling legislation and Terms of Reference, the JRP abused its discretion. And the manner in which it conducted its hearing was a flagrant violation of Bilcon’s rights of natural justice and procedural fairness.” This meant the federal and provincial ministers’ decisions were also in error, Rankin argued. Later, he testified at the NAFTA tribunal along such lines.
    Though the NAFTA tribunal found in favour of Bilcon, a strong dissenting opinion came from one of its three members, University of Ottawa professor Donald McRae. He said the case should have gone before Canadian courts for a judicial review and that the decision was “a significant intrusion into domestic jurisdiction.”
    McRae disagreed with Rankin’s criticism of the JRP for not making recommendations about how the company could mitigate adverse environmental effects of the project. McRae termed the lack of mitigation measures a “principled position” on the part of the JRP that shouldn’t be dismissed as arbitrary. 
    McRae wrote that the tribunal’s decision would cast a future chill on environmental review panels; members would be tempted to disregard socio-economic considerations in case there was a claim for damages. 
    Rankin’s report to the tribunal horrified May, who is also a lawyer and counts him as a longtime friend. “It is such a shocker, I still have trouble talking about it. It’s such a horrific decision and it’s a damaging decision against Canada’s interest,” said May.
    But Rankin emphasized his report had nothing to do with the potential environmental impacts and everything to do with process. “I was called upon by a law firm in Ontario to do an expert report. I am an administrative lawyer who has done a lot of work on environmental assessment processes and I have an international reputation. I was asked to look at whether it was fair and I concluded it was not fair,” he said. “I didn’t do so as an advocate, it just happened to be part of the process,” he added. Rankin was paid by Bilcon’s law firm and charged his usual legal rates.
    Rankin signed his report shortly after becoming a Member of Parliament at the end of 2012. A year later, when the Bilcon case came before the NAFTA panel, he was called to testify so he could be cross-examined on his report. “I had no choice about the matter, I had to go,” he said.
    Rankin said that, since being elected, he has become concerned about Investor State Dispute Settlement tribunals, but finds it surprising that the Bilcon case has surfaced as a local election issue. “I am not going to talk about why this story has arisen,” he said. 
    However, for May, the big issues of trade deals and Investor-State Dispute Settlements need to be front of mind for voters, with Bilcon serving as an example of what can happen to neuter Canadian environmental rules. “It’s a corrupt mechanism and the arbitrations are neither neutral nor fair,” she said unequivocally.
    Mertins-Kirkwood, CCPA’s researcher, warned there are likely to be more such cases as additional trade deals are ratified. Since NAFTA was ratified in 1993, Canada has been the target of 35 claims, mostly from US companies. So far, only three have been officially decided against Canada but another six have been settled out of court—meaning Canada effectively lost, according to CCPA research. “The state cannot win, the state can only not lose—it’s a very unbalanced system,” said Mertins-Kirkwood.
    Yet, he noted that the Canadian government appears to have embraced the idea of ISDS and Canadian companies have launched 55 cases of their own, mostly against developing countries that lack the capacity to mount much of a defence. The NDP, while expressing concerns about ISDS clauses, voted in favour of one of the latest Harper government trade deals that included such a clause—with South Korea. The Liberals have also voted in favour of such agreements.
    So far, taxpayers in Canada have shelled out only about $200 million to aggrieved corporations, but the possibility of billion-dollar cases is alarming, said Mertins-Kirkwood, who wonders what could happen if a company went after the federal government for compensation if First Nations blocked a project such as a pipeline.
    It is certainly a scenario BC voters should consider, said May, who is hoping Nova Scotia’s Bilcon project will focus voter attention on the ramifications of trade dispute settlements. “They are very pernicious, perverse agreements that are a threat to our sovereignty,” she said.
    All documents pertaining to Bilcon’s NAFTA case are at www.italaw.com/cases/1588
    Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith

    David Broadland
    September 2015
    The Johnson Street Bridge project director says the new bridge will be “somewhat less robust” than the existing bridge. Why?
     
    CITY OF VICTORIA TAXPAYERS are now facing a price tag of $130 million for the new Johnson Street bridge project. That’s a tripling of the $35-40 million cost put on the project in 2009 when councillors first voted to build a new bridge instead of repairing the one city residents already owned. It’s more than double the $63 million that citizens were told a new bridge would cost when the City forced them, in the middle of winter, to counter-petition for a referendum on the project. It’s also $53 million above the price former City Manager Gail Stephens had in mind when she claimed the project was “on time and within budget” shortly before the 2011 civic election. And it’s almost $40 million above what “Fixed-Price” Fortin campaigned on just last November.
    That cost escalation is difficult for most people to understand, but the price tag is only one indicator of the whirlpool of confusion gripping the project.
    Consider this: Building a new bridge was initially justified on the basis of the existing bridge’s seismic vulnerability. Sure, there were other advantages touted for a new bridge, but the first and most compelling public interest rationale offered was that the existing bridge would collapse in a significant earthquake. Building a new bridge with a high level of seismic protection became the primary objective. The project has now generated enough data about itself—what the chosen objectives were and whether those will be included in the structure that’s been built—that we should have a clear picture of whether that seismic protection objective has been met. But do we?
     
    Project director fails to explain document
    Last March we published the story “Engineers ignored their own recommendation, a Council vote and a referendum” that considered the implications of a document created by the City’s project manager MMM Group in August 2012: Johnson Street Bridge Seismic Design Criteria. That document established the allowable physical outcomes for the new structure following earthquakes of different strengths. But those outcomes were very different than what was recommended to the City by MMM engineer Joost Meyboom in June 2010. At that time, Meyboom recommended that a new bridge “be designed for an M8.5 earthquake.” He told councillors, “If you’re going to spend $100 million on a facility, the premium to pay for a very high seismic performance is a relatively low price for insurance.” Meyboom put that premium at $10 million and characterized this level of performance as “Lifeline.”
    Yet MMM’s Seismic Design Criteria didn’t contain any provision at all for the outcome expected following an M8.5 earthquake, or, in the language used in the document, a 2500-year event. Moreover, the document stated that following a 1000-year event—a significantly less energetic earthquake—the allowable outcome was “possible permanent loss of service.” That wording suggests the bridge could be unrepairable. The document said nothing on the question of whether the bridge would be available for emergency services following that 1000-year event.
    In other words, MMM’s Seismic Design Criteria allowed a significantly lower level of seismic protection than Meyboom had recommended—and had apparently built into MMM’s cost estimates for the project.
    City council wasn’t consulted about this change in the project’s scope.
    Following our story’s publication, City councillors asked Project Director Jonathan Huggett to look into the implications of MMM’s Seismic Design Criteria. He returned to council on May 7 with a written report summarizing the seismic design of the bridge.
    His short report stated: “It was confirmed in writing by MMM and its subcontractor Hardesty & Hanover that the final design is based on the most comprehensive, onerous and relevant design requirements for bascule bridges in North America.”
    Furthermore, Huggett reported to councillors: “The new Johnson Street Bridge has been designed as a ‘Critical Bridge’—the equivalent definition of ‘Lifeline Bridge,’ which is the performance required by the City. The design of the new bridge will allow the bridge to be available to all traffic after a design earthquake of a [1000-year] return period. The bridge is expected to ‘be usable by emergency vehicles and for security/defense purposes immediately after a large subduction earthquake, e.g. a 2500-year return period event.’”
    Following his report, Focus filed an FOI for the confirmation “in writing” Huggett had obtained from Hardesty & Hanover (H&H), and we requested the source of the statement he had quoted in his report, specifically, that the bridge would “be usable by emergency vehicles and for security/defense purposes immediately after a large subduction earthquake, e.g. a 2500-year return period event.”
    We also asked for all the communications between Huggett, MMM and H&H on this issue. The email record shows Huggett scrambled for an explanation and couldn’t find one. At one point, in response to Huggett’s appeal for information on the seismic capacity of the bridge’s lifting mechanism, a senior MMM employee referred Huggett to a “briefing provided by H&H.” Huggett immediately wrote back to MMM stating: “Just to be clear—that briefing note was prepared by me last August…” [emphasis added]
    What the records released to us show is that H&H didn’t provided Huggett with the written confirmation he claimed, and they didn’t deny they had used MMM’s lower Seismic Design Criteria to design the bridge. H&H’s Keith Griesing wrote to Huggett and stated, “I think MMM would have to address the history and the decisions that were made to set the direction of the project. I don’t want to offer an opinion on matters that we were not involved with since it may lead to further confusion.” 
    Worse, the City could find no record to support Huggett’s claim—which he had put in quotes as if to signify that he was quoting  seismic experts at either H&H or MMM— that the bridge would “be usable by emergency vehicles and for security/defense purposes immediately after a large subduction earthquake, e.g. a 2500-year return.” 
    It appears Huggett simply lifted a paragraph from a bridge design code and then added the word “subduction.”
    Records of Huggett’s billings to the City for his first year show he was paid $177,605. The report Huggett provided to councillors, then, was very expensive misinformation. Huggett hadn’t received written confirmation from H&H, and his conflation of a subduction event with a 2500-year event was pure fiction. In Victoria, the impact of  a Cascadia subduction zone event would be minor compared to that of the 2500-year event for which Meyboom recommended the bridge be designed.
    Don’t take my word on this. Here’s what MMM said in its Project Definition Report: “Given the location of the bridge, the Cascadia Subduction Earthquake was also considered as an important event. A comparison of site specific response spectra, however, showed that the spectral acceleration for the Cascadia event are lower than the 1 in 475 earthquake and this is therefore not a critical design consideration.”
    In other words, in Victoria, the seismic threat posed by the Cascadia subduction zone is not a critical design consideration, at least when it comes to constructing new bridges. It’s impact here, according to MMM’s analysis, would be less than an M6.5 earthquake.
    So what kind of earthquake is “a critical design consideration”? Sharlie Huffman, when I spoke with her a couple of years ago, was the Province’s Bridge Seismic Engineer. She identified shallow crustal earthquakes, like the M7.3 earthquake that occurred near Campbell River in 1946, as being particularly concerning. Could such an earthquake occur near Victoria? Yes. According to the scientists of Natural Resources Canada, the peak ground acceleration predicted for the Johnson Street Bridge site in a 2500-year return period event is .607g. That value of peak ground acceleration is similar to that measured in the vicinity of earthquakes having magnitudes in the range of M8.5. As Meyboom told City councillors back in 2010, Victoria has the highest level of seismic risk of any city in Canada.
    MMM’s seismic engineer, Jianping Jiang, provided Huggett, in writing, with his understanding of the bridge’s expected seismic performance at M8.5. Jiang told Huggett: “With respect to the bridge performance after a 2500-year return period seismic event, we wish to clarify that the 1:2500 year event is not part of the seismic design criteria specified in the JSB 2012 Project Definition Report and was not analyzed in the design.”
    Why, then, did Huggett report to councillors that the bridge would be available to emergency vehicles following a 2500-year event?
    We asked Dwayne Kalynchuk, the previous project director, whether MMM’s Seismic Design Criteria had been used in the design and construction of the bridge. Here’s the statement Kalynchuk gave Focus, in writing: “H&H Consultants are the Engineers of Record for the bascule design. They confirmed that the standards that are reflected in the August [17th, 2012] Seismic Design Criteria are still current and are incorporated in the final bascule design which is now in the process of construction.”
    Focus also asked the City for records that showed when and why MMM’s Seismic Design Criteria had been developed. The records provided show the new criteria were developed in the midst of the RFP process, after the City had learned that “indicative price” submissions from all three companies bidding to build the bridge were higher than the City’s affordability limit. MMM’s Seismic Design Criteria, which provided a lower level of seismic protection than Meyboom had recommended, would have allowed for a reduction in construction costs. The document was officially added to the RFP process on August 24, 2012 after an overnight consideration of its impact by Kalynchuk.
    Records obtained show that on December 12, 2012, as the City was trying to finalize a contract with PCL, MMM’s Meyboom prepared a list of urgent actions that needed to be undertaken “to finalize contract discussions.” At the top of Meyboom’s to-do list was “a letter from H&H stating that the design as developed during the bid with PCL is feasible from a seismic performance point of view (bridge needs to be Lifeline).” Focus filed an FOI request for that letter; the City determined that the letter was never written.
    The Seismic Design Criteria document was listed in the PCL contract as a “regulatory document,” which, the contract states, “forms part of the contract.”
    All of the records we have obtained are consistent with our original story’s contention that MMM’s Seismic Design Criteria were used by H&H to engineer the bridge, and that the bridge’s ability to withstand an earthquake is much reduced compared with what was originally recommended by MMM. If the City can provide hard evidence that’s not true, they should produce it. Hard evidence would include a complete explanation of why MMM’s Seismic Design Criteria are part of PCL’s contract.
     
    New bridge “somewhat less robust” than existing bridge
    If the new Johnson Street Bridge isn’t getting the full measure of seismic protection the experts said was needed, how has the project done on other objectives? 
    One of those goals was a wider navigational channel. Way back, the project intended to expand the distance between the new bridge’s piers by 8 metres compared with the existing bridge, thus reducing the risk that passing barges and other vessels would collide with the bridge. That improvement was effectively eliminated—to reduce project costs—in 2011. But that saving is now being offset by the cost of more substantial fendering—the bridge bumpers that would cushion a blow from a passing vessel. At a meeting on July 16, Huggett told councillors that fendering for the north side of the bridge would add an additional $3 million—more or less—to the cost of the bridge.
    Councillor Ben Isitt, who was in the room when the details of the PCL contract were supposedly laid out for councillors before they approved it back in December 2012, asked Huggett, “Could you remind us why the fendering isn’t included in the scope of the contract with PCL?”
    Huggett offered a complicated explanation involving a contract drawing that Isitt apparently hadn’t seen. My review of the contract’s details around fendering doesn’t support Huggett’s claim; the risk of additional cost of fendering seems to have been covered in the contract’s list of allocated contingencies, and limited to $462,500. Design, although incomplete, was to be covered by PCL. It’s in the contract. MMM’s own estimate of the total cost for fendering in the Project Definition Report was $1.3 million. Huggett’s prediction of an additional $3 million would mean MMM’s estimate was off by a factor of three. Hopefully Isitt will recall whether or not he was shown Huggett’s mysterious drawing and, if he wasn’t, try to save taxpayers $3 million.
    In any case, Huggett explained why fendering was so vital: “The new bridge is somewhat less robust than the existing structure,” he told councillors (emphasis added). “The last thing I need is a barge to hit the rest pier and knock it two inches out of alignment. For one, I don’t know how I’d get it back again having knocked it out of alignment and then I’m faced with an inoperable bridge. You’ve got a $100 million invested in the water here and I’ve got to protect it.”
    The news that Huggett’s bridge will be “somewhat less robust” than the existing bridge ought to have come as a shock to councillors. After all, wasn’t the robustness of the bridge—its capacity to absorb the energy of a suddenly applied force without permanent damage—the very reason why the project had been undertaken in the first place? That capacity to absorb energy is the very same characteristic required to withstand an earthquake. Huggett was now telling councillors that his bridge had less capacity to absorb a blow than the existing bridge. If any councillors comprehended the disconnect between what Huggett told them back in May about the bridge’s seismic capacity and what he was telling them now, they kept it well hidden.
    What some of the councillors did seem to comprehend, though, is the way in which the escalating price is a measure of the project’s fundamental lack of integrity. First-term Councillor Jeremy Loveday complained, “I feel handcuffed by past decisions and bad contracts and contingencies that are too small. As a member of the public I feel that I was misled by politicians at the civic level.”
    Those politicians, the records show, were misled by City staff, who, in turn, were misled by MMM Group. Take Loveday’s concern about the small contingency, for example. At the time councillors were being asked to approve a contract with PCL they were told by City staff that the four percent contingency included in the contract had been recommended by MMM. Once the project started to go off the rails, though, MMM argued that PCL should have included a 40 percent contingency. Both must have known from the start the cost would escalate dramatically. For whatever reason, neither warned the City.
    MMM has been the City’s project manager since the summer of 2009 and in 2010 it told councillors that “project management and engineering” should cost 12 percent of the bridge’s construction cost. On a construction cost then estimated at $65 million, MMM said its fee would be $7.7 million.
    But according to documents obtained by Focus through FOI, the City has already paid MMM close to $15 million. The $1.842 million Huggett obtained for MMM from councillors on July 16, along with $2.4 million the company has previously claimed, will bring their take to $19 million—or 90 percent of the $21 million federal grant.
    Shortly before Councillor Geoff Young voted to give MMM more money, he spoke at length about what could be learned from this project: “I don’t think it’s helpful to reflect overmuch at this stage on the project or where it will come out or its degree of success. I think it may be worthwhile to draw lessons from the project because, indeed, we are now embarked on another major project at the regional level. I think it’s worthwhile thinking about where we’re going with that one.”
    Young’s unwillingness to “reflect overmuch” on the project is understandable. Politicians who make bad decisions, or even those who fail to persuade their colleagues from making a bad decision, have a natural preference for forgetting. He’s right, in one way, though. It’s not the politicians who have been sitting around the table while these bad decisions were made that should now be doing the reflecting on what lessons should be learned. Judging by what councillors Pam Madoff, Chris Coleman and Charlayne Thornton Joe said at the July 16 meeting, they are oblivious to the dimensions of the disaster they have facilitated, starting with the moment back in 2009 when they all voted to replace the existing bridge. When they made that decision, there wasn’t a single aspect of the project that had been sensibly or accurately evaluated. Each bad decision they made afterward was just piling dead weight onto a poorly constructed foundation.
    In my life as a designer and builder—of physical structures and machinery—I learned early on that as soon as I realized I had made an error in measuring something in a job I was working on, I had to go back and fix the error or it could multiply into an even bigger problem. In politics, unfortunately, admitting to having made an error of judgment is rare. 
    In the case of the bridge project, there were a number of points along the way where City staff’s failure to accurately assess, measure or understand some fundamental parameter—seismic risk, estimated cost, the risk associated with using an experimental design, the amount set aside for contingencies that might arise, the integrity of the City’s partners—should have been obvious to City councillors and set off alarm bells. But the majority of councillors, ill advised by highly-paid staff, continued to make bad judgment after bad judgment and the foundation of the project ended up being based on ignorance and risk instead of knowledge and certainty. As a consequence, the taxpayer is getting a bridge that’s over three times as expensive as originally estimated and “somewhat less robust” than the bridge it will replace.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Alan Cassels
    September 2015
    Vancouver Island’s aging baby boomers, coupled with stretched budgets and operating rooms, have created a perfect storm for timely access to needed joint surgery.
     
    SIXTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD Nancy Tienhaara, who works in marketing for a Victoria software company, felt she needed a new knee but couldn’t get it. The pain, she recalls, was unbearable and X-rays showed there was very little cartilage in her knees. Walking was difficult and painful. After seven weeks of waiting, she finally got in to see an orthopaedic surgeon. But she didn’t hear what she wanted to hear: She wasn’t a good candidate for surgery—her pain and immobility were not yet severe enough.
    Disgusted with the system and driven by pain and desperation, she did what some Canadians do when they’re forced to play the waiting game—she left the country. Tienhaara travelled to Phoenix, Arizona and shelled out $22,000 US for knee replacement surgery. While that isn’t an option for most of us, Tienhaara felt compelled to find the money: “If I had not done so, I would be in a wheelchair today.” 
    Vancouver Island residents waiting for a new hip or knee, in pain and misery, tell stories that are compelling, even heart-wrenching. When I called him at his home at the end of July, Rob Brown, a retired actuary in Colwood, had just returned home from the hospital the day before with a new hip. His year of immobility waiting for a hip replacement was like “being placed under house arrest,” he told me. 
    Ask anyone who has had to wait for a joint replacement and you will hear the same urgent advice: “Get on that list as fast as possible.” The message couldn’t be clearer: Since you could be waiting in agony for a very, very long time, you’d be a fool not to act quickly. But how reliable is that advice? And does acting fast guarantee earlier treatment? Outside of emergency procedures, if you think you need a new knee or a new hip, how is your level of pain and immobility prioritised among other patients who are waiting?
    These questions are not trivial. In fact, they lie at the heart of the sustainability of our health care system because how we manage waitlists for joint surgery is an issue—due to demand and the costs involved—that has the power to make or break Canada’s public healthcare system as we know it. 
    Canada spends almost a billion dollars a year for hip and knee surgery, and waitlists for those surgeries are among the hottest and most political aspects of Canada’s healthcare system. 
    In BC, over half a million publicly-funded surgical procedures are performed every year, of which almost 80 percent are day procedures. Hip and knee replacements currently require a stay in a hospital for about three days. Another statistic to note is that more than half of all surgeries done every year in BC are emergency or unscheduled procedures and therefore do not appear on any surgery wait time list which juggles the line-up for new hips and knees. 
    In Canada, a federal benchmark for “the maximum amount of time that clinical evidence shows is appropriate to wait for a particular procedure” is set at 26 weeks for both hip and knee replacement. Problem is, you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere in the country that comes close to the benchmarks. Some jurisdictions, including Victoria, miss the benchmarks by miles. 
    Norm Peters is executive director of surgical services and heart health at Island Health. He oversees surgery for the two main hospitals in Victoria and the Nanaimo Regional General Hospital. He is responsible for quality and strategic planning for the other five community hospitals across the island.
    Peters openly admits that people in Victoria face one of the longest waiting games in the province. Even though Island Health has introduced a number of measures to address waitlists for hips and knees—aiming to perform 500 to 550 more of those surgeries this year—he doesn’t mince words about our waiting list: “We have the unfortunate distinction of being the worst performing in BC.” 
    If you live in Victoria and your orthopaedic surgeon suggests you are a candidate for a new joint, you might get your surgery in a year, as Rob Brown did. Or it might take longer.
     
    The waiting game
    Wait times have been studied extensively. Despite the endless analyses, along with programs created to reduce those waitlists, and money poured in to relieve the problem, the lists keep growing. Demographics play a big role (more later). But there are also more mundane communication issues at the bottom of the quagmire. Often physicians and specialists operate in silos, impervious to what their next-door neighbour is doing. Patients are motivated and moved by anecdotes, and believe surgery is vital, and always the solution. None of us have any idea whether the excruciating stories we hear about patients waiting reflect a general reality or are just egregious outliers. 
    The criteria for being on a list are determined by an assessment from an orthopaedic surgeon who will scrutinize X-rays, and will assess your state of pain and mobility. Is the pain keeping you awake at night? Do you need heavy-duty meds to keep pain under control? How well can you get around? What is your overall health like? Some patients, like Nancy Tienhaara, will be told they’re not yet candidates. Others might be deemed at such risk of becoming disabled they would be placed in a higher priority. As to how long each person will wait, as they say, “it all depends.”
    Everyone likes to talk about “the list” and, in fact, whole conversations can happen without people realizing there are several types of lists. 
    Going from pain in your hip to being fully recovered from a replacement hip after a two-hour operation and a three-day hospital stay involves at least four waits. Wait One is the time from when your doctor refers you to the specialist until you are sitting in front of the orthopaedic surgeon. Wait Two is the time from when the specialist agrees you need surgery and books it—known as the decision date—to the date you actually get it. The other types of waits are the access to diagnostics, maybe an X-ray or other diagnostic test, and then the wait for recovery. The waits of most concern to patients are the first two and they happen to be the ones where there is the best reporting. 
    According to Neeta Das McMurty, a member of Canada’s Evidence Network who compiled a consumer backgrounder on surgical wait times, the numbers often don’t reflect reality. For example, sometimes there are patients who are put on multiple waiting lists. She writes, “One study found that up to one-third of patients should have been removed from the list because the patient has already had the procedure done elsewhere, was already admitted into hospital as an emergency case, no longer wants the procedure, or it is not medically necessary.” Sometimes the patient dies while on the list (from other causes) or has asked to reschedule their surgery for a more convenient time. Others might argue, saying there should be more patients on the list and that people are being cruelly turned away from getting on the first rung. 
    Clearly, managing a waitlist demands heavy-duty coordination. Norm Peters points me in the direction of the BC Surgical Wait Times website (https://swt.hlth.gov.bc.ca) where you can go online, choose a surgical procedure, and look at the types of waits you might expect. For example, as of July 31, 2015, there were 956 people on Vancouver Island (out of 3302 in all of BC) waiting for a new hip. Of these, 468 people were waiting to be treated at Greater Victoria hospitals. Of the 11 doctors listed for Victoria, two had less than 5 patients waiting and one had 149 patients waiting. Each doctor has a different number of patients waiting for a number of reasons. In this system patients can choose which doctor they’d like to see, some only work part-time, and so on.
    The two key metrics represented are “50 percent received services within X weeks” and “90 percent received services within X weeks.” You will find that according to these data, half the people on the BC waitlist (in the previous three months) got their hip replaced within 19 weeks after their “decision date” and 90 percent of them got it within 52 weeks. This compares to 34 weeks and 59 weeks respectively for Vancouver Island, about the same as it is for Greater Victoria Hospitals. 
    There still might be a lot of grumbling about how long one has to wait, but the advantage here, at least for BC, is that these statistics are fully transparent for anyone to see. Compared to other jurisdictions, this is huge progress. 
     
    A local attempt at triage
    If you live in Victoria, you’ll be, like Nancy Tienhaara and Rob Brown, sent to Rebalance, (www.rebalancemd.com) which is basically a one-stop shop. Physiotherapist Stefan Fletcher and orthopaedic surgeon Patrick McAllister started Rebalance four years ago, eager to do something about the chaotic nature of Victoria’s current wait system: impenetrable lists, overworked physicians, and underserved patients. 
    Fletcher is the CEO of Rebalance, and he has an air of calm about him, dressed in a polo shirt and shorts when he greets me in his spanking new 11,000-square-foot facility in the Uptown Centre. Though Rebalance is a private company, there’s something unique about it beyond the chic glass and steel décor and video monitors adorning the walls. This doesn’t look like any public health facility you’ve ever seen in Canada, but it is public in one important way: The services offered here are covered by our Medical Services Plan. Generally you don’t need anything but your Care Card and a doctor’s referral to get service here. It feels ultra-modern and efficient, an ambience very different from the one-doctor, one-office silos we’re used to. This place reflects the group’s team approach where doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, and patient navigators are all in the same place, working towards the same goal: streamlining the journey. 
    Fletcher comes out to greet me at reception, then steers me into his office to discuss the issue of wait times. We get down to business. The tour, he promises, comes later. 
    He says that prior to Rebalance there was a “huge amount of ignorance around waitlists…[with] no knowledge, no markers, no transparency, and no tracking.” The creation of his company, he says, was “driven by physicians,” essentially Victoria’s orthopaedic surgeons who wanted a more rational, patient-centred model to help people waiting interminably (and sometimes needlessly) just for a firm answer to the first question: “Do I need surgery or not?”
    “It used to be nine months to two years to even see an orthopaedic surgeon,” he tells me, “and now it’s four to six weeks. Our goal,” he says, “is to get the right person to the right place at the right time.”
    Is this triage, I ask?
    “Absolutely. It’s 100 percent triage,” he says. The acronym they use is FAAST which stands for “first available appropriate specialist treatment.” The emphasis there is on “appropriate.” “Basically, this is the whole conservative journey,” he continues. “Get them in early. If you can, try A, B, C, D, and E. And if those fail, come back and see us.” 
    Those other things are mainly exercise, weight loss, and pain-relieving drugs. Maintaining flexibility and strengthening the muscles that support the joints are both considered important. The percentage of people who consult an orthopaedic surgeon who go on to have surgery—Fletcher calls this the “hit rate”—is only about 30 percent. The other 70 percent might need help—perhaps from physiotherapy or other forms of preparation including proper diagnostics such as X-rays—but they aren’t yet candidates for surgery. Fletcher says that at least half the patients who come and see his clinic “have other things they need to happen” before they have surgery and this includes weight loss and consultations with other specialists to correct other health problems. 
    Patients who have manageable joint pain should obviously try to avoid or delay surgery as long as possible. Recovery from surgery can take a long time and the procedure itself can involve complications. Plus there is no real guarantee how long a new joint will last. Some say you might get 10-15 years out of a new hip but then that may mean “revision surgery” down the road, which is much more complex.
    Rebalance has a contract with Island Health for physiotherapy, Fletcher says, “to optimize patients pre op and to deliver post op physio after joint replacement surgery.” Rebalance’s nurses and navigators coordinate information, manage the intake, and arrange education—stuff that allows the surgeon to focus on what they do best. According to Fletcher, the satisfaction of both the patients and the physicians is “through the roof.”
    He explains that patient satisfaction levels are a lot higher because people don’t have to wait as long (Wait Time One) to actually get their health complaint seen. And those who do need surgery more urgently can get in there quicker, too. 
    Fletcher uses his hands to explain “unravelling the nut of wait times.” He says: “What we have is this great big funnel coming in, and so the accessibility to the system is greater. We have squeezed the Wait One,” he tells me, moving his hands closer together, “yet Wait Time Two,” he says, spreading his hands far apart, “well, it’s a lot bigger.” When Rebalance got going four years ago there were about 1200 people on the Wait Two list for knee and hip surgeries; now it’s about 3000. Fletcher believes it’s because more people are being seen by surgeons. This means, he points out, that "those patients not needing surgery are also being addressed where before they were not being seen as easily.”
    With the Wait Two list so long, however, it means a lot of people like Rob Brown waiting for up to a year for a new hip. How does this compare to other places, I wonder? Fletcher calls the triage systems in other places “a pile of faxes,” explaining, “The surgeon comes in and says, give me the 10 on the bottom.” At Rebalance, the triage is continuous, and if your situation changes, so too can your place in line. Despite the Province maintaining the waitlist website, access to a surgeon is still a considerable barrier in other communities, Fletcher tells me: “In Kelowna it’s nine months just to get an appointment. It’s a mess. Vancouver it’s two years—unless you want to pay privately. We are 100 percent in the public system.”
     
    Bottlenecks and other realities
    So Canadians are still waiting, and on Vancouver Island, they may wait more than a year after a surgeon has made a decision that surgery is the best option for them.
    According to a study on wait times by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), there are typically three key strategies to reduce waiting times: More money, enforced wait times, and better triaging.
    In 2003 a federal agreement in Canada committed $5.5 billion over 10 years to the Wait Time Reduction Fund to reduce wait times for cataract removal, hip and knee replacements, diagnostic imaging, cardiac bypass surgery and cancer radiation therapy. In 2011, the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) showed that there were reported improvements for three years, as the money helped clear the backlogs, but there is insufficient data to determine if the improvements were sustained. 
    Wait time guarantees set a maximum wait time for certain procedures, putting pressure on system managers and physicians to provide care within a target time frame. These are helpful, but not a long-term solution. 
    The most hopeful strategy is what the OECD called “clinical prioritisation tools”—which is about managing and triaging patients based on need. These tools have been shown to be the best and most sustainable of the approaches.
    A study published eight years ago by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives analyzed waitlist reduction projects across Canada and found that better management of waitlists requires two major things: Firstly, physicians needed to go from working on their own to working in teams and, secondly, the accountability for waitlist management had to be transferred from individual surgeons to health authorities working with groups of surgeons and other health professionals. These principles essentially underpin what Rebalance has done in Victoria. 
    A strategy document prepared by the BC Ministry of Health, “Setting Priorities for the BC Health System,” admits how difficult it is to make progress. “Despite the attention paid to surgical waitlists and increases in volumes of elective surgeries, BC’s wait times for many procedures have not declined and performance is either stagnant or slipping. For example, the average wait time for the top 20 surgical procedures declined slightly from 2009 to 2010, but has remained mostly the same since then.”
    For everywhere in Canada, how long you wait depends on many factors: your medical status (your pain levels, your mobility, whether you’ve got other health conditions, etc), which specialist you get referred to, how busy he or she is, and whether that specialist has good access to operating rooms. The overall drivers of demand, however, are largely determined by demographics. 
    On that front, Norm Peters calls it the perfect storm. “We [on Vancouver Island] have two of the three oldest communities in BC. We have a healthy and active population so people wear out their knees.” But it’s not just older, active people wearing out their joints. Peters blames growing levels of obesity as well for an increase in the demand for hips and knees. The Canadian Community Health Survey shows the numbers of obese people in Canada rose more than 25 percent between 2000 and 2011. 
    So demand is definitely on the rise. 
    Looking at the “supply side,” we can’t blame lengthy waitlists on a lack of orthopaedic specialists. I think my jaw might have dropped when Rebalance’s Fletcher told me there were more than 130 unemployed orthopaedic surgeons in Canada. 
    According to Peters, the major bottleneck is access to operating rooms. Fletcher described the practical dimensions of that bottleneck, noting the demand for anaesthetists, staff, nurses, and hospital time. He produced a graph that showed big drops in the number of procedures done in July and August when many people are on vacation, and November and December because of Christmas. Getting surgery depends on many people, not just surgeons, and it’s hard to get them to operate on you when they’re lying on a beach or eating turkey. 
    But beyond people, it’s money. Obviously buying more dedicated hospital time at these off-peak periods could help reduce Wait Time Two; everyone agrees that to get that down, the Province needs to put more money into the back end.
    Still, Fletcher was optimistic about the future. In April, Island Health issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a “surgical services partner to carry out between 3000 and 4000 day procedures per year over a five-year contract term.” These will certainly reduce the pressure on waitlists by taking some other surgeries out of public operating rooms, and perhaps help reduce the backlog for joint surgery, but more innovations are needed. Fletcher saw other possibilities, too: a dedicated joint unit, where hips and knees could be done either in a hospital or a day care clinic in less than the required three-day stay. That seems sensible to me. The right patients, with the right home supports in place, may not need a full three-day stay after their surgery.
    “We could profoundly influence the wait times in the public system for surgery,” Fletcher suggested. “If we can crack that nut, and continue to keep our eye on the ball at the front—entry level system—then we have cracked the nut of orthopaedics in Canada.”
    I wondered about patients like Nancy Tienhaara who don’t think they can wait. She feels there are serious downsides to waiting, and a report from the Alberta Bone and Joint Institute backs her up. The report says that patients waiting longer than three months have more pain and less mobility, and there is often pain in the opposite joint for patients who wait longer than six months. It established 14 weeks as the Wait Two target. 
    Tienhaara notes, “Intolerable pain is the criterion provided by many doctors for agreeing to surgery for a patient. Because I did not have constant high levels of pain, I was rejected at Rebalance.” 
    Because pain is subjective, and experienced by everyone differently, perhaps this is why triaging patients is particularly difficult.  Fletcher admitted he often has to deal with people complaining of not getting treatment soon enough, or at all. I told him the story of Nancy Tienhaara and he was sympathetic. “We deal with that all the time,” he said.
    One patient pleaded with him, in tears, saying she would lose her job if she didn’t get to see an orthopaedic surgeon. He is as responsive as he can be. After all, any system has to make allowances for urgent special cases. He found a slot and put her in in two days. 
    It’s not as subjective as it seems though. Obviously there is a human element in managing waitlists. Clearly these are very difficult issues, but I get the feeling that at least here in Victoria, there is a sense of progress and hope. We don’t want a society that leaves people suffering and in pain when surgery could fix it. We want a system that is responsive enough so that they don’t have to travel to Arizona for a new joint. At the same time, we want a sustainable healthcare system where the most urgent care is going to those with the most urgent need. Better management of the lists is the first step. More money to deal with the mounting lists is clearly the second step. But beyond this we citizens have to remember that there are many other kinds of high-value, life-saving treatments such as those for cancer and heart disease that we still need to fund.
    There’s a limit on the supply of money in the healthcare system, but there shouldn’t be a limit on how we innovate while keeping that system public and accessible for those in need. 
    Alan Cassels is a health policy researcher affiliated with the Faculty of Human and Social Development at the University of Victoria, and the author of Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease (Greystone, 2012), and the 2005 book Selling Sickness.

    David Broadland
    July 2015
    By David Broadland and Daniel Palmer
    News of a secret investigation involving Saanich interim CAO Andy Laidlaw may throw the District into more turmoil.
     
    IN THE SAANICH SPYWARE DEBATE, either you believe that the senior manager who approved the installation of employee monitoring software on newly-elected Mayor Richard Atwell’s computer understood what she was approving, or you believe that a systemic disconnect from BC’s privacy law occurred and no one in particular was to blame.
    That latter position was all that could be found in a report to Saanich Council on the issue delivered by the District’s interim CAO Andy Laidlaw and made public on June 24. In his introduction to the report Laidlaw noted, “I am acutely aware that my report will be subject to criticism by those who believe it does not confirm their perceptions.”
    The “perceptions” Laidlaw acknowledged are that there was wrong- doing and that it’s being covered up. The installation of the spyware was approved by Director of Corporate Services Laura Ciarniello.  Laidlaw and Ciarniello worked together at the City of Campbell River. Their working relationship there was described to Focus by former Campbell River Mayor Walter Jakeway as “chummy.” The perception of a cover-up stems from the concern that Laidlaw’s investigation of Ciarniello’s actions would be a whitewash.
    Laidlaw’s introduction went on to say, “This situation has been infused with ‘politics’ from its origins and I am cognizant that my findings will be subject to that lens.”
    Laidlaw may have misjudged the “lens” through which his report would be viewed. 
    The widely-held perception of a cover-up in Saanich apparently motivated some citizens to go looking for evidence to support that perception. As a result of one of those fishing expeditions, documents landed in Focus Magazine’s mailbox the day before Laidlaw made his report public. The information they daylight calls into question Saanich Council’s decision to hire Laidlaw in January this year and then appoint him to investigate the spyware question.
    Those documents indicate that between November 12 and November 24, 2014, Laidlaw was the subject of an internal investigation by the City of Campbell River. The investigation considered whether Laidlaw’s business association with Jerry Berry Consultants Inc, and another unnamed entity, had constituted a conflict of interest. Jerry Berry was Nanaimo’s City Manager between 1987 and 2009. Berry now describes himself on his website as “a management consultant and educator specializing in local government issues.” Laidlaw worked at the City of Nanaimo between 1980 and 2011.
    Campbell River retained private lawyer Richard Grounds to conduct the investigation. Grounds has done work for such organizations as the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP.
    Grounds’ investigation looked at whether Laidlaw performed paid work for Jerry Berry Consultants Inc, or another entity, while Jerry Berry Consultants or another entity had been engaged to provide services to the City of Campbell River. Additionally, the investigation considered whether Laidlaw had a business relationship with Jerry Berry Consultants Inc or other entities, and may have been paid for services provided by him to Jerry Berry Consultants Inc, or other entities, in circumstances where Laidlaw had a role in awarding or recommending the award of contracts by the City to Jerry Berry Consultants Inc or other entities. As well, the investigation considered whether Laidlaw, through his business activities with Jerry Berry Consultants, had disclosed the City’s confidential information to Jerry Berry Consultants Inc or another entity.
    For confirmation that an investigation had taken place, Focus contacted Jakeway, who agreed to speak on the record. According to Jakeway, who was narrowly defeated in last November’s election, the investigation found that Laidlaw’s activities did constitute a conflict of interest and that he had disclosed the confidential information of the City of Campbell River. Jakeway told Focus this finding was made following the election and was considered by the outgoing council. It decided to leave a decision on whether any action should be taken against Laidlaw to the incoming council. That council, sworn in on December 2, has sat on Grounds’ findings ever since.
    According to Campbell River’s 2014 statement of financial information, Grounds’ investigation cost taxpayers $25,523. This does not include the cost of a legal opinion by Campbell River's legal counsel Dean Crawford.
    Laidlaw was paid $182,455 in remuneration and $6,392 for expenses by the City of Campbell River in 2014.
    Laidlaw declined to answer questions on this subject. Campbell River Mayor Andy Adams would only confirm that Laidlaw had retired from his position on January 16.
    This news—and Laidlaw’s unwillingness to answer questions about it—may feed the perception of wrong doing and cover-up at Saanich. Ciarniello was, until August, 2013, Campbell River’s Director of Corporate Services. She was tasked by Saanich Council on December 8 last year with creating a shortlist of candidates for the CAO position to replace Paul Murray.
    Was Ciarniello aware of the investigation into Laidlaw and its outcome at the time she put him on that shortlist? In response to that question Ciarniello told Focus, “I am unable to answer your…question as it deals with personal information and if discussed would be subject to in-camera confidentiality.” 
    The possibilities here aren’t endless. If Ciarniello wasn’t aware of the investigation, then Laidlaw didn’t inform her. What would that possibility suggest about Laidlaw’s suitability to conduct an investigation into the perceived malfeasance in the spyware case? If she was aware of the investigation, and informed councillors about it, why did they choose Laidlaw? Did councillors request a reference?
    Focus contacted Saanich Councillor Colin Plant and described in broad brush strokes what we knew about the investigation in Campbell River. Would Plant have voted to approve Laidlaw if he had known that an investigation in Campbell River had found Laidlaw in a conflict of interest position? “Unlikely,” Plant said. “However, to be fair, I would have needed to know more about the situation before answering that definitively.”
     
    LAIDLAW'S CONTRACT WITH SAANICH is set to run out in August unless a new CAO has not yet been found. Whether he can survive a storm blowing down from Campbell River until then remains to be seen. In the meantime, will his report bring closure to the spyware issue?
    Laidlaw’s report referenced Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham’s late-March Investigation Report, which found that Saanich had broken BC privacy law when it installed the spyware. In that report Denham stated, “One of the most disappointing findings in my investigation of the District of Saanich’s use of employee monitoring software is the near-complete lack of awareness and understanding of the privacy provisions of BC’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.” Parts of Laidlaw’s report read like an investigation of Denham’s investigation. His statement that “The Commissioner has provided new interpretations applying to security and the collection of personal information,” could be read: “She’s just making this stuff up.” 
    With evidence recently brought forward by current and former employees of Saanich’s IT division that indicates Atwell was the target of three IT initiatives that either intercepted communications made on his office computer, or prevented him from accessing the District’s computer network, the thorny question of whether such actions by public servants are excusable or should result in some disciplinary action hasn’t been fully answered. The portion of Laidlaw’s report that addressed that question was attributed to “Brian Simmons, Labour Relations Consultant.” Simmons’ report stated: “Finding no evidence of malfeasance, I find no cause to terminate or discipline any employee based upon those considerations.”
    How did Simmons come to that conclusion? Focus was unable to get an answer from Simmons because he couldn’t be contacted. We asked Laidlaw for information about Simmons but he refused to provide any biographical information or any way of contacting Simmons. Invoking a concern for Simmons’ privacy, Laidlaw promised, “I will forward this request to him.” An extensive web search for “Brian Simmons, Labour Relations Consultant” provided no information. Atwell, interviewed for the report by Simmons, told Focus that he was only able to obtain an email address from Simmons—no business card, no telephone number, and no website. Repeated emails by Focus to the email address given to Atwell produced no response.
    Similarly, Focus was unable to question Simmons about his statement that “I find that on the balance of probabilities, and considering all of the circumstances, the evidence does not support a claim that the Mayor’s computer was targeted.”
    How did Simmons arrive at such a conclusion? Did he interview “Whistle Blower,” whose story was published in the last two editions  of Focus? It’s our understanding that Saanich threatened Whistle Blower with legal action unless he signed an agreement that limited  his right to self-expression about the issue. Whistle Blower has said that the District's Assistant IT Manager John Proc told him on November 20: “They are nervous about the new mayor. We’re installing it on the directors’ computers as well to make it [look like] it is not targeted.”
    With Simmons secreted away, the question of whether the actions of the employees involved in the spyware issue are excusable remains unanswered since the basis for Simmons’ findings appears to be limited and can’t be examined or questioned. 
    Saanich resident Karen Harper, a vocal critic of the way the issue has been handled by the District, is a retired Chief Information Officer of BC Pension Corporation. Following the release of Simmons’ and Laidlaw’s reports she told Focus, “I can state with utter certainty that had I authorized the installation of spyware on our system, I would have been fired for cause. It would not have mattered whether I did so out of incompetence or if I had some other motivation. I would have been gone. Why? I would have brought disrepute onto the organization to a degree that cannot be ignored.” Harper called the reports a “whitewash,” and said, “As a concerned Saanich resident and taxpayer, I believe that a public inquiry is still needed—by truly independent persons—in order to restore any faith in the bureaucracy and council.”  
     
    CIARNIELLO HAS BEEN AT THE CENTRE of the spyware story from day one and the details of that involvement are now well-documented. On November 17, 2014, just two days after Atwell was elected mayor, Ciarniello and the District's Manager of IT Forrest Kvemshagen met, they have said, to discuss the recommendations of a May 2014 audit of the District’s IT security system by Wordsworth and Associates. But Ciarniello and Kvemshagen have not provided any written evidence that the plan they developed was motivated by the security audit.
    Two days later, a meeting took place between high-level staff that included Ciarniello, then-CAO Paul Murray, Fire Chief Mike Burgess, Legislative Services Director Carrie MacPhee (also responsible for privacy compliance), Planning Director Sharon Hvozdanski, Parks and Recreation Director Doug Henderson and Finance Director Valla Tinney. According to the District, no minutes were recorded at this meeting. Denham reported, however, that a decision was made to install “protection and monitoring software” on the workstations of everyone at the meeting (CAO, directors, fire chief), on workstations used by two executive assistants, on computers used by councillors and on Mayor Atwell’s computer. Ciarniello and Kvemshagen told Denham this decision was made in response to the security audit.
    By December 2, Spector 360 software had been purchased, downloaded and silently deployed on 13 computers, including that of the incoming mayor. The IT technicians doing the work were given explicit instructions to enable the most privacy-intrusive features of the software, which included logging every keystroke made by Atwell and frequent automated screen shots. At the same time, a log that would have recorded when managers viewed the information collected by the software was left disabled. If someone did sift through Atwell’s private information, it can’t be proved.
    Before activating the software, Kvemshagen emailed Ciarniello: “In order to ensure there is appropriate authorization in place for this work, please reply to this email stating your approval.” Ciarniello replied, “I approve of this program and the machines it has been installed on.”
    There is no question, then, that Ciarniello approved the installation. The question that remains unanswered, by anyone at Saanich, is this: Did Ciarniello know she had approved the installation of spyware?
    In the investigation undertaken by Denham, Assistant IT Manager John Proc told investigators that he understood the software agreed on at that November 19 meeting was meant to have “forensic auditing capability… and ability to determine whether user accounts were accessing areas which they were not supposed to be accessing.”
    A January 14 press release from Saanich, however, used very different language to characterize Spector 360, describing the software as a means of monitoring “internal activity that may result from external threats,” and assisting Saanich by deterring theft, potential leaks of data and by “protecting high profile users.”
    This claim was dismantled by Denham’s report as well as several IT experts. Denham also noted that the author of the May 2014 security audit “confirmed that he did not make any such recommendation nor did he intend to make any recommendation that could be interpreted to recommend the installation of monitoring software such as Spector 360.”
    The claim that the software was a security fix was also challenged by former Saanich IT manager Jon Woodland. “You don’t buy a system like that to protect a network; you buy it to investigate someone or their activities,” said Woodland, who is now IT manager at the Township of Esquimalt. Woodland alerted Atwell to the spyware in December after speaking to former colleagues who were worried the process “was being rushed in.” “Any of the colleagues I’ve talked to have been shocked, as I was, that the municipality would install this type of software,” Woodland said.
    That the intention of installing the software wasn’t security, but spying, is also supported more directly by the testimony of the former Saanich IT department analyst, “Whistle Blower,” whom we mentioned above. His statement is powerful and bears repeating: He stated that Assistant IT manager John Proc told him on November 20: “They are nervous about the new mayor. We’re installing it on the directors’ computers as well to make it [look like] it is not targeted.”
    There is reason to believe, then, that Ciarniello and Kvemshagen both knew—or should have known— they were setting up a system for spying on Atwell, not securing the network from external threats.
    Contacted for her side of the story, Ciarniello told Focus that she refutes the allegation made by Whistle Blower.
    From December 3 until January 21, Spector 360 was actively collecting all data from Atwell’s computer and from 12 other workstations. By January 12, of course, the affair had spilled out into the open when Atwell announced at a press conference that he was being spied on by Saanich staff.
    Focus has previously reported on additional records that show the installation of Spector 360 on Atwell’s computer was only one of three actions Saanich’s IT department was ordered to undertake that were aimed directly at the new mayor. Those actions included setting up Atwell’s computer without shared drive access, a privilege enjoyed by his predecessor Frank Leonard; and configuring Atwell’s computer to redirect to the public internet if he attempted to access the central corporate intranet—the heart of information exchange between Saanich employees.
    Focus asked Ciarniello if she had authorized the configuration of the new mayor’s computer so that he was unable to access the same departmental shared drives to which Mayor Frank Leonard had access. She said, “Mayor Atwell’s computer has been configured in the same manner as Mayor Leonard’s.”
    On this question Laidlaw told Focus, “Mayor Atwell has the same access as the previous mayor.”
    Whatever the case, what is the implication of Ciarniello’s decision that the mayor could be monitored without his consent? For one thing, it suggests she believed an elected mayor is subservient to bureaucratic managers, that a mayor is an “employee” subject to the same conditions under which rank and file District employees are required to operate. This is evident in Ciarniello’s subsequent justifications about the program of employee monitoring she approved. For example, in a January 12 press release, in an effort to prove that Atwell had been informed that his computer was under surveillance, Ciarniello stated, “Prior to being permitted access to the Saanich corporate computer network, employees are required to sign a Network Access Terms and Conditions form.”
    Atwell has consistently said he was never given the form. Councillor Colin Plant has confirmed that he, too, wasn’t given the form.  
    So Ciarniello’s claim that Atwell was warned his computer would be under surveillance is unsettled. But since everyone agrees that Atwell didn’t sign the form, by logical deduction there is agreement by everyone, including Ciarniello, that Atwell didn’t consent to having his communications intercepted. Yet intercepted they were.
     
    PROFESSOR DAVID SIEGAL, an expert in Local Government and Public Policy and Administration at Brock University, said the relationship between staff and council is clear: staff works for council and not the other way around. “The actions of installing the spyware without telling people it had been installed is the sort of thing where mayor and council could discipline somebody. It’s almost the kind of thing where you could fire somebody with cause,” Siegal said. “This seems to be a pretty serious matter. I guess what it indicates is a complete breakdown in trust between staff and council … but it’s staff who leave, not councillors or the mayor.”
    Siegal said the designation of the mayor as “Chief Executive Officer” in the Community Charter is little more than a title, but he acknowledged that the mayor does have some exclusive powers, like the ability to suspend municipal staff. If Atwell did suspend an employee, it would then trigger a review by council to reinstate the employee, confirm or extend the suspension or fire the person in question.
    “The CAO or senior staff being disciplined is the kind of thing a mayor and council collectively, not the mayor by himself, can ultimately do,” said Siegal. 
    If Ciarniello’s actions regarding the Spector 360 installation represented a “complete breakdown in trust,” as Siegal speculates, there’s been no explanation of how such a deterioration could have occurred. Atwell hadn’t even been sworn in by the time all the decisions about the spyware had been made. As well, subsequent events, as told by Atwell, suggest Ciarniello’s actions may have been guided somewhat by Atwell’s fellow councillors. This is illustrated by the fact that it wasn’t Atwell’s signature that appeared on Laidlaw’s contract. The authorizing signature came from Councillor Judy Brownoff, who was designated by staff as acting mayor in Atwell’s alleged absence the day the contract was signed. 
    Yet Atwell hadn’t taken leave or left the District, and the only attempt Ciarniello made to contact him about the contract was through his executive assistant, Brandy Rowan. “I was asked in person by Laura Ciarniello on Friday [January 16] to sign the contract, but as it was the end of the day, I told her I would have to take the contract home over the weekend to read it before I signed it,” Atwell said. “She told me, ‘No, the contract has to stay within the walls of municipal hall.’ I was dumbfounded by this statement as I have a right as mayor to take confidential documents home, given that I’ve sworn an oath of office…I do this all the time.”
    On Thursday, January 22, Atwell emailed Ciarniello to ask again about accessing Laidlaw’s contract; on January 23, after inquiring again, Atwell was told by Ciarniello via email that Brownoff had already signed Laidlaw’s contract five days earlier. “There has to be a reasonable justification for staff to defer to the acting mayor,” Atwell said. “Simply stating that they were ‘eager to put out a press release’ isn’t one that stands up. I was shocked when I found out Brownoff signed the contact, as was every other elected official I have told.”
    Focus asked Ciarniello if she had gone around Atwell to obtain authorization on Laidlaw’s contract. She said, “No, the Mayor did not make himself available.”
     
    CIARNIELLO'S POSSIBLE SIDE-STEPPING of Atwell to get Laidlaw’s contract signed wasn’t the only time she overstepped her authority, Atwell says.
    On January 27, Atwell emailed a New Year’s address to his assistant, Jennifer Downie, and asked that it be distributed to all Saanich staff through the E-link internal website, to which the Mayor was not given access.
    In that letter, Atwell wrote that he planned to schedule drop-in coffee sessions with staff in the coming weeks “at our various facilities throughout Saanich. I would love to share a coffee with you, hear about your role in this organization and your ideas for making our community a better place for all citizens.”
    According to Atwell, Downie blocked the letter. She told Atwell it touched on governance and operational lines and had forwarded it to Ciarniello for direction. Atwell said Ciarniello explained to him that the email to staff was blocked “as it contravenes council’s direction.” Focus asked Ciarniello if she refuted Atwell’s claim. She said, “Yes, I refute the allegation.” 
    Atwell told Focus that many municipal hall staff have told him that they have been directed not to talk to him and that staff are afraid of retribution from their managers for disobeying this unwritten order. Focus has seen documentary evidence that Saanich IT division staff have been told not to talk with Atwell.
    Siegal, who recently published Leaders in the Shadows: The Leadership Qualities of Chief Administrative Officers in Canada, observed, “If the mayor was trying to give staff direction about fixing a pothole or something that council hasn’t authorized, then the mayor is clearly overstepping his bounds. But if the mayor is wanting to talk to people, to staff, I don’t know very many CAOs who would intervene in something like that.”
    Contacted for comment, Laidlaw told Focus, “District staff have not been told not to speak with the Mayor.”
    Atwell, elected on a platform promising change at the District, appears to be sharing a similar experience to that of former Campbell River Mayor Walter Jakeway. Laidlaw was the city manager and Ciarniello was director of corporate services during Jakeway’s mayoral term.
    Jakeway—a mechanical engineer with an MBA who had cut his teeth in the pulp and paper industry—had been elected in 2011 on a platform of change and keeping tax increases at zero percent. He wanted to reform the budgeting process and make good on other election promises early in his term. But a strained relationship soon developed between Jakeway and senior staff.
    He remembers strong opposition from Laidlaw, his bureaucracy and incumbent councillors. “In a lot of ways, Andy was like the eighth member of council,” Jakeway said. “I did not have a positive relationship with either of them [Laidlaw and Ciarniello]… My idea was to make change happen… They did everything they could to try to block those ideas and gave me no options.”
    Both Laidlaw and Ciarniello told Focus that they disagreed with Jakeway’s characterization. Ciarniello said, “I took direction from the CAO and council.” Laidlaw said, “As city manager, I work for ‘council.’  The direction followed is subject to the collective decision making process of council. The mayor often had different viewpoints than council.”
    Jakeway said he believes that entrenched bureaucratic opposition exists across local governments to elected officials who try to upset the status quo. “There’s a bureaucratic code that at all costs you protect the bureaucracy, and when something goes wrong, hang onto that bureaucratic code…At all costs, protect the bureaucracy.”
     
    FOLLOWING THE JANUARY 12 announcement by Saanich Police that the software had been installed as a security fix, Atwell complained to the Office of the Police Complaints Commissioner. On June 23, a brief statement from OPCC noted, “Based on the information we have received to date, we have determined Mayor Atwell’s complaints against members of the Saanich Police Department are inadmissible as they do not constitute misconduct as defined pursuant to the Police Act of British Columbia.”
    That, of course, did not settle the matter of whether Atwell’s communications had been intentionally intercepted.
    Saanich Police Chief Bob Downie rejected a criminal investigation on January 12 based on a legal opinion that Section 184 of the Criminal Code did not apply since “[The] software was put in place to protect from a computer breach from the outside or unauthorized access from within. It was not and is not being monitored and the information stored on the computer is only accessed by two persons, both of whom are managers in IT.”
     But Denham and IT experts have made clear Spector 360 is an employee monitoring tool, not a firewall, anti-virus program or external threat monitor. In fact, Saanich had to turn off some IT security measures for Spector 360 to work on the affected computers, and Denham said it may have made security less effective by creating a “honeypot” of passwords and other high-level information on the Spector 360 server.
    Downie also ruled out a criminal investigation based on the premise that employees have no expectation of privacy at the workplace. Denham said the opposite is true.
    Saanich Police Sgt. Steve Eassie confirmed the department is not reconsidering its previous conclusion, as there is no new information to evaluate. “Nothing has changed,” Eassie said. “The [Privacy] Commissioner did not assert any criminality.” A determination of criminality, however, has never been within the scope of the Privacy Commissioner’s authority.
    The Province won’t be launching a public inquiry, either. Justice Minister Suzanne Anton’s deputy, Kurt J. W. Sandstrom, has told concerned Saanich residents that the issue is a matter of civic governance, so it won’t get involved. 
    Neil Turley, one of several Saanich residents who wrote to Anton, said he believes the Saanich bureaucracy—and several councillors—just want the spyware scandal to go away. “Democracy at our municipal level seems to be broken. Laws were broken,” Turley said, “and the Privacy Commissioner’s report should have been enough red flags for consensus at the top and for council to come out and admit this is wrong. But instead, it just starts to rot. This issue is not going to go away until someone decides justice needs to be served.  Once we lose a bit of democracy, you just don’t get it back.”
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine. Daniel Palmer is the former editor of The Saanich News and is now a freelance writer.

    Judith Lavoie
    May 2015
    With legal costs already over $1 million, the traumatized community continues its fight against a contaminated soil dump.
     
    AS SHAWNIGAN LAKE RESIDENTS PREPARE TO FIGHT yet another battle over provincially-approved plans to dump and treat contaminated soil in a quarry above the lake that provides the area’s drinking water, there’s a community-wide sense of disillusionment and systemic betrayal. “I feel that what went wrong are the government processes and rules and regulations,” said Victoria Robson, Shawnigan Residents Association director.
    It’s a feeling echoed by most of those involved in the battle against South Island Aggregates/ Cobble Hill Holdings’ plans to bring in up to 100,000 tonnes of contaminated soil a year—much of it from Victoria. The company intends to treat the soil either through bioremediation, using bacteria, fungi and plants to alter contaminants, or through encapsulating the soil in cells with plastic liners.
    Initially the company planned to reclaim the active quarry with clean fill, but a more lucrative option evolved after a load of contaminated soil was inadvertently dumped at the quarry in 2010. South Island Aggregates (SIA) owners Marty Block and Mike Kelly saw a way of turning a problem into a business opportunity.
    Local opposition erupted immediately, crossing all political lines, but, despite rallies, petitions, publicity, and costly legal pursuits, in 2013 the Environment Ministry decided the plan could go ahead. A 50-year permit was granted. Then, this March, the Environmental Appeal Board backed the decision.
    One deciding factor was the amount of protection demanded by the permit conditions, pointed out lawyer John Alexander, who acted for SIA/Cobble Hill. “The permit started from the proposition that this site was in a watershed—a drinking watershed and a recreational watershed—so, if it was going to be considered, it would have to be backed by at least seven layers of protection,” he said. The protection is so complete that the operation could theoretically go anywhere without fears of contamination, he said. 
    Robson, who wants to see regulations updated to provide more community protection from activities on private land, remains sceptical about both the protections and the process. The Residents Association tried to adhere to due process and do everything according to rules, she warned, but all efforts failed and other communities should take note that they could find themselves in the same situation. 
    Calvin Cook, Residents Association president, struggling to contain his outrage, agrees other communities are at risk. “Here they have taken a pristine site in a designated community watershed. If they can put it here, my Lord, they can put it anywhere,” he said. “The irony is that I am fighting the Ministry of Environment to protect water. Shouldn’t this be the other way round?”
    After the SIA proposal received ministry approval, the Residents Association, Cowichan Valley Regional District and two local residents took the case to the Environmental Appeal Board, arguing that the site was too risky, that fractured bedrock would allow contaminants—including hydrocarbons and persistent and highly toxic chemicals such as dioxins and furans—to seep into the water table, threatening drinking water and fish habitat. They further argued that the design of the facility and permit requirements were not sufficient safeguards.
    Opponents say there are also questions about the process that have never been answered, such as why Active Earth Engineering Ltd, which drafted SIA’s permit application and was owed money by SIA, then served as an expert witness. Another question concerns the role of Malahat First Nation, which supported SIA, but which also runs a contaminated soil facility on the reserve, which is used by SIA.
    Green Party MLA Andrew Weaver, who visited the site recently, points his finger at the “Professional Reliance model,” which has been used to assess permit applications since Liberal government civil service cutbacks left the Province without in-house expertise in many areas.
    Instead of using government experts, the ministry now relies on the judgement of qualified experts hired by a project proponent. During the Shawnigan Lake hearings, the CVRD and Shawnigan Residents Association brought in their own experts, whose evidence conflicted with the expert opinion provided as part of SIA’s permit application.
    “Herein lies the critical problem with the entire permitting process. The Professional Reliance model for project permitting in use in BC is inherently flawed,” Weaver wrote in his blog. He noted that in March 2014—almost a year after SIA’s permit was granted—the Office of the BC Ombudsperson released a scathing report criticizing the Professional Reliance model with respect to streamside protection and enhancement areas. (The Liberal government has agreed to accept 24 of its 25 recommendations.)
    According to Sonia Furstenau, Shawnigan representative on Cowichan Valley Regional District board (CVRD), the BC government has not even adhered to its own rules.
    “There’s a process in BC that is meant to be followed in choosing a site for a landfill and that process has not been followed. If it had, there’s no way in the world that this site could have been selected as a fill site—at the headwaters of the lake, on top of an aquifer,” said Furstenau, who believes that, because of the area’s geology, leakage into the aquifer could also put Victoria’s drinking water at risk.
    Assuming a contaminated soil treatment facility is needed in the area, she suggested, there should have been a widespread search for a suitable site. She says the CVRD offered to assist in that search, but to no avail.
    However, SIA lawyer Alexander said that, although there is nothing stopping the CVRD from looking for its own site and setting up in competition to SIA, it first needs to get its own house in order. “It’s the pot calling the kettle black,” he said, pointing out that the regional district has piles of contaminated ash from its former incinerator sitting beside a creek and that the CVRD has yet to deal with 4500 cubic metres of contaminated soil dumped on a Malahat property 12 years ago. Ironically, the SIA site could help deal with those problems and other illegal dumps in the area, Alexander said.
    Furstenau scoffed at what she sees as attempts to divert attention from the SIA site and said the more important question is the science behind the proposal.
    “Science has proved that contaminants will outlast engineered solutions,” the Residents Association’s Cook said, adding, “The liners are new technology and they haven’t worked in the past. We are taking [poisonous chemicals] and putting them in a rubber baggie.” 
    Alexander disagrees, describing cell liners as a recognized technique in dealing with contaminated soil and one that is used by other local operations such as Tervita Corporation on Millstream Road. After 40 years of use there is no sign of them failing, noted Alexander.
    After a record-breaking 31 days of hearings, the Environmental Appeal Board issued a 147-page decision which emphasized that board members took residents’ concerns seriously and recognized the unquestionable need to protect water sources, human health and environmental values. But the board ruled that “on a balance of probabilities, the geology and hydrogeology of the site and the facility design, together with the permit conditions, will provide the required protections.” The board added additional requirements, such as prohibiting blasting at the adjacent quarry while cell liners are installed and constructing a permanent roof over the soil management area.
    A balance of probabilities is not good enough when it comes to protecting drinking water, wildlife and fish habitat, Cook said scornfully. “None of it passes the sniff test,” he said, reiterating that it is the wrong site for treating poisonous chemicals such as hydrocarbons and glycols.
    In addition to the fear of contaminated water, area residents are also concerned the controversy is affecting real-estate prices, Furstenau said.
    That is not the only financial worry. Among other unpleasant discoveries made by Shawnigan residents during the protracted dispute is that the system is designed to favour those with deep pockets.
    The Residents Association, with 476 members, has spent a staggering $629,000 on legal fees. The group has raised about $250,000 through bake sales, bottle drives and dances, while praying for community goodwill to make up the shortfall, Robson said.
    The CVRD has spent about $550,000 on Environmental Appeal Board (EAB) legal costs, said Furstenau. “We weren’t anticipating that they would be that much, but, because the hearings went on so long, the costs are mounting,” she said.
    The financial implications make the decision to now escalate the battle a leap of faith.
    The Residents Association is looking at requesting a judicial review of the decision and is hoping to introduce new evidence on the impact on the community, real estate values, and the history of the company, Cook said. “The EAB didn’t feel they wanted to consider ex-employees in regard to the conduct of SIA. We have signed affidavits (about on-site disposal and company behaviour) from a couple of former employees.” 
    Concurrently, the CVRD is looking into the possibility of a BC Supreme Court challenge on land use and zoning grounds. “It hasn’t been decided yet. The CVRD board has to decide,” Furstenau said. “The CVRD is exploring all of its options.”
    In the meantime, South Island Aggregates is preparing to reactivate the site. Lawyer Alexander suggested that, if there is to be more legal wrangling, the parties think carefully before applying for an injunction. “One of the primary considerations is that someone would have to step forward and offer to pay the losses or damages caused by an injunction. That’s a pretty significant thing for the Residents Association. It could be a very big number,” he warned.
    Opponents did score a small victory in April when Furstenau and Cook, backed by community representatives such as the headmaster of Shawnigan Lake School, a local doctor, and a realtor, met Environment Minister Mary Polak and ministry staff, who agreed to expand their water sampling program and conduct an environmental assessment of the existing site.
    “We also established that the CVRD will be able to participate, which is good because we don’t have a whole lot of faith in the Ministry of Environment right now,” Furstenau said.
    It is an opinion shared by many of those living around Shawnigan Lake who feel their wellbeing is being threatened by a private company’s money-making scheme, without any benefit to them.
    Despite all the talk about a community rift, residents are remarkably united, Cook said. “There is no rift unless your name is Block or Kelly.”
    Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues.

    Leslie Campbell
    June 2015
    Do articulated tug barges, each carrying millions of gallons of hydrocarbon fuels, pose a threat to our coast?
     
    INGMAR LEE HAS A MISSION BORN OF SERIOUS WORRY. The long-time environmental activist has been trying to raise awareness about the “articulated tug     barges” that transport various fossil fuels through the Inside Passage to Alaska.
    From his home on Denny Island, near Bella Bella, Lee maintains a facebook page (10,000 Ton Tanker) where he posts regularly. It started a few years ago, he says, when he began noticing and then tracking (via www.marinetraffic.com) the tugboat Nathan E. Stewart and its two 300-ft 10,000-ton capacity petroleum-tanker barges which run directly past Bella Bella, and on through BC’s protected Inside Passage and Great Bear Rainforest. 
    These articulated tug barges (ATBs) are carrying various fuels for Alaskans—bunker oil, heating oil, gasoline, aviation fuel, diesel.
    ATBs are twinned vessels—a tug designed to fit into a large notch built into the transom of a petroleum barge. The tug then steers from the stern of the barge instead of towing it. An extra wheel house is mounted on a tall pedestal to enable a view over the bow. Lee says this only provides limited direct forward visibility. 
    These ATBs, which can carry up to 14,000 tonnes of petroleum product, are allowed in what's referred to as the "voluntary exclusion zone," including the Inside Passage, which applies to loaded oil tankers servicing Alaska from Washington. (Transport Canada also prohibits tankers of over 40,000 tonnes deadweight from using the southern portion of the Inside Passage). 
    Lee points to the Exxon Valdez’s devastating spill of 35,000 tonnes, whose effects are still felt, as a comparison. “They are carrying one-quarter or more of the spill volume released by the Exxon Valdez and would utterly destroy this coast,” says Lee.
    CEO Captain Kevin Obermeyer of the Pacific Pilotage Authority out of Vancouver explained in an email to Lee why the oil-carrying ATBs are given special treatment: “Tugs and barges as well as ATBs are seen differently from an Aframax tanker in that the tugs have additional redundancy with twin engines, twin propellers and often twin rudders compared to the single rudder, single engine and single propeller of the usual Aframax tankers visiting our coast. As a result, the tug and barge industry are treated differently due to the differing risk.”
    But Lee argues the route through the Inside Passage poses significant dangers to coastal ecosystems. With its often rough seas and narrow, rocky passages, “this is an enormous oil disaster just waiting to happen,” says Lee.
    In the wake of the oil spill in Vancouver’s English Bay, Lee’s concerns about spill response—in a far less accessible area—are understandable.
    Lee points to a 2011 incident involving the Nathan E. Stewart and its barge, DBL 55, when they narrowly avoided catastrophe during a raging storm off Cape Fairweather, Alaska. The “incident report” of the US Coast Guard noted, “This is a potential spill.” The crew reported that a series of 30-foot seas had washed over the vessel, and water entered the engine’s air intakes. Power was lost in both engines. According to the Coast Guard report, “The tug has 45,000 gallons of diesel and 500 gallons of lube oil on board. The cargo on board the fuel barge is reported to be 2.2 million gallons of diesel fuel, 1028 gallons of aviation fuel and 700 gallons of other petroleum products.” The stricken ATB was eventually towed to safety by another tug. Harrowing video from the wheelhouse of the Nathan E. Stewart can be found online. 
    The Nathan E. Stewart is owned by the US-based Kirby Corporation. Kirby’s Pacific Division vessels trade from San Diego to Barrow, Alaska. “Other than a stop at Chevron’s Burnaby refinery, or Kinder Morgan’s Westridge,” says Lee, “they seem to have no stops in Canada.” 
    It is hard to pin down the precise number of petrochemical-laden barges traversing the Inland Passage each month. Matt Woodruff of Kirby Corporation declined to give numbers. Pacific Pilotage Authority’s Obermeyer surveyed the waiver holders and concluded “there is on average one ATB movement a week.” Lee estimates that the Nathan E. Stewart plies the route four times in a six-week period. 
    Kirby’s Woodruff did tell Focus, “Our present west coast fleet consists of barges ranging from around 35,000 barrels to around 100,000 barrels [14,000 tonnes] in capacity.” The company’s latest quarterly report lists 69 coastal tank barges and 73 tugboats, though many of these are used on other routes. The company, whose slogan is “Putting America’s Waterways to Work,” pioneered the use of deep notch articulated tug-barge units for oceangoing service. Woodruff told Focus that “All Kirby tank barges are double hull vessels.”
    On March 30, 2015, Lee met with Pacific Pilotage’s Obermeyer in Vancouver. “I asked the Captain point blank to please close the loophole waivers which are allowing US tankers to ply back and forth up and down the sheltered water of the BC Inside Passage. In all other cases, tankers must enter and exit Canadian Pacific waters only through Juan de Fuca. Obermeyer said he was considering making it required to post a Canadian pilot on the bridge of such traffic, but as far as making the BC Inside Passage off limits to these 10,000-ton capacity tankers, he said I’d have to take that up with Transport Canada.”
    Which Lee did. Yvette Myers of Transport Canada only assured him that, “Effective January 1, 2015, all oil tankers and barges must meet international standards for double hull construction under the Vessel Pollution and Dangerous Chemicals Regulations (the Regulations). I should also confirm these Regulations apply in full to the articulated tug barges you refer to in your correspondence.”
    But even double hulls are not perfect. Lee points to an incident in March 2014 involving an ATB owned by the Kirby Corporation. The Miss Susan, after crashing into a bulk carrier in Galveston Bay, Texas, disgorged 820 tonnes of bunker oil into the bay, making it  the largest oil spill in Galveston Bay in two decades. According to Galveston County’s Daily News: “The collision resulted in the spill of more than 168,000 gallons—or 4000 barrels—of heavy fuel oil into the bay. The oil found its way into Gulf of Mexico and washed up on beaches from Galveston to Matagorda County.” Lawsuits have been launched by commercial fishers affected by the spill.
    Transport Canada’s Myers also noted that, “The Pacific Pilotage Authority has established compulsory pilotage areas to ensure that pilots with knowledge of the local area are onboard vessels when in sensitive or busy waterways.” But as Obermeyer admits, 26 waivers have been granted including some to the ATBs.
    While these ATBs may not carry crude oil or dilbit, on which most recent concern around tankers has focused, Lee argues they still pose a huge risk to coastal ecosystems.
    Some of the fuels carried on these tanker-barges are viewed as “non-persistent” (e.g. gasoline, aviation fuel and light diesel which dissipate rapidly through evaporation); others are viewed as persistent. The International Tanker Owners Federation states: “As a rule, persistent oils break up and dissipate more slowly in the marine environment and usually require a clean-up operation. Persistent oils include many[or] all crude oils, fuel oils, lubricating oils and heavier grades of marine diesel oil. These oils pose a potential threat to natural resources when released, in terms of impacts to wildlife, smothering of habitats, and oiling of amenity beaches.”
    Though specific cargo lists of these ATBs are not made public, the US Coast Guard incident report regarding the Nathan E. Stewart’s misadventure showed it was carrying lube oil, one of the most persistent petroleum products, as well as diesel, which, depending on the grade, can be highly problematic. 
    The recent spill in English Bay was of highly toxic Bunker C fuel oil—an estimated 2800 litres (about 2 tonnes). Globs of the oil have been found on beaches 12 kilometres from the spill site. Obermeyer says a survey of the waiver-holding ATBs indicated “none of them carry bunker C. They only carry refined petroleum products.”
    Lee fears the ATB traffic could be acting  as a “placeholder” for the federal Conservative’s tanker plans for this coast. “By allowing these tankers it keeps the precedent alive that tankers are normal on this coast.” He’s also become disillusioned with both Transport Canada and the Pacific Pilot Authority, seeing them as apologists for the barge-tanker traffic.
    In a new video produced by PacificWild’s Ian McCallister, Lee suggests, “There is a very simple solution to this. Kirby is taking the cheap way out to use the Inside Passage…these fuel deliveries need to travel offshore with a tanker. We need to get these tankers out of the British Columbia Inside Passage, offshore like all the rest of the tankers.”
    Leslie Campbell is the editor of Focus Magazine.

    David Broadland
    June 2015
    The CRD is fighting to prevent release of a record that could show how badly it estimated one of the costs of sewage treatment.
     
    SINCE AN INQUIRY CONDUCTED BY the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner is a quasi-judicial process, I suppose I’m breaking some quasi-law by disclosing the contents of the CRD’s and Stantec’s submissions before an adjudication is made. Maybe I’m headed for quasi-jail, but the information that the CRD and Stantec are trying to keep out of the public eye is central to a rational, community-based decision on the sewage treatment question.
    In 2009 the CRD contracted Stantec to provide engineering consulting services for the core area’s sewage treatment program.
    The OIPC inquiry was called to determine whether the CRD was entitled to withhold from Focus (and the public) a crucial, 80-word paragraph from a report presented to an in camera meeting of the CRD’s sewage committee in June 2009. The information in the report convinced the committee to approve that contract.
    The report was authored by two CRD employees, Dwayne Kalynchuk and Tony Brcic, both of whom are former Stantec employees. The missing paragraph in the report is believed to be the only written record of what Kalynchuk estimated hiring Stantec as the Program Management Consultant would cost. In 2009, however, Kalynchuk was reported by the Times Colonist to have stated publicly that Stantec’s fee would be “one percent of the project budget.” The project budget has remained pegged at $783 million since 2010. One percent of that would be $7.83 million. The most recent budget estimate of the cost of Stantec’s services over the life of the project, however, has been far higher. 
    An estimate based on CRD payments to Stantec from 2009 through to the end of 2012, added to figures from a late 2012 CRD projection through to 2018, puts the total cost of Stantec’s services at $55 million. That’s a seven-fold—700 percent—increase in the projected cost of Stantec’s services over what Kalynchuk is believed to have estimated.
    My working theory is that neither the CRD nor Stantec want Kalynchuk’s secret paragraph revealed for fear that public awareness of that seven-fold increase would get taxpayers wondering what other multipliers they can expect for the other parts of that “$783 million” budget.
    The CRD’s initial submission to the inquiry makes two claims about releasing Kalynchuk’s paragraph: First, that releasing the information would damage the financial interests of Stantec. Secondly, that releasing Kalynchuk’s paragraph will result in a possible loss of $200,000 to the CRD because that’s what it would cost to replace Stantec.
    The CRD, Seaterra and Stantec all claim that Kalynchuk’s paragraph has information in it that would allow Stantec’s competitors to deduce its hourly rates (a no-no in freedom of information law), and that knowledge would allow those competitors to outbid Stantec if the contract is re-bid (it expires in 2016).
    If you’re a taxpayer, you might be thinking, “Of course the CRD should get the most competitive bid. That’s the only way to get the most efficient use of my tax contribution.” You might think the public interest is best served if competition between businesses is encouraged.
    The CRD, apparently, doesn’t think that way. They’re strongly in favour of sticking with Stantec because that will save the bother of issuing another RFP, which they estimate would cost the above-mentioned $200,000.
    Posed against that, though, is my argument for why Kalynchuk’s paragraph should be released: If the estimate for Stantec’s fee has escalated from $7.8 million in 2009 to as high as $55 million in 2013, there’s either a tremendous amount of over-charging by Stantec going on, or Kalynchuk’s original estimate, which was apparently based on Stantec’s secret rates, was baloney.
    Since Kalynchuk and Brcic are both former Stantec employees, it’s a matter of public interest to know whether they grossly underestimated the probable cost of Stantec’s services or not.
    Similarly, if it turns out that Kalynchuk’s missing paragraph accurately estimated that Stantec’s total fee would be in the neighborhood of $55 million, no damage will have been done. The public will be reassured that Kalynchuk and Brcic did not let their former employer’s interest get in front of the public interest, and Capital Region taxpayers can sleep more easily knowing they are in good hands with Stantec guiding the CRD forward.
    By the way, if you search the CRD’s website for “Stantec fees” you’ll find a least a couple of relevant reports that are more current than Kalynchuk’s 2009 paragraph. Those reports provide far more explicit information from which Stantec’s hourly rates could be determined by their competitors. Either the CRD and Stantec have forgotten that they’ve already made Stantec’s rates public (doubtful) or they know they are there and simply want to delay, as long as possible, release of Kalynchuk’s crucial paragraph.
    Here’s why the community needs this information now: There’s an intense community effort being made right now to find an alternative to the McLoughlin Point project, and that process needs to be informed about the real costs lurking just over the horizon for the old plan. As it turns out, though, the position of the CRD’s brain trust seems to be that the project is going back to McLoughlin Point and they don’t want any surprises that might upset that plan.
    CRD staff’s hope for a return to McLoughlin is embedded in the documents submitted to the OIPC inquiry. Both the CRD’s submission and Seaterra’s affidavits read like a long expression of loyalty to Stantec. They go to great lengths, and, one supposes, legal expense, to explain how Stantec’s competitors might use its rates to outbid them on renewal of the project contract in 2016 or, in fact, any project.
    While their concern for Stantec’s well-being is touching, the irony is that it was Stantec who guided the project to the rocky shores of Esquimalt, along with an 18-kilometre twin pipeline to Hartland. The community rebelled. Why would the CRD be so loyal to a company that came up with a failed plan?
    Well, that’s because the CRD are intent on proceeding with that plan and McLoughlin equals Stantec. If CRD and Seaterra bureaucrats were truly committed to a reconsideration of the plan, they would be accepting of the need for a new RFP and they would release Kalynchuk’s paragraph.
     
    THE CRD’S stand-by-your-man relationship with Stantec is like the bond that developed between the City of Victoria and MMM Group during the optimistic phase of the Johnson Street Bridge Replacement Project. MMM has been the City’s project manager since 2009, a role similar to Stantec’s gig as project management consultant for the CRD. In MMM’s case though, it also provided some engineering services during the construction phase.
    If the sewage treatment project turns out to be anything like the bridge project, local taxpayers are in for a wild ride. The bridge experience provides insight into the level of optimism bias about cost that’s built into local political and governance cultures, and how that’s exploited by the commercial practices of big engineering and construction companies who operate in this market. The estimate for the cost of a new bridge started at $40 million, then rose to $63 million, $77 million, and $93 million. Each time it reached a new high, assurances were given—and believed by politicians—that it would rise no higher. Now everyone is optimistically hoping the cost of the bridge won’t reach $120 million.
    The same local optimism bias about cost is at play in the sewage treatment program. Looking at the key indicators—particularly the relative level in escalation of the project management fees—a realistic pessimist would guess the cost of a sewage treatment system here will rise to $1.7 billion, once optimism bias has burned itself out.
    One sure way to make the cost outcome worse would be to let Stantec and the CRD keep Kalynchuk’s missing paragraph in the dark. That would send a strong signal to Stantec that the political and governance cultures they’re working in can be pushed upward in cost without consequence. By unjustifiably delaying the release of Kalynchuk’s missing estimate, that signal has already been sent.
    Readers might be interested to know that the key player for the City of Victoria during the optimism burnout phase of the bridge project (June 2010 to April 2015) has been Dwayne Kalynchuk, formerly of the CRD, whose missing paragraph I’ve been seeking. He recently retired as director of the City of Victoria’s engineering department—a significant change in personnel at City Hall that, curiously, was acknowledged only indirectly through the issuance of a request for proposal that sought a head-hunter who would then find Kalynchuk’s replacement. The intial estimate for that project is unknown.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    David Broadland
    June 2015
    The spyware installed on Mayor-elect Richard Atwell’s computer was only one of three IT strategies that targeted him.
     
    NEW EVIDENCE BROUGHT FORWARD by current and former employees of the District of Saanich’s IT department may create additional pressure on BC’s Attorney General Suzanne Anton to investigate whether, on the direction of senior Saanich officials, the communications of Mayor Richard Atwell were wilfully intercepted. Section 184 of the Canadian Criminal Code provides for punishment of up to five years in prison for the “wilful” interception of private communications between parties unless at least one of the parties agrees to the interception. Atwell has said he was never informed by the District of the interception. Saanich has provided no proof he was.
    Before getting to that new information, let me remind you of what we already know.
    The public position of the District so far has been that Spector 360 employee monitoring software was installed on 13 District computers as a temporary network security upgrade in order to impress upon the newly-elected mayor that recommendations made in a May 2014 computer network security audit by Wordsworth & Associates had been acted upon. The District decided to install the monitoring software on November 19, only four days after Atwell defeated long-time incumbent Mayor Frank Leonard in a bitterly-contested election.
    Atwell became aware of the monitoring software on December 11 after a Saanich IT department employee (whom Focus has named “Whistle Blower”) expressed concerns to his former manager at Saanich, Jon Woodland, who is now the manager of IT at the Township of Esquimalt. Woodland contacted Atwell who then interviewed Saanich IT department employees until he found Whistle Blower.
    Atwell then requested that Saanich Police investigate. On January 12 Saanich Police provided an opinion to Saanich Council that no criminal code violation had occurred. That same day, Atwell went public with his concerns. Shortly afterwards, BC’s Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham announced she would conduct a formal investigation to determine whether BC privacy law had been broken. 
    In late March Denham delivered a scathing report that found Saanich broke BC privacy law when it installed the software and then collected the personal information of Atwell and others. Her report challenged the District’s claim that the initiative was a response to the Wordsworth & Associates’ security audit. Denham reported that installation of the software likely weakened the District network’s security against external attacks. She also observed that access logs that would have recorded whether anyone had accessed the information collected from the mayor’s computer hadn’t been enabled.
    Denham’s report revealed that five District directors, the Fire Chief and CAO Paul Murray met on November 19, 2014 and discussed the use of “a security strategy focussed on high-profile users.” No written record of that meeting was kept, so it’s uncertain what action was actually agreed to by assembled directors. Records obtained by FOI show Spector 360 employee monitoring software was purchased on November 20. On December 2, Director of Corporate Services Laura Ciarniello gave approval to District IT Manager Forrest Kvemshagen to enable the software. An email between Ciarniello and Kvemshagen shows that Murray was aware that employee monitoring software had been installed.
    Last month I wrote here about an affidavit prepared by Whistle Blower on January 17. The document was created to protect Whistle Blower in case Saanich took disciplinary action against him—which it subsequently did. More on that later. In the affidavit, Whistle Blower stated that on November 20 he was told by the District’s Assistant IT Manager John Proc that monitoring software was to be installed on 13 District computers. Whistle Blower quoted Proc as saying, “They are nervous about the new mayor…we’re installing it on the directors computers as well to make it look like it is not targeted.” 
    A spokesperson for the District of Saanich refused to comment on the allegation, saying only that such comment would be “premature” given that an internal report was being prepared by Saanich’s interim CAO Andy Laidlaw.
    Since then, Focus has obtained additional records that show the installation of Spector 360 monitoring software on Atwell’s computer was only one of three actions Saanich’s IT department was ordered to undertake that were aimed directly at Atwell. 
    The records were provided by former and current Saanich IT department employees on condition of anonymity; they fear Saanich will retaliate if their names are known. No details that could harm the security of Saanich’s network were sought or shared.
     
    ON NOVEMBER 17, 2014, two days after Atwell’s victory over Leonard, the District’s IT department began preparing for the transfer of political power from Leonard to Atwell. This included emailed instructions from Assistant IT Manager John Proc to his staff for physical removal of Leonard’s computer to IT department offices for “secure archival storage” in a “locked environment.” The email also shows that Leonard’s access to departmental shared drives was to be set up on a home-based computer (this access ended on December 1).
    In the same email, IT staff were directed to configure a new computer for Atwell’s use in the mayor’s office with “no other shared drive access at this time.”
    This first initiative, then, served to prevent Atwell from accessing files to which Leonard had access. Atwell recently confirmed that, six months later, he still has no access to any departmental shared drives.
    The second initiative was undertaken a few days later. At 8:55 am on November 21—the same day that Proc purchased Spector 360 employee monitoring software for installation on Mayor-elect Atwell’s office computer—a Saanich IT division employee used an iPhone to photograph a series of actions mapped out on a whiteboard. The directions in the plan showed that Atwell’s office computer would be configured so that any attempt by him to access the District’s corporate intranet—the heart of information exchange between Saanich employees—would be redirected to the network that’s available in places like recreation centres. That is, unlike Leonard, who could access all the information and ideas on that intranet, Atwell was locked out. Atwell recently confirmed he still has no access to Saanich’s corporate intranet.
    This new information changes the story in two ways.
    First, the technical details of the two initiatives make it even more difficult to accept the security rationale for the Spector 360 software on which Saanich’s defence of its actions depends.
    Second, the basic nature of the two initiatives outlined above, which have isolated Atwell from information needed to function properly as mayor, and shut off his access to the conduit through which Saanich employees communicate amongst themselves, raises serious questions about the motivation behind all three schemes.
    Let’s examine the security rationale again, this time in light of the new information, and then circle back to the underlying nature of the managers’ actions.
    I recently asked Laidlaw by email if he was aware that Atwell’s computer had been isolated from the District’s network through initiatives undertaken by Saanich’s IT division. Laidlaw replied, “The set up on Mayor Atwell’s [computer] was identical to the set up on Mayor Leonard’s computer.” That assertion, obviously, is deeply at odds with the records Focus has obtained.
    In her report, Denham outlined the rationale the District had given her investigators for why they had chosen employee monitoring software to strengthen network security. She stated, “Proc understood that the goal was to have a forensic auditing capability. The software was also to have the ability to determine whether user accounts were accessing areas which they were not supposed to be accessing.”
    We now know that Atwell’s computer had been blocked from accessing anything but his Saanich email account, his own personal files, and the internet. The councillors’ computers could only access the internet. So I asked Laidlaw why the Spector software had been put on Atwell’s and the councillors’ computers, which had no access to the sensitive files the employee monitoring software was apparently intended to guard. Laidlaw wrote, “When council use these machines, they access their personal accounts; malware could be transfered to the network through emails or sharing of files on flash drives.”
    I asked Jon Woodland for his opinion of Laidlaw’s claim that putting employee monitoring software on computers would protect them from malware. Woodland said, “Let me reiterate that Spector 360 provides exactly zero protection against malware and virus attacks, and, that Saanich IT staff had to disable portions of Saanich’s existing anti-virus features to allow Spector 360 to be installed on the PCs. Otherwise, their existing security measures would have prevented the installation of Spector 360.”
    Even if Atwell and the councillors’ computers did have access to the District’s network, why wouldn’t Saanich simply use anti-malware and anti-virus software to protect them? I posed that question to Laidlaw, who then responded, “It was never the intent to have Spector act as an anti-virus or anti-malware software—Saanich has other programs that complete these tasks. Spector was implemented as a forensic analysis tool.”
    That response, a feat of circular logic, takes us back to my first question to Laidlaw: Why would a forensic analysis tool be put on computers that had no access to sensitive files? The District is unable to explain this.
    The absence of a reasoned explanation coincides with an absence of records: Saanich’s FOI office has been unable to provide a single written communication showing that Murray, Ciarniello, Kvemshagen or Proc considered how employee monitoring software related to any of the recommendations made in the Wordsworth & Associates audit.
    If there was no credible security rationale for the three initiatives managers ordered, then why were they ordered?
    Two of the initiatives limit Atwell’s access to information. Was there sensitive information someone was fearful Atwell would find if he were able to access departmental shared drives and the corporate intranet?
    Given the reputation of the mayor-elect, such a fear might be understandable. Atwell first came to public attention for his critique of CRD bureaucrats’ handling of the sewage treatment plan. He filed FOIs, analysed that information, and compared what he found to CRD claims—and soundly embarrassed CRD staff when they provided misinformation. Atwell was a highly effective community activist. But he then took his activism to the next level and campaigned for mayor on a platform of change and more open and transparent government. Against all expectations, he won. Perhaps those at the top in Saanich were caught by surprise and felt compelled to quickly circle whatever wagons they could rustle up.
    Take, for example, the position in which CAO Paul Murray found himself following Atwell’s surprise victory.
    Murray had made statements during the election that indicated he favoured Leonard. He told a gathering of Saanich managers that he couldn’t work with Atwell. Following Atwell’s unexpected win, Murray was suddenly in an awkward position, and, as it turned out, he had a lot to lose. Through an FOI we know that, earlier in 2014, Leonard and the previous council had agreed to an unusually generous compensation package for Murray in which he was given a retroactive salary increase from $16,151.50 per month to $18,432. A personal letter from Mayor Leonard informed Murray his annual salary would rise to $250,000. A previous contract had stipulated payment of 18 months severance if Murray were terminated without cause—a much more generous provision than other local municipal executive contracts allowed. Murray's settlement agreement with Saanich  strictly reflected the terms of that contract.
    Atwell, after being advised by an expert on municipal law that Murray’s publicly-stated unwillingness to work with him presented a problem, met with Murray to determine whether he would be willing to consider leaving Saanich under the terms of his employment contract. Atwell has since said Murray agreed to leave. Unfortunately, Atwell hadn’t seen Murray’s contract. Saanich staff refused to provide him with a copy, and because of the IT initiative described above that prevented Atwell from accessing shared departmental drives, he was unable to access Murray’s contract directly. So Atwell didn’t understand the significant financial impact Murray’s leaving would have, and this mushroomed into a political fiasco for Atwell. The new mayor was roundly blamed for the outcome, the conditions for which had been set in place by the previous council’s generous compensation package and Murray’s stated unwillingness to work with Atwell.
    If the IT initiatives launched after Atwell’s election were a circling of the wagons, Saanich managers’ specific choice of wagons has since turned out to be a colossal embarrassment to the District: An arguably political decision was made to block Atwell’s access to departmental shared drives and the corporate intranet, access that Leonard had enjoyed. At the same time, a decision was made to install employee monitoring software on Atwell’s computer—which, according to Whistle Blower’s account of his conversation with Proc, was aimed only at Atwell. IT experts have ridiculed Saanich’s claim that Spector 360 was a legitimate response to the Wordsworth & Associates security audit. In any case, Atwell couldn’t access the files Saanich says it was trying to protect, so placing Spector 360 on his computer didn’t make sense on that basis alone. Moreover, there is no written record that even a cursory consideration of the merits of Spector 360 as a response to the security audit ever took place amongst senior managers.
    The big remaining question, one that Laidlaw is widely expected to avoid, is this: Who, ultimately, made these decisions and ordered the three initiatives?
    Saanich’s Information Technology division is part of the Department of Corporate Services, which is headed by Ciarniello. Ciarniello’s boss at the time was CAO Paul Murray. Although FOIs have shown that Ciarniello gave approval to Kvemshagen to purchase, install and enable the Spector 360 software, Focus has found no explicit approval from Murray. The records obtained, however, make it clear that Murray was aware that employee monitoring software had been installed on Atwell’s computer. 
    Who approved the IT measures that were taken to isolate Atwell’s computer from departmental shared drives and the corporate intranet on November 17 and November 21?
    I put this question to Woodland, who worked in Saanich’s IT division for 16 years before moving in 2012 to manage the same division in Esquimalt. “I would think that Kvemshagen would only need Ciarniello’s approval,” Woodland said. “However, this would typically be a directive from the CAO. That doesn’t mean it has to happen that way.”
     
    COMMISSIONER DENHAM DETERMINED that Saanich broke BC privacy law when it collected the personal information of Atwell and others whose communications were intercepted by the program Ciarniello approved. Had it not been for Whistle Blower’s conviction that what Ciarniello approved was morally wrong, Denham would probably never have learned that Saanich managers were spying on an elected official. So it may come as a surprise to readers that the only person who has been punished as a result is Whistle Blower.
    Before I tell you about that, here’s what Section 30.3 (c),  the “Whistle-blower protection” provision of BC’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, says about an employer disciplining an employee who acts to stop the employer from violating the Act: “An employer, whether or not a public body, must not dismiss, suspend, demote, discipline, harass or otherwise disadvantage an employee of the employer, or deny that employee a benefit, because the employee, acting in good faith and on the basis of reasonable belief, has done or stated an intention of doing anything that is required to be done in order to avoid having any person contravene this Act.”
    In order to avoid having his employer continue to contravene the Act by intercepting the mayor’s and others’ private communications, Whistle Blower did what he felt was required to be done. After repeatedly expressing concern to his managers and asking if they had informed Atwell that he was being monitored, and repeatedly receiving “wishy-washy” responses, he sought the advice of his former manager, Jon Woodland.
    As a result, Whistle Blower was required to appear before a disciplinary hearing chaired by Saanich’s Manager of Human Resources Jo MacDonald. Also attending the hearing were Proc and Kvemshagen. At the hearing, Whistle Blower repeated, in front of Kvemshagen and Proc, his recollection of his conversation with Proc in which Proc told him Atwell was the target of the monitoring software. 
    MacDonald accused Whistle Blower of breaking two of the District’s “confidentiality” requirements. One of those, which appeared in Whistle Blower’s job description, stated that he “will not release or discuss non-routine municipal or departmental business without prior authorization.”
    From whom was Whistle Blower expected to get “prior authorization”? The entire management chain, from Ciarniello down to Kvemshagen and Proc, were all part of the decision to install monitoring software on Atwell’s computer. This put Whistle Blower in an extraordinarily untenable position.
    The other District policy MacDonald claimed Whistle Blower defied was, ironically, the District’s Code of Ethics, which states: “A municipal employee shall not use information which is not available to the general public for his or her own personal profit or advantage and shall not provide such information to others unless it is in the course of the employee’s duties to do so.”
    Who could believe that Whistle Blower sought Woodland’s advice for “personal profit or advantage”? And surely Section 30.3 (c) made it his legal duty to do whatever he could do to “avoid having any person contravene this Act.” A sworn affidavit describing what Whistle Blower told Woodland shows the only information divulged to Woodland was that Saanich’s IT division was ordered to install a key-logger on Mayor Atwell’s computer.
    Apparently unaware of the prohibition against discipline under FIPPA’s Whistle-blower protection, MacDonald suspended him without pay for two days. At that point, Whistle Blower was already looking for a better place to work. So he quit. He has since found that place. Still, that an individual who had a properly functioning moral compass would be disciplined for breaking a “code of ethics” is vexing.  
    Saanich managers are clearly struggling with the basic principles of democratic governance. As Focus went to press with this story, we received word that Laidlaw had called a meeting of the few remaining members of the District’s IT division—over half the staff have either quit or gone on sick leave since Saanich became Spyynich—where they were threatened with dismissal if they spoke with Focus; former employees, too, were threatened with legal action unless they divulged to Laidlaw “the particulars of any information you have provided to anyone not currently employed at the District of Saanich.” Focus to the District of Saanich: This is Canada, not North Korea.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    David Broadland
    May 2015
    Did Saanich staff conspire to spy on the newly-elected mayor?
     
    FOLLOWING RELEASE of BC Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham’s report on the controversial installation of employee monitoring software on 13 District of Saanich computers—including incoming Mayor Richard Atwell’s—many Saanich citizens expressed frustration that Denham had left fundamental questions unanswered: Did Saanich managers conspire to spy on Atwell? If so, who ordered the spying? And who, they asked, will now determine what actually happened?
    Saanich Council’s decision on April 13 to turn further investigation of the matter over to Interim CAO Andy Laidlaw did nothing to allay concern that these questions would be left unanswered. 
    Indeed, shortly after Denham’s report was released, Laidlaw wrote to her and stated, “My purpose in writing you is to express our concern about how you have chosen to characterize the District…We believe your conclusions are only accurate to the limited number of interviews conducted and the narrow scope of material reviewed…”
    With Laidlaw already assuming a defensive position on behalf of his staff, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that his report will step backwards from where Denham left the central questions. And since councillors directed Laidlaw—on the recommendation of staff—to deliver his report at a meeting closed to the public, there’s little hope it will shed any light. In camera meetings are like black holes—no light can escape the gravitational clutches of the legal advice that will inevitably be attached to Laidlaw’s report.
    Although many people—including most Saanich councillors—want to leave this story behind, that’s unlikely to happen. The evidence Denham’s investigation gathered included interviews with all the key players in the software scandal. Their explanations for why they did what they did are, at times, a challenge to accept at face value. Denham’s report concluded what happened in Saanich was illegal—District employees broke BC privacy law. But her report also provides several key facts that are consistent with Atwell’s allegation that he was spied on following his election last November. The word “spying” simply implies secretly gathering information. If Saanich managers intended to covertly gather information from Atwell, that would be a serious erosion of the democratic principle that control of government must be kept in the hands of the people—through their elected representatives—and not the other way around.
    Focus has obtained a document created by a person we will call “WB”—for “Whistle Blower.” WB’s document outlines a much different rationale for installing the Spector 360 software than put forward by Saanich staff in Denham’s report. It documents WB’s recollection of what he was told by Assistant IT Manager John Proc on November 20, 2014. At that time WB was an IT analyst with Saanich, but he has since left the District’s employ. The document was apparently created by WB for the purpose of getting a fellow Saanich IT worker’s signature certifying that he agreed to the facts presented in WB’s document.
    In the document, WB noted that he was “present during initial talks about monitoring software on 2014-11-20.” WB went on to write, “This is my recollection of conversation between myself, [name redacted] and John Proc…John Proc came to us ([name redacted] and I) with a directive that had just come down to IT in regards to installing monitoring software on the mayor’s computer. He said, ‘They are nervous about the new mayor. We’re installing it on the directors’ computers as well to make it [look like] it is not targeted’ and ‘this won’t last long’.”
    In his commentary in the document WB noted that he had “made his concerns known that he was nervous about being involved in this and to move forward he would need some assurance that everybody subject to having a keylogger installed on their computer would be given [the opportunity for providing] proper consent above our normal end user agreement.”
    WB emailed this document to Jon Woodland on January 17, 2015, asking him “What do you think?” Woodland is the manager of information technology for the Township of Esquimalt. Before that he worked in Saanich’s IT department for 16 years. WB initially contacted Woodland in early December, 2014, and told him about the installation of surveillance software on Mayor Atwell’s computer. Woodland, after checking with his own employer, then told Atwell on December 11. Atwell eventually connected with WB independently. WB was interviewed by Denham, but his “recollection” did not appear in her report. (John Proc was asked by Focus to comment on WB’s recollection but did not respond to repeated emails.)
    The takeaway from WB’s recollection is that Atwell was targeted for surveillance and that installation of software on other computers was simply a ruse. This is a serious allegation. Does Denham’s report provide any evidence that could disprove this allegation? It does not. In fact, a careful read of the “Chronology of Events” section of the report offers much information that supports WB’s allegation.
    In the text below, I provide a part of Denham’s “Chronology of Events” from her investigation report. The part I’ve included covers Saanich’s explanation of who led the initiative and why they did what they did, up to the point when the software was enabled. Denham’s chronology is included verbatim—with one general exception. Wherever she identified a person simply as a staff position such as “CAO,” or “Director of Corporate Services,” I have identified that person by name. I have also provided additional information and analysis, identified as “Focus commentary.”
    All of the Saanich staff named below were sent emails by Focus that included questions specific to the role they played. Each person was invited to provide any commentary they might want included in this article. Saanich’s Director of Legislative Services Carrie MacPhee, acting on behalf of the holidaying Laidlaw, informed me that no Saanich employees would respond to my questions. “Given Council’s direction,” she explained, “it would be premature for staff to be commenting at this time and it is anticipated that any future comment will be provided by Mr Laidlaw or Council once they have considered Mr Laidlaw’s report.”
     
    Commissioner Denham’s “Chronology of Events”
    Denham: Through interviews and review of documents the following chronology of events was established relating to the selection and implementation of Spector 360. This chronology is the basis for my analysis of the District’s compliance with FIPPA.
    May 2014: The District contracted with an IT security consultant to perform an information security audit (“IT Audit”) on the District’s IT infrastructure. The IT Audit revealed security shortcomings which District IT staff have been working to address since that time.
    The District stated in a January 14, 2015 media release, Spector 360 was purchased in response to one of the recommendations in the IT Audit. My staff reviewed the IT audit report and it did not make any specific recommendation that could be interpreted to recommend the purchase and installation of employee-monitoring software.
    The Audit’s author, also interviewed by my Office, confirmed that he did not make any such recommendation nor did he intend to make any recommendation that could be interpreted to recommend the installation of monitoring software such as Spector 360.
     
    Focus commentary: The “audit report” Denham mentions was executed by Wordsworth & Associates. The Commissioner is clearly skeptical of the District’s claim that its decision to purchase Spector 360 employee monitoring software was a credible response to the recommendations of Wordsworth & Associates.
    That claim is further eroded by Saanich’s response to an FOI filed by Focus for communications between Director of Corporate Services Laura Ciarniello and Manager of Information Technology Forrest Kvemshagen that took place as a result of the recommendations of the audit report. Ciarniello and Kvemshagen were at the centre of the decision to purchase and install the employee monitoring software.
    But according to Saanich’s FOI office, Ciarniello and Kvemshagen left no written record that they ever communicated about the recommendations of the Wordsworth & Associates audit report; there’s also no written record that they ever communicated on whether or not Spector 360 software would address any of those recommendations.
    The absence of such records over a six-month period suggests little or no effort had been made to address the security issues raised by Wordsworth & Associates. A senior IT analyst at Saanich, whose name Focus is withholding at his request, has confirmed that other than quick and easy patches to the District’s computer network security provisions, none of the major recommendations made by Wordsworth & Associates have been acted upon.
    The takeaway from this is that Saanich’s claim that the Spector 360 initiative was a response to the Wordsworth & Associates security audit recommendations is not supported by any written evidence.
     
    Denham’s chronology: Nov. 15, 2014: Richard Atwell was elected as the mayor for the District of Saanich.
    Nov. 17 to 19, 2014: The Director of Corporate Services Laura Ciarniello continued discussions with the Manager of IT Forrest Kvemshagen about the need to remedy outstanding IT security issues, and the need to accelerate resolution of some of those issues prior to the new mayor taking office.
    According to Ciarniello, the motivation for this renewed focus on IT security was the perception by District Directors that the new mayor was experienced in the area of IT and would be able to identify and criticize current weaknesses in the District’s IT security.
    After discussions with Kvemshagen, Ciarniello decided to procure and install software which would provide for comprehensive monitoring and recording of all actions undertaken by key District employees and officers.
     
    Focus commentary: Motive is key. Two days after Atwell was elected, senior managers initiated a program that we have since learned may have left the District’s computer network more vulnerable to attack than before, but would have allowed intensive monitoring of Atwell’s computer use. What might have motivated this reaction?
    Ciarniello admitted to Denham that District Directors were aware of Atwell’s IT experience. He also has a reputation for his ability to extract damning information from local government. Did Ciarniello and her boss, Paul Murray, worry that Atwell might hack into the District’s information vault?
     
    Denham’s chronology: Ciarniello opted to secure the workstations used by employees and officers of the District who are deemed to be “high-profile” and therefore likely targets for an IT security breach.
    Ciarniello stated that this strategy was adopted so that the District Directors would be able to reassure Mayor Atwell that steps had been taken to secure the District’s IT infrastructure.
     
    Focus commentary: Did this specific direction make sense as an effective strategy to address the District’s security issues? In Denham’s “Conclusions” she notes, “ecurity measures taken by the District may have resulted in a net reduction to IT security by concentrating the personal information of key employees and officers in one location, creating a ‘honeypot’ for external attackers.”
    If Ciarniello was intent on improving security, why would she have chosen a strategy that could actually weaken security? Was the choice of effective monitoring over effective security a mistake? Or was it deliberate? Whistle Blower’s understanding is that it was deliberate.
    Moreover, there is no record that any District director made any attempt to “reassure” Atwell that “steps had been taken to secure the District’s IT infrastructure.” He was kept in the dark until WB came forward. If not for that person’s initiative, Atwell might still be typing away, unaware he was being intensely monitored.
     
    Denham’s chronology: Assistant Manager of IT John Proc stated that deploying monitoring software only on the workstations of high-profile users was considered an interim measure until the District was able to install and configure a district-wide Intrusion Detection System (“IDS”) and Intrusion Prevention System (“IPS”) capability that would protect all District workstations. The Assistant Manager stated that this was considered an effective interim step because the district-wide IDS/IPS solution would be too expensive to rapidly implement.
     
    Focus commentary: The foundational logic of using an employee monitoring strategy is difficult to grasp. Does it follow that a course of action that would create a “honeypot” for external attackers would be deemed “effective” just because a real security system would be “too expensive to rapidly implement”? Alarm bells are ringing. Were the objectives of the initiative rapid implementation and low cost—or effective network security?
     
    Denham’s chronology: Nov. 19, 2014: Ciarniello met with Chief Administrative Officer Paul Murray, the Chief of the Fire Department, and the Directors of Legislative Services, Planning, Parks and Recreation, and Finance. The use of a security strategy focussed on high-profile users was discussed and the Directors were advised that protection and monitoring software would be installed on the following employee workstations: 1. the Mayor; 2. two shared workstations for Councillors; 3. the CAO; 4. the Directors of Corporate Services, Legislative Services, Planning, Parks and Recreation, Finance, and Engineering; 5. the Chief of the Fire Department; and 6. two executive administrative assistants.
     
    Focus commentary: Saanich’s FOI office confirmed that no minutes were made of the proceedings of that November 19 meeting. Prodded, Saanich did provide the only record made at the meeting by Ciarniello—a hand-written note to herself that contained 13 words: “Council machines”; “Paul + Directors”; “Assistants”; “Same protection from hacking put on all machines.” The absence of a substantial record of the meeting, other than that it took place, suggests an organization that has a keen grasp on the downside of accountability.
    Of the computers on which Spector 360 was installed, two were shared by several people—those used by councillors. All other computers were dedicated to a single individual, including the mayor’s. Of those individuals, records show that only Mayor Atwell was kept in the dark that monitoring software had been installed on his computer. Does this prove Atwell was being targeted? It comes close, but what about the councillors’ computers? They were to be monitored too.
    I asked Councillor Colin Plant if he had been informed that his computer use would be monitored. Plant said, “No,” and added, “I was never given a Network Access Terms and Conditions form to sign. When the story hit that the mayor had been given one and hadn’t signed it [Atwell maintains he wasn’t given this form] I asked the Director of Corporate Services why I had not been asked to sign a form. I was told that because the Council computers did not access the Saanich network we did not need to sign that form.”
    Let’s review that. The supposed purpose of installing the software was to protect the District’s network, but the councillors’ computers didn’t have access to that network. Why, then, were the councillors’ computers being monitored if they didn’t have access to the Saanich network? Was this part of a strategy to make it appear—in case of discovery—that Atwell had been treated the same as other elected officials?
    Noteworthy, too, is that Director of Legislative Services Carrie MacPhee was present at that November 19 meeting. MacPhee is the District’s officer responsible for compliance with FIPPA’s privacy provisions. In a recent letter to Laidlaw, Denham referred to MacPhee’s presence at that November 19 meeting and pointed out, “n the documents provided to my staff by the District we can find no mention of any concerns being raised regarding the privacy implications of this course of action, or of the need for the District to consider its obligations under FIPPA before proceeding.”
    Denham has said that the whole affair could have been avoided if Saanich had completed a “Privacy Impact Assessment.” Saanich has, in the past, performed PIAs before instituting other IT initiatives. As Denham’s report makes clear, had one been undertaken in this case, Saanich would have needed to consult with her office before proceeding to implementation. Why did MacPhee fail to recommend completing a PIA before proceeding with the intensive monitoring strategy? (MacPhee did not respond to repeated emails.)
    The answer to that, at least in part, seems straightforward: Completing a PIA would have slowed implementation and would have required that Atwell and the councillors be notified that their personal information was going to be collected—before it was collected. If the objective had really been to impress the mayor as Ciarniello told Denham, wouldn’t notifying Atwell and the councillors have been the chosen course of action? If spying was the objective, though, what would be the purpose in warning Atwell that he would be spied upon? For whatever reason, MacPhee didn’t insist on a PIA and Kvemshagen and Ciarniello were able to proceed quickly and quietly.
     
    Denham’s chronology: Immediately after this meeting Ciarniello directed Kvemshagen to research and procure protection and monitoring software. Kvemshagen then directed Proc to research and source software that could be installed on selected workstations and record all user activity.
    Proc understood that the goal was to have a forensic auditing capability. The software was also to have the ability to determine whether user accounts were accessing areas which they were not supposed to be accessing.
    Nov. 20, 2014: After researching available options through an online search, Proc reported back to Kvemshagen, recommending that the District acquire Spector 360.
    Kvemshagen reported to Ciarniello that available alternatives had been researched and that he recommended Spector 360. Kvemshagen stated that this program would provide IT staff with information to assist in identifying and mitigating a security breach.
     
    Focus commentary: The speed with which decisions were made is breathtaking. After taking no action for six months, it took only three days to decide on a new “security” system and one day to do an online search for which system to buy. An interesting feature of the desired security system was that “The software was also to have the ability to determine whether user accounts were accessing areas which they were not supposed to be accessing.” This would have been particularly useful if the motivating concern was that Atwell would use his IT technology skills to look for skeletons in the closet.
    Elsewhere in her report, though, Denham points out “that the software didn’t restrict access to sensitive IT resources and could only provide information about a security breach after it had taken place.” Unless, of course, the information being collected by the system was being monitored more or less continuously. Then it could be known right away when someone went looking for skeletons in the closet.
    This was the point in the timeline at which the conversation in Whistle Blower’s recollection took place.
     
    Denham’s chronology: Nov. 21, 2014: Spector 360 was purchased.
    Nov. 26 to Dec. 3, 2014: District IT staff installed Spector 360 on 13 employee workstations. Spector 360 was installed with the default configuration, which provided for: 1. automated screenshots at 30-second intervals; 2. monitoring and logging of chat and instant messaging; 3. a log of all websites visited; 4. recording all email activity (a copy of every email is retained for 30 days); 5. a log of file transfer data to track the movement of files on and off the District network; 6. a log of every keystroke made by a user; 7. a log of program activity, recording which windows were open and which window had the focus of the user; 8. a log of when the user logged in and logged out; 9. tracking of every file created, deleted, renamed, or copied; and 10. a record of network activity including applications that are connecting to the internet, when the connections are made, the internet address they connect to, ports being used, and the network bandwidth consumed by those connections.
    Data collected by the Spector 360 tool was encrypted and stored on a virtual server located at Saanich City Hall. The virtual server is dedicated to Spector 360. The server was configured to retain the data for a period of three months. There is no backup copy of this information.
    Kvemshagen and Proc both described the implementation and configuration of Spector 360 as providing a reactive approach to IT security, helping to enable rapid remediation after a security breach.
    District IT staff were directed by Proc to use a “silent” installation, which refers to installation without any user input on the target computer and were specifically directed to configure the software to enable keystroke logging and timed screenshots.
    With regard to the specific direction to enable screenshots, Proc stated that there were concerns from IT staff that frequent screenshots could result in a possible drain on IT resources. However, in consultation with the vendor for Spector 360 it was determined that the software could be configured to enable screenshots with negligible effect on IT resources.
    With regard to the specific direction to enable keystroke logging, District IT staff had expressed concerns about the privacy implications of keystroke logging. Proc directed staff to enable keystroke logging because it had been specifically authorized by District management.
     
    Focus commentary: The specific direction to enable keystroke logging and frequent screenshots is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the motivation of District staff was internal surveillance, not security from outside hackers. The IT analyst who was instructed by Proc to download the Spector 360 software on November 24 seemed to know that when she wrote Proc and asked, “So do I get filled in with what’s going on? [redacted]? Surveillance software. Sounds ominous.”
    Elsewhere in her report Denham noted that some aspects of the Spector 360 software were “at least minimally related to the securing of the District’s IT resources.” But a couple of points Denham made that I’ve already mentioned are worth reiterating. First, she noted that the software didn’t restrict access to sensitive IT resources and could only provide information about a security breach after it had taken place. Secondly, she observed that “Any tool that monitors network traffic or collects confidential information in one place is a primary target for attackers. This is particularly the case where, as with the District’s implementation of Spector 360, logs that monitor administrator access to the server are not enabled.”
    Saanich’s failure to enable the logging of administrative access to the information collected by the software led Denham to make a statement that she couldn’t rule on whether the information had been used. 
    Why would those logs not have been enabled? Although Denham noted this was “a common security failing,” it’s also consistent with a plan to quietly monitor Atwell’s activity. Was the decision to not enable access logs made so that no one could later see who accessed the data collected, or how often they had accessed it?
    The surreptitious nature of the initiative is alluded to by Denham in her reference to Proc’s instruction to an IT analyst to perform a “silent installation” of the software once it had been purchased and downloaded. But that doesn’t fully capture the extent of the District’s culture of secrecy. Months later, the District tried to cover up the secretive circumstances in which the software had been deployed. FOI requests that captured Proc’s emailed instruction for a “SILENT deploy” all came back with the word “SILENT” unjustifiably blacked out. A small, but telling misuse of FIPPA by the District.
    Denham’s “Chronology of Events” continued on right through to January 21, 2015, when the software was disabled by Saanich, but the key staff decisions and justifications for those decisions are captured in the text above. The striking differences between what Saanich staff said were their objectives and what Denham reported they achieved seem to all support Whistle Blower’s allegation that the software initiative’s objective was to monitor Atwell, and that other installations of the software were done to make it look like the mayor wasn’t being targeted.
     
    Sadness in Saanich
    At the April 13 meeting at which Saanich councillors voted to have Laidlaw give them an in camera report, Atwell asked his fellow councillors to support a motion that Saanich apologize to those people whose privacy rights had been violated. Citizens at the crowded meeting were given a chance to voice their opinions on Atwell’s motion.
    One of the speakers was Shellie MacDonald, who said, “I feel sad that someone in our staff for our community decided to spy on an elected official. I feel sad that that’s our culture. I feel sad that people on this council did not work as a team to find out what was going on, and talked freely about things like impeachment in the media afterwards.
    “We elected you folks to do your best and work together. You all promised to do your best for us, for the benefit of our community, and it’s just been sad for months.
    “In human culture, when people are sad, then the people who caused that need to apologize. And if there’s any doubt about who needs an apology…I do. And everyone who voted for you people because you promised to do your best and we haven’t seen it; and you promised to be responsible and we haven’t seen it. And you need to work as a team and you haven’t done that. We need that and we need an apology.”
    The majority of the councillors were unmoved. Apparently unwilling to fully accept Denham’s verdict that Saanich staff had broken privacy laws, and out of touch with the widely-held perception in their community that democratic representation had been eroded, if not insulted, most councillors weren’t feeling sad. They voted against any apology and then voted again to avoid even an expression of regret.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Katherine Palmer Gordon
    June 2015
    You’d think Fisheries and Oceans Canada would be on the side of wild salmon. Think again.
     
    MAY 6 2015 was a great day for wild salmon,” says Margot Venton, staff lawyer at Vancouver-based environmental legal group Ecojustice. It was a good day for Alexandra Morton, too: The biologist and the wild fish both scored a potentially significant victory in court. 
    Two years earlier, Ecojustice had commenced legal action on her behalf against Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) and Marine Harvest Canada Inc in the Federal Court of Appeal, contesting the fish farm company’s DFO-issued licence to transfer young salmon smolts from its hatchery into open-water pens in the ocean. 
    Fisheries regulations clearly state that such licences can only be issued if the fish do not have any diseases or carry any disease agents that may be harmful to the protection and conservation of fish. Instead of requiring that precondition to the issue of the licence to be met, however, DFO had simply put the condition right into Marine Harvest’s licence, giving the company complete discretion to decide for itself whether it was complying with it. 
    In other words, the fox was put squarely in charge of the henhouse. DFO retained no oversight authority in the licence to make sure in advance that no infected or diseased fish would be transferred. It even permitted Marine Harvest to transfer diseased fish if the company considered the transfer would be “low risk,” despite the fact that the regulations don’t contemplate that. 
    In early 2013, Morton learned to her dismay that young fish infected with piscine reovirus (PRV) had been transferred by Marine Harvest into one of their open net fish pens in Shelter Bay, near Port Hardy on northern Vancouver Island, regardless of the potential danger to wild fish. 
    “It was a completely reckless thing to do,” says Morton in frustration. PRV in farmed fish in the marine environment represents a significant potential risk to wild salmon, she explains, as the weight of scientific evidence indicates that PRV is the most likely cause of Heart and Skeletal Muscle Inflammation (HSMI), a severe and usually fatal disease in salmon. “That tells us putting farmed fish carrying this virus in close proximity to healthy wild fish is a bad idea,” she says. “And most farm fish do carry PRV. Making that transfer was playing biological roulette with the lives of wild salmon.” 
    Morton wasted no time in going to court to seek judicial review of Marine Harvest’s licence. She argued that not only was the transfer of the PRV-infected fish a direct contravention of the regulations, but so was the issue of the licence by DFO in the first place. DFO has a responsibility to protect wild salmon, she told the court. In handing off responsibility for deciding whether a transfer of smolts might be harmful to other fish to a company with little incentive to protect wild salmon, DFO was not meeting that obligation. 
    Justice Rennie, who presided over the case, agreed unequivocally with Morton. Rennie found that DFO had clearly abrogated its duty to protect wild salmon by handing off decision-making authority to Marine Harvest: “Unlimited discretion cannot be conferred on a sub-delegate,” he stated. “Supervisory control over the delegate should be retained.” 
    In giving Marine Harvest discretion to transfer infected fish that might pose a risk to wild salmon, in direct contravention of fisheries regulations, DFO had also, in the plainest of terms, broken the law: “It seems almost too clear to state that the Minister cannot create any licence conditions which would in fact sidestep or nullify the [regulations],” wrote Rennie scathingly. “However, that is the effect of…the licence,” he concluded. 
    In reaching his decision, to Morton’s delight, Justice Rennie took the unusual step of considering and commenting on the scientific evidence presented to him in court. Rennie concluded that Morton was right about that too: “Although there is a healthy debate between respected scientists on the issue, the evidence suggests that PRV is the viral precursor to HSMI and may be harmful to the protection and conservation of fish.” 
    In light of that evidence, Rennie also castigated DFO for its failure to apply the “precautionary principle” in issuing a licence giving Marine Harvest complete discretion to release potentially diseased fish into the water. The precautionary principle, which has been recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada, proposes that where a risk of serious or irreversible harm exists, a lack of scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing or failing to take reasonable and cost-effective conservation and management measures to address that risk. 
    In court, DFO argued it had taken all due precautions required. Rennie disagreed in no uncertain terms: “It is not, on the face of the evidence, open to DFO to assert that the licence conditions permitting a transfer of PRV infected smolts reflect the precautionary principle,” he stated. “The Minister is not, based on the evidence, erring on the side of caution.” 
    Rennie was equally sarcastic about DFO’s clumsy attempts to insist that science experts were on its side: “The Minister cannot make unsupported statements of science. Nor can the Minister point to expert affidavits, drafted many months after the decision and infer that those considerations must necessarily have been taken into account by the Minister in the exercise of his discretion.”
    It’s a dramatic decision, putting a clear onus on DFO to do more to protect wild fish. “Justice Rennie sent a clear message confirming that DFO has a duty to protect and conserve wild fish and the marine environment,” confirms Venton. But while it is a significant win on paper, what happens now remains an open question. 
    The judge gave DFO four months to come up with a different form of licence that does comply with the law. Any new licence will have to either leave total control in DFO’s hands to make the decision as to whether smolts are safe or not, or spell out very clear criteria for the company to follow to ensure that diseased or infected fish are not transferred into the ocean. DFO will remain responsible for ensuring the criteria are followed; the fox will no longer be allowed to control the henhouse. 
    “The problem for the fish farms, though,” says Morton, “is that as far as I know, they can’t get stock that isn’t carrying the virus. The farms won’t let us test their stock but I am constantly testing farmed fish sold in BC supermarkets, and almost all of them are infected with PRV.” That means it’s critical for fish farms to use infected stock: “They don’t have enough uninfected stock to be profitable.”
    This federal government has a proven track record of gutting important environmental laws, so it isn’t out of the question that DFO may therefore simply amend the regulations to allow fish farms to keep using infected stock. Alternatively—as it has to date—it may simply side with the industry’s public stance that there is no disease or virus in their stock, so amendment of the licences or regulations will make no difference to fish farm operations. Business may well carry on as usual. Either way, worries Morton, “DFO would be ignoring the science and putting the whole coast at risk.” 
    The problem is that there continues to be little opportunity to directly test industry claims that their fish are fine. The public has no access to disease reports, despite the 2010 Cohen Commission’s conclusion that transparency improves industry safety, to everyone’s benefit. Also still lurking in the background is Bill 37, a 2012 proposal by then Agriculture Minister Don McRae that would make it an offence for anyone to disclose the presence of a reportable animal disease—an offence punishable by two years in prison and/or a fine of $75,000. It was condemned as restricting free speech by citizens and journalists and withdrawn at the time but remains a potential threat that could well be brought forward again by a fish farm-friendly Liberal government. 
    The industry is also hedging its bets by claiming that a strain of PRV has been present in Pacific waters since before the introduction of fish farms. “Even if that’s true, which we don’t know yet for sure, it doesn’t matter,” responds Morton. “PRV is a very robust virus and concentrating it in feedlots allows it to reproduce very fast. Unlike in the wild, there are no predators to keep the diseased fish population under control. So these farms are amplifying the problem.” 
    Even though Ecojustice’s Venton thinks an appeal of the case is unlikely—the legal point on which it was decided is very clear and would be hard to challenge—Morton’s celebration of her victory is still tempered. “Come December, DFO will be renewing all the aquaculture licences,” she points out. “These are nine-year licences that are locked in. If that happens and DFO allows infected fish to keep being transferred into the ocean, that spells a death sentence for wild salmon on BC’s coast.”
    “The real victory,” she concludes bluntly, “will be when these guys pack their bags, get out of the water and go home.”
    Katherine Palmer Gordon is a lawyer as well as the author of six books, most recently We Are Born With the Songs Inside Us: Lives and Stories of First Nations People in British Columbia.

    David Broadland
    April 2015
    Victoria City Council has been fooled again on the Johnson Street Bridge project.
    ONE OF THE GREAT PARADOXES of the Johnson Street Bridge Replacement Project is that as the costs go up and the benefits to taxpayers go down, the company managing the project for the City of Victoria makes more and more money. In a February 27 letter to the City, MMM Group asked for an additional $1.8 million. Although a precise account of MMM’s likely total take on the project is not yet available, the latest ask appears to push it close to $17 million. Yet in 2010 MMM estimated their services would cost $7.8 million. Since then, while MMM’s bill climbed, the project has undergone a continuous paring away of most of the original objectives of the project.
    Since mid-2010 the following changes were made: rail service across the bridge was removed from the project scope; the width of the roadway was reduced and the safety zone for bicycles eliminated; the navigational channel was reduced to little more than its current width; the Wilkinson Eyre signature-bridge architectural quality was downgraded to Nanaimo Light Industrial; the material quality of the finished bridge was cheapened to the point where it will now be structurally reliant on 4000 gallons of epoxy grout; and, instead of being removed, the concrete piers of the existing bridge will be left in place, with unknown consequences. Will the narrow, unbraced concrete remnants fall into the navigational channel in an earthquake, and block it, hindering recovery?   
    Even with all those reductions in scope, the overall cost of the project rose from $63 million in early 2010 to $92.8 million in 2012, and has since risen to between $113 million and $120 million today, when claims for more money from the various companies involved in the project are included. The City is in a “mediation” process involving all the parties asking for more money and would, naturally, prefer that everyone believe these claims are all just a big put-on and will vaporize into a cloud of goodwill between the builder of the bridge (PCL) and MMM, who are, right now, at each others’ throats.
    The latest loss in scope, which I wrote about last month, is the level of seismic performance MMM recommended to the City in 2010. Back then, MMM’s Joost Meyboom told City councillors the new bridge should be built to a “Lifeline” standard that would enable immediate access to emergency vehicles following an “M8.5” earthquake (read “magnitude 8.5”). Meyboom said that, compared to an “M7.5” earthquake, “M8.5” protection would cost an additional “$8.5 million.” Councillors then voted to include the “M8.5” standard in the project, and that level of seismic performance was widely promoted by the City during the referendum campaign. In fact, days before the referendum, Meyboom emailed City staff pointing out that a new study about the Cascadia subduction zone west of Vancouver Island suggested the zone could produce an M9.0 earthquake and so the City might want to consider—for more money—an even higher level of seismic protection.
    But last month I revealed here that an August, 2012 document authored by MMM showed it had secretly lowered the standard. The document, titled Johnson Street Bridge Seismic Design Criteria, stated that the bridge could experience “possible permanent loss of service” following an M7.5 earthquake. Just as surprising was the fact the document included no commentary whatever on the level of damage expected following a M8.5 earthquake, or whether emergency vehicles would be able to use the bridge following such a quake—a feature City councillors thought they had bought back in 2010.
    My article prompted a 50-minute back-and-forth discussion between City councillors and the project’s latest director, Jonathan Huggett, at a March 12 meeting.
    Huggett referred to MMM’s seismic design criteria only once at the meeting and then only refered to it as “a memo,” even though the document is listed in the construction contract for the project as a “Regulatory Document” that “forms part of the contract.” He avoided the contents of the document and instead expressed doubt that there would be any incentive to lower the seismic design criteria. “What would be the motive to reduce the design standard?” Huggett asked councillors. “Hardesty and Hanover are not responsible for the construction costs of this bridge. They designed it. So if it turns out it costs more money, it’s not their problem. And PCL didn’t design the bridge and they have a contract to build the bridge and they’ll build whatever they’re told to build. So I’m at a loss to understand who might have suggested reducing the standard and what possible advantage they would have got out of it.”
    As Huggett must have known, however, the contents of MMM’s document wouldn’t have had any input from either PCL or Hardesty and Hanover—it was written solely by MMM in August, 2012. MMM’s position at that time is easily understood. The company was trying to save the project. Before MMM published its seismic design criteria, all three companies bidding for the construction contract had indicated they couldn’t build MMM’s design on the City’s $66 million budget. MMM’s challenge was to find some way to lower those bids.
    Lowering the seismic standard for the project would have had exactly the same effect—increasing the likelihood that the project could proceed—as, say, advising the City to accept a bid that had only a four-percent contingency.
    Let me parse this point a bit, because it provides guidance on MMM’s credibility on the seismic issue. Why did MMM recommend that the City accept a bid with a  four-percent contingency? Was it because MMM thought that was adequate? No. (I’ll provide proof for this later.) It was done to ensure that at least one bid was within the City’s affordability ceiling (The other two bids ended up $16 milllion and $26 million above the City’s budget). Otherwise the project likely would have been dead, and if it had died the City would not have signed—in November, 2012—a $9.2 million contract with MMM for additional project management and engineering. 
    Recommending that very small contingency, though, isn’t the only proof that MMM were changing primary aspects of the project during the procurement process in 2012 to keep the project alive. Throughout the fall of 2012 they negotiated an agreement with Transport Canada to remove a significant cost from the project’s scope: removal of the existing bridge’s concrete piers. Although the only claim made for leaving the piers in place has been that they would provide “marine habitat,” an email from an MMM employee obtained by FOI shows that the move to leave the piers in place was done to reduce the scope of the project while the RFP was still open, in the hope of “maintaining a commercially competitive environment.” The takeaway from that is that MMM were actively reducing the scope in the hope of obtaining a viable bid.
    So MMM had a financial motive to save the project by reducing the physical scope, they engaged in that across a broad front, and this appears to have included lowering the seismic performance.
    Huggett, at the meeting, unable to see a motive, noted that the bridge had been designed using the most stringent codes. He spent much time listing these codes, but had apparently not noticed that MMM’s Seismic Design Criteria prominently stated that the provisions of all those codes were secondary to the stipulations of its own document.
    Although most of the councillors at the March 12 meeting readily accepted Huggett’s claim that there was nothing to be concerned about, Councillor Ben Isitt asked that MMM’s Johnson Street Bridge Seismic Design Criteria be projected on an overhead screen above the Council chambers. (Unbelievably, this had to be retrieved from Focus’ website.) When confronted with the actual document that was at the core of the issue, Huggett had no explanation. In a quick reversal of their earlier warm reception of Huggett’s comforting assurances, councillors passed Isitt’s motion asking Huggett to report back to them on why what he was telling them was at odds with what MMM’s Seismic Design Criteria stated.
    In an unusual motion, Huggett was directed by council to meet with me and answer questions I might have. But in the days that followed, Huggett declined to meet and refused to answer questions posed to him by email, stating that he would hold a technical briefing for all media once he had responded to the council’s request for an explanation. As this edition went to press, that technical briefing hadn’t taken place.
    Instead, Huggett sought an explanation from MMM, and on March 20 MMM responded by letter to Huggett. That letter was then made public. In part, it stated, “With respect to the bridge performance after a 2500-year return period seismic event, we wish to clarify that the 2500-year event is not part of the seismic design criteria specified in the JSB 2012 [Project Definition Report] and was not analyzed in the design.”
    That requires a little interpretation. A “2500-year return period seismic event” in Victoria has a rough equivalence to an earthquake with a magnitude of M8.5. That equivalence, in regards to this project, has been stated in writing by both MMM and Stantec.
    So MMM’s letter admitted that it could provide no documented evidence that engineers had considered what would happen to the bridge in an M8.5 earthquake. (It should be noted that in its critical review of MMM’s design, Kiewit Infrastructure’s engineers, who prepared a bid for the construction contract, rejected the mechanical concept, and instead proposed a design in which the moveable part of the bridge was firmly attached to the supporting bascule pier. Those engineers noted, “This method reduces seismic, mechanical and maintenance related technical challenges in the design.”)
    Huggett apparently had some doubt about MMM’s admission of having conducted no analyses for a 2500-year earthquake, because he then wrote back to MMM asking for an explanation. MMM responded with a second letter which boiled down to this: because the bridge has been classified, on paper, as a “critical bridge,” there is an “inference” that “it is expected to be available for use by emergency and security/defense vehicles immediately following a 1:2500 year earthquake.” MMM’s letter continued on to state: “…it is not necessary (or required) to actually analyze the structure for a 1:2500 year earthquake for us to be able to confidently state that the JSB will be available for use by emergency and security/defense vehicles following a large earthquake.”
    Armed with these two letters, Huggett then made a presentation to councillors on the issue at a meeting on March 26. I’ll come back to that meeting later, but first I’d like to pose some questions that naturally arise from this situation, questions for which councillors serious about representing the public interest would want answers.
    First off, MMM is saying that they didn’t do an M8.5 analysis because they have written on paper that  the bridge is a “Critical Bridge” and that, by definition, there is an “inference” that a “Critical Bridge” would provide the performance City council requested in 2010. But wouldn’t councillors ask themselves, “Since MMM cannot provide an actual set of seismic analyses for an M8.5 earthquake, why should I believe their assertion? Has the information they have provided me in the past been credible?”
    On the issue of credibility, MMM’s record is concerning. Let’s go back to the contingency issue as an example. When councillors were asked to approve a $66 million construction contract with PCL in December 2012, they were told: “The City’s Consultant, MMM Group, has reviewed the contract documents prepared by [the City’s legal  advisor] and the City, including optimizations, contingency, project risks and the value engineering opportunities, and in their professional opinion recommend that the City proceed with the project and enter into a contract with PCL Westcoast.”
    That “recommended” contingency amounted to four percent. Then, in March 2014, after PCL had submitted a change order requesting an additional $9.5 million ($7.9 million net) as a result of delays and costs they attributed to MMM, MMM’s Joost Meyboom, in a letter to the City, stated that the design PCL submitted to the City in its bid was “at best 10 percent complete.” Meyboom then observed,“We note that it is not unreasonable for scope to vary by 30 percent from a 10 percent design and that this is normally accounted for with appropriate contingency.” So MMM first recommended that the City accept  a four percent contingency, and then later, when it suited their purpose, suggested that it should have been 30 percent.
    Should councillors now trust MMM? Is its recent claim that the bridge will allow emergency vehicle access after an M8.5 earthquake to be trusted? Or should councillors trust what MMM said when it claimed there could be “permanent loss of service” following an M7.5 earthquake, which is the claim that’s included in the construction contract? 
    The second question is this: We live in a region of high seismic hazard. What is the normal requirement for conducting seismic assessments, when designing significant public infrastructure for our region? For guidance on this, councillors might want to look to the Port Mann Bridge Project in Vancouver. It has been built in an area that is considered to have a significantly lower level of seismic hazard than Victoria. Yet for that project the Province required four separate seismic analyses for the 2500-year return period earthquake—including a “damage assessment analysis.” Although both the Port Mann Bridge and the Johnson Street Bridge have the same “Lifeline Structure” designations, the Port Mann Project did four analyses, the Johnson Street Bridge Project did none. Councillors, no doubt, would want to know: Why weren’t these four analyses done for Victoria’s bridge?
    The third question is whether a set of 2500-year analyses would have represented significant additional cost or not. The only significant variables in such analyses are all related to the structure of the bridge itself. Those variables were all determined for the 1000-year analysis. Since these variables wouldn’t change between a 1000-year analysis and a 2500-year analysis—its the same bridge in each analysis—why would there be any significant cost to running both sets of analyses? Wouldn’t councillors want to know how much it would cost an engineer to enter a different value for spectral acceleration and then push the “analyze” button on the computer program? Since pushing the 2500-year button seems to be the normal practice in southwestern BC—witness the Port Mann Bridge Project—did the seismic engineers, in fact, push the button and later say they didn’t because they didn’t like what they found?
    By the way, the physical difference between a 1000-year event, for which MMM claims an analysis has been done, and a 2500-year event—which MMM admits it didn’t do—is very large. Last month I reported here that the energy released in the 2500-year event was 10 times that of a 1000-year event. That was incorrect. According to the US Geological Survey, an M8.5 earthquake releases 31.6 times as much energy as a M7.5 earthquake. Given that MMM’s Seismic Design Criteria state that the bridge could sustain “possible permanent loss of service” in an M7.5 earthquake, what would happen to it in an earthquake that was 31 times more energetic? Surely, councillors would want to know that, wouldn’t they?
    Although Huggett’s initial response to the issue was to tell councillors they didn’t need to be concerned because everything was being done according to code, at least having MMM’s letters in hand demonstrated that he did follow council’s direction to find an explanation for the discrepancy between his position that there was nothing to be concerned about and the actual stipulations of MMM’s Seismic Design Criteria. If I were a councillor, though, I would want to know if Huggett, as a paid representative of the chickens, went to anyone other than the fox for an opinion on whether the fox was having the chickens for lunch.
    So how did councillors do?
    On March 26, Huggett gave City council an update on the project’s escalating costs. I have written about these cost escalations in detail in previous stories and there’s nothing new on that front except that costs have gone up by an additional $4.8 million. Following Huggett’s presentation, Councillor Isitt noted that the project was “a disaster” and said, “I do have grave concern’s about MMM’s performance.” When Isitt asked Huggett whether MMM could be replaced as project manager, Huggett told councillors that the one MMM employee working on the job site was putting in long hours and said MMM “was doing a good job.” Councillors’ refusal to approve the full $4.8 million requested by Huggett amounted to closing the chicken coop door after the hens had already been eaten by the fox. Although councillors still refuse to acknowledge that the current cost of the project to City taxpayers is in the range of $113 million to $120 million, councillors being out of touch with reality on this project isn’t news.
    The escalation update was followed by a long in camera meeting on the City’s legal difficulties with MMM and PCL. Claims that the City is in mediation with the various parties have been made for several months now, and that has been useful to City staff in preventing councillors from asking, in public, substantive questions about the project’s woes. Ostensibly this muzzle has been put on councillors to protect the City’s position in any legal action that might occur if mediation fails. At the same time, though, it prevents public discussion of who at City Hall is responsible for decisions made that seem to have left the City without any case for pursuing legal action against their project manager, including holding MMM to account for its verbal recommendation to the City on the four percent contingency in the contract with PCL. The record of several closed meetings on this project, obtained by FOI, shows that advice given to councillors by City staff at these hidden-from-the-public-eye meetings has usually led to decisions that later turned out to be based on misinformation. 
    Following the March 26 closed meeting, Huggett presented his report on the seismic issue to councillors. It was short and to the point. Huggett blamed the issue on those raising it, calling media reports on the issue “irresponsible.” He invoked MMM’s two letters as proof there was nothing for councillors to be concerned about and expressed dismay over the amount of time he’d spent not answering questions. Only Councillor Isitt asked anything close to a substantial question, but he, evidently, didn’t comprehend that Huggett hadn’t provided him a substantial answer.
    What seemed evident to this observer is that the fox has now infiltrated the chicken house, and the chickens can’t tell the difference between a rooster and a fox.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Briony Penn
    March 2015
    The federal government seems intent on propping up corporate fish farming despite the high costs.
     
    ON THE AFTERNOON OF FEBRUARY 10, a whale watching boat docked at Port McNeill, packed to the limit with 48 Malcolm Islanders from the small village of Sointula. 
    They weren’t whale watchers; well, not the usual type. These were shrimp fishermen, fishing lodge operators, First Nations people, residents, members of local organizations, and biologist Alex Morton, who were coming to an open house of Grieg Seafood, the company that is proposing an expansion of two salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago that would set a precedent of replacing shellfish tenures with finfish. The reason the islanders were delivered by a whale watching boat was because their ferry doesn’t run passengers on Tuesday afternoons; the meeting was scheduled at the time when it only carries dangerous cargo. 
    Some might argue that the residents were the dangerous cargo. According to Gord Curry of Living Oceans Society, the islanders, determined to have their voices heard, found their own transportation to Port McNeill and delivered their message loud and clear: No more open net salmon farms; closed containment systems are the answer. Locals pointed to the Namgis First Nation down the road that has set up the first land-based closed containment systems in the region and has been delivering farmed salmon for nearly a year with no risk to wild salmon. The open house was intended to be a little tête-à-tête with industry reps, but it quickly changed into a town hall meeting where people voiced their concerns collectively.
    The same calls of alarm that were raised at that meeting are echoing around the coast as the industry is poised to expand open-net salmon farming four-fold. With the recommendations of the $26 million  Cohen Commission (tasked to find answers to the disappearing Fraser sockeye in 2012) still mostly unimplemented, the increasing volatility of viruses and other pathogens, the declining efficacy of sea lice drugs, the slashing of federal regulations to allow indiscriminate use of new chemicals to fight the lice and the continued muzzling of government scientists, there are reasons to be concerned. On the lower mainland, Stolo First Nation activist Eddy Gardner is gathering steam encouraging groups to boycott Costco, Walmart and other stores with his online Farmed Salmon Boycott kit with easy instructions for anyone to get started to stage your own boycott. The Change.org petition to ban salmon feedlots is at 106,000 and rising.
    Back in Port McNeill, Curry pointed out the obvious to officials, given that one of the strongest recommendations of the Cohen Commission was to put a moratorium on salmon farm expansion in the Discovery Islands—south of the Broughton—to assist the Fraser sockeye migration: “It isn’t a stretch of logic that what’s good for Fraser salmon is good for Knight Inlet salmon.” And that is what’s at stake with the Grieg applications: a safe migratory route for the Knight Inlet salmon, as well as the loss of productive shrimping grounds. Fishermen of Sointula who rely on that productivity stand to lose their livelihoods with no compensation. 
    Meanwhile, over on the west side of Vancouver Island, Clayoquot Sound fish farm watchers, like Clayoquot Action’s Bonny Glambeck, continue to tussle with the planned expansion of two new Atlantic salmon feedlots in Millar Channel and Herbert Inlet. There are currently 21 fish farm sites in the Clayoquot Sound UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, and Cermaq, a big player in the Sound, wants to add another farm to Millar Channel, which already suffered major die-offs from infectious hematopoietic necrosis virus (IHNV) in 2012, and from an algal bloom in 2014. 
    Herbert Inlet is at the gateway to the Moyeha River, one of the last intact watersheds on Vancouver Island, through which spawning fish enter and smolts leave. According to Glambeck, the issue is simple: “Salmon populations are crashing in these otherwise pristine watersheds—coincidentally where all the fish farms are. So why wouldn’t we be implementing everything we learned from the Cohen Commission before we start expanding this industry? The recommendation of Cohen was not to have farms on migration routes and Herbert Inlet, for one, is on a migration route.” One of Cohen’s recommendations was for DFO to review and change the siting criteria and analyze all current licenses to meet the new criteria. According to the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), it is now poised to release its new licencing regulations and will be open for business. DFO will now be evaluating new marine finfish aquaculture applications (other than the Discovery Islands area and the north coast where the provincial 2008 moratorium is in place) “through the lens of environmental sustainability and engagement with First Nations and other stakeholders.”
    The industry stakeholders’ lens is consistent with how salmon farms have been viewed since they first appeared on the coast in the ’70s, when they were “mom and pop” operations and the rationale of feeding the world with farmed salmon seemed viable. As Grieg writes in a letter this February to the Campbell River Mirror “wild stocks cannot keep up with growing global demand… and farming fish, like we farm other food, is the only way to meet this urgent need.” 
    There is, however, much more than altruism behind the drive for expansion. The industry’s European farms have been hit by escalating problems due to disease, sea lice and storm-caused escapees. Last autumn, the Norwegian government sold out its shares in Cermaq (a dominant player in BC’s industry) to Mitsubishi, ostensibly to privatize the state asset. But that move might also have reflected a desire by Norway’s government to shed a troubled and troublesome industry—getting out before the storm, so to speak. On January 10 this year, a hurricane force wind hit the Norwegian coast and caused the escape of over 60,000 farmed Pacific coast steelhead. Norwegians were outraged, not only because the fish were found to be suffering from what industry calls PD (or pancreas disease that has plagued Norwegian and Irish farms), but they, like British Columbians, fear these introduced species are putting their native wild salmon stocks at further risk. There are less than a half million wild Atlantic salmon left in Norway. Meanwhile, farmed Atlantic salmon are threatening Pacific species. The irony, however, might be lost only on Canada’s federal minister of Fisheries and Oceans Gail Shea.
    In an effort to expand the social licence for fish farming, DFO set up the Aquaculture Management Advisory Committee (AMAC). Craig Orr, long-time advocate with Watershed Watch, was invited to serve on the committee but quickly dropped out, claiming it was “a sham.” He stated, “We came to an early meeting but disagreed with their terms of reference. In particular, that there wasn’t a broad enough science input into AMAC. DFO said that their own scientists would be the only representation. The Cohen Commission specifically identified that DFO’s science mandate was too narrow and conflicted in terms of them wanting to expand the industry and that is exactly what they are doing now. We cannot sit at a committee that ignores the Cohen recommendations and dismisses our research with academics. In the meantime they are expanding farms and they don’t have their advisory committee together.” 
    DFO refutes these allegations. It claims the federal government respects the 2008 moratorium in the north and that it takes a “science-based approach to the management of aquaculture in British Columbia, including consideration of both DFO and non-DFO research.” DFO also states it has “not dismissed any of the Cohen recommendations, particularly those related to the consideration of peer-reviewed research.” It evaluates the research through the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat, which it claims includes “non-DFO science.” 
    One can understand the frustration of people like Orr and Glambeck. Glambeck also turned down a seat on the advisory committee which hosts seven industry reps, two industry associations, two local government reps, seven First Nations and, ostensibly, three environmental non-governmental organizations’ (ENGOs) representatives. No ENGOs have accepted the invitation. Why? The advisory committee is tightly controlled, as are the questions that come before it for review.
    One of the independent scientists whose questions and research have been rejected by the Science Advisory Secretariat is Morton, who has published extensively in highly-regarded peer-reviewed journals like Science and posts monthly updates on her work with viruses and sea lice. She has been continuously testing for one of the most dangerous viruses, Infectious Salmon Anemia, a strain of which hit Chilean fish farms with devastating results in 2007-2009. The Cohen Commission revealed evidence of strains of ISA in farms from Clayoquot Sound (reported by a DFO lab). As Morton attests, “We have learned from the Cohen Commission that several government labs have produced positive tests for the ISA virus in BC. We haven’t heard from those labs again. They are silent but we have the exhibits [from the Cohen Commission]. Last fall the Canada Food Inspection Agency made a big announcement that they couldn’t find ISA virus on the coast. I’ve asked them to detail their methods but they won’t provide them. I continue to do work with the eastern lab [that tested positive results for ISA in supermarket-bought fish] and I hope to publish the results. The thing about viruses is that they won’t remain silent. The ISA virus pattern is that it gets to a new place, kicks around harmlessly for 8 to 10 years and then—boom—there is a mutation that takes off. Chile couldn’t believe how quickly their ISA virus variant HPR7b spread.”
    In order to bring attention to the severity of the problem, Morton launched a new lawsuit with Ecojustice last December based on a 2007 confidential memo in which the provincial vet in charge of farmed salmon told the minister that BC is at low risk from ISA because BC doesn’t import live salmon eggs. He wrote that memo at the time when his colleagues in DFO were filing reports on the importation of 28 million live Atlantic salmon eggs into BC. As Morton recounts, “I asked the College of Veterinarians to investigate twice and they refused, so I went to Ecojustice. The reason I have done it is because vets and biologists are under so much pressure from these companies. That is why you need colleges that will come down strongly if members do things like this—then vets can simply say: ‘I have to adhere to these standards.’ It isn’t punishment then, it is back-up. This is Canada—it’s a tough place to be a scientist right now.”
    Morton’s early research focused on the sea lice issue. As she notes “The salmon fish farm industry is in a drug war with sea lice that they are losing around the world. There is a myth in BC that says sea lice are not a problem here, but it is not true. They are currently using drugs to suppress them. The sea lice are still there but at lower levels, because for the moment the drugs are working and that has saved wild stocks of salmon, specifically the mainland Area 12 pinks where I live. But a life on drugs never works. Companies are certainly looking for new drugs. There’s a guy going to jail for supplying illegal drugs to the fish farm industry on the east coast that killed a vast number of lobster. The prawn and shrimp fishermen are not happy because the drug SLICE does impact anything trying to make a shell [like lice].” Currently the government is giving the industry permits to use hydrogen peroxide baths for farmed salmon, but these are released directly into wild salmon habitat.
    Grieg Seafood’s 2013 annual report outlines its efforts, both chemical and biological, to control lice. The report indicates a rising trend in the use of oral medicine and hydrogen peroxide. There is also an increased use of antibiotics for infections like mouth rot in BC. Reading these documents as a shareholder, one wouldn’t have confidence that chemical solutions are either long term or profitable. Such concerns haven’t stopped the federal government from gutting Section 36 of the federal Fisheries Act, which stopped companies from “putting deleterious chemicals into the ocean frequented by fish.”
    In response to diseased fish invading Norwegian sportfishing waters and apparently intractable sea lice drug problems, the Norwegian parliament is tightening up their regulations related to water. Unfortunately, that sends Norwegian companies to the wild frontier of BC where licenses and rents are virtually free, regulatory oversight is minimal, government compensation is provided in case of die-offs from disease, and the Canadian government is accommodating industry expansion.
     
    ACCORDING TO GLAMBECK, the federal government seems to be more than happy to subsidize this beleaguered industry. “We are treating the fish farm industry like Alberta is treating the companies in the tar sands, by giving the resources away, or polluting our oceans for nothing.” 
    In Norway, salmon farm licenses cost $1.69 million dollars each. With 1400 of them, substantial revenues are generated. Compare that to DFO’s proposed flat fee of $100 per license which will come into effect in 2015 for 115 federally-listed aquaculture licences. 
    BC takes $2.50 per tonne of produced farmed fish. With 787,000 tonnes produced annually, that means about $2 million is coming in—not much considering it costs $6.3 million to run the BC Aquaculture Regulatory Program, $54 million to run the Sustainable Aquaculture Program, and $6.5 million is spent on regulatory research. The Province, under the new federal/provincial harmonized Aquaculture Application, now just handles the renting of Crown seabed under a farm, a role which the Stolo’s Eddy Gardner refers to as the “slum landlord of the coast.” He has a point: Industry rents farms at a little over $700 per hectare per year. With a total of 4575 hectares, that brings BC another $3.3 million in annual rent. 
    The BC Salmon Farmer’s Association argues that their industry “provides 6000 direct and indirect jobs while contributing over $800 million annually to the provincial economy.” It is hard to know where those numbers come from. In their recent Fisheries and Aquaculture Sector report, BC Statistics counts only 1700 people as employees of either finfish or shellfish farms (at least 20 percent are in shellfish). The report notes both forms of aquaculture contribute a total of $61.9 million to the GDP (from $496 million in direct sales of farmed fish and shellfish). 
    According to the government report, the multiplier for the aquaculture sector is 7.83 jobs per $1 million of direct sales of salmon sold, which at $496 million means there are, at most, an additional 3883 jobs. But the numbers seem high. The award-winning environmental reporter D.C. Reid, in his Fish Farm News and Science, claims he could only find 795 actual employees of all fish farms in BC. 
    Regardless of which set of data one uses, aquaculture doesn’t come close to the economic benefits of even sport fishing. This sector contributes $325.7 million to GDP, $936 million in gross revenue with 8400 direct jobs, according to BC Stats. The government uses an 11.36 multiplier effect in the sports fishing sector, for 10,633 additional jobs. This is an industry that is detrimentally impacted by fish farming. If you add the data for the commercial capture fishery, which still generates $102 million to the GDP and 1200 direct jobs, plus the subsistence fishery for First Nations, aquaculture—which threatens all three—is blown out of the water in terms of jobs generation. 
    One figure the BC Salmon Farmer’s Association doesn’t like to talk about is the number of taxpayer dollars its members get from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for their diseased fish. Last year, after weathering an injunction against releasing compensation figures, D.C. Reid reported payments of $2.64 million to Cermaq Mainstream for 959,498 diseased salmon at its IHN-infected Clayoquot Sound farms and $201,000 for infected equipment and supplies. Grieg Seafood’s open-net operation in Sechelt received $1.61 million for 312,032 IHN-diseased fish and $152,000 for infected equipment and supplies. Adding BC figures to those in Atlantic Canada, Reid said, “Here’s the bottom line: In little more than a year, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency paid fish farms almost $50 million taxpayer dollars for diseased slaughtered fish across Canada.”
    There are other administrative and legal costs associated with fish farms. When you do the back-of-the-envelope addition of basic costs to Treasury—running departments, holding inquiries, and compensation for diseased fish, the costs easily outstrip the benefits.
    Compare this to sport fishing and the economic justification for endangering wild salmon is even more baffling. Why is the federal government catering to three foreign companies who employ few people, bring relatively few dollars into the economy, and cause high administrative and legal costs—let alone the incalculable ecological damage of devastated wild stocks that create far more jobs and economic benefit? 
    If Canadians are not benefitting, who is? The shareholders of Marine Harvest, who are mostly European and American banks. 
    So is there any good news on the horizon? When Marine Harvest failed to honour their agreement with ENGOs to do a full-fledged land-based closed-containment pilot project, the Namgis First Nation set up their own and the first harvest took place last April. (See Focus, July, 2014). Other First Nations are exploring Namgis’ lead. 
    Meanwhile, Watershed Watch is giving advice to other First Nations who are working with their lawyers to get area-based management plans that scientifically evaluate impacts of extending aquaculture in their territory. As Orr says: “The juggling of balls goes on.” 
    Back in Sointula, Morton is “heartened to see more and more scientists ending up speaking out. It wasn’t our original role, but if you are the person who is on the ground with your hands on these fish and see the effects that the viruses and sea lice have on them, if you don’t stand up then who will?”
    Briony Penn PhD has been reporting on the environment since her first article in The Islander in 1975 on Garry oak meadows and has been a columnist in Victoria publications since 1993. She has just completed a biography of Ian McTaggart Cowan.

    Leslie Campbell
    March 2015
    Living with wildlife can be a community-building project. Oak Bay chose a different path.
     
    READING OAK BAY’S REQUEST FRO PROPOSAL for the contractor that will kill up to 25 deer, one gets a glimpse of the difficulties envisioned. Besides the required covered truck, steel-toed boots, smart phone, and data plan, the RFP warns applicants in bold: “Experience dealing with angry, aggressive or hostile people an asset.”
    The successful contractor, who can earn a maximum of $600/deer or $15,000, must set and bait each trap in the evenings through March 15. Before first daylight, any trapped animals must be “dispatched” with two contractors present. “The first contractor will collapse the trap while the second contractor puts their full body weight on top of the deer and collapsed trap, then holds the head still while the first contractor dispatches the deer quickly and humanely using the bolt gun.” If that doesn’t work, reshooting is advised; if another misfire occurs, the contractor is advised to reload “or utilize exsanguination.” A black plastic bag must be used to cover the head of the dead animal, which must be “under cover and in the back of the truck, away from public view and be bled within 15 minutes of euthanasia [sic], to reduce meat spoilage.”
    There are more instructions about getting to the butcher on time—within no more than an hour from killing—and transporting the entrails to the Hartland Landfill.
    There’s no guarantee the contractor will be able to kill 25 animals. The deer in Oak Bay are not going hungry so may decline the opportunity of dinner in a cage. And whatever number is killed, a portion of them will likely be males. As wildlife biologist Rick Page explained to me, males do not stay put—they have been tracked moving from Esquimalt to Queenswood in Saanich. Which means that any males trapped and “dispatched” may well have nothing to do with Oak Bay’s munched tulips. Killing them will do little to reduce Oak Bay’s resident deer population. 
    No one knows what Oak Bay’s deer population really is, but, Page says, the deer population is not out of ecological balance yet. “If the population is 200 [likely the upper limit] and they remove 25, no one will notice any difference at all.” Some plants will still be eaten; some deer will still be injured or killed by car accidents. And those aggressive deer Mayor Jensen talks about? Chances are they’ll elude the traps.
    And chances are the community will still be in an uproar, especially in the lead up to next year’s cull. The mayor says “population reduction is a multiyear undertaking.”
    Former mayoral candidate Cairine Green says she’s never experienced such a divisive issue through her nine years on North Saanich and Oak Bay councils. The pages of letters in the Oak Bay News also attest to the divided community. The BC SPCA has condemned the cull, expressing concerns about the humaneness of the method and noting that, “Using lethal control measures in Oak Bay is not a sustainable or evidence-based option for managing deer in particular in this area.”
     
    THAT OAK BAY WOULD RISK community cohesion along with its reputation as a paradisiacal seaside village full of amiable people and charming gardens for the sake of killing 25 deer is a surprising turn of events. 
    While the mayor trumpets “public safety” as the main motivation for killing deer, damaged gardens constitute the main type of complaint that has driven the whole process, at least in the urban areas of the CRD.
    Such complaints, along with those about farm damage in rural areas, led the CRD to develop a Regional Deer Management Strategy, a strategy that allows a lethal cull, but also suggests many other pre-cull remedies. Jensen and his council could have chosen to simply put more energy into public education and traffic and fencing projects to address complaints. Biologist Page notes, “There’s always going to be some deer here. Residents’ only option if they want to have a pristine garden is a fence and people need to get used to that.” Biologist Gayle Hesse, author of the Province’s foundational ungulate management treatise, concurs: “Fencing is the only viable option when damage cannot be tolerated.”
    Traffic accidents are also brought up to justify the cull, sometimes citing public safety, other times pointing out what a cruel fate it is for deer. Oak Bay had 13 deer-involved collisions in 2013 (ICBC), out of a total fatality count of 40. In 2014, according to Oak Bay public works department spreadsheets, total deaths had slipped to 37, with 17 of them being vehicle related. Three were fence-related, one was killed in battle, one by an arrow.
    A full 15 fall into the “unknown” category. It might be worth pointing out that deer—like human beings—die of old age and disease. We may not like finding a sick or dead animal in our back yard, but it hardly seems a valid reason to go out and kill more of them.
    As for the traffic issues, speed-reduction campaigns can work wonders. Over a four-year period, Ottawa reduced its 344 deer-related collisions by over one-third (to 214) through an award-winning “Speeding Costs You Deerly” campaign.
    In answer to Oak Bay’s assurances that it “strengthened its signage” to reduce deer traffic fatalities, Oak Bay residents Kerri Ward and Kristy Kilpatrick recently wrote to Minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources Steve Thomson: “Oak Bay has made no attempts at speed reduction or installing appropriate deer signage in the municipality. A total of six small and ineffective signs were installed in two locations where car/deer collisions are most frequent…The speed in these areas continues to be 50 kmh.” 
    Ward and Kilpatrick’s letter also alludes to a more fundamental omission: “No survey of Oak Bay residents for their opinions or values on appropriate urban deer management has ever been conducted.” They point out that the Province itself recommended that “a survey of public opinion must be conducted.” 
    But the most glaring failure of Oak Bay’s approach, say many, is the ignorance around the deer themselves. Sara Dubois, chief scientific officer of the BC SPCA, says, “It’s the biggest missing piece. We need to know where the deer are, why they’re there, what they are being fed, and why incidents happen.” She notes there’s a university with keen researchers and students right in Oak Bay’s back yard. The amount of money the CRD has spent without really learning anything about the deer astounds her. (The CRD’s budget is $220,000 not including staff time. Oak Bay’s budget is $25,000.)
    As Mayor Jensen himself admitted in October, “the CRD pilot program that Oak Bay has embarked on is truly uncharted waters.”
     
    THE PROCESS THAT LED TO the CRD’s Regional Deer Management Strategy began in 2011 and has been controversial ever since. 
    In a June 2013 letter, Craig Daniells, chief executive officer of the BC SPCA, wrote of the CRD’s formation of a Citizens Advisory Committee, “having been a part of the process, the BC SPCA found the experience to be fraught with difficulties…including a lack of representation, individual bias, lack of attendance, as well as several committee resignations.”
    The two members who resigned from the Citizens Advisory Group (CAG)—museum consultant and archivist Kerri Ward and lawyer Robin Bassett—cited an “irretrievably flawed” process that relied on anecdotal evidence rather than science. A letter elaborating some of their complaints also noted lack of independence: “It was established early in the process that the CAG members were not allowed to either meet with or speak to the expert panel except through the offices of the CRD.” In an email, Ward told me, “there was never any discussions of science, research etc; every meeting was micro-managed by the facilitator.”
    The limitations of the process were reflected in the report which is prefaced by a laughably defensive preamble. Describing the issue as “emotional, economic and politically-charged” with “a lack of scientific evidence,” CAG Chair Jocelyn Skrlac and Vice Chair Robert Moody wrote: “It is, however, important to note that ‘anecdotal evidence’ and ‘convincing evidence’ are not antonyms, nor does ‘anecdotal’ mean ‘unscientific.’ Sometimes anecdotal evidence is not only all that is available (as in this case), but it can often be enough evidence to support a decision.”
    The anecdotes relied upon, along with provincial government-supplied information, led them to recommend mitigation measures as well as “population reduction measures” that included “capture and euthanize.” (Orwellian as it sounds, executing a healthy wild animal is called “euthanasia” in BC and CRD reports.)
    The Advisory Group rejected immunocontraception, an option which could potentially satisfy the goal of reducing the deer population without a lethal cull—and therefore avoid the intense community discord that culls everywhere seem to inspire. The CAG seemed to feel there were too many unknowns about it. But the same could be said of a lethal cull—or indeed the local deer population. 
    Right here in Victoria there are at least a couple of biologists who know a lot about one immunocontraceptive. Ten years ago, Sidney-based biologist Mark Fraker purchased the patent rights for Spayvac for use on wildlife. Spayvac was developed at Dalhousie University in the early 1990s to treat seals. It uses pig protein to create antibodies that prevent sperm from binding to the female’s eggs. Similar contraceptive vaccines are used on wild horses in the US and zoo animals. The antibodies, being a natural product of all animals, has no environmental impact say proponents. 
    In BC, case-by-case approval is needed to use Spayvac, says Page who is an advocate for Spayvac. “It’s only manufactured on demand and we haven’t asked the company to make it, but we have no reason to believe they wouldn’t.” He estimates a six-month to one-year lead time to obtain it, due mostly to regulatory hurdles.
    Page says, “For as little as $10,000 we can get started, but we prefer to have $25,000 for a pilot project.” The Province’s main deer management document (British Columbia Urban Ungulate Conflict Analysis, by Gayle Hesse, 2010) noted: “The cost of the immunocontraceptive vaccine itself is relatively inexpensive…The main cost of a fertility control project is associated with the cost of capture and vaccine administration.” Provincial Wildlife Veterinarian Helen Schwantje has estimated the drug cost to keep does infertile for six years at $200 each. Add in the trapping or tranquilizing costs and it comes in about the same price as the trap and kill method.
    Page says Schwantje was supportive of earlier experiments. She needs to apply to Health Canada for what’s called an “emergency drug release—a single piece of paper that goes to Ottawa which would rubber stamp it…A proper study is a more elaborate process.” 
    On James Island off Sidney, Spayvac was used on the overly abundant fallow deer. Page says it was 100 percent effective—meaning the injected deer were still sporting the antibodies that prevent pregnancy after five years. No fawns were born over a six-year period. An experiment in Maple Ridge with 10 does proved similarly successful. Mark Fraker described it this way to the Victoria News in 2013: “Five years down the road after they were treated, there was only one born instead of 60…a 50-times reduction in fawns being born.”
    Schwantje and the CRD have suggested for an immunocontraceptive program to be effective, 70-90 percent of the does in the area must be given the drug—a challenging task. But Page says the math doesn’t bear that out—and the same logic should apply to a cull. It all depends on what your goal is, from eradication to stabilization. Any less fertility in does, which around Victoria tend to produce annual twins, should be helpful. (Killing bucks has little impact.) Page also notes the infertile does still occupy their space in that setting, so other deer will stay away. Sara Dubois of the SPCA agrees, saying contraception “won’t create a sink population,” unlike a cull which results in other deer moving into the territory.
    Page, who has worked for the Province in the past, thinks it prefers lethal culling because it’s considered “an operational method, not an experimental method...It’s supposed to just work.” But he adds, “Nothing—when you muck with the environment—just works.” And culling, he says, usually doesn’t work out very well at all. Dubois agrees, citing culls in Kimberley and Cranbrook.
    One reason for the ineffectiveness of culls is that deer are smart and won’t enter the traps after being exposed to them for a season or two. In the US—where urban deer herds are three to ten times higher than local populations—the next step after the trap and bolt gun method fails, says Page “is usually sharp shooters, professional hunters that go through the city at night.” Understandably, that comes with its own problems and opposition.
    A big advantage of a contraception program, in Page’s mind, is that the deer are tagged—allowing for valuable information gathering which aids in future deer management.
    Dubois is in favour of anything that produces good quality information. An adjunct professor at UBC’s Animal Welfare Program, her PhD work focused on public values and attitudes towards wildlife and the effectiveness of wildlife policy (she also managed the SPCA’s Wild ARC in Metchosin for four years). She says good information allows you to track down the cause of the problem and target individual trouble-makers—whether they are black bears, wolves, coyotes or deer—or, though she doesn’t say it, humans. 
    Dubois mentions Winnipeg researcher Erin McCance’s fascinating research using GPS collars to map deer movements. She found virtually 100 percent of the human-deer conflict and many deer-vehicle collisions, could be traced to artificial feeding of deer. Educating the people feeding deer helped solve some of the problem; $500 fines help deter others. Oak Bay’s fines have recently been increased to $300 for a first offense, and $500 for subsequent ones. No fines have been issued though Dubois tells me she knows some Oak Bay residents regularly buy deer feed from local merchants.
     
    AS OAK BAY CARRIES OUT ITS LETHAL CULL, a small New York State community is carrying out an innovative immunocontraception program with the aim of reducing its deer population by 35-45 percent over 5 years.
    Only two square miles in area, up to 120 deer live in Hastings-on-Hudson, along with its 7900 human inhabitants. Traffic accidents involving deer were increasing, as was damage to gardens and the native fauna in parks.
    Mayor Peter Swiderski first assumed a “net and bolt” cull was the answer to community deer woes. But after listening to residents, he realized, “With captive bolt, there would have been a polarizing battle every year that wouldn’t have done the village any good.” At a public meeting on the topic he explained: “A cull in a community as dense as ours and as culturally averse to a cull as ours is just not an option. So we put that to bed and are now going to engage in an immunocontraception project.”
    To assist in “the first birth-control study of a free-roaming deer population in an open, suburban area in the US,” the community engaged Allen Rutberg, director of the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University. Rutberg doesn’t like culls for two reasons: “netting and bolting free range deer is at best difficult to carry out humanely and at worst is brutally cruel…It also stirs up personal animosity among members of the community.”
    In the program’s second year now, the community is being aided by volunteer wildlife vets and the Humane Society to dart female deer with a tranquilizer shot from a dart gun from about 30 feet, then inject them with a contraceptive, and tag them. A host of community volunteers helps in other ways. They aim to get close to 80 percent of the does. 
    It has not been without its challenges. Last year, its inaugural, the project was hindered by deep snow and only eight does were immunized. (Legally, the drugs can only be given there during February and March.)
    Mayor Swiderski estimated it would cost about $10,000 in the first year, and about half that in subsequent years. He sees it as a good investment. He told All Animals magazine last spring, “If it works, we will have done a great thing, not only for us but for a thousand other communities. If it doesn’t work, we won’t have killed any creature, we won’t have split the community, and we’ll also know it doesn’t work in this kind of community.”
    Rutberg, in a thoughtful essay about how killing programs cause strife for communities, contrasted them to his recent experience in Hastings-on-Hudson: “Nearly three dozen people showed up at an organizational meeting last month to volunteer to help track deer, secure darting sites, stock feeders with bait, and measure deer impacts. The community set up a website for reporting deer observations, and a local high school student wrote a program to display the observations on a map….[The project] opens a door to learning and transforming attitudes about nature, and building appreciation for wildlife.”
    I don’t relate Hasting’s story to suggest deer contraception is the answer for CRD communities. Hasting’s situation may be different in key ways from Oak Bay’s. We have so little solid information here we don’t even know if we have a problem, except for the strife. What we do know, says Sara Dubois, is that “A real opportunity for leadership was lost by Oak Bay.”
    Editor Leslie Campbell sees the deer question as a fascinating way to explore our relationship to other animals. She has a high fence around her vegetable garden.

    David Broadland
    March 2015
    Engineers recommended a high level of seismic protection for the new bridge and then, as their cost estimates went south, they secretly cut that level of protection to the bone.
     
    A DOCUMENT OBTAINED THROUGH AN FOI shows that the new Johnson Street Bridge could experience “possible permanent loss of service” following a magnitude 7.5 earthquake that engineers have estimated has a “30-35 percent chance of occurring within the next 50 years.”
    This is a much lower level of seismic protection than was recommended to the City of Victoria in 2010. Engineering company MMM Group strongly advised the City to pay an extra $10 million for a level of seismic performance that would protect the bridge in a magnitude 8.5 earthquake. Councillors voted to fund the recommended level of seismic protection and the issue helped win a referendum that approved the bridge.
    By definition, a magnitude 8.5 (M8.5) earthquake releases 10 times as much energy as a magnitude 7.5 (M7.5) earthquake. 
    Surprisingly, the document that specifies  the lower seismic standard was written by MMM Group. Their Johnson Street Bridge Seismic Design Criteria is a set of standards to which the bridge has been seismically engineered. It delineates the allowable impacts different strengths of earthquakes can have on the bridge (far right column of table below).
    MMM’s seismic design criteria were created in August 2012, just as three construction companies were preparing bids for a contract to build the bridge. The design criteria were not included in the publicly-released Project Definition Report, a move that kept the lower level of seismic protection hidden from councillors and public view.
    Discarding the M8.5 seismic standard recommended by MMM  would have cut costs and helped to keep the project within the council-approved budget. But that decision appears to represent a conflict of interest for MMM. If the City hadn’t received bids within its self-imposed limit of $66.1 million, the project likely would have failed. If that had happened MMM would have lost a $9.1 million contract for additional project management and engineering during the construction phase. So MMM had a financial incentive for dropping the seismic standard it had recommended.
    The role City engineers played in the lowering of the seismic standard is unknown. The City’s Director of Engineering and Public Works Dwayne Kalynchuk did not answer questions posed to him about the lower seismic standard. Kalynchuk confirmed the bridge is being built to MMM’s 2012 seismic design criteria.
     

     
    When City councillors were asked to approve a construction contract for the project in December 2012, City engineers didn’t warn councillors about concerns raised by two of the three bidders, Kiewit Infrastructure and WCC Construction. Kiewit had advised the City the design “may represent a fundamentally high risk and expensive design approach.” Instead, City staff recommended going ahead with the project on the basis that the third company, PCL Constructors Westcoast, had provided the only bid within the City’s budget for the project.
    Asked if City councillors had been advised about the lower level of seismic protection, Councillor Geoff Young said, “I would think I would have remembered if we had been told the seismic standards were being reduced.”
    Young added, “I would certainly say that if indeed the new bridge has been designed to a much lower level of seismic protection than engineers recommended, lower than council requested, and lower than was promised in the referendum campaign, then this is a serious departure from what was expected. If so, I think we should request information from Hardesty & Hanover [the company that engineered the bascule leaf and main piers] about the design standard achieved, if only for the purposes of emergency planning and for planning of any Bay Street Bridge renovations.”
    As Focus was going to press with this edition, City councillors met privately with Karen Martin, a partner in the law firm Dentons Canada, LLP. Martin’s resumé notes that she “practices in the areas of construction/infrastructure” and has “experience as counsel on large construction trials.”
    Presumably the City is hiring Martin to represent it during coming litigation involving MMM, Hardesty & Hanover, and/or PCL. Since March, 2014 the City and the companies have been in dispute over delays caused by unresolved design issues, cost increases, and steel fabrication problems in China. Attempts to obtain records about these issues through FOI have been unsuccessful.
    Whether or not the significantly diminished seismic protection of the bridge is at issue in the preliminary legal maneuvering is unknown, but the low level of protection implied by MMM’s Seismic Design Criteria raises questions about whether the new bridge is being constructed to adequate seismic standards. In 2009 City councillors voted to replace the current bridge after being told it would collapse in an M6.5 earthquake. In June, 2010 councillors met twice with engineers to consider what level of seismic protection the project should include. 
    A presentation to City of Victoria councillors by MMM engineer Joost Meyboom on June 14, 2010 stated there was a “35 percent probability of a major quake (M7.0 to M7.9) in the next 50 years.” Meyboom recommended that a new bridge “be designed for an M8.5 earthquake.” He told councillors, “If you’re going to spend $100 million on a facility, the premium to pay for a very high seismic performance is a relatively low price for insurance.” 
    Much the same information was in a written report to councillors at a meeting on June 17, 2010. Signed by Kalynchuk, the report again warned councillors there was a “30-35 percent probability of experiencing a major earthquake (in the range of M7.0 to M7.9) in the next 50 years as per Natural Resources Canada.” The report added, “Staff agree with [MMM’s] recommendations that the seismic design should be at the highest level under the current bridge design code, which is for an M8.5 seismic event…”
    At the June 17 meeting Meyboom told councillors: “The premium you pay to go from 7.5 to 8.5 is not a big number when you’re talking about spending in excess of $80 million dollars on a project.” That premium, Meyboom advised councillors, was $8.5 million. “I wouldn’t call myself an expert in seismic,” Meyboom said, “but I’m very knowledgeable about it…The risk of earthquake in Victoria, just to put it in perspective, is the highest in Canada, and it’s comparable to the highest in North America.” 
    Following the staff presentation, councillors asked questions and expressed their understanding of the seismic issue. The City and others videotaped the meeting, so statements made by the engineers were recorded. The engineers’ recommendations—and the way in which that advice was understood by councillors—are unambiguous.
    Then-mayor Dean Fortin told the meeting that one factor that convinced him the M8.5 standard was essential was “getting the emergency vehicles back and forth—and not only on that day [of the earthquake]—but for the next year or two or three or however long it takes.” Fortin also emphasized the need for the M8.5 standard to insure protection of the taxpayers’ “investment.” “Do you spend $70 to $80 million on a bridge and not get the insurance and then it falls down?” he asked. “That’s a bit of a penny-wise and pound-foolish approach.” The mayor summed up: “That’s the lens I’m putting it in. Do we go to that 8.5?”
    A motion by then-Councillor John Luton to “approve the seismic design of both the rehabilitation or replacement options at the M 8.5 (‘lifeline’) level” was passed, with only Councillor Geoff Young opposed.
    The imposition of this standard made the option of rehabilitating the existing bridge to the same seismic standard more expensive than replacement—according to MMM—making it easy for councillors to then decide to put the borrowing of money for a replacement bridge, rather than rehabilitation, to a referendum.
    In that referendum, the City informed voters that it was essential to build the bridge to withstand an M8.5 earthquake. For example, brochures sent to every household stated: “The safety of the travelling public is top of mind. The bridge will be upgraded to a lifeline structure able to withstand an 8.5 magnitude earthquake—the highest standard of earthquake protection—to ensure the safety of users, disaster response capability, protection of investment and post-disaster recovery.” Those same brochures stated: “Victoria is located in the most active seismic zone in Canada and recent studies have indicated that there is a 30-35 percent probability of a major earthquake occurring in Victoria within the next 50 years.” The City’s referendum campaign material defined “major earthquake” as one having a “magnitude of 7.0 to 7.9.”
    A majority of electors voted “Yes” to borrow for a new bridge in the referendum held on November 20, 2010.
    That appears to be the last time anyone on City council or in the City’s engineering department showed interest in the issue of seismic protection or how much it was costing. By August 2012, at the time MMM produced its Seismic Design Criteria, that company’s concern seemed to have shifted from preventing the bridge from collapsing in an M8.5 earthquake to preventing the bridge project from collapsing under the weight of underestimated costs. 
    A key question is this: Has a significant risk to the public’s investment been imposed by lowering the level of seismic protection, as MMM warned against back in 2010? Since ten times as much energy is released in an M8.5 earthquake as compared with M7.5 (see graphic below), MMM appears to have lowered the level of protection to only 10 percent of what it had previously recommended.

     
    Moreover, the expected outcomes for the new bridge following even an M7.5 earthquake are much worse than the City expected following an M8.5 earthquake. Comparisons with the seismic design criteria used for Seattle’s South Park Bridge are telling (see table below).
    That structure, which has a section that opens for marine traffic like the Johnson Street Bridge, was completed in 2014. The design chosen was a tried-and-true double-leaf bascule; it spans about the same channel width as the Johnson Street Bridge.
    For the South Park Bridge, the expected impact following an M7.5 earthquake is “minor to moderate damage with some loss of operation.” The Johnson Street Bridge, on the other hand, can expect to experience “possible permanent loss of service” in an M7.5 earthquake. “Permanent” implies the bridge would not be repairable. The two sites have similar expected peak ground acceleration values, which are a measure of the expected ground motion for different magnitudes of seismic events. Given that, comparing seismic design criteria for each of the major elements of the two bridges gives the distinct impression that there is something fatally flawed about the Johnson Street Bridge’s design.
     

     
    One wee flaw: Although the bascule leaf is expected to weigh close to 2300 metric tonnes, it won’t be firmly attached to anything—no anchor bolts will keep it from jumping around in an earthquake. Instead, its two 15-metre-diameter rings will float on steel rollers. Moveable span locks at the west end of the leaf and at the east end of the counterweight—both of which will need to fit loosely so they can be easily operated several times a day when the bridge opens and closes—are all that will hold the bascule leaf in place during an earthquake. If they fail, the bridge could experience “permanent loss of service.” MMM’s seismic design instructions for these span locks in an M7.5 earthquake is: “failure may occur but this should not lead to global structural collapse.” The words “should not” are not particularly reassuring. Moreover, MMM’s seismic design criteria say nothing at all about what the span locks “should do” in an M8.5 earthquake.
    Curiosity about what the bridge engineers had discovered from seismic analyses carried out on the design prompted me, in November 2013, to file an FOI for any analyses done on the design. For the South Park Bridge, engineers did extensive analysis of what was needed before they chose the mechanical design. Their analyses were made public even before construction began. For the Johnson Street Bridge, nothing had been released. In response to my FOI the City advised me they had “no records.”
    Lisa Helps, a councillor at the time, offered to make a public request for these records, which she did at an April, 2014 council meeting. At that meeting Kalynchuk told Helps, “I believe that information has been requested under freedom of information and has been released.” Then-Mayor Fortin, who has always been quick to believe that his staff were doing a terrific job on the bridge project, prompted Kalynchuk: “And posted to our website...?” Kalynchuk provided a reassuring response: “Oooh, it’s binders of material, so I’m not sure that’s available. We’ll see if there’s a summary that can be posted.”
    I filed a second FOI, this time for the “binders of material.” I also asked Kalynchuk if he’d seen the actual seismic analyses. Kalynchuk replied, “…the staff from [Hardesty & Hanover] stated at their April presentation a full seismic review was conducted on the bridge. While I assumed some data was provided to the City, this was incorrect.”
    Meanwhile, my second FOI for seismic analyses worked its way through the system. Once again, the City’s response came back: “No records.” I then stepped into the long queue at the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner and many months passed. Then, finally, an investigator from the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner told me that MMM had informed the City the seismic analyses might contain “trade secrets,” so MMM wasn’t obligated to release them. The City admitted to the OIPC investigator that the company that performed the seismic analyses—Hardesty & Hanover—had provided only a verbal account of the results of the analyses to MMM, and MMM had provided only a verbal account to the City. No written communications discussing the seismic analyses by any of the parties had, apparently, taken place, because my FOI for those records also proved fruitless. If you’re getting the impression that MMM and Hardesty & Hanover didn’t want anyone to see those seismic analyses, then you’re reading this the way I am.
    A couple of months ago, though, I asked Mayor Helps to intervene. She agreed, and between her assistance and the threat of dragging the City to an inquiry at the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, the word got back to Hardesty & Hanover’s New York office to produce something. I am reporting to you that as Focus went to press, 3183 pages of scanned computer printouts were delivered by courier to our office. Most of the pages contain long strings of numbers—the raw data that would be used to do the seismic analyses like those released for Seattle’s South Park bridge. A rough guess is that there are 687,096 of them—most seven digits long, and as soon as I figure out what they are and enter each of them into some—at this moment—unknown computer program, I’ll report back to you on what I discover. Don’t hold your breath, though. 
    Back in 2010, when the City was deciding whether to rehabilitate the existing bridge or build a new one, MMM Group led the City to believe it could build a new “signature” bridge for $77 million. That included a $10 million premium for seismic protection of the City’s investment to an M8.5 standard. The City expected this level of protection to provide immediate access to emergency vehicles following a catastrophic earthquake. Although the cost of the bridge is now hovering around $110 million, the seismic standard has been significantly lowered. It would appear MMM never consulted with the City, officially, on lowering that standard. That will leave the City in the position of having no disaster response route across the harbour, a situation that Meyboom himself said back in 2010 the City needed to address. As Councillor Young has noted, this means the City may have to re-examine the extent to which the Bay Street Bridge is upgraded, which could mean expenditure of millions more than the City has budgeted. 
    Any doubts about the level of seismic protection included with the new bridge could be cleared up by the City insisting that MMM and Hardesty & Hanover release comprehensive seismic analyses like those released for the South Park Bridge—not just raw data—that can be independently verified by someone not associated with the project.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Katherine Palmer Gordon
    February 2015
    The extraordinary potential of Vancouver Island forests to sequester carbon is being lost due to government inaction.
     
    VICKY HUSBAND, one of BC's best-known environmentalists and a member of the Order of Canada and the Order of BC, states the situation in her typical forthright fashion: “Our forests are being completely plundered. It’s a cut-and-run approach that isn’t providing local jobs, isn’t going into value-added products, and certainly isn’t seeing money coming back into the pockets of the people of BC. Forest management in BC, as it is practised today, is none of those things.”
    It also isn’t helping preserve the capacity of BC’s unique coastal forests, world-famous for their huge and ancient spruce, fir and cedar, to absorb greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and sequester that carbon in those giant trees. 
    In the mid-1950s, as Husband points out, old-growth forests (more than 140 years old) once painted Vancouver Island and the south coast of BC a rich dark green. By 2014, as shown on the map below by David Leversee, green has been almost completely replaced by the purple of second-growth trees, some still in their infancy. Even second-growth forests are now at risk, as logging companies turn their eyes towards trees as young as 40 years old in the quest to meet their bottom lines. 
    Why does it matter? The Sierra Club calculates that remaining high-quality old-growth forests on Vancouver Island and the South Coast are still currently storing at least 225 million tonnes of carbon, equivalent to more than 13 times BC’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. But that clearly can’t be taken for granted. With a business-as-usual rate of logging, those remaining old trees—along with their remarkable ability to capture and store massive amounts of carbon—could vanish in our lifetimes. With the way things are going in Canada’s efforts to reach greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets, it’s a loss we can ill afford. 
     
    BY NO LATER THAN the end of March, Canada is required to submit a preliminary long-term greenhouse gas emissions reduction plan to the United Nations in anticipation of the annual UN Climate Change Conference taking place in Paris in December 2015. 
    Given the federal government’s track record to date (Canada perennially wins the Climate Action Network’s Fossil of the Year Award), it’s difficult to imagine the plan will commit to any significant transition away from fossil fuel exploitation. That’s despite the fact that by 2020, Canada’s oil and gas sector is expected to have increased its annual emissions from 2005 levels by 45 megatonnes.
    It’s also despite the fact that 2020 is the year by which Canada is supposed to reduce its annual emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels of 731 megatonnes of carbon dioxide, equivalent to a target of 611 megatonnes. We already know that we’re not going to get even close. Environment Canada estimates that Canada’s annual emissions will still be as high as 727 megatonnes by 2020. 
    In BC, emissions reduction targets are considerably more ambitious—and equally tenuous. The Province has committed to reduce its emissions to 33 percent below 2007 levels (64.3 megatonnes) by 2020, and 80 percent by 2050. In its 2014 Progress Report on Climate Action, the provincial Ministry of Environment (MoE) reported that it had achieved an interim target of 6 percent by 2012. The next interim target is a significantly higher 18 percent reduction in emissions by next year.
    Yet the provincial government continues to frantically promote massive high-emissions LNG development. It has also done little to stand in the way of oil infrastructure proposals (i.e. pipelines). BC’s carbon tax, though lauded by some, is viewed by many economists as too low to effectively discourage fossil fuel use. Falling oil prices aren’t helping. MoE openly admits: “More action will be needed to move from each target to the next. With current policies remaining as they are, BC greenhouse gas emissions may begin to increase.” 
    Meanwhile, the temperature keeps going up. Climate scientists recently announced that 2014 was the hottest year on record. They said the same thing about 2013. According to the US National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, 11 of the 12 warmest years on record have occurred since 2000. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned against the drastic consequences of a global average temperature increase of two degrees Celsius. At current rates of emissions, that may well occur before the end of this century, with consequences typically described in biblical terms: extreme storms, lengthy droughts, flooding, famine, and pestilence.
    The IPCC also states: “Forestry can make a very significant contribution…to mitigation. In the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks…will generate the largest sustained [contribution].” 
     
    GIVEN CANADA'S FAILURE TO REDUCE fossil fuel exploitation in the last decade, could forest carbon sequestration offer the solution to achieving our emissions reduction targets? Victoria-based Natural Resources Canada senior research scientist Dr Werner Kurz is unequivocal in his response: “Forests can definitely make a meaningful and significant contribution.” 
    Global forests currently remove up to one-third of the world’s carbon emissions from the atmosphere and sequester or store them in their wood, leaves and roots and in the surrounding soil. 
    They also emit carbon in a variety of ways, including through decay and wildfire. 
    Forests are carbon sinks if they absorb more carbon than they emit, or carbon sources if they emit more than they absorb.
    How forest resources are used also affects whether forests are carbon sinks or sources. When cut timber is stored in long-lived wood products, like construction lumber and high-end value-added products, it continues to store carbon for a long time. Emissions are also reduced if those products are used in construction to replace emissions-intensive products like steel and concrete. 
    Converting wastewood to biofuel may also reduce emissions if the biofuel replaces fossil fuel energy. Conversely, burning wood or using it for shorter-lived products like pulp and paper will result in the tree’s carbon being released to the atmosphere in the short term, thus adding to emissions totals. 
    With 310 million hectares of forests, 55 million of them in BC, Canada has the potential to contribute significantly to global carbon sequestration. Since 2002, however, Canada’s forests—including BC’s—have been a carbon source, not a sink. The reasons include wildfires and unprecedented insect outbreaks (both of which can result from warming temperatures). However, it's the rate at which our trees are being cut down that is the biggest contributor.
    Environment Canada openly acknowledges in Canada’s Emissions Trends 2014: “The human activity that has the most impact on Canada’s forest emissions/removals is harvesting.” In BC’s 2010 State of the Forests report, the provincial Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations includes a graph that clearly shows that the emissions from continued harvesting in BC far exceed those from fire and slashburning, and outweigh emissions sequestered in growing trees by a factor of two to one. In its 2013 publication Growing Carbon Sinks, Ministry of Forests also admits that increased harvest rates are a problem. 
    Despite both admissions, neither Canada nor BC has moved to limit harvesting towards reducing overall carbon emissions. 
     
    WERNER KURZ BEGAN WORKING WITH the University of Victoria’s Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions in mid-2014 to research the ways in which BC’s forests can contribute to climate change mitigation. Kurz says that BC’s coastal forests are key in the carbon sequestration equation: “On Vancouver Island and the coast, trees can grow for hundreds of years. They may be taking up carbon at fairly high rates for two or three centuries. The risk of loss due to natural forces is also probably lower than elsewhere in Canada, so [this is where] we likely have the greatest opportunity to grow long-lived forests storing a lot of carbon for a long time.”
    The provincial government appears to agree: “Some of [BC’s] forests,” boasts its Ministry of Forests, “contain the most carbon storage per hectare of any forest type in the world.” Ministry of Forests states that a 100-year-old coastal Sitka spruce will store about 1.84 tonnes of carbon (compared to an interior spruce the same age, at 0.47 tonnes). Coastal red cedar and Douglas fir aren’t far behind their spruce cousins, storing 1.47 and 1.32 tonnes of carbon respectively by the time they hit a century (an interior Douglas fir, by comparison, stores about one-third that amount). 
    An assumption oft-quoted by the forest industry is that the rate at which mature trees sequester carbon slows down and becomes negligible after about 100 years. It’s used as a justification to cut down relatively young trees: If they’ve become “decadent” and they’re not continuing to absorb carbon from the atmosphere, why leave them standing? 
    But in 2008, a scientific study in the US established that forests as old as eight centuries in fact do continue to accumulate carbon, and at a significant rate. In 2014 another group of US scientists built on that finding, concluding not only that old trees continue to accumulate carbon but that the larger a tree gets, the more carbon it accumulates each year. In just one West Coast forest plot that the scientists studied, trees larger than one metre in diameter comprised just 6 percent of the trees, but accounted for 33 percent of the growth. Lead scientist Stephen Sillett concluded: “The idea that older forests are decadent—it’s really just a myth.”
    Kurz believes there’s no time to waste in implenting forestry-related mitigation measures aimed at meaningful long-term reductions in provincial emissions. 
    “Ecosystems are slow-moving,” he explains. “At the rate trees grow in Canada, it could take several decades to see the full benefit of changes to forest management. We have to start making those changes now so they are having an impact by 2050, when we need our forests to be making the biggest contribution to emissions reductions.” 
    Unfortunately, there’s little sign of anything actually happening on the ground. When Kurz was asked about the timeline for implementation of his research results, he responded candidly: “I honestly don’t know.” 
    In the meantime, as usual, the economy continues to drive the federal government’s agenda. Canada’s Action on Climate Change “Reducing Greenhouse Gases” webpage contains no reference to forest management. Moreover, Natural Resources Canada suggests that reducing harvesting would have a negligible impact on emissions. That’s despite their own admission that “[It is clear] that where deforestation is reduced, the immediate outcome is reduced GHG emissions.” NRC also admits that the rate at which net deforestation is occurring is only expected to drop by a fraction from 2005 levels by 2020, “due to the expansion of the oil and gas industry.”
    NRC says that it would simply cost too much to engage in afforestation, or the creation of new forests where none exist now: “One problem identified is that many of the costs of afforestation must be paid for upfront, but the carbon sink benefits develop slowly over time. This means that afforestation is not always economically attractive to the private sector.” Heaven forbid companies profiting from resource extraction should have to pay for mitigation of the impacts of their activities.
    BC at least promotes forest carbon management as “an immediate imperative.” But as usual, talk is one thing, action another. In 2013’s Growing Carbon Sinks, the Ministry of Forests admits “no official strategy exists currently.” The Ministry has committed to developing a climate action plan by March 31 of this year. A request for an update on the status and likely contents of the plan received no response, however.
    In 2010, the provincial government did enact a net-zero-deforestation policy for BC. As Kurz points out, however, while that may mean there have been no further reductions in forest land area in BC, that doesn’t mean a net-zero impact on carbon emissions: “You’re typically cutting down mature trees but replacing them with small ones, so you likely still have a net reduction in carbon stocks.” 
    To the Province, age doesn’t seem to matter, despite the science pointing to the carbon storage efficiency of older trees. The Ministry of Forests states: “[The] minimum harvestable age is an estimate of the earliest age at which a stand has reached a harvestable condition—i.e., has met minimum merchantable criteria.” In other words, if there’s a market for it, you can chop it down. For Douglas fir, admits the Ministry of Forests, that can be as young as 40 years.
    Then there’s the issue of private forest land, comprising 20 percent of Vancouver Island’s forest cover. The provincial government doesn’t regulate harvesting on private land. The Ministry of Forests confirms that: “The determination of minimum harvest age on private-managed forest land is at the discretion of the landowner.” Commons BC geographic information system mapper Dave Leversee estimates that from 2012 to 2014, of the more than 40 million cubic metres of timber logged on Vancouver Island, one-third of it came from private lands. That’s a lot of unregulated wood.
    Here are some more depressing statistics. Unprocessed logs, more than 40 percent of which come from private forest land, comprise more than 30 percent of coastal forest exports. Forty-six percent of the Coast-Douglas Fir Zone—southeastern Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands—had been lost to non-forest use by 2010. Seventy-five mills have closed permanently in BC since 2000, 17 of them on Vancouver Island and another 33 on the rest of the coast. In the two decades to 2011, forest sector jobs had declined by 52 percent to just over 46,000. 
    In other words, strategies to support the forest economy on the BC coast—let alone promote carbon sequestration or the local wood product industry—seem to be thin on the ground. There is an upside to all this, according to the Ministry of Forests: mill closures and a reduction in industrial activity in recent years “have contributed to a decrease in emissions.” 
     
    THE SIERRA CLUB ADVOCATES that from a carbon storage perspective, logging of old-growth forests needs to stop today. Their 2013 report Carbon at Risk: BC’s Unprotected Old-growth Rainforest, concluded, “Avoided logging of old-growth rainforest is one of the most immediately effective actions to reduce emissions.” It argued that from a carbon perspective, “converting old-growth rainforest to second growth is like giving away a safe, hefty bank account with a decent interest rate in exchange for a start-up bank account with almost zero money and the promise of spectacular growth based on unreliable forecasts.”
    Vicky Husband believes that given how little old-growth remains, it is now just as necessary to provide similar protection to mature second-growth forests: “It’s absolutely critical,” she declares emphatically, “to preserve all these big trees.”
    Given how important a role BC’s coastal forest could play in terms of carbon emissions reductions, preserving mature trees—on both Crown and private land—would seem logical as a simple matter of precaution. 
    Katherine Palmer Gordon has written six books of non-fiction, including several BC Bestsellers and a Haig-Brown prize-winner. Her most recent book is We Are Born with the Songs Inside Us: Lives and Stories of First Nations People in British Columbia.

    David Broadland
    February 2015
    In their coverage of two stories, was the local daily concocting a case for an overturn of November’s election in Saanich?
    BILL CLEVERLEY, municipal affairs reporter for the Times Colonist, described his “favourite news story of 2014” in a December 20 piece called A gotcha moment on April Fool’s Day: “Working with Saanich Mayor Frank Leonard and Oak Bay Mayor Nils Jensen, we concocted a story about them approaching the Province to rename the University of Victoria to the University of Saanich Oak Bay—USOB—to better reflect where the campus is located.” 
    Two weeks later, Cleverley wrote a short story that, like his April Fool’s joke with Leonard and Jensen, was a thin concoction of inaccurate information and imagined public interest. This time, though, the laughs were on newly-elected Saanich Mayor Richard Atwell, whose private life Cleverley exposed to public ridicule, from coast to coast to coast.
    That public shaming began with Cleverley's January 5 piece titled, “Police called after Saanich mayor involved in altercation.” Cleverley’s complete description of the actual events went like this: “Saanich police were called to an altercation involving newly elected Mayor Richard Atwell, who is the chairman of the police board, in December. Sources say that police were called to the home of an Atwell campaign supporter about 11 pm on December 11. Atwell, who had been sworn in as mayor 10 days earlier, had apparently been in the home with the woman when her fiancé arrived. Sources say an altercation between Atwell and the man ensued and police were called.”
    Cleverley’s story then quoted Saanich police spokesperson Sgt Steve Eassie as saying, “I know that our relationship from the past is one that I would normally be able to share details with you, but I’m not able to share anything.”
    The way most people would understand that story is something like this: Atwell and a woman were in the woman’s home late at night; the woman’s partner came home, caught Atwell and the woman in a compromising situation, and a fight ensued between the two men. The fight might have attracted the attention of neighbours, or a passerby on the street, because police were called. Later, police were unexpectedly constrained about talking to Cleverley about the case by someone—possibly the new chair of the police board, Mayor Atwell.
    The story clearly had prurient interest, but it’s not news that politicians have private lives. What was it that made this incident important to report on and not just another opportunity for scandal-mongering?
    Before I consider that question, let’s look at how the TC dealt with another opportunity for exploiting a prurient-interest story involving a mayor of Saanich.
    In June of 2009, Frank Leonard’s divorce from Elaine Leonard was finalized. About the same time, Leonard and former Saanich Councillor Jackie Ngai conceived a child. Back then, rumours of an affair between Ngai and Leonard had circulated for some time. During that time, the Times Colonist didn’t publish any stories about the Leonards’ divorce, Frank Leonard’s marriage to Ngai, the birth of their child or how the two politicians had become a couple in the first place. There were no questions raised about whether Ngai’s and Leonard’s relationship had conflicted in any way with their duties as elected officials. That is to say, in Leonard’s case, what happened behind closed doors was off limits. That was fine with everybody. So why was the December 11 incident different?
    The difference is that the Atwell affair involved a 911 call, but whether that fact alone makes this a public matter depends entirely on the exact circumstances of that call.
    In the January 5 story, the only rationale provided for why the paper was exposing Atwell’s private life to public ridicule were comments from Integrity BC’s Dermod Travis. Cleverley quoted Travis who said Atwell’s role as chairman of the Saanich Police Board “puts him in a very difficult position and it also, frankly, puts the police in a very difficult position because, in the future, it could raise questions going both ways.” Travis’ comments in the story read more as advice to Atwell that he ought to contain the damage rather than a reasoned explanation of a significant public interest at stake. The paper offered no other explanation for why this was any different than the Leonard-Ngai affair.
    Noteworthy is that Travis articulated no case for a “conflict of interest.” He has since confirmed to me that he never used the term “conflict of interest” in talking with media about the Atwell incident.
    Two days after Cleverley’s story was published, Atwell provided information about the incident that differed substantially from the sparse details in Cleverley’s 80-word account of what had happened that winter night. Atwell said he was invited to the home and both the man and woman were present when he arrived. After deciding he wasn’t welcome at the home, Atwell started to leave but the man pushed him and then grabbed him from behind. Atwell recently told me he didn’t hit back, he left the house, and once on the street—out of concern for the safety of everyone in the house—he called 911. It was around 8 pm. (Not 11pm as the TC story had it.)
    There are two troubling problems with Cleverley’s January 5 story. The first problem is that Cleverley didn’t mention that Atwell placed the call to police. This is such a primary piece of the story that if Cleverley was aware Atwell had placed the call, he had a journalistic duty to include that information in the story. Atwell placing the call puts a completely different flavour on the story: he had nothing to hide. On the other hand, if Cleverley knew Atwell had placed the call but intentionally kept that out of the story, Cleverley would have been hiding from readers an important fact about what happened. Why would he do that?
    Giving Cleverley the benefit of the doubt, let’s assume the story was published without anyone at the paper knowing that Atwell himself had placed the call to police. We then collide with the second troubling problem: the paper’s sole rationale, offered after the fact, for publishing the story in the first place.
    The day after Atwell gave his first account of what happened, a TC editorial explained why the paper published Cleverley’s January 5 story. An unidentified editorial writer stated: “What happened in a private residence in Saanich on the evening of December 11 was none of the public’s business—until the police were called. At that point, it became a public matter, especially given that the chairman of the police board was involved in the incident.” The writer went on to restate that assertion in a slightly different way: “While we accept that what occurred was a minor incident, that isn’t the issue. Politicians’ private lives are by and large ignored by the media, but that changes once those private lives overlap with public duties. When the head of the police board calls his police department to resolve a dispute, there’s an obvious potential for conflict.”
    Let me distill that down a bit. The paper’s position now was that whatever went on in that house was no one’s business until Atwell called the police “to resolve a dispute.” Then it became the public’s business. I’ll address the validity of that argument in a moment, but first let me draw your attention to a serious inconsistency in the only rationale the paper has offered for publishing the story. As mentioned earlier, the paper’s January 5 story contained no mention that Atwell called police, yet it ran the story anyway. Only after Atwell revealed that he had called police did the paper make his placing of the call the reason why it had published the story two days before. 
    Let’s consider the paper’s claim that because Atwell called police to the house that evening “to resolve a dispute, an obvious potential for conflict” arose. To be clear, it’s Atwell’s position as chairman of the Saanich Police Board that makes his case special, in the paper’s opinion, but the paper didn’t describe any mechanism by which Atwell’s phone call to police could create a “conflict.” Atwell, however, says that he called 911 out of concern for the safety of those in the home, not “to resolve a dispute.”
    Two days later, TC Editor-in-Chief Dave Obee made another attempt at justifying why the paper had published the January 5 story. Obee wrote, “Atwell’s private life became public news because a line was crossed. When private matters might affect an elected person’s ability to do the job, the public has a right to known.” Again, the TC’s read on this is questionable. If a mayor gets the flu and has to remain at home for a few days, does the public need to know? Where does Obee draw the line on what private matters might affect performance?
    If Obee seemed unable to clearly articulate exactly how “a line was crossed,” we might presume he meant it had something to do with a potential “conflict of interest” because his editorial included this line: “The key point: Atwell is the chairman of the Saanich police board. All of us, elected to public office or not, have to avoid any perception of conflict of interest in our careers. And yes, these considerations apply to the media as well.”
    Obee then gave an example of a recent case of a conflict of interest involving a media personality in eastern Canada. Notably, he made no attempt to explain how a conflict of interest could arise from Atwell’s 911 call.
    Obee’s concern for a perception of conflict of interest is at odds with his record of disinterest in the subject, especially in regards to mayors and police. Just before the November election, the Saanich Police Association endorsed Leonard, who, if re-elected as mayor, would have again served as chairman of the Saanich Police Board. Obee and Cleverley apparently missed the implication. Election endorsements from police associations have the appearance of a quid pro quo arrangement. In exchange for the endorsement—and presumably members’ electoral support—the Saanich Police Association expects something back from Leonard. Yet Cleverley and Obee overlooked that story entirely. Not one word. The same thing happened in the 2011 election: Saanich Police Association endorses Leonard, TC looks the other way.
    I asked Dermod Travis about these endorsements; he called them “highly inappropriate.” I sent Travis the BC Police Board Handbook section on “Conflict of Interest” and asked him to comment on how Atwell’s 911 call and his position as Police Board chairman might constitute a conflict of interest. Travis declined to tackle that riddle. If Travis can’t make a connection, who can? Travis had been a frequent expert commenter in both the TC’s stories and the media frenzy that followed publication of Cleverley’s story.
    Recently, I asked Obee by email what his thinking on this story had been. He had the ultimate say in whether the story was published or not and his decision to run that January 5 story has led to tremendous damage to Atwell’s reputation. Does Obee stand by the accuracy of the story? Obee didn’t answer that question directly. Instead, he said, “Mayor Richard Atwell gave a different account after the initial story ran. We have no reason to disbelieve him.”
    I asked Obee why, if he knew Atwell had made the call to police on December 11, that fact had been left out of the first story. “We believed that information to be true, but could not confirm it,” Obee said.
    Does this ring true? Cleverley got other significant details wrong—the time and the circumstances. Next to nothing about Cleverley’s story was truly “confirmed,” but Obee okayed the story anyway.
    If he was so concerned about conflicts of interest, why hadn’t Obee covered the Police Association’s endorsement of Leonard just before the election? “We were covering all the municipalities, and we had to be selective,” Obee said. “The endorsement did not seem that significant at the time. We mentioned it for the first time in an editorial after the Atwell incident became major news.”
    Consider how different the coverage was by the Saanich News of both the political endorsement of Leonard by the Police Association and its handling of the 911 call story. In the case of the endorsement, reporter Daniel Palmer’s story included comment from the Police Association, Leonard and Atwell. His story was straightforward election reporting: accurate information fairly presented on the day it happened.
    In a January 9 editorial the Saanich News explained why it had refrained from joining the media-mobbing that followed Cleverley’s January 5 story: “Greater Victoria media outlets were falling over one another this week chasing a story published by the Times Colonist that quoted sources as saying Saanich Mayor Richard Atwell was involved in a December 11 incident where police were called to a private residence…The News chose not to publish Tuesday’s story of a story because we received no confirmation of facts, no first-person accounts of the incident, no evidence nor a police report to independently corroborate the TC’s story. No one agreed to go on record. In short, it didn’t meet our basic requirements for publication.”
    Cleverley’s use of unnamed “sources” for his story didn’t create a yellow flag for other media, though. Even though the information was inaccurate, most mainstream media ran with the TC’s story. That paper’s policy on using unnamed sources was explained to me by Obee: “We allow unnamed sources when careers or lives or family relationships might be put at risk if the identities are known. Even then, we need to know and trust the people involved, and we need confirmation from at least one other source.”
    As any Journalism 101 textbook would confirm, that’s a very low bar for using unnamed sources. At the least the TC should have sought corroboration from two other sources and included an explanation in their story about why the source had sought anonymity. Was the source a Saanich politician with an axe to grind? Was it a member of the Saanich Police Association ticked off at the public’s repudiation of its candidate? Moreover, the use of unnamed sources ought to be confined to significant stories involving an important public interest—which is entirely different from a story that would interest the public because of its sensational innuendo. Cleverley and Obee didn’t demonstrate this story’s public-interest legitimacy; not in the story itself or in the shifting, defensive editorials that came later.
    Cleverley’s use of unnamed “sources” figured prominently in another series of stories that also served to discredit Atwell: what’s come to be known as the Paul Murray affair.
     
    ON DECEMBER 11, THE TC PUBLISHED A STORY by Cleverley titled, “Mayor tries to oust Saanich’s top bureaucrat.” Cleverley stated: “In a move that could cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in severance, Saanich chief administrative officer Paul Murray is being pushed out the door by newly elected Mayor Richard Atwell, sources say. Atwell, elected on a platform of change, met Murray before being sworn in as mayor to tell the administrator he was done and to begin negotiating a ‘resignation package,’ the sources said.”
    Cleverley went on to report that Atwell had not returned calls for comment. He noted, “If Murray leaves, it won’t be cheap. According to Saanich’s latest Statement of Financial Information, Murray was paid $199,881 and was reimbursed for $9,193 in expenses in 2013. Murray’s contract calls for a minimum payout of 18 months’ salary or about $300,000 for early departure. Benefits could push the cost into the $400,000 to $500,000 range.”
    On December 17, a second story by Cleverley appeared: “Saanich mayor forces out CAO; council condemns action.” The story noted: “Actions taken by Saanich Mayor Richard Atwell to force chief administrator Paul Murray out the door have been condemned by his council and will cost the municipality $480,000.” Cleverley repeated a claim made in the earlier story: “Sources told the Times Colonist last week that prior to being sworn in, Atwell, accompanied by lawyer Troy DeSouza, who does not work for the municipality, met with Murray to tell him Atwell wanted him gone.” His story included paragraphs from a Saanich Council media release, including these: “‘The actions taken by Mayor Atwell left council with no viable options other than to proceed to end the employment relationship with Mr. Murray,’ the statement says. ‘Council is also concerned about the financial impact the mayor’s actions have had on the citizens of Saanich—a total payment of $476,611 [inclusive of accrued vacation of $55,448].’”
    Most people would read those stories something like this: Atwell, for no good reason, and without consulting Saanich councillors, tried to fire CAO Paul Murray. His council attempted to intervene but Atwell prevailed and councillors were forced to go along with Atwell’s firing of Murray. Atwell’s actions cost taxpayers $476,611. He alone is responsible for that cost. Atwell wouldn’t respond to calls for comment.
    Once again, the unnamed “sources” seem to have provided Cleverley with inaccurate, incomplete information.
    Atwell recently described to me the chain of events that led to Saanich Council’s decision to terminate Murray’s employment contract. I asked him if the Times Colonist had ever made a serious attempt to get his side of the story. “No,” Atwell said. He recalled Cleverley leaving telephone messages asking for a single piece of information, but never an offer to have a dialogue. So let’s consider Atwell’s version of the events that led to Murray leaving Saanich.
    After his election, but before he had been sworn in as mayor, Atwell had informal meetings with Saanich employees in order to familiarize himself with his new workplace. One manager he met told Atwell he had heard Murray say before the election that he (Murray) wouldn’t work with Atwell if he was elected. Atwell told me he has a written statement from the manager to this effect. The manager also told Atwell that other Saanich employees had told him that Murray had informed another meeting of Saanich employees that he (Murray) would not work with Atwell if he was elected.
    At the same time, Atwell had been put in contact with lawyer Troy DeSouza as an advisor on local government. Amongst other subjects, Atwell and DeSouza discussed the information provided by the manager mentioned earlier. DeSouza advised Atwell that this was “essentially a vote of no confidence” on Murray’s part. DeSouza then contacted Saanich Municipal Solicitor Chris Nation to advise him that Atwell and he were going to have a meeting with Murray.
    On November 26 or 27, Atwell told me, “I invited Paul into my office. I thanked him for his service and told him I thought I needed a new CAO to go forward and I asked him if he would be willing to take a dignified exit in line with his contract. He asked me if I was asking him to resign and I said ‘No.’ He asked me if I was recording the meeting and I said ‘No.’ He and DeSouza conversed about how this could be handled, then Paul went away to talk with his lawyer.”
    “He seemed keen to leave [employment with Saanich] when we had this conversation,” Atwell said. Later, DeSouza informed Atwell that Murray had come back to him and said something like: I want to leave on December 1. Make it happen. 
    At that point Atwell had not been sworn in as mayor and had no official capacity at Saanich Municipal Hall. “I wasn’t forcing him out; he really wanted to leave. And so it all seemed like there was going to be some kind of agreement and it could be done quickly. Whether council was going to approve it was still up to council.”
    Atwell continued his account of what happened next: “Through the municipal solicitor, and working with the municipal clerk, I was trying to set up a council meeting to talk about Paul’s exit. Nothing had been negotiated and council had not authorized negotiation.”
    At that time Atwell was also talking with councillors one-on-one about the Murray situation, including Councillors Vic Derman, Vicki Sanders and Judy Brownoff. But councillors were unable, or unwilling, to meet officially, Atwell said. “Most of the councillors had a heads-up on this and I was planning to go into the meeting [that Nation was organizing] with the rest of the councillors.”
    At that point, Atwell said, “Nation decided he wasn’t going to be involved because Murray was a friend of his. DeSouza was then engaged by Nation to represent Saanich in this negotiation with Murray, who was to have his own lawyer. But [Councillor] Susan Brice had gone behind the scenes and she’d sent a letter to council…stating that DeSouza wasn’t the regular legal counsel that dealt with personnel issues, and that she was uncomfortable with this [arrangement of lawyers].”
    Atwell feels Brice is still loyal to Leonard and noted that they had shared the same campaign office for many elections.
    Regardless, as a result of the letter, Atwell says, DeSouza was “kicked out” of an in camera council meeting held on December 8. “By the time council met on December 8, they had put themselves in a position where Mr Murray could have sued for constructive dismissal,” Atwell said.
    As Cleverley pointed out in one of his stories, Atwell had no legal authority to dismiss Murray; that required a vote of at least two-thirds of councillors, and as Atwell told me, councillors could have chosen to give Murray a vote of confidence and invite him to stay. They didn’t do that and Murray didn’t want to stay.
    This was, obviously, a much more complex story than “Saanich mayor forces out CAO; council condemns action.” Atwell was willing to tell what he could to Cleverley, but says he was not given the chance.
    Another aspect of this story that never made it into Cleverley’s brief stories was a comparison of the terms of Murray’s contract with the contracts of other recently-departed top municipal officials. As noted in Cleverley’s first story on the Murray affair, his contract stipulated “a minimum payout of 18 months’ salary.” Murray had been CAO for 2.5 years and was paid $199,881 annually.
    Former Victoria City Manager Gail Stephens received $240,346 in the last full year of her employment (2012). Her employment contract stipulated “12 months written notice or payment of salary and benefits in lieu thereof” in case she was terminated without cause. She had been City Manager since 2009 and her contract had been renewed through to 2017 with the same “12 months” stipulated for severance. Stephens resigned in 2013, receiving no severance.
    The City of Victoria’s second in command, Operations General Manager Peter Sparanese, was terminated without cause a month later. His severance agreement, obtained by FOI, provided payment of “10 months salary plus 13 percent in lieu of benefits.” He had received $217,965 in salary in 2012. His payout was $205,249.
    Murray, who was paid $18,000 a year less than Sparanese, received $421,163. Even if Murray had accepted the contract-stipulated minimum, he still would have got $100,000 more than the more highly-paid Sparanese. Where did Murray get such a sweetheart deal?
    The terms were negotiated and approved by the previous Frank-Leonard-led council, which included Councillors Brice, Derman, Sanders, Brownoff, Dean Murdock and Leif Wergeland—all of whom, according to Cleverley, had “condemned” and “censured” Atwell for the payout. The councillors even blamed Atwell for Murray’s accrued vacation pay—all $55,448 worth—even though this was owed to Murray regardless of whether he left or stayed.
    I asked Obee why the Times Colonist had used those exact words—“condemned” and “censured.” The actual wording from Saanich councillors on their expression of distaste for having to follow through on the contract they had previously approved was “does not support.”  Obee said, “The words we used were fair and accurate.”
    In the TC’s coverage of this story, it portrayed Atwell as a danger to the public purse carelessly overstepping the boundaries of his office. The paper made no serious attempt to get Atwell’s side of the story; they provided no context for the reader to understand fully why Murray was eligible for the generous payout he received, and how that compared with other recent local cases. Cleverley’s use of unnamed sources—who likely were one or more councillors breaching their public oath of confidentiality—is in itself dangerous to the public interest. When a politician with an axe to grind provides the TC with selective, confidential information that politician wants the public to know, isn’t there an expectation of a favour in return? The resulting news story might be biased in the direction of that informant’s position, in the hope there would be more prohibited information available later on. That bias is evident in the TC’s coverage of the Murray affair. By practising this form of journalism, Cleverley and Obee are, in fact, in a conflict of interest. Their primary responsibility is to their readers, not to the hidden agenda of some politician or policeman with an axe to grind.
     
    IN BOTH THESE STORIES, the Times Colonist seemed to be treating Atwell unfairly. The stories lacked context, used loaded language, included erroneous information while leaving out factual information, and were published without including Atwell’s side of the story. In the case of the 911 call story, the paper has provided no believable rationale for why Atwell’s private life should be exposed to public ridicule. It applied clearly different standards to Atwell’s privacy than it did in the case of the previous mayor. Critically, the stories relied on information from people who would not go on the record, leaving the stories vulnerable to the criticism that they were driven by hidden agendas. In doing this, the paper has severely damaged Atwell’s reputation in this community. When I challenged Editor-in-Chief Obee on these issues, he responded: “If you had simply asked if the Times Colonist had some motivation other than accurate news coverage, I would have said no. We strive to give readers information they should have. We don’t have an agenda.”
    The “agenda” that many people fear is at work, and is being aided by the Times Colonist’s biased coverage, is perhaps best represented by a line from one of Cleverley’s stories, which quoted Councillor Wergeland: “All I can say is: ‘Who is going to be leading council in Saanich? The jury is still out.’ But someone will lead.”
    The “jury is still out”? Didn't the real jury deliver its decision on this question in November?
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Katherine Palmer Gordon
    January 2015
    Failure to protect First Nations graves on Grace Islet may lead to the first aboriginal title claim on private property in BC.
     
    ON NOVEMBER 10, Chief William Seymour of the Cowichan Tribes wrote a polite letter to  Premier Christy Clark. Attached to the letter was a formal notice of claim to aboriginal title over Grace Islet, a three-quarter-acre rocky knoll located in Saltspring Island’s Ganges Harbour. 
    It’s not unusual these days for the provincial government to receive claims of aboriginal title over Crown lands in British Columbia. But this one is different from all the others: the claimed property, Grace Islet, is privately-owned. 
    The claim states that prior to European contact, Cowichan people exclusively occupied Grace Islet as a burial ground. Its conversion to private property in the mid-twentieth century was a breach of Cowichan’s aboriginal title, and therefore invalid. Seymour requested that the government therefore take immediate action to repurchase Grace Islet from its current owner, Alberta businessman Barry N. Slawsky, and return it to the First Nation. Otherwise, wrote Seymour, Cowichan Tribes will proceed with legal action. 
    The implications of the claim, if it proceeds, could be profound. How will a court balance constitutionally-protected aboriginal title against bedrock principles of private property ownership? 
    “If it goes ahead, this will break completely new legal ground,” observes Professor John Borrows, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Law at the University of Victoria Law School. “An aboriginal title claim over private property is uncharted territory.” 
    It’s a risky step for a First Nation to take, notwithstanding the increasingly robust case law affirming aboriginal title in the province. A court could decide that the conversion of the land to fee simple status extinguished Cowichan’s aboriginal title. On the other hand, as Borrows points out, the court will have a blank page to fill. Given the facts related to Grace Islet, the balance could just as easily swing in Cowichan’s favour. 
    Based on his legal advice, Seymour firmly believes that Cowichan will win: “If we are forced to go to court, Cowichan has a very strong history here and a very strong case so I think we’ll succeed.” 
    But Seymour also strives to quell fears about what a case like this could mean to private property owners in BC. “It’s important to understand that we’re not going after private lands in general here. We’re not interested in that.” The claim is all about Grace Islet: “It’s completely exceptional.” 
    He also emphasizes that going to court is a strategy of last resort: “I really hope we don’t have to go to court,” he says. He says the First Nation has had little choice but to take this dramatic step: “We’ve been forced to this point.”
     
    GRACE ISLET has been registered as a provincial heritage site since 1974. Archaeologists have identified at least 18 burial features clustered on the islet. First Nations who share the territory in which Grace Islet lies—Cowichan Tribes, Penelakut, Halalt, Tsartlip, Tseycum and others—have made it clear that the sanctity of such group burial sites—cemeteries in all but regulatory name—must be respected. 
    But in 2014, with provincial government permits in hand allowing him to do so, owner Barry Slawsky began construction of a 2300-square-foot home on the tiny islet. Room to build is very limited, and the home incorporates two of the graves into its crawl space. When First Nations learned that construction was proceeding, despite their protests to the government that no construction of any kind should take place on Grace Islet, they were aghast. 
    Building a house in a cemetery is a breach of customary laws and cultural practices governing the care of the dead in these places. Cowichan lawyer and negotiator Robert Morales says cemeteries like Grace Islet are considered “dangerous, powerful places that are to be strictly avoided by the living…it is unthinkable to knowingly build a house on top of a cemetery.”
    In an August 2012 letter to Minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations Steve Thomson, Penelakut Chief Earl Jack wrote: “The disturbance of the dead is dangerous to the living, who may suffer sickness, poor fortune or death. For this reason, the dead were placed in cemeteries, such as burial islets, distant from village life. Only those persons who own the traditional ritual knowledge to deal with the dead may visit the cemeteries and care for the spirits through ceremonial practices.” 
    But requests by Cowichan, Penelakut and other First Nations made to both the owner and the provincial government to leave the dead in peace on the islet have fallen on deaf ears. In July 2014, Minister Steve Thomson issued a public statement that the provincial government recognized its obligation to protect First Nations’ “archaeological sites,” but that the rights of private property owners must be respected. That, as far as Thomson was concerned, was that. 
     
    THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM lies in the distinct forms of legislation applied to First Nations burials sites versus those of others.
    Under B.C’s Cremation, Interment and Funeral Services Act, it’s an offence to litter, play games or even drive over a nearby flowerbed in a cemetery—all activities disrespectful to the dead and their living descendants. But collective aboriginal grave sites do not receive the same level of sanctity under the Heritage Conservation Act (the HCA). 
    The HCA, says Robert Morales, is supposed to protect aboriginal graves. “It does state quite clearly that it is an offence to desecrate them,” explains Morales. There are two problems, however. “Unlike the cemeteries legislation, which is premised on respect for human remains, the purpose of the HCA is preservation of the scientific and historic value of archaeological sites. First Nations human remains are the remains of real people, but the HCA treats them like artefacts.” 
    The second problem, says Morales, is the way the Act’s being implemented: “It’s more about facilitating development than it is about protecting heritage sites.” The HCA authorizes the Archaeological Branch to issue permits to do exactly what it supposedly seeks to prohibit—to alter (read desecrate and damage) heritage sites as part of a construction project or development. Hence a permit to build a house on top of graves on Grace Islet.
    The provincial government has also never developed any policies or guidelines governing what amounts to desecration or damage in the course of construction, he continues. “There are no criteria, for example, governing when a site simply shouldn’t be developed at all, like Grace Islet.”
    Gabriola-based archaeologist Eric Mclay, who has inspected Grace Islet, says: “There should at least be a minimum threshold that must be met before a permit can be issued. But BC won’t create any guidelines at all, and owners are taking advantage of that, as we can see. In my experience,” he adds darkly, “the Archaeological Branch will simply push and push the limits on what can be done to sites until there are no more limits. It’s almost a rubber stamp process now. Grace Islet is a good illustration of that. Where are the boundaries?” he asks in frustration. “On a known burial site, with mass graves, how is it possible that a permit could be issued?”
    No municipality or government would dream of issuing a building permit over a cemetery, nor would they be permitted to. Yet that’s exactly what has happened at Grace Islet under the auspices of the HCA. It’s an approach that Mclay describes as crass and appalling: “The HCA is supposed to protect these sacred sites from development. But the provincial government has instead chosen to allow a known cemetery to be developed [at Grace Islet]. There’s no morality in that whatsoever.”
     
    EVERYTHING MAY CHANGE, however, now that Cowichan Tribes have fired their aboriginal title shot across provincial government bows. A title case may be risky for Cowichan, but it’s a downright unattractive proposition to a government that stands to be held financially responsible if a legal precedent is set for aboriginal title on privately-held lands.
    It’s therefore unsurprising that an urgent flurry of activity followed receipt of Cowichan’s November 10 letter. Minister Thomson promptly secured Treasury Board approval to fund the purchase of the islet, and tasked former provincial deputy minister Lorne Brownsey and experienced consultant Patrick Kelly with attempting to reach a negotiated settlement between all the parties. 
    Cowichan, encouraged by the prompt response, has put the title suit on hold while the negotiators meet with all of the affected First Nations and owner Barry Slawsky. “We see these negotiations as a positive step in the right direction,” says Seymour. His vision of a successful outcome is straightforward, and much the same as outlined in the title claim: “We don’t want a house built over our grave sites. It’s really that simple.” 
    He would much prefer to see that outcome happen as a result of reaching an agreement with the owner and the provincial government rather than being forced to resort to litigation just to get to the same place: “I hope we don't have to go to court,” he repeats. “No-one wants that. But,” emphasizes Seymour, “that requires everyone to work together.” 
    At press-time, the negotiators had no comment to make and the provincial government could only say: “Discussions are going slower than we would like.” Seymour was unsure whether anyone had had any luck getting hold of Slawsky, who was out of the country. The prospects for success of a negotiated settlement were anything but clear, and the likelihood of a court case proceeding—whether by Cowichan alone, or joined by their fellow First Nations with shared interests in the islet—is entirely possible.
     
    WHEN THE POSSIBILITY of a title suit was made public in December, Slawsky’s lawyer John Alexander told the CBC in dire tones that with burial sites scattered all over the Gulf Islands and coastal BC, title claims posed a huge threat to property owners: “This is going to ignite a firestorm of controversy if now private land is no longer something you can buy with any certainty.” 
    But Seymour doesn’t agree that the Grace Islet case will set a precedent of that nature. “I hope it doesn’t do that. It shouldn’t. First Nations have never been after private land.” Cowichan haven’t asked for private property to be expropriated as part of their treaty negotiations, and Seymour notes that the Tsilqhot’in specifically excluded private land from their recent successful title claim. 
    Grace Islet, however, is different. It may in fact be unique. Burials are found from time to time on private property but in most cases, an arrangement can be made with the landowner to deal respectfully with the remains, either by moving them or by moving the proposed construction to a different part of the property. In their experience, say Seymour and Morales, in almost every case this is the mutually satisfactory outcome. 
    But when it comes to Grace Islet, First Nations have consistently emphasized that the entire islet is a burial ground, filled with grave sites. Eric Mclay says that given the tiny area of the islet, its steep and rocky topography, and the sheer number of burial features, it’s impossible to build a house without affecting them: “It’s clear there is not enough physical space on the islet to put a house without impacting the burial cairns.” 
    Saltspring resident Joe Akerman, who is of Cowichan descent, agrees: “There’s simply no room to build on a different part of the property.” Because of this unusual situation, Akerman also dismisses fears that all private property would be at risk if a lawsuit should succeed. “That’s just not true. We aren’t here to kick everyone off their properties. This is just a matter of basic respect and decency when it comes to Grace Islet.” 
    Robert Morales agrees: “It’s a great exaggeration to say all private property would be affected, whether this is a negotiated settlement or a court decision. I just don’t buy the fear-mongering. This is an exceptional situation.”
    Even if aboriginal title over Grace Islet is established and a court orders the return of the land to its prior occupants, it may choose to limit the impact of the decision to the almost unique set of facts that Grace Islet represents, setting concerns to rest that the decision will have general application to other private property in the province. 
    Professor John Borrows points out that as the law stands, the government could argue that the alleged infringement of the aboriginal title—the granting of fee simple title by the Crown to an individual property owner—is justified. But the test for justification has been set high by the courts. “The Crown would have to demonstrate that the benefits of the grant of land to a private owner outweigh the detriment to the First Nation,” says Borrows. While it’s possible, it’s hard all the same to imagine that the building of a house would trump the protection of 18 graves in this situation.
    Cowichan isn’t the only First Nation with an interest in Grace Islet, of course (despite stating in its draft claim that it exclusively occupied the islet). That doesn’t necessarily pose a barrier to a grant of title, says Borrows; the courts have consistently taken the view that First Nations can have shared title to land to the exclusion of all others. 
    “If Cowichan are serious about going to court they may want to talk about how to approach shared exclusivity with their neighbours and amend the statement of claim,” suggests Borrows. William Seymour agrees: “For Cowichan to claim totally exclusive use wouldn’t be right. Our neighbours used Grace Islet too. We will definitely talk to them and deal with that aspect if we go to court.”
    In its notice of claim, Cowichan asks for the return of the entire property. Borrows believes that if it does come to that, fair compensation by the Crown to the disenfranchised party must be embedded in the decision. “That could actually be a good thing for property owners. Right now, private property rights aren’t constitutionally recognized in the way aboriginal rights are. So if the Supreme Court ultimately decides that compensation should be a bedrock principle in a case like this, that would be a good outcome too.”
    Borrows acknowledges that money may never be enough compensation for people whose emotional and cultural attachment to a piece of land goes to the core of their identity and being. “Sometimes it isn’t just about the law and about rationality. You have to consider the emotive aspect and the connection to the land as well. You can get all this right on paper but if we don’t address those issues everyone still loses in the end.” 
    Eric Mclay agrees with that assessment, saying Grace Islet simply needs to be protected from development like any other cemetery: “We have to recognize that the graves take priority.” Whether that’s through a negotiated settlement, says Mclay, or by establishing in court that aboriginal title and rights take precedence over private property rights in a case like Grace Islet, “BC needs to purchase that land back.”
    Ultimately neither litigation nor a last-minute, expensive and one-off desperate attempt at negotiation is an ideal way to address this issue. Things wouldn’t have got to this pass, say all the players, if the law already effectively protected First Nations cemeteries and burial sites. Future title litigation could be avoided if this aggravation were finally to be remedied.
    “The law needs to be strengthened so that situations like this don’t arise in the future,” concludes William Seymour. “It’s just crazy that we have to fight so hard to protect our burial grounds this way. No-one should have to do that to take care of their people.”
    Katherine Palmer Gordon worked for more than 15 years as a contracts lawyer and First Peoples’ land claims negotiator and facilitator, both in New Zealand and BC.

    David Broadland
    January 2015
    Will Oak Bay Mayor Nils Jensen and Victoria’s Dwayne Kalynchuk lead the region’s big issue back to a gunfight at McLoughlin Point?
     
    THE EFFORT TO LOCATE a central sewage treatment plant at Esquimalt’s McLoughlin Point has shifted into a new phase. After being temporarily shut down by Environment Minister Mary Polak’s refusal to force Esquimalt to host the facility, the McLoughlinuts now seem intent on a campaign to eliminate any other possibility.
    By “McLoughlinut” I mean a person or organization that has repeatedly expressed the belief that any solution to Victoria’s treatment deficit must include a large secondary treatment plant at McLoughlin Point. The McLoughlinut mantra is that anything else is “too expensive.”
    Before November’s election campaigns began, the community’s attention was riveted on the apparent failure of the CRD to locate a $783-million central treatment plant on the rocky point at the entrance to Victoria Harbour. Pro-McLoughlin politicians and power-brokers in the region hoped the election would bring a broad repudiation of the Barb Desjardins-Richard Atwell-Lisa Helps-Cairine Green alliance. None of these mayoral candidates were McLoughlinuts.
    If that had happened it seems likely the CRD’s plan for central sewage treatment would have been quickly reactivated and a delegation of re-elected mayors sent to Ms Polak to seek reversal of her April decision. Instead, Desjardins received a bigger vote and Atwell and Helps defeated two of the most powerful supporters of the McLoughlin plan. But a number of staunch McLoughlinuts were re-elected as CRD directors, along with David Screech as mayor of View Royal. Screech has, in the past, supported the McLoughlin plan.
    Indeed, at the first CRD board meeting attended by newly-elected mayors and councillor-directors, McLoughlinut Nils Jensen, the re-elected mayor of Oak Bay, defeated Desjardins in a secret-ballot election for chair of the board. In an interview with CBC’s Gregor Craigie the following day, Jensen outlined his idea of a process to find a solution to the sewage treatment issue. He said the CRD was encouraging “people to come forward if they have a proposal for their community for a single plant. That’s one track. The other track that’s being contemplated is eastside and westside committees looking at a two-plant solution.” Jensen, who famously missed most of the CRD’s sewage committee meetings in his first term, subsequently anointed himself chair of that committee.
    The fundamental difference between the region’s two sewage factions is based on two factors. First, whether or not the burden of hosting sewage treatment should be shared equitably: the McLoughlinuts say the burden should be forced on Esquimalt, but Esquimalt says it will take them to court if they try. Secondly, the quality of treatment—should it be lower quality secondary treatment or higher quality tertiary treatment? The McLoughlinuts say tertiary treatment is too expensive, their opponents say that has never been proven. Mixed into both positions are claims of potential resource and energy recovery. But neither position depends on including or excluding that possibility.
    The westside mayors (Esquimalt, Colwood, View Royal, Langford), along with First Nations participants, have begun a public engagement process to consider their options. The fact those mayors have agreed there might be an option to McLoughlin Point eliminates them as McLoughlinuts, at least for now.
    But on the eastside, there’s been no real progress toward a non-McLoughlin solution. A shout-out from the CRD last September for all communities to put forward a possible site for a treatment plant in their community produced no response from Victoria, Oak Bay or Saanich. Victoria decided in October to at least go through the motions of considering a plan B, but a December 18 meeting of its council suggests that process has been designed to lead right back to McLoughlin Point.
    At that meeting councillors received a progress report on the engineering and public works department’s exploration of a sub-regional treatment system. Urban Systems has been awarded a contract to design a public engagement process that will allow the public to make its preferences about sewage treatment known. Invoking the example of the Johnson Street Bridge, Councillor Pam Madoff suggested council should make it clear to the public that councillors would not necessarily act on those preferences.
    After addressing the issue of how to politely ignore public input, councillors voted to initiate investigation of potential sites for sewage treatment. In doing that they seemed not to have comprehended that Director of Engineering and Public Works Dwayne Kalynchuk had already outflanked any move to a non-McLoughlin solution by appointing a proven, reliable soldier to kill that possibility at the outset.
    Here’s how that happened: Last October, after the apparent failure of the CRD’s McLoughlin plan and the splitting off of the westside group, the City of Victoria realized it might need to find its own way. Overseeing exploration of that fell to Kalynchuk’s department. It issued an RFP for an engineering study that would make recommendations on the City’s treatment options. The RFP cited a 2009 Kerr Wood Leidal study and instructed responding engineering companies to use the same costing assumptions that Kerr Wood Leidal had used in 2009. At that December 18 meeting councillors learned that the contract had been awarded to Kerr Wood Leidal. That should have triggered an alarm in council chambers and here’s why:
    Back in 2009, Kalynchuk was at the CRD heading the effort to develop regional sewage treatment. Under his leadership, the engineering firm Kerr Wood Leidal (in partnership with two other engineering firms) undertook a study of distributed treatment plants. Its findings have provided the entire basis for the pro-McLoughlin origin story that claims, as a recent Times Colonist editorial put it, “The CRD’s waste-treatment committee did extensive professional studies into the options, including distributed treatment, which was deemed to be too expensive, and came up with the proposal for the central plant.”
    The Kerr Wood Leidal study’s findings, though, have been dismissed by the Sewage Treatment Action Group and other knowledgeable critics as having little or no applicability to the network of tertiary treatment plants STAG envisioned in its RITE Plan. Some of the criticisms are easy to understand. The Kerr Wood Leidal study’s cost estimates, for example, were for secondary treatment. That form of treatment would have required construction of nine new marine outfalls, but a system of strategically-located tertiary treatment plants could use existing outfalls. Another criticism has been that Kerr Wood Leidal used population growth projections that have since proven to be too high, and so its cost estimates were based on building plants that would provide greater capacity than is currently required or even projected. RITE Plan proponents want a cost estimate based on addressing current capacity requirements, and suggest small plants could be added later as needed.
    One finding of the study that’s hard to comprehend involves the energy recovery estimates it developed. Kerr Wood Leidal used a methodology and assumptions that led it to conclude there would be more demand for energy in both Colwood and Royal Bay than in downtown Victoria. Since the study produced a result so transparently flawed, its critics say, it can’t be trusted. Yet the study has been used by the Times Colonist, CRD bureaucrats—in fact all McLoughlinuts—as proof that any form of distributed treatment would be “too expensive.”
    Was the 2009 study designed to produce a predetermined result, that distributed plants would be too expensive?
    This appears to be what happened with another pricey infrastructure project, the Johnson Street Bridge. Soon after Kalynchuk left the CRD and became head of the City’s engineering department, a study was done that compared the cost of rehabilitation of the bridge with the cost of replacement. That comparison was fudged to favour replacement. Unrealistic assumptions were imposed (a repaired bridge must last 100 years) that seemed designed to deliver a predetermined outcome.
    History now seems to be repeating itself. There’s little doubt that a new Kerr Wood Leidal study that uses the same costing assumptions as their 2009 study will lead to the same recommendation: a central plant at McLoughlin Point. That property is owned by the CRD, is large enough and has the required zoning in place for a secondary sewage treatment facility that would serve Victoria, Oak Bay and a portion of Saanich.
    Some Victoria taxpayers might experience fainting spells at the thought of the City’s engineering department overseeing development of a sewage treatment project whose starting price is likely to be in the neighbourhood of $300 million. The department, under Kalynchuk’s leadership, has taken the new Johnson Street Bridge project from an original estimate of $63 million to a currently unknown cost—estimated by Focus at about $108 million.
    Ironically, the December 18 council meeting was scheduled to include a quarterly update on the bridge project. That report, dropped from the agenda without explanation, would have included a synopsis of the project’s legal problems, an updated cost estimate and a new completion date. Construction of the main elements on the project’s critical path—the bascule leaf and the bascule pier—was halted last July and October, respectively. That long-anticipated update has been “delayed until the New Year for a fulsome and complete as possible report,” according to Mayor Helps.
    On December 20, a high tide unexpectedly flooded the bascule pier cofferdam raising more questions about the planning and execution of the project. Yet the same folks who shepherded this project are now in charge of sewage treatment.
    Victoria residents who wish to be politely ignored might want to mark their calendars. Councillors requested that a public engagement strategy for sewage treatment options be ready by the end of January.
     
    FOR INQUIRING MINDS that would like to know if the McLoughlinuts might be wrong, let me introduce you to Oscar Regier. A retired civil engineer, Regier has some 40 years’ experience in the investigation, design, construction and project management of municipal and industrial infrastructure projects. He was the design project manager on the award-winning Dockside Green wastewater treatment plant and he has been giving technical advice to Richard Atwell on the potential for a distributed enhanced-tertiary sewage treatment system for the Victoria region.
    Regier’s tertiary-level sewage treatment plant at Dockside Green sits below Café Fantastico and Fol Epi Bakery between Tyee and Harbour roads. A visit will confirm there’s no odour produced by the plant and  water it reclaims circulates to a series of lush water gardens immediately adjacent to Dockside’s residential towers.
    The Atwell-Helps-Desjardins alternative to a central plant at McLoughlin Point—or anywhere—would rely on adaptation of the Dockside Green technology to a larger scale, which the brain trust at the CRD has convinced the majority of its board members isn’t possible.
    The CRD dismissed Dockside’s potential with a simple calculation: multiplying Dockside’s cost per unit of treatment capacity by the total treatment capacity the CRD needed. It decided that simple calculation was proof enough it would cost $2 billion to use distributed tertiary treatment.
    No one at the CRD has ever spoken with Regier. Perhaps someone should. He recently researched the costs of some 40 tertiary treatment facilities built in North America during the last 10 years, and adjusted their final costs so they could be compared with the estimated cost of McLoughlin Point’s treatment plant. He says, “Several tertiary treatment facilities with a wide range of capacities have unit costs in the same range [around $2 million per million litres per day of maximum sustained capacity] as the McLoughlin Point proposal, which provides only secondary treatment. These are existing plants so the costs are real and final—not class C estimates.”
    Let me give you a sense of what that cost translates to for Jensen’s municipality, Oak Bay. The CRD says Oak Bay would need treatment capacity to process about 12 million litres of sewage each day. Using Regier’s figures, that would cost $24 million. That’s just for the treatment plant and doesn’t include conveyancing or biosolids treatment. By comparison, Oak Bay’s share of the expected construction cost of a secondary plant at McLoughlin Point is about $14 million.
    Regier’s research shows that a 12-million-litre-per-day tertiary treatment plant would require a site area of about 4500 square metres, roughly equivalent to the area occupied by 6 tennis courts. Oak Bay’s Windsor Park, for instance, has three tennis courts at its west end that occupy roughly the area required to treat half the municipality’s sewage.
    There are two other large costs associated with sewage treatment for both the CRD’s McLoughlin secondary treatment scheme and distributed tertiary treatment: conveyancing (pumps and pipelines) and biosolids treatment—the process that reduces the solids the treatment plants take out of the sewage. The CRD’s McLoughlin plan would spend hundreds of millions on each. What about distributed tertiary?
    Again, let’s look at Jensen’s Oak Bay and use Windsor Park as an example. Right across Currie Road from the tennis courts, the CRD owns two residential properties that house a sewage pumping station disguised as single-family homes. To hook up a 12-million-litre-per-day underground tertiary plant that could treat the equivalent of Oak Bay’s daily production of sewage, the CRD would need to run two pipes under Currie Road; the current input to the Currie Road pumping station would become the input to the Currie Road café-bakery, er, sewage treatment plant, and the output from the plant would go back under the road and be pumped to the Clover Point outfall, exactly as is now.
    Oak Bay’s share of conveyancing construction costs in the McLoughlin scheme is about $4 million. That compares with an estimated cost of $500,000 to connect an underground Windsor Park treatment plant with the Currie pumping station. The extra cost of constructing tertiary treatment for Oak Bay is now less than $7 million above secondary treatment. For the 50-year life expectancy of these plants, that crunches down to an extra cost of $140,000 per year. That works out to $20 per Oak Bay household per year. Is that “too expensive”?
    The other big cost, biosolids treatment, would require either an on-site gasifier or a truck pulling into the café once a day to remove solids to a gasifier located where plenty of energy could be used. Saanich Councillor Vic Derman showed his fellow sewage committee directors years ago that using gasifiers instead of pumping everyone’s poop 18 kilometres to a biodigester at Hartland Road would save the CRD “$200 million plus $3-4 million in annual operating costs.” 
    Would it be possible to execute a systematic adaptation of distributed tertiary plants to the CRD’s existing system of forcemains and pumping stations—like that suggested above for the Currie Road pumping station? “Yes, I think so, at a number of locations along or near the trunk mains leading to Clover Point and Macaulay Point, including some of the pump stations,” Regier said.
    He described to me the differences between a system that utilized “independent” plants compared to one with “inter-related” plants and outlined how that might work. When I expressed difficulty in understanding what he meant, he said, “Think about a big picture puzzle. If you only have one or two pieces of the puzzle without the picture, you have no idea what you are dealing with. If you have most or all of the pieces, you can start sorting them out and get a much better idea of what the final result will look like.”
    So choosing actual locations for plants in a larger system is difficult until decisions have been made about how the larger system will work. Of course, when it comes to sewage treatment plants, no one—except the folks who live in Dockside Green—wants one built near them.
    Regier was cautious on this issue: “I hesitate to name specific sites because there will be an instant knee-jerk uproar and rejection without sober thought and analysis.” Pressed, though, he provided some possibilities: “Penrhyn, Currie and Marigold could be suitable for larger DT [distributed tertiary] plants; Trent for a smaller DT plant. Clover and Macaulay should probably have DT plants to serve the adjacent areas and possibly some backup/standby capability in case of failure at an upsteam DT plant, instead of pumping their sewage back up to a another DT. If the ‘westside’ develops something on their side then Craigflower might become redundant and it could be modified to pump reclaimed water to Central Saanich to irrigate a large agricultural area.”
    Even though these numbers suggests a distributed tertiary system could break the siting stalemate in which the region is now locked, there are two good reasons why CRD bureaucrats and local politicians don’t want to see a cost estimate for such a system.
    For one thing, CRD bureaucrats decided a distributed system would cost too much and then went on to spend over $85 million preparing for a central treatment plant. A study that demonstrates Regier’s distributed system would cost less would show that those bureaucrats screwed up. Why would they risk that? They could lose their jobs.
    For the politicians, there’s the problem of the “knee-jerk uproar.” Once a few possible locations are named—like Windsor Park in south Oak Bay or Clover Point in Victoria—only elected officials with great personal courage would be able to stand up to the blow-back. No one in either Saanich, Victoria or Oak Bay has yet shown they possess that courage.
    McLoughlinism depends on no politician having that courage. But to go ahead with a central plant at McLoughlin will likely mean a protracted legal battle between the CRD and Esquimalt, and taxpayers losing all promised senior government funding. The solution? Jensen ought to visit Café Fantastico and stroll through the water gardens.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Roszan Holmen
    December 2014
    Records recently obtained by FOI show that after explicit warnings about the condition of the E&N Railway tracks in 2009, the BC Safety Authority allowed 22 months of further deterioration before passenger service was finally terminated in 2011. Now, with $20 million in public money allocated to upgrade tracks and restart service, critics say the plan is under-funded, won’t provide long-term safety, and therefore isn’t worth pursuing. At the same time, impassioned advocates see rail as a low-carbon solution to the increasingly congested and accident-prone Island Highway—and a potential boon for tourism.
     
    “LOOK OUT!” That was the warning from the train conductor to his companions as he approached a tree lying across the railroad tracks, some five miles from Courtenay.
    Fred Boddy watched the incident from the train’s head end—and he logged the incident in a report to his superiors at Herzog Contracting, a company that specializes in railroad construction, rehabilitation and maintenance.
    The engineer didn’t slow down as he drove over the tree, Boddy noted in his account, dated July 2009. “Fortunately no damage occurred.”
    With 40-some years in the railway industry under his belt, Boddy had never seen anything like it. He oversaw preventive maintenance work for rail lines throughout North America. And despite these other lines running longer trains, more frequently, at faster speeds, none required the amount of maintenance work as the few Budd cars rumbling along the E&N corridor on Vancouver Island.
    Herzog, contracted by VIA Rail, had flown Boddy out to investigate—and his 10-hour round trip proved insightful. He discovered uncontrolled weeds choking the track, branches striking the cars, and foliage clogging the air-intake system—the likely culprit behind a recent fire on board.
    In other words, conditions were much the same as he’d found them in early 2007.
    Back then, Boddy called a meeting with the train operator and VIA Rail in response to reports of collisions with boulders, trees and other crossing accidents. “The safety to the public and rail workers can be jeopardized when the right of way is not being protected,” he told both parties at the time.
    Having had his warnings ignored once before, Boddy delivered his 2009 verdict emphatically: “We will do all that is possible to prevent another fire…BUT we need the Operator [Southern Rail] to do their part!…I conclude by stating that it is very expensive for VIA Rail to operate in this way and UNSAFE.”
    It turns out that Boddy wasn’t the only one sounding the alarm.
    Well before authorities shut down the train due to poor track conditions in early 2011, others were filing complaints. Documents obtained through a freedom of information request reveal these informants played a key role in applying the brakes to the historic passenger service. Their anonymous reports triggered an audit that found significant safety violations. Internal correspondence also reveals that VIA Rail had serious concerns about the operator’s liberal interpretation of track safety, and about the BC Safety Authority’s oversight of the industry.
    Today, critics are calling for accountability, before train service resumes under the same leadership as before. A deal to bring service back is reportedly close at hand.
    Many rail enthusiasts are eager for the upgrades to begin: Trains offer an energy- efficient mode of transportation, capable of relieving congestion on the Malahat, and costing only a fraction of a highway expansion.
    But doubts are surfacing once again, this time about whether the pledged funds are adequate to restore the tracks to a safe standard. Critics of the plan argue the only way passenger service can succeed in the long term is if it’s properly funded, and properly regulated; that without accountability for past mistakes, the new train service will be doomed to repeat them.
    For those who wonder whether such concerns might be overwrought, Lac Megantic provides an excellent lesson in worst-case scenarios. When that train exploded in 2013, it wiped out the heart of the Quebec town, and woke an entire nation to the consequences of industry deregulation. 
    A similar situation has played out on Vancouver Island. Time and time again, the BC Safety Authority has proved itself a weak-willed regulator, either unwilling or incapable of enforcing the rules until pressured by the public, the media, or other agencies. 
     
    How Vancouver Island lost its train
    For 21 years Deborah Craw was VIA Rail’s primary representative on Vancouver Island. Stationed in the old heritage-style brick station on Wharf Street, she was the face of the E&N, talking with passengers and crew daily. In about 2007, Craw started hearing reports from her regulars about bumpy rides on the train. The crew also shared their concerns about track defects with her, and she dutifully logged the problematic locations and reported them. 
    Her input wasn’t welcomed when she brought a list of her concerns to the attention of Southern Rail and the BC Safety Authority. “People got tired of me saying ‘I am so worried about putting people on this train because I wouldn’t put my mother on my train,’” Craw recounts. “But I couldn’t live with myself if something happened on my watch.”
    She was told that, as a ticketing agent, she didn’t have the expertise to gauge track defects. Fair enough. But behind the scenes, professionals with the right credentials were verifying her anecdotal reports.
    At about the same time Fred Boddy’s train collided with the tree, the BC Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure was doing its own investigation as part of a $500,000 study into the costs and benefits of upgrading the E&N rail line. The resulting report came to the following conclusion: “The Railway condition is considered not to be in compliance with BC Safety Authority Railway Regulations and Rules Respecting Track Safety.”
    The inspection took place in June 2009, but the BC Safety Authority took no action for more than a year.
    In August 2010, the BC Safety Authority issued a non-compliance letter, only after the public release of the BC Ministry of Transportation study. It regurgitated verbatim the findings of the 14-month-old inspection.
    The non-compliance letter put Southern Rail in a difficult situation.
    When the company signed a service agreement with VIA Rail in 2006, it inherited a nearly 120-year-old rail corridor, suffering from decades of deferred maintenance. Southern Rail was tasked with operating the trains, as well as maintaining and inspecting the tracks. However, bringing the tracks up to code wasn’t possible without a major capital investment, and upper levels of government were dragging their feet on a long-anticipated funding announcement. And so the BC Safety Authority granted some leeway to allow service to continue in the meantime.
    Instead of ordering a compliance plan, it ordered a risk assessment—to ensure the danger to the public fell within an acceptable range.
    Southern Rail complied. In the company’s own assessment, the risk of catastrophic injury (such as death or injury by derailment) was “improbable, in other words tolerable.” The company outlined its ongoing efforts to mitigate the risk, but also acknowledged that corrective action based on an appeal for funding did “not address the immediate safety concerns.”
    The BC Safety Authority signed off on the temporary service plan and promised to monitor the situation. Months passed. Government grants did not materialize. A daily average of 86 passengers continued to board the train.
    It’s hard to say how long the temporary allowances would have dragged on had it not been for several anonymous complaints lodged through the federal Transportation Safety Board’s confidential reporting program. The first complaint in January 2011 included photos depicting timbers on the deck of the Niagara Canyon Creek Bridge in an advanced state of deterioration. A second complaint depicted sections of track in mud and water.
    Both the BC Safety Authority and VIA Rail responded to the complaints—but not in the same way.
    “We have had discussions with the General Manager and Roadmaster of Southern Railway of Vancouver Island and have been assured this matter has been fully investigated,” said Eric Samuelson, railway safety manager for BCSA, in response to one of the complaints.
    VIA Rail, however, wasn’t satisfied with the industry’s own assessment. The federal passenger-service provider scheduled an inspection to investigate, and it invited the BCSA along to participate.
    VIA Rail’s suspicions grew stronger when they received yet another complaint: this one a full report, detailing defects along 40 miles of track: “Since this is the third time recently we have had an important discrepancy in what is being alleged as defects and what Southern Rail is finding, it would tend to raise our level of concern,” wrote VIA Rail director of infrastructure Paul Boisvenue.
    Southern Rail reiterated its assurances:  “We have not found any exceptions that would affect the safe passage of trains at the posted speed,” wrote general manager Don McGregor in an email reply dated February 2011.
    VIA’s inspection told a completely different story.
    On March 7 and 8, Boisvenue led a team of inspectors along the corridor. He found “many issues: track, regulatory and political.” In his report to VIA headquarters, he levelled criticism at both Southern Rail and the BC Safety Authority. “Following the two-day inspection, VIA and BC Safety Board met to discuss the uncomfortability and Southern Rail’s misrepresentation of the applicable Safety Rule Standards (Southern Rail being too liberal),” he wrote. “Both the BCSA and the railroad were informed that VIA will not accept sub-standard inspections and maintenance. I believe that they (the BCSA) have real concerns nevertheless; although they never state this clearly, they are waiting for VIA to force the issue.”
    Boisvenue followed up with a letter of concern directly to the safety authority: “My understanding of the BCSA sign-off on this risk-assessment approach was that this was a very temporary initiative with the objective of giving them a few weeks to a few months to gear up for the needed track work…Having a policy of relying on forthcoming infrastructure funding in order to bring the track into compliance with the track safety rules can’t be a strategy for any railroad, particularly for one carrying passenger traffic.”
    Within three days, the BCSA issued Southern Rail a second non-compliance letter.
    The letter ordered track repairs, to be followed by a second inspection within 28 calendar days. It also ordered a halt to train traffic if the required repairs exceeded available resources. “Complaints from the public concerning the tracks non-compliance has elevated its profile to other agencies,” wrote Samuelson of the BCSA to Southern Rail. “We are now almost 7 months past the issuance of the original non-compliance, I feel that it is now incumbent of the railway to make the necessary repairs and improvements to the tracks.”
    On March 19, Southern Rail suspended passenger service to begin the repair work—with the full expectation of resuming within a couple of weeks. As the date for the follow-up inspection approached, McGregor again assured authorities that repair work was on track to restart the train by April 9.
    Again, the follow-up inspection contradicted his optimistic outlook.
    “First of all we walked with the Southern Rail inspectors,” states Boisvenue’s account of events. “I didn’t interfere with them but did point out to the inspection group they were leaving behind what I felt was a number of defects that should be corrected…Following this we proceeded to do random checks of areas of track that had already been inspected and repaired/cleared by Southern Rail track forces…In these locations which roughly represent 1.9 miles of track, we found 41 defects that did not meet the minimum Track Safety Rules Standards.”
    Southern Rail didn’t welcome the findings. Boisvenue recounted his conversation as an “energetic discussion.”
    “I pointed out each defect and why it didn’t meet the minimum standard...and [they] accepted our findings,” he wrote, adding: “The BCSA will allow Southern Rail to continue to operate its freight operation at slow speed.” (Read: the BCSA will not allow passenger service to continue.)
    On April 5, 2011, McGregor sent this message to various rail stakeholders: “I regret to advise that, as a result of an audit/inspection with VIA Rail conducted over the last 2 days, we jointly concluded that significant infrastructure improvement beyond available resources will be required in order to reinstate the passenger rail service.”
    McGregor announced the indefinite suspension of rail service, reiterating the joint nature of the decision—conveniently omitting mention of the gun to his head.
     
    A deal is around the corner
    Fast forward three years and eight months to the present.
    Don McGregor is now Southern Rail’s project manager for railways infrastructure improvement—tasked with overseeing the $20 million track upgrade. The company’s latest prediction is for upgrades to begin in early 2015. 
    Islanders have heard these predictions many times before. But this time, most of the pieces are in place. It’s a complicated and fragile agreement, given the number of players involved. Provincial and federal governments have pledged $7.5 million each; five regional governments have pledged $3.2 million combined; the operator and the Island Corridor Foundation have pledged the remainder. The investment will reportedly sustain service for 10 years.
    After years of negotiations, VIA Rail has confirmed a new service agreement with Southern Rail. But there is one catch: Passenger service will only resume once all parties deem the track safe for passenger travel. Details of the agreement are scant, but it appears to endorse a reversal in direction: Trains will finally move from Nanaimo to Victoria in the morning, and return in the evening, to capitalize on commuter traffic.
    It also appears VIA Rail’s annual operational subsidies will remain the same. In the past, VIA covered the cost of fuel, Budd car maintenance, and ticketing. It also provided an annual subsidy to Southern Rail of $1.45 million to offset operational expenses for the money-losing operation. VIA kept the revenue from ticket sales.
    So what’s holding the plan back?
    The delays appear twofold: Federally, the Treasury Board must sign off on the expense; provincially, the BC Minister of Transportation must sign off on Southern Rail’s business plan. “We are working our way through that now, going back and forth with questions we have,” Minister Todd Stone told CTV News in October, adding he’ll be keeping a close eye on safety moving forward.
    Concerns over past safety practices may also be contributing to the delays. In October, key details about the train’s safety track record broke on C-FAX 1070/CTV. Since then, stakeholders have circled the wagons and refused interviews, but behind the scenes, the media attention sparked a flurry of activity. Within days, inspectors quietly descended on the tracks still carrying freight from Parksville to Duncan. On October 31, freight service outside Nanaimo was suspended indefinitely due to safety concerns, leaving clients such as a Duncan-based feedlot with less than 24-hours notice to find alternate transportation.
    It’s yet another example of the BC Safety Authority reacting to external pressure, instead of conducting inspections proactively and routinely.
    For its part, Southern Rail refused an interview about the recent suspension of freight service and its management of passenger service before 2011. Instead, it posted this statement: “VIA passenger rail service operated by Southern Rail on Vancouver Island was always in compliance with BC Safety Authority requirements.”
    The assertion defies understanding.
    In the last year of passenger service, Southern Rail received two non-compliance orders and failed a follow-up inspection, earning a reprimand by VIA Rail for inadequate track maintenance and misrepresentation.
    The company’s recent statement goes on to outline its safety management systems: “The complete railway is patrolled and inspected a minimum of twice weekly and extensively on quarterly basis,” it reads, adding annual inspections involve ultrasonic testing. “Any defects encountered with any of these inspections are repaired promptly within prescribed periods consistent with the type and severity of defect.”
    Judith Sayers, co-chair of the Island Corridor Foundation, defends the company. “Southern Rail has always been a really good operator,” she said, adding she doesn’t remember the board discussing any concerns about its track record. 
    For Jimmy Sturgill, however, the response is disappointing. “Southern Rail’s statement shows that nothing has changed since 2011,” said the rail consultant and member of the E&N Action Group, calling for improved governance and transparency. “They are still maintaining that there was never anything wrong.”
    More questions need to be asked about how much money Southern Rail spent on track maintenance annually, said Via’s Deborah Craw. Technically, Craw is on temporary leave from her job as ticket agent, though she hasn’t worked since March 2011. “The emotional toll has been huge,” she said. She’s been criticized and ostracized for speaking out by former colleagues and other rail advocates. “You devote yourself to a career, which has been a source of pride, and camaraderie,” Craw said. To have it turn so quickly, without closure, has been a heavy personal price to pay.
    Now, she’s looking for someone up the chain to pay the price. “I believe there were people who were negligent in their duties and they should be held accountable.” 
    NDP MLA Doug Routley for Nanaimo-North Cowichan is the newly-assigned critic for Island rail. He fingers a flawed oversight system.
    It is a conflict of interest for rail operators to maintain and inspect their own tracks, he said. “My response to that is to ask ourselves, ‘How many of us would write our own speeding tickets?’” “It’s not even fair to a corporation that is tasked with making profit for its shareholders to tell it that ‘you now must impose conditions that will result in penalties and loss of profit [to protect] the public interest,” he said. That’s the role of government.
    It’s a role the federal government is taking more seriously since last year’s tragedy in Lac Megantic, Quebec. The train disaster killed 47 people and triggered a large-scale investigation and a series of recommendations. The first were introduced in late October.
    However, the new federal safety regulation won’t apply to provincially-regulated lines like the E&N, confirms former president of the Canada Safety Council, Emile Therien. It would be in the Province’s best interest to adopt them voluntarily, he said. “But will they? It’s another question. Pressure has got to be brought to bear to make sure they do it.”
    BC Minister Rich Coleman, responsible for the BC Safety Authority, declined comment. 
    The BC Safety Authority also declined an interview, but submitted a statement defending its track record. Between 2009 and 2011, BCSA conducted six safety inspections on the E&N, it says. While inspectors identified a number of concerns, “none were deemed high-risk or of a nature that would necessitate BCSA issuing an enforcement action…as there had been no reported near misses, accidents or incidents.”
    The BCSA also reaffirmed its philosophy of relying on industry to self-regulate: “We believe that, if given the information they need, [railway owners and operators] will take responsibility for technical safety…The decision by Southern Rail to suspend service in 2011 is a clear example of BC’s railway safety system functioning effectively.”
    That’s a generous interpretation of historical events, at best. Southern Rail only suspended rail service after intervention and pressure from regulators. It was not a proactive safety measure but rather the only remaining option after being ordered to conduct repair work beyond its available budget. 
    The term “professional reliance” has surfaced in the last few years, explained Sturgill. Ten years ago, inspectors “would show up on a property anytime, unannounced.” Now, he said, the norm is to give ample notice. Often times, inspections take place on paper, rather than on site. 
    Sturgill and his business partner (and father) Jim Sr. were members of the Island Corridor Foundation’s rail operations committee, before it was disbanded. Together, they invested hundreds of volunteer hours, logging track defects and alerting stakeholders.
    “We were continuously coming up against a brick wall,” said Sturgill. “We felt quite concerned because we thought there was a serious threat to safety and nobody was willing to act.”
    For this reason, he lodged the anonymous report to VIA Rail in early 2011. Today, he’s speaking out again, to prevent history from repeating itself.
    Sturgill questions whether $20 million will prove adequate to fix the tracks, when previous studies peg the number much higher. (Southern Rail’s own estimate from 2007 concludes the track required $47 million in funding.)
    He fears VIA Rail will not sign off on the repair work, once the pledged money has been spent. Or worse: “If somehow it did [pass inspection], it would be for a very short-term basis, and you’d expect the track to slip back into substandard conditions…and we’d be in the same position all over again.”
    He insists the current proposal isn’t worth pursuing.
    It’s a controversial position that has divided rail advocates. Some people agree the numbers don’t add up; others defend the plan, and fear his public criticism will kill any hope for moving forward. “I would hope that us bringing [concerns] forward serves as a catalyst for change,” Sturgill said.
    When the Ministry of Transportation crunched the numbers in 2010, it determined reviving the rail line would cost approximately $100 million. At the time, it concluded demand for train wasn’t worth such a significant investment. But that was four years ago. The case for rail is getting stronger every year, as more and more drivers find themselves stuck in gridlock. 
     
    Getting back on track: a vision for rail
    Stew Young has witnessed congestion on the Malahat gradually worsen throughout his 22 years as mayor of Langford. He used to whip up the Island Highway to visit his mom frequently—but now he’s got to plan his weekend trips carefully to avoid the weekend rush. “Sunday is a pain,” he said. “I’ve watched it back all the way up to the Millstream Corridor…[and] if there’s an accident, you sit there for five hours.” Young added, “It really is getting to a point where you have to make your decisions based on the traffic on the road…People are already making decisions not to go up Island—so the patterns change.”
    As the population on Vancouver Island grows, congestion will only get worse.
    Right now, there are 758,500 people living on the Island. In the next 10 years, that number will grow by approximately 90,000; almost half of newcomers will live outside the Capital Regional District, according to projections by BCStats.
    In Greater Victoria, the regional district is pursuing solutions to the Colwood Crawl—but Young sees shortcomings. BC Transit is moving ahead with priority lanes and signals for buses. “It’s not the solution long term,” said Young. Ultimately, these changes will only add more delays for vehicle traffic. “It might work for 10 years, but the only solution long term is the train.”
    Westshore residents have also been advocating for an interchange at McKenzie Avenue. But Young argues an interchange will only resolve gridlock for that one small stretch of the highway—and won’t help any communities north of the Malahat.
    There are many practical reasons to prioritize rail over roads.
    There’s the speed argument: Track upgrades could reduce the Nanaimo-Victoria commute to under two hours, compared with a 2.5 hour drive depending on traffic.  
    There’s the energy-efficiency argument: Moving freight and passengers by rail is generally accepted as a lower-carbon form of transport. Rail corridors are more level than roads, steel wheels presents less friction than rubber, and trains require fewer energy-burning stops and starts. “You can take 70 trucks and replace them with one train,” said Chris Alemany, who ran successfully for councillor of Port Alberni in November. 
    There’s also the danger argument. “We’ve seen major accidents on the Malahat,” added Alemany. A functioning rail line will channel big trucks away from the highway, lowering the risk, he said.
    For work, Alemany drives to Parksville and transfers onto a commuter bus which takes him to Nanaimo. “It’s packed,” he said. “I don’t see why that bus [couldn't be replaced by] a rail car.”
    Finally, there’s the financial argument: Railway infrastructure is far cheaper to maintain than highways, noted Alemany.
    It’s a fact not lost on the BC NDP. The Province is already investing heavily in transportation infrastructure; they’re just funnelling it into road improvements rather than rail, says Routley. The MLA cites $23 million in spending announcements to improve the Malahat since 2012.
    A similar amount was spent on the McTavish Interchange to get to the airport, despite no clear demand for the project. “We can’t forever expand highways,” Routley said. There are natural constraints on the Island, such as Goldstream Park, where lane expansion is impossible. “The E&N is a great option for taking up some of that anticipated growth,” said Routley. 
    All up and down the Island, dedicated individuals are working to bring back rail.
    Andre Sullivan helped fundraise to restore the historic train station in Nanaimo, as part of the Young Professionals of Nanaimo. The older people on the team were interested in the heritage value of the station, but the younger people got involved because they believe in the future of rail, he said. “This corridor is the best line anybody could have drawn. It cuts through all the communities on the east coast of Vancouver Island.” Because the tracks intersect most downtowns, the vast majority of Islanders live within two kilometres of the rail lines, he added.
    Sullivan works in downtown Nanaimo, but has clients in Victoria. Visiting them means leaving home at 5 am or 10 am to avoid rush hour. “If that train was operating, and it went from one block from my office to downtown Victoria, I’d be there all the time.”
    Sullivan is now leading a fundraising effort to build the E&N rail trail in Nanaimo. The trail is well on its way to completion in Victoria, and similar efforts are underway in the Cowichan Valley. Once the trail is continuous, the tourism potential for cyclists and hikers would be huge, he said. A hop-on-hop-off train ticket could be a major draw for those wanting to explore the island. “It’s one of those assets that might be good enough that you wouldn’t have to market,” said Sullivan. “People would come because it exists, like the West Coast Trail.”
    On the other side of the Malahat, Aaron Lypkie is advocating for rail in his own way. He founded the facebook page Rail for Vancouver Island, which now has more than 450 members. The Camosun College student also designed a new train station for Langford as part of his studies.
    Lypkie argues that train isn’t just practical—it’s romantic. “There is something about rail that attracts more people [than the bus],” he said. It’s got more leg room; you can get up and walk around, and the ride is smoother and more spacious, making it easier to work on a laptop. But, he said, you have to make it sexy: that means offering amenities such as wifi, on-board concession and modern equipment.
    Alemany agrees. “Here we are arguing about getting a 1950s Budd rail diesel car back on dilapidated track. Meanwhile, on an island to our immediate west, 21st century technology is connecting two communities, one with a population of 70,000, one 26,000— and only 50 minutes apart by car.” Alemany is referring to a maglev train running between the cities of Uenohara and Fuefuki, Japan, reaching speeds of up to 500 kilometers per hour (311 mph).
    The opportunities are enormous, but the people need to be included in the discussion, Lypkie said. “The Island Corridor Foundation needs to do more to engage the public. If people feel like they are part of something, they will support it…the public can be an amazing tool.”
    A growing group of critics echo his sentiment. Some are calling for a new governance model for the ICF that is more accountable, transparent and inclusive. 
    ICF co-chair Sayers defends the foundation against what she calls a “small group of naysayers.” “We give out as much information as we can,” she said. “I don’t know what will satisfy them.”
    It might be unwise to discredit these naysayers, as they include a growing group of Island politicians, including Routley and Young. 
    “Where are our stumbling blocks?” asked Young, about the reason for delay. “I’m the mayor and I don’t know. I need to get the information to the public of Langford because they are asking me.”
    “Right now, I’m putting together an advisory group,” Routley said. “One of the deficits of the ICF model has been to resist including people who have experience and expertise managing and operating railways.”
    Train enthusiasts are an ardent bunch. If given the chance, they will pour countless volunteer hours into rail technical and advisory committees. They belong to historical societies, and advocacy groups dedicated to the future of rail. They recognize progressive transportation planning requires alternatives to cars and trucks. They envision a future where municipalities plan development and zone industrial land around train stations, and mid-islanders can opt for a fast and convenient commute to work, free from the hassles of highway congestion. 
    These dedicated train buffs are networked through every community along the E&N corridor. They are the best available tool to rally the public around the possibilities of rail, and attract significant public investment required to build it.  But in order to win them over, the rail industry will first have to win back their trust. The E&N’s dubious safety record has shown that playing fast and loose with the safety regulations is the easiest way to turn impassioned advocates into vocal critics. 
    Roszan Holmen is the talkshow producer for C-FAX 1070. In May 2011, she filed a freedom of information request for documents pertaining to the condition of the E&N track in the months leading up to, and following, the shutdown of passenger service. VIA Rail provided the materials almost three years later.
    (In 2015 Roszan Holmen was awarded a Jack Webster Award for community reporting for this story.)

    David Broadland
    November 2014
    Key votes at City Hall raise questions about the judgment of some councillors seeking re-election.
     
    THE PRIMARY ROLE OF NEWS MEDIA in a democratic society is to provide citizens with information and analysis on important issues that allow those citizens to hold their government accountable for the decisions it makes and the actions it takes. This is particularly important in the period just before an election. If a politician has played a significant role in enabling an unfolding fiscal disaster, for instance, the period just before an election is the time to make that clear. For that politician, though, just before an election is a really inconvenient time for truth-telling. It’s an excellent time to say things like, “It’s with the lawyers, so I can’t talk about it.”
    That’s what’s going on right now with the Johnson Street Bridge project. At the beginning of the current council’s term, the official budget for the project was $77 million. Since then the cost has apparently escalated to $108 million, but nobody at City Hall will talk about it. This is a déjà vu moment if ever there was one. The same thing happened before the last civic election and that led to one of the most revealing episodes in the term of the mayor and councillors. I am referring to the City’s attempt to silence analysis and criticism of its management of the bridge project. Councillors distinguished themselves one way or another on this issue, and now all but one of them is seeking re-election.
    Here are the basics of what happened. In March of 2012, the price tag for the Johnson Street Bridge project suddenly rose from $77 million to $92.8 million. Focus filed an FOI and the information released to us a couple of months later showed that senior City staff knew two days after the 2011 civic election that the price tag had risen by at least $5.8 million due to an escalation in construction costs. A question occurred to us: Did City Hall actually know this before the election? This was an important question of accountability: then City Manager Gail Stephens had made a very clear and public report to City councillors 45 days before the election in which she stated that the project continued to be within the $77 million budget. Had she misled councillors and the public just before an election?
    At the same time that Focus obtained this information, a City Hall insider provided Ross Crockford, a freelance journalist, with a tip: there was a “smoking gun” in the City’s finance department records that would show that Stephens and other senior bridge project managers had been told the project had incurred significant expenses that were not included in the council-approved budget.
    In May of 2012, Crockford filed a carefully-worded FOI for records from the finance department that was practically guaranteed to find that “smoking gun,” if it existed.
    While Crockford negotiated a fee for the requested records, the City made a Section 43 application to Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham. The application covered Crockford, Focus Editor Leslie Campbell, myself, and “any persons acting on their behalf.” The practical effect of this application was to immediately cut off all of our rights to access public records, including Crockford’s request for the “smoking gun.” In doing so, the City became only the second public body that had ever used this provision of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act to limit a journalist’s access to public records.
    The City said that it had to make the application to Denham because it was being overwhelmed by requests from Crockford and Focus. But in the first seven months of 2012, aside from the “smoking gun” information request, Crockford had filed only two FOIs. Focus had filed five, only one of which had taken enough City staff time that a fee had been applied. (This fee was later appealed by Focus as being unreasonable and Denham’s office agreed, directing the City to return 60 percent of it.)
    In other words, the City’s claim that it was being overwhelmed with requests was unsupportable. You may recall the City withdrew its Section 43 application without submitting any evidence of its claims to Denham’s office. But before it did that, a vote was held by City councillors on the issue. That vote boiled down to whether councillors supported City staff’s attempt to limit press access to public records, or whether they opposed it. For the record, those councillors in favour of limiting press access to public records included Mayor Fortin and councillors Alto, Coleman, Thornton-Joe and Madoff. Those opposed to limiting press access to public records included councillors Helps, Young, Isitt and Gudgeon.
    A few months later, the “smoking gun” Crockford was seeking was released to him by the City. It was a memo from acting Assistant Finance Director Troy Restell that showed Stephens had been warned by her finance department in August, 2011 (well before the election) that $5.2 million in project costs had not been included in the council-approved budget of $77 million. When added to the $5.8 million in additional construction costs the City was officially notified of two days after the 2011 civic election, it became clear that Stephens may have misreported the financial state of the project just before an election. 
    In April, 2013, a group of Victoria citizens, including Crockford, wrote to Stephens asking her to provide a legitimate explanation for why she had reported the project was on budget. Not receiving a response, they then asked Mayor Fortin to hold an inquiry. Fortin’s position was that Stephens hadn’t made a full report and at the time she claimed the project was on budget, she believed it was on budget. Councillors Young and Helps were very vocal in their support of the citizens’ request that Stephens provide an explanation for why she had reported the project was on budget. Under the chilling influence of a threatened lawsuit, however, the issue disappeared from public discussion.
    Stephens’ lawyer Joe Arvay told Focus,“n the fall of 2011, Ms. Stephens was advised that some of the estimated costs had actually been reduced, based on changes to the cost of materials and that such cost-savings would offset any of the added costs set out in the [finance] memo.” Focus then filed an FOI seeking the record that would support Stephens’ claim. The City could find no such record.
    The issue boiled down to whether the mayor and councillors supported the right of citizens to hold Stephens accountable for her report that the bridge project was on budget. The record shows that Mayor Fortin did not support that right; Helps and Young made it clear they did. Other councillors were publicly silent on the issue.
    Three months later, Stephens resigned.
    The central event that led to the current mystery about the project’s cost happened on the last day of 2012, when councillors approved the contract City staff had negotiated with PCL Constructors Westcoast. The meeting was closed to the public but Focus obtained the minutes through an FOI request.
    City staff provided councillors with a report that stated, “The City’s Consultant, MMM Group, has reviewed the contract documents prepared by FMC [the City’s legal adviser on procurement] and the City, including optimizations, contingency, project risks and the value engineering opportunities, and in their professional opinion recommend that the City proceed with the project and enter into a contract with PCL Westcoast.”
    According to the minutes of that meeting, the wisdom of the 3.9 percent contingency that the agreement depended on was questioned by some councillors, notably by Young and Isitt. A vote was held on whether to award PCL the construction contract. The issue boiled down to this: Was the assurance councillors had been given that City engineers and their professional advisers had all their ducks in a row, including that small contingency, credible?
    The minutes show that only councillors Lisa Helps and Ben Isitt had doubts strong enough that they voted against City staff’s recommendation to sign the contract with PCL.
    The minutes also show that none of the councillors questioned MMM’s recommendation, or even asked to see it. What, exactly, did it say? Focus filed an FOI for MMM’s written recommendation but the City now admits that no such written record exists. It was just someone at MMM providing a verbal recommendation to someone at the City of Victoria that, sure, it seems okay to us.
    In February, PCL submitted a $9.5-million change order to the City. The company has since submitted an additional change order for an undisclosed sum. The City handed over the first change order to MMM for advice.
    MMM’s advice to the City was that PCL’s request for more money should be refused. Ironically, MMM argued that PCL’s bid proposal contained such extensive design changes that its bid should have included a much higher contingency, on the order of 40 percent. With no written proof that MMM did, in fact, recommend the City accept PCL’s bid, including the small contingency, the prospects of any legal action by the City against MMM for providing dubious advice seem limited.
    Whatever the quality of MMM’s advice, it has been expensive. In June, 2010, MMM told the City that project management and engineering costs would amount to 12 percent of construction costs. That’s the industry standard. The City has already paid, or committed to pay, $12.5 million to MMM since April 2009, and MMM recently told the City they and their subcontractor will need an additional $2.4 million to complete the job. If they get that, their $14.9 million would represent 23 percent of the $66 million construction cost the City is counting on, almost double the industry standard.
    The key MMM employee the City has been working with since 2009 is Joost Meyboom. Meyboom conducted the original condition assessment of the Blue Bridge back in 2008. His first recommendation to the City, following his examination of the bridge (the Delcan Report), was to “retrofit rather than replace.” Back then Meyboom told City staff that a retrofit “to lifeline standards can be achieved by installing a new, relatively flexible foundation to relieve the existing timber pile arrangement. Together with electrical/mechanical upgrades, painting and other rehab items this retrofit option is currently estimated to cost in the order of $8.6 million.” This recommendation was hidden from the public until an FOI by Focus found it. But by then momentum for a new bridge was so strong it didn’t matter: nobody believed it.
    At consequential turning points in the project’s history, City staff have hidden the difficulties the project was encountering. Perhaps that’s not surprising. What was unexpected was the degree to which that secrecy would be supported by Mayor Fortin and several of his councillors. Such secrecy not only frustrates deliberation by the public, it can also lead to exceedingly expensive government. The preliminary estimate for fixing the bridge was $8.6 million. The project is now sporting a $108-million price tag. That’s a 1200 percent ballooning from the preliminary estimate. Now consider this: A preliminary estimate of the City’s infrastructure deficit is “$600 million.” Voters might want to ask themselves, as they mark their ballots on November 15, if they’re confident the candidates they’re voting for have what it takes to keep that from blowing up by 1200 percent. Just say’n.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    David Broadland
    October 2014
    An FOI request for the record of how environmental assessments for gas plants were axed last spring catches government and industry in flagrante.
     
    PERHAPS YOU ALREADY KNOW that fossil fuel corporations get the satisfaction they desire in BC when it comes to regulations affecting their industry. But have you ever wondered how, precisely, that business takes place? Is it done behind closed doors? Over the telephone? In a back alley behind the convention centre?
    BC’s Environmental Assessment Office (EAO) carries out extensive reviews of proposed major projects in the province before they’re permitted to proceed. For example, in 2009 when Encana proposed to build the $900-million Cabin Gas Plant project in the Horn River Basin, the Environmental Assessment Act required the EAO to consider the potential environmental, economic, social, heritage and health impacts posed by the project. As well, the assessment process provided a structure for participation in the review by the project proponent, First Nations and the public. There are, after all, a lot of legitimate concerns about such large-scale industrial projects.
    Last April, Environment Minister Mary Polak announced essentially all gas plant projects like Encana’s Cabin project would be exempted from environmental assessments. Recently, the record of how the government made that decision was revealed following an FOI request filed by Canadian Press reporter Dene Moore. The documents obtained show the process leading to the elimination of environmental assessments for gas plants was heavily influenced by a registered lobbyist in the employ of Encana. Although the group of civil servants considering how to reform the environmental assessment process for gas plants recommended transferring responsibility for environmental assessments to the BC Oil and Gas Commission, their recommendation was ignored. Instead, the Provincial cabinet decided to accept industry’s request to eliminate environmental assessments altogether, and issued two Orders in Council amending the Environmental Assessment Act and the Reviewable Projects Regulation.
    I will go into more detail later about how the reform process was influenced by industry, but first let me provide you with some details about gas processing plant projects that puts the cabinet’s decision—and what motivated it—in some perspective.
    The EAO’s 2009 review of Encana’s proposed Cabin project concluded it would have “significant adverse environmental effects.” The EAO came to that conclusion because the Cabin project would process 800 million cubic feet of gas daily from the Horn River Basin. Shale gas from that basin happens to contain a lot of carbon dioxide—12 percent by volume. Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas implicated in climate change.
    Numbers provided to the EAO by Encana back in 2009 indicated the plant, when completed, would emit 2.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. To put that figure in perspective, that’s just a little less than the 2.8-million-tonne annual drop in emissions the Province says has occurred since 2008. The EAO concluded that there was no available reservoir for carbon sequestration and, in any case, that would be “prohibitively expensive.” The carbon dioxide, separated from the natural gas as it is prepared for sale, would simply be vented to the atmosphere. The assessment report concluded the Cabin plant would increase BC’s overall emissions by 3.3 percent. Thus the conclusion of “significant adverse environmental effects.”
    In spite of that, Encana was granted a permit to build the plant. The first phase has now been built, but Encana and their partner in the project, Spectra Energy, decided to delay making the project operational until market conditions improve. The emissions the Cabin plant will add do not yet show up on the Province’s inventory of emissions, but as sure as summer follows spring, they’re coming.
    On the heels of the Cabin project, a 2013 environmental assessment of Quicksilver Resources’ proposal for a gas processing plant at Fortune Creek in the Horn River Basin came to the same conclusions: “Emissions from the proposed project are at a level that will make it more challenging for the Province to achieve its legislated greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.”
    “More challenging” is a bit of an understatement. Once all three phases of the Fortune Creek plant are in operation, according to the EAO, the plant will process 600 million cubic feet of gas each day, and, as a consequence, will emit 2.436 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. 
    The Fortune Creek environmental assessment also noted, again, that there was no available reservoir for sequestering that carbon dioxide. Again, it would have to be vented to the atmosphere. The assessment calculated that this one plant would increase BC’s overall emissions by 3.9 percent. As with the Cabin project, the assessment concluded there would be “significant adverse environmental effects.” The cabinet approved the project and construction of the first phase has been completed. Its emissions have not yet appeared in the provincial tally.
    So when Environment Minister Mary Polak announced last April that environmental assessments for such plants would be eliminated, she was getting rid of the process that quantified and made public the significant greenhouse gas emissions associated with such projects, and that allowed the public and First Nations to express their concerns on this and other potential impacts.
    One political rationale for eliminating assessments is this: The Province is trying to create favourable conditions to attract investment for a liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry here. But to feed even two LNG plants on the coast there would need to be dozens of projects like the Cabin and Fortune Creek plants preparing Horn River Basin shale gas for transmission to the coast, where it would be liquefied and shipped to Asia. Imagine the unfortunate optics of the cabinet ignoring report after report from the EAO, each one coming to the same conclusion that it did for Cabin and Fortune Creek: significant adverse environmental effects, another challenge to emission reduction targets.
    The Liberals are stuck with at least appearing to meet their own legislated emission reduction targets stipulated in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets Act. The Province currently claims it met its 2012 reduction target, but either Cabin or Fortune Creek coming fully on line would effectively cancel out that reduction.
    With these two conflicting objectives—LNG development on the one hand and emission reductions on the other—pulling the Liberals in opposite directions, which one will prevail, and why?
    The best possible data for answering that question is contained in the documents obtained recently by Moore, which consist of a series of emails and attached documents.
    Eliminating environmental assessments, it turns out, began with a directive in June, 2013, from Premier Christy Clark. It’s unknown what, exactly, Clark commanded, but by August 28, 2013, a “Natural Gas Plant Proliferation Project Charter” (the Charter) had been created, along with a “Natural Gas Processing Plant Working Group”—a joint undertaking of the Ministry of Natural Gas Development, the Ministry of Environment, the Environmental Assessment Office, and the Oil and Gas Commission. The project, essentially, was to determine how to reform the environmental assessment process in light of expected “proliferation” of gas processing plants needed for LNG development.
    The impetus for reviewing the environmental assessment process for gas plants, according to the Charter, originated with a complaint by Encana. The Charter noted that: “Encana representatives have stated that the environmental assessment timeline of 18 months is a barrier to industry and creates an incentive to build plants [with a capacity of less than] 200 million cubic feet of gas each day.” Under BC’s Reviewable Projects Regulation, only plants that process more than 200 million cubic feet per day, or emit more than 2 tonnes of sulphur per day, have to undergo an environmental assessment.
    Whoever wrote the Charter didn’t seem aware that Encana’s initial Cabin project proposal to EAO was dated January 26, 2009, and that by January 28, 2010—only 13 months later—the project had been approved by the cabinet. But I digress.
    The Charter went on to state: “Encana has asked that the regulation be changed to exempt sweet gas processing facilities from the environmental assessment process.” “Sweet gas” is natural gas that is lower in sulphur content. According to the Oil and Gas Commission, ninety-nine percent of gas in BC is processed as sweet gas.
    The Charter noted that the Ministry of Natural Gas Development was forecasting that 26 to 40 new gas plants—depending on whether they had capacities of 200 or 400 million cubic feet per day—would be needed in the Montney Basin “to supply LNG export needs for government targets of 82 megatonnes” per year.
    The Charter observed: “EAO and the Oil and Gas Commission anticipate that cumulative effects concerns will arise when a multitude of new wells and gas processing facilities are proposed.” What seems to be the issue here is not so much the cumulative effects, but the concerns about those cumulative effects.
    The Charter’s “Project Scope” stated: “Policy review is confined to developing options for managing sweet natural gas plant development in the Montney Basin.” It went on to declare that the interests of “stakeholders,” including “Montney Basin First Nations” and “communities” “must be considered throughout the project.”
    The original direction, then, was to leave EAO assessments in place for the other major shale gas basins in BC: the Horn River Basin, the Cordova Embayment, the Liard Basin and the Doig formation. The Montney Basin lies to the south of the Horn River Basin and contains far less—2.0 to 2.5 percent—carbon dioxide.
    What we know happened subsequently, though, is that the reform process snowballed to include environmental assessments for gas processing plants for all basins, including the carbon-dioxide-rich Horn River Basin. This would have been of special interest to Encana, which spent hundreds of millions acquiring drilling rights on over 116,000 hectares of Crown land in the Horn River Basin, where prices reached nearly $4000 per hectare in 2008 before natural gas prices plummeted in North America. How did that scope growth happen?
    The email record obtained by Moore shows the process immediately started to go off the track. Or get on track, depending on your perspective. On September 6, 2013, Trish Balcean, lead for the EAO on the Working Group, notified her fellow members that she “had a good discussion with Encana this AM,” and reminded them of the first meeting that afternoon of the Working Group. Following that meeting, the Ministry of Natural Gas Development’s Michelle Schwabe emailed the Working Group members an outline of “next steps,” which included, “change scope from Montney focus to all sweet gas plants irrespective of Basin.” Suddenly, environmental assessments for the Horn River Basin were also in play.
    The email record shows that Encana was ready with a draft proposal “to address the environmental assessment process for sweet gas plants” only three business days after the Working Group first met. The lead for Encana on the project was Nadia Monaghan, a registered lobbyist for that company. Although the documents provided by the Province show Monaghan’s “co-lead” was Sherry Sian, representing the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), the BC Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists shows Sian was not, at the time of her involvement with the process, a registered lobbyist. 
    Remarkably, Encana’s Monaghan seems to have been given the job of designing the process by which environmental assessments would be reviewed. That was decided at a September 19 meeting between Monaghan and members of the Working Group. Shortly thereafter, Monaghan sent the Working Group a draft “Industry Plan for Gas Plant Environmental Assessment Process Review.” Commenting on Monaghan’s plan, the Ministry of Natural Gas Development’s Michelle Schwabe wrote, “I am not sure we want to be reviewing early drafts unless this is meant to be a more iterative and collaborative process, which personally, I don’t think it needs to be. As we have already done our background work and analysis, I would like to see what CAPP has to bring forward based on their assessment. They just need to get it done.”
    A week later, the document was returned to Monaghan with minor style changes and a request to her to send back an “updated (polished) version.” The resultant “Environmental Assessment Reform for Natural Gas Processing Plants Joint (Government & Industry) Work Plan” mapped out how the process would proceed. The main steps of the plan were that, first, the gas industry would frame the problem. Next, Monaghan and Sian would give the Working Group a tour of a gas processing plant and a presentation. Thirdly, the gas industry would recommend its preferred solution. Finally, government would weigh in, provide feedback, and then reform options would be recommended to decision makers. Even though the Project Charter had indicated First Nations and “communities” “must be considered throughout the project,” there was no consideration given in Monaghan’s plan for including input from either First Nations or the public, and the record provided by the Province gives no indication anyone in the Working Group expressed qualms about that.
    As part of the internal discussion between the Province’s participants in the Working Group, they produced a “Decision Note” in October, 2013 for Ministry of Natural Gas Development Deputy Minister Steve Carr, Oil and Gas Commission Commissioner Paul Jeakins, and the Environmental Assessment Office’s Doug Caul.
    The Decision Note observed that with increased demand for gas resulting from the three LNG projects already in the Environmental Assessment Office’s queue at the time, provincial natural gas production would nearly quadruple.
    With “26 to 45” new gas processing plants needed to meet that demand, the Working Group foresaw an “80 percent” increase in projects going through environmental assessments.
    Other reasons for reforming the assessment process, the decision note observed, included shortening the duration of the process, providing greater certainty and transparency for project proponents, and reducing or eliminating duplication between the EAO and the Oil and Gas Commission. 
    The six signatories to the Decision Note recommended “Environmental Assessment change and enhanced Oil and Gas Commission process.” The fine print below that recommendation expanded on what that would mean, but also provided plenty of wiggle room for decision-makers, noting that regulations “could be amended to increase the trigger for sweet gas natural processing facilities from 200 to 400 million cubic feet per day, or removed entirely.” Even so, the main thrust of the recommendation seemed to be that environmental assessments for gas processing plants be shifted to the Oil and Gas Commission.
    By January, 2014, as laid out in Monaghan’s “Government & Industry” work plan, the industry presented its “preferred solution”: elimination of the volume threshold for natural gas processing plants, exempting all gas plants that fall below the sulphur emissions threshold of two tonnes per day. This would have eliminated assessments for 99 percent of future gas processing plant projects and that’s exactly what Minister Polak announced last April, apparently ignoring the recommendation of the Working Group.
    You may recall that Polak quickly rescinded the Orders in Council under pressure from First Nations. Fort Nelson First Nation Chief Sharleen Gale famously expelled BC government officials from an LNG conference two days after Polak’s announcement. Gale said, at the time, “No shale gas development will proceed in Fort Nelson First Nation territory until our Nation and our treaty are respected and our concerns about our land and our waters are addressed.” Polak rescinded the Cabinet Orders but made it clear the cabinet’s retreat was only temporary—“until we have undertaken discussions with First Nations.”
    So the question of whether the Liberal’s legislated requirement to reduce emissions could compete with the fossil-fuel industry’s desire to sell LNG to Asians seems answered: it can’t. It can’t, and not just because Encana gave $891,995 to the Liberal Party between 2005 and 2013. Or because during that same time Encana’s founding CEO Gwyn Morgan gave the Liberals $153,510. Or even because Morgan served as a close adviser to Premier Clark when she took over from former Premier Gordon Campbell. Sure, those factor in, but it runs much deeper than that.The fossil-fuel industry has extended its lobbying tentacles deep into the operational grooves of the Provincial civil service. In those intimate circumstances the industry’s desires become the desires of the government and it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate one from the other.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Katherine Palmer Gordon
    October 2014
    A recent scientific report implies we are close to a point of no return on climate change. UVic’s Dr Tom Pedersen weighs in.
     
    LAST AUGUST, a draft report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), leaked to the news media, set out some cold, hard facts about global warming.
    The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million in pre-industrial times to 400 now. The rate at which emissions are rising has never been higher. In 2013 alone, the concentration of carbon dioxide increased by nearly 3 parts per million.
    Scientists say planetary emissions must be reduced by 40 to 70 percent by 2050 to keep global temperature increases to tolerable levels and minimize infrastructure damage and coastal erosion associated with rising sea levels. But the report also points out that accumulated emissions to date will continue to have a negative impact for centuries to come, even if all emissions were to cease today. 
    The media reacted in apocalyptic terms: “Runaway growth in the emission of greenhouse gases is swamping all political efforts to deal with the problem,” observed the New York Times. In Mother Jones, journalist James West asked gloomily: “How many synonyms for ‘grim’ can I pack into one article? [The IPCC report] confirmed, yet again, the grim—dire, frightful—reality that we face if we don’t slash our global greenhouse gas emissions, and slash them fast.”
    But Dr Thomas Pedersen, executive director of the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, a solutions-based research network hosted by UVic, has a different take. While the internationally recognized authority on ocean chemistry believes a “full frontal assault” on emissions is necessary, he also believes the future doesn’t have to spell drastic climate failure: “When the final official version of the IPCC report comes out it is no doubt going to set out some grim facts. But I doubt the IPCC is going to suggest we should all throw up our hands and surrender,” says Pedersen. “They are also going to talk about mitigation efforts that are underway.” In that respect, Pedersen ardently believes, there is “a very good story to tell.”
    Not every good story has a happy ending, of course. According to both the IPCC and UK-based Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, current mitigation efforts—investment in renewable energy and improved public transportation infrastructure, for example—are nowhere near enough. Any emission reductions being gained by such initiatives are being dwarfed by rocketing greenhouse gas emissions on other fronts. China is a good example of that.
    With its vast heavy-industrial economy, China frequently gets blamed for rising global emission rates. But Pedersen says that China is also doing more than almost any other country to produce clean energy. In August, the Chinese government announced the country will bring in a national carbon trading system in 2017. “They’ve already had seven pilot emission trading schemes in place for nearly two years, in five cities and two provinces with populations comparable to Canada’s, and the schemes are already showing good results in emissions reductions with no economic dislocation.” 
    Moreover, China’s investment in renewable energy is the highest in the world, according to Pedersen. “President Xi Jinping has stated that Chinese coal consumption will not be allowed to increase past 2030, when it is anticipated to peak. So China now has by far the highest rate of installation of solar-voltaic capacity and wind turbines, and households are installing solar-thermal systems for domestic hot water production on rooftops across the country. China is also building more nuclear plants and hydro dams than any other country in the world.” There are downsides to the two latter initiatives that can’t be ignored, acknowledges Pedersen. “But the point is that China is trying to do the right thing,” he insists. “They’ve acknowledged something has to be done.”
    That is indeed good news. The bad news: Sometimes trying to do the right thing may simply not be enough. 
    Pedersen admits that China is also “by far” the world’s largest consumer of coal. And the US Energy Information Administration estimates that China’s use of petroleum liquids will double from 2010 to 2040. An even greater increase in use of natural gas is predicted. 
    He also acknowledges that China’s efforts in the renewable energy sector will merely “blunt” the leading edge of its emissions: “It’s not going to compensate for the rise in its use of coal and other fuels.”
    By comparison, in 2011, Germany adopted a policy called “Energiewende,” or Energy Transition, aiming by 2050 for greenhouse gas emissions reductions of 80-95 percent; for hydroelectricity, solar, and wind power to supply 60-80 percent of the country’s energy demand; and for electricity efficiency to be improved by 50 percent. 
    Like China, it’s a good news/bad news story, albeit for different reasons. On the emissions front, the prognosis for a happy ending is good. Three years after the introduction of Energiewende, renewable energy now accounts for 27 percent of Germany’s power supply. Thanks to high demand, the cost of wind and solar power has been reduced by 70 percent in the last five years. A proliferation of small renewable energy cooperatives has emerged across the country, some of them meeting 100 percent of local need. Germany has also become a global leader in the export of clean energy technology, and is the biggest manufacturer of wind turbines in the world.
    The results of the transition remain mixed, all the same. Germany has discovered that the rapid success of the renewable energy sector—in part due to generous government tariffs paid to renewable energy producers—has made significant inroads into the profitability of conventional energy utilities. With little time to adjust, their financial viability is seriously threatened. Some utilities are facing closure. That could, ironically, be seriously detrimental to the success of renewable energy ventures: At least in the medium term, it remains vital to ensure that back-up conventional energy is available to fill the gaps when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind isn’t blowing—or people might reject renewables as highly inconvenient. 
    Germany has also made a misstep, in the opinion of Pedersen and like-minded climate experts, in deciding to phase out nuclear energy following the Fukushima disaster in 2011. That decision was made for the wrong reason, says Pedersen: “The problem with Fukushima wasn’t the fact that it was a nuclear power station in the way of a tsunami; the problem was that the reactor was badly-designed,” he explains. “The result has been a massive increase in coal imports to make up for it. That’s led to progress in meeting emissions reduction targets in the country coming to a standstill.”  
    All the same, Pedersen believes Germany is still “well on the way” to meeting its 2050 goals. “If the lessons Germany has learned along the way are taken into account, overall Energiewende is still a good model for rest of the world to follow.”
     
    ONE OF THE KEY CHALLENGES to reducing manmade greenhouse gas emissions remains the relatively low cost of fossil fuels in most countries, resulting in profligate use of oil, gas, and coal worldwide. 
    Pedersen is a big fan of aggressive carbon pricing as a way to discourage fossil fuel use: “Economists have quantified the cost of damage from carbon emissions arising from the extraction, processing, and use of fossil fuels to be about $200/tonne of carbon dioxide emitted. But we aren’t paying that price for the damage we’re causing, or anywhere near it. We’re essentially getting a free ride, and we’re using it wastefully. That needs to change.” 
    Many countries have imposed some form of carbon tax or emissions trading system to discourage fossil fuel use, but not at the level Pedersen suggests is required. Nonetheless, in BC, he credits the 2008 provincial carbon tax for the fact that the province is leading the way in Canada in its emissions reduction efforts: “The province’s per capita fossil fuel use, relative to the rest of Canada, has declined by 19 percent since 2008.” He thinks there can be only one driver responsible for that: “That’s the carbon tax.” 
    He also acknowledges, however, that the secret to the success of the tax is that it was designed to gain acceptance by the general public by avoiding sticker shock. We pay just $30/tonne of carbon dioxide emitted: “The tax was introduced at a very low rate and has only gradually increased to its current rate of seven cents/litre at the pump. It was also intended to be revenue neutral, so was tied to income tax reductions at the same time.” 
    Despite the low rate, Pedersen remains an admirer of the tax: “If the BC-style carbon tax were to be adopted worldwide, I think we would see similar declining consumption globally, and that would be significant. But,” he adds, “the price of energy has to go up to the real cost of using carbon, so that there’s a real incentive to stop using the atmosphere like an open sewer and a real stimulus to invest in renewable energy instead.”  
     
    IT'S ONE THING TO MAKE FOSSIL FUELS more expensive. The price tag on renewable energy—perceived to be much greater than that of fossil fuels—is also, however, a significant factor at play here. Germany is out of pocket $140 billion (US) to date in implementing Energiewende. The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate has also estimated that implementing measures to limit emissions over the next 15 years could cost up to four trillion US dollars. 
    But let’s put those costs into perspective. For a start, pricing carbon appropriately, as Pedersen advocates, would make renewable alternatives much more competitive with fossil fuels. Even in the absence of that, the Global Commission has also pointed out that the four trillion dollar cost of building and supporting renewable energy infrastructure only exceeds that of fossil fuel infrastructure requirements by a factor of five percent. 
    A hot off-the-press Global Commission on the Economy and Climate report delivered to the United Nations in mid-September also states that aggressive action on emissions reductions would be a boon to prosperity and not the economic show-stopper some perceive it to be. Co-author Lord Nicholas Stern says: “Reducing emissions is not only compatible with economic growth and development, if done well it can actually generate better growth than the old high-carbon model.”
    The Global Commission also reports that the cost of renewable energy itself has plummeted over the last three decades. “The cost of a photovoltaic cell, for example, has come down more than 100-fold since the mid-1970s,” agrees Pedersen. “In 1976, solar cell capacity cost $70/watt. Today it costs 70 cents/watt. I can’t name any other energy or fuel source that has dropped that much and it hasn’t bottomed out yet.” 
    That’s despite the fact that in addition to an absence of a truly equalizing carbon pricing system, the renewable energy sector  doesn’t enjoy the kind of subsidization that the fossil-fuel industry relies on for profitability, estimated by the Global Commission to be worth $600 billion a year worldwide. The International Monetary Fund pegs Canada’s share of those subsidies at $34 billion (including tax incentives and externalized costs of burning fossil fuels). The Pembina Institute recently calculated all direct federal subsidies at $711 million—not including provincial ones, or external costs, or “reclamation liabilities.” The latter are estimated to be $12 to 20 billion in Alberta alone.
     
    ALBERTA'S NEW PREMIER, former Conservative MP Jim Prentice, has unequivocally stated that market access for Alberta’s oil and gas—including through BC—is the highest priority for his government. The federal government has given a green light to the construction of the Northern Gateway Pipeline, anticipated to carry 525,000 barrels of diluted bitumen daily from Alberta’s oil sands to Kitimat, BC for export to Asia. It is expected to do the same with Kinder Morgan Canada’s application to twin its Trans Mountain Pipeline, tripling its capacity to 890,000 barrels of dilbit daily to the Port of Vancouver. Both projects will, of course, increase global emissions.
    In the meantime BC’s own government continues to beat the LNG drum. Touted as a much cleaner-burning fuel than oil, BC’s LNG nonetheless is a potentially significant contributor to emissions volumes. Alberta’s Pembina Institute has estimated that carbon pollution from the scale of LNG development envisioned by the BC government could reach 73 million tonnes per year by 2020, equivalent to nearly three-quarters of the projected emissions from Alberta’s tar sands, and 30 million tonnes above BC’s 2020 climate target. In 2012, by comparison, Canada’s entire greenhouse gas emissions volume was 699 million tonnes. That means BC’s LNG production, if fully implemented, would add up to more than ten percent of Canada’s emissions volume.
    In the face of the known increase in emissions all these proposed pipelines represent, isn’t it critical to prevent their construction if we’re to have any chance of meeting BC’s 2020 emissions reduction targets? 
    Selling Canadian oil to Asia will also do nothing to help global emissions reduction efforts. In 2013, the Stockholm Environment Institute analyzed the effect on global manmade emissions of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. The Institute concluded that pipeline—which would transport up to 830,000 barrels of dilbit daily, with 181 million tonnes of associated carbon emissions attached to those barrels—would impact the global oil market by increasing supply, decreasing prices, and thereby increasing global oil consumption. 
    The impact would be modest—that volume represents less than one percent of daily global oil production (86.8 million barrels per day in 2013)—but the Institute nonetheless concluded that “the problem of carbon pollution could be significantly exacerbated” by proceeding with the Keystone project.
    Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain represent more than one and a half times the volume of Keystone XL. If these pipeline projects go ahead, will there be a similar correlated impact on oil prices in Asia? Pedersen doesn’t think so: “The impact would be minimal at best. It’s a matter of scale.” He points out that the combined volume of the two pipelines still only amounts to 1.6 percent of current world oil production. “That’s not going to have an impact on price or consumption. It’s just too small in proportion to overall supply.” What’s really required, says Pedersen, returning to his mantra, is carbon pricing to drive a reduction in demand. “It’s the only way to do it,” he insists. 
    Fair enough: Raise the price, people stop buying, and look for alternatives. But doesn’t that also mean that reducing the price (even with a tax) by increasing supply will have the opposite effect, as the Stockholm Environment Institute concluded? And even if the impact of the two pipelines seems small in the global context, when all the other negative environmental impacts associated with the two pipelines are thrown in the mix—emissions associated with extraction of dilbit, construction of the pipelines, and tanker traffic, let alone consumption of the product, the resultant lag in shifting to renewables, and the potential for leaks and spills—it’s understandable that many British Columbians will still stand in their way. 
    The IPCC has stated that we must leave the vast majority of all known fossil fuel reserves in the ground in order to avoid catastrophic climate change. They didn’t exempt Canada’s or BC’s reserves.
     
    THE GLOBAL COMMISSION on the Economy and Climate’s September report echoes a key conclusion of the draft IPCC report: Current levels of investment in renewable energy and other anti-emissions efforts are nowhere near enough. 
    The other glaring problem is a lack of the kind of leadership required to implement the necessary global shift away from fossil fuel dependency to renewable energy and alternative ways of living. “The first step that needs to be taken is for every government worldwide to actively and vigorously recognize that human activity is driving climate change,” Pedersen acknowledges. “They need to recognize that reality has the potential to cause large scale global damage and act to prevent it, now.”
    We still can overcome the grim prognosis expressed in the IPCC report, says Pedersen, if all global leaders take aggressive steps to combat rising emissions. 
    Unfortunately, Canada is missing in action in that respect: “It’s shameful. [Prime Minister] Harper was in the Arctic in September and not once was climate change mentioned. It’s reprehensible and irresponsible.” By comparison, he says, he felt encouraged at a recent carbon conference in Bogotá, Colombia, “because all the South and Central American countries were there and they are all committed to reducing emissions.” Pedersen believes that’s a worldwide trend. 
    Judging by results in China and Germany, however, half-hearted efforts won’t do. “What’s needed,” Pedersen acknowledges, “is a full frontal international assault on climate change.”
    Katherine Palmer Gordon is the author of six books of non-fiction, including several BC Bestsellers and a Haig-Brown prize-winner. Her most recent book is We Are Born with the Songs Inside Us: Lives and Stories of First Nations People in British Columbia.

    David Broadland
    September 2014
    Decisive moments in the bridge and sewage projects illustrate the need for more politicians willing to work in broad daylight.
    THE VICTORIA REGION'S TWO LARGEST PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS are in deep trouble. The proposed $800 million sewage treatment program had already cost $90 million by the end of June even though the project didn’t have a site on which a central treatment plant could be built. Of that $90 million, $45 million appears to have gone up in smoke, and three month’s after Environment Minister Mary Polak backed Esquimalt’s right to decline hosting a central treatment plant, there’s no political agreement on how to proceed. 
    Meanwhile, the Johnson Street Bridge replacement project has a new, tentative price tag of $100 million and all indications are it could go much higher. Yet when City of Victoria councillors first voted to replace the current bridge instead of repairing it, they were told the cost of replacement would be $40 million.
    While proponents for amalgamation have seized on the sewage fiasco as proof that the current system of 13 independent municipalities needs to be streamlined, close examination of decisive moments in each of these projects suggests a simpler solution: election of politicians who commit to conduct the public’s business in broad daylight.
     
    THE DECISIVE MOMENT that led inevitably to the current impasse in the sewage treatment program didn’t occur when Esquimalt councillors voted unanimously in April to reject the CRD’s rezoning application for a larger sewage treatment plant than existing zoning allowed. Nor was it the step before that, in July, 2013, when Esquimalt rezoned McLoughlin Point to allow for a sewage treatment plant, but one that would have to be smaller than the CRD wanted. 
    No, the decisive moment was the step before that: At a June 9, 2010 closed meeting of the CRD’s Core Area Liquid Waste Management Committee (the sewage committee), directors voted to abandon a four-plant treatment plan, developed over three years, and instead focus all treatment in a single plant at McLoughlin Point.
    The abandoned plan—which had the approval of then-Minister of Environment Barry Penner—would have shared the burden of hosting sewage treatment between Victoria, Saanich, Esquimalt, and either Colwood or Langford. Instead, over the course of two consecutive closed meetings of the sewage committee, culminating with that June 9 decision, committee directors were convinced to discard fairness and to dump the whole messy business on Esquimalt.
    This was the moment when the whole enterprise shifted too far away from the political reality that every municipality has its own cultural identity, a right to make decisions about what happens within the borders of that identity, and a legal right to protect that identity. This is (just ask Minister Polak) a more defensible political position than, say, keeping the financial costs for other municipalities in the enterprise to a minimum. This was the moment when the process became too much about engineering and Realpolitik—and too little about respecting existing community richness. It was a vitally important moment that should have been discussed openly—in public.
    Who said what at that June 9 meeting? What brought about this sudden change in approach? We don’t know, because sewage committee directors also decided that day that the public didn’t have a right to know how, or why, they voted the way they did.
    Officially, the meeting was closed to the public because it included “negotiations and related discussions respecting the proposed provision of a municipal service that are at their preliminary stages and that, in the view of the [directors], could reasonably be expected to harm the interests of the [CRD] if they were held in public.”
    Committee directors didn’t have to follow the staff recommendation to close the meeting, but the majority of them did.
    Elected public officials in BC are required by the Community Charter to keep confidential everything said at a meeting closed to the public unless a majority agree to “rise and report” on that meeting. Even when that happens, the “report” provided to the public usually acknowledges little more than the course of action decided upon. The arguments for or against that course of action are normally excluded from that report.
    This is what happened at that decisive June 9 meeting. The minutes show that after an 85-minute closed session, the committee “rose and reported” that staff had been directed to pursue consolidation of all liquid waste treatment at McLoughlin Point. The minutes provide no indication of why that change was made.
    Considering that $45 million in public money appears to have been wasted as a direct result of that decision, the lack of transparency is disturbing. It’s as though the information required for holding politicians and public servants accountable for their decisions has disappeared into a black hole.
    The staff report (obtained by an FOI request) given to sewage committee directors at that meeting showed the recommendation for a centralized system was made by Tony Brcic, the CRD’s project manager for the wastewater treatment program, and Jack Hull, the general manager of the CRD’s Integrated Water Services.
    So Focus filed another FOI request for all emails and reports exchanged between the CRD’s Chief Administrative Officer Kelly Daniels, Hull and Brcic between April 1 and June 9, 2010, that related to the recommendation to CRD directors to shift from a four-plant configuration to one central plant at McLoughlin Point.
    The record provided by the CRD shows no bolt of lightning striking project managers, urging them toward a central plant at McLoughlin Point. For example, the record shows no demand from either the Province or the federal government that tied supportive funding to a single, central plant. Instead, a picture of chaotic, last-minute planning emerges from the record. Three weeks before committee directors voted to move all treatment to Esquimalt, Daniels emailed private engineering consultant Jonathan Huggett. Daniels told Huggett, “The CRD has submitted the Business Case and Amendment #7 for the [Liquid Waste Management Plan] in application for approval and funding for a Waste Water Treatment System that includes four treatment plants and a bio-solids processing facility. Work continues to proceed on finding alternate site locations for all these facilities with the expectation that we may see significant reductions in the overall capital and operating costs of the system, particularly if we can consolidate the treatment facilities to one treatment plant site as recommended by the Peer Review Committee.” 
    In that last sentence Daniels was referring to a report required by the CRD’s funding agreement with the Province. It appears Daniels was under the impression the Peer Review Committee had recommended consolidation to one treatment plant. If so, he didn’t have it quite right. The Peer Review Committee strongly recommended that the CRD try to secure an Upper Harbour site from Steel Pacific, because that site would have been large enough to accommodate a single, central plant including digesters for processing solids. McLoughlin Point was not large enough for digesters. Negotiations with Steel Pacific were ongoing. The FOI record provided shows the CRD was considering a price of $42 million. The possibility of acquiring that property seems to have tipped the whole planning process toward a central site. Yet no peer review report had ever recommended McLoughlin Point as an appropriate location for a single central plant.
    Indeed, a May 2009 peer review report on the CRD’s four-plant treatment plan had repeatedly raised “serious reservations” about McLoughlin Point, even though the CRD was proposing a plant with considerably smaller hydraulic capacity than would be required by a single central plant.
    For example, that review listed nine “concerns and restraints” with the McLoughlin site that included technical problems likely to arise from the site’s “extremely small” size, the necessity for “full buildout to the fenceline,” the likelihood of the need for lengthy and expensive site remediation, and the prominent visibility of the site “from the water as well as from the cruise ship wharves and heliport terminal on Ogden Point across the harbour entrance to the east.”
    The peer reviewers concluded, “In view of the concerns and constraints expressed above, the [Peer Review Team] has serious reservations about the McLoughlin site. Resolving these issues will entail a major and possibly prolonged effort. Before proceeding too far down the path of trying to resolve these issues, it would be prudent to ensure that the facilities currently proposed for the McLoughlin site…can indeed be accommodated by the site in a reasonable and satisfactory manner.”
    Yet even while negotiations on the Steel Pacific site continued, Hull and Brcic were advancing their planning for a central plant at McLoughlin. What seems clear is that senior project managers weren’t reading, thoroughly, the reports taxpayers were funding. Instead, as Daniels put it to Huggett, the managers were focussed on “reductions in the overall capital and operating costs of the system…”
    A week after Daniels wrote Huggett, on May 27, Hull emailed Daniels and reported that he had reconfigured the McLoughlin plant to a larger size—including a “little” encroachment on DND lands—and had replaced the Saanich East-North Oak Bay plant with a storage tank. Hull added, “Digesters would still be at Hartland although we can look for a closer site. Cost estimate expected tomorrow but expect total to be less than $800 million.”
    The very next day Hull emailed Daniels: “As it looks like Esquimalt is the likely plant location, I’m going to try to meet with Bev DeJardin [sic] to give her a ‘heads up’ before she reads about [it] in the agenda package.” Daniels quickly replied: “Good luck with that!!”
    Hull, apparently unaware of how to spell Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins’ name, similarly seemed to have no notion of the complex chain of political reactions the reconfiguration was destined to unleash.
    The rest is history. Without any public consultation with Esquimalt residents beforehand, a majority of sewage committee directors voted to approve a centralized plant at McLoughlin Point, thus eliminating a crucial political compromise—a more equitable distribution of the burden of hosting sewage treatment. By the end of that June the new plan was sitting on Minister Penner’s desk awaiting his approval. A few weeks later, the CRD’s public consultation with Desjardins’ community took the form of two open houses.
    If Brcic’s and Hull’s recommendation and verbal reports had been delivered to a public meeting, and committee directors’ comments and questions were forever immortalized on websites and in print, you can be certain every word would have been turned over and over and checked for veracity against the known record, including what the Peer Review Committee had actually reported to the CRD. There would have been the possibility of quickly holding these public officials accountable for their decisions. Instead, the people elected to protect the public interest allowed Brcic, Hull and Daniels to proceed down the McLoughlin path as far as they could go, burning through $45 million as they went, before finally being brought to a halt by “Bev DeJardin.”
     
    THE GRAVE RISK TO TAXPAYERS of important decisions being made at closed meetings is even more evident in the case of a November 16, 2012 meeting of Victoria City councillors. I have written about this previously, but there have been developments, as they say.
    Three bid proposals to build a replacement for the Johnson Street Bridge were received by the City of Victoria on November 1, 2012. Two weeks later, City councillors were summoned to a closed meeting and were given a report that recommended councillors authorize City staff to begin negotiation of a “fixed-price contract” to build the new bridge with PCL Constructors Westcoast. Without seeing any of the bids, the majority of councillors went along with that recommendation and, on New Years eve, they authorized City staff to sign a contract with PCL.
    But this past spring councillors were told PCL had submitted a change order asking for an additional $7.9 million and five and a half months of extra time to complete the project.
    What happened to the City’s “fixed-price contract” that, as Mayor Dean Fortin had promised, would protect the taxpayer? To answer that question the City then brought in engineering consultant Jonathan Huggett—yes, the same Jonathan Huggett mentioned above—to advise the City on future risks it faced with the project.
    Huggett delivered his report to councillors on July 24. At the same time, the City released details of PCL’s request. The City also released a response from MMM Group—the City’s project manager—to PCL’s claim for more time and money. MMM rejected PCL’s change order, claiming PCL knew back in November, 2012, when it submitted its bid proposal, that its changes to the design were so extensive that it should have allowed a 30 percent contingency in its pricing rather than the four percent contingency it used.
    At that July 24 meeting, Huggett told councillors they should expect to pay more if they wanted the project to get built. How much more he wouldn’t say, but he warned that PCL’s $7.9 million change order was likely not the last request for more money. Huggett committed to providing councillors, in September, a more complete estimate of how much additional money and time it will take to complete the bridge.
    Now let’s go back to that November 16, 2012 closed meeting. Following a few months of Focus fighting with the City for the record of what happened at that meeting, Victoria councillors “rose and reported” and a slightly redacted version of the minutes and staff report from that meeting were released to us. I’ll focus on just one issue that arises from those minutes that relates to the current dispute between the City and PCL: the contingency.
    At that November 16 meeting, the minutes show, at least one councillor was concerned about the tiny four percent contingency included in PCL’s bid proposal. Shouldn’t it have been higher? City engineering staff told councillors that the tiny contingency was “normal” for the stage the project was at. Councillors were also told, “This is a unique project, that is why the contingency is different.”
    In the privacy of a locked room, councillors were given seriously flawed advice by City staff. Don’t take my word for it; listen to what MMM Group said about the contingency issue in its refutation of PCL’s change order request for more money, released on July 24. MMM wrote that PCL’s design “was not more than 10 percent complete at the time of PCL’s [bid] proposal submission and it appears that PCL calculated quantities either from their optimized design without considering any contingencies, or from [our] design. In either case, this would lead to a significant error in their bid.” MMM went on to suggest that a 30 percent contingency would have been more appropriate.
    So let’s just review that. At that closed meeting in November 2012, councillors were advised by staff that a four percent contingency was “normal.” But now we know, thanks to MMM Group, that the contingency should have been 30 percent. Where did City staff get the idea that a four percent contingency was normal? And why did councillors believe them?
    For the answers to those questions we need to look at the minutes of the closed meeting at which City of Victoria staff recommended that councillors approve signing a “fixed-price contract” with PCL. That meeting took place on December 31, 2012. City councillors recently preempted our efforts to obtain the staff report and minutes from that closed meeting by, again, rising and reporting.
    That staff report stated: “The City’s Consultant, MMM Group, has reviewed the contract documents prepared by FMC and the City, including optimizations, contingency, project risks and the value engineering opportunities, and in their professional opinion recommend that the City proceed with the project and enter into a contract with PCL Westcoast.” I’ve added the emphasis to the word “contingency.” FMC, by the way, was the City’s legal adviser on the procurement.
    So MMM gave its blessing to the tiny four percent contingency on December 31, 2012, even though it now says that a more appropriate contingency would have been 30 percent.
    If a 30 percent contingency had been used, however, the City would have been looking at an overall project cost of $109 million, far above its “affordability ceiling” of $92.8 million. In other words, the project would have died, and along with it the $9.1 million contract MMM had inked with the City—just before councillors were encouraged to approve negotiations with PCL. Perhaps it wasn’t in MMM’s best interest back then to provide the City with its opinion that the contingency should have been 30 percent instead of four percent. But it seems to be now.
    Had City staff known that the basics of PCL’s bid proposal would be exposed to an open, public meeting, rather than to a group of councillors who, politically, couldn’t afford the project to fail, would City taxpayers now be facing a $110 million bill for the bridge? And would councillors, labouring under the scrutiny of retired engineers and would-be councillors, have been more prudent and less gullible? For the record, only councillors Lisa Helps and Ben Isitt voted against signing the contract with PCL.
     
    A BROWSE THROUGH the minutes of past meetings of the City of Victoria or the CRD quickly reveals the extent to which the public’s business is increasingly conducted in private. And, as these two cases illustrate, there’s a brutally high price to pay for this lack of transparency and accountability. Information is power, and those having power are generally reluctant to share it. With a civic election on the horizon there isn’t a better time to demand fuller transparency. 
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Katherine Palmer Gordon
    September 2014
    Is the Supreme Court of Canada’s declaration of Aboriginal title the death knell for proposed resource projects in BC?
     
    TRIBAL CHAIRMAN of the Tsilqhot’in National Government Chief Joe Alphonse, 46, was sitting in the Supreme Court of Canada on June 26 this year when it declared that the Tsilqhot’in Nation holds Aboriginal title to more than 1750 square kilometres of what is now former provincial Crown lands. “This decision will be remembered as a turning point in the history of Canada and its relationship with First Nations,” reflected Alphonse.
    Some corporate commentators were appalled—to the point of hysteria. Businessman Gwyn Morgan, writing in the Globe and Mail, described the recognition of Aboriginal title as “a recipe for investment-killing litigation” and that the decision amounts to “economic poison” for Canada, ushering in a new era of economically-devastating business uncertainty. 
    Others responded more optimistically. The BC Business Council refused an interview, but shortly after the decision was announced, Vice-President of Communications Tom Syer blogged: “Do not panic. The sky is not falling. The decision will have significant implications [but the] desired path forward is through engagement, dialogue and respectful negotiation.” 
    First Nations, of course, greeted the momentous decision with jubilation, and a strengthened resolve not to allow their hard-won rights and title to be trampled on any longer by government and industry. Several groups had previously launched lawsuits challenging Enbridge Inc’s Northern Gateway Pipeline and Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain proposal. Immediately after the decision, another nine First Nations followed suit. Two weeks later, on July 10, the Gitxsan First Nations served eviction notices on resource-based companies operating in their North Coast territory. 
    “This is the end,” says Joe Alphonse emphatically, “of denying First Nations’ rights and title. It’s the start of a new way for everyone.”
     
    A changed economic landscape
    Is the resource-based economy of BC dead in the water? No, says Alphonse, it isn’t. He believes the Tsilqhot’in decision could in fact be very good for the provincial economy. But the economic landscape has changed permanently, and that can’t be ignored. 
    Alphonse says that the case will, without question, help First Nations hold the wall against environmentally-devastating projects like pipelines and mines that threaten their lands and waters. In other words, companies like Enbridge, Kinder Morgan, Taseko Mining Group, and Imperial Metals just got a serious wake-up call. So did a provincial government that has been actively promoting LNG and mining mega-projects in BC.
    Says Alphonse, “People should understand that First Nations aren’t going to tolerate having these kinds of projects shoved down their throats any more. Some development proposals will always be unacceptable. They were unacceptable before the court case, they still are, and now the Tsilqhot’in title case has provided a legal club for First Nations to use to stop them.” Hence the flood of lawsuits against the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain pipeline proposals that immediately followed the decision, along with the eviction notice served by the Neskonlith on Imperial Metals Inc after the Mount Polley dam breach.
    On the other hand, Alphonse says: “First Nations will support development that is beneficial to them, so long as it’s the right kind of development. So it should also be understood that Aboriginal title is simply a legal club we can now use to ensure we benefit from development when it’s on our lands, to ensure that we’re included in planning, in revenue-sharing, and in employment opportunities.”
    Alphonse also notes that it is up to governments and industries to put to rest any panic-stricken hype about economic uncertainty by dealing promptly, respectfully, and honourably with their First Nations counterparts. “It’s in their hands. The only thing that will perpetuate economic uncertainty now is if governments and industry simply say ‘it’s business as usual,’ and nothing changes.” 
     
    Tsilqhot’in Nation v. British Columbia, 214 SCC 44
    Alphonse was just 14 years old in 1982, the year Aboriginal rights were enshrined in section 35 of Canada’s new constitution. Barely a year later, the provincial government granted a logging licence to Carrier Lumber Ltd over the area claimed in the court case, but failed to take into account the Aboriginal rights of the Tsilqhot’in. Their objections fell on deaf ears. 
    Faced with little other choice, they headed to court with their title claim. Both the provincial and federal governments opposed it, vigourously, for the next three decades. But on June 26 this year, they lost—resoundingly. 
    Anyone who thinks this case isn’t an outstanding victory for the Tsilqhot’in—and First Nations all over the province—hasn’t read it. The 40-page unanimous decision is compelling, straightforward, and crystal-clear. 
    For the first time ever, the Supreme Court declared the continued existence of Aboriginal title over a specific area of Crown land. It also put beyond debate that a First Nation holding proven Aboriginal title has the exclusive right to decide how the land is used and to benefit from it. If Aboriginal title is established and the consent of the First Nation hasn’t been obtained to a project on their lands, the project may have to be cancelled.
    That’s not without constraint. It’s a collective right, and the land must be managed for the benefit of future generations. As well, while governments have to respect title, they can infringe it to further a “compelling and substantive” governmental objective, such as the development of agriculture, forestry, mining, hydroelectric power, general economic development, the building of infrastructure, and protection of the environment.  
    That may seem a catch-all that would allow government to pretty much do as it wishes. But the Court also set out exacting standards that must be met in justifying any incursion on Aboriginal title. The infringement must be necessary; it can’t prevent future generations from controlling and benefiting from the land; and the benefits of the objective must outweigh any other adverse effects on Aboriginal title. 
    These considerations can’t be determined solely by government, as they have in the past. The First Nation’s views must be given equal weight. In other words, it’s no longer a one-way street in which government makes all the decisions. Governments can avoid having to justify a proposed infringement, the Court pointed out bluntly, by simply obtaining the consent of the First Nation holding title in the first place. 
    While the provincial government can continue to regulate Aboriginal title lands, it has a very limited scope of authority. Regulating pest control would be fine, for example, said the Court; but issuing timber licences to a third party without justification or consultation, as it had done in this case, clearly would not. 
     
    Title here, there and everywhere
    “Proving Aboriginal title is no longer a political pipedream,” observes Victoria-based lawyer Drew Mildon. “That’s huge for First Nations across the country. Their negotiating position on any project proposals became much, much stronger overnight.” 
    Mildon, who was a legal adviser to the Tsilqhot’in on the court case, believes the case sets the stage for other First Nations across the province to bring their own successful title claims: “When you scratch the surface of British Columbia, there is existing title all over the province.” 
    Merle Alexander, a Vancouver-based Aboriginal rights lawyer, agrees with Mildon. “We’re looking at this for a number of clients, many of whom have territory that would be crossed by various proposed pipelines. It seems very likely that many of them will be able to prove title along those pipeline corridors.”
    Alexander also says that while the list of potentially justifiable infringements seems broad, it is still a significant hurdle to jump for proponents because of the criteria imposed upon it by the Supreme Court. He is particularly taken with the Court’s suggestion that the Crown avoid the risks of unjustifiably infringing Aboriginal title or having to cancel unauthorized projects by simply obtaining consent from First Nations in the first place. 
    “To date governments have taken a very narrow, self-interested approach to the issue. That’s demonstrated by their fairly consistent track record of losing court cases,” says Alexander. “This now encourages governments to be more forward-thinking and obtain consent as a starting point for all future projects on any lands where Aboriginal title is asserted. That’s also a safer bet from a strategic point of view: It minimizes the risk of litigation that the government probably won’t win, or that they’d have to cancel a project when the First Nation successfully sues for title.”
     
    Governments need to do a complete rethink
    In a radio interview shortly after the decision was announced, Union of BC Indian Chiefs President Stewart Phillip commented drily: “There’s been a deafening silence from Ottawa and Victoria. They weren’t expecting this.”
    “The federal government and British Columbia have gone very quiet,” agrees Joe Alphonse. “We’ve been contacted by some senior government staff, but I’m waiting to hear from the Prime Minister and the Premier. Stephen Harper and Christy Clark should be leading the way at this momentous time.” 
    Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be. The only statement that’s been made by the federal government was a short press release on June 26 by Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt saying that the government is reviewing the decision to determine next steps. 
    MP Jean Crowder, the federal NDP critic on Aboriginal Affairs, thinks that’s unfortunate. Crowder sees the decision as an opportunity for governments to move forward by recognizing Aboriginal title and developing protocols for dealing with resource projects, so that everyone is clear on their roles and responsibilities. “That has the potential to provide the certainty anyone considering resource development is looking for. Up until now, it’s been managed on a court case by court case basis and that’s made it difficult for business to do any kind of planning.” If the decision is seen as an opportunity to manage the development process better, says Crowder, “that gives us a way of moving forward.” 
    As for the provincial government, on July 21, BC Premier Christy Clark told a Pacific Northwest Economic Region LNG conference: “To me, the decision gives us a little more certainty and that’s going to be good for the economy. We’re still working through the details and how it might change the way we do things.” 
    But the provincial government, added the Premier, has already been doing a good job on the Aboriginal relations file: “Since the Delgamuukw [Aboriginal rights] decision came out the government has learned how to deal fairly and honourably with First Nations and to change the way we do things, and that’s been really good for the economy.”
    BC NDP Aboriginal relations critic Scott Fraser thinks more is needed: “It’s time for the government to recognize that Aboriginal rights and title exist, and to acknowledge it respectfully and openly. That’s what will bring certainty to industry and to government. Continuing to force litigation will only lead to confrontation. It’s far better to get out of the court system to reconcile jurisdictional issues and that needs to be through recognition of title.”
    Merle Alexander agrees. He also points to the number of Aboriginal rights court cases that the provincial government has faced over the last decade and the fact that BC has a track record of losing them: “So the Courts are consistently finding in fact that BC is failing in its duties towards First Nations. That suggests that the Province hasn’t been dealing fairly and honourably with First Nations.” 
    There could be positive implications for the economy, he says, but only if the government and industry are willing to embrace the new legal reality facing them. “If the Premier’s saying it’s just business as usual, that they’re doing everything right already, that’s not going to be good for the economy. That’s just going to mean more litigation.” 
    Merv Child is a Victoria-based lawyer and executive director of Nanwakolas Council, which works with seven First Nations on northern Vancouver Island to support them in land use planning and decision-making. Like Alexander, Child is sceptical; he says that despite what the Premier says, the Clark government hasn’t been particularly open to positive solutions in dealing with Aboriginal issues. 
    “We keep hearing that there’s no money to do anything, for example, but I think that the government needs to think longer-term about the positive financial consequences of working with First Nations.” He agrees with Alexander that the status quo isn’t good enough anymore: “There needs to be a complete re-think of the relationship. If that happens, then there is some real promise for the future.”
     
    Taseko in denial?
    Lawyer Robin Junger is head of the Aboriginal Law group at McMillan LLP, which acts for the Taseko Mining Group. Junger is typical of legal commentators advising resource-based industry; he is adamant that the Tsilqhot’in case is not a “game-changer” that will undermine resource projects, nor does it represent “a fundamental advance” for the law of Aboriginal title. 
    Junger’s opinion may help explain Taseko’s position on the case. Taseko is attempting to develop its proposed New Prosperity gold-copper mine near Teztan Biny (Fish Lake), a sacred place in the heart of Tsilqhot’in territory. The proposed mine has been much-reviled by First Nations and environmental groups, and has failed federal environmental assessment twice. Taseko continues to push the proposal, however, and takes this rather surprising position on its website: “The ruling confirms that Taseko’s New Prosperity [mine] is located in an area where Aboriginal title does not exist.” 
    Merle Alexander laughs when he reads the statement. Words like “deluded” and “deranged” pepper his response when asked if Taseko is correct in its interpretation of the case. Both Mildon and Alexander agree that the case can’t possibly be interpreted as meaning that title doesn’t exist elsewhere in the territory. 
    Alexander points out: “The Tsilhqot’in intentionally and strategically chose to claim a targeted portion of the traditional territory. If challenged, it is highly likely the Tsilqhot’in would succeed in a title claim to the New Prosperity site. The proposal has also been rejected twice because of the potential effect on Aboriginal interests being too great to justify the project as being in the public interest. That’s not about to change.”
    Drew Mildon concurs: “It seems a surprising conclusion. The Tsilhqot’in only requested a declaration of title for the areas where it was proven. New Prosperity was rejected twice because of a host of significant adverse impacts, aside from the title issue, and it is ridiculous to suggest that the ruling in any way changes that.” 
     
    Northern Gateway? Not likely
    Enbridge may be equally deluded in thinking its Northern Gateway project can still advance in the face of this decision. 
    The company’s Communications Manager Ivan Giesbrecht emailed: “This important decision affirms existing principles surrounding First Nations title in Canada. Resolving these issues provides greater clarity to complex matters and creates opportunities for respectful relations. We have more work to do and are committed to building on progress in the months ahead.”
    However, Stewart Phillip’s view, typical of most First Nations affected by the proposed pipeline, suggests Giesbrecht is overly-optimistic: “The Northern Gateway Pipeline cannot proceed without the consent of every First Nation whose territory the pipeline would cross, and we know that will never happen.” No less than eight First nations have already taken legal action, and, according to West Coast Environmental Law, over 100 First Nations have banned the Enbridge project and other tar sands infrastructure from their territories and watersheds through various declarations.
    Merle Alexander points out that if Enbridge insists on attempting to push forward with the pipeline, it will be, almost without question, the next legal Aboriginal title confrontation that industry and governments face. “And they’re going to lose. It is absolutely impossible for them to achieve consent or prove that the pipeline wouldn’t irreconcilably interfere with the enjoyment by future generations of the land it crosses.”
    Jean Crowder agrees: “I think Enbridge won’t be able to overcome the challenges it is facing now.” Scott Fraser also shares that view: “Projects like Northern Gateway have been almost universally opposed by First Nations. Without First Nation consent, both governments should be saying ‘No’ as well.” That, adds Fraser, “is going to be true of every major infrastructure project in this province unless governments engage in a real partnership approach with First Nations.”
     
    The Province and LNG
    Despite the Supreme Court ruling, Taseko, as we know, continues to push for approval of the New Prosperity mine. There is also no sign that Enbridge or Kinder Morgan are backing off their pipeline projects. Given the glacial pace at which the federal government does anything—it took four years for it to review and update half-a-dozen of its treaty mandates, announced in late July—holding out any hope that it will act in the short-term seems fruitless.
    On the Province’s side, Aboriginal Relations Minister John Rustad will only say that his government needs time to review the ruling thoroughly. However, he adds: “We’re not going to tell First Nations what we’re doing. We’re going to sit down with them and work with them to decide what the response should look like.” 
    He points out that in the last ten years the provincial government has successfully negotiated hundreds of shared decision-making agreements with First Nations on everything from treaty to revenue-sharing to conservation management: “I think the strengths we’ve developed in taking that shared decision-making approach will be very helpful in our discussions with First Nations on this issue.” 
    As evidence of that, on August 6, the provincial government announced that it has agreed with the Taku River Tlingit First Nation to protect over one million hectares of Crown land around Atlin from hydro-electric development and commercial logging.
    Of course, the Taku River Tlingit have also been very successful in Court defending their Aboriginal rights. In other parts of the province, Rustad’s words are less encouraging. Asked if the government is prepared to cancel exploration permits provided to pipeline project proponents such as Enbridge, if and when title is proven along the pipeline corridor by other First Nations, Rustad remained non-committal: “We have statutory requirements and processes to follow and we need to follow them.” 
    A successful Aboriginal title lawsuit will trump any such statutory requirements, naturally. Unfortunately, it sounds like that may be what is required. 
    In the meantime, the provincial government has also not slowed down for a moment in promoting its LNG strategy. How will it respond to continued First Nations opposition to LNG proposals? 
    Rustad professes to be “confused” by the question. “I haven’t heard any solid opposition to LNG,” he says. “There may be some local issues we will be working through—concerns about environmental impacts— but we’ve been having very positive discussions and I believe we will work through that.”
    Setting aside for a moment the fact that it doesn’t get more local than an LNG pipeline running through your back yard, or that having land declared as Aboriginal title land will likely focus such “local” issues as environmental concerns in an entirely new way, Rustad may be under a serious misapprehension that LNG faces no serious First Nations opposition.
    Chief Terry Teegee of the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council has stated repeatedly and unequivocally that the Province doesn’t have a social licence to promote LNG: “They haven’t addressed the cumulative effects of these pipelines in our territories.” Fort Nelson Chief Sharlene Gale has stated that the price her First Nation is being asked to pay to fulfill BC’s LNG strategy is too high. The Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs have unanimously rejected the Pacific Trails Partnership LNG proposal, and the Unist’ot’en Camp remains firmly in place in its path. 
    “There is no sweeping endorsement of LNG by First Nations, and the reason is obvious,” Stewart Phillip told Focus earlier this year. “The impacts of fracking are one of the ugliest footprints of oil and gas to witness.” 
    In the face of such stated distaste for LNG, and with Aboriginal title now in their back pockets, the likelihood of First Nations simply accepting new LNG proposals without demur seems highly unlikely, despite Rustad’s optimism.
     
    “The only route to go”
    There is a very simple formula for industry to follow if they want to keep working in Aboriginal territory, says Joe Alphonse: “Work with us, not against us.” 
    At the wrong end of the working-together spectrum is the Taseko Mining Group. The company has failed spectacularly to handle matters with the Tsilqhot’in an effective manner: “I can’t say anything good about Taseko,” says Alphonse. “They keep trying to push that mine forward but they don’t want to include us or work with us. They just see us a hindrance. But I can guarantee that a title case there will be successful. There have been a lot of archaeological finds there. It’s a sacred place.” 
    But Alphonse says Taseko stands in stark contrast to several companies that have worked closely and successfully with the Tsilqhot’in since well before the Supreme Court decision came down. All of them have been ahead of the game in seeing the value in working with the First Nation and ensuring the Tsilqhot’in share the revenues and benefits of their developments, to their mutual advantage. “It’s a win-win situation for both sides that way. Everyone gets what they need and want out of a project.”
    Working together will also be a good strategy for First Nations to take amongst themselves, believes Merv Child. Child speculates that the Tsilqhot’in decision may be a good impetus to encourage First Nations to resolve overlapping Aboriginal title claims to their mutual advantage: “The rights that go with Aboriginal title are very powerful,” he observes. “If First Nations can collaborate to demonstrate their respective occupation and use of various areas, that will allow them to leverage the Tsilqhot’in decision in discussions with industry and government to their greatest benefit.” 
    But for now, the focus is on more immediate matters, and the game-changing decision itself. “We did the impossible,” says Joe Alphonse. “We won title when governments never thought we could. Now we hope that those governments will take it seriously and that will lead to a better future for all First Nations in this country.” Indeed, some would argue it will lead to a better and more environmentally-sound economic future for all Canadians.
    The onus, repeats Alphonse, is for federal and provincial government and industry leaders to start dealing with First Nations in terms of economic development in an honourable way. “That’s where certainty lies. That’s good for everyone,” he says. “It’s the only route to go.”
    Katherine Palmer Gordon is the author of six books of non-fiction, including several BC Bestsellers and a Haig-Brown prize-winner. Her most recent book is We Are Born with the Songs Inside Us: Lives and Stories of First Nations People in British Columbia (Harbour Publishing). She has 20 years experience working with First Nations on land claims and inter-governmental relations.

    David Broadland
    July 2014
    Are City of Victoria taxpayers getting ripped off by seismic sleight-of-hand on the new Johnson Street Bridge project?
     
    BY JULY 7, the City of Victoria should have released details on the 6-month schedule delay and $7.9 million change order claimed in February by PCL, the company building the new Johnson Street Bridge. Focus filed an FOI for that change order in April. The City refused to release the record to us, invoking a section of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act that allows them to withhold a record that they intend to release to the public within 60 working days. The City must now release the change order by July 7. So watch for it.
    What we can tell you from other documents obtained by Focus through FOI is that the City’s committee of senior staff monitoring the project knew by mid-December, 2013 that a dispute with PCL was emerging. Councillors were informed in late March and the public learned of it at an April 10 council meeting. At that meeting City Manager Jason Johnson referred to this as “putting the information out early.” In late May, the City’s project manager MMM Group said it didn’t think the City should entertain PCL’s claims. The City has been silent on the matter since.
    During that April 10 council meeting, City of Victoria Director of Engineering and Public Works Dwayne Kalynchuk told councillors PCL’s claim for more money was based on “design delay” and “scope growth.” He offered no further elaboration. But the following day, during a CFAX Radio interview with Terry Moore, Kalynchuk linked PCL’s claim for more money and time to changes that were needed to “beef up” certain elements of the bridge design following “seismic analyses.”
    Kalynchuk’s choice of venue to make this announcement was peculiar given an exchange that occurred at the previous day’s council meeting. Councillor Lisa Helps had asked a question about what engineers expected would happen to the bridge in a big earthquake. The lifting part of the bridge is balanced on top of 24 steel rollers. There’s nothing attaching the lifting span to the substructure.  This is like a house sitting on a concrete foundation with no anchor bolts to prevent the house from bouncing off the foundation during an earthquake. Helps asked, “Could the bridge be knocked off its rollers in ‘the big one’?”
    In response, a Hardesty & Hanover engineer (MMM subcontracted the design of the bascule span to the New York engineering firm Hardesty & Hanover) acknowledged that a “full seismic analysis” of the design had been done, but his answer didn’t include the words “No, the bridge will not be knocked off its rollers.” The engineer said the bridge had been designed as a “Critical Bridge” and as such, “Collapse of the bridge is not permissible. There may be damage to elements of the bridge that will limit operation for a short period of time but its traffic carrying capacity will not be impeded after a seismic event.”
    Helps didn’t know it but the engineer’s description of the expected level of service after “the big one” for a “Critical Bridge” wasn’t accurate. A more accurate description of the seismic performance expected for this “Critical Bridge” is contained in a document prepared by MMM in 2012, Johnson Street Bridge: Seismic Design Criteria. That document notes that after a “Cascadia subduction event,” otherwise known as “the big one,” bridge service would be “Significantly limited; limited access to emergency traffic is possible within days of the earthquake. Full access to public may resume in several weeks to months.”
    That’s quite different than “its traffic carrying capacity will not be impeded after a seismic event,” as Helps was told.
    More importantly, MMM’s criteria are a lower standard than City officials requested in 2010, when they told electors before a borrowing referendum that the new bridge would be built to "the highest standard of earthquake protection." In the lead up to the referendum, Councillors insisted the bridge should have uninterrupted access for emergency vehicles after “the big one”—that's the highest standard. After all, what good would access for fire trucks, ambulances and emergency rescue vehicles be if it takes “days” to provide that access? Fire would already have destroyed buildings and people trapped under rubble would already have died from their injuries if it took "days" to get emergency equipment to the scene. That's what councillors argued in 2010 when they imposed this condition on both a new bridge and a rehabilitation of the current bridge. MMM didn’t tell councillors that their request for "the highest standard" was unreasonable, MMM simply said that level of seismic performance would cost more money: $10 million more. They even said a lower standard, the one adopted by the Province in its seismic retrofit program, was "not recommended." So City councillors of the day voted to pay $10 million extra for that level of public safety. Now, taxpayers are paying for it, but they’re not getting it.
    Following the engineer’s response to Councillor Helps, the councillor asked if that seismic analysis could be made public. Kalynchuk said, “I believe that information has been requested under freedom of information and has been released.” Mayor Fortin prompted Kalynchuk: “And posted to our website?” Kalynchuk provided a reassuring response: “Oooh, it’s binders of material, so I’m not sure that’s available. We’ll see if there’s a summary that can be posted.”
    Kalynchuk didn’t say, “Oh, and by the way, the $7.9 million and 6-month delay were the result of the bridge design failing one or more seismic analyses.” Instead, he waited until he was safely in Terry Moore’s studio the next day to make that connection.
    As it turns out, Kalynchuk’s “binders of material” didn’t exist. Focus had requested the seismic assessment of the new design last November and the City had told us it had no such documents in its possession. Following Kalynchuk’s answers to Helps and Fortin, we filed a second FOI for the “binders of material” Kalynchuk had referred to. The City again responded that they could find no such record.
    I then emailed Kalynchuk and asked him about those “binders of material,” and inquired as to whether he’d ever seen the seismic analysis. Kalynchuk responded, “…the staff from [Hardesty & Hanover] stated at their April presentation a full seismic review was conducted on the bridge. While I assumed some data was provided to the City, this was incorrect.”
    Since the new bridge was originally justified on the basis of the seismic risk associated with the old bridge, this seemed like an issue City officials would make sure they understood as fully as possible. I asked Kalynchuk, the senior City engineer overseeing the project on the public’s behalf, if he perhaps ought to have reviewed the seismic assessment for the new bridge before construction began, or at least before fabrication of the bascule span commenced.
    Kalynchuk replied, “…it is the responsibility of [MMM] to assure the project is delivered in accordance with project specifications which includes seismic. As stated, [Hardesty & Hanover] have undertaken a full seismic assessment to assure the final product meets the specs. Upon completion of the job they will be required to provide letters of assurance to certify construction meets the specs and design. With respect to the seismic analyses, it is not expected that the detailed data would be provided to us as we are not structural engineers and probably would not understand it. We will rely on [MMM] to provide full letters of assurance.”
    Is Kalynchuk’s faith in MMM warranted?
    MMM's design, which it claimed in 2010 was “tried, tested and proven,” has undergone two major redesigns since. The two other companies that bid on the contract to build the bridge both declined to use MMM's design. One sited the design's apparent seismic vulnerability. When a version of the design finally made it through to a seismic analysis, it apparently failed. Kalynchuk can’t know how many times it failed, or if it ever actually passed—he’s never seen the analyses. MMM have never publicly acknowledged that its design will not be built to "the highest standard of earthquake protection."
    The “design delay” all this hidden seismic analysis caused appears to be substantial. The contract between PCL and the City stipulated that MMM’s design would be completed, and advanced drawings provided to PCL, by May 20, 2013. But a revised project schedule delivered to the City by PCL last February (and obtained by FOI) shows that design work for the bascule span wasn’t expected to be completed until May 8, 2014. 
    On the political side, Fortin has maintained the City has a “fixed-price contract” with PCL and doesn’t intend to pay one penny more. But is it a fixed-price contract? City officials may have misled the mayor and councillors in November 2012 when they said PCL had requested no amendments to the City’s draft contract. PCL’s bid proposal had indeed suggested amendments to the contract, although the City has refused to disclose the exact nature of those suggestions.
    But a copy of the draft contract, obtained by Focus through FOI, shows substantial additional terms were included in the final contract the City signed with PCL. In the section covering “Changes,” for example, a clause was added that created a “Schedule of Prices”—an extensive list of possible sources of changes and an “allocated contingency” for each. Perhaps the mayor and councillors thought all possibilities were covered in that list. Unfortunately for City taxpayers, neither “design delay” or “scope growth” are included on that list and $7.9 million is over three times as much as the project’s entire completion contingency. That doesn’t mean the City won’t have to pay the $7.9 million. It means that the City must determine where the money will come from. Whether they will determine that in or out of court may become clearer after July 7.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Katherine Palmer Gordon
    July 2014
    There’s little evidence to support the Joint Review Panel’s critical conclusion that diluted bitumen is “unlikely to sink.”
     
    WHETHER DILUTED BITUMEN WILL FLOAT on the surface or sink in the ocean, says chemical scientist Thomas King wryly, “is a simple question, but it trails a raft of complex issues.”
    King, based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is leading Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s research into the behaviour of diluted bitumen under various environmental conditions. “The trouble is,” he says, “that we have very limited information about dilbit’s properties in water. Very little research has been done so far.” 
    Yet, despite the lack of research, the National Energy Board’s Joint Review Panel (JRP) recommended approval of Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline project (subject to 209 conditions). And on June 17, the federal government did just that.
    The Northern Gateway Pipeline, if completed, will carry 525,000 barrels of diluted bitumen (“dilbit”) daily from Alberta’s oil sands to Kitimat for export to Asia. Kinder Morgan Canada’s expanded Trans Mountain Pipeline is intended to carry another 890,000 barrels of dilbit daily to the Port of Vancouver, also for export. Together, according to Transport Canada, that represents an additional 600 oil-laden tankers a year traversing British Columbia’s coastal waters. 
    The ability to recover dilbit spilled by an errant tanker in these turbulent, rock-strewn waters hangs on the response to that so-called simple question: Does it sink or does it float? 
    The JRP seemed to think it had a simple answer, stating in its report: “The evidence does not indicate that dilbit is prone to sink in the marine environment.” Unfortunately, it would seem that the evidence is nowhere near that clear. If anything, the indications to date suggest that dilbit is prone to sink in the ocean. 
    Either way, two things are clear. We’re a long way yet from getting the information needed to answer the question definitively. And, until we have it, Canada’s ability to respond effectively to any dilbit spill will remain severely impoverished. 
    Canada has experience dealing with surface spills of conventional light oil and has developed techniques to deal with such spills, says King. But those techniques aren’t foolproof by any means. And when dilbit is spilled, he points out: “Standard recovery approaches can’t be used anyway.” Submerged dilbit is much harder to locate and remove. It may be completely irrecoverable in deep water. 
    There is one thing we do know for certain, he adds: “Damage to marine habitat and its living resources [from sinking bitumen] is expected to be much greater.”
     
    The great sink/float debate
    Conventional light oil typically floats on the surface of water—hence the oily sheen commonly seen around docks, for example. Undiluted bitumen, a form of a heavy, viscous crude oil, is considerably denser (which is why it is sometimes referred to as “heavy oil”). Bitumen deposits are often referred to as “tar sands” because of the thick, sticky texture of the oil. 
    Undiluted bitumen is too thick to transport by pipe. Various types of condensate or light synthetic crude oil are therefore used as diluents. The end product is referred to by the generic term “dilbit” or “synbit,” but there may be dozens of different varieties. No-one knows for sure how many currently exist, however, because the development of new chemical combinations is not only industrial proprietary property, but constantly changing as new research is undertaken.  
    Oil companies, including Enbridge, have typically taken the stance that dilbit floats and therefore doesn’t pose a greater risk to the environment than conventional oil. 
    Alberta-based Crude Quality Inc, for example, reported in 2011 to American authorities in relation to the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline that “under standard conditions,” dilbit will float on water. A 2012 report by Ottawa-based SL Ross Environmental Research Ltd drew a similar conclusion. A year later Dr Alan Maki, a witness for Enbridge at National Energy Board hearings on the Northern Gateway project, told the NEB even more strongly: “It is an immutable fact of physics that [dilbit] will float. It simply cannot sink in water.”
    Independent scientists believe exactly the opposite, however. Dr Merv Fingas, an Edmonton-based environmental physicist, former head of Environment Canada’s oil spill R&D unit and the author of seven books about oil spills, told the Globe and Mail that Maki’s claim was simply “not true.” Fingas added: “Every time we did get a sample of any kind of bitumen in the lab and analyzed it, it always sank.”
    Last year American environmental chemist Dr Jeffrey Short, who assessed the impacts of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill for the Alaska and US governments, looked into the susceptibility of dilbit to sinking on behalf of Kitkatla’s Gitxaala Nation. Short reviewed previous studies and then assessed that data against the typical rough, windy weather and cold temperature conditions in the Douglas Channel and Hecate Strait. 
    He concluded that those previous studies had failed to take into account these typical conditions. The studies were therefore unreliable at best, and completely invalid in some cases. He also pointed out that testing has taken place on only two dilbit products to date. There are many varieties of dilbit being produced, so to conclude that all dilbit floats based on those tests, stated Short, simply doesn’t add up. In fact, he posited the opposite: “Because…only a very few bitumen products have been evaluated experimentally, it is plausible that other products that might be shipped through the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline might be even more susceptible to sinking.” 
    Short also told The Tyee that he was “mystified” by the lack of available scientific information about dilbit given its importance in analyzing the environmental impact of the Northern Gateway proposal. “On a project of this significance,” he commented to writer Andrew Nikiforuk, “Canadians should go into it with their eyes open and not base your public policy on fantasies.”
    Unfortunately, it seems independent Canadian experts able to speak knowledgeably about dilbit’s buoyancy are thin on the ground on the west coast. The University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University, and the University of British Columbia all failed to identify anyone on faculty with this kind of expertise. The provincial Ministry of Environment admitted that there is also no one within the BC government who can speak to the science. 
    Even Merv Fingas, who was so outspoken on the topic just last year, can apparently no longer speak about the issue. Fingas refused an interview request, writing: “Due to commitments on a particular study I am unable to do that.”
     
    Unprepared for 600 tankers
    On November 30 last year, the government released a multi-departmental report confirming what King is saying: “The potential range of behaviour, fate and treatment options for a possible marine spill of diluted bitumen products is not well understood. There is little information on the spill behaviour, fate, impacts and remediation options for diluted bitumen spills.” It did, however, note: “When fine sediments were suspended in the saltwater, high-energy wave action mixed the sediments with the diluted bitumen, causing the mixture to sink or be dispersed as floating tarballs.”
    About the same time, Transport Canada released two reports reviewing Canada’s ship-source oil spill and response regime and assessing the risk of spills in Canadian waters south of the 60th Parallel. It made this disturbing admission: “Advances in research and development of response techniques are not captured in the Canadian [response] regime and there has also been a gradual weakening of the regime in other respects. Over time, knowledge and skills sets within Government have eroded…The Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development also identified a number of gaps, largely the result of insufficient data and information collection and analysis.” 
    In other words, despite the push to export oil, the government isn’t even close to being prepared for a conventional oil spill at sea, let alone a dilbit disaster. The reports contain further bad news for west coasters: One of the areas of highest probable risk right now for a crude oil spill over 10,000 tonnes is the area around the southern tip of Vancouver Island. “In the Strait of Juan de Fuca,” notes one report in unequivocal terms, “Canada should be prepared for a spill of crude oil.” 
    What happens when 600 additional oil-laden tankers a year start navigating British Columbia’s wild waters? It would seem neither Transport Canada—nor any other arm of the federal government—has any idea. 
    Only recently, as the result of heavy public pressure, is the issue being taken seriously by the feds. The November 30 report also announced the launch of the coordinated scientific research initiative in which Tom King is participating. In collaboration with DFO, Environment Canada and Natural Resources Canada have begun investigating what may happen in the event of a dilbit spill in Douglas Channel or Hecate Strait. The primary goal of the research initiative is to “improve the preparedness and response for marine spills” of dilbit so that responders can “make informed decisions on the appropriate oil spill response options and strategies.” 
    King’s team is looking not only into whether, how quickly and how far dilbit sinks in water, but also how the heavy oil behaves in different weather conditions; the impacts of salinity, rainfall, wind, sunlight, water temperature and sedimentation; and the environmental impacts of bitumen in different situations. They are also reviewing the effectiveness under water of existing conventional oil recovery techniques and chemical dispersants—all issues that must be understood before effective dilbit recovery methods can be developed. 
    The first phase of the research work isn’t expected to be completed before March 2016. Funding has been provided to continue development of ocean and dilbit behaviour models through to the end of 2018. It’s uncertain whether this is sufficient time for the work to be completed, however. In the meantime, the environmental impacts of a major bitumen spill are still only being guessed at. 
    We do know that three years after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, tar balls—sticky, solid pieces of oil that form when water combines with spilled oil and which can travel hundreds of kilometres—could still be found in the coastal marshes of Louisiana. In 2013, it was estimated that approximately 680 million litres of dilbit remained in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River after an Enbridge pipeline burst in 2010, spilling more than three times that amount into the Kalamazoo. Portions of the river still remain closed. 
     
    The JRP’s conclusions
    Notwithstanding the scientific uncertainty, the JRP was dismissive of evidence suggesting that dilbit will sink, stating: “Although there is some uncertainty regarding the behavior of dilbit spilled in water, the Panel finds that…dilbit is unlikely to sink due to natural weathering processes alone, within the time frame in which initial, on-water response may occur, or in the absence of sediment or other particulate matter interactions. The Panel finds that a dilbit spill is not likely to sink as a continuous layer that coats the seabed or riverbed.”
    The JRP also stated—in contradiction to the concerns expressed by Transport Canada about the negative impact of a lack of scientific information on response capability—“In the Panel's view, the weight of evidence indicates that disagreement among experts on the fate and behaviour of spilled oil is related to specific details that may not be significant from a spill response perspective.” 
    That’s despite the fact that the JRP also admitted it didn’t have enough information: “Additional research is required to answer outstanding questions related to the detailed behaviour and fate of dilbit. All parties with technical expertise on the topic were in agreement with this. The Panel finds that research on the behaviour and cleanup of heavy oils is required to inform detailed spill response planning and heavy oil spill response in marine and freshwater environments.” 
    Condition 167 of the JRP’s approval requires Enbridge to file much more detailed information on spill modelling and response with the National Energy Board at least three years prior to commencing operations. How that might change the JRP’s conclusions remains unclear.
     
    Federal scientists’ investigations
    Environment Canada, the lead federal agency investigating potential environmental impacts of spilled dilbit, could not “accommodate” a request to interview one of their scientists. Communications staff, however, confirmed: “In certain environmental conditions, dilbit can sink in saltwater environments. In general, how combinations of factors might cause oil to sink is not well known currently. Further research is needed.” 
    DFO did permit Tom King and another of its senior scientists, Sidney-based Dr Charles Hannah, to speak about the latest state of the science on this subject. In Halifax, Tom King has been conducting experiments in flume tanks with two variations of dilbit. “There are several things that are important to understand,” he explains. “Dilbit will float at first, because it is less dense than water. However, lighter diluent material will start to evaporate. You can smell it—it’s the kind of smell you get at a gas station.” Some of the oil will start to dissolve. What remains will be subject to “weathering”—the effects of rain, temperature, sunlight, turbulence, wind, and microbes in the water. 
    “Our tests, which mimic what will happen in a real world environment, indicate that by the sixth day of natural weathering, bitumen will sink.” Other factors may cause it to sink more rapidly. “If it spills in freshwater, bitumen will sink faster because freshwater is less dense than brackish (partly salty) or ocean water. In the Kalamazoo River, parts of the oil sank within four days.” 
    Heavy seas will also make bitumen sink faster. So will the presence of sediment in the water. Many sediment-laden glacial rivers empty into Douglas Channel: “We’re looking at that right now and the impact when bitumen combines with sediment suspended in water,” says King. 
    Where the spill occurs is also critical. In deep water, the oil won’t necessarily sink to the bottom but may instead hit a point of neutral buoyancy where it will remain suspended. In shallower waters, oil will likely coat the ocean floor or riverbed. As we’ve learned from the Kalamazoo River experience, it may be just as difficult to remove in that situation as if it were floating freely in sub-marine waters.
    The next step, King continues, is to use the data being generated by his lab to develop ocean models predicting what will happen in a range of different circumstances. That’s where Charles Hannah comes in. 
    “What we’re doing here at DFO in Sidney,” says Hannah, “is collecting ocean observations on the north coast and building an ocean circulation model that factors in what happens to water movement based on wind, tides, current, weather conditions and so on. That will inform the development by Environment Canada of different oil spill scenarios and remediation methods to deal with different situations. ” 
    In Hecate Strait and the Douglas Channel, says Hannah, ocean conditions vary widely from location to season. “At Kitimat, for example, when the rivers are in full flood there is more freshwater entering the Channel. So at some times of year bitumen might sink faster, or have different neutral buoyancy zones.”
    The problem for the modellers is the same as the one King and other researchers face: a lack of information. Asked what other factors he is taking into account in developing ocean models specific to the north coast, for example, Hannah replied: “We just don’t know yet.” 
    He cites Kitimat again as an example. “It’s the rainfall capital of the world, but what weathering impact does rain have on bitumen? The knowledge may be out there but we don't have it yet. We do know a lot about wave impacts, but the wave environment varies enormously in that area. We need to start to study that too, and its importance. ” 
     
    Sailing into dangerous waters
    Will dilbit-laden tankers be plying Hecate Strait—one of the most dangerous bodies of water in the world (waves can reach 26 metres)—or indeed Juan de Fuca Strait, already identified as high risk for an oil spill—before all these questions have been answered? 
    Asked to confirm whether current spill response capacity still remains insufficient, Transport Canada replied instead: “As part of new measures for our World Class Tanker Safety System announced on May 13, 2014, the federal government will be implementing Area Response Planning starting in four local areas. Under Area Response Planning, response plans will be tailored to reflect local conditions such as geography, environmental sensitivities, and vessel traffic.”
    It also admitted again that it doesn’t yet have the information it needs: “As well, the Government will be undertaking additional research and development on the behaviour of petroleum products and a range of response measures to quickly and effectively respond to and clean up a marine oil spill, should one occur.” Translation: No, as things stand, we aren’t ready for a spill. 
    Bitumen certainly doesn’t sink if it isn’t permitted to spill in the ocean in the first place, but there appears to be no appetite on the part of the federal government to consider whether dilbit-laden tankers should be allowed in those tempestuous waters in the first place, given the associated risks. Nor, given its acceptance of the JRP’s recommendation to approve the Northern Gateway project, does it seem concerned about the discrepancies between the JRP’s conclusions and the views of several of its own departments. 
    That may change as a plethora of lawsuits challenging the JRP’s findings starts hitting the courts. Joining several other environment groups and dozens of First Nations in attacking the decision, the BC Federation of Naturalists launched its suit within hours of the federal government’s decision. The view expressed by President Kees Visser is typical of the opposition being expressed: “We cannot stand by and allow Cabinet to approve this ill-conceived project on the basis of a JRP report that is so flawed and incomplete.” 
    Even if unsuccessful, the litigation may tie up the process long enough for the vital missing research to be completed and for response capability to be improved. 
    Whether that will be enough is another outstanding question. In the meantime, British Columbians will have to hope that question will only ever have to be answered in theory. 
    Katherine Palmer Gordon is the author of six books of non-fiction, including several BC Bestsellers and a Haig-Brown prize-winner.

    David Broadland
    June 2014
    Esquimalt shoots CRD in foot. Now what?
     
    FOLLOWING THE CRD'S APPEAL to Environment Minister Mary Polak to intervene in the “impasse” between Esquimalt and the CRD on amending zoning to allow for a larger sewage treatment plant at McLoughlin Point, Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins wrote her own letter. Desjardins asked Polak to “decline the CRD’s request.” Her 12-page letter, supported by an 11-page legal submission, had the unmistakable heft of a well-considered battle plan.
    The CRD’s appeal to Polak had argued that section 37 of the Environmental Management Act (EMA) provided the minister with authority to override Esquimalt’s refusal to amend its zoning of McLoughlin Point that allows for sewage treatment but limits site coverage and building height. It would appear the CRD made the mistake of bringing a knife to a gunfight.
    Since the EMA was enacted in 2003, section 37 has never been invoked by an environment minister. For Polak to do so now would risk a legal test of the Act, with no certain outcome. A careful reading of the legal submission accompanying Desjardins’ letter leaves the distinct impression Esquimalt’s strategy to protect itself from becoming the septic tank for the entire region is well-founded in legal precedent.
    The Act says, and I’m paraphrasing here, that if a “conflict” arises between existing zoning and the requirements of the Act, the Act trumps the zoning. But the Act also says, “a conflict does not exist solely because further restrictions or conditions are imposed…unless the minister by order declares that a conflict exists.”
    Desjardins’ letter argued that, “In law, there is no ‘conflict’ on land use; there is no impossibility of dual compliance.”
    The mayor’s logic is compelling: The CRD’s McLoughlin property is already zoned for sewage treatment—Esquimalt defined that zoning in 2013. The CRD could proceed with a treatment project there if it accepted the restrictions of Esquimalt’s existing zoning. Esquimalt’s refusal to allow the greater site coverage and higher buildings closer to the waterfront that the CRD wants does not prevent the CRD from using McLoughlin Point to meet some of its obligations under the Act to provide sewage treatment. So Polak should not intervene. That’s the mayor’s logic.
    In its letter to Polak the CRD included a compilation of its objections to the conditions imposed by Esquimalt’s 2013 zoning bylaw. The most significant of these related to building height and siting requirements that, the CRD stated, “would severely limit the capacity” of a treatment plant constructed on the site. That, in turn, would necessitate “construction of a second [plant] at substantial cost to taxpayers.” This is really the most compelling element of the CRD’s argument, and that claim requires careful, arithmetical examination. After all, the CRD’s credibility on this file has been badly strained. How could the CRD, for example, spend $47 million in public funds on a plan that depended on locating a large, potentially foul-smelling industrial building at the entrance to Victoria Harbour and somehow overlook that ordinary setbacks and height restrictions would be applied by Esquimalt?
    Desjardins directly countered the CRD’s claim that Polak should intervene because Esquimalt’s application of setbacks and height restrictions could cause greater expense to taxpayers. She told Polak, “CRD’s submission claims there will be increased costs, but that is not a legitimate legal basis to override legitimate local zoning.” Indeed, section 37 has nothing to say about “cost,” just “conditions,” so it’s possible Esquimalt would take the minister to court for imposing the McLoughlin plant on them on the basis of “cost to taxpayers.”
    But for the average taxpayer, this is a critical consideration. Is Esquimalt’s refusal to amend its rezoning going to cost taxpayers more money? This is a much more complex question than the CRD is implying, and finding anything more than a superficial answer requires looking back at what the CRD has said about costs in the past and then doing a little arithmetic.
    Back in the spring of 2010, the CRD was promoting a four-plant configuration that, it said, would cost $942 million and provide 124 million litres per day of treatment capacity. That cost was validated by Ernst & Young, which, several months later, similarly validated the $830 million cost of the 108-million-litres-per-day plant that the CRD now wants to build at McLoughlin (both estimates were done by Stantec).
    Whether either of these dollar figures are an accurate reflection of likely costs is an open question, but their relative values are likely credible. And that allows us to make a comparison of value for money. The point of that approach is to determine which option is the most efficient and effective use of tax dollars.
    The four-plant configuration works out to $7.60 per litre of treatment capacity; the one-plant configuration $7.67. On that basis, taxpayers would be getting a better deal with the four-plant configuration if the extra capacity could be arithmetically justified.
    Actually, the CRD has already done that justification and that received the blessing of the Minister of Environment. In Amendment 7 of its Liquid Waste Management Plan, the CRD used a set of population projections to justify their proposal for a 124-million-litres-per-day 4-plant treatment configuration. In Amendment 8, they used the same population projections to justify a lower-capacity single-plant configuration at McLoughlin. But this is arithmetically illogical and raises two questions: Did the consolidation to a one-plant system create a plan that lacks capacity for future growth? Would the CRD’s choice of a one-plant configuration at McLoughlin require construction of a second plant sooner than the CRD is admitting? I’ll come back to these questions in a moment.
    First, it’s likely Minister Polak, or her aides, will notice that the size of the plant the CRD was proposing for McLoughlin Point in early 2010 was only 40 percent of what the CRD now wants Polak to force upon Esquimalt. That 2010 plant would have fit within the building setbacks and height restrictions Esquimalt’s zoning has since imposed. There would have been no conflict.
    Going back to the question of whether the CRD’s current plan would provide adequate capacity for future growth, comparison with other treatment projects in British Columbia is illuminating. In North Vancouver, the Lions Gate Secondary Wastewater Treatment Plant produced its project definition report last February. Like the CRD’s project, Lions Gate will be built to meet new federal regulations requiring a minimum of secondary treatment by 2020. Its design capacity is just five percent smaller than the capacity proposed for McLoughlin Point. Yet there’s a remarkable difference between the two. By the time Lions Gate reaches its full capacity around 2050, it will be serving a residential population of 254,000 plus institutional, commercial and industrial users. The CRD says that the marginally-larger McLoughlin plant will be able to serve a residential population of 342,000 plus institutional, commercial and industrial users. Why is there such a dramatic difference in the per capita capacity provision for Victoria and North Vancouver?
    When McLoughlin’s treatment capacity is compared with Kelowna’s, there’s a similarly large per capita difference in the capacity being provided. Tellingly, Kelowna and Lions Gate have allowed for almost identical per capita capacity.
    Comparison of the physical sizes of the sites that will be used by Victoria, Kelowna and Lions Gate point to the cause. Kelowna’s plant is located on nine hectares, Lions Gate on three hectares. The McLoughlin Point site, which will serve the largest population of the three, is only 1.4 hectares in size. It’s that small size that limited the treatment capacity the CRD could build there.
    The risk to taxpayers in this situation is that the CRD’s shift from a four-plant configuration to putting all treatment at McLoughlin wasn’t based on a careful assessment of the regions’s predictable treatment needs or a value for money approach to the problem. The CRD has created a situation where construction of a second plant at substantial cost to taxpayers may be right around the corner—the very same result the CRD says would follow having to build a smaller plant at McLoughlin.
    Why did the CRD’s plan for four plants shift to just one large one?
    In June of 2010, CRD directors were told the consolidation to a central site was necessary to ensure federal funding. But the timing of this shift suggests local political considerations may have also played a part. The four-plant configuration was dumped soon after CRD staff experienced hostile encounters with residents of Saanich East-North Oak Bay in the spring of 2010 during public consultation on the CRD’s plan to locate a treatment plant in Haro Woods.
    At least one indignant Saanich resident told the CRD that, if it went ahead with its plan, he would sue them if he detected so much as a “whiff” of sewage. A CRD report on that consultation noted, “Throughout the public events, CRD staff witnessed a high degree of aggressiveness and distress amongst some participants. CRD staff will look to incorporate best practices in future public processes which discourage these types of behaviours. This [is] to ensure everyone has an equal opportunity to participate and share their own views in a neutral and safe environment.”
    In fact, the Haro Woods encounters were the last any member of the public saw of CRD staff before the sudden announcement that all treatment would take place in Esquimalt. No consultation took place with Esquimalt residents before that consolidation, even though the Environmental Management Act explicitly required the CRD to do so. Esquimalt has been fighting back ever since. Was a super-sized McLoughlin plant a quick fix for Saanich politicians fearful of blow-back from well-heeled constituents, rather than a reasoned approach to providing the most cost effective treatment solution over the long term?
    This was the moment when the CRD’s plan began its slow-motion derailment. That Esquimalt might rezone to suit its preferences ought to have occurred to CRD officers and directors back then, but if it did, they seemed to have misjudged the relief that might be provided by section 37.
    Desjardins captured this in her letter to Polak when she reminded the Minister that as recently as April 24 at a CRD board meeting, CRD CEO Robert Lapham stated the CRD “isn’t obligated to rezone the property.” Desjardins wrote, “[Lapham] asks Mr Hull—an engineer, not a lawyer—for the reference to the Act that states that. There is no Act that states that.” Desjardins letter provided the Minister with a full transcript of Lapham’s halting, apparently confused grasp of the CRD’s unsupportable position.
    Desjardins told Polak the “CRD’s attack on the Township Zoning Bylaw is incorrect in law, internally inconsistent, and hypocritical…The CRD’s assertions are more argument than they are settled law. If there is a proper legal argument to be made regarding municipal zoning, the CRD can and should make it in Court.”
    Pointing to a way out of the “impasse,” Desjardins told Polak, “CRD’s assessments of the appropriate models of sewage treatment and sites are dated and were made on cost assumptions that have proven to be incorrect. There is other evidence to suggest decentralized systems can be built for less cost.” 
    Desjardins and her councillors have already moved to distance them from the CRD’s “dated” models. They’ve joined forces with Cascadia Green Building Council and have launched the “Esquimalt Village Living Community Design Competition.” This is intended to be an “international design competition” that “strives to craft a 21st Century sewage treatment solution for Esquimalt that can also be used as a model for the entire region,” according to a Cascadia press release. In the release, Cascadia’s Neville Grigg noted, “The design competition incorporates sewage treatment into the heart of the community as a source of water, heat and energy which will offer a sustainable, competitive advantage for Esquimalt.”
    I asked Desjardins if she would support a reworked regional treatment plan based on the CRD’s 2010 four-plant configuration, with either a much smaller plant at McLoughlin or one located in the Esquimalt Village centre. “The best value may not be McLoughlin at all,” she said, “because there’s nowhere at McLoughlin where resources can be utilized at their highest value.” Desjardins added, “That’s partly why Cascadia is looking at the opportunity in the Esquimalt Village project, because it will have new development very close which can hook in almost immediately. The use of the heat and energy coming out of the treatment centre for public buildings in the area is substantial.”
    Desjardins said Esquimalt would consider including Vic West and View Royal in the Village treatment plant.
    I asked Desjardins a second time if she could see supporting a smaller plant at McLoughlin as part of a regional system. “Here’s my real problem with McLoughlin,” she said. “Not only would it not be the best use but you haven’t taken into consideration the biggest concern: Why would we put that infrastructure right at the entrance to the harbour—and why would we put it in a tsunami zone? Can you fit the plant into the provincial guidelines that advise setbacks of 15 metres? Why would we put a plant in harm’s way? We know that climate change is causing rising sea level. During Hurricane Sandy, all of the big plants went down; none of the distributed systems went down. All those things are saying ‘Don’t do it.’”
    Esquimalt’s and Desjardins’ position are supported by a large number of regional citizens who the CRD has bluntly labelled “the opposition.” One such thorn in the CRD’s side is the Sewage Treatment Action Group (STAG). Over the past several months STAG has developed information about an alternative to the CRD’s one-plant configuration that would see construction of a number of distributed tertiary treatment plants. I reported here last month on STAG Director Richard Atwell’s research that showed the CRD has been cherry-picking costs from different studies, depending on which would make tertiary distributed look the most expensive and the one-plant configuration look the least costly. The CRD insists a study done for it in 2009 showed an 11-plant distributed model would cost “$2 billion.” (The study actually put the cost at $1.85 billion.)
    Atwell’s research also suggested that a distributed tertiary model based on the building concept and treatment technology used at Lighthouse Point Water Reclamation Facility in Blaine, Washington, if applied to Victoria, would cost far less than the CRD’s “$2 billion.”
    This doesn’t seem to be fully supported by the numbers.
    Blaine’s Public Works Director Ravyn Whitewolf told Focus the Lighthouse Point project cost $36 million, including engineering, construction and construction management costs. That figure didn’t include conveyancing to and from the plant, or an outfall.The facility uses membrane bioreactor technology like Dockside Green’s and produces water than can be reused for agriculture. The facility bears little resemblance to the industrial-looking buildings most of us associate with public works projects.
    Whitewolf, a professional engineer, said the plant was designed for a maximum Average Dry Weather Flow (ADWF) of 3.4 million litres per day. BC’s municipal sewage regulations require treatment plants to be capable of treating twice the measured ADWF to secondary standards. The McLoughlin plant, for example, was designed for an ADWF of 108 million litres per day, but would have been capable of secondary treatment of 216 million litres per day. To treat that amount of sewage would require 63 Blaine-size plants. At $36 million a pop, 63 plants would cost $2.3 billion. This is, of course, just an arithmetical exercise.
    When the CRD’s consultants designed the aforementioned four-plant configuration, the plant to be located in Haro Woods was designated for tertiary treatment and the design capacity for that plant was set at 1.75 times ADWF. If that reduction in treatment capacity was permitted by the Province across the system, only 56 Blaine-size plants would be needed. At $36 million a pop, 56 plants would cost $2.0 billion.
    If that last calculation is done for the current ADWF rather than for the capacity of the proposed McLoughlin Point system, 43 Blaine-size plants and $1.5 billion would be required. With this scenario, there would be no cost for unused capacity. More capacity could be added as required.
    All of the above assumes Blaine-sized plants. There would doubtless be savings by doubling or tripling the size of plants. But one of the attractions of the Blaine model is that its human-scale architecture would allow it to be located just about anywhere. To obtain economy of scale the physical size of the plants would need to increase. Whether that enlargement would start to erode the very attributes that would make such small plants easy to integrate into the city’s neighbourhoods is an open question. But that scaling up could make it politically difficult—if not impossible—to locate so many facilities that resemble, say, firehalls, into the community.
    Again, this is just an arithmetical exercise, and additional subtractions, multiplications and consideration of technical nuances are necessary for a clearer understanding of the real potential for alternative models so they can be properly compared with the CRD’s plan. In an election year, CRD politicians might want to consider doing that instead of twisting Minister Polak’s arm.
    In the article that follows this, Katherine Palmer Gordon relates what two scientists have to offer on this issue. One of them, Dr Chris Garrett, tells Palmer Gordon: “I’m not necessarily anti-sewage treatment, I’m pro-arithmetic.” Precisely.
    UPDATE
    On May 27, 2014, BC Environment Minister Mary Polak announced that she would not override Esquimalt's zoning. The Minister's announcement is here, the CRD's subsequent announcement here, and the Township of Esquimalt's response is here.
     
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

    David Broadland
    June 2014
    Esquimalt shoots CRD in foot. Now what?
     
    FOLLOWING THE CRD'S APPEAL to Environment Minister Mary Polak to intervene in the “impasse” between Esquimalt and the CRD on amending zoning to allow for a larger sewage treatment plant at McLoughlin Point, Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins wrote her own letter. Desjardins asked Polak to “decline the CRD’s request.” Her 12-page letter, supported by an 11-page legal submission, had the unmistakable heft of a well-considered battle plan.
    The CRD’s appeal to Polak had argued that section 37 of the Environmental Management Act (EMA) provided the minister with authority to override Esquimalt’s refusal to amend its zoning of McLoughlin Point that allows for sewage treatment but limits site coverage and building height. It would appear the CRD made the mistake of bringing a knife to a gunfight.
    Since the EMA was enacted in 2003, section 37 has never been invoked by an environment minister. For Polak to do so now would risk a legal test of the Act, with no certain outcome. A careful reading of the legal submission accompanying Desjardins’ letter leaves the distinct impression Esquimalt’s strategy to protect itself from becoming the septic tank for the entire region is well-founded in legal precedent.
    The Act says, and I’m paraphrasing here, that if a “conflict” arises between existing zoning and the requirements of the Act, the Act trumps the zoning. But the Act also says, “a conflict does not exist solely because further restrictions or conditions are imposed…unless the minister by order declares that a conflict exists.”
    Desjardins’ letter argued that, “In law, there is no ‘conflict’ on land use; there is no impossibility of dual compliance.”
    The mayor’s logic is compelling: The CRD’s McLoughlin property is already zoned for sewage treatment—Esquimalt defined that zoning in 2013. The CRD could proceed with a treatment project there if it accepted the restrictions of Esquimalt’s existing zoning. Esquimalt’s refusal to allow the greater site coverage and higher buildings closer to the waterfront that the CRD wants does not prevent the CRD from using McLoughlin Point to meet some of its obligations under the Act to provide sewage treatment. So Polak should not intervene. That’s the mayor’s logic.
    In its letter to Polak the CRD included a compilation of its objections to the conditions imposed by Esquimalt’s 2013 zoning bylaw. The most significant of these related to building height and siting requirements that, the CRD stated, “would severely limit the capacity” of a treatment plant constructed on the site. That, in turn, would necessitate “construction of a second [plant] at substantial cost to taxpayers.” This is really the most compelling element of the CRD’s argument, and that claim requires careful, arithmetical examination. After all, the CRD’s credibility on this file has been badly strained. How could the CRD, for example, spend $47 million in public funds on a plan that depended on locating a large, potentially foul-smelling industrial building at the entrance to Victoria Harbour and somehow overlook that ordinary setbacks and height restrictions would be applied by Esquimalt?
    Desjardins directly countered the CRD’s claim that Polak should intervene because Esquimalt’s application of setbacks and height restrictions could cause greater expense to taxpayers. She told Polak, “CRD’s submission claims there will be increased costs, but that is not a legitimate legal basis to override legitimate local zoning.” Indeed, section 37 has nothing to say about “cost,” just “conditions,” so it’s possible Esquimalt would take the minister to court for imposing the McLoughlin plant on them on the basis of “cost to taxpayers.”
    But for the average taxpayer, this is a critical consideration. Is Esquimalt’s refusal to amend its rezoning going to cost taxpayers more money? This is a much more complex question than the CRD is implying, and finding anything more than a superficial answer requires looking back at what the CRD has said about costs in the past and then doing a little arithmetic.
    Back in the spring of 2010, the CRD was promoting a four-plant configuration that, it said, would cost $942 million and provide 124 million litres per day of treatment capacity. That cost was validated by Ernst & Young, which, several months later, similarly validated the $830 million cost of the 108-million-litres-per-day plant that the CRD now wants to build at McLoughlin (both estimates were done by Stantec).
    Whether either of these dollar figures are an accurate reflection of likely costs is an open question, but their relative values are likely credible. And that allows us to make a comparison of value for money. The point of that approach is to determine which option is the most efficient and effective use of tax dollars.
    The four-plant configuration works out to $7.60 per litre of treatment capacity; the one-plant configuration $7.67. On that basis, taxpayers would be getting a better deal with the four-plant configuration if the extra capacity could be arithmetically justified.
    Actually, the CRD has already done that justification and that received the blessing of the Minister of Environment. In Amendment 7 of its Liquid Waste Management Plan, the CRD used a set of population projections to justify their proposal for a 124-million-litres-per-day 4-plant treatment configuration. In Amendment 8, they used the same population projections to justify a lower-capacity single-plant configuration at McLoughlin. But this is arithmetically illogical and raises two questions: Did the consolidation to a one-plant system create a plan that lacks capacity for future growth? Would the CRD’s choice of a one-plant configuration at McLoughlin require construction of a second plant sooner than the CRD is admitting? I’ll come back to these questions in a moment.
    First, it’s likely Minister Polak, or her aides, will notice that the size of the plant the CRD was proposing for McLoughlin Point in early 2010 was only 40 percent of what the CRD now wants Polak to force upon Esquimalt. That 2010 plant would have fit within the building setbacks and height restrictions Esquimalt’s zoning has since imposed. There would have been no conflict.
    Going back to the question of whether the CRD’s current plan would provide adequate capacity for future growth, comparison with other treatment projects in British Columbia is illuminating. In North Vancouver, the Lions Gate Secondary Wastewater Treatment Plant produced its project definition report last February. Like the CRD’s project, Lions Gate will be built to meet new federal regulations requiring a minimum of secondary treatment by 2020. Its design capacity is just five percent smaller than the capacity proposed for McLoughlin Point. Yet there’s a remarkable difference between the two. By the time Lions Gate reaches its full capacity around 2050, it will be serving a residential population of 254,000 plus institutional, commercial and industrial users. The CRD says that the marginally-larger McLoughlin plant will be able to serve a residential population of 342,000 plus institutional, commercial and industrial users. Why is there such a dramatic difference in the per capita capacity provision for Victoria and North Vancouver?
    When McLoughlin’s treatment capacity is compared with Kelowna’s, there’s a similarly large per capita difference in the capacity being provided. Tellingly, Kelowna and Lions Gate have allowed for almost identical per capita capacity.
    Comparison of the physical sizes of the sites that will be used by Victoria, Kelowna and Lions Gate point to the cause. Kelowna’s plant is located on nine hectares, Lions Gate on three hectares. The McLoughlin Point site, which will serve the largest population of the three, is only 1.4 hectares in size. It’s that small size that limited the treatment capacity the CRD could build there.
    The risk to taxpayers in this situation is that the CRD’s shift from a four-plant configuration to putting all treatment at McLoughlin wasn’t based on a careful assessment of the regions’s predictable treatment needs or a value for money approach to the problem. The CRD has created a situation where construction of a second plant at substantial cost to taxpayers may be right around the corner—the very same result the CRD says would follow having to build a smaller plant at McLoughlin.
    Why did the CRD’s plan for four plants shift to just one large one?
    In June of 2010, CRD directors were told the consolidation to a central site was necessary to ensure federal funding. But the timing of this shift suggests local political considerations may have also played a part. The four-plant configuration was dumped soon after CRD staff experienced hostile encounters with residents of Saanich East-North Oak Bay in the spring of 2010 during public consultation on the CRD’s plan to locate a treatment plant in Haro Woods.
    At least one indignant Saanich resident told the CRD that, if it went ahead with its plan, he would sue them if he detected so much as a “whiff” of sewage. A CRD report on that consultation noted, “Throughout the public events, CRD staff witnessed a high degree of aggressiveness and distress amongst some participants. CRD staff will look to incorporate best practices in future public processes which discourage these types of behaviours. This [is] to ensure everyone has an equal opportunity to participate and share their own views in a neutral and safe environment.”
    In fact, the Haro Woods encounters were the last any member of the public saw of CRD staff before the sudden announcement that all treatment would take place in Esquimalt. No consultation took place with Esquimalt residents before that consolidation, even though the Environmental Management Act explicitly required the CRD to do so. Esquimalt has been fighting back ever since. Was a super-sized McLoughlin plant a quick fix for Saanich politicians fearful of blow-back from well-heeled constituents, rather than a reasoned approach to providing the most cost effective treatment solution over the long term?
    This was the moment when the CRD’s plan began its slow-motion derailment. That Esquimalt might rezone to suit its preferences ought to have occurred to CRD officers and directors back then, but if it did, they seemed to have misjudged the relief that might be provided by section 37.
    Desjardins captured this in her letter to Polak when she reminded the Minister that as recently as April 24 at a CRD board meeting, CRD CEO Robert Lapham stated the CRD “isn’t obligated to rezone the property.” Desjardins wrote, “[Lapham] asks Mr Hull—an engineer, not a lawyer—for the reference to the Act that states that. There is no Act that states that.” Desjardins letter provided the Minister with a full transcript of Lapham’s halting, apparently confused grasp of the CRD’s unsupportable position.
    Desjardins told Polak the “CRD’s attack on the Township Zoning Bylaw is incorrect in law, internally inconsistent, and hypocritical…The CRD’s assertions are more argument than they are settled law. If there is a proper legal argument to be made regarding municipal zoning, the CRD can and should make it in Court.”
    Pointing to a way out of the “impasse,” Desjardins told Polak, “CRD’s assessments of the appropriate models of sewage treatment and sites are dated and were made on cost assumptions that have proven to be incorrect. There is other evidence to suggest decentralized systems can be built for less cost.” 
    Desjardins and her councillors have already moved to distance them from the CRD’s “dated” models. They’ve joined forces with Cascadia Green Building Council and have launched the “Esquimalt Village Living Community Design Competition.” This is intended to be an “international design competition” that “strives to craft a 21st Century sewage treatment solution for Esquimalt that can also be used as a model for the entire region,” according to a Cascadia press release. In the release, Cascadia’s Neville Grigg noted, “The design competition incorporates sewage treatment into the heart of the community as a source of water, heat and energy which will offer a sustainable, competitive advantage for Esquimalt.”
    I asked Desjardins if she would support a reworked regional treatment plan based on the CRD’s 2010 four-plant configuration, with either a much smaller plant at McLoughlin or one located in the Esquimalt Village centre. “The best value may not be McLoughlin at all,” she said, “because there’s nowhere at McLoughlin where resources can be utilized at their highest value.” Desjardins added, “That’s partly why Cascadia is looking at the opportunity in the Esquimalt Village project, because it will have new development very close which can hook in almost immediately. The use of the heat and energy coming out of the treatment centre for public buildings in the area is substantial.”
    Desjardins said Esquimalt would consider including Vic West and View Royal in the Village treatment plant.
    I asked Desjardins a second time if she could see supporting a smaller plant at McLoughlin as part of a regional system. “Here’s my real problem with McLoughlin,” she said. “Not only would it not be the best use but you haven’t taken into consideration the biggest concern: Why would we put that infrastructure right at the entrance to the harbour—and why would we put it in a tsunami zone? Can you fit the plant into the provincial guidelines that advise setbacks of 15 metres? Why would we put a plant in harm’s way? We know that climate change is causing rising sea level. During Hurricane Sandy, all of the big plants went down; none of the distributed systems went down. All those things are saying ‘Don’t do it.’”
    Esquimalt’s and Desjardins’ position are supported by a large number of regional citizens who the CRD has bluntly labelled “the opposition.” One such thorn in the CRD’s side is the Sewage Treatment Action Group (STAG). Over the past several months STAG has developed information about an alternative to the CRD’s one-plant configuration that would see construction of a number of distributed tertiary treatment plants. I reported here last month on STAG Director Richard Atwell’s research that showed the CRD has been cherry-picking costs from different studies, depending on which would make tertiary distributed look the most expensive and the one-plant configuration look the least costly. The CRD insists a study done for it in 2009 showed an 11-plant distributed model would cost “$2 billion.” (The study actually put the cost at $1.85 billion.)
    Atwell’s research also suggested that a distributed tertiary model based on the building concept and treatment technology used at Lighthouse Point Water Reclamation Facility in Blaine, Washington, if applied to Victoria, would cost far less than the CRD’s “$2 billion.”
    This doesn’t seem to be fully supported by the numbers.
    Blaine’s Public Works Director Ravyn Whitewolf told Focus the Lighthouse Point project cost $36 million, including engineering, construction and construction management costs. That figure didn’t include conveyancing to and from the plant, or an outfall.The facility uses membrane bioreactor technology like Dockside Green’s and produces water than can be reused for agriculture. The facility bears little resemblance to the industrial-looking buildings most of us associate with public works projects.
    Whitewolf, a professional engineer, said the plant was designed for a maximum Average Dry Weather Flow (ADWF) of 3.4 million litres per day. BC’s municipal sewage regulations require treatment plants to be capable of treating twice the measured ADWF to secondary standards. The McLoughlin plant, for example, was designed for an ADWF of 108 million litres per day, but would have been capable of secondary treatment of 216 million litres per day. To treat that amount of sewage would require 63 Blaine-size plants. At $36 million a pop, 63 plants would cost $2.3 billion. This is, of course, just an arithmetical exercise.
    When the CRD’s consultants designed the aforementioned four-plant configuration, the plant to be located in Haro Woods was designated for tertiary treatment and the design capacity for that plant was set at 1.75 times ADWF. If that reduction in treatment capacity was permitted by the Province across the system, only 56 Blaine-size plants would be needed. At $36 million a pop, 56 plants would cost $2.0 billion.
    If that last calculation is done for the current ADWF rather than for the capacity of the proposed McLoughlin Point system, 43 Blaine-size plants and $1.5 billion would be required. With this scenario, there would be no cost for unused capacity. More capacity could be added as required.
    All of the above assumes Blaine-sized plants. There would doubtless be savings by doubling or tripling the size of plants. But one of the attractions of the Blaine model is that its human-scale architecture would allow it to be located just about anywhere. To obtain economy of scale the physical size of the plants would need to increase. Whether that enlargement would start to erode the very attributes that would make such small plants easy to integrate into the city’s neighbourhoods is an open question. But that scaling up could make it politically difficult—if not impossible—to locate so many facilities that resemble, say, firehalls, into the community.
    Again, this is just an arithmetical exercise, and additional subtractions, multiplications and consideration of technical nuances are necessary for a clearer understanding of the real potential for alternative models so they can be properly compared with the CRD’s plan. In an election year, CRD politicians might want to consider doing that instead of twisting Minister Polak’s arm.
    In the article that follows this, Katherine Palmer Gordon relates what two scientists have to offer on this issue. One of them, Dr Chris Garrett, tells Palmer Gordon: “I’m not necessarily anti-sewage treatment, I’m pro-arithmetic.” Precisely.
    UPDATE
    On May 27, 2014, BC Environment Minister Mary Polak announced that she would not override Esquimalt's zoning. The Minister's announcement is here, the CRD's subsequent announcement here, and the Township of Esquimalt's response is here.
     
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

    Katherine Palmer Gordon
    June 2014
    With a likely capital cost of between $800 million and $1 billion, it had better. Focus explores the issue with two scientists.
     
    LAST DECEMBER, retired University of Victoria ocean physics professor Chris Garrett wrote to Focus, along with some of his former marine science colleagues, stating: “The allegedly scientific arguments put forward in support [of land-based secondary sewage treatment] are very superficial… [there is no] detailed, quantitative, rational analysis of what the problems are with the present system or how the proposed schemes will fix them.”
    Garrett is an expert in ocean dynamics and his CV includes extensive analysis of the environmental impacts of waste disposal in marine environments. Although retired, he remains keenly interested in oceanographic issues like this one where, as he puts it, science meets society. He’s also reviewed what he describes as excellent studies of the sewage issue undertaken by CRD scientists. He says no-one has conclusively established that there are problems with the CRD’s current preliminary sewage treatment system: “Fundamental questions still remain unanswered,” he says. 
    On that premise, of course, it’s also true that no-one has proven that there aren’t problems with the current system. But with the public debate over sewage treatment mired in political rhetoric and Seaterra spin, confusion reigns supreme. The average citizen can be forgiven for finding it difficult to discern fact from fiction. 
    Garrett is sympathetic. While he believes concerns over the current treatment system are overstated, he’s also tried to be as objective as possible in what has become an intensely polarized discussion. “I object to people on any side of this issue making absolute statements that Victoria’s current sewage output is toxic or that it’s harmless,” he says, “or that secondary treatment is the only solution or that the current system is perfectly fine. Before we can decide that, we need to make sure we’ve correctly identified and quantified the problems so we can know with certainty what is worthwhile and effective.” 
     
    The status quo vs. secondary treatment
    Currently, Victoria’s effluent receives preliminary treatment only. Screens collect about ten percent of the solids coming through the pipes, or about 657,000 kilograms annually, which are taken to the Hartland Landfill for disposal. The remaining 90 percent—nearly 6.7 million kilograms annually—is discharged into Juan de Fuca Strait, in what Garrett describes as a “thin, grey soup,” from two outfalls at Clover and Macaulay Points, more than a kilometre from land and at a depth of about 60 metres. 
    The CRD confirms that it routinely measures “upwards of 200” organic and inorganic contaminants in that “soup.” But those who favour this preliminary treatment system argue that the total volume of effluent coming out of the pipes comprises more than 99 percent water, and that its contents are effectively diluted, dispersed and degraded by the active tidal currents in Juan de Fuca Strait. Contamination in the immediate vicinity of the two outfalls is also believed to be relatively minor.
    Critics, however, cite a litany of environmental concerns. Sediment samples taken at the outfalls have failed provincial contamination standards. Organic material and dissolved nutrients in the effluent consume oxygen in a process called eutrophication, said to endanger marine life. Moreover, toxic contaminants in the liquid waste are being absorbed by the marine food chain. Human pathogens and fecal coliforms near the outfalls also pose a hazard to humans. This all adds up, say the critics, to the need to put something more than preliminary treatment in place.
    In 2012, new mandatory minimum effluent quality standards were enacted by the federal government. Environment Canada requires at least secondary treatment as the way to achieve those standards. Secondary treatment removes biodegradable material from effluent before it is discharged, but it doesn’t remove all the contaminants, so those it misses get flushed out to sea. Material remaining after secondary treatment, called sludge, contains all the contaminants that secondary treatment did remove, which means the sludge must be disposed of safely. Options for disposal include landfill, incineration, gasification, conversion into energy, or use as fertilizer, all of which pose issues of their own. 
     
    Chris Garrett’s take
    Garrett says that eutrophication, or oxygen depletion, can indeed be a problem associated with dumping minimally treated sewage effluent into confined waters. However, he states, “The strong tidal currents off Victoria recharge the local waters with oxygen constantly. The addition of a relatively small amount of extra nutrient material isn’t likely to make any difference.” 
    He adds: “In fact there is a lot of thriving marine life present in the sediments near the outfalls, which suggests that oxygen depletion isn’t having a significant impact.” That’s not to say that the dilution effect of active ocean waters is foolproof. “Discharges might not be a problem now, but the cumulative impacts after many years might be a problem in future.” 
    Occasionally, plumes of sewage containing fecal coliforms also reach the surface near the outfalls. Most of the time the coliform count falls below provincial guidelines for recreational waters, so the plumes don’t pose a safety issue. That’s not always the case, however. Garrett notes: “The guidelines are occasionally exceeded.” 
    That’s a problem for humans rather than fish, as is the presence of bacteria and viruses in surface water. “Bacteria tend to die within hours, but viruses can persist for many days,” says Garrett. He says this is a good example of an issue that requires more research: “There are anecdotal claims of infections from exposure to the sea in the vicinity of the outfalls, but no epidemiological evidence.”
    Serious concerns have also been raised about heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, industrial waste, micro plastics, and chemicals contained in the effluent, and the negative impact not only on the areas surrounding the outfalls, but on marine life in the Strait itself. High levels of PCBs have been found in marine mammals, and flame retardants and similar pollutants are also worrying.
    “PCBs are a real problem,” says Garrett, “that is a known fact. That’s why they were banned back in the 1970s. But they’re very persistent and they get recycled again and again into the environment, so are taking a long time to disappear.” He points out, however, that in local waters, most of the PCBs aren’t getting into the marine environment from the sewage system. “They’re entering the marine environment from the atmosphere, river run-off, and sediments contaminated by former industrial activity.”
    Emerging problems these days arise from other persistent pollutants such as flame retardants, which unquestionably are entering the ocean via the sewage outfalls: “Controls are only now being imposed on use and disposal of flame retardants, so levels will have to be monitored. This is another example of a very important issue we need to understand better. Simply treating for removal of these pollutants from the effluent may not be good enough, for the same reasons as PCBs and metals. Limitation of use in the first place may be the only effective control.” 
    “The other thing to remember,” adds Garrett, “is that secondary treatment doesn’t destroy many contaminants. Some are still discharged into the sea, and others simply get concentrated in the leftover sludge instead of the liquid effluent. Whether that’s worse for the environment or not depends on what you do with the sludge. If you dispose of it on land, it may contaminate surface and groundwater. If you incinerate it, it may produce dioxins. What’s the environmental impact compared to the contaminants being absorbed and buried in the sediments around the outfalls? We don’t know, because an objective comparison hasn’t been done.”
    Under the CRD’s plan, no final decision has been made on what to do with the sludge, though use as a fertilizer has been rejected.
     
    Tertiary treatment
    Given that secondary treatment doesn’t remove some of the contaminants, tertiary or “advanced” treatment has been raised as a better solution to the federal government’s mandated treatment of CRD wastewater. Advanced treatment can remove additional contaminants from wastewater after it has been through the secondary process, including some heavy metals and nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen. Pathogens and other microorganisms may be removed through a final disinfection stage, often called “polishing.” The goal is to produce effluent suitable for safe discharge into the environment or for reuse in certain applications. In parts of the world where water is scarce—Namibia, for example—the resulting water is used for human consumption.
    Water may be plentiful in the CRD, but Victoria’s Sewage Treatment Action Group (which has developed “the RITE Plan”) believes advanced treatment is the way to go. Green Party MLA Dr Andrew Weaver has publicly supported the concept. Colwood has jumped on board, opting out of secondary treatment in favour of its own advanced treatment plan with resource recovery and recycling of wastewater for irrigation and similar purposes built into the concept.
    Garrett doesn’t profess to be able to speak authoritatively on the merits of advanced treatment, but is emphatic that his questions remain the same: “We need to analyze the facts before we jump to solutions that are expensive, address problems that might not exist, and create other potentially worse environmental impacts.”
    Dr Don Mavinic, however, is more than qualified to weigh in on where advanced treatment fits into the discussion. A professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of British Columbia, Mavinic’s research over the last four decades of his career has included biological waste treatment processes, wastewater residuals treatment, phosphorus removal and recovery, and disinfection by-products in drinking water; and his department at UBC is engaged in extensive research into various aspects of advanced treatment.
    Mavinic agrees with Garrett about the need for hard facts. “There are basically several questions that have to be asked before deciding on advanced treatment,” says Mavinic. “What’s left in the water that you really need to deal with? How much of it is there? What’s the potential environmental impact—where is the water going? Into saltwater, like Victoria, or freshwater or into another particularly sensitive environment? Do you intend to recycle it?” To make sense of the issue, he says, “You have to do your homework first.” In the meantime, he adds, there’s still uncertainty in scientific and engineering circles about some aspects of advanced treatment. 
    There are also bad ways to do advanced treatment as well as good ones. But right here in BC, points out Mavinic, is a model of how to do it in the best possible way that current technology can offer. It’s a model that most of Western Canada has followed—and that the CRD should, at minimum, have a long, hard look at before it finalizes its secondary treatment plans. 
     
    The nutrient issue
    Mavinic says that the typical issue of concern that leads to adopting an advanced treatment system is the presence of excess nitrogen and phosphorus in effluent, both of which nutrients are excreted in human waste and have potentially negative environmental impacts in water, including eutrophication and algal blooms. 
    One way to remove these nutrients is by the use of chemicals such as alum (potassium aluminum sulfate) or iron salts (such as ferrous sulfate). But there’s a problem that goes hand in hand with that process: the nutrients end up in the leftover sludge, along with the chemicals and any metals that might have been picked up in the process—and that sludge can’t be burned, used as fertilizer, or recycled in any other useful way. (The CRD admits that such chemicals “will be used during chemically enhanced primary treatment for wet weather events.”)
    “This is a huge problem in Ontario right now,” observes Mavinic, who is currently advising the Ontario government on this issue. “It’s become very contentious. Very few landfills will accept the sludge now. Most incinerators won’t touch it. Ontario has ended up with this chemical soup that has to be stored somewhere because you can’t do anything with it.” For now, the sludge is simply contained in holding ponds.
    Some heavy metals, such as nickel, can only be extracted using a chemical process. But for nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus there is a smarter approach, and Mavinic says BC’s Okanagan Valley has led the way. “Biological nutrient removal technology is a process that was first pioneered in South Africa and adapted for use in a cold climate setting right here at UBC. Kelowna was the first place to use the treatment process 30 years ago. It’s now used throughout the Okanagan Valley and much of BC, as well as Alberta and Saskatchewan.”
    The Kelowna model eschews the use of chemicals to treat nutrients in favour of a biological process that results in the nitrogen being converted into gas and the phosphorus being absorbed into reusable biomass. “You still have leftover sludge,” points out Mavinic, “but because it doesn’t have any chemicals in it you can now gasify it safely and the water can be discharged into Okanagan Lake.”
    At the same time, the lake is the source of drinking water for 100,000 people in the Okanagan Valley.
    Is this a model the CRD should be interested in? “Victoria is different from the Okanagan, where they’re discharging their effluent into a lake system,” says Mavinic. The ocean off southern Vancouver Island, he says, is a “giant sink” that isn’t as sensitive to some of these contaminants. “Ocean water is also typically phosphorus-deficient,” he says, “so the level of sensitivity just isn’t the same as in Okanagan Lake, say.” 
    But, Mavinic continues: “It depends very much on what is coming out of the pipes. You have to understand that before you can be definite that there isn’t a problem that needs treatment of some kind.” 
    Kelowna’s treatment, called Bardenpho Biological Nutrient Removal, requires large tanks and would occupy a much bigger footprint than is available at the McLoughlan Point site. Kelowna’s plant, which will serve a population of about 161,000 people by 2030, is located on a 9-hectare property. The McLoughlin Point site, which CRD projections have shown could need to serve an equivalent population up to 493,000 by 2030, is only 1.4 hectares.
     
    Cleaning up the trace contaminants
    Another key issue is how to deal with additional trace contaminants remaining in effluent even after such advanced treatment: contaminants such as pharmaceuticals, caffeine and endocrine disrupters, the latter found in many household and industrial products. These chemicals can interfere with hormone systems in mammals, leading to cancer, birth defects and other developmental disorders.  
    In May, the CRD confidently announced it plans to add an “advanced oxidation” process to the secondary treatment plan, stating that this process will “significantly reduce the level” of these types of contaminants in the region’s discharged effluent.
    “Advanced oxidation can certainly help,” confirms Mavinic. “It’s a lot better than doing nothing. Ozone, for example, is a powerful oxidant in increasing use for disinfecting water rather than using chlorine, and it may be useful in dealing with some trace contaminants as well.” 
    But Mavinic also says there are no guarantees as to just how effective the process is in practice. “The fact is that there really isn’t any effective technology out there in the marketplace yet to deal with these other contaminants. It’s coming, but it isn’t there. This is a very young science still. There’s a huge amount of research going on globally right now on this subject, including here at UBC, but the jury is still out.”
    He includes in this judgement the Membrane Bioreactor (MBR) technology used at Dockside Green: “Frankly, the jury is still out on the efficacy of MBR. It was developed for the drinking water industry, not wastewater treatment. The industry is now looking at wastewater treatment applications and we’re working on a pilot plant here at UBC to test its efficacy and see if there are any real differences in output to the Kelowna model in terms of processing nutrients. That’s a long term process, and the jury is still out yet as to whether it will be effective in treating micro contaminants, pharmaceuticals and other trace contaminants, let alone nutrients. No-one has the answer yet. We’re a long way away from making any recommendations on it.”
    Microplastics, found in both personal care products and fleece clothing—and released into wastewater—have also lately become a contaminant of concern. Scientists studying the issue agree that microplastics may pose problems in the marine environment because of their increasing abundance, their longevity, and their demonstrated ingestion by marine organisms. Mavinic says, “I haven’t seen any published literature or even heard of anyone doing any meaningful research on effective treatment for microplastics. I don’t think anyone has any idea what will deal effectively with that. If anyone is making a claim that there is a system to treat them effectively, I would love to see their data. It would have to be very convincing. Let’s just say it would be a real stretch to make a claim like that.”
    Mavinic says unanswered questions include exactly what “trace contaminants” need to be targeted: “There are so many different types of chemicals out there and they all respond differently to various treatments.” Exactly what impact those contaminants are having in different environments also needs to be considered. “There are still many, many unknowns,” concludes Mavinic bluntly.
     
    Where to from here, then? 
    On this point Mavinic is completely unequivocal: If the CRD is committed to secondary treatment, planning ahead to integrate effective advanced treatment such as biological nutrient removal into the process is simply prudent, both from cost and environmental perspectives. 
    “Ontario is facing that question right now as it looks to upgrade its secondary treatment facilities,” he says. “Will it move to advanced biological treatment to deal with the nutrients going into the Great Lakes? The answer is probably ‘Yes’. The lakes do have problems with excess nutrients and no-one wants any more chemical sludge to deal with. It’s a much more sustainable environmental approach and that’s why the Okanagan adopted it decades ago.” 
    Chris Garrett simply favours doing the math first. He likes to adapt a borrowed quote: “I’m not necessarily anti-sewage treatment, I’m pro-arithmetic,” he concludes. 
    Identifying the problems and doing a thorough quantitative analysis of all of the factors is about good decision-making, he says, whatever treatment solution the results favour in the end. “Without that, people are simply going to stay confused about what the right thing is to do.”
    Katherine Palmer Gordon is the author of six books of non-fiction, including several BC bestsellers and a Haig-Brown prize-winner.

    Rob Wipond
    May 2014
    The unplugging of a Saanich School District database raises serious concerns about the BC government’s secret plans for students’ personal information—and for everyone’s BC Services Card information.
     
    THE BC MINISTRY OF EDUCATION warned Saanich School District in March that it would cost the district millions of dollars to make their openStudent database properly integrated with the BC Services Card. Daunted, the school board immediately cancelled development of their in-house database for recording student information, abandoning the two years and $1.5 million they’d invested. 
    However, there’s a snag in this seemingly straightforward story. Based on the facts the public has been given about the BC Services Card, the government’s assertion to Saanich couldn’t possibly be true. So was the provincial government misleading the school district? If so, why? Or does the government have secret plans for the BC Services Card and our schoolchildren’s personal information that are much more invasive, expansive and expensive than the public realizes? 
    Clues to the answers lie in understanding what openStudent is, and what it represents to the BC government.
     
    By and for the community
    “I do believe, still believe passionately, that what we’re doing is the best possible option for BC education,” said Gregg Ferrie, IT director for the Saanich School District, in April. “It puts development in the hands of the users instead of farming that out to large multinational corporations.” 
    BC’s most widely-used student information system (SIS), called BCeSIS, is a commercial product purchased by the BC government, launched in the province’s schools in 2005. BCeSIS cost hundreds of millions of dollars and was fraught with problems, until the company simply shut down support for it.
    According to openStudent project manager Tim Agnew, the idea of developing a custom replacement for BCeSIS from free, open-source software and in close collaboration with educators emerged amongst a grassroots consortium of teachers, administrators and IT specialists from various BC school districts. Saanich decided to make it happen. “This thing was entirely done to be run as a non-profit, to be governed by the education community,” said Agnew. “It doesn’t get any better than that, to have a system that is developed for your community and by your community.”
    After two years, openStudent was on schedule and on budget (under $4 million). If used by all school districts, it was projected to cost taxpayers about one-seventh of the approximately $100 million over twelve years the provincial government recently pledged for Aspen, a commercial tool now dubbed MyEducation BC. Over 40 of BC’s 60 school districts showed interest in openStudent. However, the BC government was never supportive.
    “They’ve been putting roadblocks up since the very beginning,” alleged Agnew. A government-commissioned analysis of SIS options by Gartner Consulting resoundingly panned the possibility of building from open-source tools—even though Gartner otherwise frequently advises governments and companies that using open-source yields significant competitive advantages. 
    Then, the BC government refused to allow Saanich to even bid on the contract for a new SIS, explaining in a brief email that the Saanich School Board was not a “legal entity,” even though it’s obviously a legal entity under the BC School Act. The government then buttressed the exclusion by specifying in the SIS Request for Proposals (RFP) that proponents could only be corporations with “a minimum of either $100 million in annual revenues or $10 million annual net income.”
    Ferrie said the Ministry consistently refused to even discuss openStudent. “We’ve never been offered an opportunity to sit down and find out what objections there might be. We’ve requested many, many times through emails and phone calls and invitations,” said Ferrie. “We’ve always viewed the Ministry of Education as a partner in this, that it’s to our mutual advantage to find the most relevant, cost-effective [SIS]…Never having a discussion with your own ministry, the people you’re supposed to be working with and for, makes it frustrating.”
    Saanich School Board Chair Wayne Hunter added that the board had twice already this year arranged meetings with BC Deputy Minister of Education Rob Wood to discuss openStudent, but Wood cancelled both meetings.
     
    Come now and come alone
    This March, however, Deputy Minister Wood suddenly called Saanich Superintendent of Schools Nancy MacDonald to a meeting about openStudent. According to MacDonald, he instructed her to come alone. Wood then conveyed to MacDonald a simple message.
    “It was a message given to us by the Ministry of Education, directly to me, that the ability for openStudent to integrate with the new BC Services Card would cost in the millions of dollars,” said MacDonald. 
    Why would it cost so much? “It was not explained to me,” replied MacDonald. Wood gave neither general reasons nor technical specifics, and provided nothing in writing. 
    MacDonald reported the meeting to her board.
    “We were all shocked,” said Hunter. “We just couldn’t go forward. We don’t have that kind of money lying around.”
    Did he find it strange that the government had never even hinted this to them before, but then suddenly summoned MacDonald alone to relay this information? “Yes, very much so. [I was] upset, really,” replied Hunter. “They just pulled the rug out from under us.” 
    Meanwhile, from a technical standpoint, the extraordinarily high dollar figure was baffling. The BC Services Card is replacing CareCards and driver’s licences; nearly a million people have them already. It’s a photo ID with a chip which, when activated, will provide more secure authentication of a person’s identity. The ID card taps into IDIM, a system at this time either connecting or envisioned to soon be connecting with driver’s licence data, personal health records, and various other government services.
    The government’s RFP for a student information system basically only required the SIS to be able to interact with the BC Services Card/IDIM identity authentication system—a relatively simple task. 
    “There was certainly nothing in [the RFP] that would suggest this was millions of dollars of development to do this,” said Agnew. After Wood’s assertion, Agnew asked the government for the technical specifications clarifying how an SIS must integrate with the BC Services Card system. “I haven’t heard back from them,” Agnew said.
    “It just strikes me as odd that it would cost that much. It’s generally not that difficult,” said Ferrie. “I think it would be nice to have those numbers that were talked about verified.”
    I provided details of MacDonald’s meeting to the Education Ministry’s media liaison and asked, “Was Rob Wood's statement to Ms Macdonald based on any factual information of any kind? On what was his statement based?” and “Why did Mr Wood say that? What was his intention in conveying that?”
    Since the story had already received publicity, including angry comments directed at Saanich from Education Minister Peter Fassbender, I believe it’s virtually certain that my questions were run by Fassbender and Wood. After two weeks, Public Affairs Officer Ben Green provided the Education Ministry’s official reply. “It was the responsibility of the Saanich school district to look at their own business case and determine the costs of meeting the requirements of a new provincial student information service, including the cost of making openStudent compatible with the BC Service Card,” an email from Green stated. Specifically in response to my questions about the Deputy Minister’s assertions, the statement from Green said only, “I wasn’t privy to conversations or meetings with the Saanich school district.”
     
    Sensitive records, strong concerns
    So was Wood simply trying to scare Saanich into abandoning openStudent? And if so, why? Alternatively, does the government actually intend to do expansive, expensive integration of student information records with health records and other government data that it doesn’t want to detail to Saanich or the public? And if so, for what ends? Might the government be considering allowing researchers access to that combined data?
    Saanich has received investment interest from school districts outside BC, so openStudent may be resuscitated; however, most school districts have now buckled to the government’s imposing deadline and signed on to MyEducation BC, and Saanich may have to as well. But the mysteries surrounding the government’s plans for student information are causing worry.
    MacDonald clarified that BC student information systems contain not just exam results and class grades, but report card comments, attendance, discipline incidents, information about medical issues and special needs, and more. “I don’t think people are realizing what significant information could be shared,” said MacDonald. “I don’t want to be old-fashioned about it, but I’m a bit nervous.”
    “There’s a lot of detailed information there about each individual who passes through our education system,” said Agnew. “It is something that needs to be safeguarded at every level. This is why we believe firmly that this should be controlled by the education community…I don’t know [the government’s] agenda, and I don’t know that anyone really knows their agenda. But as a parent, as a taxpayer, I think it’s a slippery slope. I’d be very concerned about some of the potential.” 
    Furthermore, Ferrie pointed out that the data that MacDonald was describing is only a fraction of what MyEducation BC will capture. While developing openStudent, Ferrie said they analyzed the information BCeSIS was designed to capture and found that over 70 percent seemed superfluous to BC’s educators and education system, so they built openStudent “leaner.” And indeed, MyEducation BC is designed not just to track basic student records but also to act as a comprehensive online school administration, teaching, learning, assessment, and intra-school communications tool. In principle, with MyEducation BC, nearly every significant activity an administrator, teacher or student does could be saved to each person’s permanent record.  
     
    Who won’t want access?
    Christopher Parsons is also concerned. Parsons is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, and he co-authored two reports about the BC Services Card for the BC Civil Liberties Association—a technical-privacy evaluation and policy analysis.
    Parsons said the government’s not actually building a single, large, centralized database. “It’s more sophisticated. It’s using something called a federated database management structure,” said Parsons. “Rather than having one swimming pool within which all of the government’s data will be stored, the Services Card acts as the entry way into every ministry’s pool of data.”
    Essentially, all the information about a citizen will be linked to a Services Card number and, depending on their access permissions, people will be able to view data about a person from different ministries’ linked databases. Reports from the company hired by the government to conduct some limited public consultations suggest that, alongside providing access to government services, health, driver’s licence, and school data, the BC Services Card could also soon be used as fishing licence, library card, and identity authentication at banks, bars, employers, and cellular providers. In one report, it’s explained that “ICBC would not be able to see health information, police would not have access to information from schools.” Nevertheless, the report continued, the IDIM will “make it technically easier” for those very things to occur. Children’s data will apparently be viewable on their parents’ BC Services Card records.
    It’s not clear what the government is ultimately envisioning for IDIM. “I’m a researcher and I can’t tell you what exactly it’s for,” said Parsons. “I don’t think the bureaucrats know exactly how this will and will not be used at a provincial government level.” Parsons said many bureaucrats simply want to improve online access to government services and increase efficiencies; nevertheless, Parsons called it “upsetting” and “infuriating” that “all of the ostensible policy drivers are based on anecdotes, they’re based on rhetoric, and there has been no evidence-based policy for this.” 
    Meanwhile, Parsons explained, one of the “pernicious” aspects of the kind of system we’re building, especially in the absence of clear, publicly-vetted rationales, policy and legal frameworks, is that down the road there’ll be increasing pressure for ever more people to get access to ever more personal information about others in pursuit of similarly vague goals such as “safety,” “security,” or “efficiency.” School cafeteria monitors or physical education instructors could justify accessing students’ health records, or psychiatrists could justify accessing students’ school records. And what records might employers start expecting prospective young employees to turn over?
    “Until we properly deal with those sorts of questions as a society, that’s where these databases are risky,” said Parsons. And he doesn’t trust government assurances that none of this will happen. “All of them say, ‘We won’t do something that would violate the law,’” said Parsons. “But BC governments have a history of weakening privacy law. Privacy law was weakened to facilitate the Services Card in the first place.” 
    And in the aggregate, how valuable would children’s combined school, health and mental health records be to drug companies or insurers, asked Parsons. Or could algorithmic programs identify “at risk” youth, and automatically place warning flags on their records that would follow them forever? “We’re going to build a technical infrastructure that is highly inter-operable that could be used for all sorts of really interesting data mining,” said Parsons. “So don’t evaluate what it looks like right now, but what it might look like in future.”
     
    Sensurround surveillance
    If not evidence-based policy, what is driving all this?
    BC Civil Liberties Association Policy Director Micheal Vonn has been following the BC Services Card development. “This government is convinced that data linkages are going to generate important information in research, quality control and citizen services,” said Vonn. “They are 100 percent bought in to the Big Data revolution.” For example, while teachers generally are skeptical, said Vonn, there’s spreading belief among politicians and bureaucratic managers of education systems that analyzing mass amounts of aggregated student data will eventually somehow lead to improved teaching and learning.
    Told about events surrounding openStudent, Vonn conceded she could only speculate about government’s motives. “They’ve been highly secretive about most of the things that they’ve done with the BC ID card,” said Vonn. She said there’s no evidence that the government is planning complex integrations of different databases; as Parsons described, it’s mainly linking databases. So for Vonn, the most compelling interpretation is that the government wants active control over what data is being captured about BC students and how it’s being stored, rather than letting school districts themselves control it through something like openStudent. 
    “The ability to control the capture may well be what’s at issue here,” said Vonn, describing the BC Services Card as a “disciplinary device” to pressure school districts to get on-board with MyEducation BC and into the government’s own data pool. Through MyEducation BC, the government can determine what data gets captured, and more easily access, gather, analyze or give access to that data. And this theory, she added, was not coming out of nowhere. Vonn pointed to the US. “We see these issues highlighted much better, they fall into starker relief with systems that are a little more down the road than we are.”
    In the US, the Gates and Carnegie Foundations have pumped $100 million into InBloom, one of the biggest of a growing number of companies and non-profits gathering and analyzing public school student records. They also sometimes sell the data to private companies or government agencies that provide goods or services to the education sector or to children and families. It’s a rapidly expanding business in nearly every state, bolstered by federal stimulus funding. 
    A 2013 US Department of Education report provides a vivid picture of where it’s leading. Lamenting the analytical limitations of test scores, the report endorses a “growing movement” to also capture “noncognitive” information about children, such as “attributes, dispositions, social skills, attitudes, and intrapersonal resources” so that we can better understand what traits create “high-achieving individuals.” Aside from supporting more comprehensive SIS data-capture tools, the report favourably discusses studies and pilot projects using surveillance cameras, sensors in computer mice, MRI devices, and other biofeedback tools to track eye movements, facial expressions, blood volume, and galvanic skin responses that help measure student “frustration, motivation/flow, confidence, boredom, and fatigue.” The report acknowledges some of these tools “can be intrusive or impractical for use in school settings.”
    Protests are emerging from teachers, students and parents, and Vonn said she expects similar uproar in BC. Vonn pointed to April’s little-publicized report from a “User Panel” of 35 randomly-selected citizens who examined the BC Services Card and provided feedback at the request of the provincial government. “This is fascinating. As much as possible, it’s the finger on the pulse of what citizens think about this,” said Vonn. “They don’t trust the system. There is an extreme note of caution and restraint.”
    Indeed, the User Panel report is rife with words like “concerned,” “unconvinced,” “caution,” “as-yet unproven,” and “unethical surveillance.” The Panel pushed for the right of citizens to opt out of the BC Services Card, the power of individuals to see records about themselves, “strong, ongoing, and independent oversight,” and limiting use of the card by private companies. They also called for more public consultations: “The User Panel is concerned that too many BC residents are not yet sufficiently aware of the BC Services Card.”
    “I’m very confident right now on the basis of the temperature taking that we’ve seen in the User Panel that the movement towards this data-excessive collection and integration is not what citizens want,” said Vonn. “And I would imagine that [citizens’ concerns] would never be more pointed than where the issue is the collection of information about our children in ways that may jeopardize them…Citizens of British Columbia don’t want this, aren’t asking for it, and will be increasingly concerned the more they know about it.”
    Rob Wipond was just as wary in grade eleven as he is now.

    David Broadland
    May 2014
    The risk of cost overruns on the new bridge was hidden. Is the same thing happening with sewage treatment plans?
     
    APRIL WAS A DANGEROUS MONTH for two local megaprojects and their political backers. City of Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin’s claim of a “fixed price” contract with the builder of the new Johnson Street Bridge turned out to be little more than a mayoral misunderstanding. That project’s acknowledged price is now almost certain to top $100 million and construction will likely run well into 2016.
    In the same week, CRD politicians’ attempt to ram a regional sewage treatment plant down the throat of the smallest municipality involved in the scheme proved to be an expensive political miscalculation. Esquimalt Council voted unanimously to push the project out of the municipality, and provincial Environment Minister Mary Polak made it clear she wouldn’t interfere on behalf of the CRD.
    Both projects claimed to address problems for which there was little or no evidence of immediate danger to the public. Instead, the compulsion to get shovels in the ground in both cases came from claims—never verified—that supportive funding from upper levels of government could disappear. In that atmosphere of a looming deadline, proper planning and thorough consideration of alternative solutions were abandoned and financial risks hidden. The fear most Victorians have now is that the projects have dubious merits yet will add dearly to their annual household costs.
    Let’s start with the bridge and examine closely the source of the mayor’s confusion. There is a cautionary tale therein, one that  backers of the centralized sewage treatment project might want to digest slowly before attempting to restart their unpopular program in the middle of an election year.
     

    This image of work on the new JSB bridge was taken in China in March 2014. It suggests that, at the time the photo was taken, this critical aspect of the project was about 10 months behind schedule.
     
    TO UNDERSTAND THE ORIGINS of Mayor Fortin’s misunderstanding about the nature of the contract he signed with the bridge’s builder, I’ll replay a series of critical events that took place in 2012. Our understanding of what happened behind closed doors at City Hall as these events unfolded is made possible by the excellent hindsight provided by provisions of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.  
    You might recall that councillors had first approved replacing the current bridge in April 2009 when the price of a new “signature” bridge—complete with on-street bicycle lanes, three lanes for vehicular traffic, a railway track and separate pedestrian/cycling amenities—was estimated at $40 million. This price rose within days to $63 million; the company that did the estimate left out a lane-width of bridge. A year later—in a “Class C” cost estimate—a bridge without rail on it was pegged at $77 million.
    In March 2012, however, City staff announced the price to build a new bridge had risen to $92.8 million. 
    This last jump in the estimate was accompanied by a major reconceptualization of the one-of-a-kind bridge’s physical configuration. If you’ve been following the sewage treatment project’s twisted history, this reconceptualization of the new bridge was the equivalent of going from a three-plant distributed system to a single centralized plant at McLoughlin Point—it was a fundamental change that should have triggered alarm bells in the minds of Victoria councillors.
    Alarm bells didn’t sound because neither City staff nor the City’s project manager MMM Group told councillors that the project had undergone a fundamental rethink. Councillors weren’t told that engineering challenges had been encountered with the unique design, or that only partly-worked-out conceptual solutions to those problems had been found.
    Instead, a March 2012 staff report urged councillors to commit to a form of procurement (“Design-Assist”) that would quickly secure a contractor to build the bridge. The report stated, “This [course of action] secures the contractor as soon as possible and allows the contractor to plan and execute the installation of coffer dams prior to the close of the next fisheries work window on February 15, 2013. This is required to accommodate the in-water construction of bridge foundations in order to maintain project schedule.”
    Councillors had long been warned by City staff that if project schedule wasn’t maintained, federal funding would be jeopardized. To ensure construction began as soon as the winter fisheries window opened, staff were saying, in effect, a bridge builder needed to be ready to go by December of that year. The need for committing to immediate action and making irrevocable decisions was tied to preserving federal funding.
    So without realizing that the bridge design was still at a conceptual level, and accepting City’s staff’s admonition that they had to move quickly, councillors agreed to enter into a procurement process.
    By May 2012 three construction firms (PCL Constructors Westcoast, Kiewit Infrastructure,  Walsh Construction) had been short-listed to submit bid proposals. The City’s RFP stipulated that proposals must include “a fixed price for the complete performance of all of the Contractor’s obligations under the Contract.”
    The RFP also stipulated that proponents would provide an “Indicative Price” based on MMM’s design, which it now claimed was at “60 percent” completion even though it was simply a concept.
    The first indication to City staff that the project was in trouble—aside from the aforementioned doubling of the cost estimate over a two-year period—was when all three proponents said they couldn’t build MMM’s design for the City’s $66 million budget for construction. (Other costs, including MMM’s project management fee, brought the total estimate to $92.8 million.)
    Undaunted, City staff proceeded to the next phase of the procurement process: “collaborative” meetings with the proponents. Senior City staff records of those meetings, obtained by FOI, show that all three companies expressed strong reservations about MMM’s conceptual design; all three proposed “optimizations” that would change every aspect of MMM’s design; only the basic shape of the bridge originally proposed by Wilkinson Eyre architect Sebastien Ricard was left more or less intact.
    The need to extensively reconsider MMM’s design delayed the RFP process and the closing date for final bids was extended by two and a half months. The previously pressing need to have a contract signed by the end of November so as to “maintain project schedule” vanished.
    On November 1, 2012 the City received three bids, the details of which were shared with only four or five of City Hall’s most senior managers. Each of the bids produced significantly different proposals on how to create a bridge that looked like the one in MMM’s design. Two bids were much higher, price-wise, than the City’s “affordability ceiling,” and all three bids completely reconfigured the mechanical scheme for making the bridge lift. Kiewit Infrastructure’s engineers said, “unknowns and/or unexpected costs” of MMM’s “unconventional design” would “conflict with the City’s mandate to remain near or below the indicated Affordability Ceiling.” Kiewit added that MMM’s design “may represent a fundamentally high risk and expensive design approach.” They advised the City to abandon MMM’s “rolling wheel” concept in favour of a bridge that rotated on bearings fixed at the centre of the big wheels. They might as well have said, “Why reinvent the wheel?”
    In their critical review PCL noted that MMM’s design “was heavily imbalanced” in the open position and that “the level of imbalance…is greater than was used for the design of the span drive machinery.”
    PCL also noted: “The support  machinery… was considered to present a significant unknown in terms of the performance of the bridge when deformations were taken into account. The tolerances specified…are impossibly tight, and were viewed to be impossible to maintain after erection of the bascule span.”
    Overall, very little of MMM’s design was left unchanged. Ironically, two of the bids included construction schemes that would eliminate the need for the coffer dam that had been used months earlier to rush councillors into the procurement phase.
    In PCL’s bid proposal every single element of the bridge had changed in shape, the material it would be made from, or both of those.
    Although PCL’s bid was within the City’s affordability ceiling, the risk to City taxpayers was high. PCL’s bid might have been low-balled to ensure it became the preferred proponent. Once it was in that position, PCL could then negotiate a contract with City officials in which a higher cost could be hidden, possibly by mutual agreement, in the details of the contract. That this was a real risk was underlined by the fact that the other two bids proposed radically different mechanical concepts and put the cost of building the bridge much higher than PCL’s suspiciously low bid. Only a small circle of senior City managers were aware of the details of the bids.
    This was the most critical moment in the project’s 4-year life. City staff and the project’s political backers no doubt would have preferred all of these concerns to remain hidden; for the project to fail at that moment would have hurt political careers—particularly the mayor’s—and marred the professional reputations of these highly-paid, ambitious bureaucrats. Should they go public with details of the bids? Or should they keep it all hidden and try to negotiate a contract with PCL?
    When I wrote about this in Focus’ March edition I wasn’t able to say whether City councillors had been warned by City staff about this risky situation. Had the warnings of PCL, Kiewit and Walsh been communicated to councillors? After all, the City was going to pay $75,000 to each unsuccessful proponent participating in the bid process, mainly for providing a critical review of MMM’s design and suggesting ways to improve it. Given the drastic nature of the changes all three companies were proposing—and the fact that two of the bids were far above what the City said it could afford—wasn’t the costly and independent advice of the engineering teams exactly the kind of information City staff should have shared with councillors? Did they?
    Hold that question in your mind a minute as we consider something else that happened before City staff told councillors about the bids: Six days after receiving the three bid proposals and their stinging critiques of MMM’s flawed design, Mayor Fortin signed MMM to a new $9.1-million contract to project manage and redesign the bridge. That’s right. Almost as soon as City engineers learned how badly they had been served by MMM’s project management and engineering services, they signed MMM up for more of the same.
    So did City engineers inform councillors of what was in the engineering reviews of MMM’s design?
    They did not. The staff report delivered to councillors at a November 16, 2012 in camera meeting, and the minutes of that meeting, including the questions asked by councillors and the answers provided by engineering staff, were recently obtained from the City’s FOI office. That staff report shows that none of the warnings from PCL, Kiewit or Walsh, nor the actual bid amounts from Kiewit or Walsh, were provided to councillors. The minutes also show that none of the councillors asked about any aspect of the Kiewit or Walsh bids. (Download the staff report and minutes as well as the individual proposals from the menu at the end of the article)
    The staff report shows that City staff told councillors PCL’s bid was $63.4 million and “The other two proposals also offered optimizations, but their prices were above the City Affordability Ceiling, and therefore include significant risk that it would not be possible to reach an acceptable agreement with these other proponents.” Yet City staff mentioned none of the numerous risks pointed out by PCL, Kiewit and Walsh.
    The City had said going into the RFP that their $66 million affordability ceiling included a “ten percent” contingency. PCL’s proposal left only a four percent contingency. When asked about this at the meeting, the minutes note that councillors were told: “Arriving at a design built with a five percent contingency is normal...This is a unique project, [so] that is why the contingency is different.”
    Even though City staff knew the design level was, at that point, less than 60 percent because of all the proposed changes in the bridge’s design, they led councillors to believe a “five percent” contingency was normal, and at the same time it was “different” because of the one-of-a-kind design. Shouldn’t it have been higher? American bridge engineer Ed Wortman recently told Focus, “The $2.8 million contingency allowance seems too low for the design at the 60 percent level. This amount would be reasonable for 100 percent final design but not for an incomplete design.”
    Especially noteworthy is that the staff report told councillors: “It was also important to note that the proposal from PCL had no proposed amendments to the draft construction contract.” This appears to be a significant misrepresentation. PCL’s proposal actually stated, “In keeping with the collaborative intent of the RFP, PCL is proposing a modified contract.” After outlining its understanding of the design and price negotiations that the draft contract would set up, PCL’s bid proposal then stated, “PCL is proposing a subtle deviation to this process where...” which is followed by a big blank space in the copy of the proposal provided to Focus. The modification to the contract PCL proposed was redacted by the City on the basis that disclosure would be harmful to PCL’s business interests.
    On the recommendation of senior City staff who signed the report, all but one councillor (Ben Isitt) voted to proceed with negotiations with PCL. Forty-five days later, the City had signed a contract with PCL to build a bridge for a “fixed price” even though the design was little more than conceptual.
    The contract Mayor Fortin signed, and that all councillors—except Ben Isitt and Lisa Helps—approved on December 31, 2012, has a provision in it that allows PCL to submit a “Claim for Change.” On March 17 of this year PCL submitted a claim for $7.9 million based on, according to the City’s Director of Engineering Dwayne Kalynchuk, “design delay” and “scope growth.”
    Given that the design of the bridge—a structure that various engineers have described as very complex—had been knocked back to a conceptual level during the RFP process, the mayor ought not be surprised that “design delay” has occurred. Perhaps he isn’t.
    As for “scope growth,” one example of a significant material change in the bridge that took place since the contract was signed has been documented by Focus over the last several months. In its proposal, PCL envisioned a simple interface between the 1700-tonne bascule leaf and the rollers that support that weight. But the interface that was eventually chosen is vastly more complex and expensive than PCL envisioned, and now includes the use of 4000 gallons of epoxy grout.
    Such a design change would have been executed by the engineering company designing the bascule leaf (Hardesty & Hanover), but, under the terms of PCL’s contract, the change had to first be approved by MMM Group, who have overall responsibility for design.
    The City has stated that MMM will provide “advice on the merits of PCL’s request,” but one thing is already clear: fabrication of the critical bascule leaf in China only got started in March 2014, approximately 10 months behind the schedule outlined by the City and MMM in March 2013.
    A local expert on contracts and procurement—who requested anonymity because of dealings with the City and/or engineering companies involved in the project—said an overrun of $7.9 million so early in the construction schedule was the mark of a project that is “financially doomed.”
    The expert said that a fixed price contract shouldn’t have been entertained by the City until the design was at “85 percent.”
    The contract expert called Mayor Fortin’s claim that the City has a fixed price contract and doesn’t expect to pay the $7.9 million “disingenuous,” and said, “A ‘fixed price’ contract is not a ‘fixed price’ anymore if the project scope or schedule materially changes.”
    Should the mayor expect MMM to reject PCL’s claim? The expert told Focus, “It’s the fox in the henhouse with MMM reviewing the claim—especially when they could be potentially at fault.”
    The $7.9 million additional cost will push the project’s publicly-acknowledged price to $100.1 million.
    Mayor Fortin and his engineering department staff appear to have taken the advice of former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Interviewed about a $300 million cost overrun on a train terminal being built in San Francisco, Brown famously said, “We always knew the initial estimate was way under the real cost. If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever get approved. The idea is to get going. Start digging a hole and make it so big there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.”
     
    ACROSS CENTENNIAL SQUARE from Victoria City Hall, the CRD has been busily digging such a hole for over a year: In March 2013 the CRD secretly purchased a site on Viewfield Road for $17 million on the chance it could be used as the site for an anaerobic digester as part of its purported “$782.7 million” secondary sewage treatment program. In May 2013 the commission appointed to oversee implementation of the program issued an RFP to design and build a plant at McLoughlin Point in Esquimalt, and by June had short-listed three teams of engineering and construction firms. The successful bid was expected to be announced “in the spring of 2014.” The commission then hired Albert Sweetnam as program director at a salary of $290,000 a year, including a $290,000 bonus if Sweetnam completes his five-year contract. In September, construction began on the first component of the program—the $11.5 million Craigflower Pump Station. In November a contract was awarded to design another component, the estimated $9.5 million Arbutus Road Attenuation Tank. In March of this year Acumen Communications Group were awarded a $1.5 million contract to supply communications services and Millennia Research signed a $600,000 deal to provide assistance in case human remains are uncovered during excavation work. Stantec, the engineering consultants, have an existing contract that will see them paid close to $40 million for “program consultant services” to 2018. By the end of 2013 the CRD had spent $65.4 million developing the program.
    That’s a big hole.
    All these expenditures were approved by a majority of CRD directors even though a final agreement to rezone McLoughlin Point was not in place. On April 7 Esquimalt Council voted unanimously to reject the CRD’s rezoning application. Whoops.
     

    Esquimalt Council votes unanimously to reject a rezoning application that would have permitted a sewage treatment plant at McLouglin Point
     
    Asked if she would intervene, provincial Environment Minister Mary Polak told CBC Radio, “I am not inclined to intervene in a matter that is ultimately, and should ultimately be a local decision… No provincial government should take lightly the idea of interfering when it comes to something that is legitimately within the bounds of a local government… I certainly will review whatever request is made of us and I will look forward to seeing what the CRD presents.”
    On April 10, CRD Chair Alastair Bryson wrote to Polak and outlined what the CRD saw as its only options: It could “proceed in defiance of the bylaw,” abandon sewage treatment altogether (which, Bryson said, would place CRD “directors, officers and employees…in personal jeopardy of prosecution”), or find a replacement for the McLoughlin Point site, which “would necessitate re-negotiation of the funding agreements with senior governments. With a multi-year delay and significant uncertainty about when such a process would conclude, critical dates in the agreements could not be met.”
    Bryson asked Polak to initiate “a Cabinet Order to suspend the operation of those provisions of the existing Zoning Bylaw…to allow this important project to proceed to construction.”
    At the time Focus went to press, there had been no public response to the CRD from Polak.
    Will the Minister take the CRD’s list of its options seriously? Attempting to build a sewage treatment plant without a building permit would set an interesting precedent; who else might follow the CRD’s example? Costco? Bryson’s worrying out loud about being prosecuted is dramatic, but federal regulations won’t come into effect locally until 2020. Bryson and his fellow directors don’t know for certain they’ll still be directors following this November’s civic elections, let alone in 2020.
    The CRD’s real play in its letter to Polak is the threat of losing contributory funding from the provincial and federal governments, an argument aimed not so much at Polak as it is at other civic politicians thinking of standing up in support of Esquimalt’s position. As we saw earlier in this story, this is the same argument as used by City of Victoria staff to press their political enablers forward to a premature contract to build the Johnson Street Bridge. 
    In his letter to Polak, Bryson left out a fourth option available to the CRD, the one Esquimalt’s Mayor Barb Desjardins supports, which she has called “a better plan.”
    If Polak doesn’t intervene in favour of the CRD’s McLoughlin Point plan, the CRD will be forced to consider a different plan. Since the CRD has said itself that no other viable site for a central plant exists in the CRD, the only option would appear to be to distribute treatment amongst participating municipalities. Colwood has already chosen this option.
    The CRD’s argument against distributed treatment is that it already considered that option and determined that it would cost “$2 billion.”  On the other hand, the CRD are still saying that a $783 million estimate for the plan with a treatment plant at McLoughlin Point is still valid, even though it was done in 2010.
    Richard Atwell, a member of Sewage Treatment Action Group (STAG) and one of the developers of the “RITE Plan,” has found what appears to be a serious flaw in the CRD’s estimates: They’ve been cherry-picking cost estimates from two different studies.
    A 2007 study by Associated Engineering, CH2MHill and Kerr Wood Leidal determined that a 110-million-litres-per-day central plant at Macaulay Point would cost $572 million. A 2009 study by the same companies estimated that a 10-plant distributed system would cost $1.85 billion.
    In 2009 a third study for the CRD by Stantec and Brown & Caldwell put the cost of a 108-million-litres-per-day plant at McLoughlin Point at $210 million, far less than the 2007 study. The centralized plants in both studies had virtually the same capacity.
    Atwell points out that when the CRD uses “$783 million,” that estimate depends on the $210 million estimate for the centralized plant. On the other hand, as Atwell notes, the CRD’s estimate of “$2 billion” for the distributed system comes from the Associated Engineering study. If the CRD is going to uses Associated Engineering's “$2 billion” for a distributed system, why don’t they use Associated Engineering's $572 million for the centralized plant?
    Moreover, Atwell has determined that the 2009 Associated Engineering study put the cost of individual small plants in a distributed system at about 2.3 times the cost of a similar-sized (8 million litres per day) tertiary treatment plant in Blaine, Washington, completed in 2010.
    Atwell also argues the CRD’s claims about the amount of land distributed plants would require is similarly flawed. In its 2009 study, the footprint such a plant would require was estimated by Associated Engineering to be 1.5 acres. Atwell says that’s three times the area the plant in Blaine uses. The plant in Blaine, which has the physical resemblance of a marina-restaurant-retail-shopping complex, was designed by Brown & Caldwell. That’s the same Brown & Caldwell who participated in the 2009 Stantec study on a centralized system. Atwell questions why the CRD didn’t ask Brown & Caldwell to provide estimates for a distributed tertiary system.
    Atwell says “the CRD’s figures are totally unreliable for estimating the cost of a decentralized sewage treatment system.” He has created a video presentation of this information: www.sewagefacts.ca.
    If the CRD’s estimate for a decentralized system seems fishy, is its 2010 estimate for a centralized system reliable? The estimate was performed by Stantec at the same time that company did a peer review of the $77 million cost estimate for a new Johnson Street Bridge. Stantec judged the bridge estimate to be “reasonable” even though it didn’t include, for example, anything for “approvals and permits.” At the time Stantec did that peer review “approvals and permits” had already cost the project $320,000. That sum had been paid to…Stantec.
    At the very least, Stantec’s 2010 centralized system estimate ought to be adjusted for inflation and for the $38 million the CRD has said would likely be needed for a biosolids incinerator. With those adjustments, the estimate becomes $885.5 million.
    The lesson from the bridge project is that nobody’s figures can be relied upon and that financial risks to taxpayers will be hidden. Early on in that issue, Victoria City Councillor Geoff Young tried to get fellow councillors to seriously consider repairing the existing bridge; that would have required doing a cost estimate based on practical considerations about how to get the most life out of what the City  already owned. His fellow councillors refused to follow Young’s practical suggestion and instead insisted on a cost estimate that would justify a decision they had already made.
    Mayor Desjardins, Richard Atwell, STAG and many others are now asking Young to support doing an updated cost estimate for a distributed tertiary treatment system in which the burden of hosting treatment is both physically and politically shared. Given the way the bridge project has unfolded, you would think that Young, the chair of the CRD’s sewage committee, would want to support that.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    David Broadland
    April 2014
    Awarding of a CRD sewage treatment project contract to Stantec that turned out to be worth $43 million was overseen by two former Stantec employees.
     
    LET'S PARSE STANTEC'S expected $43 million share of the $783 million CRD sewage treatment program, one meeting at a time, and figure out how that happened. To start, we need to crank our minds back—way, way back—to 2006. That’s when it all began.
    Just three working days after Environment Minister Barry Penner wrote the Capital Regional District and ordered it to develop a plan for sewage treatment, Dwayne Kalynchuk was promoting his former employer— Stantec—as the go-to company to meet the Minister’s challenge. Kalynchuk was then General Manager of the CRD’s Environmental Services Department.
    In a July 26, 2006 report to the Core Area Liquid Waste Management Committee (the sewage committee), Kalynchuk wrote, “t is recommended that a comprehensive report on treatment options, procurement strategies and update costing be prepared.” Kalynchuk argued that his former employer ought to be given the job because “Stantec has already provided estimates in the past for treatment at Clover and Macaulay, so any proposed changes at these locations should be consistent with work already done.” Stantec’s previous experience with the CRD, Kalynchuk asserted, “will facilitate a review in both a timely and cost-effective fashion.” A schedule included with the report showed the study could be completed in three months. Kalynchuk’s report put the “expected” cost at $125,000 and recommended Stantec be awarded a contract without calling for competitive bids.
    The CRD’s minutes for that meeting stated, “Mr. Kalynchuk pointed out that the staff report had been written prior to the receipt of Minister Penner’s letter. However, staff felt the proposed action to prepare a comprehensive treatment options and strategy report was in line with the Minister’s direction.” The minutes then recorded that “Considerable discussion ensued. General concern was expressed regarding sole sourcing the work.” The upshot? CRD directors didn’t bite on Kalynchuk’s recommendation to hire Stantec.
    Kalynchuk had started working for the CRD just 10 months earlier. His past employment included a stint with Stantec in their Edmonton headquarters. A news story from the October 2003 edition of Peg, the official publication of Alberta’s professional engineers, noted his recent appointment at Stantec and stated, “Mr. Kalynchuk will assist in the areas of infrastructure management and pavement engineering, as well as transportation and environmental infrastructure practice, primarily in their marketing efforts.”
    In the parlance of the engineering community, “environmental infrastructure practice” means sewage treatment facilities.
    It’s not unreasonable to ask: Was Kalynchuk still “marketing” for Stantec at that July 26, 2006 meeting when he proposed by-passing a competitive bid process? (Kalynchuk declined to comment for this article.)
    Over the next three years the CRD gathered information needed to develop the plan Penner had ordered. A team of private consulting firms—which didn’t include Stantec—inched the CRD forward. In July 2008, Tony Brcic  was hired as the treatment program’s project manager. Brcic, too, had worked at Stantec—for 18 years before leaving in 2005.
    In March 2009 Kalynchuk and Brcic made a pitch to the sewage committee in which they argued for contracting with a firm that would serve as the “program management consultant.” Their report described the work that firm would do, including “finalizing site selection, preparing a Class C estimate for the project to satisfy the requirements of the business case and providing services to enable the CRD to submit the Liquid Waste Management Plan amendment by the end of 2009...”
    Kalynchuk and Brcic argued for a “quality based selection process” rather than a competitive process. Their report stated, “The system configuration and method of procurement for the [Core Area Waste Treatment Plan] will not be know until approved by the minister of environment in early 2010. Therefore, it is difficult at this stage to establish a defined scope of work for consulting firms to price. It is on this basis that CRD staff recommends using the [quality based assessment] process to hire the program management consultant.”
    Even though Kalynchuk and Brcic pointed out that “the provincial and federal governments require a transparent and competitive process and may not find [quality based assessment] acceptable,” their report recommended it anyway.
    The minutes of the meeting at which that report was delivered make it clear that Kalynchuk “provided…the estimated cost of a [program management consultant] over the entire project, and the comparison of hourly rates with industry standards.” The minutes did not record what either of those were, but as we will see later on, the recipient of a great deal of tax money was about to be decided.
    Using a quality based assessment process would allow Kalynchuk and Brcic to define the parameters by which they could narrow the field of interested engineering companies down to a recommendation. It was a less-than-transparent, subjective process that could—if someone wanted to—be shaped to produce a desired outcome.
    On June 10, 2009, Kalynchuk and Brcic brought their recommendation for the program management consultant to an in camera meeting of the sewage committee. Three justifications were given for closing the meeting. The first was that holding the meeting in public might harm the business interests of a third party. The second reason given was Section 90(1) (e) of the BC Community Charter, which gives directors the choice of going in camera if they’re going to discuss acquisition, disposition or expropriation of land or improvements and they decide that disclosure could reasonably be expected to harm the interests of the regional district. The third reason, also from the Community Charter, was that Kalynchuk’s and Brcic’s recommendation could somehow be construed as “negotiations and related discussions respecting the proposed provision of a municipal service that are at their preliminary stages and that, in the view of the directors, could reasonably be expected to harm the interests of the regional district if they were held in public.”
    Was the CRD justified in closing the meeting? The recommendation of a management consultant doesn’t appear to have anything to do with “acquisition, disposition or expropriation of land or improvements.” Moreover, how could open discussion of Kalynchuk’s and Brcic’s recommendation of a program management consultant—and how they arrived at that recommendation—be harmful to the interests of the CRD? Only three months beforehand Kalynchuk and Brcic had reported that “the provincial and federal governments require a transparent and competitive process…”
    Of the three reasons the CRD gave for closing the meeting, only the “harm to the business interests of a third party” seems to be in play. 
    The minutes of the closed June 10 meeting only show that directors voted to “rise and report,” which means they decided to record, in the briefest terms possible, the outcome of the closed meeting. Their report noted that Stantec had been “approved as the program management firm” and that CRD staff had been “authorized to enter into negotiations with Stantec to develop a consulting service agreement…” It’s not a big leap to assume these were the recommendations of Brcic and Kalynchuk, both former Stantec employees.
    On July 22, 2009, having negotiated with Stantec, Kalynchuk and Brcic came back to the sewage committee directors with a list of initial tasks that Stantec would undertake for the sum of $3,565,220.
    Looking through that list, it’s hard to say why it couldn’t have been used to define the scope of work in the first of a series of competitive bids. The minutes for this meeting show  no indication anybody made this objection. In fact the minutes record little more than that “Staff noted the hourly rates of the selected firm were competitive with the others, and the costs fit in with the planning budget and work plan.” Sewage committee directors approved Stantec’s contract with only Directors Derman, Gaul and Saunders opposed.
    Thus Kalynchuk’s and Brcic’s quality based assessment process set up a routine where, periodically, Stantec would estimate the cost of completing or advancing progress on a list of tasks; CRD staff would note that Stantec’s hourly rates “were competitive;” and sewage committee directors would vote to approve a renewed contract with Stantec. But in this routine there was never any way of telling whether the number of hours Stantec was estimating a task would require was “competitive” or outrageous.  
    Press reports of that meeting show that Kalynchuk had told sewage committee directors the Stantec contract would “likely be around one percent of the project’s total cost.” At that time, the CRD were saying the project would cost $1.1 billion. At one percent, Stantec’s expected haul over the life of the project would have been $11 million.
    Instead, by mid-November 2013 Stantec had already billed the CRD for $11.3 million and the estimated cost for their services over the life of the project had grown to over $43 million. CRD Director Vic Derman, who has been on the sewage committee since its inception, told journalist Rob Shaw at the time, “Maybe I missed something, but I didn’t think it would be that high.”
    Shaw also reported that the sewage treatment program’s Project Director Albert Sweetnam told him, “Stantec is not being overpaid. I’ve looked at the rates. The rates are reasonable.”
    Shaw, who reported extensively on the sewage treatment issue for years before leaving for the Vancouver Sun, speculated on one possible source of the increase in what Stantec will be paid: “Some of the Stantec advice has led to key decisions on the project’s size and scope. Other advice, such as a report used to recommend the application of sewage sludge to land, has been shot down by local politicians.” In other words, some of Stantec’s work had been wasted.
    But an examination of Stantec’s billing of the CRD since 2009, obtained by FOI, shows that the vast majority of the $30 million difference between Kalynchuk’s “one percent” and the current estimate has nothing to do with work that has already been done. The $30 million will be paid for work Stantec has yet to do.
    It seems possible that Kalynchuk low-balled the cost of a program management consultant in 2009 to help convince sewage committee directors to avoid an open and competitive bid process. A competitive process would have been more transparent and could have eliminated the uncertainty over whether the number of hours a consultant estimated for future work was reasonable or outrageous. This likely would have saved taxpayers millions of dollars.
    Of course, this project has just begun. If Stantec’s “Class C” estimate of costs turns out to be as inaccurate as Kalynchuk’s estimate of how much Stantec would cost taxpayers, the project cost could rise to $3 billion.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Rob Wipond
    May 2014
    Internal RCMP investigation also underway
     
    INFORMATION AND PRIVACY COMMISSIONER Elizabeth Denham has recommended that the BC Association of Chiefs of Police and BC Association of Municipal Chiefs of Police should be made subject to Provincial freedom of information laws. After a review of new evidence and a public consultation process, Denham wrote on April 2 to Technology, Innovation and Citizens’ Services Minister Andrew Wilkinson stating that these private associations play a “significant public policy role with respect to legal and law enforcement issues” and “appear to exert significant influence” over British Columbia’s public policing practices. And although the Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists—which Denham also oversees—had previously determined that the associations were not in breach of the BC Lobbyists Registration Act, Denham seemed to intimate that she might revisit this matter, too, when her letter highlighted that police chief associations elsewhere in Canada are registered as lobby groups. 
    “The decision-making process of the Associations should, as a matter of public policy, be transparent, and transparency flows from access,” Denham wrote in conclusion. “I recommend that the Associations be added as public bodies under FIPPA [the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act].”
    A government media liaison provided Focus with a written comment for attribution to Minister of Justice Suzanne Anton: “I appreciate comments from the Commissioner and see merit in her recommendation. We will review our options closely—I have directed staff to determine an appropriate course of action.” Anton will have to be careful to avoid an appearance of conflict of interest, since a number of senior representatives of the Ministry of Justice are associate members of the BCACP. Anton herself attended part of last November’s two-day BCACP meeting.
    The BC government previously followed Denham’s recommendation to make the governing board of the Police Records Information Management Environment subject to FIPPA. Denham’s recommendation comes in the wake of two years of reporting in Focus on the police chief associations, revealing that the two associations function as both primary governing bodies for public policing in the province and as extremely effective private lobby groups, but without being publicly transparent nor held accountable under BC laws regulating either practice.
    The BC Civil Liberties Association, the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, Pivot Legal Society, post-doctoral fellow Adam Molnar of the Queen’s University Surveillance Studies Centre and I all provided submissions arguing that the police chief associations should be subject to FIPPA. 
    Even the associations themselves, in their submissions to the Commissioner, indicated that they would not oppose being declared to be public bodies. “The BCACP takes no position on the ultimate issue of whether a recommendation should be made by the Commissioner in this matter. We defer to and will respect any decision made by you in this regard, and will fully comply with any decision the Legislature makes in response to your recommendations,” wrote current BCACP President and Abbotsford Deputy Chief Len Goerke. The BCAMCP endorsed the BCACP submission.
    Only David Winkler, President of the BC Association of Police Boards, provided a submission opposing making the associations more transparent. It seemed ironic—or perhaps worryingly to the point—that these civilian overseers for our municipal police, who’ve been largely kept in the dark about the associations’ activities by our police chiefs, would not see the need for making the associations more publicly transparent and accountable.
    The Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, though, isn’t so indifferent to finding out more about what’s actually going on in BC policing. After being provided with a summary of my research and concerns, on the same day that Denham released her recommendation, the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP issued an order to the RCMP to conduct an investigation into the activities of the RCMP members of the BCACP. The Commission also instructed the RCMP to provide a written reply to seven specific allegations of possible police misconduct. These include concerns about the BCACP being a private group yet nevertheless signing official legal agreements on behalf of public police forces, diverting public resources to their group’s private benefit, and taking undeclared payments from the banking sector for their private group while conducting official police business with respect to financial crimes.
    “The [RCMP’s response] will summarize your complaint, describe the RCMP’s investigation, and advise you of the RCMP’s conclusions…[and] will include any action the RCMP will take as a result,” stated the letter to me from the Commission. The RCMP is legally required to respond. That should be interesting reading; after two years of efforts, don’t let anyone say I didn’t go the extra mile to try to ensure I got the police’s side of the story. 
    Rob Wipond

    David Broadland
    March 2014
    Documents recently obtained by FOI show the City of Victoria was warned by engineers of two of the three companies bidding on the Johnson Street Bridge project that the floating-ring design was too risky to build. The City went ahead anyway.
     
    THE GOOD NEWS IS that the City of Victoria finally released the three November 2012 bid proposals for the new bridge contract. Those proposals were the only chance for City councillors and interested citizens to hear what experienced bridge engineers thought about the design Wilkinson Eyre and MMM Group dreamed up in a hurry back in 2009. The bad news is that whatever the engineers said probably wasn’t heard by City councillors and is now irrelevant. There’s no going back—the bridge is being fabricated in China and steel support pilings drilled into the harbour as you read this. Focus requested these documents in November 2012. They were released to us by the City last month. The ugly news is what the engineers said.
    The three companies chosen to submit bids—PCL Constructors Westcoast, Kiewit Infrastructure, and Walsh Construction—were required to provide an “Indicative Design Review” as part of their bids. Each of the companies was paid $50,000 for their participation. The “Indicative Design” was the final version of the design the City contracted MMM Group to develop with Wilkinson Eyre. Below is a drawing of the most contentious element of that design—the lifting mechanism.
     

    MMM Group's "Indicative Design"
     
    Providing proof that nice guys finish first, PCL didn’t have much criticism to dish out. Instead, they offered up a reworked MMM design that Victoria is likely going to regret in 30 or so years. Why? Because that’s the design life for critical “subject to wear” parts of the lifting mechanism that PCL had to incorporate in order to meet the City’s “affordability ceiling.” And for reasons that I’ll tell you about towards the end of this story, replacing those critical parts may be impossible short of taking a cutting torch and a wrecking ball to the bridge.
    The big story here is that Kiewit and Walsh both ditched the Indicative Design’s fundamental mechanical concept: the two big rings floating freely on supporting rollers. This was the first time engineers had been able to publicly voice their professional opinion about the design (engineers are constrained by their Code of Ethics from publicly commenting on the work of other engineers) and a rare opportunity for the public and their elected representatives to get independent reviews of MMM’s claim that it would be reliable and durable. Kiewit’s and Walsh’s critiques of MMM’s design contained several concerns that were addressed in PCL’s proposal, so in the summary below I am including only criticisms that PCL’s final design did not address.
    As mentioned, the Kiewit and Walsh proposals both broadly rejected the heart of MMM’s Indicative Design, the mechanism used to raise and lower the movable section of the bridge. MMM’s design called for the lifting part of the bridge to be attached to two 50-foot-diameter rings, each of those supported by four large rollers. By rotating the 50-foot rings, the bridge could be raised or lowered.
    Since 2009 the mechanical concept has gone through several iterations, indicating uncertainty. Project watchdog Ross Crockford, a director of johnsonstreetbridge.org, called the design “experimental,” in 2010, which brought this response from MMM’s Joost Meyboom: “...elements of the proposed mechanical system have been developed to be simple and robust. They are based on applications from heavy industry such as foundries where similar mechanical arrangements have been used for decades under conditions that are considerably more aggressive and demanding than anticipated at the Johnson Street Bridge.”
    But in their bid proposal to the City Walsh’s engineers noted, “To the best of our knowledge, the only other application of this bridge type, also designed by Wilkinson Eyre, was built for the City of London’s Canary Wharf development. That bridge is significantly smaller than the proposed Johnson Street Bridge. Maintenance of the support rollers might be very difficult since the entire weight of the bridge rests on these supports. Should repair or replacement [of the rollers or their bearings] be necessary, jacking of the entire truss will be required to remove the load from these supports. The depth of the bridge pit will make shoring of the truss difficult and expensive and increase maintenance cost for this critical item.”
    Kiewit said it had consulted with “a number of steel and machinery fabricators, who are experienced in movable bridge design and/or construction. All expressed the opinion that there were likely more cost effective mechanical concepts for a bascule bridge than the one used as the basis for the Indicative Design.” Kiewit said “unknowns and/or unexpected costs” of MMM’s “unconventional design” would “conflict with the City’s mandate to remain near or below the indicated Affordability Ceiling. In summary, Kiewit is of the view that the Indicative Design may represent a fundamentally high risk and expensive design approach.”
    Kiewit’s engineers said their “comprehensive” review “resulted in the decision to propose a bascule concept based upon a more proven bridge type—the Strauss Bascule with under-deck counterweight. Joseph Strauss was a pioneer in bridge engineering who is best known as the Chief Engineer for design of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Strauss was also responsible for many innovative design patents and design of several movable bridges, including the existing Johnson Street Bridge.” Kiewit provided detailed drawings of the mechanism they were proposing.
     

    Kiewit's mechanical concept with span in open position
     
    Besides the Indicative Design’s unproven lifting mechanism, Kiewit noted that the counterweight in the Indicative Design was attached to the truss rings in a way that “would load the truss ring eccentrically, which could distort the ring—a highly undesirable condition.” The Strauss mechanism, they said, would provide a fixed axis on which the bridge could rotate, eliminating the complex arrangement of rollers beneath the rings. Kiewit noted their mechanism would reduce “seismic challenges” as well. 
    Walsh, too, advised the City to use a mechanical design with proven reliability. They proposed to convert the design to a “rolling lift,” which, they said “continues to be used on numerous rolling lift bridges throughout the world.” Because “the drive system is a proven concept, it will meet the life expectancy requirements of the project and potentially lower overall maintenance costs over the life of the bridge.” Walsh did not include drawings of its proposed design.
    There were other aspects of MMM’s design criticized by the companies.
    Walsh provided the City with a sobering warning about the light-weight bridge deck specified for the bascule leaf: “The orthotropic deck will impose significant ongoing costs for maintenance of the roadway coating. It is expected that the deck will require recoating every five to ten years. In order to accomplish this, portions of the bridge will have to be closed, the deck sandblasted and new coating applied. We believe this will have significant long-term maintenance costs for the City.” Their solution? “An open grating deck with concrete-filled pathways for bicycles has a lower initial cost, easier erection, longer life...”
    Kiewit worried the difference in widths of the pedestrian walkway and the multi-modal pathway would “destabilize the balance of the bridge in both the static and dynamic conditions.” The “overhanging walkways” were “unnecessarily complicated,” and “introduce the possibility of harmonic oscillation that could be very uncomfortable for pedestrians.” This is the vibrational phenomenon that troubled the Millenium Bridge in London which, after being opened for just three days, closed for two years while modifications were made. Kiewit’s solution was to widen the south side pedestrian walkway to match the north side and place both walkways at the level of the road deck, as in the existing bridge.
    Walsh’s bid proposal totalled $91.6 million; PCL bid $63.4 million. Kiewit withheld its bid price from the record released to Focus. (UPDATE: The City of Victoria released Kiewit's bid amount in November 2014 in response to direction from OIPC following an FOI filed by Focus. Kiewit's bid proposal was $80.99 million.)
    After receiving and considering the bid proposals from PCL, Kiewit and Walsh, an evaluation committee of City engineers—Peter Sparanese, Dwayne Kalynchuk and Ken Jarvela—delivered a report and made recommendations to a closed meeting of City councillors in November 2012. Since the meeting was closed, there’s no way for the public to know if councillors were made aware of the Walsh and Kiewit engineers’ warnings and concerns, or whether they were told that PCL’s proposal included a 30-year design life for the many parts of the bridge’s mechanical system subject to wear.
    Councillor Lisa Helps told Focus that councillors had previously agreed to let City staff do the digging through the proposals; councillors were to confine themselves to voting on the evaluation committee’s recommendation.
    Did this hands-off approach serve the public interest? The substance of the Kiewit and Walsh proposals, along with the maintenance liabilities inherent in PCL’s adaptation of MMM design, suggest MMM had spent millions of taxpayer dollars developing a bad design. If councillors—who hold office to represent the public interest—weren’t told the truth about the problems, whose interests were being served?
    There were both private political and economic interests at stake that didn’t necessarily work well with the public interest.
    The mayor and councillors who supported the bridge project from its inception would have lost political face in a public humiliation of the project.
    But the bigger loser likely would have been MMM. Three days after the closed meeting at which City staff briefed councillors on the bid proposals, the City announced a new $9.1 million project management contract with MMM Group. That was on top of $2.1 million for project management and design services performed between 2009 and 2012.
    If City engineering staff had provided councillors with as full an account of what the bid proposals contained as you have just read, would councillors have agreed to renew MMM’s contract?
    Councillors could still vote to “rise and report” on what they were told at that meeting. In the meantime Focus has filed an FOI for the evaluation committee’s report and the minutes of that meeting. We will report on those when we get them.
    From other FOI requests filed in the last few months, more information about the design of the bridge has emerged.
    We have learned that no seismic assessment of the PCL design has been performed. Given the political promises to build a bridge able to withstand a magnitude 8.5 earthquake, the absence of even theoretical confirmation that the bascule leaf would indeed remain on its rollers in the so-called “Big One” is a surprising oversight. The ring truss isn’t physically attached to the substructure of the bridge in any way—it simply floats on the rollers—and the only thing keeping it from sliding off to one side or the other is a lip on the rollers about one inch high.
    Engineering drawings obtained recently have revealed certain features of the bridge that could make it “iconic” in a way not intended by the councillors who pushed for a signature bridge. The bridge could also become an international symbol of poor planning, a miniature Fukushima.
    This stems from the way in which the central design feature of MMM’s mechanical system—the rollers under the rings—have been reconfigured (again) by PCL’s engineering consultant Hardesty & Hanover. They initially proffered a support system that had 32 rollers under each ring instead of the four MMM envisioned. Now Hardesty & Hanover have changed their minds and believe 12 big support rollers for each ring is the magic combination. As you can see in the drawing below, to support all those big, heavy 42-inch-diameter rollers there is now a forest of machinery beneath the rings. This could be tough on future taxpayers: there appears to be no way of jacking the rings off the rollers to do necessary repairs like replacing the bearings; the space where jacks and shoring would go is filled with rollers and other unmovable machinery. The task that Walsh’s engineers warned would be “difficult and expensive” is now going to be even more difficult and more expensive. The wheels of progress grind on.

    Hardesty & Hanover mechanical system as per final construction drawing
     
    Another fundamental change Hardesty & Hanover made to MMM’s design was to change how the rollers contacted the rings.  MMM’s design had the rings sitting directly on top of the rollers; they specified that a replaceable wear plate be attached to the rings. A simple, elegant idea. But MMM’s design required very precise—and expensive—fabrication tolerances for the rings. Hardesty & Hanover called them “impossibly tight...and impossible to maintain.” To get around that, and to stay within the City’s imposed affordability ceiling, Hardesty & Hanover came up with a truly bizarre cost-saving solution. Around the outside of each ring 11 U-shaped steel “support segments” will be attached. Each of these segments consist of about 85 separate pieces of steel that will be subject to rusting: lengths of crane rail, gear track, bolts, nuts and washers, flat metal plates, curved metal plates, etc, etc. Aesthetically, it will be messy. The segments will be arranged around one-half the outside circumference of the rings and—this is the truly strange why-is-this-happening-to-us? part—the strength to transfer the weight of the bridge to the rollers will be provided by epoxy grout pumped into the void between the segments and the rings. Not just a little epoxy grout, mind you, but iconic, mind-blowing amounts. Each ring will be swaddled in a semi-circular slab of epoxy grout that, if laid out flat on the ground, would be 12 inches deep, 55 inches wide (at its widest) and 80 feet long.
    The critical elements that connect the rings to the support segments will be forever encased in that epoxy grout, un-inspectable and inaccessible for the life of the bridge. And, because epoxy grout and steel have different thermal qualities, the grout will become fractured and separate from the steel. Water will get between the grout and the metal parts and corrosion will occur. How much corrosion? Since the parts will be inaccessible, no one will ever know. 
    Has this technique ever been used on a bridge before? I posed that question to the professional engineer whose stamp appears on the construction drawings. He’s Sean Bluni, CEO of Hardesty & Hanover, working out of their New York City headquarters. I also asked Bluni how the bridge could be jacked to repair or replace subject-to-wear parts. Bluni said, “As we are contractually required to do, we will discuss your questions with the parties to whom we are providing service on this project.”
    Most likely, this will require a closed council meeting.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    David Broadland
    March 2014
    Emails between top-level BC civil servants show Premier Clark’s 100,000 LNG jobs were based on dubious assumptions thrown together at the last minute for her 2013 throne speech. Were those civil servants working for the public interest or Clark’s election campaign?
     
    THE BC PROSPERITY FUND got barely a mention in last month’s Speech from the Throne. But a year ago Premier Clark’s apparently far-sighted plan to develop a massive LNG industry that would create “100,000 jobs for BC families” and pump billions into Provincial coffers fuelled the launch of the Liberals’ election campaign. Their compelling clean-energy-and-jobs message brought them from 20 points behind to a surprising victory in last May’s election.
    Now, though, Clark’s government appears to be stepping back from all that. The legislation to introduce a new LNG-supportive tax regime has been postponed a second time, for no apparent reason. Although Finance Minister Mike de Jong outlined the tax regime in his February budget speech, his plan to introduce it is vague.
    Were the Prosperity Fund and the job claims part of an elaborate election ploy? It wouldn’t be the first time a government made an election promise it didn’t intend to keep. A more troubling possibility, though, is that Provincial public service employees and public funds were used to create that election ploy, contrary to the BC Standards of Conduct that govern what civil servants can do while on the job. Documents recently obtained by Focus through an FOI, and our independent analysis of a consultant’s report done for the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Natural Gas days before Premier Clark announced the Prosperity Fund in February 2013, suggest that might be the case.
    The documents (download from link at end of story) suggest that an initiative to produce reports from independent consultants who would validate the potential for large revenues and massive job creation from LNG projects was launched only a month before Premier Clark announced the Prosperity Fund. The initiative appears to have been overseen by Assistant Deputy Minister of Finance Doug Foster. Foster outsourced the work to three private firms and delivered the numbers for Clark’s speech only days before it was made. Foster appears to have been reporting to Neil Sweeney, Deputy Minister, Corporate Policy in the Premier’s Office.
    The report that provided the numbers was authored by Grant Thornton LLP (download from link at end of story), a prestigious accountancy firm with world-wide operations. Grant Thornton’s report allowed the Premier to say in her February 2013 throne speech, “LNG development is poised to trigger approximately $1 trillion in cumulative GDP within British Columbia over the next 30 years and that means more than $100 billion will flow directly to the Prosperity Fund. Province wide, LNG is expected to create on average 39,000 annual direct, indirect and induced full-time jobs during a nine-year construction period. As well, there could be as many as 75,000 full-time jobs required once all LNG plants are in full operation.”
     
    Was the report credible?
    Before I tell you exactly what was in those emails, let me tell you why we were looking for them and how they came into our possession. Back in February 2013, all we knew was what the Premier said in her speech. For many of us it was the first time we had heard “LNG.” After Clark’s government had delivered its election budget, it released two reports—one authored by Grant Thornton and the other by Ernst & Young—that purported to validate the LNG revenue projections underpinning Clark’s Prosperity Fund. Oddly enough, those reports didn’t contain any job creation numbers.
    Throughout the subsequent election campaign, Clark had repeatedly stressed her plan would create “100,000 jobs for BC families.” But where did those jobs come from?
    After the election, inquiries to the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Natural Gas about the  LNG job figures used by Clark revealed that a third report, also by Grant Thornton, had provided the mathematical substance for the previously released studies of potential LNG revenues. But this report had been secreted away. There wasn’t a single reference to it in BC media coverage of the election. The Ministry sent us a link to its hiding place.
    After we read the report, which had the deceptively simple title Employment Impact Review, Focus filed an FOI for the record of communications between the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Natural Gas and Grant Thornton as they developed the study. The report contained many warnings to the reader that it was based entirely on assumptions provided by “the Province and its advisors.” We wondered who those “advisors” were and whether the Province and its advisors had pushed the process toward some desired outcome.
    There was good reason to believe they had. Grant Thornton had arrived at questionable conclusions in its report. For example, it had checked the validity of a key assumption provided to them by the Province and its advisors by comparing it with the Australia Pacific LNG project, which was being built in Queensland. Grant Thornton concluded the assumption was supported by the Australian  numbers. There were, however, problems with how they applied the Australian comparison.
    In its commentary about the comparison, Grant Thornton noted the ratio of direct jobs to tonnes of product for BC was only “slightly higher” than the Australian case. “Overall,” they concluded, “the estimates are comparable.”
    Actually, the BC ratio is 36 percent higher than the Australian number. If BC’s significantly higher number had been adjusted to actually be “comparable,” 36 percent of the direct jobs in the assumption would have vanished.
    Another of those key assumptions was that a capital expenditure of $98 billion in BC would create the capacity to produce 82 megatonnes of LNG per year. That, too, seems to be unreasonable.
    Australia Pacific is a two-phase, $35 billion project expected to eventually produce 16 megatonnes annually. At that ratio of capacity per dollar of investment, the Province’s assumed $98 billion would only create capacity for 45 megatonnes per year. Yet Grant Thornton had accepted that $98 billion would build 82 megatonnes of capacity.
    Australia Pacific’s likely costs, by the way, are significantly lower than BC’s would be: Australia Pacific is building a substantially shorter pipeline and will sip on coal seam gas, not shale gas. Coal seam gas doesn’t require drilling horizontal wells and fracking, so the wells for Australia Pacific LNG are about one-third the cost of wells in northeast BC.
    Grant Thornton’s estimation of long-term employment is also puzzling. According to an extensive study by KPMG of the $35 billion Australia Pacific project, ongoing operations of the LNG plant would employ 325, the pipeline 20 and the gas fields 520. Extrapolating from that example, a $98 billion project in BC would create 910 long-term operational jobs at LNG plants, 56 pipeline jobs, and 1456 gas field extraction jobs. That’s direct, long-term employment.
    If the pertinent BC Stats Input/Output Model multipliers are applied to these long-term employment figures, the total number of long-term jobs—direct, indirect and induced—rises to 21,000.
    It’s difficult to see how Grant Thornton arrived at the conclusion $98 billion would bring 75,000 long-term full-time jobs to the province.
    It seemed possible, then, after analyzing the Grant Thornton study last May, that the process of creating the report might have been pushed to create a 100,000-jobs election platform rather than function as a careful and reasoned analysis of the potential for LNG to produce jobs in BC. If it was the former, had taxpayers paid for a Liberal campaign expense? If it was the latter, why had the jobs report been kept in a drawer during the election?
     
    FOI adventures
    We filed that FOI for communications between Ministry employees and Grant Thornton in May of 2013. But the FOI was assessed a very high fee by the Province, which Focus declined to pay. Our efforts to ask for fewer records were thwarted by a Ministry information gatekeeper who said he would help but didn’t.
    So we FOIed instead for records that should have been slam-dunk easy for the Ministry to find: the “Documents and information relied upon” listed in the Grant Thornton report. Most of the entries on that list had been provided, Grant Thornton said, by “the Province and its advisors.” It defined “Province” as “the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Natural Gas.”
    We were again rebuffed by the Ministry’s information gatekeeper, who, this time, refused to respond to our request. To make a long story short, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner ordered the gatekeeper—under threat of a $13,000 fine—to release the record.
    The package we received in early February 2014 was surprising: It contained none of the “documents and information relied upon” by Grant Thornton. We protested. Then, through the mediation of OIPC, the Ministry revealed it had no such information in its custody and control. How could the Ministry not have the information Grant Thornton claimed the Ministry provided?
    What the Ministry seemed to have provided, however, were the communications we originally requested last May: emails between high-level employees of the Province, their “advisors,” and employees of Grant Thornton. Fifteen pages of the records were fully severed on the claim of “cabinet confidences.” The emails were copied from the files of Brian Hansen when he was Assistant Deputy Minister of Energy, Mines and Natural Gas. (Hansen is now Assistant Deputy Minister and Lead Negotiator, LNG Task Force, Ministry of Natural Gas Development).
    Hansen’s email record explains why his Ministry didn’t have the information Grant Thornton said the Ministry had provided: The information had come entirely from outside of government.
     
    Cooking with gas
    Hansen’s emails show that Assistant Deputy Minister of Finance Doug Foster first contacted Grant Thornton and Ernst & Young on or about January 11, 2013 to enlist their professional services in developing reports that would project revenues that might flow to the Province from an LNG industry in BC. About a week later, Foster realized employment projections would also be needed.
    So on Sunday, January 20, Foster emailed Patti Daum of Grant Thornton’s Vancouver office. Grant Thornton describe themselves as “a leading Canadian accounting and business advisory firm, providing audit, tax and advisory services to private and public organizations.”
    Foster asked Daum, “Is it possible that GT may be able to answer the following?” Foster wanted to know how many direct and indirect jobs might be created by “five to seven LNG plants/pipeline projects into the future.”
    Fifteen minutes later, Foster fired off another email, this time to André Powell, a partner in The Deetken Group, a business consultancy firm in Vancouver. Deetken describe themselves as providing “services to a broad range of private sector, venture capital and public sector organizations,” including “energy infrastructure and markets.” Foster’s email to Powell said, “You have been copied on my communiques to EY [Ernst & Young] and GT... Can you begin preparing presentations that combine the work of Deetken and those of EY and GT? think (in fact know) we will need these this week. Also, we will need to incorporate employment forecast to the extent that we can get these from third parties too. Can you let me know your thoughts?”
    Later that day, Powell emailed Foster: “...with respect to employment, we have estimates of direct labour (mostly from proponents) and have developed estimates of indirect and induced [jobs] using [input/output] multipliers. This analysis might be a good start and accelerator for EY and/or GT’s work. Happy to package this for them.”
    On January 23, following conference calls (referred to in the emails) involving Foster, Powell and Grant Thornton employees, Doug Bastin, a partner in Grant Thornton’s Vancouver office, emailed Powell an eight-point list of information he wanted, which included LNG plant sizes and capacities, production volume estimates, development costs, project timing, and direct, indirect and induced employment estimates. Note that Bastin asked Deetken for this fundamental information; he didn’t ask Foster or Hansen. But Bastin did copy his request to both Hansen and Foster.
    Later that day Powell emailed Bastin: “We are currently pulling this data together and will get it to you by end of today.”
    On January 26 Powell emailed Hansen with an update, noting: “With respect to employment, we had a call yesterday and we have provided additional details; also BC Stats are helping them; GT said they will shoot for Friday [February 1] next week for results.”
    Late on February 4, Powell, after considering Grant Thornton’s draft report, emailed Doug Foster four suggestions, copied to Hansen. Powell’s suggestions included: “We should remove all reference to ‘proponent’ information, this should be described as data provided by the Province and its advisors developed from industry benchmarks and other sources.” Powell added that removing all reference to proponent “should also apply to E&Y’s final report.”
    If any of Foster, Hansen or Bastin raised any objections to this apparent switch in the attribution of the source of some of the information Grant Thornton was using, it does not appear in the records Hansen provided. In the final report, as mentioned above, Grant Thornton credited assumptions and information to “the Province and its advisors.”
    Late on February 4, just 8 days before Premier Clark announced the Prosperity Fund, Hansen emailed Powell: “On the jobs and revenue and the GT and E&Y work, are we close to being [ready] to advance some validated metrics? I ask as there is a meeting tomorrow with folks from the centre around these metrics and I assume Doug [believed to be a reference to GT’s Doug Bastin] is close to finished.”
    Early the next day Powell replied to Hansen: “The GT labour market work is almost ready, we are on a call with them this morning to make some changes/updates to their work. EY is not intending to provide labour market forecasts. For your meeting this [morning], I would go with the GT numbers as provisional/work in progress.” Powell then listed numbers which are virtually identical to estimated LNG employment figures presented in Clark’s Speech from the Throne on February 12, and in the 2013-2014 BC Budget.
    Early on February 6, with less than a week before Clark would announce the Prosperity Fund, Deputy Minister to the Premier Neil Sweeney emailed Foster and Hansen and asked: “Guys, can we get the actual drafts from GT and the other folks?” 
    Foster emailed back: “Neil, the drafts are in various stages and continue to evolve due to:” and then Foster listed three issues that were causing delays, including: “Reviews by them [presumably “them” refers to GT and E&Y] to ensure that details are removed to protect proponent information sources...” 
     
    Who provided what to whom?
    Focus emailed Deetken’s André Powell, Grant Thornton’s Doug Bastin, and the Province’s Doug Foster questions about how the Grant Thornton reports were developed. Neither Bastin or Foster responded to emails.
    I asked Powell why he had suggested removing any reference to “proponent” information from the final reports and instead suggested attributing all information to “the Province and its advisers developed from industry benchmarks and other sources”.
    Powell said, “[T]he proponents did not provide information to GT and EY. To state otherwise in the final report would have been inaccurate and I therefore provided a corrected description for inclusion in the final document.”
    Powell added,“In providing information and assumptions to the consultants (GT and EY), Deetken considered a variety of sources. This included aggregated information from proponents, industry benchmarks and other research and analytics.”
    Powell explained that “Deetken used aggregated information collected on the Province’s behalf to assist it in evaluating other information it had already compiled as to reasonableness before passing specific assumptions to the consultants. The consultants [Grant Thornton and Ernst & Young] themselves were also free to accept or adjust such received information based on their own analysis and research of industry information.”
    Powell confirmed that “Deetken was not under contract with any LNG proponents or developers at the time the report was developed.”
    With the “Province” claiming it had none of the information Grant Thornton said it had, Deetken seems to be the sole source of information used by Grant Thornton, aside from their consideration of the Australia Pacific project. Deetken’s information, then, provided the fundamental basis for Clark’s Prosperity Fund and her successful election campaign. 
    Powell’s explanation of why he wanted aggregated information from proponents to be given a more opaque attribution is that no specific information from individual proponents was included. Fair enough. But how could the public interest be served in this taxpayer-funded exercise without transparency and accountability? Asking Encana, for example, for objective information about how many drilling jobs an LNG industry would create is like asking Goldman Sachs whether reducing regulation of investment banking would be good for the economy.
    By disguising the source of the information, the exercise became political.
    And, as mentioned earlier, the numbers seem to have been manipulated, or "fudged," as British Columbians prefer to put it. 
    Grant Thornton, Deetken and Foster seem to have created, intentionally or not, a “fudge-it budget” for LNG.
    For whose benefit were such arithmetical indiscretions performed? Well it wasn’t for Adrian Dix’s sake.
     
    Is fudging the numbers political activity?
    You might recall the scandal the Liberals were embroiled in just before the last election involving public service employees doing partisan work on the job. The Deputy Minister to the Premier John Dyble wrote a report about that affair in which he said the public service oath “expressly includes the Standards of Conduct, and requires public servants to conduct themselves in a manner that maintains and enhances the public’s trust and confidence in the public service.”
    The BC Standards of Conduct state, “Employees must not engage in political activities during working hours or use government facilities, equipment, or resources in support of these activities.”
    If a public service employee oversees development of a study, and if that study misrepresents the facts about the employment potential arising from LNG development in the province, and that misrepresentation then becomes the political position of the governing party seven days later—and the key component of their election campaign—was that employee engaging in political activity during working hours? Did he conduct himself in a way “that maintains and enhances the public’s trust and confidence in the public service”?
    This is a question that Premier Clark needs to answer, or democracy will continue to wither in BC.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Rob Wipond
    January 2014
     
    BC’s Information Commissioner launches an inquiry into police chief associations.
     
    INFORMATION AND PRIVACY COMMISSIONER Elizabeth Denham has launched an inquiry into British Columbia’s two police chief associations. Denham is considering recommending to government that the BC Association of Chiefs of Police (BCACP) and the BC Association of Municipal Chiefs of Police (BCAMCP) should be declared governmental “public bodies” and be made subject to the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA). According to her December 6 “letter to stakeholders,” the Commissioner is also inviting public input about this possible recommendation until February 14, 2014. 
    The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissoner (OIPC) evidently has some of the same concerns about
    the associations that Focus has been reporting on for two years, as it’s become clear that these secretive associations have been doing everything from crafting the government’s policing legislation to ordering police media spokespersons around the province to promote the virtues of mass surveillance. 
    “In my reflections on this issue to date,” Denham’s two-page letter states, “it appears that the policy argument in favour of such a recommendation is based on two related considerations.” Denham describes “the important public role that the Chief Constables and the Associations play in our society,” while “government and others treat the Associations as the focal point for contact with the Chief Constables on matters of public policy.” However, she points out, “the appropriate level of transparency of Association records can be achieved for FIPPA purposes only if a member of the public can request current and historical records from the Association itself, rather than relying on what might be piecemeal and incomplete records held by individual Chief Constables at any given time.” 
    What prompted this action? “We had inquiries, we had letters, we had calls, and we examined the implications of [freedom of information] and its application to these associations in some mediation files,” said Denham in an interview with Focus. “So we’ve had interest in the question. We’ve had evidence presented to us in relation to this question.” 
    The OIPC mediations included Focus’ own freedom of information requests for association records being held by four municipal police departments, which all four departments initially refused to release. And the “evidence” Denham was referring to included a nine-page letter and approximately 70 pages of documents submitted to the OIPC in late October, overviewing the research and writing about the associations that Focus has published. The documents show clearly that the BCACP and BCAMCP have been operating as de facto governing bodies for policing in the province and simultaneously functioning as influential private lobby groups, in secret and without public oversight, for decades. 
    So isn’t this situation a matter of law, not of “stakeholders’ opinions” about policies? “I think it’s a bit of both, and that’s why we need to clearly examine how these organizations operate, and we need to hear views,” answered Denham. “It’s a fact-finding mission.” Denham compared it to similar situations the OIPC has investigated, such as subsidiary corporations of public universities operating outside the reach of FIPPA, and the corporate entity that oversees the BC Police Records Information Management Environment which was recently made subject to FIPPA on the Commissioner’s recommendation. “There’s precedent for us to examine these issues,” said Denham. 
    Vincent Gogolek, executive director of the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association (FIPA), is one of the “stakeholders” who received the Commissioner’s letter. He sees the OIPC’s move as a positive development. 
    Gogolek pointed to how the police chief associations have characterized themselves as public bodies to avoid regulation under the Lobbyists Registration Act, and as private bodies to avoid regulation under FIPPA. He said the Commissioner’s possible recommendation of adding the associations to Schedule 2 of FIPPA would be a straightforward solution. “I think it might be cutting to the chase,” said Gogolek. “Having the thing actually put into the legislation rather than having it adjudi- cated makes the thing 100 percent certain...It takes out any ambiguity.” If police chiefs still want to get together privately, he added, they can do that apart from the government business of the associations. 
    However, Gogolek believes the underlying “criteria” guiding any decision are even more important, and FIPA intends to tell the Commissioner that. “We want to do a reasonably fulsome submission on this. I think we need to look at the broader question. Here we have one specific entity that should be covered [by FIPPA] for the reasons set out in the Commissioner’s letter. It just makes sense. They’re basically the heads of these various police departments assembled together, acting together, and what they do is governmental...They’re not getting together to run a toy drive. It’s not a social club...But if we’re going to be designating things [as public bodies] or asking the government to be doing it, the government should be doing it on the basis of some sort of reasonably recognizable and transparent criteria.” 
    BC Civil Liberties Association policy director Micheal Vonn emphasized that same point. “[I’m] very, very happy that the Commissioner is seized of this [issue]. That’s good,” commented Vonn. However, she added, a “test” for distinguishing the public and private spheres needs to be developed, because both carry values worth protecting. 
    “Freedom of association is a powerful good,” said Vonn. “On the other hand, so is governmental accountability—the heart of democ- racy. So the question here is, how do we parse it?...What I’m hoping is that we get [from the OIPC] some kind of concerted, holistic analysis.” 
    “What we would like to see, and what we may end up making the basis for our submission, is not the question of, ‘Should the Commissioner recommend this?’” explained Vonn. “Recommendations aside...What are the indicia, the factors, the criteria that make you public versus private? Because, while this question is of keen importance in relation to police accountability matters, this is not going to be the only situation in which this arises.” 
    Vonn pointed to a recent international survey of information commissioners that ranked proliferating public-private hybrid bodies as a top legal concern. Focus’ struggles to obtain information about BC’s police chief associations, said Vonn, don’t exist in isolation. “It certainly highlights very starkly how an important component of citizens’ rights are all based on this notion of what sign do you hang on the door: Are you public; are you private? Rights change on the basis of the sign. So the sign cannot be arbitrary,” said Vonn. “We want to see this [police chief associations] matter remedied. But we also want a mechanism whereby we can recognize ‘government’ according to a test.” 
    Vonn pointed to a court case in which BC Transit and Vancouver’s TransLink tried to avoid certain responsibilities under our Charter of Rights and Freedoms because, they claimed, they were not public bodies. In 2009, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled against them, while laying out specific criteria for what constitutes a public body. That made clear, said Vonn, that our governments don’t have “unbridled discretion” to place public bodies outside public accountability. “If the Commissioner is in the position to apply the legal thinking of that office to shaping criteria and helping to set out a test, then we think that would be optimal,” said Vonn. 
    And who else will submit comments to the Commissioner? Most people know little about these secretive associations, yet at the same time this would seem to be potentially the most important single policing governance issue facing BC in a generation. There are fundamental questions of public information access and government accountability involved. 
    However, in addition, for anyone who cares about high-profile cases of police abuse or in-custody deaths, surveillance, regional policing, roadside prohibition or other controversial policing legislation, undercover operations and monitoring of political organizations, white collar crime investigations, police digital records systems, or secret collaborations between police, CSIS and other security agencies in the US and Canada, it’s now clear that BCACP and BCAMCP meetings are where all of these major BC policing issues are being discussed. And the public has not yet seen any of the minutes from a single one of some 25 BCACP subcommittees. The fact that so far Focus remains the only news outlet to cover this story in any substantive way in two years may be a testament to the moribund state of Canadian media. The associations have been operating for decades; do people understand how dramatically the Commissioner’s upcoming decision could affect the transparency and accountability of our police forces for decades to come? 
    Rob Wipond is glad that some other people besides him are finally looking into the police chief associations.

     
     

    Rob Wipond
    December 2013
    We’re worried about each other’s “mental health” a lot more than we used to be. But calling 911 for someone can be a disastrous approach, say victims of our good—or not so good—intentions.
     
    FOLLOWING A SERIES OF QUIET PROTESTS outside Revenue Canada offices, Gordon Stewart was apprehended by police at the Victoria Law Courts, taken to a hospital, put into seclusion and forcibly drugged for 10 days. The day before, John had interred his mother’s ashes. But then came what he describes as an “unbelievable, incomprehensible incident” that, in his sensitive state, was “otherworldly” and “traumatizing.” 
    John (who wishes to keep his name confidential) went to a Victoria recreation centre to try to clear his mind. He bumped into a friend and they talked into the wee hours. When John returned home, the lights in his condominium were on. 
    “I thought I must have leaned up against the dimmer switch when I was putting my shoes on,” says John. Then he noticed an out-of-place binder, his laptop positioned differently, his email program opened. “Something was askew,” says John. “It was like I was in some sort of parallel universe.” 
    Had someone broken in? Visible money hadn’t been taken. “It was just a really creepy feeling,” he says. Having suffered a heart attack last year, and also taking medications for anxiety and help with sleep, the 50-year-old felt a “physiological response” to the sense of “violation” and quickly took his medications. “I’m in no immediate danger,” he said to himself. 
    At five in the morning, John was awoken by his phone ringing. A police constable introduced himself and said, “We’re just wondering how you’re doing.” 
    “I’m sleeping,” answered John through a sedated haze, recalling the disjointed dialogue as best he can several months after the incident earlier this year (he’d later obtain the police records). “My mom just died and I just cremated her and buried her. It’s not a really good time.” 
    The constable asked if police officers could drop by. “Someone’s been trying to get ahold of you and they’re quite worried.” 
    The statement seemed strange to John, who’d been fielding calls and emails constantly from his and his mother’s friends for weeks; however, the constable wouldn’t name the caller or explain more. 
    Around 10 am John was awoken again by a firm, loud knocking. He groggily opened the door to two Victoria police officers let in by his building manager. They wanted to talk. 
    Embarrassed by his messy home, John suggested that he’d go to the washroom and then they could all sit in the condominium lounge. The police refused both suggestions, and soon John was standing uncomfortably in the building hallway being interrogated. The officers asked him very personal, informed questions about his mother, his lifestyle, and his health. 
    Did it occur to John to refuse to talk? “No!” answers John. “Because I couldn’t believe it was happening, Rob. I didn’t ask what my rights were...I didn’t ask, ‘Can we talk again after I’ve spoken to my attorney?’ It was like an alien abduction. You’re in the tractor beam, you are powerless, whichever way they tell you to go, you go. I’m not in the habit of being confronted by authorities, and I’m certainly not in the habit of being confrontational back.” 
    “Do you have a plan?” said one officer suddenly.
    “A plan for what?” asked John.
    “Have you ever thought about suicide?”
    “Sure, at different times, who hasn’t?” answered John. 
    “Do you have a plan?” asked the officer again. “Have you tried to cut yourself?” 
    In recounting the story, John imitates his own flabbergasted response. “No! No!” 
    After half an hour, one officer commented, “You still don’t know why we’re here, do you?” 
    John responded, “I have no idea why you’re here!”
    “Someone’s very concerned that you might harm yourself.” “Who? Who is this person?” asked John. “And why are you here and why aren’t they here, if they care for me so much?”
    The police admitted that they’d searched John’s home the previous night as part of their investigation to decide if John should be taken to a psychiatric hospital. Currently on disability, John assured them that he was seeing several competent doctors regularly for his various physical and mental conditions, and wasn’t feeling at all like killing himself. The officers eventually seemed satisfied. As they waited for the elevator, one officer answered again that they couldn’t tell John who’d called them; “however,” the officer added, with a finger pointing towards John’s transfixed eyes, “you should be really thankful that you have people in your life that care for you this much.” 
    The elevator opened and the officers departed, never to return. “I was just left reeling,” says John. “I was nearly committed!” 
    There have been significant increases in mental health calls to police in recent years. Plausible explanations include cutbacks to social services, growing homelessness, and unhelpful treatments. However, the biggest factor may be one that no one is discussing. According to rough calculations provided by Victoria Police Department Information Manager Debra Taylor, VicPD gets about two or three mental health calls daily of the kind that prompted police to visit John. About 18 of 20 are coming from people who aren’t physicians. Evidently, in the wake of extensive TV advertising, news coverage, and public education about mental health, people are increasingly calling 911 to report each other’s behaviours. 
    But how do police decide whom to take to hospital? What happens when they do? And what are the true motives of these callers? For months afterwards, John wondered what “friend” of his would deliver him to the brink of incarceration in a psychiatric hospital—none of his friends ever admitted to it. 
    Vince Geisler, on the other hand, knows for certain it was no friend of his who made the call.
     
    Dare not sound too upset 
    Vince Geisler was laid off for financial reasons after two years as the South Island field technician for Vancouver’s Navigata Communications. Geisler says he and Navigata’s human resources director never got along. There is disagreement about exactly what got said in their final conference call, but Geisler admits he became angry and hung up. He then went into his home workshop. 
    “I started to do some welding,” says Geisler, “just to kind of focus my attention on something else so I’m not sitting there brooding.” A couple of hours later he decided to go to Hillside mall for lunch but stopped mid-step when he spotted a van and police with guns drawn.
    According to police records, the street had been cordoned off by about ten officers, including an emergency tactical team with assault rifles. They called Geisler out. He walked over and asked what was going on. Geisler was “calm and cooperative” state police records. Police told Geisler that he was being arrested under Section 28 of the Mental Health Act, slapped handcuffs on him, and loaded him into the van. 
    “I’m like, ‘What in the hell?’” describes Geisler. He says this was when he uttered the first of many clear, firm requests to be allowed to contact a lawyer, which were refused. 
    At the Royal Jubilee Eric Martin psychiatric hospital, a psychiatrist asked Geisler how he was feeling. 
    “I said I’m feeling a little stressed out because I’ve just been laid off and I’ve been basically kidnapped and hauled off here and I’m being denied a lawyer,” recounts Geisler. 
    Geisler learned that Navigata’s HR director had called Victoria police, alleging that Geisler had said, just before hanging up, “I may as well walk off, put a gun in my mouth, and blow my brains out. You’ve ruined me.” For his part, Geisler says he wasn’t feeling suicidal (“For a job? Seriously?” he says.) and believes he may have said, “I feel like I’ve been shot.” His wife of 16 years suggests Vince sometimes uses dramatic language when he’s upset that some might take too literally. “He can be a little volatile that way with his speech,” Carol says. 
    Police had then determined that Geisler, a hunter who also sometimes worked in bear territory, had five registered rifles and shotguns, and a handgun. When Geisler hadn’t answered his door (his workshop was in the basement and he didn’t hear knocking), police had suspected Geisler had barricaded himself. 
    Misinterpretations escalated further in the hospital. 
    Geisler told psychiatrist Diana Ingram that he didn’t understand the police actions. Geisler mentioned his medications for ADHD and chronic pain from an old injury, but forgot to mention an antidepressant (often prescribed off-label for ADHD). Geisler said he wasn’t depressed, and in the circumstances understandably downplayed suggestions he was “under stress.” 
    All of this served to indict Geisler. 
    In her assessment, Ingram described Geisler as being “limited” in his “insight” about police concerns, and “not totally truthful” about his stress. She wrote, “It certainly would appear from his prescription of an antidepressant that he has been on for some time that he has been depressed and which he has denied. Given his lack of honesty and forthrightness, for his safety he is being detained...”
    Geisler was locked in seclusion and ordered to change into a hospital gown, and his wife would be prevented from seeing him. “It’s kind of like a cell, and there’s nothing in there except for a toilet in the corner and a mat on the floor,” describes Geisler. “If anything would have alleviated the fear and the stress, it is actually having somebody that I can trust, somebody I’m paying to represent my interests, or somebody I love who I know inherently will represent my interests, to talk to, to go between, to find out what’s going on. But I was isolated. Cattle have more rights being transported to the abattoir than a person does under the Mental Health Act. Seriously. It’s ridiculous.” 
    Geisler was officially labelled as “incapable of appreciating the nature of treatment and/or his or her need for it” and, at 5 pm, secu- rity entered Geisler’s room led by a nurse carrying a Dixie cup with pills. Geisler says he was told the drugs would calm his nerves— and if he didn’t take them, they would force him to. 
    He woke up 16 hours later. “I’m looking around, what the hell just happened... For about five minutes, I didn’t even know where I was,” describes Geisler. “I’m groggy, I can barely even stand up.” 
    Geisler says he was still “looped” when another psychiatrist interviewed him that morning. This psychiatrist wrote that Geisler had “no suicidal or homicidal ideation” and “no evidence of a formal thought disorder” and immediately discharged him. 
    “I don’t want to belittle rape, but I felt like I had been mentally raped,” says Geisler. “I felt so violated by the people who are supposed to have my best interests.” 
    Geisler next discovered that police had applied for a court ban on him owning guns. The reason? Because, police argued, Geisler had threatened suicide and been incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. However, the judge ordered Geisler’s guns returned and even demanded police clarify their records so that the event wouldn’t be a “lifetime millstone” that could precipitate similar miscues again. “I want such an entry [in police records] to very clearly articulate the fact that the court has found that there are no issues related to the public safety or Mr Geisler’s safety in relation to firearms,” the judge wrote. “I want that in very bold and express terms.” 
    It was small vindication for Geisler. He says he now suffers severe anxiety and has not been able to return to working since the incident in 2011. “I had been taught that we live in a country where you have certain inalienable rights. I was shocked at how those rights were just utterly washed away in the blink of an eye.” 
    I ask his wife if she’s seen changes in her husband from the apprehension. “It traumatized him,” says Carol. “There’s still in him a sense of fear in an employment setting, because of the sense of betrayal from the company that he was working for that led to this.” 
    Vince’s complaint against the police officers was dismissed. He then wrote to VicPD’s Police Board, arguing that police should always allow people apprehended under the Mental Health Act (MHA) to retain a lawyer without delay pursuant to Canada’s Charter of Rights. He was told that the Board had asked Chief Jamie Graham to “investigate” the issue. 
    Geisler didn’t know that after Gordon Stewart had complained years before, Graham had been “investigating” the issue for years.
     
    Dare not protest 
    Gordon Stewart provides a seminal example of how MHA apprehensions can be easily prompted and steered by anger, fear, gossip, incomplete facts, falsehoods, and highly subjective interpretations— making the MHA a dangerous interpersonal weapon. 
    On May 24, 2001, Stewart parked his truck outside Revenue Canada’s Victoria offices with a banner hanging from it saying, “Canada’s Dishonest Tax Police,” and talked with passers-by about his forthcoming self-published book. 
    Stewart’s tale is long and complex, and twists continue into the present. But basically, in 1990, Revenue Canada determined that Stewart owed about $5000 in taxes for his struggling small arborist company, which he argued he didn’t owe. They repeatedly seized Stewart’s bank account, garnished his wages, and coerced payments. In 1999, however, Revenue Canada issued a “notice of reassessment” and returned to Stewart $11,266.03 they’d leveraged out of him over ten years. It was a lot of money to Stewart, a man generally of modest means with a wife and four children today in their teens, and he decided to further research Revenue Canada’s workings and write a book about his experiences—which soon led to new conflicts. 
    It was most likely Revenue Canada that called police about Stewart while he was promoting his book, even while the police record described Stewart as “rational and calm” and “does not want to hurt anyone or anything, just wants to protest out front of the [Revenue Canada] building.” Revenue Canada definitely called police the next day when Stewart came in to discuss an issue related to his book. “We stood by and the [Revenue Canada] director met with Stewart and all went fine,” stated the police record. 
    On May 29, Stewart went to the courthouse. Concerned that Revenue Canada might try to confiscate key document evidence he’d obtained about their mistakes (they’d seemingly already tried), he wanted to obtain a peace bond to help prevent that from happening. He asked Crown Counsel to call Victoria police, so they could all meet and sort out a bureaucratic runaround that he’d been getting about how that might be done. 
    Stewart says he wasn’t acting abnormally. An unnamed security person actually made the call, but between the police record’s vagueness and sections censored from Stewart’s view, it’s apparent only that this caller requested removal of an “unstable” person and provided “no other information.” When police arrived, both Stewart and police records indicate no conversation took place. Police instantly handcuffed Stewart and ushered him to a waiting van, even though there’s no indication in police records that he’d been threatening or disruptive. Had some muddling of the message occurred passing from Stewart to Crown Counsel, the caller, and then police? Had police decided that if they get three calls about you in a week, odds are you must be crazy, no discussion needed? In any case, after they’d detained him and denied his request to call a lawyer, police described Stewart as becoming “very emotional,” and took him to hospital. 
    His partner of 28 years, Rita Dutsch, had talked with Stewart just an hour earlier, and says the sudden apprehension was a complete shock and utterly perplexing. “Gordon’s a really calm guy. He doesn’t get upset. He’s never had mental health issues his entire life.” No one ever interviewed her, she adds. 
    At the hospital, with Stewart still cut off from contacting counsel or his family and becoming increasingly confused and concerned about what was happening, Dr J. Stempien began his analysis of Stewart’s “agitated” but “in control” status: “Police were called to Revenue Canada, I am not exactly sure why. I can only assume [Stewart] was being somewhat threatening at Revenue Canada.” Starting from these demonstrably false assumptions (“When I said I was at the courthouse, did he think I was delusional?” comments Stewart), Stempien then tried to render judgment. 
    “On one side, the story sounds one of paranoia with Mr Stewart saying Revenue Canada is out to get him, he is worried for the safety of his wife and children, he thinks Revenue Canada is going to do him away,” Stempien wrote. “On the other hand,” Stempien continued, there was clear corroborating evidence that in fact, “Revenue Canada has been out to get [Stewart], they admit to making some mistakes, it sounds like they have been very hard on him financially, and not having good reason to be so.” Stempien then tried to reconcile these conflicting versions of reality: “[Stewart’s] insight seems reasonable up to the point where he says ‘Revenue Canada is going to blow away my wife and children.’” 
    “I never said that,” states Stewart, and it’s not clear from the records if Stempien heard those provocative words, or whether they came to him second or third hand like the other false information. Stempien also didn’t discuss whether “blow away” might be dramatic vernacular for, say, “drive into abject poverty.” So, weighing those provocative words alongside police concern that Stewart “may try to do something,” Stempien decided, “it is best” to hold Stewart longer. 
    Reviewing many such records of Stewart’s apprehension, it’s difficult not to conclude that, regardless of whether or not Stewart really did act “irrationally” at any point, the vastly greater madness was these ad hoc, poorly investigated, haphazardly documented, unfair and hurried processes by which people imposed hugely consequential judgments upon him, and him alone.
     
    Duty of care 
    VicPD wouldn’t provide anyone to be interviewed. However, Vancouver Police Department Constable Brian Montague offered helpful insights into police perspectives. Montague is Media Relations Officer with the VPD. 
    Montague says that of the thousands of mental health calls VPD fields annually, “Very few of the calls that we get would be from a physician.” Relatives, co-workers, bosses, friends, landlords, or passing strangers are more likely to be reporting on someone they’ve seen seeming depressed, missing work, acting strangely, or posting worrying comments online. “If we get called, there’s a duty for us to attend,” adds Montague. “Someone will go in every case.” Callers’ identities usually aren’t revealed. 
    This alone is problematic, notes John. From police records, he believes he’s determined who called about him and it was indeed a friend, says John—a friend diagnosed with schizophrenia who frequently calls ambulances for himself. “I cannot believe that they immediately started investigating me rather than investigating the source,” says John. “It can and does have catastrophic impact on people’s lives when the information is not accurate.” John is worried about the impact of the record alone; Canadians have been turned back by US border services based on records revealing that they were once visited by police for mental health reasons. 
    Montague also confirms that police might in some circumstances apprehend someone under the MHA without even conversing, and says police have broad authorities in “exigent circumstances” to circumvent the requirements for search warrants and bypass due process rights to help people. When someone might be suicidal, says Montague, “If I knock on the door, am I going to stop there because there’s no answer? Absolutely not...Under exigent circumstances, I could use as much force as necessary.” 
    Is any vetting of callers done? Am I the first person to ask whether some callers might be overly sensitive, less than altruistic, or even lying with malicious intent to cause fear and trouble or get someone out of the way? “I don’t think it’s a case where it’s never been discussed,” says Montague. “From the police perspective, though, we can’t afford to have those debates, because we do have a duty of care...We still have to go, assess the situation, and determine what’s truly happening here.” 
    How do police decide whom to take to hospital? Montague says Vancouver police get mental health training and try to always bring a psychiatric nurse, but admits, “That’s a tough question to answer because we’re not mental health professionals; we’re police officers...Every situation is different.” 
    Nevertheless, Montague acknowledges that police give more rights to suspected criminals than to people suspected of having mental disorders. I ask if part of the reason is because police assume a psychiatric hospital is a safe, good place, and therefore, even if their assessment proves incorrect, no harm will be done. 
    “I think I agree with you,” replies Montague. “Our officers are under the understanding that if they make that decision to apprehend someone and take them to the hospital, they will get care there, and good care.” Montague adds, though, that one of the reasons Vancouver police have been publicly pushing for more mental health services is so that police could potentially direct people towards other services. “Years ago, the police were the last resort when it came to mental health, and we’re becoming the agency of first resort. And we shouldn’t be,” says Montague. 
    No one from our psychiatric hospital was available for an interview, but VIHA media liaison Sarah Plank provided some written answers. A patient will be informed of their rights upon admission to hospital, wrote Plank, “if the patient is able to understand the information at that time.” A patient will be refused contacts with family only for “clinical or other valid and important reasons.” And a patient will be forcibly drugged right away only based on “prudent yet timely clinical judgment.”
     
    Are rights bad for your health? 
    Stewart has been campaigning to change BC’s Mental Health Act to comply with Canada’s Charter. “I agree with detaining a person,” says Stewart. “Taking them in a safe room, now you can let the rest of the process take place: a call to a lawyer, a call to family. Forcing me to remove my clothes and drugging me, that’s not justified.” 
    Geisler agrees. “Unless the person is trying to grab anything he or she can to harm themselves, there’s nothing that’s so expedient about a mental health issue that it requires them to railroad you through the system,” he says. “It’s not like you can just drop dead from being bipolar...I think it’s more convenient [for staff to tranquillize you], but I think that does far more harm than good because it builds mistrust.” 
    BC’s mental health laws were challenged in 1993; however, the plaintiff had a long psychiatric history and was sometimes in dangerous situations. Justice Donald therefore concluded that care would be slowed and harmed if patients had due process rights. “Canadians want to live in a society that helps and protects the mentally ill,” he wrote. 
    However, since then, BC’s committal criteria have expanded significantly, no longer applying only to those in dangerous states. Simultaneously, the definitions of mental disorders have broadened considerably—the US National Institute of Mental Health states 25 percent of our population is now mentally ill at any given time. And people are reporting concerns to police much more often. So it’s unclear how BC judges would regard a case like Stewart’s or Geisler’s today, where gossip gets people incarcerated; where it’s an impossible task to distinguish vague disorders from uncomfortable behaviours and potentially-somewhat-dangerous tendencies; and where psychiatrists can just as likely cause serious harm as healing. 
    It’s precisely in this context, then, that Geisler and Stewart argue all the more strongly that all potential psychiatric patients must have due process rights respected and strictly followed to minimize traumatizing mistakes. 
    More people are coming around to their perspective. 
    The Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP in 2008 wrote, “Individuals brought into police custody under the authority of mental health legislation are unquestionably detained or arrested. Accordingly, all such individuals are guaranteed rights under s.10 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. These include...the right to retain and instruct counsel without delay...” A Canadian Department of Justice report states that upholding Charter rights makes good mental health sense, too, because “the traumatic circumstances surrounding an arrest or detention may well serve to exacerbate underlying mental health problems...” 
    Ontario, the Yukon and other provinces have written Charter rights into their mental health laws—most importantly, requiring separate, distinct tests and processes before someone can be deemed incapable of understanding and forcibly drugged. 
    Stewart also wants Victoria police to at least submit written apprehension records to hospitals, to prevent factual mistakes and third-hand accounts. In BC, the RCMP and some municipal police departments already do exactly that. “It’s our policy to provide that information in writing in the form of a report to the doctors so there’s no confusion as to what our observations are, what the information is that we’ve received,” explains Vancouver police’s Montague. “We find that it’s good practice just to make sure that everyone knows what’s going on.” 
    But Stewart has been stonewalled in his efforts to change BC laws or Victoria police practices. After Focus began inquiring, in June of 2013 the Victoria Police Board finally responded to Stewart, stating that allowing MHA detainees to contact lawyers “is a matter of police discretion.” They ignored the question of written reports. The Police Complaints Commission criticized VicPD’s Board for taking three years to respond to Stewart’s policy complaint (Stewart had earlier complained unsuccessfully about the arresting officers), challenged their key arguments, and urged them to “investigate further.” 
    Stewart suspects that VicPD’s reluctance to discuss or change their policies relates to Chief Graham’s other role as a director of the BC Schizophrenia Society—prominent proponents of forced psychiatric treatment. 
    Asked why hospital doctors aren’t demanding written police records to help their clinical assessments, VIHA’s Plank wrote, “We have identified this as a gap and are working to connect with the local police departments to jointly develop a standardized process.” 
    “I don’t want to go public with this story, I don’t want anyone to know my business,” says Stewart. “But I started this [complaint] process in 2001...Are they going to end this any time soon? Are they going to change the policies for other people so that it doesn’t happen to them? It needs to be told, so people can understand that, yes, this can happen in Canada.” 
    But Stewart says he won’t risk releasing his book and taking on Revenue Canada again until our laws change. “Could somebody call police and give them misinformation again?” he says. “I think I would be stupid if I wasn’t concerned.” 
    Rob Wipond has won a Jack Webster Award as well as a Western Canada Magazine Award for his writing in Focus. After writing this feature, he says he’s worried we’re descending into psychocracy. 
     

    Rob Wipond

    Coup de police

    By Rob Wipond, in Investigations,

    November 2013
    Secret police chief association records provoke serious questions about lack of police oversight in this province.
     
    AS I READ THROUGH HUNDREDS OF PAGES of records from two BC associations of chiefs of police, I discovered that a letter I had sent to the West Vancouver Police Department Chief Constable had been turned over to all of Canada’s major banks, Canada Border Services, CSIS, and the US Secret Service. This certainly made a mockery of my privacy rights. Yet I realized that much more than privacy was at stake. These previously secret records—a drop from a much vaster pool—painted a worrying picture of unchecked police powers.
    A catch up: Last year, I set out to learn more about the BC Association of Chiefs of Police (BCACP) and BC Association of Municipal Chiefs of Police (BCAMCP), because these groups have had tremendous influence on public opinion and provincial justice policies for decades, and yet there’s virtually no publicly available information about them. My quest became a saga (see Focus October 2012, May 2013, July/August 2013). 
    The chiefs weren’t talkative, and claimed they weren’t subject to the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) covering public bodies (including governing bodies of most professional associations), because their associations were actually “private” groups of “volunteer” participants. I knew that both associations did a lot of lobbying of government officials, so if they were private groups, then I reasoned that at least some of their activities should be tracked in the BC Lobbyist Registry. However, the chiefs also claimed that they weren’t subject to the BC Lobbyists Registration Act because their work in the associations was actually being done in their official capacities as public employees. 
    Pardon? 
    BC Civil Liberties Association policy director Micheal Vonn not-so-sardonically summarized the chiefs’ shifting, self-contradicting descriptions of their associations succinctly: “We’re going to use a characterization that may or may not match reality as a shield against, well, whatever we decide we need to be shielded against.”
    Were they hiding something?
    During mediation with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC), I finally obtained some basic records from Victoria, Saanich, Central Saanich and West Vancouver police departments. It was a scattershot collection based mostly on whatever each respective chief had kept on file from the associations at their departments, but together, I got meeting minutes from 2008 to early 2013. (I also got records from the BC Ministry of Justice, but 30 years of these associations’ archives are still missing-in-action.) Reviewing the documents, I suddenly understood why our police leadership didn’t want association records publicly released. 
    The associations are actually fully hybrid public-private entities—and that’s dubious under all applicable laws.
     
    Public work done in private
    BCAMCP members meet monthly and include chiefs and deputy chiefs of BC’s municipal police departments. The BCACP membership meets three times a year for two days, and has many ongoing subcommittees. It includes all BCAMCP members plus every BC RCMP detachment commander. There are also non-voting “associate members,” including seven senior directors from BC’s Ministry of Justice, and representatives from Canada Border Services, the Civil Forfeiture Office, the US Secret Service, CSIS, and security divisions of about 40 other public agencies. Security representatives from six of Canada’s major banks and the Canadian Bankers Association are also associate members. 
    Association agendas are packed. The (heavily censored) minutes indicate discussions take place about mass surveillance and undercover programs, online videos of police brutality, medical marijuana (rarely mentioned without organized crime being mentioned) and Occupy events. Discussions also occur about salvaged vehicles, metal theft, motorcycle noise, and the legal definition of winter tires—basically, issues so mundane that the agenda alone suggests no police officer in his right mind is attending as a “volunteer.”
    They’re doing a lot of official police work; often, the associations function as de facto governing bodies for policing in the province.
    Clayton Pecknold, assistant deputy minister of Justice and director of Police Services, provides comprehensive updates from government at nearly every meeting. The provincial government seems to use the associations as its main conduits for communicating and consulting with police forces, and regularly asks the associations to appoint representatives to important governing boards for the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, Criminal Intelligence Service Canada, or the Police Records Information Management Environment. The BCAMCP led the hiring process for a provincial witness protection coordinator. 
    Both associations have represented British Columbia’s police agencies as signatories to important Memorandums of Understanding or protocol agreements with the chief coroner, chief electoral officer, police complaint commissioner, and BC Assembly of First Nations. 
    The associations also conceive and coordinate many collaborative policing-related initiatives. For example, the BCACP coordinated 2012’s safe driving campaigns involving the Province, all BC police agencies, and ICBC. 
    So in summary, the records show the exact kind of policing governance activities we’d expect our police leadership to be doing on the public’s behalf. 
    There’s just one problem: This is a private club, remember? These associations don’t report to any public body. They aren’t subject to our freedom of information laws—you’re learning about these major police undertakings only because some chiefs left association records on police department computers, assuming that they wouldn’t be subject to FIPPA (a record-keeping habit they could soon stop). We’re lucky our elected representatives and senior public servants are even allowed to participate: The associations have their own bylaws for making decisions, and the police officer members dictate who can attend meetings through strict criteria and votes. 
    “This sounds like high-level management meetings,” commented BC Civil Liberties Association’s Vonn. “If this is a private association, we have to ask ourselves how we feel about members of our government and our policing forces having ostensibly private meetings with the US Secret Service…A meeting that is in fact off the record.” 
    We must also ask ourselves how we feel about our police leaders doing double-duty as highly politicized lobby groups.
     
    Private lobbying at public expense
    The associations lobby for tougher drug laws and broader surveillance and, most significantly, have direct access to ministers and senior bureaucrats without anyone tracking it. 
    This secret lobbying seems very effective. In April 2009, Victoria Police Chief Jamie Graham brought a proposal to both associations for banning cell phones while driving; by October, it was law in BC. In November 2011, Abbotsford Police Chief Bob Rich distributed his “Proposal for a BC Crime Reduction Initiative.” Eight months later, Geoffrey Cowper’s justice system review for the government recommended that the BCACP lead crime reduction planning. Through 2011-12 meetings, West Vancouver Chief Lepine, Graham, and Pecknold featured prominently during discussions about trying to improve public opinion of the BC Liberals’ roadside prohibition laws, which were being challenged in courts. Amidst many redactions, the minutes include remarks like: “The media put their own spin on it…Lepine advised that he hopes it is not being interpreted that police are locking horns with the Minister…Graham is still a little nervous about all the civil actions going on and asked the committee to tell your members that the more we get the better the statute looks; stats are impressive.” 
    Was Graham encouraging his fellow officers to “get” more statistics, or to get more roadside prohibition-related arrests to generate those statistics? In any case, it’s sometimes chilling to read how, under cover of these secret associations, our police leaders slide between their public responsibilities as powerful, impartial enforcers of the law, and their private roles as biased political activists, until it’s difficult to distinguish between the two.
    It looks even more concerning when we delve into the associations’ finances and administration. Their funding comes mainly  from their members’ public employers, but the Canadian Bankers Association (CBA) has also donated regularly to the BCACP. Last year, the CBA donated $10,000, one-fifth of the BCACP’s budget. The BCACP’s February 2012 minutes thank the CBA and also report that, “The financial institutions are forming good partnerships with the robbery investigators.”
    “The juxtaposition really highlights how muddy and compromised the scenario is,” said Vonn. 
    Indeed, while it’s easy to imagine reasonable scenarios where police, in the course of their public duties, would meet with bank representatives to discuss common concerns such as robberies, should the same police officers be taking $10,000 private gifts from those banking representatives at the very same meetings? It’s difficult to imagine a situation that could more blatantly give off the appearance of conflict of interest—or that’s more rife with potential conflicts if such police fundraising practices increase out of sight of the public. 
    Of course, if these associations are private groups, they’re allowed to accept secret, private donations. On the other hand, if they’re private groups, how come police agency staff do their work?
    “A special thanks to Insp. Steve Ing from Victoria PD for his assistance,” read the June 2012 BCACP minutes. Ing, a VicPD lawyer, had helped with the BCACP’s incorporation process. In December 2012, RCMP lawyer Kyle Friesen came to a BCAMCP meeting to discuss my FOI requests for the associations’ minutes. And for years, executive assistants from the RCMP, Port Moody and Victoria police departments have been taking association minutes.
    “It would be one thing to say, we really did have counsel who normally work for the police department appear pro bono at our private association. That’s not too far a stretch to suggest that it’s possible,” said Vonn. “That our secretary appears pro bono to take the minutes, is just beyond [believable].” 
    After I described some of the associations’ other public governance activities, private lobbying, and moving of confidential policing information between them, Vonn observed, “It’s not impossible that there are places of blurry overlap; clearly, the private sector meets with the public sector. But it would seem that this particular construct, this overlap, is not visited upon [the associations]. They live there… And it would appear that anywhere you slice across these vectors you find a mixing that is impermissible or at least problematic.”
     
    All exemptions available, no disclosures required
    Vincent Gogolek, director of the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, examined some of the associations’ minutes through the lens of information access laws, and seemed as perturbed as Vonn.
    Many sections of the minutes were heavily censored using FIPPA’s law enforcement exemptions. Occasionally, the minutes also include mentions of going “in camera,” away from the associate members. All of which would seem reasonable if these were official police working records, pointed out Gogolek—but these are allegedly the records of private groups of volunteers. 
    “That’s where it gets a little confusing for me,” said Gogolek. “What are they doing? Who are they actually representing?…They’re doing a lot of things basically related to their functions as senior public servants. If they’re going to say they’re a totally private body, well then, can we look forward to the Association of Deputy Ministers getting together to talk about senior government policy? The Association of City Clerks? Where does it stop? Suddenly these are all being created and they’re all getting together having a grand old time outside the scope of [FIPPA]?”
    The associations actually also intervene in processes that are supposed to be handled confidentially within police departments. For example, through 2008-2010, an ongoing Vancouver Sun FOI request for information about police salaries was discussed by the BCAMCP. At first, different police departments were releasing data as their information managers deemed appropriate. But the BCAMCP began coordinating the departments, hired an outside expert to go to legal battle and, according to their minutes, “did all they could to refuse to provide this information.” They also decided, against the protests of some chiefs, to make the municipal police departments pay for the BCAMCP’s lawyer.
    “[The BCAMCP] seem to be putting themselves in the position of the heads of a public body,” said Gogolek. “The ambiguity is what’s concerning. Who are they? Who are they working for? Because a public body, whoever the head [or information manager] of the public body is, is supposed to determine what gets out. Not some group meeting offsite.”
    My own FOI request got dragged across similar legal boundaries. My letter to Chief Peter Lepine (BCACP president at the time) at the West Vancouver Police Department was passed out in a BCACP meeting agenda—so now CSIS and the US Secret Service have it. Yet Gogolek pointed out that both public and private bodies have laws regulating how people’s personal information can be shared. “You can’t go from being, ‘Oh, I’m the public body,’ and then suddenly you walk into another room and say, ‘Oh, now I’m part of a private association and we’re not the public body anymore, but by the way I have this information that I got from my role as a public servant and let’s all take a look at it.’”
     
    Bypassing police boards
    Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin is Chair of the Victoria Police Board, responsible for overseeing the chief. I asked him how often the board discusses the BCACP and BCAMCP.
    Not much, said Fortin. “[Chief Graham] highlights the various conferences, committees he goes to, community meetings, those sorts of things; they are part of his monthly update report.”
    Fortin said he’d read my writings on the police chief associations. So I asked if the Victoria Police Board is aware of the many ways in which the BCACP and BCAMCP are acting as public-private hybrid bodies, and of how these associations are usurping VicPD staff time. 
    “Do we have a general awareness of what they’re doing? Yes,” answered Fortin. “Am I aware of any specifics of that? No. Am I concerned? Again, no. These are efforts by our police chief, as part of the association of other police chiefs, to accomplish the strategic goals of the City of Victoria.”
    It’s not clear that’s what’s going on, though. At association meetings, after decisions by majority vote, the chiefs sometimes describe “encouraging” all police departments to follow BCAMCP or BCACP directives, and at times use stronger language like “ensure compliance.” And they seem aware they’re sometimes walking dubious legal lines. In October of 2008, the BCAMCP was discussing certain possible changes to police practices, and then the minutes note that Abbotsford Chief Rich “used this as an example where changes in policies need to be approved by the Board that it affects.” Meanwhile, countless lobby letters have been sent to Ministers by both associations pushing political positions that were never explicitly approved by the chiefs’ respective police boards. 
    I described the conflict of interest surrounding the CBA donation. Fortin didn’t realize the BCACP had a wide variety of associate members, but then commented that police should be liaising with banks about common security concerns one way or another. “Those are important conversations to have,” he said. “You’re asking me, is this the best way? My quick answer is, I don’t know. I do hear your concern.” He pointed to VicPD’s donation policy, which requires avoiding any appearance of possible conflict. “There should be some general rules around donations and there should be policy around that,” Fortin said.
    The associations have no such policies.
    I suggested to Vonn that municipal police boards may not feel bothered by what the associations are doing.
    “It’s our experience that police boards are very ill-equipped to understand their obligations as board members,” said Vonn. “We do not do the kind of education and training of police board members that is required for them to do their job. This has been a constant concern about a part of the police oversight mechanism that is broken.” And regardless of how board members might “feel,” Vonn added, “We have rules that must be complied with.” She described the laws distinguishing public and private bodies and their respective responsibilities, and the applicable regulations governing police transparency. “They’re black-letter law. We have statutes; there are requirements.”
     
    Coup de police
    All of this wouldn’t seem nearly as nefarious if our police leadership were openly acknowledging and discussing these issues. But they’ve been refusing to answer questions. They’ve been making every legal and quasi-legal effort to keep their activities hidden from the public, and to maintain these unaccountable powers.  
    After issuing generic statements, the BC Ministry of Justice also refused to answer questions. I discovered that ADM Pecknold, the top person in the Ministry who’d be able to speak knowledgeably, was previously deputy chief of Central Saanich Police and in 2010 BCACP president. At that point, I felt like British Columbia’s public policing system had undergone a coup d’état, covertly orchestrated by a private group of senior police officers. Our ever-rotating justice ministers probably had little understanding. Who could wrest back public control? 
    The BC Civil Liberties Association wrote to OIPC Commissioner and Lobbyist Registrar Elizabeth Denham, seeking resolution to the “public or private” question. “There has to be an honest adjudication of the contradictory decisions that have been rendered on the issue of privacy and access legislation on the one hand, and the lobbying registration on the other,” said Vonn. “We currently have a situation that is entirely untenable, where [the associations are] described as two different things under two different decisions.”
    Corrective action seems simple. While it’s understandable that BC police forces and other security representatives would sometimes meet and collaborate as part of their public duties, and it’s legal for police chiefs to form private groups to advocate and lobby, the coalescing of these two functions in one entity creates a myriad of problems surrounding governance, accountability, lobbying, conflicts of interest, use of public resources, and transparency of public policing. So it seems critical that the BC Ministry of Justice structure and run an interagency collaboration and governing body for BC’s balkanized police forces that’s publicly transparent and accountable.
    Meanwhile, the police chief associations must become truly independent, private entities, register as lobby groups, and be made subject to FIPPA like most other BC professional associations. The provincial government has to take informed leadership. But Andrew Wilkinson, the Minister in charge of FIPPA, has also been avoiding my questions. And if the Ministry of Justice proves definitively to be under the control of the police chief associations, rather than vice versa, what then?
    Rob Wipond has won a Jack Webster Award as well as a Western Canada Magazine Award for his writing in Focus. He will be posting the records he obtained for the above article at www.robwipond.com.

    Katherine Palmer Gordon
    November 2013
    The Truth and Reconciliation Commission process, aimed at raising awareness of the impacts of the Indian residential schools and building bridges between indigenous and non-indigenous Canadians, has proved a remarkable and moving experience for those involved. But much more is needed to make the process of reconciliation meaningful.
     
    “THE POLITICAL ELITE ALL KNEW WHAT WAS HAPPENING in the residential schools and they did nothing. I am filled with incandescent rage,” seethed celebrated humanitarian Stephen Lewis during his address to September’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission event in Vancouver, “thinking about what was done to the children. It was sheer, unadulterated evil and they did nothing to stop it.” 
    In a contemporary context, continued Lewis, who is an honorary witness to the TRC proceedings: “Changes need to be made at a political level. Governments still refuse to negotiate land claims in good faith. The level of poverty and ill-health of Aboriginal people in this country is scandalous. Look at Attawapiskat. The disappearance and murder of hundreds of Aboriginal women is unacceptable but the federal government refuses to address this. This is not a political spasm. How much bad faith can a government display? The Prime Minister’s 2008 apology to survivors,” he concluded to thundering applause, “withers on the vine in the face of the ongoing hostility and racism of our government.”
     
    Truth, yes, reconciliation not so much
    The last of Canada’s Indian residential schools (which were operated by churches and funded by the federal government) closed in 1996. By then, more than 150,000 indigenous children had been incarcerated in the schools. 
    The goal was to assimilate the children into Canadian non-indigenous society by forcibly separating them from their families, teachings, language and culture. It didn’t work. In the meantime, however, several generations of Aboriginal people were severely traumatized by the pervasive physical and psychological abuse that occurred in many schools. 
    In the late 1990s, victims began bringing lawsuits against the government and the churches. The 2008 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) provided for compensation to victims, an apology from the government, and the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The stated goals of the TRC were to “raise awareness of the history and impacts of the residential school system,” and to “enable a process of healing and reconciliation between those affected and non-Aboriginal governments, communities and individuals.”
    Five years later, thousands of tragic stories have been shared and millions of archival documents gathered for permanent safe-keeping. Non-indigenous attendees at one of the many public TRC events that have taken place across the country have gained a deeper understanding of the problems that Aboriginal people face today, directly stemming from the residential school system and its multi-generational impacts. 
    Is the TRC simply preaching to the converted, however? In 2012, as many as 3,000 Victorians attended a TRC event held in the provincial capital. People were eager to reach out and learn, and a warm atmosphere of goodwill pervaded the proceedings. But if members of a native lacrosse team can still have racist slurs hurled at them in Victoria, as they did in September this year, it suggests that outside the supportive environment of a TRC event, a large and intolerant gulf still yawns between First Nations people and other Canadians.
    Then there’s the relationship—or the lack of one, as Stephen Lewis so eloquently points out—between First Nations and government. On the 250th anniversary of the Royal Proclamation on October 7, which should have been a cause for celebration of the relationship between First Nations and the Canadian government, instead Idle No More protests took place on the steps of government buildings across the country.
    That’s not surprising. While defending its commitment to the reconciliation process, as Lewis pointed out, the track record of the federal government is one of refusal to respect Aboriginal title and the right to self-determination and control over lands and resources; funding cuts to First Nations institutions; and failure to address urgent educational and health needs. 
    That’s also true of the provincial government. “The reconciliation process is meaningless, total whitewashing,” says Troy Sebastian unequivocally, “as long as the government treats us like this.” Sebastian, a 36-year-old Ktunaxa man living in Victoria, is fighting on behalf of his Nation to try and stop the massive cultural and environmental threat posed by the proposed construction of a new ski resort at Qat’muk, a sacred and ecologically fragile grizzly bear area in Ktunaxa territory in the East Kootenays. To date, Ktunaxa’s pleas have fallen on deaf provincial government ears. 
    Under those circumstances, Sebastian views the BC government’s participation in the reconciliation process as sheer hypocrisy: “[Minister of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation] John Rustad stands up and talks about reconciliation being so important, and about how he took part in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission event in Vancouver in September and in [Reconciliation Canada’s] Walk for Reconciliation,” says Sebastian. “Well, as far as I’m concerned that’s just BS. He shouldn’t have been allowed to take part. How does he have the gall to do something like that while he and his government are behaving this way towards First Nations in this province?”
     “I would never want to take away from the individuals telling their stories at the TRC, and I wish them the best,” says Dr Robina Thomas (Qwul’sih’yah’maht), an associate professor in the University of Victoria’s School of Social Work and a member of the Lyackson First Nation. “I understand this process is about raising awareness of the impact of the residential school system and hearing people’s stories. But where is the conversation about the fact that the impact of the schools still isn’t being addressed by governments?”
    TRC Chief Commissioner Justice Murray Sinclair adds sombrely: “We have more children in care now, I understand, than went through residential school. That’s shocking to me. So is the fact that any young First Nations person in school today is still statistically more likely to end up in prison than to graduate. It makes me want to cry. Governments should be stepping up and confronting that reality, but they aren’t doing it.”
    Instead, both levels of government continue to pursue development agendas that conflict constantly with the desire of First Nations to protect and control the future of their traditional homelands. Mining, large-scale forestry, oil and gas development and open-net fish farming all receive abundant government support, often in the face of passionate First Nations opposition, while at the same time First Nations advocacy groups knock fruitlessly on the door of improved education programs and healthcare, better housing and poverty reduction initiatives, language revitalization support and environmental protection. 
    There may be a whole lot of truth coming out at the TRC, but it certainly doesn’t feel like there’s much reconciliation to go with it, at least at government level. After the Commission concludes its work in 2014, and its final report and recommendations vanish into the unlit Orwellian depths of bureaucratic review, where will Canada be on its path to reconciliation with First Nations? If current indications are anything to go by, a long and difficult road still lies ahead. 
     
    Has the TRC had any effect at all?
    The work of the TRC has without question helped to raise public awareness of the impact of the residential schools. Extensive media coverage of TRC events may also have helped shift diehard public perceptions. In 2004, more than half of those polled in a national survey said poor Aboriginal people have only themselves to blame. By contrast, in 2012, according to Karen Joseph, executive director of Reconciliation Canada, an Environics poll found that two-thirds of Canadians believed they have a role to play in reconciliation. “People are ready for this,” says Joseph. “They want reconciliation to happen.” 
    There has also undoubtedly been immense value to survivors in sharing their experiences publicly. “Thank you,” survivor Deborah Johnson told the audience at the September TRC event in Vancouver, “for listening to me.” 
    Johnson had just recounted how she was proudly wearing the brand-new dress and shoes her mother had given to her when she was taken to St Joseph’s residential school at Williams Lake. But on arrival, the dress and shoes were promptly ripped off her tiny four-year-old body by the nuns. She was left standing in the cold room in her underwear, confused and crying, begging to be given back her pretty new clothes. She was given a ragged old uniform and tattered shoes instead, and punished for crying.
    Her mother left, sobbing heartbrokenly. Johnson mistook her mother’s sobs for laughter. Until adulthood, when she finally learned of her mistake, Johnson hated her mother for abandoning her with apparent joy. Like thousands of other children, Johnson also spent her childhood suffering abuse at the hands of her supposed caregivers. “It helps people like me to heal and to grow,” she said to the hushed crowd, “knowing you are supporting me and not judging me.” 
    Antoinette Archie, from Canim Lake, had similar experiences. Archie sat outside in the warm September sunshine and spoke about appearing at the TRC in Vancouver: “I think the TRC process is great. All these years, I have been feeling sorry for myself for everything that was done to me. I was so angry. Being able to understand that I was not alone, that all these other people were there too, has helped. Knowing non-First Nations people want to hear about it really helps.” 
    But the TRC process hasn’t proved a cure-all for the damage done to Aboriginal children like Johnson and Archie. Archie says she still needs therapy, and hasn’t yet revealed everything that happened to her; she doesn’t know if she ever can. As Grand Chief Ed John told the crowd at the 2012 Victoria event, the memories and the impacts of the residential schools will stay with the survivors for the rest of their lives: “Like the Hotel California,” he observed, “You can check out, but you can never leave.”
    The TRC itself has had challenges right from the start. It was set up as a federal department rather than an independent commission, so receives its marching orders from the federal government. In other words, the guilty party calls all the shots. Department of Justice officials watch every step of the TRC process with hawk-like ferocity, ensuring there is no deviation from the legal terms of the settlement. All TRC processes also have to comply with onerous federal bureaucratic policies tailored to large, resource-rich government departments rather than a tiny, brand-new organization. Getting an office up and running in 2008 and hiring staff was immensely challenging.
    Then, before the substantive work had even begun, the first three Commissioners all resigned. Justice Harry LaForme, the former chair, stated publicly that the Commission’s independence had been compromised by political interference and that his authority was being questioned. 
    More than a year after it was established, in July 2009, the TRC process finally got under way with a new slate of Commissioners, a small group of overworked staff, and its public credibility badly-shaken.
     
    Dollars depend on abuse specifics
    In 2012 the TRC issued an interim report, with 20 recommendations for federal and provincial government action. They included developing educational materials about the residential school system, creating parenting programs, establishing trauma therapy centres and restoring funding to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, extending compensation to day students (currently excluded from the settlement), and increased funding for archiving historical residential school records. None of the recommendations have been accepted by either level of government.
    “The federal government says it is looking at the recommendations,” says TRC Chief Commissioner Murray Sinclair, “but I can’t say there has been any significant change as a result. Some of them have been rejected outright, like the recommendation to re-establish funding to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation and making improvements to the TRC process. I expect,” Sinclair concludes with resignation, “that we will be repeating most of the recommendations in our final report.”
    It doesn’t seem likely they will meet with any greater success second time around. Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, Bernard Valcourt, was not available to comment on the government’s lack of action on the recommendations. Press secretary Erica Meekes provided this anodyne written response: “Our government is committed to a fair and lasting resolution to the legacy of the Indian residential schools and will continue to work with the TRC and to fulfill its obligations under the IRSSA.”
    And not one iota more, Meekes may as well have added. That may be in part because the government has chalked up approximately $4 billion to date in settling compensation claims through the IRSSA. Survivors could choose to accept a limited “common experience payment” based simply on proven years of attendance at a school—the government set aside $1.9 billion towards this category of compensation—or participate in an independent assessment process (IAP) in which they could receive considerably greater compensation based on proving the actual abuses that had occurred. To date, more than $2 billion has been spent on compensating IAP claims to 23,268 claimants. Another 14,600 remain in progress.
    It is questionable whether the IAP has contributed to reconciliation or compounded the problem, however. Participants are interrogated by government lawyers in a quasi-legal setting, and asked repeatedly to describe the most intimate acts of sexual abuse upon them. Points are awarded to the claimants based on how many times they suffered digital, vaginal or anal penetration, and whether those acts were persistent or occasional. Fondling doesn’t score as highly as persistent masturbation; broken bones rate less than anal intercourse. Dollar figures are assigned to the points scored; they are non-negotiable. 
    It is difficult to imagine the sheer horror of having to tell strangers such intimate details, while lawyers repeatedly question your integrity and memory. Inspite of such indignities, thousands have done so, determined to hold the government to account in the only way that seems possible, and despite the psychological consequences of having to relive all those dreadful experiences. Whether the payments will adequately compensate for the reawakened memories is questionable. 
    Also questionable is the federal government’s refusal to apologize for its role in undertaking unconscionable nutritional experiments on the children, another horrifying fact that gained prominence in mid-2013. In tests bringing to mind those undertaken on Jewish Holocaust victims, students were deliberately starved and studied to assess the effect of poor nutrition on growing kids. Minister Valcourt simply told media that the past can’t be erased, and “everyone needs to reconcile and move forward.”
     
    Risking being labelled a sham
    Critics of the federal government’s lack of commitment to reconciliation point not only to its refusal to live up to the spirit of the TRC process, but to its apparent lack of interest in having any kind of relationship with First Nations, let alone a positive one. 
    The Harper government remains determined to drive the Northern Gateway bitumen pipeline through British Columbia despite ferocious First Nations opposition; refuses to honour historic treaties or show any inclination to move forward on concluding contemporary land claims and self-government agreements; and continues to neglect impoverished communities. “I would say that it goes beyond neglect to a completely counter-productive agenda that does nothing whatsoever to promote reconciliation,” says Lorne Brownsey bluntly. 
    Brownsey is a former executive director of the federal treaty negotiations office in Vancouver and deputy provincial minister of aboriginal relations and reconciliation, now retired in Victoria. In late 2011, he told Focus: “Unfortunately, the government of Canada has become an increasingly reluctant partner in the process of reconciliation in British Columbia and elsewhere.” Two years later, nothing has changed. “The relationship between the federal government and First Nations has not improved one iota. To talk about reconciliation without any relationship is pointless, especially when the party with the fiduciary responsibility towards Aboriginal people—the government—is frankly derelict in its duties.”
    Brownsey is cynical about the federal government’s reconciliation agenda, citing its recent frantic attempt to engage with First Nations on the Enbridge file. In mid-September a plane-load of federal deputy ministers landed in Vancouver and fanned out across the province to try and persuade First Nations that they could trust the government on this one. “I’m not impressed. Frankly, this isn’t about building a proper relationship with First Nations. I think they’re just trying to butter up the ones they think they need onside. It’s the same old story.”
    That attitude, thinks Brownsey, explains why the TRC process has some fundamental barriers to success in its way. “How can the TRC do its job when the federal government is not engaged and is uncooperative? If they don’t step up to support it and the recommendations it’s at risk of being labelled a complete sham.” 
    Things aren’t much more promising on the provincial government front. Minister of Aboriginal Relations John Rustad says he has found the TRC process “very moving.” But when it comes to the recommendations that the provincial government actively address educational and health issues, all he has to say is: “We’re looking at them. I am particularly interested in the education recommendations.”
    Rustad says he is more interested in moving forward on the provincial government’s treaty agenda. “I think that’s where the greatest opportunity for reconciliation lies. We’ve managed to reach a few agreements and there is interest from other First Nations in moving forward.” 
    The merits of the BC treaty process and the provincial government’s role in it are fodder for a whole different article. Despite what Rustad says, in September the independent BC Treaty Commission berated the provincial government for its lack of commitment to the treaty process. Whether or not treaties will achieve reconciliation of anything other than governmental economic agendas also remains a hotly-debated issue, as is the question of whether treaty agreements can possibly address the kinds of needs and issues highlighted by the TRC process. 
    In the meantime, people like Troy Sebastian are incensed when they hear Rustad pushing the government’s treaty agenda as a path forward to reconciliation. “His government’s actions are utterly inconsistent with any commitment to reconciliation,” repeats Sebastian. “How on earth can John Rustad talk about reconciliation with a straight face?” he demands. “It makes me sick.”
     
    Is there any good news here?
    Yes, insists Reconciliation Canada’s Karen Joseph. “We are inundated with interest from both indigenous and non-indigenous people wanting to be involved in the conversation about reconciliation,” she says. “As people learn about the history, and understand not only the impact of the residential schools but of everything that governments have done to First Nations people in Canada since first contact, they are hungry to do something to repair the relationship.”
    Reconciliation Canada, a non-profit organization, was created following the 2012 Victoria TRC event. “We’d already been talking about putting something in place that could carry on the work of reconciliation,” says Joseph. “People were really engaged but had nowhere to go to continue the conversation. That’s when we started talking about creating the Walk for Reconciliation as a way for people to show solidarity.”
    Within a matter of weeks Reconciliation Canada had been created and substantial funding was in place to organize the walk.  “I couldn’t believe the level of appetite for it,” says Joseph. The walk, held on September 22, was hugely successful, reportedly attracting 70,000 participants. “We aren’t stopping there,” says Joseph. “Clearly people want to continue the conversation. We have to have a structure that people can become involved with on an ongoing basis, especially after the TRC is gone.”
    Reconciliation Canada, says Joseph, is about moving forward past “sorry” and into a new relationship together that will benefit everyone long after the TRC completes its work. “It is partly a matter of social acceptance. When people at an individual level can become comfortable with each other, we’re really getting somewhere.”
    Commissioner Sinclair thinks individual Canadians have a responsibility to make their actions speak as loudly as their words. “People who support reconciliation need to reach out. The TRC process is just part of a huge conversation that needs to take place about all the gaps that still exist between First Nations people and their lives and the lives of non-indigenous people in Canada. That conversation needs to take place with everyone.”
    People can also help by advocating to government for the rights of First Nations people, say the critics of government inaction to date. “In the simplest terms, reconciliation, at some point, has to be not only about the residential schools but about transference of power back to First Nations,” observes Lorne Brownsey. “That means return of lands, restoration of prosperity, and not least of all, self-determination. British Columbians need to accept that’s vital, and support it.”
    “Governments aren’t doing that right now in a way that is meaningful to First Nations, and won’t unless their constituents support them doing it,” he continues. “I know the TRC process has been worthwhile for many people who have found healing in sharing their stories, and for non-indigenous people who have been touched by hearing them, so it isn’t a failure from that perspective by any means. But there remains a major piece missing, and that is acceptance that reconciliation goes beyond individual healing and requires the return of real control to First Nations and recognition of their rights.” 
    Troy Sebastian expresses his view in starker terms: “I don’t believe it is necessarily within our interest as indigenous peoples to participate in reconciliation when the concept of reconciliation is predicated on strong principles of white supremacy, apartheid and cultural genocide. If people mean what they say about wanting reconciliation, they have to put pressure on the government to compel the state to re-imagine its relationship with indigenous peoples, lands and law. Tell government to stop flying in the face of First Nations’ rights and needs and culture. If non-indigenous people don’t support us in our rights, and our goals for self-determination, this reconciliation process is all completely meaningless as far as I’m concerned.”
     
    Where to from here, then?
    On Canada Day 2014, the TRC will hold its final national event in Ottawa. That, at least as far as governments are concerned, is where the TRC process will end.
    But, as Joseph and Sebastian and Brownsey all point out, it doesn’t have to mean the end of reconciliation efforts by everyone else. Fred Robbins, chief of the Alkali Lake Band, stood up at the TRC in Vancouver and said: “We need to recognize that things can’t end with the TRC process. We need to support the recommendations they have made. We need to carry on this momentum, or all this work will just get folded up by bureaucrats and put away on a shelf. And we need to do it together.”
    Otherwise, all those stories so bravely shared will be forgotten, and the past, as usual, will simply be repeated. We can’t ever get Deborah Johnson’s brand-new dress and shoes back for her, but metaphorically at least, we can work together to make sure that governments never take them away from future generations of little girls just like her. And if Canada is ever to truly reach meaningful reconciliation with First Nations, we must.
    Katherine Palmer Gordon is the author of six books of non-fiction, including several BC Bestsellers and a Haig-Brown prize-winner. We Are Born with the Songs Inside Us: Lives and Stories of First Nations People in British Columbia has just been released by Harbour Publishing. She also has 20 years experience working with First Nations on land claims and inter-governmental relations.

    Briony Penn
    November 2013
    Permits for development over First Nations’ burial grounds raise the question: Would the government ever say “no”?
     
    IN THE HEART OF VICTORIA lies a peaceful sanctuary of century-and-a-half-old gravestones and trees called the Pioneer Square Cemetery, the “Old Burying Ground” for pioneer families. Currently underway are respectful repairs to its gravestones, paths and landscape. Meanwhile, Grace Islet, a tiny picturesque ancient Coast Salish burial site amongst ancient oaks and juniper, just off Salt Spring Island shores, lies desecrated by proposed residential development. 
    British Columbia’s Archaeology Branch, after a year of deliberation, chose Reconciliation Week to extend a provincial heritage site alteration permit to an Albertan businessman so he could build his luxury waterfront vacation home atop this First Nation cemetery.  
    The alteration permit enables him to build his house on posts over the burial islet, with the intention of “preserving” the ancient burial cairns underneath the house footprint, patio decks and landscaping. This permit was issued despite the strongest objections from many local Coast Salish First Nations. Chief Earl Jack of the Penelakut Tribe called the proposed building atop the cemetery “a cynical and vulgar notion.” 
    Grace Islet, part of the large ancient village of Shiya’hwt waht at the head of Ganges Harbour, has long been a recorded archaeological site. An archaeological assessment study confirmed two separate locations of ancient human remains and at least 15 other burial cairn features amongst the camas lilies of this half-hectare rocky islet.
    Last July, the Penelakut Tribe wrote a complaint to the Salt Spring Island RCMP about the property owner’s reported bulldozing and clearance of the burial islet. Archaeology Branch staff confirmed the land clearance was in breach of existing permit conditions. In a subsequent visit to Grace Islet, First Nations documented the desecration—the vegetation and soils stripped to bedrock by use of a small excavator, and several burial cairns left pedastalled within the proposed house footprint. 
    In his letter this June to Minister Steve Thomson, Chief Jack repeated his request for “upholding our customary laws, beliefs and aboriginal rights to protect our ancestral dead from further disturbance by private development at this burial islet.” Considering the whole islet to be an ancient and historical First Nation cemetery, he pleaded “We believe this sacred place must be publicly respected and preserved, not allowed by your Ministry to be developed and desecrated.” 
    As archaeologist Eric McLay, a specialist in Coast Salish heritage, stated after the permit was issued, “There is a perceived fundamental discrimination against First Nations peoples in such bureaucratic decisions by the Archaeology Branch—that First Nations people and their deceased ancestors aren’t being treated like human beings, but objects that can just be dug up, bulldozed and built over with no consequences. The message sent to First Nations is that they aren’t equal, that their heritage sites—even their cemeteries—aren’t worth preserving, and don’t deserve respect, even long after death.” 
    Archaeology Branch Director Justine Batten, in a written response to Focus’s question on the branch's interpretation of the Heritage Conservation Act, states the goal is to conserve heritage “but in a reasonable balance with other land uses.” One wonders what type of development in one of Victoria’s pioneer cemeteries would be considered reasonable by the Archaeology Branch.
    Batten claims that in the Grace Islet case, “the landowner had the requisite permit, redesigned his house to ensure there would be no contact with any of the rock features that are believed to be burial cairns and a restrictive covenant will be registered on the certificate of title to ensure future owners of the property have notice of the presence of the site.” But change “rock features”to “gravestones” and “the site” to “Pioneer Square Cemetery” and one can understand the moral outrage felt by Coast Salish peoples.
    Batten states her mandate is “to achieve a compromise acceptable to both that allows the development but protects the contents of the archaeological site to the extent possible.” At Grace Islet , no compromise was acceptable to First Nations. As Penelakut Elder and hereditary grave worker August Sylvester stated, “This is a shmukw’elu—a cemetery—a place to take care and avoid out of respect for the dead and their spirits.” Batten’s response is, “If the protection sought is more than avoidance and the desire is to preclude any alteration of the lands, then purchasing the property may be the best solution.” The Penalakut Tribe had appealed to Minister Thomson last year to assist in a purchase to preserve Grace Islet as a memorial parkland or cemetery, but the province dismissed the request due to lack of finances. Buying back the burial site themselves would be especially galling considering Coast Salish people never relinquished title to Grace Islet in the first place.
    Yet buying back a burial site is what the Musqueam First Nation was recently forced to do at the Marpole village site in Vancouver—another ironic Reconciliation Week announcement. Wade Grant, councillor of Musqueam, described his mixed feelings that this ancient village and burial ground—long ago designated a National Historic Site—had to be purchased with $4.8 million that the Musqueam had received as part of a separate payment from the Province for other projects in Vancouver. As part of the sale agreement the Province also provided $5.3 million directly to the property owner for foregone development costs.
    This purchase came after the Musqueam had exhausted all other political avenues to protect the site from a proposed $100-million condominium development, including a six-month occupation of the site, a blockade of the Arthur Laing Bridge, the lobbying of the premier’s office, public petitions, an intensive social media campaign, and countless meetings and negotiations over a year.
    Grant said the Musqueam attempted, unsuccessfully, to implement Section 4 of the Heritage Conservation Act, which is a special enabling power that the Province could have used to protect the burial site. The Province’s response to why they didn’t use Section 4 was that, “A working group has been formed to look at the feasibility of developing a mandate to implement Section 4 of the Heritage Conservation Act. This work is not completed and no Section 4 agreements have been developed to date.” 
    Grant questions why “a 1000-year-old Viking burial site is declared a World UNESCO Heritage Site while a much older Musqueam burial site is declared an inconvenience.” For Grant, the Marpole site in the heavily urbanized Vancouver location is the “last undeveloped heritage site of our traditional Musqueam culture—as much part of Canadian heritage as Viking sites.” 
    The Musqueam purchase is the latest in a series of high profile burial site fiascos. The destruction of the burial site at Poet’s Cove on Pender Island in 2006 led to the first fines for altering without a permit, but still resulted in what was called by Robert Morales, chief negotiator for the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group, “one of the worst desecrations of an aboriginal burial ground by development in the recent history of Canada.” 
    A year later, the Snuneymuxw First Nation was faced with the destruction of the Departure Bay burial site. The site wasn’t issued a stop order until 80 individuals had been dug up and the premier was directly lobbied. The Province eventually withdrew the permit and protected the site directly by providing the $2.5 million in funds to buy it. 
    Such effort required to preserve First Nation heritage places in BC is worrying. Archaeologist McLay says a chronic lack of political will and investment to uphold the principles of the provincial Heritage Conservation Act over the past decade has led to this crisis. The dismantling of the BC Heritage Trust in 2003 led to the current absence of any role for government to publicly invest in provincial heritage site conservation, research, education or heritage site stewardship across the province. 
    Despite strong legislation, the Archaeology Branch’s narrow interpretation of the Act has had the effect of aiding development of archaeological sites rather than conserving them. The lack of any provincial policy or guidelines on decision making over the issuance of alteration permits is of key concern and has led to what McLay calls a “morally-bankrupt” system: “they have no principles, policies, or ethics to responsibly ground a decision to ever say ‘no’ to development—site preservation is always an ad hoc political decision, often made after-the-fact of development.” 
    When designated ancient burial sites and National Historic Sites are greenlighted for development, then our provincial heritage law is rendered meaningless—which means Pioneer Square Cemetery might not be far behind.
    McLay suggests we need to move beyond existing narrow bureaucratic thinking and implement new mechanisms other than “permits” to regulate—for instance, a provincial heritage legacy fund to help negotiate the purchase of archaeological sites in conflict with development, or an independent provincial heritage advisory board to study, provide advice, and report on current provincial heritage issues. Otherwise, cautions McLay, the status quo will continue where “no First Nation’s archaeological site is safe from the wrecking ball.” 
    Reconciliation Week might have started to build some public awareness of the extent and depth of systemic discrimination of First Nations peoples, but there is a long way to go. 
    Briony Penn PhD has been reporting on the environment since her first article in The Islander in 1975 on Garry oak meadows and has been a columnist in Victoria publications since 1993. She lives on Salt Spring Island.

    Alan Cassels
    October 2013
    Are we ready for the consequences of a province-wide colon screening program?
    THE SIGN ON THE FRONT OF THE PODIUM said it all: “Screening Saves Lives.” It was April of this year and Health Minister Margaret MacDiarmid was speaking at a very important event. After a three-year pilot study in several communities around BC, she was announcing the official start of the new Provincial Colon Screening Program which was going to be unrolled on Vancouver Island this summer, before moving on to the rest of the province. 
    As she was announcing that program, few might have predicted the controversies that lay ahead; a summer where front page headlines were saying people who needed colonoscopies were facing massive line-ups and long waits for referrals to gastroenterologists. The new Health Minister Terry Lake had to face reporters to explain how they would fix things. 
    Some might say these were just growing pains for a province that has been somewhat slow in introducing a colon cancer screening program (at least six other provinces have already established their programs), yet screening large numbers of healthy people in the name of prevention is undoubtedly a complicated matter, both medically and politically. The praiseworthy goal is to reduce the rate at which British Columbians die from colon cancer—the third most lethal type of cancer in Canada—and BC’s program seems on the surface well-designed, but its implementation is not without its problems. 
    Within months of the program beginning on Vancouver Island, referrals to the island’s gastroenterologists, experts in assessing and treating people with a range of stomach and digestive problems, tripled. The ensuing waitlists for colonoscopies generated those headlines and the perception was set: People were being denied a lifesaving procedure. 
    BC’s program asks people to take a low-tech screening test before moving on to more complex, invasive and expensive tests, like the colonoscopy. The FIT (Fecal Immunochemical Test—essentially a take-home poop test) is offered free to all eligible BC residents between 50 and 74 years old. If you have a positive test (evidence of blood in the stool) you are eligible for a colonoscopy, which, done every ten years, is considered equivalent to the FIT every 1-2 years in terms of its ability to prevent or detect colon cancer at an early stage.
    For people thought to be at higher risk because of their family history or a previous history of polyps, they can skip the FIT test and jump straight to a publicly-funded colonoscopy.


     
    The simple fecal test costs our health care system only $35 per person to administer. It is an appropriate first-line screening tool as it can detect blood in the stool which might be an early sign of colon cancer. But there may be other reasons why there is blood in your stool: for example, hernias, ulcers, anal fissures. Sometimes even eating very rare meat can create a false positive. So, like any screening test, the problem of a false-positive result is always there. 
    A colonoscopy involves a long flexible scope, threaded through the anus and up into the colon to look for signs of bowel disease. If any signs of precancerous growth such as polyps are found, they can be removed. 
    It is believed by most medical authorities that finding and removing these polyps can reduce the risk of colon cancer. Currently, a typical Canadian faces a lifetime risk of a colon cancer death of about four percent. If a simple inexpensive FIT can improve those odds, it seems a reasonable and appropriate thing to do. 
    However, like all screening programs, colon screening is imperfect. There is much medical conjecture and debate about the relative values of FIT versus colonoscopy. Colonoscopies can find polyps and remove them, but they can also miss things. Also, at least a third of healthy people between ages 50 and 75 will have colon polyps. And here’s what you’re not likely to hear: Most of us will die with—but not because of—colon polyps. 
    Vancouver gastroenterologist Jennifer Telford is enthusiastic about colon screening. She was involved in piloting the screening program in BC and says it’s entirely appropriate that the stool test should precede a colonoscopy. She estimated that if we gave the FIT to 10,000 eligible BC residents, 8.5 percent, or 850 would go on to be recommended for a colonoscopy. Of those 850, about 34 cancers would be detected and about a third would have an advance neoplasia, or advanced polyps. These can be removed during the procedure. 
    “Colonoscopy is a great test and I love doing it,” says Dr Telford. Certainly removing polyps must be a satisfying enterprise because of the perceived benefit to patients. Dr Telford estimates that “75 to 80 percent of colon cancers come from precancerous polyps.”
    But does a polyp automatically mean a death sentence? 
    Not at all—only about 2.5 polyps in a thousand will progress to cancer. There is much medical debate around how fast even “precancerous” colonic polyps will go on to develop into full blown cancers; estimates range from 10 to 25 years. Admittedly, finding things that could be precursors to cancer and then leaving them alone is very hard to do. Hunting down and removing polyps seems relatively easy to do and lucrative for those doing it. 
    But before fully embracing the program, we need to understand the problems colonoscopies themselves can cause both individuals and the health care system. 
     
    Volume clogging care
    In early August, the Times Colonist reported that a young Oak Bay High graduate had sued VIHA for not arranging an early-enough colonoscopy when he had serious symptoms (blood in his stool, a swollen abdomen and fever) that needed investigating. He was told by physicians that a diagnostic colonoscopy was necessary to determine if it was Crohn’s disease or perhaps a carcinoid tumour—something that can be fatal if not detected early. But the 19-year-old got stuck in the four-month-long queue with everyone else getting a screening colonoscopy. (He has now had this test.)
    Consumer advocate Wendy Armstrong of Edmonton isn’t surprised to see these sorts of delays now happening in BC. She has been monitoring the expansion of various screening programs for decades and what concerns her—watching how colonoscopies have been so eagerly promoted, sought and delivered in Alberta—is how the attention of gastroenterologists is consumed by, among other things, all the polyp chasing. 
    She tells me the story of a young man in Alberta, suffering a flare-up of Crohn’s, who was told he had an eight-month wait before he could get a colonoscopy. The problem, in Wendy’s estimation, is how busy the specialists can become “looking further at people with suspicious fecal tests.” 
    Unlike BC’s program—which requires the FIT first—Alberta publicly funds first-line colonoscopy screening. The growing numbers of colonoscopies performed in Alberta in the last few years has been staggering. In 2007, Alberta Health paid for 54,000 colonoscopies, yet by 2012 that number had increased to just over 107,000, a 100 percent rise in a province whose population grew just over 10 percent. This is, perhaps, why Calgary has been given the ignominious title of the “Colonoscopy Capital of Canada.” 
    The experience in Alberta is relevant because when you introduce a test that goes on to occupy the energies of the specialists, they may have even less time to treat genuinely sick people. With all the screening through colonoscopies, Wendy Armstrong says she has seen firsthand the “difficulty for people with debilitating symptoms of bowel disease—such as Crohn’s or colitis or even people showing clinical symptoms of possible cancer—to get timely and appropriate care.” After all, the time and availability of gastroenterologists are limited.
     
    Unpredictable demand, unknown costs
    BC’s program seems more rational than Alberta’s, yet with both provinces, access to specialists is related to the issue of unpredictable demand. When you offer a screening program, how many people will bite? 
    When I inquired earlier this spring, health authorities on Vancouver Island could give few precise details on the forthcoming screening program, such as the numbers to be screened, how many lives would be saved and the overall cost of the program. A 2010 UBC study suggested a cost of about $70 million per 100,000 individuals (in BC there are 1.345 million people between the ages of 50 and 74). 
    But calculations are not simple. Besides factoring in possible savings from earlier detection of cancer—which will take many years, maybe decades, to be realized—there are many other unknown factors: How many people will submit to screening? How many positives will be found? How many physicians will refer their patients to a colonoscopy without a positive FIT? And we can’t forget the costs associated with medical procedures needed to fix people who are injured by a colonoscopy.
    The BC Cancer Agency’s Angela Wilson told me by email that “FIT use in the first three months of availability has been [25 percent] higher than expected. Patients with positive FIT would be referred to colonoscopy; therefore colonoscopy referrals have been higher than anticipated as well.”
    Wilson also said that “the Ministry of Health has estimated the annual program cost to be $10 million,” though those costs could be much higher. 
    There are many things which might drive (or reduce) demand for colonoscopies. One of the things that drives consumer demand for screening is the celebrity factor. When TV personality Katie Couric had her colonoscopy done live on the Today Show, there was a 20 percent spike in colonoscopies in the US. Celebrity endorsements might be the last place one should go for health information, but knowing someone who has died from colon cancer (or believing one’s life had been saved because of a polyp removal) surely contributes to the demand for colonoscopies.
    What does the evidence say about the difference between the FIT test and colonoscopies? Dr James Allison, a gastroenterologist and clinical professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco says BC’s colon screening program seems “conservative and appropriate.” He has written extensively on the lack of evidence to support the popularity of colonoscopies, telling me that there is “no proof from randomized controlled trials that colonoscopy every 10 years is superior to FIT every year in decreasing colorectal cancer incidence and mortality.” In other words, the colonoscopy is not any more “lifesaving” than having the poop test every year or two. 
    So how effective is the fecal test? Like many screening programs, many of us have to be screened in order for one person to benefit. Dr James Penston, a UK gastroenterologist, criticizes colorectal screening as “being sold to the general public on the grounds that it saves lives. But there’s no evidence for this claim.” He points to a large 10-year study in the UK of colon cancer screening using the fecal occult blood test. In the control group (those not screened) the death rate for colorectal cancer was 0.8 percent. It was 0.7 percent in the screened group. This 0.1 percent difference translates into a one-in-a-thousand benefit. 
    A new study published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine in late September looked at 30 years of follow-up for more than 46,000 people undergoing annual or biennial fecal blood screening for colon cancer. Those undergoing screening were less likely to die from colon cancer (by about 6 in 1,000), but overall death rates in screened and unscreened populations were the same. So the Minister's sign that “Screening saves lives,” at least in this case, isn’t proven by the evidence.
    Perhaps more important, how many will be given colonoscopies that lead to bleeding, hospitalization, perforation and, occasionally, death? Unfortunately, we won’t know the answers and hence the overall outcome until the program has been in place for a very long time. 
     
    Overdiagnosis, overtreatment and harm
    In the last few years even the most-studied and widely-used screening programs (for breast and prostate cancer, for instance) have faced evidence-based arguments about whether they were doing more harm than good. The main issue has been the possibility of overdiagnosis. In the case of colon cancer, because most of us will have polyps and very few of us will die from them, screening is also liable to result in overdiagnosis and overtreatment. 
    If and when polyps are found, people may live under a dark cloud, with a “pre-cancerous” label for the rest of their lives. They will certainly be more frequently reminded of their colon health because they will receive many future invitations for follow-up colonoscopies. There is some evidence that depression and suicide is higher among those who submit to screening programs. 
    Dr Gilbert Welch, author of the book Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health, knows well the downsides of screening. In an article he wrote for the New York Times last year he said that “screening the apparently healthy potentially saves a few lives…but it definitely drags many others into the system needlessly—into needless appointments, needless tests, needless drugs and needless operations…” He argues that the process of screening doesn’t promote health but rather promotes disease. “People suffer from more anxiety about their health, from drug side effects, from complications of surgery. A few die. And remember: These people felt fine when they entered the health care system.”
    In addition to the psychological effects of screening, the downsides to an actual screening colonoscopy can include the side effects of ingesting the bowel preparation (including bloating, gas, stomach pain, feeling very hungry and dehydrated), as well as cardiac arrhythmias, and other metabolic disturbances, and even neurological damage. 
    When Deb Novak, a 56-year old native of Edmonton agreed to have a screening colonoscopy, like many people she was seeking an ounce of prevention. When Novak arrived for the procedure, the clinic was crowded with others waiting for their colonoscopies. Despite the mild sedation she found the colonoscopy painful and at one point a searing pain caused her to scream out and struggle to jump off the table. When the procedure was over the doctor said they had found a single mushroom-like polyp and removed it. That should have been the end of the story. 
    But it wasn’t. She spent most of that night vomiting and in severe pain. A late-night ambulance ride back to the hospital and a near 12-hour, agony-filled wait in the emergency room left her feeling abandoned and bitter. She said that it appeared the screening program “had no back-up plan for a return in the case of a perforation emergency.” During the emergency operation to repair a seven-centimetre perforation of her bowel, Novak thought to herself, “I think I’m going to die.” She had to rely on a colostomy appliance for a year before they could repair her torn intestine. 
    While only a small proportion of colonoscopy procedures turn out as horrendous as Deb Novak’s, colonoscopies for some people can be fatal. Studies show a .5 percent risk of serious medical complications from colonoscopy—one person in 200.
    There’s also the opposite possibility, that a patient will get stamped with a clean bill of health after a colonoscopy when the scope missed something. This is common “even among expert examiners who know that they are being scrutinized,” said one study. In fact, as Deb Novak tells me, the doctors doing the emergency repair to her perforated colon found a polyp that had been missed during the original colonoscopy. 
     
    Inflating the demand
    For some diseases of the digestive system, such as Crohn’s and colitis, getting a close-up view of a colon with a colonoscopy can be an incredibly valuable tool. After all, these are people who have clear symptoms of pre-existing bowel diseases and a diagnostic colonoscopy is a great way to find out more about their condition.
    But when used purely as a screening method, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the financial incentives shaping who gets screened, how often, and for what purpose. Physicians in BC don’t make a ton of money doing a colonoscopy (MSP pays them $230.62 for a colonoscopy or $344.79 if a polyp is removed), but when you add all the additional costs—the anaesthetist’s time, the nurse, equipment and admin costs—the bill to the tax-funded system could be as much as $1000. And of course if you have complications, bleeding or perforations, it’s back to the hospital for even more medical interventions and costly treatment. 
    In the private sector, a screening colonoscopy can be bought for $1600 at a place like the False Creek Healthcare Centre in Vancouver. When I called inquiring about the program, I was told that I’d be in good hands because “all the doctors are gastroenterologists who work in the public system.” 
    There are a limited number of gastroenterologists in the province. If they can get (or their private facility can get) $1600 for a colonoscopy for 20-30 minutes of work, and only $344 for removing a polyp in the public system, guess where most of them are going to work? That’s exactly what they found happened in Alberta. This understandably results in more stress on the public system, making delays more likely for those who are suffering symptoms that require a scope to help determine their cause.
    Wendy Armstrong, who is a past president and current researcher for the Consumers Association of Alberta, was an official intervener in a recent public inquiry in Alberta examining alleged preferential access in the public healthcare system. 
    The inquiry found that some private patients were getting booked for screening colonoscopies in weeks or months in private clinics while others waited two to three years to get the procedure in the public system. It also found that some patients were being recalled for follow-up colonoscopies more frequently than recommended by current guidelines. In Wendy’s opinion, the potential for inflating demand for colonoscopies (inside and outside the public system) was huge and that the wait-time problems and frustrations that we are seeing in BC are entirely predictable. She told me, “what came through loud and clear was that doctors in these boutique clinics are shopping for ‘healthy users.’” By overscreening healthy, better-paying private clients, the sick and the more needy (those with real symptoms) will inevitably get shunted to the back of the line, or stuck in the line with everyone else, like that poor Oak Bay student. There is a name for this: It’s called the “inverse care law,” which can be re-tweaked here to be the “inverse screening law”—which is to say, the availability of a service, in this case screening, is in inverse proportion to its need. 
    Spending $10 million or more of public health dollars every year to avoid a fatal disease seems on the surface like the right thing to do, but we always have to ask: What kind of overall impact will this screening program have? Will other important public healthcare services or programs be cut or clawed back to pay for the growing costs of this program? Have they been already? And are there better, perhaps more efficient ways to reduce the burden of colon cancer? We know, for example, that better diets (less meat and processed food), more exercise, not smoking—the usual triumvirate of better health advice—is crucial to help us all live longer and healthier lives. Want to reduce your risk of colon cancer? Eat more vegetables and ride your bike (as well as talk to your doctor about your family risk and how you might benefit from colon cancer screening).
    From my perspective as a researcher, we need better evaluation of existing screening programs to estimate the benefits; better predictions so we can estimate the burden of the program on the gastronenterology profession; and better information so that people go into screening knowing what to expect—both the potential benefits and potential harm—so they can opt out if they don’t like the odds presented to them. At the end of the day, well-informed citizens, not physicians or the government, should determine if they want to submit to a colon screening program around which there are many questions and unknowns.
    Alan Cassels is the author of Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease and he has worked for the last 18 years as an administrator, researcher and consultant on research and evaluation projects supported by the provincial and federal governments.

    David Broadland
    October 2013
    The CRD’s own records show it failed to consult taxpayers on the financial impacts of its sewage treatment plan. That's contrary to provincial law. Was the Ministry of Environment napping on the job when it approved the CRD's plan?
     
    FOCUS RECENTLY FILED an FOI for the CRD’s record of public consultation on its $783 million sewage treatment plan. We did this so we could compare what the CRD invited the public to provide input on against what seems to be the minimum legal requirement for consultation. The results suggest the CRD has, in significant ways, been avoiding its legal responsibility to consult the public on this massive expenditure of public money. Moreover, giving such scant attention to public consultation would only be possible if the Ministry of Environment—the regulator watching over the process—has been sleeping on the job or looking the other way.
    To help you understand why such an exercise might be in order, let’s go back to July 2010, when the CRD advertised in a local paper two “open houses” to be held in Esquimalt. Presented as “Esquimalt Community Engagement,” the CRD advertisement said it was “moving forward with a new system configuration for wastewater treatment in the Core Area Municipalities.” The ad invited Esquimalt residents “to learn more about the chosen treatment system and give feedback and suggestions on mitigation and community benefits.”
    Actually, Esquimalt was being dumped on. For over three years the CRD had pursued various plans in which three or more treatment plants were to be distributed around the region—a sharing of the burden of hosting treatment infrastructure. Then, suddenly, the CRD switched to a single treatment plant—in Esquimalt. This new configuration had been approved by the CRD’s sewage committee in a single meeting without any prior public notice or consultation. That this happened shortly after a round of frosty public consultation had taken place over the location of a proposed treatment plant in an affluent neighbourhood near UVic did not go unnoticed in Esquimalt. 
    At the open houses in Esquimalt, the CRD asked attendees to fill in a feedback form. One of the questions on that form was: “How can the CRD be a good neighbour?”
    Naturally, the CRD received a talking-to: “Consult the public prior to making decisions. Stop changing numbers to suit your need to push the project through. Listen to us. Do not use falsehoods. Do not mislead the public. Do not spend taxpayers’ money on a one-sided campaign.” And that was just one person. Another chided, “A good neighbour would ask the public for input before it decides on such a huge project. A good neighbour would not spend the public’s money before asking. It is impossible to trust such a body of people who ignore the wishes of the residents who will be most affected.” Some commenters didn’t bother to answer the CRD’s question and led with their own: “Isn’t Esquimalt in the CRD? When did we separate? Regulation without representation is fascism. Until and unless the CRD becomes a wholly elected body, it is tyranny. Consult ex camera on all, ALL, policy issues, development plans, infrastructure proposals and regulation suggestions BEFORE IMPLEMENTATION. Investigate the meaning of the word ‘democratic.’ Stand for office or close shop.”
    In response to that “good neighbour” question, 60 percent of the commenters poked hard at the CRD’s performance on public consultation. That wasn’t surprising considering the CRD Board of Directors had already approved the $783 million plan two weeks beforehand, and by the time of the open houses that plan was sitting on the desk of then Environment Minister Barry Penner, awaiting his thumbs-up. 
    That doesn’t sound like genuine consultation. In fact, the CRD didn’t even want to be in the room. Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins, the municipality’s representative on the CRD sewage committee, recalled that “it was only because of my protests and a minority of the [sewage] committee supporting me that the CRD agreed to do the two sessions in Esquimalt.” Desjardins said, “I felt the CRD must present their decision to Esquimalt, and insisted that it be done as soon as possible. But let’s be clear that these were not, in any way, ‘community consultation.’”
    The deep distrust expressed in the comments gathered by the CRD at those open houses has since grown into community-wide discontent. The CRD’s retreat last summer from a new proposal to locate a sewage sludge processing plant in the midst of a residential neighbourhood in Esquimalt has done little to bridge the gap. Instead, people have been wondering out loud if provincial Environment Minister Mary Polak should call a time-out, bring the CRD back to consult more comprehensively with the people, and allow time for creating a better plan. There is a legal avenue for Polak to do that. Will she take it? Was the CRD’s consultation with the public so bad that it demands redress?
     
    What the Environmental Management Act requires
    Creation of a liquid waste management plan like the CRD’s is governed by BC’s Environmental Management Act. The Ministry of Environment administers this law and has developed guidelines for regional districts on how to develop such plans (Interim Guidelines for Preparing Liquid Waste Management Plans). On the subject of “Consultation Process” the Guidelines are squishy, perhaps intentionally so. “Should” is used as often as “must.” So definitive statements about what the guidelines intend are open for debate. 
    So let’s back up a bit. The Act says, “A [regional district] must provide for a process for comprehensive review and consultation with the public respecting all aspects of the development, amendment and final content of a waste management plan that applies to that [regional district].”
    The ministry’s Guidelines explains why that “process for comprehensive review and consultation with the public” is so important. The document states: “Under the Community Charter and Local Government Act, electoral approval must be sought for any borrowing associated with capital works. Because the Environmental Management Act waives these requirements for elector approval for any borrowing necessary to implement [a liquid waste management plan], it is important that the public has an opportunity to provide input with respect to proposed financing.”
    In other words, unlike for borrowing for other capital projects, the CRD doesn’t have to seek permission from electors—through a referendum or an alternative approval process—to borrow for a sewage treatment system. Instead, the Environmental Management Act commands “comprehensive review and consultation” with electors before a plan for a sewage treatment system can be approved by the minister. 
    The Guidelines further direct regional districts to consult on the financial impact to taxpayers. Toward that end, they state: “The possibility of senior government grants and the use of development charges to reduce capital costs should be presented for comparison with the no grant scenario. As a minimum, for a typical residential taxpayer, the added capital debt repayment and user fees associated with the Stage 2 options and the selected Stage 3 option should be presented.” (The “Stage 3 option” in this case is the plan for a single treatment plant at McLoughlin Point in Esquimalt.)
    Did the CRD give the public an “opportunity to provide input” on any of those aspects of the financial impact on taxpayers?
     
    The record of public consultation
    I posed that question to Saanich Councillor Judy Brownoff, who was the chairperson of the CRD committee overseeing development of the liquid waste management plan in 2010 when Penner approved the McLoughlin plan. Brownoff said, “Consultation was held specifically on procurement method and models... and there was public input, including verbatim comments in reports.” Brownoff was referring to two open houses and a meeting of her committee, held in February 2010, that sought public input “on issues and concerns relating to procurement.” The CRD had asked for public and stakeholder input on various procurement models, such as “design-bid-build” and “design-build-operate-maintain.” But the sessions did not provide “an opportunity for the public to provide input with respect to proposed financing.”
    I asked Victoria Councillor Geoff Young if he was aware of the requirement imposed by the Environmental Management Act to formally consult and review with the public on the financial implications to taxpayers of the McLoughlin plan. Young was the Chairperson of the CRD at the time the McLoughlin plan was approved by Penner. Young simply said “ don’t have much to add to [the] response Judy sent you.”
    Another requirement for public consultation set out by the Ministry of Environment’s Guidelines is that a record of consultation must be kept. The CRD has done a good job of making that record “available for public scrutiny,” as directed by the Guidelines. When so scrutinized and checked against the record Focus obtained by FOI, it becomes clear that the CRD never set up an “opportunity” in which they reviewed the proposed financing with the public, and the public was never specifically invited to provide input with respect to the proposed financing.
    The Guidelines’ section on public consultation notes that “[a]pportionment of costs to existing users and to future development should be equitable.” This is, arguably, a direction to local governments to consult with the public on how the excess capacity of a proposed treatment system is allocated. After all, those allocations would have a direct impact on costs to taxpayers. But they would also have a profound influence on where future development in a region is possible. I wrote extensively on that issue here last month; the CRD and its member municipalities decided how and where to allocate that excess capacity without any public input. 
    The Guidelines also provide direction to regional districts on consultation around “social impacts.” If you live relatively close to where a treatment plant is proposed, for example, and you might be directly subjected to “odour nuisance, noise, traffic, air quality and visual impact” as a result, then you need to be consulted. The CRD has a mixed record here. They did consult with the neighbourhood near UVic before finalizing their plan. They did not consult with their Esquimalt neighbours, nor with people living nearby in Victoria’s James Bay neighbourhood, before finalizing their plan for McLoughlin Point.
    Besides the question of whether the CRD consulted or not, there’s the issue of whether they listened to what the public said and incorporated that into their plan. No doubt the CRD took heed of much of what they were told. But there’s at least one example—and it’s an important one—where the official consultation process seems to have been overshadowed by unofficial consultation. This is the question of whether the cost of a treatment system is the most important consideration to the public. The CRD did official consultation on this in 2009, in a series of “community dialogues” in Victoria, Saanich and Westshore. These dialogues included a survey of what people valued most. For example, the CRD asked people to rate the importance of six characteristics of a wastewater treatment plant. The people surveyed gave the lowest rating to “The plant was constructed for the lowest possible cost.” And they gave the highest rating to “The plant includes technologies for maximum water and energy reuse.”
    Other results from those surveys supported the general idea that the environmental impact of the treatment system was more important to the public than the cost of the system.
    Yet Young recently told Focus, “Taxpayers throughout the region have made it abundantly clear they do not welcome paying for sewage treatment costs.” And Brownoff said, “When I was chair of the committee the focus was always on limiting costs of the project while meeting regulatory requirements and [to] provide resource recovery where it made sense. We heard through our many discussions with the public, either at the committee meetings (two a month), through presentations at various groups, or through our established consultation process, that costs were the biggest issue to manage.”
    Did Young and Brownoff and other CRD directors listen to what the public told them? We don’t really know. One thing is certain though: the record shows the public was never given an opportunity to be informed about the benefits and costs of tertiary treatment, even though public preference, as determined by the CRD’s official consultation, was for that level of treatment.
     
    The avenue for appeal
    The Environmental Management Act takes away electors’ right to say “No” to a capital project that provides sewage treatment. It replaces that right with a command to a regional district to create opportunities to comprehensively review and consult with the public on several aspects of its plan for a sewage treatment project, and to keep a record of that consultation. So what happens if the regional district doesn’t provide the opportunities for that “process for comprehensive review and consultation”?
    The Environmental Management Act provides a recourse to protect the public’s right to be informed and consulted. The Act states, “The minister may not approve a waste management plan unless the minister is satisfied that there has been adequate public review and consultation with respect to the development, amendment and final content of the waste management plan.”
    But former Minister Penner did approve the plan. What recourse is left to those feeling less than comprehensively consulted? Although  Penner approved Amendment 8 of the CRD’s plan, does current Environment Minister Mary Polak have any avenue to address the evident lack of consultation with taxpayers on the final content of the CRD’s treatment plan?
    In response to that question, an Environment Ministry spokesperson noted: “During the plan amendment, the CRD undertook extensive public consultation, as required by the Environmental Management Act. In addition, further consultation was completed with Esquimalt, with regard to the selection of McLoughlin Point for the central sewage facility. As you note, the minister may not approve a waste management plan unless the minister is satisfied that there has been adequate public review and consultation. Former Minister Penner indicated his approval of the consultation on the final content of the plan when he approved Amendment 8 on August 25, 2010.”
    For those hoping to hear that the Environment Minister will intervene, no luck. But Polak’s office didn’t say she was satisfied, either. Polak does have the power under the Environmental Management Act to cancel the CRD’s waste management plan.
     
    Should there be a pause for further consultation?
    Judy Brownoff said there will be some additional consultation: “[The] CRD will be continuing with various neighbourhood engagements depending on what and where a component of the project is located.” The CRD promised Penner in 2010 that it would “Engage neighbourhoods where treatment plants, pump stations, storage tanks or major pipelines are to be constructed in interactive workshops regarding the location, design, construction and operation of the proposed facilities, and use general public consultation...on broader issues.” 
    Brownoff explained why that hasn’t happened yet: “The Committee made the decision (when I was chair) not to ‘invest’ any more money on this project until the funding agreements had been finalized, and that led to no more ‘public meetings, informational newsletters, etc’.”
    But “neighbourhood engagement” is unlikely to produce the depth of consultation and change of plan that Barb Desjardins wants to see. The memory of the CRD short-changing her community in 2010 still rankles. That, compounded by the Viewfield Road fiasco, has damaged the CRD’s relationship with her community. “Once the trust of a community is lost it is very hard to regain. It takes significant work and requires going back to where you lost the trust. The CRD has not been willing to do this,” she said.
    She noted the lack of clarity in the law about what aspects of a liquid waste management plan require public consultation: “It is not clear what criteria the Ministry used to approve the plans. There is nothing in the Environmental Management Act that makes reference, directly or indirectly, to such criteria.”
    Although Desjardins feels Esquimalt residents haven’t been adequately consulted, just going back and doing more of the same won’t work. “I would like to have seen greater Provincial assistance in directing this process,” she said. “The CRD has not done public consultation well and this feeling of unease is growing in the public. [Minister] Polak could amend the liquid waste management plan under section 24 (6) of the Environmental Management Act to state that Amendment No.8 is no longer valid until public consultation is completed…The whole process has been tainted,” she said. “It can’t practically be redone. However there is time to develop a better plan and meet the deadlines.”
    She has a simple, two-step program by which the CRD could do a reality check with the public: “First, the CRD should notify every household in the Core Area by mail about the design and cost of the project. With a nearly three-year window available, the CRD could [then] hold a referendum on whether electors are satisfied with this plan or want the CRD to look at the alternatives.”
    Desjardins declined to elaborate on the state of negotiations between the CRD and Esquimalt over the latter’s rezoning of the CRD’s McLoughlin Point property. Esquimalt rezoned the property, as requested by the CRD, but attached conditions to the rezoning that the CRD says it cannot accommodate. “These conversations are ongoing,” she said of the negotiations.
    Oak Bay-Gordon Head MLA Andrew Weaver agrees with Desjardins that a better plan is needed. “There are many, many people in Oak Bay-Gordon Head who have expressed concern over this project for the reason that they want sewage to be treated [to a tertiary standard]. By and large, people accept we need to treat sewage, but they realize that this $783 million megaproject will essentially take away any appetite for future capital investment and will not actually treat the existing problem. It will only delay that until sometime in the future—because the requirements are for a secondary system as opposed to potential tertiary treatment.”
    Weaver’s constituents’ continuing concern about the inadequate treatment being proposed is another signal the CRD has not listened to what the public has been saying. As mentioned earlier, the CRD was advised by the public in early community consultation that including technologies for maximum water and energy reuse were more important than keeping costs as low as possible. Tertiary treatment removes contaminants such as pharmaceuticals, and would produce abundant reusable water.
    Weaver confirmed that Polak and Minister of Community, Sport and Cultural Development Coralee Oakes have told him there’s time to develop a better plan: “Both have said if they were asked for an extension of time to 2020, the money would be available and they would be fine in meeting the federal deadline. So there is time to actually do this properly, to go out and do an extensive taxation consultation, one that explores distributed systems, explores PPPs, explores tertiary versus secondary and the additional add-on costs.”
    Weaver thinks the CRD is missing out on opportunities for collaboration: “I’ll give you an example,” he says. “Someone should be talking with UVic; they are going into consultation about having a biomass facility of some form, whether it be anaerobic digestion or combustion; they’re talking about doing that now…Would it make sense to have an aerobic digestion sewage system, or a little tertiary system right there? This is the kind of thing that should be happening. But it’s not because [the CRD] are in rush mode now. And the sad reality is we’re not going to be dealing with the problem that exists; we’re just delaying it and we’re spending $783 million in the process.”
    Should Polak intervene? Weaver doesn’t think so. “The minister is loathe to get involved because it’s really not the minister’s job to get involved in this. It’s the minister’s job to ensure the process has been followed...The minister should not come in, for example, and order Esquimalt to have the facility built there, although the minister could. I think what the minister should do is proactively switch the deadline in light of this big hullabaloo that’s going on in the CRD… And she should take a very hard look at whether or not the actual consultation process, as required by law, has been met.”
    Informed of Desjardins’ call for a referendum, Weaver said, “Totally in favour of a referendum, just as Regina did!”
     
    Is there a better way to do public consultation?
    How could a community spend seven years and close to $65 million—most of that on planning—yet still come up with a plan that few people trust is the right thing to do? Municipal amalgamation beforehand might have made a difference; the stresses created by having eight different and unequal political cultures in the same room, each trying to avoid getting stuck with too much of the unwanted infrastructure that goes along with sewage treatment, may have wreaked havoc on common sense. But there’s no reason to believe amalgamation is just around the corner. So what happens when the next big infrastructure need comes along? Will the CRD use the same kind of public consultation and get the same kind of result?
    I asked Barb Desjardins if she had any suggestions on how to create more authentic dialogue between local government and citizens on such contentious issues in the future. “Engage people before final decisions, not after them,” she said. “Good public process and honest engagement take time. Policy decisions that limit—like never considering expropriation, never considering the use of ALR land—must be reviewed throughout the process to ensure they are still relevant. Respect the people who are paying; they should have more say in what is being put in their backyard. Decisions should be made and heavily weighted to what the local community wants and can support, not what other municipalities want.”
    Late last year Victoria Councillor Lisa Helps set up five “citizen budget workshops” to give her ideas that would help the City keep a check on escalating costs. “The purpose,” she said, “was to gain citizen input at the beginning of the City’s budget process, so that this could feed into decisions I’d be making at the council table in the fall.”
    How would she create more authentic dialogue between government and citizens on contentious issues? “Victoria’s residents and business owners have terrific, creative, innovative ideas,” Helps said.  “These ideas need to be sought at the beginning of any new project through opportunities for meaningful dialogue. This does not mean politicians directing staff to trot out with shiny billboards proposing a plan. This requires staff, politicians, residents and business owners to sit side by side, around tables, sharing ideas, being willing to be moved and to develop a better plan than each party would individually. This is good, old-fashioned deliberative democracy at work. It takes time. It asks each person to come to the table willing to be moved by what they hear. And this kind of democratic process creates lasting, resilient change because people are part of that change from the outset.”
    Alan Dolan, of Alan Dolan & Associates, is a facilitator and community engagement consultant. He suggests the CRD might have done better had it used the approach taken by the BC government to develop an option for electoral reform in 2002.
    “The Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform was comprised of two randomly selected citizens (one man and one woman) from each of the province’s 79 electoral districts, plus two Aboriginal members. The Assembly began with a ‘learning phase,’ where it received experts and held public hearings so members could understand the different electoral systems in usage around the world and how they affected the political process. Then members deliberated over which electoral system to recommend. Finally, the Assembly decided they would recommend a Single Transferable Vote system (STV) and the Assembly’s findings were presented in a report to the BC legislature.”
    Like Desjardins and Helps, Dolan acknowledges the deliberations of a citizens’ assembly take time. But, he says, “The CRD process has already taken a great deal of time. Using groups of ordinary citizens has a number of distinct advantages. Process is more democratic and representative of the community at large. The International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) says, ‘No other process takes such care to accurately reflect the public.’ Discussions are not swayed by special interests and powerful stakeholders. Members become very well informed on the subject matter. When options are presented to the community, members of the public have more trust in the information. Process allows the assembly to look at alternative ideas from all over the world, not just the ideas of CRD’s engineers or its consultants.”
     
    The path forward
    While there's always hope governments will behave differently in the future and the public will be included as a full partner in the business of the people, that's not much comfort for those unhappy with the CRD's plan right now. The problem seems to boil down to this: Esquimalt doesn’t want the CRD to build a treatment centre at McLoughlin Point. And that location has problems the rest of the community should be concerned about: It’s too small to include the necessary biosolids processing function, it’s too small for future tertiary treatment, and it’s too small for long-term population growth. If McLoughlin goes ahead, another site will have to be found later on.
    At the same time, the CRD has said it will not expropriate land or use land in the Agricultural Land Reserve for a treatment facility, thereby making it impossible for it to find a larger, more suitable location. Does that self-imposed limitation really make sense?
    And the CRD has not provided taxpayers with carefully considered information about the benefits and costs of a higher level of treatment. Would that higher level cost each household an additional $200 a year? $500 a year? $1000 a year? The community has been asking the CRD to provide that information to taxpayers before proceeding any further. So far the CRD has not been listening.
    The CRD could hold a referendum in which the public can express support for the current plan or support for a closer look at alternatives.There is time to do this. The Province has signalled the CRD that it will wait for it to resolve these issues with the community. It’s never too late to start consulting with taxpayers.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

    Rob Wipond
    May 2013
    The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner and the Registrar of Lobbyists are hot on their association’s trail. But a former BC police chief and solicitor general doubts they’ll ever be caught.
     
    THERE’S ONE THING THE POLICE TELL YOU never to do when they want to question you, right? Run. Running makes you look even more suspicious. So why do British Columbia’s chiefs of police keep running from me? Fortunately, I’ve gained some high-profile help in this now year-long chase.
    I first began looking last summer into the activities of the BC Association of Chiefs of Police (BCACP), which includes all chiefs in the province plus RCMP and provincial government representatives, and the smaller sub-organization, the BC Association of Municipal Chiefs of Police (BCAMCP). It’s a complicated story but, basically, it seemed impossible to obtain virtually any information about these organizations, even though they play prominent roles in BC law enforcement (see “Are BC Police Chiefs Evading the Law?” October 2012). They’ve publicly advocated and helped craft legislation around issues as diverse as drug laws, expanding police powers, and mass surveillance programs, but my attempts to better understand these associations’ activities became like a game of mental whack-a-mole: wherever I reached, all document records disappeared into a conceptual vortex. 
    Victoria Police Chief Jamie Graham, president of the BCAMCP and senior executive with the BCACP, didn’t speak with me. West Vancouver Police Chief Peter Lepine, then president of the BCACP, was friendly and professional, but not particularly forthcoming on key issues. The business of the associations was seemingly being performed by police staff on the public dime and time, but when I submitted FOI requests, both associations claimed they were not subject to BC’s freedom of information legislation covering public bodies because the associations were actually just “private” groups. 
    When I submitted FOI requests directly to Victoria, Saanich, Central Saanich and West Vancouver municipal police departments, all four departments stated their BCACP and BCAMCP records were not theirs to release because the records were actually the legal property of the associations. Yet, when I went looking for incorporation records, I discovered neither of these associations legally existed. And I also found no records of the associations’ existence or activities in BC’s Lobbyist Registry, even though our police chiefs were certainly doing more political lobbying than many other similar, appropriately-registered and tracked lobby groups like the professional associations of Massage Therapists, Aboriginal Friendship Centres, or Guide Outfitters. 
    On and on the chase went—I, of course, becoming ever more suspicious. 
    So I submitted complaints to both the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) and the Registrar of Lobbyists. (The Commissioner is also officially the Registrar, but the two offices operate separately.) As I awaited replies, I gathered more dark hints that much of the governance of policing and development of law enforcement legislation in BC might be running through these associations, with the deliberate intent of hiding it all from public transparency and accountability. 
    One knowledgeable person who was willing to talk on the record was former West Vancouver Police Chief and former BC Solicitor General Kash Heed. “I can imagine what you’re going through,” said Heed, when I expressed my frustrations with trying to learn about the associations. “I can tell you right now, you’ll never get the information that you need.” 
    Heed, long a strong proponent for unified regional police forces in Metro Vancouver and the Capital Region, and for stronger transparency and accountability for the RCMP in BC, sat on both the BCACP and BCAMCP. Heed became convinced the associations were in large part tools to help protect police fiefdoms throughout BC from exactly those kinds of changes. “It’s the old boys culture in its strongest sense. Not much more to say if you understand that this old boys culture is part of the reason why we have such a balkanized police system here in British Columbia.” Heed added that, “There were times where I spoke out on various issues and [the BCACP] did not like that…They were very upset.” 
    And having sat on the other side of the table as solicitor general, Heed said he has no doubt that the BCACP is primarily a political lobby group. “That’s what it actually is. They lobby for specific changes.” Yet Heed confirmed that both self-described “private” associations’ meetings, activities, public relations, and lobbying are being performed by chiefs and police staff during regular working hours. “If it’s a private entity, that entity is being created and funded by the public taxpayer,” said Heed.
    It sounded like damning evidence to me; how would the OIPC and Lobbyist Registrar see it? 
    The OIPC found no Association of Chiefs of Police listed in Schedule 3 of the BC Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, and so were not empowered even to consider my complaint about the associations’ refusals to proffer records. This, even though Schedule 3 empowers us to submit FOIs to virtually every other professional association doing work of even tenuous public interest, from associations of Music Teachers and General Accountants to Land Surveyors. On the other hand, even if our elected representatives had wanted to include these police chief associations in Schedule 3, they couldn’t have—because neither association legally exists.
    The OIPC, however, did begin to investigate my requests for records from the four police departments. The police departments, though, maintained to the OIPC that all their BCACP and BCAMCP records were actually legally “in the custody” and control of these legally non-existent associations, and refused to turn any of the records over. As arguments went back and forth through the OIPC, the police departments eventually offered a compromise: they’d negotiate giving me some documents but they would never admit they were legally required to give them to me, so they could cut off the flow at any time. I didn’t like the sound of where that was heading. With no solution emerging, a full-scale OIPC legal inquiry was the only remaining option. The associations and police departments would bring their platoon of publicly-funded legal experts, and on the other side would be…well, honestly, just me. It seemed hopeless.
    But on October 30, Deputy Registrar of Lobbyists Mary Carlson sent me an email. “This is to acknowledge receipt of your complaint under the BC Lobbyists Registration Act (LRA) that the Association of Chiefs of Police may be engaging in activities that qualify as lobbying and have not registered as required by the LRA,” wrote Carlson. “In response to your complaint, we have commenced an investigation…” 
    This was exciting. My intent when complaining to the two offices simultaneously was to try to corner the associations. I reasoned that, if they were finally going to claim definitively under official investigation that the police chief associations were “private” organizations, then they would have to become registered and have their activities tracked as political lobbyists. This would also be tantamount to confessing that they’d been breaking the lobbyist laws and improperly funnelling taxpayer money into private political lobbying for years. On the other hand, if they were going to claim that they were simply public servants properly doing their normal public service as our police chiefs, then that would essentially be admitting that the public had the right to access their records. Cornered, the mole was going to have to choose one of those two holes…and then… 
    Bang.
    It worked. All of a sudden, on behalf of all four police departments, Victoria Police Department Information Manager Debra Taylor delivered a long list of all the records pertaining to the BCACP and BCAMCP that they had and promised to start processing them for me. I was elated. 
    Meanwhile, in November the BCACP applied to incorporate itself as an independent legal entity under the Society Act, like other above-board police chief associations across Canada. That didn’t clear the BCACP of any past improper use of public funds or unregistered lobbying they might have done, but at least they were now coming clean and going straight. This was all good. 
    Equally encouragingly, some of our chiefs actually started being more careful about distinguishing their private lobbying from their roles as impartial public servants. For example, though West Vancouver Chief Lepine and the BCACP have previously lobbied for tough “war-on-drugs” laws, the Vancouver Sun quoted Lepine in September declining even to comment on a BC citizens’ petition to decriminalize marijuana. “At the end of the day, from a policing perspective, we’re tasked with enforcing the laws as the laws are written,” Lepine said—entirely appropriately. 
    How much more could I have asked for?
    But something started to niggle at me. As I looked more closely at the list of documents the police departments were preparing to give me, I noticed there were almost no records from before 2008, yet these associations had existed for at least 30 years. Surely there were older records, an association library or archive, perhaps in hard copies in some file boxes? Neither association had an office, so those files presumably would have resided at the police station of some association official. For that very reason, I’d deliberately targeted my FOI requests to the police departments that were home to the associations’ current top officials. So where were those records? Could it be that, during the months of wrangling after I’d submitted my requests in July, someone had secretly absconded with the bulk of BCACP and BCAMCP records archives and moved them from those police stations? 
    I asked VicPD’s Taylor if that could have happened, and she wrote back that the four police departments “did not locate a main ‘archive’ or ‘library’ of documents for the BCAMCP or the BCACP.” Of course, that was merely a confirmation that the archive was at present gone; it did not answer my question about whether the older files had been there when I’d originally submitted my request. 
    I submitted the same question again directly to Chief Lepine and West Vancouver police information officer Corporal T. Nelson. Nelson wrote back that West Vancouver PD did not have “custody” or control of such an archive. But of course, back in the beginning of this whack-a-mole game, Nelson had also stated their police department did not officially have the custody or control of any BCACP or BCAMCP records at all. So were they simply once again creatively interpreting the meaning of these legal terms? 
    That dang mole. I felt like giving up. Nevertheless, I persisted.
    For his part, I get the impression Kash Heed doesn’t share the intensity of my worry about what these associations are up to—though Heed admits he avoided attending their meetings as much as possible. He does believe BCACP lobbying helps preserve a “chaotic“ system of police governance and accountability in BC. Heed singles out the RCMP, whose voting reps seemingly dominate the BCACP according to its now-public constitution, for wanting to keep things that way. “I think that’s intentional,” says Heed. “I don’t think [the RCMP] want the people out there really to know what they’re all about and what they do and how they do it… They’ve been doing it for so many years and they’ve managed to get away with it, and they continue to do it.”
    It’s certainly clear I’m not the only one asking questions and still coming up confused. There are Hansard records of our elected politicians expressing bafflement as to whom is being represented when a police department employee makes an official submission proposing changes to BC’s freedom of information laws, apparently on behalf of the BCAMCP, yet on police department letterhead. Last fall, Geoffrey Cowper’s report to the province on reforming BC’s criminal justice system recommended the BCACP direct a provincial crime reduction strategy—while Cowper showed no recognition that the BCACP is just a private lobby group. 
    Looking back, how many of us are sure if we were hearing the opinions of our public servants or of private, professional political lobbyists when our police chiefs spoke out in defence of roadside prohibition legislation, tasers, licence plate surveillance, and giving police the powers of crown prosecutors? Tellingly, even this April, Office of the Police Complaints Commissioner adjudicator Ben Casson criticized VicPD Chief Jamie Graham and his Deputy Chief John Ducker for making inflammatory public comments about a hearing concerning two VicPD officers. Casson then appealed to the BCACP. “BC Chiefs would think the same way, hopefully, [and] issue some guidance to their chiefs...” So even an ex-judge and policing expert like Casson apparently didn’t realize he was in effect asking a murky, untransparent, unaccountable private group to rein in seemingly unaccountable police brass. 
    Heed suggests it’s municipal police boards that should be more vigilant about such issues, especially with respect to their police chiefs and police staff spending on-duty, publicly-funded time working for these private associations. “Some of the problems are, Rob, that the police boards are not doing anything about it,” says Heed. “Some of the members of the boards, I think, are confused about what their roles are and how much power they have over their chiefs of police.”
    Hopefully our police boards, along with the rest of us, will soon gain a slightly clearer picture of what these private associations have been doing—at least since 2008. And the Lobbyist Registrar will almost certainly issue a public report, if not penalties; their investigation has stretched into months. As for that fabled archive, West Vancouver PD’s Nelson finally wrote back again: “I asked some specific questions and can advise there is a collection of records pertaining to the BC Association of Chiefs of Police which contain records made prior to 2008.” That archive, it turns out, is sitting at the RCMP’s Surrey headquarters—hence under federal jurisdiction and far out of reach of our province’s much stricter enforcement of information access laws. Besides, contends RCMP Inspector and new BCACP President Brad Haugli to me in an email, “the BCACP archives itself is not within the custody or control of the RCMP.”
    Anyone got a bigger hammer? 
    Rob Wipond spent two years submitting information requests which ultimately helped prompt the Privacy Commissioner to investigate and declare much of BC polices’ licence plate surveillance program illegal.

    David Broadland
    April 2013
    Did Victoria City Manager Gail Stephens misrepresent the financial state of the Johnson Street Bridge project before the 2011 civic election?
     
    LAST MONTH I wrote here about the circumstances surrounding the City of Victoria’s efforts last year to bar three people (freelance journalist Ross Crockford, Focus editor Leslie Campbell, and myself) from obtaining certain records the City apparently wished to keep secret. The City had applied under a rarely-used provision of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act to effectively block access to those records. The City abandoned that process once the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner unexpectedly called an expedited hearing of the City’s Section 43 application. I ended last month’s story by telling you that a portion of the records being sought had finally been released to Ross Crockford—10 months after he first requested them—through provisions of FIPPA. The information contained in that release—which has been dubbed “the smoking gun”—raises serious questions about the veracity of a public statement made by the City’s top executive just before the 2011 civic election. The following series of events have been reconstructed from that release, other FOI releases, and public records.
     
    AT A MEETING of Victoria City Council on October 6, 2011, City Manager Gail Stephens introduced an update on the then two-year-old Johnson Street Bridge Replacement Project by noting, “interest in the bridge remains very high.” She went on to tell councillors, media and members of the public, “A lot of work is being done to prepare for the construction, but it’s all behind-the-scenes kinds of work, and not clearly visible to the public. However this preparatory work is critical to the successful delivering of the project, that I’m pleased to note continues to be within the budget of $77 million and the March 2016 timeline.”
    Near the end of her short address, Stephens announced the project had received confirmation of an $8 million grant from the CRD which, she said, “can be applied to reduce the amount of money we have to borrow” to complete the project.
    That the project was on budget and on schedule and was so well-managed that the City wouldn’t need to borrow as deeply as previously thought must have sounded like beautiful music to the ears of Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin. After all, he would soon be pounding the pavement and knocking on doors in search of votes so he could retain his $100,000-a-year job in the upcoming civic election, just 45 days away. Stephens’ public reassurances would surely help him in that effort. Indeed, two days after the meeting, Fortin wrote on his Facebook page: “The good news Victoria City Council received this Thursday is that the amount we need to borrow for bridge construction has dropped 8 million due to a federal gas tax grant administered by the CRD.”
    But as buoying as this news was for Fortin and his pro-replacement councillors, it came with a potentially serious problem attached for Stephens, who is a certified general accountant. As such she was required, as stated in her professional association’s Code of Ethical Principles, to “not be associated with information which the Member knows, or should know, to be false or misleading, whether by statement or omission.” And her “within the budget of $77 million” statement, along with her inference that the City would be able “to reduce the amount of money we have to borrow” was directly at odds with information and recommendations given to Stephens by the City’s finance department months before.
     
    THE JOHNSON STREET BRIDGE Replacement Project Steering Committee, hereafter referred to as the Steering Committee, was established by the project’s Charter in January 2011. To borrow from the Charter’s bureaucratese, the Steering Committee occupies the position in the accountability structure between City council and the City engineer running the project. That is to say, the Steering Committee controls what information is passed on to councillors. And as Stephens had been at the helm of that committee since its inception, she was the gatekeeper that separated councillors from the rest of City staff working on the project back in 2011. So when the City’s Director of Finance Brenda Warner first approached the Steering Committee in the spring of 2011 with concerns about the project’s budget, Stephens was guarding the pass.
    Warner had identified millions of dollars in project-related costs that were not included in the $77-million project budget approved by City councillors before the referendum in 2010. But that was the only approved budget that she could assign those costs to, and they were steadily eating up the project’s contingency fund.
    Warner had initially been assured councillors would be informed of these costs at a council meeting scheduled for July 2011. But after attending a Steering Committee meeting on June 24, 2011, where she provided an account of these costs, she was told by Stephens that councillors would not, in fact, be informed until October, when new drawings and a project cost update were to be completed by the City’s consultant, MMM Group, a private engineering and project management company. An hour after that June 24 meeting, Warner was told by the City’s JSB Project Director Mike Lai that “we will need to strategize with the Steering Committee on the timing of that update.”
    Why the secrecy and strategizing? Why not just tell councillors the truth about the project and get their input and direction? Well, that would have dumped the millions in unaccounted costs into public view just before an election, and the Steering Committee had previously identified a “change of council” in an election as a definite risk facing the project. Moreover, both Lai and Stephens were aware of other serious problems: the overall cost had been badly underestimated in 2010 and now the project team was furiously reworking the design to contain costs. But keeping a lid on costs also meant reductions in the functionality, expected life, amenities and architectural qualities of the bridge, and that could result in a legal challenge to the referendum that approved borrowing for the project. As well, the lifting mechanism had undergone a radical design change, necessitating additional construction cost increases. Revealing all this at the wrong time—especially before an election—might force a public reconsideration of the entire project.
    A few days after that June 24 meeting, Warner, perhaps sensing the project had gone beyond the point where council approval ought to be sought, asked Acting Assistant Director of Finance Troy Restell to put together a detailed account of the unbudgeted costs. On August 12, 2011, Restell, a certified management accountant who had been with the City since 2006, sent a memo to Lai that was circulated to Stephens. Restell’s memo stated, in part, “$5.2 million of construction/ design and City costs have been identified that are in addition to the original $77 million budget…The total revised estimate for the Johnson Street Bridge project is $82.2 million.” Restell went on to say, “It is recommended that council be advised, based on the attached analysis, of items not included in the budget that will be required to complete the project.”
     
    Smoking gun: Troy Restell's August 12, 2011 memo

     
    Two months later, Stephens made her “continues to be within the budget of $77 million” statement. Was there something that happened in between to reduce costs? No. Key City staff had to be aware that costs were on the rise. Look at what happened two days after Victoria electors had cast their votes. On November 21, MMM Group, the company providing the City with project management and engineering for the new bridge, delivered to the City a document called the Project Definition Report that showed construction costs had climbed $5.85 million above and beyond the costs outlined in the Restell memo, bringing the total cost estimate to over $88 million. Originally, this report and budget update had been planned for release before the election. Its delivery two days after the election was likely no coincidence.
    And the cost escalations weren’t over. On January 6, 2012, Assistant Director of Finance Susanne Thompson estimated costs at $91.25 million; she noted that the project had used up all but $660,000 of its $8.9 million contingency; and she recommended council be informed. By mid-January the cost was set at $92.8 million. So at the time when Stephens said the project “continues to be within the budget of $77 million,” she should have been aware that costs on various fronts were escalating rapidly.
    None of the cost escalations were revealed to councillors or the public until March 2012.
    Focus asked Stephens for an explanation of why the warnings and recommendations of Warner and Restell, made months before her October 6 statement, were apparently not factored into her announcement that the project “continues to be within the budget of $77 million.” Here is Stephens’ full response:
    “Based on the preliminary information I  had received as of October 2011, I believed the project was within the approved budget. In preparation for a budget update for council, I instructed staff to do a full review of the costs and funding related to the project, and at the same time the project team was finalizing the 30 percent design drawings necessary for the Project Definition Report [delivered November 21, 2011]. Upon completion of further engineering and financial analysis, I was confident in the information and a council meeting was scheduled for early March [2012]. The complete information was presented to all of council at the same time. Information is brought to council when it is complete and the proper due diligence has been conducted.”
    I asked Stephens, again, if the “preliminary information” on which she based her “within budget” public statement had included Warner’s and Restell’s information. She replied, “The preliminary information I received was incomplete and was related to pre-construction costs. In addition, the Project Definition Report and value engineering had not been completed, which significantly informs budget analysis. Complete and tested budget information was presented to council when the necessary due diligence had been completed.”
    What Stephens seems to be saying is that she could not have declared the project over-budget at that October 6 meeting until a number of things had happened, roughly summarized by her expression “due diligence.” But shouldn’t that same logic have applied to a declaration that the project “continues to be within the budget of $77 million”?
    Stephens’ decision to characterize the financial state of the project as rosy had real consequences. Most obviously, voters were given an inaccurate picture of a controversial project just as they were being asked to make decisions about how to cast their ballots in an election. I recently asked Victoria Councillor Lisa Helps, a first-time candidate in that election, what she had experienced during her campaign in terms of the bridge. Was it an issue? Helps said, “When I was door knocking during the 2011 election campaign, the single issue that I heard most about was the bridge. I’m not saying that everyone on every door step mentioned it. But uninvited and unprovoked, people wanted to comment on the bridge—on the public engagement strategy around it, on the cost, on the necessity of one big infrastructure project when there were so many other important things the City could spend their money on. I’m not sure how much the bridge actually swayed people on voting day, but there was certainly a lot of discussion—and more critique than praise—in the months leading up to it.”
    I asked Stephens if she had withheld the information Warner and Restell had provided her in order that the escalating cost of the bridge project did not become an issue during the 2011 civic election. She responded, “Civic elections do not factor into the timing of staff reports to council.” 
    Stephens did not respond to questions about whether Mayor Fortin had been informed of the information provided to her by Warner and Restell, or whether Fortin had advised Stephens to make public Warner’s and Restell’s information on unbudgeted costs. Fortin did not respond to emailed questions.
     
    WAS STEPHENS SIMPLY exercising due diligence when she claimed the project was on budget? Or did she know costs were escalating and misled voters before an election? And why does it matter?
    I asked Colin Macleod this last question. Macleod is a UVic associate professor in law and philosophy whose research focuses on issues in contemporary moral, political and legal theory, including democratic ethics. He is also the associate editor of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.
    Macleod explained that civil servants play a crucial role in facilitating the proper functioning of democratic governance by providing accurate information: “Such information is relevant to democratic deliberation amongst citizens and politicians about the wisdom of different policies and projects…If civil servants distort or withhold relevant information bearing on matters of public interest, they frustrate deliberation by the public. The confidence that citizens should have in civil service and the government is threatened by deception or misrepresentation. In the absence of some genuine emergency that somehow posed a significant threat to the immediate health or safety of the community, it is hard to imagine a case in which a municipal civil servant would be justified in knowingly misleading the public.”
    Ross Crockford has carefully scrutinized the bridge project for the past three years as a director of the watchdog group johnsonstreetbridge.org. He was told about the “smoking gun” by a concerned City Hall insider.
    I asked Crockford what action he thought was needed so that the theoretical accountability that’s at the heart of access to information laws could be turned into actual accountability—a very tricky process. “Normally, a city manager would have to answer to mayor and council,” Crockford said. “In this case, though, they could be in a perceived conflict of interest: the members of council running for re-election in 2011 may have benefitted from voters getting a false impression that the project was ‘within the budget of $77 million.’ So I think the mayor and council need to appoint an independent inquiry. I believe one is needed here if we’re ever going to find out what’s really going on at City Hall.”
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

    David Broadland
    March 2013
    Information obtained through three FOIs raises serious questions about how the City of Victoria's FOI office is being run. That office's attempt to block Focus' access to City of Victoria records last fall was misrepresented to City councillors, and the City prepared no evidence for the hearing called by BC's Information and Privacy Commissioner.
     
    IT'S A SUNDAY MORNING, around 10 o’clock. I’m sitting at a table, scissors in hand. CBC’s The Sunday Edition is on the radio. There’s a small pile of papers in front of me, the results of an FOI request to the City of Victoria. They contain information that is out of chronological order, and I’m trying to sort out who did what and when they did it. Hence the scissors. I’m cutting out individual emails and arranging them on the table so I can follow conversations among City officials about why they applied to BC Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham for a Section 43 authorization to ignore FOI requests from Focus.
    On the radio Michael Enright is interviewing Canada’s Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault. She’s telling him, “The reason we have access to information laws is so that citizens can hold their government accountable and they can meaningfully participate in democracy by having information about the policies and the programs that governments put forward.”
    Snnnnip.
    I’m dividing the individual emails and other documents into two separate themes: One group is related to the question of whether City officials fully informed the mayor and councillors about what they were doing; the issue of withholding vital information from citizens’ elected representatives arises again and again at Victoria City Hall. Was it at play in this story? 
    The other group of emails shows the extent to which City officials were having difficulty responding to FOI requests just before the Section 43 application. The official justification for the application was that a small group of people, which included me, had overused the City’s FOI resources. Was this true?
    Snnnnnip.
    Back on the radio, Enright says to Legault: “Information equals power, and governments don’t want to share that power, do they?” Legault responds, “Information is power, but access delayed is access denied. When information about sensitive files is not disclosed in a timely fashion, it prevents Canadians from holding their governments to account in the way they respond to crises, in the way they spend money in responding to crises.”
    While I snip, Enright and Legault talk about all the ways in which the federal government avoids meeting its legal obligations to provide access to its records: long delays, excessive fees, redactions based on unproven exemptions, claims that no records exist—all of which I have experienced at the hands of City Hall. 
    Legault tells Enright that Canada has lately been ranked number 55 of 93 countries in terms of its performance on access to information. “Canadians should be angry,” she tells him. “The law is there. It’s really a fundamental democratic right that we have. In other countries, access to information is considered a fundamental human right linked to freedom of expression. I think Canadians should not be complacent about the fact that our government is not putting [in] enough resources and it’s not managing the access to information systems such that it delivers on its obligations to Canadians.”
    Snnnnnnnip.
    After separating the emails into the themes I want to examine, I arrange them in chronological order. This is the slow, tedious work that can’t be avoided if our individual right to access government records is actually going to materialize into the lofty goal set out by access laws. Or, as Legault put it: “so that citizens can hold their government accountable...” 
     
    GOVERNMENTS CAN ROB CITIZENS of their ability to meaningfully participate in democracy in more than one way. It happens, for instance, when politicians neglect to tell us something important during an election and then later surprise us with some bad news. Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government did that in the 2009 provincial election with the HST. Before the election the Liberals secretly discussed implementing it. After the election they brought it in.
    This story is about City of Victoria bureaucrats who similarly robbed citizens of their ability to meaningfully participate in democracy. They did this at three levels.
    First, they withheld information—“the smoking gun”—about the true cost of replacing the Johnson Street Bridge before the 2011 civic election. They knew as early as June 2011 that the true cost of the project would be much higher than estimated, and they kept that information to themselves until after the election. In doing so they prevented citizens from participating meaningfully in democracy.
    Secondly, when media tried to access the records that would allow that issue to be fully explored, the same bureaucrats invoked a section of a law that was created to ensure accountability to instead prevent accountability. They once again robbed citizens of their ability to participate meaningfully in democracy.
    Thirdly, the bureaucrats misinformed elected representatives about what they were doing, again robbing citizens of their ability to meaningfully participate in democracy.
    Let’s start with the bureaucrats misinforming councillors about their Section 43 application and then circle back to the smoking gun.
     
    ON AUGUST 7, 2012, City of Victoria Corporate Administrator Robert Woodland sent out two communications related to the topic at hand. First he sent a letter to BC Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham. That was followed by a memo to the mayor and City councillors. He copied City Solicitor Tom Zworski on both.
    In the memo to councillors, Woodland noted, “I have limited resources available to respond to these applicants’ record requests and still provide service to other record applicants.” He went on to tell them, “I am asking the Commissioner to limit the number of requests from the applicants to one request at a time.” To the mayor and councillors that no doubt sounded perfectly reasonable.
    But in his three-page letter to Denham, Woodland requested authorization under Section 43 of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act “to disregard requests from David Broadland, Leslie Campbell, Ross Crockford and any persons acting on their behalf (collectively the ‘Applicants’).” Woodland detailed for Denham exactly what he was asking for: “[T]he City seeks an order authorizing it to disregard requests from the Applicants or any of them received while an earlier request from any of the Applicants remains active or an appeal in relation to any such request is pending. With respect to existing requests, the City seeks authority to process them one at the time, beginning with the oldest outstanding request, and disregard the remaining requests until that request and any appeal related to it are concluded.”
    This goes far beyond what he suggested in his memo to council. He didn’t mention that I had just filed an appeal with OIPC asking them to order the City to produce a record that I had requested 16 months earlier. As well, Ross Crockford had earlier filed an appeal because the City had assessed a very high fee for records he sought on behalf of johnsonstreetbridge.org.
    By including the length of time an appeal could take in his proposal to Denham, if it had been accepted, first Crockford’s appeal would work its way through OIPC, and, once that had been settled—and it’s usually a five to six month wait before an appeal file is opened by OIPC—then my appeal would begin its journey, likely another five to six month wait. Then the oldest outstanding request that either Crockford or I had made would begin its journey through the City’s FOI office, followed by any appeal process, and so forth. Woodland’s proposal would have effectively killed both Crockford’s and my individual right to timely access of City records. This is an important point. As Suzanne Legault put it, “access delayed is access denied.”
    By not providing this information to councillors, Woodland disarmed them of their ability to make an accurate judgment about his action. The record of what happened after the City wrote to Denham makes this clear.
    On learning of the Section 43 application, I immediately wrote a letter to the mayor and councillors asking them to intervene. My letter, it turns out (learned via FOI), prompted an email discussion among councillors Madoff, Helps, Mayor Dean Fortin and City Manager Gail Stephens. At one point in the conversation Helps wrote to Fortin and Stephens: “I worry that if we follow through with this, Focus will make a giant national brouhaha about how closed the City of Victoria is. Is there a way to stand down and process FOI requests from Focus just as we would from anyone else?” Stephens responded to Helps: “Will send a more detailed response tomorrow. But in the short term, we are not denying Focus FOI requests, but asking that they limit those requests to one at a time...” Again, on the surface, a not unreasonable limit—and Helps’ follow-up email a couple of days later reflects this: “Has it been made clear to them that the City is not denying their FOI requests, but rather asking that these requests be made one at a time?”
    Helps, who from the record seems to have been the councillor most actively seeking a resolution that respected media’s right to access information, writes to Fortin and Stephens a few days later summing up the situation: “There is much public outcry, there has never been a Section 43 request filed against a media outlet in the history of the Act, and I think it does more harm to the City’s reputation than the good that will come of it. Not to mention the expense of the adjudication [hearing] process. Dean [Fortin] said to me yesterday during our monthly meeting that he thinks Mr Woodland maybe made a mistake on this one.”
    I recently asked councillor Helps what she thought Woodland had meant in that memo by “one request at a time.” Her response indicated she assumed “that unless there were extenuating circumstances...that the City could conform to the requirements of the Act.” That would imply requests were responded to in the 30 working days stipulated by the Act.
    That’s a long, long way off from what Woodland had proposed to Commissioner Denham—something that could have resulted in FOIs taking years to fulfill.
    By not providing councillors with full disclosure about the true impact of his action on the media’s right to participate, he took away councillors ability to meaningfully participate in democracy. Woodland did not reply to questions submitted to him by email for this article.
    But what about the claim of overuse in Woodland’s Section 43 application? Was it valid? He told Commissioner Denham, “The Applicants’ requests, due to their repetitious and systemic [sic] nature, have placed an unreasonable burden on the City’s limited access and privacy resources and on the operation of the JSB Project.”
    There are two ways to judge the validity of Woodland’s claim that Focus and Crockford were overeating at the City’s information table. First, you could look at what the City did once OIPC called a hearing to allow Woodland and Zworski to present documentary evidence of our over-indulgence. The City withdrew its Section 43 application the day before it was required to submit proof to the OIPC hearing. And a subsequent FOIseeking the written submission Zworski prepared to support Woodland’s application showed he had prepared no submission and assembled no evidence. Sheryl Masters, the City’s FOI coordinator, told Focus, “It is my understanding that no submission was prepared and that there is no draft submission nor affidavits or draft affidavits in support of any submission.”
    I asked Zworski by email why he hadn’t prepared a submission to support Woodland’s Section 43 application. He responded, “I am not at liberty to discuss the nature or content of legal advice that I may or may not have provided to either City council or City staff and, therefore, will not be responding to your questions.”
    The other basis on which to judge the validity of Woodland’s claim of overuse is the City’s record of that overuse, which I sought by FOI.
    Based on the record provided, either the City is not good at keeping records, or it was vastly overstating its case. In the seven months leading up to Woodland’s letter to Denham, the only time the City’s FOI office created a record showing how many bridge-project-related FOIs were active was on May 18, 2012. That record shows that with less than three months to go before Woodland wrote to Denham, Focus had two active (highlighted by Focus in yellow in that record) bridge-related requests. Ouch. Two.
    Crockford had made a single request on May 3, 2012 that the City then broke into five parts and said were five requests (highlighted by Focus in blue in that record). Records Crockford has shown Focus indicate he then engaged in a lengthy process of negotiation with the City over the assessed fee, and that included filing an appeal to OIPC, which I mentioned earlier. The important thing to know about Crockford’s requests is that at the time Woodland wrote Denham, the City had not been required to do any more than a preliminary assessment of what his requests involved.
    Woodland’s Section 43 application simply seems unsupportable. It’s one thing to assert that something is true, another altogether to prove it. The City has provided no proof.
    So what was the City’s Section 43 maneuver about?
    Both Crockford and I had been separately seeking what we were calling “the smoking gun.” This was a record that a whistle-blower inside City Hall had suggested we should try to locate. It would show City Manager Gail Stephens knew the cost of the bridge project was going to be millions of dollars over budget when she told councillors, media and the public in October 2011, just before a civic election, that the project “continues to be within the budget of $77 million.” Documents dated shortly after the election show the estimated cost had climbed to over $90 million. By March 2012 the cost had risen to $93 million, and that was for a bridge that had been significantly reduced in size and quality. 
    In July 2012, I wrote Woodland and told him I was looking for records that could show whether City engineers, the City manager or the mayor knew the cost of the bridge was higher than the council-approved $77 million budget before the civic election. Shortly thereafter, both Crockford and I were Section 43ed. By doing so, Woodland took away our timely access to that record, preventing us, as Suzanne Legault might put it, from participating meaningfully in democracy.
    But that only lasted as long as it took Woodland and Zworski to no-show at the OIPC hearing last fall. Since then, both Crockford and I have continued to file FOIs and participate in democracy. And, just as this edition of Focus was going to press, the City finally coughed up a response to the FOI he had filed in May 2012. As expected, it contained the “smoking gun,” or, more accurately, several smoking guns. These included a memo written by acting Assistant Director of Finance Troy Restell in August 2011. His memo pointed out many costs that had already been incurred, and many other costs that were completely predictable and should have been included in the $77 million cost estimate but weren’t, that would push the project budget millons of dollars higher. Senior City managers—and the mayor—knew of Restell’s memo but kept it to themselves, thereby preventing citizens from participating meaningfully in democracy during the 2011 civic election.
    Watch here next month for part two of this story: The smoking gun and accountability.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

    Alan Cassels
    March 2013
    Health researcher Alan Cassels explores the context—and theories—surrounding the unprecedented and unexplained destruction of independent drug evaluation in BC.
     
    WHEN I MET ROBERT BROWN FOR COFFEE a couple of years ago he had something to show me. It was a sample of a new drug called Pradax (dabigatran) that his doctor had given him. It was the first in a new class of drugs prescribed for people with atrial fibrillation (AF), a relatively common condition that can increase one’s risk of having a stroke. The standard script for AF is warfarin, a widely used blood-thinning drug. I didn’t want to worry him but in the course of our coffee I asked if he was aware of the drug safety controversies surrounding Pradax. It was an innocuous question but when the 64-year-old retired professor of statistics and actuarial science called me a few weeks later, he was outraged. 
    He told me: “The drug was marketed as cutting a person’s risk of stroke in half,” and, he added, “If my risk of having a stroke to start with is about one percent, the daily dabigatran would reduce it to 0.5 percent.” Then he wondered: If the benefits are that small, how high are the rates for potential harm? He told me he consulted Dr Google and found what I knew was out there: reports of “serious bleeding events” as a result of taking the drug. That, too, can happen with warfarin. The difference is, unlike warfarin, there is no antidote to stop the bleeding with dabigatran. 
    Dabigatran is just one of the drugs that was being evaluated when a wave of firings at the BC Ministry of Health last spring shut down a variety of drug safety investigations that involved BC citizens.
    I was thinking of Robert when I called the BC Ministry of Health last month to ask a few questions about certain drugs covered under our public drug program. I calculated that the $1.2 billion spent annually on drugs under BC PharmaCare translates to about 75 cents a day—or $274 per year—from every single person in BC (4.4 million people). This pays for pharmaceuticals for BC citizens who are eligible for drug coverage.
    I have had a long-time interest in public and private drug plans, and have studied how evidence-based medicine is applied in the real world. Having written books about the pharmaceutical industry, I have more than a passing interest in drug safety and so I had a lot of questions to ask the Ministry. I didn’t want to burden the staff there, so I decided to keep things simple. I pared my list of questions down to three, all related to drugs whose reviews were affected by the events of last spring: 
    On May 23, 2012, the anti-coagulant drug dabigatran (Pradax) became covered by BC PharmaCare. Since that date, how many BC citizens taking this drug have bled to death?
    On September 30, 2011, BC PharmaCare started paying for drugs to help people stop smoking. Since that date, how many BC citizens taking varenicline (Champix) have committed suicide or had a cardiovascular event (heart attack or stroke)? 
    Since February 23, 2011, when a national drug safety study was launched, how many women in British Columbia taking the acne drug isotretinoin (Accutane) delivered a baby with birth defects?
     
    Easy questions, right? 
    The ministry spokesperson replied promptly when I phoned with these questions—by giving me some options for finding their answers. I could either search Health Canada’s Vigilance Adverse Reaction Online Database (a voluntary reporting system capturing less than 10 percent of adverse events); I could ask the drug companies who make the drugs for the data (uh, yeah); I could look at published research (there is none on my questions, I’ve looked); or I could submit a request to PopData BC. This group coordinates requests for PharmaNet data adjudicated by the Data Stewardship Committee at the Ministry of Health. That committee’s members include people with financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. I wasn’t interested in starting my own research project; I just wanted answers to my questions. 
    “Incredible,” said Janet Currie who took a look at the Ministry’s non-answers to me. Janet is a local consultant, an expert in adverse drug reactions and one of the contributors to www.psychmedaware.org, a website that tries to educate people about the dangers of psychiatric drugs. She said: “What they are saying is that they have no idea about the risks of these drugs. They’re telling you to just go out and find out yourself from data you know is lousy or you wouldn’t have access to. And even I know that these drugs have a profile of being dangerous.”
    The reason the non-answers worry me is because it likely means these three drugs, and many more, which could cause death and birth defects, are essentially unmonitored in BC.
    I know enough about drug evaluation in BC to know the problem is not one of technological capacity. British Columbia is one of the few provinces in the country that has a computerized database, BC PharmaNet, which tracks all of your prescriptions, silently and securely. With our unique personal health numbers, which we carry on our journey through the health care system, the pharmacy, the doctor’s office, and the hospital, finding links between drug A or drug B and your risk of dying should be straightforward. 
    But you need people with specialized skills—in epidemiology, clinical medicine, database analysis and the ability to separate truth from artifact in the data. You also need another key component: people with the ability and the integrity to call a spade a spade. You need people who can do independent evaluations who are allowed to say, without interference from drug makers or governments, that deaths are due to, or conversely not due to, drug A or B. But with the fired researchers and the de-funding of the Therapeutics Initiative, we don’t have those people working on our behalf anymore.  
    Every second of every day, someone in BC, like Robert Brown, is swallowing a drug like dabigatran, isotretinoin or varenicline, yet the BC Ministry of Health can’t tell us the degree to which the drug may be killing some of them. 
    These three drugs have relatively small markets. They are the canaries in the coal mine, so to speak. If the Ministry can’t tell us who is dying from these drugs, then it is even more worrisome to think of the much more commonplace drugs like statins (known to cause diabetes, muscle breakdown and kidney failure) or heartburn drugs (likely causing C-difficile, colitis, pneumonia and heart attacks) which are also almost completely unmonitored.
     
    Creating “the right environment”
    On June 19, 2012, the BC Minister of Health was a long way from Victoria. Mike de Jong was in Boston at the BIO International Convention, a massive conference that bills itself as “The Event for Global Biotechnology.” He was in fine company, rubbing shoulders with many of the drug makers and deal takers among the world’s biotechnology elite. Past speakers at the BIO International include George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Sir Elton John, among others. 
    Among the 16,505-strong attendance list of medical academics, drug company executives and government officials from 65 countries, Mr de Jong did not have a passive role. He was there with an announcement to make, armed with a very expensive bit of bait.
    In Boston he told the crowd that his government was putting up $39 million in new money towards pharmaceutical research, bragging that “British Columbia is recognized as a leader in life sciences research in part because of our government’s support.” Twenty-nine million of that money was going to the newly-established Centre for Drug Research and Development (CDRD) which recently moved into a brand-spanking-new 35,000-square-foot glittering glass office building at UBC, known as the Pharmaceutical Sciences Building. The extra $29 million is on top of a previous investment of $25 million in the Centre. Ten million in new money went to Genome BC.
    The Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences has deserved a new building for a long time and this certainly reflects the world’s growing demand for pharmacists and UBC’s willingness to produce them. But the folks at CDRD are there not just to tap into UBC’s brain trust; they intend to turn molecules into money. Their website says: “Our mandate is to de-risk discoveries stemming from publicly-funded health research and transform them into viable investment opportunities for the private sector.” 
    While funding to support start-ups and smaller companies doing essential bench research is laudable, the downstream purpose of this money is to attract the big pharma companies like GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Schering-Plough, all fine upstanding corporate citizens. Or maybe not. According to a recent analysis by the consumer group US Public Citizen, “the drug industry has now become the biggest defrauder of the [US] federal government.” In the last 20 years these four companies alone have been collectively fined $10.5 billion for criminal wrongdoing in the US, including withholding safety data and promoting drugs for use beyond their licensed conditions. 
    No one can argue about the importance of bringing new drugs to market. Mike de Jong told the Globe and Mail what was really happening: “We decided some time ago that if we were smart and provided the right environment, that eventually national and international agencies would begin to take advantage.” 
    “The right environment.” Mark those words. 
    The obvious reason for excitement around the new money was best described by Karimah Es Sabar, the president of the Centre for Drug Research and Development, who effused that the investment will translate “academic health research into viable investment opportunities for the private sector, and ultimately into new therapies for patients.” 
    At the same time as de Jong was in Boston, back home in BC Dr Margaret MacDiarmid, the then-Minister of Labour, Citizens’ Services and Open Government, added a few words at a sister event held at the CDRD: “Investments in research and development are necessary to keep on the cutting-edge of life sciences here in British Columbia. The funding we are announcing today will ensure that these two organizations continue to innovate and add value to health care in the province.”
    “Innovate and add value.” Remember those words. 
    After all, who could be against your tax dollars innovating and adding value, especially in the “right” environment?
    As the champagne was flowing in Boston and Vancouver over the promise of high-paying research jobs and lifesaving drugs emerging from innovative BC labs, another innovation was underway which would change the complexion of BC’s drug evaluation world. Possibly forever. 
     
    Seven fired, two lawsuits, one dead
    A year ago this month, March 28, 2012, to be exact, BC’s Office of the Auditor General told the BC Ministry of Health about a complaint someone made about the way contracts were being awarded and how research was being conducted within the Ministry’s Pharmaceutical Services Division (PSD).
    PSD is in charge of paying for medications for BC citizens, medications that cost about $100 million per month (the equivalent of one Johnson Street bridge, every month). The drug budget is the fastest growing, and possibly the most controversial area of the ministry. There’s always been a bitter struggle between governments who want to appropriately contain costs and ensure safety, and drug companies whose corporate mission is all about expanding sales through whatever legal means possible. 
    At the time, there was a small evaluation unit within PSD—a staff of half a dozen economists and data analysts plus one position shared by two academic researchers, for facilitating drug evaluations by outside researchers. These weren’t lightweight researchers: both had PhDs, one was a world-leading Harvard trained epidemiologist and the other a health economist. The unit’s job was to help design and sponsor evaluations to determine if drugs paid for by BC PharmaCare were effective and safe. In the course of this work the evaluations might show that some medications are ineffective or worse: they might sometimes kill or injure people. When poring through drug data to find dangers, you need sophisticated methods to see the difference between observed and expected deaths. It is this difference that indicates causation, which can allow you to say “this type of drug probably caused this type of death.” 
    The Ministry of Health started investigating the complaint in April 2012 by conducting staff interviews and reviewing contracts. As the summer started the net widened. People both within the Ministry and outside, including researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Therapeutic Initiative (TI) and the University of Victoria were drawn into the investigation. 
    Ministry letters were sent out by a then-brand-new Assistant Deputy Minister Barbara Walman who was new to the field of pharmaceuticals, and employees were brought in for questioning. No one could say what was going on; there were few details to share. As the chill started to filter through the Ministry, staff, employees and researchers were told an investigation was underway and they were warned to talk to no one. 
    What was going on? 
    The Ministry said the formal investigation was initiated to “examine financial controls, contracting, data management and employee/contractor relationships.” Then a handful of employees were sent letters saying they were suspended without pay, but not told the specific reasons why. Other researchers had their data access suspended. Contractors were fired and contracts cancelled.
    In June, while the BC Minister of Health was announcing nearly $40 million in drug research money in Boston, his staff back in Victoria were carrying out what some called a “Kafkaesque” series of interrogations. People were on trial, not knowing the charges, or who was doing the accusing. All drug safety evaluations carried out by the Therapeutics Initiative (TI) were halted. Funded by the provincial government, the TI has been providing an independent voice on pharmaceuticals since the mid 1990s and has gained an international reputation for its meticulous and thorough drug reviews. 
    Conspiracy theories started to take shape: Maybe the pharmaceutical industry’s hostility to drug cost-containment and evidence-based policies were dealing out their final blow before an election. Industry pressure, including a task force stacked with members almost all of whom had ties to the pharmaceutical industry, has repeatedly tried to shut down the Therapeutics Initiative. Now maybe this was the smokescreen to kill it once and for all. 
    Something was up. But what? 
    In early September, the day after her appointment as Minister of Health, Margaret MacDiarmid and her Deputy Minister Graham Whitmarsh called a press conference in the Legislature. They announced that four employees had already been fired and three more were suspended without pay. 
    Two others were fired later. The seventh in the unit has sued for constructive dismissal. One of the fired employees, a coop student, had three days left in his term. He wasn’t able to complete his PhD—an evaluation of smoking cessation drugs, like varenicline—because the government cut off his access to data. And he’ll never complete it. He’s dead. (His death is still under investigation by the coroner.) Some of the fired employees are working through their unions to address their grievances or have brought suits against the government.
    In news reports, vague and confusing references were made to privacy concerns, inappropriate conduct, and potential conflicts of interests. The minister was “deeply troubled” and let it be known that the cops had been called, saying: “The Ministry provided the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with the interim review of this investigation in August 2012.” The health minister stated: “We take all allegations of this nature very seriously. I have instructed the Ministry to continue to take whatever steps are necessary to respond to these matters thoroughly. We must ensure confidence is maintained in the integrity of the public service to execute its responsibilities in a manner that meets the high standards of conduct expected by the public.” 
    “Confidence…Integrity…High standards of conduct…” Mark those words. 
    As the months rolled by, no one could say what was happening. No one knew, and/or no one would talk. After all, there was an investigation underway and the RCMP were involved. If this was about data breaches you might understand the Ministry’s heavy-handed position. But there was absolutely no precedent for this. There have been other data breaches in the past and no one was fired. 
    Things must be serious. Very serious. 
    Dabigatran was one of the drugs the Therapeutics Initiative evaluators were assessing as part of a cross-Canada drug safety study, but because their data access was cut off, any final national analysis of the drug will not include the experience of BC patients. This is the drug that the retired actuary, Robert Brown, was prescribed. Halting access to PharmaNet data means that his doctor and thousands of physicians in BC will be no closer to learning about dabigatran’s “real world” safety record in this province. The Ministry’s broad approach has halted studies involving Alzheimer’s drugs, smoking cessation drugs, atypical antipsychotics, and drugs for attention-deficit disorder. A program to inform physicians by giving them evidence-based information on drug therapy for cholesterol, blood pressure, and bacterial infections was also halted after it had been proven to save money and improve prescribing. At the end of the day, with these evaluations killed, BC physicians, and their patients prescribed dabigatran, isotretinoin or varenicline, or any of the dozen or so drugs currently carrying serious safety concerns, will be that much more left in the dark.
    Despite intense media curiosity, secrecy continues to be the order of the day. When I asked for confirmation of the people doing the investigation, the Ministry spokesperson wrote: “We have not and will not confirm any of the individuals involved in this investigation.” The health minister won’t even say when the nightmare is going to be over for the fired staff and the contractors who depend on evaluating Ministry data. She said: “We are unable to provide a specific timeline,” and made assurances the Ministry was working hard to wrap up the investigation “as quickly and expediently as possible.” 
    Hmm. Quickly and expediently? It’s now been a year since the complaint was made. 
    Staff at 1515 Blanshard (headquarters of the Ministry of Health) have been silenced, and insiders have told me that everyone is left wondering who will next be thrown under the bus. The Health Ministry is a major employer in Victoria and there are many people inside that big white building with a story to tell, but will those stories ever emerge with employees muzzled by fear?  
    Government employees are sworn to uphold Standards of Conduct as explained by a policy statement which clearly states: “Employees have a duty to report any situation relevant to the BC Public Service that they believe contravenes the law, misuses public funds or assets, or represents a danger to public health and safety or a significant danger to the environment.” [Italics added] The people I know still working in the Ministry are intelligent, educated, and ethical. There are PharmaCare staffers who are well-aware that the Ministry is paying for drugs, like dabigatran, that could be increasing the rate of deaths compared to patients taking warfarin. They are ethical people with a sense of purpose who probably cringe at the thought of the minister of health and her inexperienced staff firing or shunning those whose alleged transgressions could never merit the swiftness or lethality of the guillotine applied. We don’t know what they did to warrant such a drastic step, but we do know one thing: Killing the mechanisms of independent drug safety evaluation represents a clear and present danger to public health and safety. 
     
    Keystone Kops or pharma puppets?
    Thus far everyone involved in this curious investigation has remained anonymous, but this is a government town. We know who is doing what. 
    The investigation is headed by the current Deputy Minister Graham Whitmarsh. He’s the one who signed the letters firing people and apparently the investigators brief him weekly. Pharmaceutical Services Division’s ADM is Barbara Walman and Lindsay Kislock is the ADM in charge of data access; both neck- deep in this one. Members of the investigation team included Sarah Brownlee from the Public Service Agency, Wendy Taylor, executive director of Information Management and Knowledge Services, Dale Samsonoff from Human Resources, Ted Boomer, director of the Ministry’s Accounting Operations Branch, and Manjit Sidhue from Finance and Corporate Services. Apparently Taylor runs the show and leaves no one wondering who is in charge. 
    Some will say these bureaucrats were only doing their jobs. But who defined those jobs? Who is ordering the investigation and pursuing the firings? Of course, the biggest question of all is who most gains from carrying out a coup of this magnitude? Some have called this the last gasp of a government intent on killing any independent drug evaluation in BC. Is killing off the Therapeutics Initiative a going-away gift to the government’s many industry-friendly backers? (Pharmaceutical firms are among the larger donors to the BC Liberals.) Maybe seven fired employees are just part of the price you have to pay to keep the pharmaceutical industry investments flowing to BC, and to prevent any future drug safety evaluators from affecting the bottom line. The stench of conspiracy hangs heavy over the Ministry of Health and it’s going to take a long time to clear the air. 
    Being a government town there are a lot of theories swirling around. 
    The two dominant ones are the Keystone Kops theory and the Pharma-puppet theory. The KK theory—imagine five cops trying to get a ladder through a doorway sideways—portends that the people carrying out the investigation are rank amateurs who got a sniff of wrongdoing and went off cocksure, in a ready-fire-aim sort of way. The minister, the deputy, and the assistant deputy are all relatively new to the Ministry of health, as is the lead interrogator Wendy Taylor. This theory suggests that the bureaucrats running the show are simply floundering in their own inexperience, not just unwilling—but unable—to explain to anyone what the heck is going on. 
    Then there’s the second theory, the Pharma-puppet theory which insinuates a motive. In developing BC’s home-grown pharmaceutical industry, measures of all sorts need to be taken to get rid of barriers, and independent drug evaluations are seen by some as a distinct barrier. Drug safety? Maybe not such a priority when the government is so busy “de-risking” investment in BC’s drug development machinery and trying to lure large pharmaceutical companies to our shores. 
    Meanwhile people continue to dutifully swallow their daily prescriptions for dabigatran, varenicline and isotretinoin, their statins and their alzheimer’s drugs, while a large part of BC’s drug safety evaluation machinery shows no pulse.
    Bigger questions remain: Who is working the strings behind the scenes seeing that drug monitoring activities are halted, experts fired and important programs cancelled? 
    And further, why such enormous delays in getting drug monitoring restarted? 
    Maybe when the minister starts talking and we know all the facts it’ll become clearer, but at the moment fired employees are calling this a gross miscarriage of justice, and it is hard for anyone to imagine what crimes would have necessitated such a massive, anaphylactic reaction in the bureaucracy. When will the Ministry start to restore the reputations and the livelihoods of the innocent contractors and data evaluation people caught in the crossfire? So many questions remain that people are already saying a public inquiry is essential. 
    But until then, back to my three questions. Let’s start there, shall we? Because finding those answers, as I have said, should be easy. 
    Alan Cassels is the author of Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease and he has worked for the last 18 years as an administrator, researcher and consultant on research and evaluation projects supported by the provincial and federal governments. None of his earnings come from any of the interrupted evaluation studies mentioned in this article.

    Rob Wipond
    February 2013
    A new book provides a shocking analysis of environmental destruction and human rights abuses committed by Canadian mining companies abroad—and how we help them do it.
    CHANDU CLAVER WAS BORN IN THE SMALL TOWN of Tabuk in the mountainous Cordillera region of the Philippines, near a large copper mine at various times partially owned by Canadian interests. This is where he became a surgeon, got married, and wanted to raise his family. 
    He never planned on being a refugee in Victoria.
    Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Claver was running a one-man surgical hospital in Tabuk, while every two months he’d spend a couple of weeks voluntarily bringing health care to remote indigenous villages of the area. Claver himself is indigenous, of the Igorot tribes of the Cordillera. But he was also the son of a loyal mining company doctor, so it was during these sojourns, he says, that his “consciousness” first began developing into that of an activist for human rights.
    “I started to see the effects of mining,” says Claver, whose calm, warm demeanour belies the intensity of his feelings. “When you’re working in situations like that, you get to see the poverty, you get to see the oppression, you get to see the state militarization, you get to see the effect on the people. You start to see that people are getting sick because of that, because of the poverty that they are forced to undergo because their lands are being denied them.”
    To those familiar with British Columbia aboriginal rights issues, Claver’s explanation of the fundamentally conflicting views in the Philippines is recognizable. “They see that everything around them is connected,” says Claver, who shifts between using “we” or “they” in relation to indigenous peoples. “So the land, the sea, the water, the skies, the minerals, the trees, animals, fauna, all these are connected and comprehensively linked to support life, including people. So they cannot understand how you can actually compartmentalize things, like mine out the minerals without affecting the rest…And when you start saying that this land is for a mining company and nobody else, that’s not something we can grasp. And that’s where it all starts; that’s where the violations of rights start.”
    As Tabuk grew and surgeon specialists began arriving, Claver turned to general medical practice. He also increased his volunteering as a leader with the Cordillera Peoples Alliance (cpaphils.org), a multi-sectoral organization of 150 grassroots groups that advocate for indigenous people’s rights. The organization “became very influential and strong,” says Claver.
    But in the late 90s, new, even more permissive mining and land expropriation laws were passed. There was also a push towards “free trade” and “globalization,” and, after 9/11, a tightening relationship between the Filipino and US governments. All these factors led to dramatically worsening conditions and tensions around the country. The Philippine military, says Claver, even set up a specialized “Investment Defense Force” to help protect mining companies from the growing protest movements. Worse, “extrajudicial” assassinations became rampant: Since 2001, over 1,500 activists and members of social justice organizations have been killed or “disappeared,” says Claver. None of the attackers have ever been convicted, but, according to Claver, a damning secret document obtained by Philippine media revealed that military intelligence seemed to have begun regarding many legitimate political and non-profit organizations as merely branches of known terrorist and armed rebel groups. 
    One day, without warning, Dr Chandu Claver became a target for assassination. 
    It was July 31, 2006. “It was a Monday, early morning,” says Claver. “I’d just dropped off my youngest daughter at her school.” He manoeuvred away from the busy curb in the heart of Tabuk and began to head towards the school of his other girls, aged 7 and 11. 
    “As I was making a turn, a van cut me off,” says Claver. Next, two people stepped out of the van, raised automatic rifles and unloaded 38 rounds into the Claver family car. One daughter was never hit. Claver’s other daughter took a bullet to the head but, miraculously, it only scraped her scalp. Claver himself took three bullets in the shoulder and one in his abdomen. Claver’s wife of 15 years, Alice, took seven bullets near her heart, and would die on the operating table. 
    “[The gunmen] got back into the van and escaped,” he says. Though police were on the scene almost immediately from the nearby police station, adds Claver, “the [gunmen’s] van actually passed through three military and police checkpoints and never got stopped.”
    For the next six months, Claver only visited his children surreptitiously and continued to speak out for indigenous rights and for justice for his wife and other victims of extrajudicial killings. But when a medical colleague relayed to Claver a warning about another planned attack on Claver and his children, from a patient who was a sympathetic soldier, Claver decided he couldn’t stay. He and his three daughters landed in Canada in 2007.
    Claver felt Canada was a safer place to continue to speak out, although the US would have recognized his medical credentials. “My objectives were twofold: to raise my kids and to continue working for justice,” explains Claver. “Nowhere in those goals said that I have to be a doctor.”
    So he’s found a small, affordable rental home and employment as a caregiver and support worker at a Victoria shelter. And he’s begun liaising with church and non-profit groups on behalf of the Victoria Philippine Support Group and Cordillera Peoples Alliance as he tries to raise public awareness about the impacts of mining. 
    Claver has also been learning about his new homeland—how destructive a role Canadian mining companies and the Canadian government have been playing in BC, in the Philippines, and around the world, and how few Canadians realize the extent of it. So educating Canadians, says Claver, has become an important part of the process towards getting justice for his wife. 
    A powerful new book may help his efforts.
     
    Daring to ask why
    According to the Canadian federal Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 75 percent of the world’s mining companies are headquartered in Canada. It’s an astonishing statistic that obviously raises the question, “Why?”
    Two Quebec-based academic researchers, Alain Deneault and William Sacher, set out to answer that question in a searing and disturbing new book: Imperial Canada Inc.–Legal Haven of Choice for the World’s Mining Industries. Along the way, the authors examine a parallel troubling question, “Why do so few Canadians know?”
    Tellingly, two major Canadian mining corporations have been trying to prevent Canadians from ever seeing this book.
    In early 2010, tiny Vancouver publisher Talonbooks announced on its website that Imperial Canada Inc. was being developed with Deneault and other collaborators. Within days, lawyers for the world’s biggest gold mining company, Canadian transnational Barrick, faxed Talonbooks a “demand” for copies of any parts of the manuscript-in-progress that made “direct or indirect reference to Barrick, Sutton Resources Ltd, or to any of their past or present subsidiaries, affiliates, directors or officers.” Barrick also sent the letter to all the authors, collaborators and translators, and threatened to sue everyone if they didn’t like what they saw.
    Many promptly quit the project. Talonbooks announced Imperial Canada Inc. was “cancelled.”
    “We were scared and we were intimidated,” explains Talonbooks President Kevin Williams. “We were also somewhat outraged by the fact, ‘We haven’t even published the book!’ It felt like an infringement of our civil liberties and our ability to have free speech.”
    It wasn’t a complete surprise, though. Barrick had similarly threatened lawsuits in 2008 ahead of publication of Deneault and Sacher’s previous book about Canadian companies in Africa, Noir Canada. Small Quebec publisher Écosociété pushed ahead and, even though less than a couple hundred copies of the French academic book were ever sold, Barrick sued for $6 million and another Canadian mining giant, Banro, sued for $5 million.
    From 2008 through 2010, public concern about these threats and developing legal cases spread. Montreal independent daily Le Devoir reported the story. Academics and lawyers posted a petition at freespeechatrisk.ca, where Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein expressed support. Some alternative media covered the story, including The Tyee, Watershed Sentinel, The Walrus and CBC radio. 
    Most observers criticized the legal actions as “SLAPPs”—Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. SLAPPs are typically libel lawsuits that corporations use to shut down public criticism by dragging shoestring-budget watchdog groups or small publishers through expensive, time-consuming court processes. Many US states and European countries have crafted anti-SLAPP laws to allow judges to more quickly dismiss cases where libel laws are obviously being abused in this way. Canadian governments, however, have been reluctant to pass anti-SLAPP laws. 
    Though the Banro lawsuit continues, an out-of-court settlement was reached with Barrick that Noir Canada would be withdrawn from print. “It was a way for Écosociété and for ourselves to continue the fight in another forum than the legal one,” says Deneault on the phone from Montreal, explaining that he’d rather see the evidence he’s gathered debated freely in public than at mammoth expense in a small courtroom between lawyers. He says the years he’s spent battling has taught him how much the Canadian court system is corrupted by money: “Do you have the money to continue? No? Well, then you have to settle with the conditions of the party that has money to continue.” Continuing, Deneault says, “It’s totally undemocratic. Taxpayers are subsidizing a structure that’s only accessible to wealthy people. It’s not a question of rights, it’s a question of means.”
    Talonbooks never did show Barrick Imperial Canada Inc. However, Williams says the book’s content was refocused more on structural, overarching problems than on specific cases and companies. 
    “The book was extremely carefully written,” says Williams. “But aside from the fact that it took us two years longer than we would have liked, and we had to pay for the cost of a legal review, in the end we got a very good book…It’s allowing people to have a look at this issue and consider perhaps what we need to do.”
    And though mainstream media have so far ignored it, Imperial Canada Inc. is provocative. It’s essentially a 189-page argument, buttressed comprehensively with reference footnotes, that provides an overview of reams of damning research about Canada’s pre-eminent role in mining’s devastating global impacts on both the environment and human rights.
     
    Canada the haven
    Deneault says he first became interested in the mining industry while studying offshore tax havens. “A haven is a country that allows a wealthy individual, corporation or a bank somewhere in the world to circumvent some kind of constraints,” says Deneault. “There are about 80 or 90 havens in the world. And why is it so? They all have their specific vocation.” Havens like the Cayman Islands, Jamaica or Liechtenstein each offer specialized legal bypasses, he explains, such as 100 percent tax-free revenues, non-existent minimum-wage laws, or ship registration without safety standards.
    And Canada, Deneault discovered, has become the top haven for transnational mining companies. Deneault points to the company running the infamous Katanga mine. “It’s a Belgian corporation in the province of Katanga in the Congo. [The senior officers] are all Belgian,” says Deneault. “They registered their company in Toronto. Why? Why did a Belgian company register itself in Toronto to operate in Southern Congo?”
    Indeed, the significant, dubious involvement of Canadian-based mining companies and the Canadian government in the war-ravaged Congo will be one of the more disconcerting revelations in the book for most Canadians. Deneault writes about an “avalanche of public documents,” including UN reports, that explicitly criticize Canadian citizens and companies for their roles in the Congo war. 
    But for Deneault, that was only the beginning. “We started to discover all sorts of cases, in a lot of countries, involving a lot of corporations,” he says. “And [they were] cases about very important issues. Not about anthropological civilities, but corruption, bribery, arms dealing, collusion with warlords or rebels, partnerships with dictatorships or kleptocrats, and so on.” And these came from many different sources, he says, including UN reports, parliamentary commissions, independent documentaries, academic studies, and organizations such as Mining Watch Canada, Amnesty International and Global Witness. 
    Another UN report points to abuses of indigenous peoples around the world and implores the Canadian government to “explore ways to hold transnational corporations registered in Canada accountable for these acts.” Yet instead, as Imperial Canada Inc. lays out in detail, our governments have been actively assisting these corporations with enormous tax breaks and subsidies, lax stock market regulations, diplomatic support, and immunity from prosecution for environmental destruction and human rights abuses overseas.
     
    Canadian government support
    Imperial Canada Inc. provides evidence showing how our governments help the mining industry with diplomatic support and funding, particularly exploring how Export Development Canada and the Canadian International Development Agency regularly pump millions into mining operations in notoriously troubled areas where mining wealth, civilian poverty and resulting armed conflict are virtually synonymous—like Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tunisia and the Congo. 
    “The money [our government] will put into a project is related to the interests Canadian corporations have in that specific project,” says Deneault. He points to two dams on the Senegal River which Canadian International Development Agency aid helped build in the 1980s. “It was a catastrophe,” says Deneault, describing soaked arable lands, collapsed fisheries, new diseases blooming in the stagnant water, and violence erupting amidst diminishing food supplies. 
    “And why,” Deneault asks, “were those dams built?” First, he explains, Canadian companies made money building them, and then the dams provided electricity for a Canadian company’s nearby open-pit gold mine, which itself spread streams of deadly arsenic and turned into an environmental and health disaster for local populations. “And they called that a successful project on the web site of the Department of External Affairs,” says Deneault. “It’s a pure contradiction, what [Canada] claims to be and what they do abroad.”
    Canada also has a legal framework that makes it impossible to hold these corporations to account in court, says Deneault. Imperial Canada Inc. reviews how over 23,000 Guyanese citizens filed suit against Canadian mining company Cambior after a catastrophic tailings pond accident, but in 1998 Quebec courts simply threw the case out. Just last November, Canada’s Supreme Court summarily dismissed attempts by a coalition of organizations and families of victims to sue Canada’s Anvil Mining for its involvement in a massacre in the Congo. 
    One supposes that at least these companies must be golden-milk cows for our own government coffers. But a study by Quebec’s auditor general, for example, found that 14 mining companies with $4.2 billion in revenues from 2002-2008 paid no tax at all, while other mining companies paid a tax rate of about 1.5 percent. Meanwhile, Quebec tax breaks and credits cost taxpayers from 1.5 to 7 times more than mining royalties brought in. 
    Investors are also being handsomely compensated, with tax credits of up to 150 percent for investing in companies doing mining exploration. Such figures almost stretch credulity but, commendably, the ImperialCanada.ca website has links for many of the book’s references. That footnote clicks through to a Quebec government tax advisory for mining investors: “…which gives a total possible deduction of 150 percent of the amount invested.”
    So why are our governments so supportive of mining companies? 
    Deneault shows that our mining industry magnates and political leaders are in many cases the same people, including Brian Mulroney, Paul Desmarais Sr, Jean Chretien, Joe Clark and Brian Tobin. However, the book also presents a more variegated history to how Canada became so mining-friendly.
     
    Corrupt stock exchanges and uninformed investors
    “Canada is a former colony,” says Deneault. “The public institutions that we created in Canada historically were dedicated to monopolies exploiting natural resources…Canada is fashioned a little like Leopold the Second fashioned the Congo.”
    Further, both the Toronto and Montreal stock exchanges developed during Canada’s late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century goldrush eras, establishing their niche as speculative mining markets. Imperial Canada Inc. examines how the two exchanges then competitively raced each other to the bottom to attract companies, including making most regulatory compliance obligations “voluntary.” Today, though the Toronto exchange has become the mining company epicentre, many of those lax practices remain in place at Vancouver (home to nearly half of Canadian mining companies), Toronto and Montreal’s stock exchanges. For example, unlike in most other countries, Canadian publicly-registered companies are allowed to mislead ordinary investors by blurring the lines between “reserves,” which are precisely calculated estimates of a mine’s geology, and “resources,” which are speculative assertions about how much ore might be there. It’s a practice that became infamous during the $6 billion stock market collapse of Calgary’s Bre-X in 1997.
    Canada also only requires publicly-traded companies to report to shareholders on issues that a “reasonable investor” would care about—and that’s deemed to be only issues directly affecting market value, not affecting broader society, human rights or the environment. “When we’re reading the documentation related to the [legally required] disclosure of information,” comments Deneault, “it’s always about this ‘reasonable investor’ and what he should know…It’s like a sociological character, defined so. A reasonable investor in that fiction is an investor who only cares about what he has to know with respect to his own private interests.”
    Even more unnerving: Most Canadian financial institutions, mutual funds, and major private, public and union pension funds, including the Canada Pension Plan, are heavily invested in this cloaked ethical miasma. “All Canadians are mining shareholders, but they don’t have any control of that, they don’t even choose to be shareholders or not,” says Deneault. Meanwhile most of us, he adds, don’t realize that mining companies and government officials often rationalize many exploitative and abusive acts overseas by claiming they’re protecting average Canadians’ investments and pensions.
     
    Change needed here first
    In many respects in the globalized economy, concludes Deneault, it’s Canada that’s the “lowest common denominator” dragging the rest of the world’s ethical and environmental mining standards down. That’s why it seems backhanded flattery that, in a 2008 survey, mining executives ranked 7 Canadian provinces amongst the top 10 jurisdictions on Earth for their pro-mining policies—BC ranked 24th, well below Botswana, but far above Ghana and Zambia. And it’s therefore perhaps even more unnerving that, this year, UBC and SFU received millions in Canadian International Development Agency money to host a new institute that will work with mining companies to promote Canadian mining “policy, regulations, educational programs and technologies” in developing countries. 
    Besides suing academics, our mining industry works in other ways to suppress open discussion in Canada about all of this. Deneault draws direct links between directors of mainstream media and the mining industry. But his book reveals other insidious efforts, like an industry group’s “Mining Matters” educational program for elementary schools, implemented by the Ontario government, which warns teachers against being critical of mining, and the University of Toronto agreement allowing Barrick to co-develop curriculum in exchange for donations, which got rewritten only after protests.
    Deneault doesn’t claim every Canadian mining company is immoral, but he does believe his book is revealing “only the tip of the iceberg.”
    “The mining sector in Canada is totally out of control,” he summarizes. “We don’t have any way to make sure that, on an ethical level, these mining corporations registered in Canada behave properly abroad.”
    How can we rectify the situation?
    Deneault proposes calling independent commissions to investigate. “There are too many allegations from too many sources on too many very controversial cases to believe that it’s all suppositions,” he says. 
    He also suggests taking ethical financial action. “Since there’s no way to verify what [mining companies] do, Canadians should try by any way or means to withdraw their money from that sector.” 
    Deneault believes we’d do well to improve mining practices here in Canada, too, which he feels often aren’t much better than elsewhere. He recently spoke in Kamloops, and heard from the protesters battling the planned open pit mine there. It reminded him “how weak the voice of the population is” even in Canada.
    I describe to Deneault the ruckuses that have erupted since the BC Liberal government put up an online tool making it incredibly easy and cheap for mining companies or anyone else to stake previously publicly-reserved mining rights on public and private lands. Though most new claims have been happening in remote locations, so few of us know about them, two men recently staked claims across huge swaths of Pender Island, throwing property owners, law enforcement and local government into confusion about what happens next. The Tyee has reported on a quarrelsome Vernon man who staked claims on his neighbours’ lots and then with impunity began trespassing on their properties at all hours, putting up mining signs, and spray-painting their trees for removal. And of course, the intent of the tool is that real mining operations might ultimately begin in some cases.
    “In any other kind of activity, in any other sector, it’s impossible to imagine you could obtain a property in five minutes on the internet,” comments Deneault. “It tells a lot about the jurisdiction that we’re in.” 
    That’s part of the reason that, here in Victoria, a new group called the Mining Justice Action Committee has begun trying to raise public awareness and build solidarity amongst people affected by the practices of Canadian mining companies in BC and around the world (see event below). Indigenous Filipino refugee Chandu Claver has been working alongside them.
    “We identify very well with what First Nations are looking at here,” comments Claver on the BC situation, where he sees controversial oil pipeline proposals as just another example of the power of the “extractive” industries like mining. “The state looks at indigenous peoples’ areas as resource-based areas, meaning a source of raw materials. Period. That’s why the people there are not a priority for social services, they’re not a priority for anything. What’s important for the state are their raw materials.”
    Like Deneault, Claver hopes BC activists could help set a better standard for human rights and environmental responsibility that would be exported as a model elsewhere. “If I’m able to work with First Nations in doing what needs to be done here, maybe it’s something that can actually accelerate change in the Philippines.” 
    Deneault optimistically points out that there have been several federal mining-related bills recently, one each from the Liberals, Bloc and NDP, that variously sought to create a mining ombudsperson with investigative and regulatory powers, require more forthright corporate reporting, and permit Canadian companies to be sued in Canada for human rights abuses. Although he saw flaws in each bill and watched each be defeated or scuttled, Deneault felt encouraged. “Technically, they can change [the laws],” he observes. “We’ve had bills, we can see that it’s possible, we’re not dreaming.”
    Rob Wipond can be reached through his website at robwipond.com.

    Briony Penn
    February 2013
    Climate policy experts are speaking out against various schemes to export more carbon from BC’s coastal ports.
     
    TRUCK DRIVER JOHN SNYDER retired to bucolic Fanny Bay to live the life, only to wake up one morning three years ago to find a notice on his doorstep—an invitation to an information session on the Raven Coal Mine, proposed five kilometres upstream of his home. 
    After attending the meeting, Snyder launched into his new career as a citizen researcher on the impacts of coal mining on his community. With others, he set up the group CoalWatch. As he says, “It started with concerns about how the mine might contaminate our wells, and took off from there.” 
    The coal underlying the Comox Valley is a soft bituminous coal that is only marketable at the moment as a metallurgical coal for steelmaking—at least if it is blended with better quality metallurgical coal. The Asian market for coal for steel production has been so hot in recent years that companies around the world have been looking to mine just about anything black to satisfy demand. 
    But the Raven project wouldn’t be producing just coal. More than half of what gets mined will be left behind as waste rock—over a million metric tonnes a year proposed for Raven. It will also produce methane off-gases—over 127,000 cubic metres per day is projected. Snyder explains it this way: “The proposed waste rock will fill up a three-storey football field every year, and to offset the mine’s emissions, every person in the Comox Valley would have to park their cars each year it operates.” 
    The combined leaching of acidic materials from the waste rock and the increasing effects of carbon on ocean acidification are another key worry in Fanny Bay, a community that derives its main revenue from shellfish farming. Impacts from acidification have already hit Snyder’s neighbours, the downstream shellfish farmers of Baynes Sound, a story that recently made national news. The Globe and Mail reported that farms like Island Scallops can’t grow their shellfish larvae in the ocean anymore; they die as the shells fail to form in the acidic water. 
    Snyder isn’t budging from his mission to educate his community. “You either stick your head in the sand, move, or stand up for the place where you live.” 
    But both federal and provincial governments are very supportive of the export of coal—as they are of the export of other fossil fuels. The resulting greenhouse gases—from both the mining and the burning in foreign lands—seems to trouble them little.
     
    ACROSS THE WATER from Fanny Bay, Dr Mark Jaccard, a high-profile SFU expert on energy economics who has been vocal on the pricing of carbon, was arrested for trying to stop coal trains from the US reaching Vancouver ports. Flanked by other briefcase-toting professionals, he told the media that “the current willingness of—especially our federal government—to brazenly take actions that ensure we cannot meet scientifically- and economically-sound greenhouse gas reduction targets for Canada and the planet, leaves me with no alternative.” 
    At UBC, Dr Kathryn Harrison, an MIT chemical engineering graduate who worked in the tar sands before obtaining her PhD in political science, has co-founded an advocacy organization, UBCC350, focused on drawing attention to “one of the most underappreciated and worrisome gaps in BC’s climate policies”—the exporting of climate change in the form of coal, oil and gas. 
    Harrison and Jaccard are referring to federal and provincial goals of turning BC, and particularly the coast, into a giant conduit for exporting fossil fuels from both BC and elsewhere on the continent. As Harrison points out, there is a huge policy disconnect: “BC has got some laudable targets for reducing internal emissions, but has gone in the opposite direction in its export of emissions.” Potential exports from the new projects, she says, will “completely negate and even overwhelm BC’s internal greenhouse gas emissions.” These include proposed coal projects like Raven and their associated ports, coal coming from the US, proposed shale gas projects with their pipelines, liquefied natural gas (LNG) processing facilities and their ports, and, of course, bitumen coming from the tar sands through the proposed pipelines and port infrastructures.
    As UVic climate scientist (and Green Party candidate in the upcoming provincial election) Andrew Weaver has written, “The idea that we’re going to somehow run out of coal, natural gas, and other fossil fuels is misplaced. We’ll run out of our ability to live on the planet long before we run out of them.”
    How much carbon are we poised to export from British Columbia? This was the central question pursued by Harrison and her newly-minted group of faculty, students and staff who, like Jaccard and Weaver, are bravely defying the usual strictures of the ivory towers. 
    The figures are astonishing. Assuming everything we export is burned, BC is set to nearly triple our current exported annual emissions from 172 million tonnes to 461 million tonnes. Compare this to our current in-province emissions of 67 million tonnes based on the 2009 provincial carbon accounting figures. The Northern Gateway alone would increase carbon exports a further 86.4 million tonnes—which is more than all of BC’s in-house emissions alone. 
    The next question, then, is why this sudden rush to ramp up and get it off the continent?
    “The fossil fuel industries are like dogs to a bitch in heat,” says Arthur Caldicott, an energy researcher out of Victoria who has been tracking this issue over the last ten years. “One day they are all rushing to shale gas. The next day they are all rushing to LNG.” He explains that when natural gas shortages hit North America 12 years ago, the price hit all-time highs, luring investment into developing unconventional shale gas. By 2008, as the recession hit, natural gas production was increasing and the prices were collapsing. Investment in tar sands bitumen extracting and processing was well established and production was ramping up. And at the same time, the market for coal was dropping as electrical generation shifted to cheap natural gas. Says Caldicott, “All three fossil fuel industries—gas, oil, and coal—in North America are now caught in this position of being heavily invested, having lots of ‘product’ coming on stream but having a limited North American market to sell it to. There is a big pressure to justify the big debt, so they have to get the stuff to Asia to sell fast. If they don’t, the whole thing collapses.” 
    As David Hughes, geologist and Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute states, “You just have to follow the money, with the current price of natural gas hitting $18/1000 cubic feet in Japan and $3.40 in Canada.” 
    This offers an explanation for the increasingly bizarre schemes being proposed to coastal residents: five to eight (depending on who’s counting) LNG processing terminals in Kitimat, coal shuttle ports at various places including  Surrey Fraser Docks, Texada Island and Port Alberni, not to mention pipelines through seismic zones and tankers travelling through narrow channels and the wild waters of Hecate Strait. “Don’t expect the dogs to be thinking a lot about what they are doing in the long term,” suggests Caldicott.
     
    AT UBC, Kathryn Harrison raises the sticky policy question of how to deal with this issue. “We don’t use these fossil fuels, we export them, and get very wealthy off it, but this is like continuing to prosper by exporting tobacco or asbestos. It is legal but the ethics are questionable.” 
    There are definite parallels to the asbestos issue. On one hand, the international treaties around climate assign responsibility to each country for the emissions that occur only within its borders. It’s a pragmatic policy based on what those countries can most easily measure. Still, some countries have more climate-friendly policies than others. Reminiscent of Canada’s asbestos exports, what happens when a jurisdiction like BC, with a regulatory framework and carbon tax, simply offloads our carbon-intensive manufacturing emissions to China, which doesn’t? Given that China’s emissions have been rising in part due to increased demand from North Americans for Chinese manufactured goods, where in this loop are we, the consumers, responsible for our carbon consumption? Harrison believes “consumers share responsibility, as do taxpayers because we are funding public enterprises through it.” 
    However, unlike asbestos, our fossil fuel exports come back to kick us—and BC clamshells—in the teeth; there are no international boundaries in the atmospheric and oceanic commons.
    Someone who has taken a stab at a policy directive around exporting emissions with our resources is Matt Horne at the Pembina Institute. He recently floated the idea of a carbon tax on all exported emissions to raise revenue for global climate change solutions. Exporting carbon to countries without strong climate policy, he notes, “simply moves the planet closer to dangerous and irreversible climate change.” Horne argues in his proposal that although BC can’t force policy on other countries, we “could nudge things in the right direction.” If a $70 per tonne carbon tax was placed on exports, the province would raise about $3.5 billion per year. He points out that they do this in Norway in the oil and gas sector and the funds go directly to international aid focused on climate. He advises: “Just make [the tax] modest and put it back into the sectors where they need investment to retool…With LNG you could also get the limited number of national producers to agree to the tax, just like OPEC.”
    Minister Terry Lake, in a written response to Horne’s proposal specifically for LNG exports, claims that British Columbians would never allow the tax dollars collected to be sent overseas and that LNG represents “an opportunity of a lifetime for BC.” He even argues that LNG provides “climate solutions for Asia.” 
    Critics beg to differ on both counts. Horne points to emerging research into LNG markets that shows that while LNG might offset some coal use somewhere, it mostly increases emissions when it goes to Korea and Japan to replace nuclear, other regions to replace the more expensive alternatives like solar, and new regions to boost manufacturing capacity. “One thing we really know is that whatever we export will end up in the atmosphere and the argument that it will substitute more carbon-heavy fuels is simplistic.” 
    Harrison argues that the added internal emissions from processing the coal or shale gas into its transportable form of LNG will make it virtually impossible for us to meet our BC 2020 emissions reduction targets. Current proposals to significantly increase shale gas production and build the first three LNG terminals on the coast are expected to contribute up to 16 million tonnes of CO2 per year, a 25 percent increase in our provincial emissions alone. The governing Liberals and NDP opposition have embraced both shale gas development and LNG exports, but have yet to say how they will reconcile the resulting greenhouse gas emissions with BC’s legislative target to reduce within-province emissions by one-third by 2020. UBCC350 has sent a letter raising the issue to the Premier but she hasn’t yet responded, “which is striking,” Harrison adds, “because most of us live in her riding.”
    Critics also counter Lake’s “opportunity of a lifetime” characterization. Caldicott sums it up this way: “Support from the provincial government is an act of desperation. The BC government is now caught in the dilemma of where to obtain revenues. There aren’t any options left in natural resources. There’s no pot of gold for us with wood, electricity, coal, or with natural gas. The rush to LNG is coming from an industry which is over-invested in unconventional gas projects and has no market for its product. All the gas-producing regions, including the United States, are rushing to export their heavily subsidized LNG. That is partly why the NDP sound like the Liberals; they have no place else to turn. In the end, any government will continue to reduce regulatory and royalty requirements for these industries to such a degree that there will be no financial benefit to British Columbians to go with the environmental costs.” 
    The Post Carbon Institute’s Hughes elaborates on those costs: “British Columbians will take the collateral damage for the impact of the vented methane, the environmental impacts of water use, disposal of fracking fluids, and carving up of the forest for pads, pipelines and roads, while the corporations will take the profit. Christy Clark would argue that we get royalties, taxes and jobs, but these are short-term benefits compared to the longer-term energy security and environmental interests of Canadians, which are being sold out.” 
    Dr Harrison admits, “there is no magic bullet.” The policy choices are complicated—ranging from taxing exports to just saying no. The first step is “to acknowledge and talk about it.” 
    Snyder and the citizens at CoalWatch are certainly ready to talk about it. The public comment period for the Raven Coal application comes up next month when the proponent, Compliance Energy Corporation, submits its application for the 180-day review. “One thing for sure,” says Snyder, “there will be no decision made on this mine until after the election, so we want to make it an election issue.”
    There will be many British Columbians wanting to make these burgeoning projects and the export of fossil fuels an election issue. With the kind of expertise lining up to debate and the high stakes, it will be something to watch. 
    Briony Penn has been reporting on the environment since her first article in The Islander in 1975 on Garry oak meadows. She thinks the situation for the environment has never been so bad, but the forces for change have never looked so good.

    Katherine Palmer Gordon
    December 2012
    The final report of the 3-year, $26-million Cohen Commission may signal the end of fish farming on BC’s coast.
     
    IN THE SUMMER OF 2009, the number of Fraser River sockeye salmon reaching their spawning grounds could be counted in mere thousands rather than the ten million fish originally predicted to arrive in the river that year. 
    By then, steadily declining returns had already led to closures of the fishery for three years in a row. Bowing to vociferous public demand for action, in December 2009 the federal government commissioned BC Supreme Court Judge Bruce Cohen to investigate what was happening to the wild fish. 
    Cohen’s terms of reference required him to consider the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ (DFO) policies and practices, investigate and make findings of fact on the state of the fishery, and make recommendations for improving its future sustainability. 
    Cohen, a slender man with a neat head of silver-white hair and a penchant for dark suits, had the right credentials for the job: a West Coaster born and bred, he had more than 40 years’ legal experience, 22 of them as a judge. Cohen also had the necessary gravitas to keep a courtroom full of ardent and often angry people in check.
    Both attributes were put to the test many times over the next three years, as Cohen listened to 900 public submissions and 160 witnesses, and analyzed 2100 exhibits, totalling 14,000 pages of evidence. The bill for the process was $26 million, not counting what other organizations and individuals had spent to participate in the proceedings.
    In 2010 Fraser River sockeye returns hit the highest levels in decades. Sadly, scientists concluded it was merely an anomaly. By 2011, the numbers were back down to the levels of the last few years. Overall stock numbers—not just of Fraser River salmon, but of at least 45 other stocks—continued to steadily decline.
    On October 31, 2012, Cohen held a press conference to release his findings. Thousands of NGO representatives, scientists, academics, First Nations and other British Columbians who had followed the three-year process were chewing their nails in anticipation. Hopes were high that he would direct the federal government to act without delay to mitigate potential risks to wild salmon posed by the fish farm industry. Many hoped Cohen would go further and order the industry right out of the water. 
    While the latter outcome wasn’t likely, even the former was anything but a sure thing. Much of the evidence Cohen had heard on that subject had been contradictory. In just one of many examples, Raincoast Conservation Foundation biologist Michael Price had told Cohen that exposure to salmon farms has had a significant impact in spreading sea lice to juvenile wild salmon throughout Georgia Strait. Biologist Alexandra Morton too reported that sockeye running the gauntlet of Broughton Archipelago fish farms were heavily infested with sea lice. 
    But the aquaculture industry disputed such findings, claiming they were based on misleading research, and in turn producing reports denying that sea lice from salmon farms were endangering wild fish. DFO also disputed the connection. In August 2009, in the same breath it admitted it didn’t know what had happened to the missing fish, DFO adamantly stated: “Sea lice from fish farms are not the explanation.” 
    Confronted with such conflicting evidence, not just about sea lice but also about diseases and other risks associated with fish farms, what chance was there that Cohen would come down on the side of wild fish over the aquaculture industry? Even if he did make recommendations for action on salmon farms, would they go far enough? 
    Perhaps most important of all, having heard repeatedly how strongly the government supports the aquaculture industry, would Cohen be prepared to hold the federal government to account for its failure to protect the wild fish?
     
    A resounding victory for wild salmon
    To the joy of wild fish advocates, Cohen exceeded all expectations. Making his view clear beyond any debate, Cohen stated unequivocally in his opening announcement: “I conclude that the potential harm posed by salmon farms to Fraser River sockeye salmon is serious or irreversible.” 
    As Cohen continued speaking to his spellbound audience at the press conference, wild cheering was breaking out along BC’s entire coast. “It was like a thunderbolt!” recalls biologist Alexandra Morton. For Morton, who has devoted decades of unwavering effort to protecting wild salmon, it was a huge moment of vindication. Originally a whale researcher in the Broughton Archipelago, when orcas left the area in the early ’90s her work shifted towards protecting wild salmon and campaigning against proliferating fish farms. She has spent countless hours documenting sea lice on wild salmon and more recently has been spearheading efforts to get proper monitoring for the ISA virus in salmon.
    In total, Cohen made 75 recommendations for action by the federal government to improve the chances of survival of wild fish, covering everything from climate change mitigation to enhanced habitat protection. He put clear deadlines on their implementation and fearlessly threw the gauntlet down to the federal government to publicly account for its actions in implementing the report. The first public report on progress is due by March 2014. 
    Although he acknowledged that he can’t force the government to accept his recommendations, there is little doubt Cohen believes the government must do as he advises, and do it fast or our fish are doomed: “Fraser River sockeye face an uncertain future. If implementing [my] recommendations is delayed, ongoing threats to the stocks will make remedial action all the more challenging when it does begin.” 
    “Overall, it’s a fabulous report,” says Craig Orr of Watershed Watch, still savouring the good news over a Sunday morning cup of coffee a few days after the report’s release. Orr, who holds a PhD in behavioural ecology from Simon Fraser University and who has been working to protect BC’s wild fish for 20 years, had followed every step of the Cohen process closely. He and his Watershed Watch colleagues had collectively devoted thousands of hours and extensive resources to providing evidence and issuing daily public updates as new information came to light in the hearings.
    For Orr, Cohen’s report made it all worthwhile: “His finding that DFO is in a conflict of interest in promoting salmon farms is huge. Calling for immediate implementation of the 2005 Wild Salmon Policy, with conservation of wild fish as DFO’s primary mandate and confirming its obligation to take a precautionary approach to conservation—we’re very happy about that. Those two things alone are worth all the effort.”
     
    Cohen’s findings: a damning indictment 
    Cohen couldn’t have been any clearer about DFO’s responsibilities towards salmon: “In relation to wild fisheries, DFO’s paramount regulatory objective is the conservation of Fraser River sockeye salmon and other wild fish species…In my view, DFO should act at all times in accordance with [that objective].” 
    Although he did it in more restrained terms than Orr might have used, Cohen also did make it crystal clear that DFO has been doing anything but acting in accordance with that objective. The report recites a damning litany of failures and omissions in DFO’s management of wild salmon. 
    First and foremost, found Cohen, DFO has plainly and simply failed to act to conserve wild fish species. Its mandate to promote and support the aquaculture industry is in direct conflict with its responsibility for conservation of wild salmon, and may be responsible: “Promotion of salmon farms might prejudice the health of wild salmon stocks,” wrote Cohen. “As long as DFO has a mandate to promote salmon farming, there is a risk that it will act in a manner that favours the interests of the salmon-farming industry over the health of wild fish stocks.”
    DFO has also failed to implement the 2005 Wild Salmon Policy (WSP), a detailed plan of action setting out the federal government’s responsibilities under the 1995 United Nations Agreement on Straddling and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks. Under that agreement DFO is required to apply a “precautionary approach” to its management of wild fisheries. When scientific information is “uncertain, unreliable, or inadequate,” the precautionary approach prohibits DFO from using the absence of adequate information as “a reason to postpone or fail to take action to avoid serious harm” to a fishery. 
    Wild salmon advocates have been urging DFO for years to take a precautionary approach to minimizing potential risks from salmon farms. But their efforts have been fruitless to date, and Cohen pinpointed why: “Seven years [later], little progress has been made in implementing the WSP. The level and manner of funding for implementation [of the WSP] is inadequate and disappointing. The blunt truth is that, in terms of dollars, [DFO] attaches greater importance to programs such as promotion of salmon farming.”
    This situation has been compounded by a dearth of meaningful research by DFO into the various stressors that affect wild salmon, including salmon farms, sea lice and infectious diseases: “DFO has not yet completed research into the effects of [these] diseases and pathogens [and] DFO’s lack of research into the stressors means that the department had no capacity to draw firm conclusions about the decline as the years unfolded and therefore was precluded from taking action in a timely manner.” 
    Despite that, DFO has continued to make decisions supporting fish farms in the face of a real likelihood that wild fish are being exposed to diseases and pathogens spreading from fish farms: “The evidence before me,” wrote Cohen, “indicates several plausible mechanisms for harm.” 
     
    Obfuscation and obliquity
    These are just some of the formidable list of DFO’s shortcomings described in the Cohen report. Unfortunately, the list doesn’t end with the report itself. Interwoven through the dense stack of Commission transcripts of evidence are page after page of DFO and federal government cover-ups, obfuscation and evasion.
    Cohen was specifically directed in his terms of reference not to find fault on anyone’s part. That must have been remarkably challenging. Browsing the transcripts is akin to turning the pages of a conspiracy thriller: there are shonky alibis, security goons with earpieces, muzzled scientists, blatant political interference, questionable financial transactions, secrecy, and denial. It’s a plot any novelist might envy. Here’s just a tiny smattering of what transpired.
    On March 17, 2011, Dr Laura Richards, DFO’s regional director of science, was on the stand responding to questions regarding several revealing departmental emails and documents. It quickly became clear that even though staff had prepared ministerial briefing notes admitting plainly that sea lice and disease were possible causes of the decline of wild fish, DFO had continued to publicly dismiss sea lice as a factor rather than taking the precaution of investigating the potential link further. 
    It was evident that federal government communications staff in Ottawa had control over what could be said publicly, rather than DFO scientists, who had received written instructions on what could and couldn’t be included in any news releases or ministerial speeches and correspondence on the subject. Denial of the possible existence of disease such as infectious salmon anaemia (ISA) in BC’s farmed fish, particularly in correspondence to potential United States buyers, was routine. 
    Ottawa’s unequivocal support for salmon farming was clear in DFO’s communications plan, the goal of which is to convince an “uninformed” and “confused” public of the merits of fish farming. The plan was clearly unsuccessful: on August 31, 2011, the Commission heard that Trevor Swerdfager, director general of aquaculture for DFO, eventually instructed his staff to simply ignore numerous letters that DFO was receiving from the public expressing concerns over salmon farming. 
    Other documents submitted to the Commission the previous day revealed that DFO had developed a marketing strategy to counter NGO campaigns against aquaculture. It also had a budget to send senior management staff, including Swerdfager, on several trips to the US to promote Canadian farmed salmon. These travel expenses were just a small portion of a $70 million federal budget for aquaculture promotion, large chunks of which were doled out directly to private aquaculture companies undertaking research and development projects. 
    At the same time Ottawa was subsidizing the industry, it was threatening to cut funding to its own scientists—at least the ones doing work that might prove detrimental to the fish farm industry. 
    In January 2011 Dr Kristi Miller, DFO’s head of molecular genetics, co-published a paper in the prestigious journal Science hypothesizing that a virus could be responsible for the dying wild salmon. While the breaking news electrified the West Coast, and anti-salmon farm activists immediately connected the potential virus to salmon farms, Ottawa also moved immediately, forbidding Miller to talk about her discovery. 
    When Miller appeared before the Commission in 2011, she alone of numerous DFO staff was accompanied by a burly security guard, ostensibly there to protect her but clearly under instructions to ensure she didn’t speak to the media. Miller needed no such “protection,” however. The scientist proved unafraid to speak candidly to the Commission about events that had unfolded after the publication of her team’s hypothesis. Once on the stand and under oath, the evidence she provided was nothing short of explosive. 
    After publication of her paper, testified Miller, her department’s funding came under immediate threat from senior DFO management. She was also extremely worried that her extensive body of research materials might be taken away. She had been quarantined within her own organization, admitting to the Commission: “I’m pretty alienated in the department at the moment, so I’m not included in any conversations about disease. Once I reported the information, nobody in the department talked to me about disease after that.”
    Since publication of the first results, continued Miller, she and her team had discovered yet another virus, this time a parvovirus never before seen in fish and one she believed could be the “smoking gun” responsible for the 2009 sockeye collapse. This astounding discovery complemented other research results going back several years that identified a number of diseases and viruses discovered in BC hatcheries and net pens with potential to have caused harm to Fraser River sockeye, including ISA. 
    Miller’s testimony about being alienated, was dramatically illustrated when fellow DFO scientist Kyle Garver, who followed her onto the stand, attacked her findings on the new parvovirus. Garver dismissed her conclusion as pure speculation, saying far more research was required before a connection could be made between the parvovirus and the collapse. 
    Miller had in fact tried to get more research done, only to be stymied yet again by her own department. Her requests to get farmed salmon samples for testing for the parvovirus were repeatedly ignored. Miller persisted, sending an email to her colleagues in July 2011 asking them to elaborate on “their reasoning for not initiating any testing of [farmed] Atlantic salmon for the parvovirus we have recently identified in high prevalence in wild sockeye populations.”
    She not only received no response, she was actively obstructed in her efforts to get further samples for parvovirus testing. The samples were sent to her, but in a thawed state: “Anyone who knows anything about molecular biology,” said Miller, “knows you cannot send tissue samples that aren’t kept frozen or they degrade very, very rapidly. By the time they got to our lab, they were no use.”
    Miller wasn’t the only scientist attacked by DFO for her findings. Dr Fred Kibenge, an ISA specialist at the University of PEI and an independent and credible scientist, had also been examining the presence of ISA in BC under the supervision of DFO scientist Simon Jones. When Kibenge confirmed ISA may be present, Jones refused to publish his report. 
    Under questioning, Kibenge confirmed that he had been heavily criticized for his findings, something he found incomprehensible: “I can’t understand where the government is coming from. I mean, that’s my view.” Legal counsel asked Kibenge if he thought he would have experienced the same kind of pressure had he found no evidence of ISA; Kibenge unequivocally said no.
     
    What Cohen recommended
    After everything he’d heard, it’s little wonder that Cohen hit hard when he made his recommendations. In addition to immediate implementation of the Wild Salmon Policy, they include immediately relieving DFO of its responsibility for aquaculture to allow it to focus 100 percent on wild fish. 
    He also advised the government to undertake properly funded and extensive research into wild fish health, and supported much greater transparency of data and data-sharing with independent scientists, including health data from salmon farms. He recommended development of new farm siting criteria by March 2013, building in protection of wild salmon migration routes. Farms that don’t meet the criteria, he stated, should be shut down without delay. 
    He called for immediate implementation of a policy limiting licences to one-year terms in the Discovery Islands, where a high density of farms and a narrow passage for Fraser sockeye to pass through puts the wild fish particularly at risk, and recommended an immediate freeze on any expansion to fish farm activities in that area.
    Perhaps most fundamental of Cohen’s recommendations is to shift the onus of proof as to whether harm is being done to wild salmon back to DFO and the industry, where it should have been all along. “Until now,” says Alexandra Morton, “as a scientist you’ve had to prove some impact has happened to the wild population because of farms. Well, the trouble with that is by then it may be too late to prevent permanent damage.”
    Now, thanks to Cohen, the shoe is finally on the other foot. In the face of the uncertain science and real potential for risk to wild salmon from fish farming, Cohen gave DFO a maximum of eight years to do research into diseases and pathogens affecting wild fish. If by then DFO “cannot confidently say the risk of serious harm is minimal, it should prohibit all net-pen salmon farms from operating in the Discovery Islands. If DFO is satisfied before then that the risk is more than minimal, it should,” wrote Cohen, “put an immediate stop to operations.” 
     
    The industry response
    Mary Ellen Walling, executive director of the BC Salmon Farmers Association, thinks no one should be holding their breath that the industry is about to vanish from BC’s coast as a result of Cohen’s report: “We have an important role to play in the economies of the small coastal communities of BC in which we operate,” says Walling firmly. “We provide employment in those communities and we’re working hard to make sure they understand we’re going to be here for a long time to come.”
    Walling, a self-described “long term resident of the BC coast,” has an applied communications Masters degree from Royal Roads. On her website, maryellenwalling.com, she highlights her expertise in applied marketing, public relations and promotion, with a “particular focus on risk communications.”
    The industry, continues Walling, “fully supports” the Cohen report. Pressed as to whether the industry has plans to take mitigative steps on a voluntary basis to address the concerns identified in the report—or indeed to prepare to exit the coast if further research doesn’t support their case—Walling is evasive, however. “We are confident in the health of our fish,” she insists. She then changes the subject: “We’ve proven we’re prepared to be transparent with information. We provided unprecedented amounts of raw data to the Commission and we’ll continue to provide it to DFO.”
    The industry continues to look at options for closed containment but the technology remains expensive and small-scale in nature. More likely to be on the radar are innovative new vaccines: “That’s at the forefront of our management approach. We use very few antibiotics compared to other farming sectors, so vaccinating at smolt stage against the risks of disease is a good form of protection.”
    But Walling is talking about protecting farmed fish, not wild salmon. She agrees that further research into the health of wild fish is required, but for a different reason than folks like Orr and Morton: “We know our fish are brought into the pens healthy, so we’re very concerned to protect them. What we’ve been saying for a long time is that more information is needed about wild fish, because our fish are vulnerable to the diseases that wild fish carry.”
    That’s quite the “risk communication” spin on Cohen’s findings: the research needs to be done in order to protect the farmed fish, rather than the wild fish. Unsurprisingly, Alex Morton is derisive when she is presented with these perspectives. “Well, finally we agree on something!” she scoffs. “That’s easy to fix. If you want to protect your fish, get them out of the ocean, Ms Walling!”
    Morton also disputes Walling’s assertions about the industry’s contribution to coastal communities, and speaks from personal experience. “My community had about 200 people in it when the industry moved in here in the late eighties. They told us they would be good for the community and, naively, I believed them. Today, we have 27 Norwegian feedlots, and about 8 people left in the community. They don’t hire locals, they don’t buy gas from us. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve destroyed us.”
     
    What else has been happening in the meantime?
    In 2010, authority for the management and regulation of fish farms was transferred to DFO from the provincial government after the BC Supreme Court decided in 2009 (in a lawsuit brought by Alexandra Morton against the province) that finfish aquaculture is a federal government responsibility.
    DFO’s official policy since then has been to hold off making any decisions on applications for new fish farm sites, or for amendments to existing licences where there is “potential for a significant increase in the environmental footprint,” until DFO has had time to consider the Commission’s recommendations.
    But even as the release of the Cohen report was imminent, DFO’s actions spoke louder than its words. In October it gave clearance to a new farm site at Meares Island, near Tofino—only a few kilometres away from another farm at Millar Channel, where earlier this year all stock was destroyed after an outbreak of IHN virus. 
    The rationale for the exception is that the new site replaces an existing one with a higher environmental impact. The provincial government, which retained the authority to issue and manage fish farm tenures, approved a licence for the new site, agreeing that no “significant” environmental impacts had been identified with that location. 
    In 2008, the Province placed a moratorium on fish farm applications on the north coast. Apart from that, there have been no limitations on the issue of tenures for fish farm sites pending Cohen’s report. According to BC’s Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations (FLNRO), the Ministry of Agriculture is in the process of reviewing Cohen’s findings and will be communicating its response directly to the federal government in due course. 
    In the meantime, FLNRO communications staff report that there are seven outstanding applications for tenure replacements in the Discovery Islands, all of which are currently operating under month-to-month tenancies and “under review,” along with one tenure amendment application.
    It’s not much information on which to base any sense of where the provincial government’s going to land on the Cohen report. But in mid-2012, the government introduced Bill 37, an apparent attempt to override freedom of information legislation and severely constrain whistle-blowers from publicizing reportable diseases (read salmon farm outbreaks) by the threat of severe criminal penalties. It was only withdrawn after legislators were bombarded by public protests.
    In the absence of any indication to the contrary, the message seems clear: far from constraining any further activity, let alone shutting it down, both governments are still backing the industry over wild fish and the environment. In fact the environment, as much as the fish, appears to be the victim in this story.
    One of many things Cohen criticizes the federal government for in his report is its performance on climate change, including its withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol. In recommendation 74, he urges the federal government to reverse that direction by “championing” reasonable steps to address warming waters and their effects on fish.
    Cohen is also critical of the federal government’s failure to implement DFO’s long-standing habitat protection policy, premised on a principle of no net loss to vital fish habitat. In fact, as it did with Kyoto, the government has yet again been going in exactly the opposite direction.
    On June 29, 2012, the Orwellian Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act, also known as Bill C-38, amended both federal fisheries and environmental assessment legislation by emasculating environmental assessment processes and fisheries habitat protection. Notwithstanding roars of outrage from the public, both vital processes were effectively made secondary to economic interests. 
    Read the section of Cohen’s report covering this issue and it’s impossible to conclude that he is also anything but utterly outraged. Not only did the government fail to alert him to the changes coming down the pipe—changes that he notes would have a “significant impact” on his findings—but they chose to introduce the legislation when his draft report was nearly complete. “The federal government’s tabling of Bill C-38 is disappointing,” fumes Cohen. “It is regrettable that [these] legislative amendments could not have waited until the Government of Canada had the opportunity to consider this report.”
    Someone with lesser integrity or courage may not have done what Cohen did, which was to go back to all the Commission participants and invite them to make submissions on the changes. After he analyzed the results, he concluded unequivocally: “Bill C-38 reverses the explicit approach to fish protection set out in the Wild Salmon Policy.” 
    He also found that the combined effect of the legislation means that “it is likely DFO will be less involved in assessing the impacts of projects on Fraser River sockeye and sockeye habitat. Expanding the circumstances in which harm to fish habitat may be authorized concerns me. Based on the evidence I heard, this shift could harm the long-term sustainability of the [fish].”
     
    What happens now?
    “The only thing Cohen could have done better is ask for permanent removal of fish farms right now,” says Craig Orr of Watershed Watch. “But he’s done the next best thing. He’s said the precautionary principle has to be applied to all decision-making about wild fish from now on. So it’s still a whole new ballgame for fish farms.”
    But will Cohen’s report simply fade into oblivion like so many of the other reports that have preceded it. Orr feels that won’t happen. Besides going so much further than any previous review of these issues, he says, “It’s very powerful. It captures so much testimony and evidence and information that might never have seen the light of day otherwise, especially the evidence that DFO staff were required to give under oath, which includes some very honest and compelling testimony. That’s permanently on the record now, whatever happens.”
    Alexandra Morton, too, is optimistic: “The industry’s on the way out the door. There’s no question. We’ve already seen that wild salmon bounce back when they’re relieved from the risks posed by salmon farms. There’s tremendous potential in our wild salmon stocks, and coastal communities should be preparing to get ready to take advantage of that when the industry moves on. Because believe me, it will.”
    Still, she’s not relaxing her efforts. Morton is now undertaking research in collaboration with independent international scientists to track and verify the existence of ISA in BC. “Given the type of tests we’re doing, tests undertaken by internationally respected and credible scientific institutions, it’s impossible to say ISA is not here,” says Morton. “The results are already demonstrating that there is more than a minimal impact from these farms on the wild fish. It’s more than time to act on this.”
    The data Morton and her colleagues are collecting will be vital in the battle to save BC’s wild fish, but at times it feels like she is fighting a lonely and financially challenging war: “We’re working to track three potentially deadly European viruses here. This work has to be funded. The fish farms have to go. But it’s not just up to me. I am really trying to wake British Columbians up to the need to be proactive and tell our politicians that they have to do something now. Nothing will happen if we don’t all rise up and take action.”
    Otherwise, ultimately, the fate of the wild fish will be left in the hands of the federal government. Bruce Cohen may not have had the authority to find fault with anyone in his report, but there’s no question that if his recommendations aren’t implemented, at least we know squarely who is to blame.
    Katherine Palmer Gordon is an author and freelance writer based on Gabriola Island. Her sixth book, We Are Born with the Songs Inside Us, is scheduled for publication by Harbour in December 2013.

    Rob Wipond
    November 2012
    An elderly woman, with the support of her family, has been struggling to avoid forced psychiatric treatment at the hands of Vancouver Island Health Authority doctors.
    WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE PREARRANGED LOCATION, Michelle met me at the door. “Sorry, I didn’t want to tell you on the phone,” she said. “Now we’re going to go to where Mia really is.”
    We drove through the winding suburban roadways, and it felt like I was being taken into remote mountains of Central America for a secret meeting with el Comandante of the guerrilleros. I was actually on my way to interview an 82-year-old Victoria woman named Mia, described by friends and family as quiet, sophisticated and loving. Mia hadn’t threatened anyone or broken any laws, but she was on the run—from her doctor and the Vancouver Island Health Authority. And this tense drama had come to epitomize the challenges, and frightening dangers, of enforcing powerful mental health laws that are guided by woefully weak science.
    I had actually met Mia S. for the first time two months earlier (only the first names of family members are used to protect their privacy). 
    Mia lived in a Victoria retirement home from 2008 to 2011. She was put on various antidepressant drugs—common in Canada’s long-term care facilities, where 50 percent of our elderly are being given antidepressants (about 50 percent in BC are also being given antipsychotics, as was Mia, at times). During a prolonged period when several family members were unusually busy, Mia became lonely and withdrawn and, in mid-2011, was taken to the Royal Jubilee Hospital (RJH) geriatric psychiatry unit for several months. During this time, Mia’s close stepson, Michelle’s father, died unexpectedly. Responding to Mia’s expressions of loneliness and grief, Michelle took Mia into her home with her husband and children, where Mia lived until injuring her pelvis in March of 2012. While rehabilitating in hospital, Mia was transferred to the psychiatric unit again. 
    It was then, in June of 2012, that I started receiving concerned emails and calls from Michelle S. After a decade of writing publicly about mental health, civil rights, and seniors care, I’m often contacted for any advice I have by people negotiating “the system.” 
    VIHA senior geriatric psychiatrist Dr Michael Cooper had certified Mia under the Mental Health Act (MHA)—he was now holding her against her will in hospital, and intended to give her electro-convulsive therapy (ECT, or electroshock) against her and her family’s wishes. Mia feared ECT because she’d seen other patients experiencing massive memory loss. On her grandmother’s behalf, Michelle appealed the certification. Michelle asked me to witness the hearing. I agreed, provided Mia wanted me there, too.
    Before meeting with Mia that first time, I reviewed some of her medical history. A key worry was malnutrition: “…lack of intake of food…major concern is that Mia is not eating…at significant risk for physical deconditioning…” It seemed Mia was suffering a depression so severe she was nearly starving, and therefore her doctors recommended emergency ECT.
    I accompanied Michelle to the hospital, where Mia invited me to the next morning’s hearing. Mia also complained about being hungry. Michelle retrieved a half wheel of brie from a dining area, which Mia ravenously wolfed down. A nurse expressed frustration: “Oh no, eating isn’t her problem! We need her to have a bowel movement. Cheese won’t help that.”
    So, what was the emergency?
     
    Involuntary treatment and review panels
    Over 10,000 people were certified, incarcerated and treated against their wills under BC’s Mental Health Act last year, including 1557 on the south island from all walks of life. Countless more patients are simply told, “Do this, or else you’ll be certified…” 
    And contrary to common belief, in BC, involuntary patients needn’t be “dangerous”—they need only be diagnosed with a mental disorder and be at risk for “deterioration.” 
    It’s not without controversy. After years of consultations developing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights recently proclaimed that forced psychiatric treatment “must be abolished.” A BC Civil Liberties Association paper complains about how, unlike elsewhere in Canada, BC gives no rights even to intellectually competent individuals to refuse psychiatric treatments. 
    Appeals are heard by a three-person administrative tribunal of the provincial Mental Health Review Board (MHRB) comprised of a medical practitioner, a lawyer, and a community member. However, Vancouver’s Mental Health Law Program (MHLP) provides the only specialized, publicly-subsidized legal representatives for patients, and they turned down over half of requests for assistance last year due to funding shortages. In last year’s Public Commission on Legal Aid final report, Commissioner Leonard Doust wrote that he was “profoundly shocked” by this “profound violation” of human rights, where so many vulnerable people, often while forcibly drugged, had to represent themselves at detention hearings.
    Meanwhile, according to the Health Ministry’s MHRB website, it’s usually a two-hour hearing, with a majority decision within 30 minutes. Only 15-20 percent of patient appeals are successful.
    He didn’t legally have to wait, but Dr. Cooper had agreed to postpone the ECT until Mia’s appeal. Yet Mia couldn’t get MHLP assistance. Her chances didn’t look good.
     
    No right to attend
    In a Royal Jubilee Hospital meeting room, the chair, lawyer Frank Borowicz, briskly introduced the panel. Nothing was said or done to comfort Mia. There was no welcoming, inviting speech about how we were all gathered to help understand what was truly best for this vulnerable person going through a very difficult time. Borowicz pronounced discussions would be “informal” and explained nothing about the purpose, agenda or procedures for the hearing—instead, he grilled Mia:
    “[Mrs. S.], do you know why we are here?” Borowicz asked.
    “Yeah,” Mia replied.
    “Why are we here, ma’am?”
    “It’s all about me.”
    “What about you, ma’am?”
    The back and forth became excruciating, as if Borowicz’s interrogation were an on-the-spot test of Mia’s mental capacity, and Mia’s every hesitation, misunderstanding, confusion or moment of forgetfulness was indicting her. Borowicz would soon admit as much, stopping Michelle from assisting Mia with a recollection and saying, “Is it possible for [Mia] to speak? Because if it isn’t, then that tells me something about whether or not she’s capable of forming a view that she wanted a lawyer.”
    Perhaps Borowicz was out of sorts: Mia’s recently hired lawyer hadn’t come but had requested an adjournment. Michelle had brought what might’ve looked to Borowicz like a small army, including her husband Russel, Mia’s current home caregiver, a family friend, me, a seniors advocate, and two lawyers. Dr Michael Cooper had objected to my presence, and had sent for VIHA’s legal counsel, Lee Ann DeCecco.
    Borowicz soon adjourned to wait for DeCecco. Cooper and DeCecco then met with the panel separately for 15 minutes. Reconvening, Borowicz promptly ordered me, the seniors advocate, and the family friend to leave because, he said, this was a “private” hearing.
    I realized it was probable no journalist had ever witnessed a BC mental health review panel hearing. The public had no idea how people’s fates were being decided by people like Borowicz. I resolved to write about it.
    Based on recordings I obtained from anonymous sources, things didn’t lighten up after I’d left. Borowicz began asking Michelle about when, how and why she’d retained her own lawyers. When one lawyer questioned the relevance, Borowicz threatened to throw him and Michelle out, too. “Well, sir, [Michelle] is not a party to these proceedings,” Borowicz proclaimed, “and if you’re here on her behalf, you may be excluded, too.”
     
    The case for electroshocking Mia
    Cooper began with a powerful 40-minute narrative. Pulling observations from medical records, he described Mia as having a 5-year struggle with depression.
    “Patient has severe depression characterized by severe apathy and withdrawal…spends most of her day lying in bed…not interacting socially…not participating in activities…not eating well…persistent low weight…decreased self care…family history of suicide…danger to herself…” 
    Mia had declined participation in many activities due to feeling nauseous. “Her complaint of nausea, associated with really objective signs of distress, has been a persistent issue with Mia,” said Cooper, adding that all possible causes of the nausea had been dispelled. “We feel that [the nausea] is a psychosomatic presentation of the depression.”
    Cooper also portrayed Michelle as a questionable caregiver. He explained that she “was not following up with the recommendations by the treatment team.” Michelle had once “reported being overwhelmed.” Michelle’s hired home help was “inadequate for Mia’s needs”. Mia’s pelvic injury was made to sound like it may have been a result of neglect. 
    Cooper even criticized Michelle for being “too coercive,” and for sometimes using words to others like “make” or “force” Mia to do things which might help her grandmother feel better. Cooper then segued, with no sense of irony, into proposing forced electroshock, partly due to Mia not meeting his expectations for attending VIHA support groups and outreach clinics sufficiently often. He also claimed he’d once allayed Mia’s fears about ECT, but Michelle had “undermined” that.
     
    ECT and memory loss
    Mia had good reasons to be afraid.
    Most people imagine that electrically shocking people’s brains was long ago relegated to the dustbins of psychiatric history along with other abusive techniques from the same era, like insulin comas and icepick lobotomies. In fact, BC’s current best-practice medical guidelines say ECT can treat depression, mania, schizophrenia and mood disorders, while it “may be the first choice of therapy for frailer, older patients” who don’t tolerate drug side effects well. Last year, over 100 Victorians received a typical “treatment” of 10-12 rounds of ECT over three weeks. (Some receive ECT more regularly.)
    ECT often “works”: many patients experience a mood lift lasting weeks to several months. “How does it work?” one heading asks, in a section of BC’s medical guidelines directed at patients. The answer: “Current theories suggest that the seizure activity causes changes in brain chemistry.” That theory is actually from the 1940s, and the guidelines themselves correctly dismiss it in the section directed at doctors. A shock that induces a grand mal seizure, the guidelines state, “will have little effect on improving target symptoms (i.e. depression).” To achieve “therapeutic” effects, shocks must be 2.5 to 6 times the intensity required to cause a major convulsion lasting 25 seconds or more. 
    Consequently, critics argue ECT actually “works” through damaging shocks that blot out memory and cognition until you forget your problems and become docile. 
    VIHA’s brochure for patients assures memory losses are only “temporary.” A headline in our provincial medical guidelines similarly declares, “Myth: ECT leaves permanent memory loss.” However, read further, and these same guidelines admit, “memory loss for events that occur before, during, and/or after the period of time you are being treated may persist.”
    Such spin-doctoring has characterized ECT debates for decades. In 2001, two UK Department of Health-commissioned reviews found most pro-ECT studies had “limited general credibility” and avoided examining long-term impacts, while surveys found 29 to 79 percent of ECT patients reported permanent memory loss. So in 2007, long-time ECT proponent Harold Sackheim buckled to public pressure and performed “the first large-scale, prospective long-term study of cognitive outcomes following ECT.” Sackheim’s team reported in Neuropsychopharmacology that ECT caused long-term disruptions in most people’s abilities to recall events, retain new information and think clearly. And the worst effected were elderly women whom, in Victoria as elsewhere, are two to five times more likely than men to be treated with ECT. 
    Recently, the US Food and Drug Administration demanded manufacturers finally begin formally testing ECT devices for effectiveness and safety. 
    Yet Mia’s hearing was already underway. 
     
    Whose story is more believable?
    After Cooper’s testimony, Michelle said she was “appalled” by the inaccuracies she’d heard. (Mia was largely silent or resting in hospital throughout the five-hour hearing, and she was rarely asked anything. She told me later she was “just frightened” the entire time.) Michelle and Russel’s initial responses were emotional and disjointed. In part, they were staggered by how Cooper had been able to access and selectively cull information from virtually every point of contact they’d ever had with the health care system, from relationships they’d assumed were confidential with social workers, support groups, pharmacists, family physicians, and private home care companies. Alone against all this, they felt they had no chance. 
    But they had lawyers. Combing through those same records, Michelle’s lawyers found evidence of Mia’s status changing almost weekly, including “mild” depression, “probably not clinically depressed,” “smiling,” “tends to minimize and deny her symptoms,” “able to… present well.” Even just two weeks before certifying Mia, Cooper wrote, “no obvious signs of depression…no grounds to proceed involuntarily.” And if Mia has had depression for years, they asked, is that indication of an emergency, or indication that she has been successfully living with it?
    They found ups and downs in the weight records. They argued that Mia, known as an extremely picky eater who hated the food in the care facility and hospital, gained weight at Michelle’s. 
    As for Mia’s time in bed—how much was there to do in the small, depressing hospital unit, anyway? And weren’t patients frequently criticized for walking around too much?
    And Cooper’s hint of some dangerous genetic predisposition, a history of family suicides which Mia and Michelle said was nonsense, turned out to come from a social worker’s note after chatting with someone unnamed. 
    Meanwhile, they explained, Mia didn’t attend VIHA’s support group because she felt out of place amongst people who seemed much more troubled.
    And if Mia’s accident somehow reflected poorly on Michelle’s home care, how did it reflect on the hospital’s care that Michelle brought Mia back repeatedly before doctors finally diagnosed her with a pelvic fracture instead of with just deeper depression?
    The lawyers also suggested Mia’s nearly-constant nausea could have been worsening her depression, and could have been caused by medications. Cooper admitted another doctor had suggested that, so he’d changed one antidepressant, and later tried stopping two. (Mia had actually been taking eight major drugs, often five or more simultaneously, and the side effect profile for every one included possible nausea.)
    Michelle presented her home care plan and, over the next several hours, the panel zigzagged through questions for Cooper, Michelle and Russel. In particular, they asked Michelle and Russel reams of questions about the condition of their home, Mia’s suite, their neighbourhood, their work and financial circumstances, their educational background, their willingness to ensure Mia followed VIHA doctors’ orders, and their level of respect for psychiatric science. It seemed it was Michelle (a research assistant on leave from the University of Victoria) and Russel (owner-manager of a shopping centre) who were really on trial, being judged against unspoken standards.
     
    Court without rules
    Russel described the hearing process as, “like a wood chipper, like a steam roller, like you were going to get destroyed.” 
    Paige Kato, Mia’s university-student caregiver, described it as “disorganized” and “unprofessional.”
    “To even have to go through a process like that for such a thing is really outrageous,” she said.
    Both lawyers present at the hearing declined comment. 
    Mia’s lawyer, Lloyd Duhaime, generally observed, “One of the problems with administrative tribunals is that they are very much masters of their own process. It’s like Judge Begbie on horseback in the Kootenays back in the 1880s. Each tribunal, while quite arguably trying to do the best they can, imposes these apparently arbitrary decisions.”
    Administrative tribunals were designed to allow conflicts to be resolved outside slow, expensive courts, explained Duhaime, but BC’s expanding use of them, especially in situations where someone’s “soul” is at stake in the face of “horrifying” psychiatric treatment, is worrying. “These types of decisions should be made by courts of law.”
    Duhaime was particularly disturbed to learn that Dr Cooper had been privately talking ahead of the hearing with MHRB chair Margaret Ostrowski. Ostrowski is essentially a one-woman supreme court for the panels, ruling on laws, processes and conflicts.  
    “It certainly is confusing for a lawyer who goes by the rule book to have a communication with the chair of the Mental Health Review Board, who casually remarks that she’s already spoken to the lead psychiatrist on the case directly on previous occasions,” said Duhaime. He added, “I would add a bunch of question marks after that, as if to say, it sounds almost hard to believe, doesn’t it????”
    I requested an interview with Ostrowski, but she declined and refused to provide anyone else. A Health Ministry communications rep said someone had gotten to her first: “She was not impressed apparently with what happened at a hearing that you attended…[She thinks] the way that you acted was not professional.”
    In my opinion, I’d behaved professionally in my brief time at the hearing, but I stopped pursuing Ostrowski because the situation seemed to pointedly exemplify the concerns Duhaime and others were raising. Indeed, the MHRB’s own “Rules of Practice and Procedure” articulately elucidated the problems: These “rules” are basically a list of things the panel can do any way it wants, each one presenting more opportunities for arbitrariness, behind-the-scenes scheming, and lack of public accountability. For instance:
    Rule 15.1: The Board “requires the patient to attend the hearing.” Or, alternatively, the Board can refuse to allow the patient to attend his own hearing.
    Rule 15.5: “Witnesses…must not be present in the hearing room before they give their evidence,” except if the Board decides otherwise.
    Rule 16.1: The hearing “must be held in private unless the review panel otherwise orders.”
    Rule 17.1: The review panel can decide to allow or disallow any evidence, “whether or not the information would be admissible in a court of law.”
    Rule 17.4: Panel members will not review or discuss evidence with any party to the case before or outside the hearing, except “in the discretion” of the panel.
    In 1992, BC’s provincial Ombudsman recommended legislation changes to address “possible unfairness” due to the “wide discrepancy in procedures” and “informal standards” mental health review panels were operating under. Her recommendations haven’t been implemented.
    In Mia’s case, the panel declared in their final written decision, “The patient is a member of a close and loving family, which has always caringly attended to her personal, as well as medical care and supervision.” The panel further concluded that Mia did not need to be electroshocked. She did not need to be certified. She did not even need to be in hospital. Mia was sent home the morning after the hearing.
    I was immensely relieved for Mia. But it was also unnerving. After all, this complete reversal just further highlighted the unscientific, unfair process that had deprived Mia of her liberty for months, and had nearly subjected her to electroshock. So who else was in danger? 
    Dr Alistair Murray, the panel psychiatrist, wrote a dissenting opinion. He said Michelle and Russel were “obviously caring people,” but they didn’t have “appropriate expertise.” He concluded: “[Mia S.] is committable under the Mental Health Act.” 
    It was a foreboding warning.
     
    You’re free to go. Sort of.
    Shortly after Mia’s discharge from hospital, VIHA representatives began to call (according to Michelle, sometimes many times per day, but she did not answer) and they also came by her home at least twice in two weeks that she knew of.
    “They asked us a ton of questions, trying to find out what we were doing, where we were going,” said Michelle. “They asked grandma who her new doctor was…How’s your therapy going…” 
    Since the hearing, the whole family began viewing all health system workers with inherent suspicion: Whose side were they on? What would they report? Duhaime wrote to VIHA lawyer DeCecco, protesting the continuing “invasion of my client’s privacy.”
    Far from denying the harassing activities, DeCecco responded with demands: Mia must visit a physician monthly, continue taking all prescribed drugs, submit regularly to assessments by VIHA staff, and always give VIHA her current whereabouts and phone number. And Michelle must help Mia do all this. “VIHA requires compliance with the above on or before September 26, 2012,” wrote DeCecco.
    DeCecco did not say what the consequences of non-compliance might be, but from research, Michelle and Russel learned the Adult Guardianship Act gives health authorities powers to enter a home without a warrant, “use any reasonable force” and “take any other emergency measure” to seize any adult whom they believe may be “apparently incapable” or neglected.
    DeCecco also suggested to Duhaime that the Public Guardian might be called in to take over Mia’s affairs. And indeed, both Russel and Michelle had earlier received cryptic letters from the Public Guardian’s office, stating, “We are in receipt of a referral with respect to [Mia S.] and will be assessing the situation to determine if the services of our office are required.”
    Outraged, Duhaime pointed out that the panel’s discharge of Mia was “unconditional.” “There’s no difference really between the regular citizen and my client,” he said. “[Mia] is a person who is entitled to the full protection of the law in terms of her privacy and the sanctity of her being, and as far as I’m concerned, I will protect that with my last breath.”
    The family went underground. Calls were screened, daily details were closely guarded, and Mia began moving between friends’ and relatives’ homes in Victoria and elsewhere. Michelle and Russel adapted their work situations and started home schooling their children to allow family mobility.
    When I sat with Mia in her relative’s home, she seemed quiet and sensitive, but clearly wanted freedom from VIHA’s clutches.
    She described mainly feeling “frightened” and like she was “going nuts” in the hospital. She was now taking no drugs of any kind, and felt better. “I had the feeling I was overdrugged,” Mia said. “Terrible. I felt very tired.” 
    She was no longer experiencing nausea, but she said she still feels depressed sometimes. I asked what makes her feel better. “I like to be with this family,” she answered. “I’m very glad I have Michelle and Russel.”
    Was she surprised to learn about doctors’ powers to take away her rights? “Yeah, I was really surprised about that,” she said. “I thought the doctors were there to help the patients.”
    The relative hosting Mia said Mia was “fantastic” now and opined that Mia’s “soft” nature made her easily “strong-armed” by male doctors. “She needs to be left alone now. She needs to have an environment where she feels safe and secure.”
    Her own perspective on what she’s been witnessing? “I am completely shocked by it. I have aged parents myself…I just had no idea you could actually lose control of someone that you love.”
     
    What protection is there?
    “What do they want, why do they want to do these things to us, what are their motivations?” asked Russel. “Is it money? Is it something darker?”
    Surely, this conflict and breakdown of trust on all sides weren’t good for Mia. But as her hearing had demonstrated, there are still no objective ways to identify hypothetical brain diseases or biochemical imbalances, so declaring anyone certifiably mentally ill against his, or his family’s, wishes almost inevitably develops into each side criticizing the other’s credibility, character and comprehension of reality. 
    For confidentiality reasons, VIHA psychiatrist Dr John Copen couldn’t speak about particular cases, but he conceded that during certifications, “There are always difficulties around families, and patients, and have the right things been done.”
    Copen said differences of opinion can be addressed by “checks and balances,” such as review panels. However, he acknowledged that, if doctors don’t agree with a panel decision, they don’t really have to abide by it, anyway. “If a review panel overturns a status, virtually immediately, if that condition still exists, a practitioner can make another application for certification,” said Copen. If a physician believes a person is “really ill” or “very at risk,” he added, then “the physician would be in fact held medically negligent if they did not do their clinical duty to manage that safety risk.”
    According to the BC Civil Liberties Association, broad Mental Health Act liability protections would likely prevent doctors from being sued even for “disastrous” actions. Nevertheless, Copen’s perspective reflects an important feeling that’s likely genuine and pervasive. With the enormous powers they’ve been handed, many psychiatrists probably experience a swelled sense of responsibility, like an army general, or someone who gets an infant left on her doorstep.
    And like generals, psychiatrists are reluctant to relinquish or distribute those powers. For example, last year’s legislation empowering advance directives for health care decisions excluded mental health care. We’ve gained stronger rights to decline resuscitation, but never to refuse psychiatric drugs or electroshock.
    “From our end, we really are doing our best to help our patients and our best to promote good practice and good care,” Copen said, describing “a really intense caring attitude” amongst most mental health workers. 
    Of course, a psychiatrist’s “intense caring” about you could seem warmly helpful, or imposingly threatening.
    “[Mental health professionals] do grapple with and struggle with what’s best for the patient, what’s best for the family, first and foremost,” said Copen. “Not everything is clear as mud…There are no easy answers.”
    Michelle and Russel were at a loss as to what advice to give others, because they’d had everything in order with Mia, including powers of attorney, representation agreements, home support and more.
    “I felt that this was a great country, and we had a good Charter of Rights, and that we were protected here, and we were free people,” said Russel. “But we’re not. We’re all in danger. No matter what legal documents you have that you think are expressing your desires and wishes…None of that is worth anything once the hospitals and doctors decide that they want you.”
    “This has ruined our lives,” said Michelle. “It’s been a year of hell for us…Financially, it’s insane. Just our time, our family, everything. It’s been overwhelming.”
    “I’m scared,” said Russel. “The legislation absolutely does need to change. And people need to know what’s going on because they’re hiding it. And these stories are so impossible to believe. The only way that this can change is in the public eye.”
    For others in their situation, Mia suggested, “Perhaps they should speak out.”
    Rob Wipond has been shortlisted this year for a National Magazine Award, two Western Magazine Awards, and three Jack Webster journalism awards for his writing in Focus.

    David Broadland
    October 2012
    We debunk the City's claims about why it is trying to censor Focus and we provide a more likely motivation for its unwarranted attack.
     
    LESLIE, DAVID AND GOLIATH. That’s what the City of Victoria’s application to “Section 43” our magazine feels like to us. A corporation 1000 times our size is trying to throttle us because we had the nerve to expose its mismanagement of a mega-project for which only a dubious rationale was ever produced. That project is now at the edge of failure, and Goliath is angry.
    That’s the metacontext of the City of Victoria’s application for a Section 43 authorization from the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) to freeze my FOI requests. Section 43 is a provision of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) that allows a public body like the City of Victoria to protect themselves from the odd crank who wants to file an FOI a day. What makes our case noteworthy is that Section 43 has never before been applied to a media source in BC.
    What prompted the City’s dramatic move? They claim they did it because the three people named in the application, Leslie Campbell, Ross Crockford and myself were overwhelming them with work arising from our FOI requests. I’m going to address the overwhelming- them-with-work claim in detail because that’s the fastest way to debunk what the City has been saying. Then I’ll move on to what this is really about: their dark secret. 
    The City of Victoria made their Section 43 application on August 7, 2012. In the seven months previous to that date, Focus filed five FOI requests for which the City has provided a response. That’s five, not fifty. Our 2012 requests have declined dramatically in frequency since 2011 (a civic election year), when we filed 24. All of our requests were as focused as possible.
    Which makes the City’s Communications Director Katie Josephson’s characterization of our requests on CBC Radio borderline libel. Josephson told CBC, “In most cases they are asking for every email or record over the span of half a year, and you can imagine the volume of work that does go into collecting and compiling an enormous amount of records...We have seen a significant increase in the number of Freedom of Information requests from this group [Campbell, Crockford and Broadland], however it really is due to the broad nature of those requests [that the City applied for a Section 43 authorization].”
    Let’s look at the facts Ms Josephson has ignored. The largest of our requests was for the emails between former Project Director Mike Lai and MMM Group—the company providing the City with project management—from August 2011 to March 15, 2012. This request was filed after the predicted cost of the project had jumped from $77 million to $93 million last March. The City’s response to this request ran to 677 pages, puffed up by hundreds of pages of information that did not fit the request criteria. The City charged us $1200.
    I made two other requests on March 15, one for the record of internal staff communications relating to the escalating cost of the new Johnson Street Bridge (52 pages) and the other for the record of communications between the City of Victoria and the Government of Canada regarding the $16.5 million Gas Tax grant announced March 3 (19 pages).
    Then on March 27, I requested a ledger record of the City’s costs for the bridge replacement project between July 2011 and March 2012 (16 pages supplied in electronic format). This is a record that the City would keep as a natural course of tracking the project’s cost.
    On July 9, I requested evidence that the City was being overwhelmed with FOI requests, a claim they had made to OIPC in support of serial delays in producing the 677-page request. This information was supplied by the City as a single-page email. They clearly shouldn’t have been overwhelmed.
    One of the other people in Josephson’s “group” is Focus editor Leslie Campbell. Campbell has never made an FOI request to the City.
    Ross Crockford, who is a director of JohnsonStreetBridge.org, tells me that so far in 2012, the City has provided him with a response to only one request for information (191 electronic pages). He abandoned one other request after the City assessed what he felt was an unreasonably high fee.
    Josephson’s “enormous  amount of records” actually amounted to 956 pages over a period of 7 months. Is this “enormous”?
    No. A single FOI request by a journalist can often run to thousands of pages of records. Focus’ Rob Wipond tells me a recent request he made to Public Works and Government Services Canada will run to 5200 pages; another with Health Canada, 3200 pages.
    Speaking about the City’s Section 43 application at the September 28 Sunshine Summit in Victoria, former Information and Privacy Commissioner Dr David Flaherty called the City’s Section 43 request “absolutely outrageous,” adding, “If you’re planning to spend $100 million on something, you better fund the FOI regime to be able to handle the access requests, otherwise it’s undemocratic and inappropriate.” He expressed a hope that the City would be “whacked” by OIPC.
    It isn’t too surprising that the same senior City managers who forgot to include the $1.1 million cost of applying for permits, for example, would also overlook the need to increase funding for its FOI capacity by a few thousand dollars. Meanwhile, the City happily spends $600,000 a year on Josephson’s image  makeover department.
    But the source of the City’s Section 43 attack on this magazine isn’t just the short supply of competency at City Hall. Its action demonstrates a willingness to use FIPPA’s provisions for cynical political purposes. According to FOI experts assisting Focus, City of Victoria has next to no chance of winning the authorization it is seeking. That’s not even the City’s game. Lawyer Michael Vonn, policy director for the BC Civil Liberties Association, in discussion  about the City’s Section 43 maneuver, compared it to a shell game and said, “Like comedy, the only thing that counts in FOI is timing. If you can stall it out past the line, it almost doesn’t matter.”
    The City is simply misusing a provision of FIPPA to stall the release of information. It’s hoping to play the clock out and get a contract signed on a new bridge before its Section 43 request is declined by OIPC and it is ordered to release information that could embarrass it and threaten its already shaky project.
    I believe the foundation for the City’s stalling tactic was laid on July 5, 2012 when I sent an email to the City outlining the public interest involved in my 677-page request mentioned above. Public bodies are required by FIPPA to provide information at no cost when the information is deemed to be in the public interest. So I made my pitch.
    My premise was simple. In the 52-page FOI mentioned above, I had obtained a memo written by the City’s Assistant  Director of Finance Susanne Thompson. That memo and other documents showed senior City managers definitely knew about significant design changes and the bulk of the $16 million price increase for the bridge project on November 21, 2011, just a few days after the last civic election. It seemed very likely, then, that the cost increase was known by City Manager Gail Stephens and former Project Director Mike Lai before the election. But how much before?
    This question matters. In my appeal for a fee waiver, I wrote, “If the engineers knew of the design change and anticipated cost increases and did not relate this information to the city manager or councillors, this raises the question of whether they have breached their professional code of ethics. If the city manager knew of anticipated cost increases but did not relate this information to the mayor or councillors, this raises the question of whether the city manager acted ethically by informing them that the project was ‘on budget, on schedule.’ Whether civic officials have acted ethically is always a matter of public interest.”
    I was referring to an October 6, 2011 council meeting at which City Manager Gail Stephens had reassured councillors the project was “on budget and within timelines.”
    The City’s Director of Legislative Services Robert Woodland rejected my request for a fee waiver on July 19. He made it clear that he was aware of my “theory,” as he put it, but differed on whether such a concern was a matter of public interest. What’s important to note is that the City was aware of why I was asking for the information.
    Now I need to go back in time for a moment to pick up a stray piece of the story. A document obtained from the above-mentioned 52-page FOI request had noted that on September 12, 2011, the “JSB Steering Committee” had met and discussed the “wheel design.” Don’t laugh. This is much more unusual than it sounds. In the 677-page response mentioned above, the subject of the bridge’s design never appeared; nor was there any mention of cost escalation. It was clear these issues, and any other problems they were having, were being discussed in some other venue than the email communication between Lai and MMM Group. The Steering Committee consisted of all the top officials working on the project, including Stephens, Lai, and Joost Meyboom of MMM Group. Whenever the design changes and cost increase had occurred, these would have been the first people to know. We know from the above document that Sherri Andrews, Stephen’s personal assistant, attended all or some of these meetings and made notes. We know from a City Hall insider that Andrews takes shorthand notes of transcript quality.
    So on August 3, working along that same line of inquiry, I requested from the City “the personal notes and records made by City of Victoria employee Sherri Andrews that covered the proceedings of the JSB Steering Committee between January 1, 2011 and August 3, 2012.”
    My August 3 FOI  touched a sensitive nerve at City Hall. By August 7 the City had applied to OIPC for authorization to ignore FOI requests from me, Leslie Campbell and Ross Crockford, both of whom were apparently guilty by association. Merely by applying for the authorization, any FOI requests I had made were automatically frozen, including the August 3 request.
    Is the dark secret that the cost increase was known in September 2011? Or is it that and a whole lot of other embarrassing facts about how badly this project has been managed? A “Final Project Definition Report,” which was wrestled from the clutches of senior managers and into public view after I informed councillors of its existence back in early September, contains sobering revelations. For example, the report notes that as of July 31, the design for the bridge was only at “30 percent.” MMM Group told councillors in March the design would be at 60 percent before the procurement process started.
    Here’s the bottom line. The date for receiving bids for construction of a new bridge was to be completed by August 17. After two postponements, that date has been moved to October 18. The “design optimization” process, by which the three construction companies rework the design so they can keep within an overall project cost of $93 million, may produce a bridge very different from the one Victorians approved in the 2010 referendum. When councillors finally get to see what that looks like, they’ll have to decide whether to proceed or kill the project and look at other options. With the project hanging by a political thread, any bad news could sink it. So City managers chose to knock the most likely source of embarrassing news out of the game for as long as possible.
    City managers could easily prove me wrong by releasing the requested information without further delay.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    David Broadland
    September 2012
    An engineering report obtained through an FOI estimates $34 million is needed to bring 16 City-owned buildings up to seismic code.
     
    THE CONTENTS OF AN ENGINEERING CONSULTANT’S seismic risk assessment of City-owned buildings obtained by Focus through provisions of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act suggest the City of Victoria has been misrepresenting the financial liabilities it faces by at least $34 million. And the study’s findings lead inevitably to the question of whether senior City managers have been making rational decisions about how to manage the risk associated with potential loss of life during a seismic event.
    According to the City’s Director of Corporate Communications Katie Josephson, the work entailed in the $40,000 study “was completed during the last half of 2009 and through 2010,”  and a final version delivered to the City by engineering consultants Read Jones Christoffersen in December, 2010—three weeks after the referendum on the Johnson Street Bridge. The report, which looked at 16 City-owned structures, estimated the extent to which they met current seismic code requirements, provided an estimated cost for seismic retrofit and created a ranking system for determining which projects were most urgent.
    The report included the City-owned Victoria Conference Centre and its parkade, the grandstand and administration structure at Royal Athletic Park, various public works buildings on Garbally Road, administration buildings and community centres. According to the City, the aggregate peak occupancy of the 16 buildings is 3425 people.
    Read Jones Christoffersen considered life safety, cost, and “level of importance” in ranking the buildings.
    The “Royal Athletic Park Administration and Entrance Pavilion,” with a potential peak occupancy of 1000 people, ranked first (highest priority) in two out of three rankings. The report noted the structure “is estimated at roughly 20 percent of current code,” and ball-parked the cost of a seismic retrofit at $1 million.
    Also high in the rankings is Fairfield Gonzales Community Centre, which has a peak occupancy of 150 people, is “in the order of 20 percent” of code requirements, and has an estimated cost to retrofit of $375,000.
    Read Jones Christoffersen estimated the Victoria Conference Centre and its parkade were both at approximately 62 percent of current code requirements. In spite of having a peak occupancy of 1500 people, the estimated cost for a seismic retrofit—$20 million—pushed that facility to the bottom, or close to the bottom, in each of the three ranking systems.
    Four of the public works buildings in the study were estimated to be at only 10 percent of code requirements for seismic resistance. With a total peak occupancy of 30 people, the report estimated their retrofit would cost $2.5 million in total.
    In March 2011, Focus filed an FOI request for all seismic risk assessments the City had completed. The City’s legislative services department made serial attempts to deny access to three documents, and only provided the Read Jones Christoffersen report when a formal complaint was filed with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner in August.
    The City administration’s suppression of the report begs the question: Why hasn’t the information been made public? Senior City managers have known for 20 months that these 16 buildings will add at least $34 million to stated unfunded capital costs. (Having a déjà vu moment? The City also held back a seismic assessment of Firehall No. 1 for 18 months before going public last October.)
    Questions emailed to City Manager Gail Stephens and General Manager of Operations Peter Sparanese went unanswered by our press deadline.
    The City’s Josephson downplayed the report’s findings. “As you’ll see on page one of the introduction,” Josephson pointed out, “the evaluation prepared by Read Jones Christoffersen ‘was the initial stage in a process to identify which buildings should be considered a priority for possible seismic upgrades.’ It was further outlined in the same paragraph that a more detailed analysis and accurate budgets would need to be prepared. This study was commissioned as a preliminary review of civic buildings to assist City engineers in developing policy on prioritization and the development of a long-term capital plan is underway. When more detailed analysis and accurate budgets are established, the capital plan will be updated and considered by council.”
    But don’t all exploratory engineering reports allude to the need for further study and refinement of costs? And does that mean they should be kept secret from council and the public? When Delcan’s Dr Joost Meyboom made his first recommendation about the seismic vulnerability of the Johnson Street Bridge, he told City staff the bridge should be repaired and seismically retrofitted. He offered a first estimate of cost ($8.6 million) and said, “I would suggest that our current study be extended to refine the retrofit concept and the associated costs.”
    In that case, too, senior City managers kept the “initial stage in the process” hidden from councillors and the public. Meyboom’s recommendation wasn’t made public until it was rooted out by FOI. By then the price had risen dramatically. City managers are now hoping a new bridge won’t cost more than $93 million, over ten times Meyboom’s first estimate. Given that outcome, is there any good reason City staff should be left to work out of public sight? 
    Victoria City Councillor Geoff Young doesn’t seem to think so. He confirmed the Read Jones Christoffersen report hadn’t been seen by councillors. Was he concerned the report had been withheld for 20 months?
    “I am very conscious that since the report was produced,” Young said, “council has spent much time considering priorities, budgets, and capital needs. In those discussions it would have been very valuable to have had the information in this report in front of us.”
    Young added, “I am very concerned that the whole range of seismic problems and the price list [in the report] have not been presented to council. I have already expressed my view that had the condition of the firehall been known at the time we were still discussing our approach to the bridge, the council might have considered the [less expensive rehabilitation] options seriously, instead of insisting on the rehabilitation meeting 100 percent of current standards for post-disaster bridges.”
    The safety implications of the Read Jones Christoffersen report perturb Young: “I know that all of us on council were very aware of the need for public safety; knowing that many of our employees work in buildings that are only at 20 percent of current codes might have changed some of my colleagues’ views as to the best use of funds—and probably more people among our staff work in buildings that are only at 10 percent of current seismic
    than would normally be on the bridge at any given time. Again, the need to make one bridge perfectly safe pales against the need to increase the safety of public buildings in which perhaps hundreds of our citizens may be gathered.” With the rising cost for a new bridge strangling the City’s ability to address the needs raised in the Read Jones Christoffersen report, Young thinks a change in course is needed. “Saving perhaps 10 or 20 or 30 million dollars by making do with a refurbished bridge built to slightly lower standards (preserving life but not usable after the disaster) makes a lot more sense when, with that same money, we could save the building value, and perhaps lives, within many of our buildings. I say ‘perhaps lives’ because the report does not translate the seismic code percentages into loss of life [or] loss of building value, and I do not have the technical expertise to make that translation. Based on my small knowledge of the Christchurch experience I suspect that a building meeting only 10 percent of code is very bad for the occupants in a major quake, but cannot be sure. Adding this component to the analysis would be one of the first things we should ask for in ordering our priorities.”
    The Delcan report estimated that peak occupancy of the Johnson Street Bridge was likely to be 35 people. It’s sobering to consider that number now in light of the 3425 people that could be at risk in the 16 public buildings covered by the Read Jones Christoffersen report.
    The Delcan report noted that even in a “major seismic event” there would likely be no loss of life on the existing bridge, as is. For a “severe seismic event,” they predicted a 20 percent fatality rate and a loss of seven lives. Yet the same senior City managers who have  known the life-safety basics of the Read Jones Christoffersen report since late 2009 recommended to councillors they spend $93 million to replace the bridge.
    Release of the Read Jones Christoffersen report comes at a critical moment. The City, for reasons unexplained, extended by three weeks the date by which the three companies in the running for the contract to build a replacement bridge were required to submit bids. This suggests more than one of the companies are having trouble meeting the City’s expectations on cost and/or design. If the bids come in above the City’s “affordability ceiling” of $93 million for the entire project, councillors—with the Read Jones Christoffersen report on the table—will have a hard time justifying an even costlier bridge.
     
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

    Katherine Palmer Gordon
    September 2012
    While fleets of log-laden ships depart our shores in growing numbers, scores of mills have closed resulting in massive job losses in BC. With so few mills left to send logs to, logging companies claim exports are the only way to stay in business. With the removal of the requirement that forest companies holding tenure on Crown forestland must mill that timber locally, there’s little or no impetus for them to invest in much-needed infrastructure that would provide an alternative to log exports. What will it take for BC to stop exporting so much home-grown opportunity to Asia?
     
    “ADVOCATES OF RAW-LOG EXPORTS in British Columbia claim log exports create employment. The truth of the matter,” the United Steelworkers Union declared bluntly in a May 2012 publicity campaign linking massive BC job losses to record volumes of log exports, “is that raw-log exports kill BC jobs.” 
    A few months earlier, the Truck Loggers’ Association had kicked a similar but opposing crusade to support log exports into high gear. “Many people continue to insist that exporting logs means we are exporting BC jobs,“ stated TLA Executive Director Dave Lewis in a February 2012 press release. “This is simply not the case. Log exports support jobs in the logging and transportation sectors. The last thing we should be doing,” insisted Lewis, “is sacrificing the jobs we already have by banning log exports.”
    It’s an acrimonious battle line between BC’s manufacturing sector and harvesting companies that goes back a long way. It’s not just an economic issue; it’s a highly emotional one in a province where trees and wood products have been the backbone of the economy for more than a century, and where protection of both our forests and our manufacturing jobs is dear to the heart of most British Columbians. 
    Log exports were banned as far back as 1891, but have also always been a cash cow for those in the harvesting and transportation business; hence the introduction of exemptions less than 20 years later, in 1909. The war has raged back and forth ever since. When times are good in the manufacturing business here, the angst over exports naturally loses its intensity. When things are tough going, as they have been for the last few years, the fight hits the front pages on a regular basis. 
    By the end of 2011, with record-breaking levels of log exports headlining the news, the battle had taken on a whole new level of intensity. In 2010, more logs were shipped to China alone from this province than in the preceding 20 years combined. By May 2011, the volume of log exports to that country had already exceeded 2010 totals. By the end of the year, they had exceeded those totals by a third again. 
    In the meantime, manufactured wood product exports had dropped in value from $16.6 billion in 2000 to $7.6 billion in 2009. Over 50,000 timber-based jobs had vanished since 1991, a decline of 52 percent. For every job opening in the forestry sector in 2011, there were 34 unemployed workers lining up for it, and over the year, forestry employment dropped a further 2.3 percent from 2010 figures: another 1,660 people out of work in just twelve months. 
    Were record export volumes responsible, or were they helping maintain what few jobs were left in the forestry sector? 
     
    First, some background
    Bill Dumont is a registered professional forester and a consultant in forestry policy and economics based in Cobble Hill. In 2006, with export volumes on the rise and BC’s manufacturing sector in economic freefall, the provincial government commissioned Dumont and former deputy minister of forests Don Wright to undertake a review of log exports and their impact on the forestry industry. 
    Those two analysts concluded that trying to correlate job losses with log exports simply doesn’t work. Increases in exports, they wrote, lead to increases in harvesting and export-related jobs but a decrease in processing positions. With constantly fluctuating numbers, added Dumont and Wright, “It isn’t possible to say anything definitive about the net effect.” 
    Dan Schrier agrees with that assessment. Asked if it was possible to do an objective mathematical analysis of the data, Schrier, who is the manager of trade and business statistics for BC Statistics, said “no” immediately. “I suppose it would technically be possible,” he admitted after some thought, “but it would be enormously complicated. You’d have to make so many assumptions about so many variable aspects that it would be almost impossible to rely on the outcome.”
    But that doesn’t mean a link can be dismissed out-of-hand, especially when it comes to the coast. Here, for instance, are a few more facts and figures to toss into the mix, along with a little history to consider. 
    According to BC Statistics, in 2011 log exports comprised only about ten percent of BC’s overall annual forestry revenues (pulp is the dominant export, followed by processed softwood products). For the coast, however, that ten percent figure is misleading. The term “log exports” can only mean coastal log exports. There is virtually no log export market for BC’s interior wood harvest, because of the high cost of transportation to export hubs. In that context, the figures look quite different: last year, while record numbers of unemployed forestry workers lined up to collect EI cheques, 31 percent of all trees harvested on BC’s coast were being exported in log form. 
    The tension between would-be exporters and the manufacturing industry also intensified in early 2003. That’s when the Liberal government’s Forest Revitalization Act removed what was known as the “appurtenancy” requirement from provincial forestry tenures, a condition that had previously required tenure holders to use the trees in local sawmills. It was a huge blow to an industry that had already seen 15 medium to large sawmills close on the coast since 1990 (and another 18 in the interior). 
    By 2003, there were 28 active sawmills in that category left on the coast, processing 2.3 billion board feet per year. By 2006, another five sawmills had closed. Three years later, only 19 medium to large coastal mills remained, processing 1.2 billion board feet annually. The estimated figures for 2011 are much the same.
    In the meantime, coastal log export volumes spiked immediately after the removal of the appurtenancy clause, increasing by 20 percent over 2002 volumes. There was a sharp drop in 2004, but that seems to have been an anomaly: the rate doubled again in 2005 and stayed at that level through 2006. It dropped again in 2007 following the burst of the US housing bubble, nonetheless remaining at higher levels than 2003. Since then, the volume has kept steadily climbing, while employment rates, as we already know, continue to decline. 
     
    How log exports work...in theory
    A permit from the provincial government is required for the export of any trees harvested from provincial Crown lands. There are limits on how many logs harvested from provincial Crown lands can be exported, as well as on which species, and before a permit can be issued, the log must be harvested, graded, and ready for shipment. 
    It must also first be offered for sale to BC buyers, to determine whether it is surplus to the needs of the domestic manufacturing sector. Any offer to purchase the log is reviewed by the Timber Export Advisory Committee, or TEAC, a panel of individuals from various sectors of the industry. TEAC’s job is to determine whether the offer is fair, based on the current price being paid for logs on the domestic market. An export permit will only be issued if no offers are received or TEAC rejects the offer as unfair, and declares the log surplus. 
    Successful applicants for an export permit must pay the provincial government a fee in lieu of manufacture on the log’s domestic market value, depending on the species and where it is harvested. A Douglas fir harvested on Vancouver Island attracts a 20 percent fee, for example; for all species on the north coast, the fee is just five percent. 
    Export limits are also set higher on the north coast, where, since the mid-1980s, it’s been permissible at times to export 100 percent of the harvest from some areas. In other words, government has essentially waived the fees and normal volume limits in locations where, thanks to the loss of local mill capacity, it’s too expensive for the harvesting companies to ship logs profitably to the few domestic mills that remain.
    If the log is leaving Canada, a federal export permit must also be obtained. The federal government also regulates all exports out of BC from private and federal lands. The surplus test is essentially the same, but no fee in lieu of manufacture is charged and there are no constraints on which species may be exported, although limits are placed on the total volume that can be applied for in any one permit.
     
    …and how they work in practice
    The fee in lieu of manufacture has proved to be little disincentive for harvesting companies that can earn close to double the domestic price in export premiums. 
    For 2007, the last year for which specific figures are available, the province earned a paltry $1.3 million in fees from coastal exports. But revenues to the industry that year were $369 million. By 2011, revenues were $588 million. It’s unsurprising that in February 2012, Minister of Forests Steve Thompson admitted the provincial government was receiving an average of 1000 export permit applications every month. 
    And there is no fee charged on logs exported from private and federal government lands. Given that 65 percent of exported logs came from private forest lands in 2011—even though they comprise only about five percent of BC’s forested lands—it’s a lost revenue opportunity and a regulatory issue that is begging to be addressed.
    The surplus test is also under fire. Cowichan Valley MLA Bill Routley, NDP critic on the forestry file, says something’s gone fundamentally wrong when BC mills are “crying out for wood” while record volumes of logs are being shipped offshore. In March, Teal Jones Group CFO Hanif Karmally told the media that the company could put another 100 to 115 people to work at its Surrey sawmill if it could get more logs. Routley says this is just one example of many he has heard: “Around two dozen offers are made by BC buyers every month to buy logs for which export permit applications have been made, but only three or four succeed. The rest are being categorized as surplus, despite the purchase offer, and exported regardless.” 
    The same month, news also broke that Minister of Forests Steve Thomson had overruled a TEAC decision that logs should be sold to Teal-Jones, handing the exporter a permit instead. On further investigation, it was revealed that a total of 86 TEAC decisions originally made in favour of local purchasers had been overturned. 
    TEAC had started making its decisions based on excluding the costs of shipping the logs to the buyer, a policy change that favours the competitiveness of domestic buyers over would-be exporters. When he learned of it, Thomson brought the new practice to a rapid end. By February, the government had ceased referring any applications to TEAC from the west coast of Vancouver Island, saying it expected the decisions would be overturned anyway. 
     
    The industry’s argument
    “The global industry is ultra-price sensitive and ultra-competitive,” says Rick Jeffery, president and CEO of the Coast Forest Products Association, who also describes forestry markets as “brutal.” Jeffery insists: “It’s very simplistic to say that the export of logs is the export of jobs and that it’s easier to export logs than to sell them here, so that’s why companies do it, but neither of those things are true.” 
    He says that BC’s log exports are simply a response to market demand. “Log exports have always been part of the mix in BC. On any given day companies look at the costs and the margin return they can get on a particular log, and that’s what determines whether it goes to a mill or to the docks. Not every log has a market in BC that the company can make a profitable return from. If that’s the case, it isn’t going to sell the log here. It might not even cut it.”
    Some forestry companies say that a ban on log exports would simply cause more mill closures and job losses, because it isn’t worthwhile to cut logs for the domestic market unless they can also cut higher value export logs at the same time—it can cost up to $78 to harvest a log that only sells for $50 in BC but up to $90 offshore. Without the export premium, they can’t afford to take what they claim is almost always a loss on domestic sales. Dumont thinks that’s an indisputable fact: “I have absolutely no doubt there would be no logging going on without log exports.”  
    On the north coast, where the nearest mills are simply too far away to transport logs economically to them, companies like Coast Tsimshian Resources Ltd claim that they are utterly dependent on being able to export their harvest. In July, CEO Wayne Drury told the Vancouver Sun: “If we and others in the northwest couldn’t do it, none of us [up here] would be in business.” Bill Sauer of the Northwest Loggers Association added: “If log exports were banned today, we might as well close the doors and throw away the keys.” 
    Coastland Wood Industries Ltd President Hans de Visser confronts the tough realities of the business from the other side of the table. He says his Nanaimo-based veneer manufacturing plant has gone through some very difficult times recently: “Especially with China on fire—we had great difficulty finding logs of a suitable quality because all the best logs were going offshore. It’s been a bloodbath for us for the last couple of years.”
    As a manufacturer, de Visser could be forgiven for having harsh views on the subject of log exports. But he says a reality check is required: “When times are tough, everyone starts running around looking for someone to blame and pointing fingers. But in North America, we only have about half the normal home construction going on. The long-term average is 1.5 million housing starts a year. We’re still only at 700,000 or so.” When there’s no building going on, says de Visser, no one wants wood products. “That’s just the way it is. So the companies start exporting logs to China instead. At least the companies are logging,” he adds. “I think things would look a lot worse for the coast,” he admits frankly, “if we didn’t have any log exports at all.”
     
    Taking the easy way out
    But is that really true, or is it just the easiest default option? It sounds reasonable: it’s certainly true that right now, exporting companies are keeping thousands of forestry workers employed. But it also begs this question: if there were more domestic manufacturing mills buying logs, wouldn’t that make it economical to harvest for the local market?
    You bet, says Ben Parfitt, a forestry analyst for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. “It strikes me that the more investment we get in manufacturing mills here in BC,” says Parfitt, “the more domestic demand there will be, and with increasing demand come higher prices. That’s to everyone’s advantage to see that happen, and soon. The longer we go without investment here, the more exports there will be. That’s what we really can’t afford.”
    In 2011, Parfitt undertook a detailed analysis of ways to boost manufacturing jobs in BC, picking up on a question that had been posed by UBC business management professor Rob Kozak: “Why is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of Douglas fir window frames, with about 1,500 employees, located in Manitoba?” 
    BC, says Parfitt, continues to seek out new markets for its pulp, logs and low-end commodity products like rough-cut lumber. Parfitt says the better strategy would be to focus instead on diversifying BC’s product base into a much broader range of high quality secondary wood products—everything from specialized laminated materials to cabinets and mouldings—that are also in big demand in global markets, and which fetch considerably higher prices. 
    Parfitt analyzed industry data and concluded that investment in the kind of infrastructure required for that level of production—along with ramped-up bio-energy production from wood waste, greater integration of infrastructure for improved efficiency, and reforestation management improvements to see older, higher- quality wood being harvested—would create as many as 2,630 additional manufacturing jobs and another 2,400 jobs in waste-wood recovery in the short term, an additional 5,200 seasonal silviculture jobs, and more than 10,000 jobs over the long term in higher-end value-added product manufacturing.
     
    An untaken opportunity 
    These are compelling figures. But the big BC players have yet to invest a dime in new infrastructure of the kind Parfitt describes. “No-one has spent a cent on large mills in BC for 20 years,” agrees Dumont. That has also left the coast with virtually no mills capable of processing much of the second-growth wood that is now being exported. In a July editorial in the Vancouver Sun, Ancient Forest Alliance Executive Director Ken Wu quoted forestry analyst Peter Pearce, who in 2001 said that at as many as 14 new large mills would need to be built in BC over the next decade to cope with the changing pattern from old-growth to second-growth harvesting. 
    Eleven years later, however, Teal-Jones’ Surrey mill is the only operation on the coast with that specific capability. Western Forest Products has done some upgrade work to two of its Vancouver Island sawmills, and says it plans to put another $200 million into further improvements to all of its mills and manufacturing plants over the next three years. But it is the exception. Instead, for the most part, says Parfitt, the industry—including Western Forest Products—has simply defaulted to the easy cash represented by log exports. “That represents a huge lost opportunity for a much greater return on our wood supply, and nothing’s being done to take it.” 
    Wu says we need to learn from history. As with our fisheries, if we simply keep logging at the rate we are now, we can expect one day to see all of our old-growth forests vanish. “That’s why we need to retool the mills to be able to process high quality second-growth and develop high-end value-added manufacturing capability,” says Wu. “You don’t have to cut as much, but at the same time, you create more jobs in manufacturing. That, and protecting our remaining old growth forests, are the most important things to do right now.” 
    But short-term profit goals are also trumping long term management planning to increase the inventory of older, higher-quality wood. Bowing to corporate pressure, the provincial government announced earlier this year that it is considering opening up protected areas of old-growth forests for logging activity. As Ken Wu succinctly puts it: “That’s like burning up parts of your house for firewood after you’ve used up all your other wood sources.” In the meantime, smaller and smaller trees are being taken off private lands and increasingly, from provincial Crown lands. With no mills capable of processing them, they are heading straight offshore.
    Opening up old-growth protected areas to logging is also completely counterintuitive to this statistic: nature-based commercial tourism that relies on forests provides an estimated 19,400 jobs in BC. That’s more than 40 percent of the total number of forestry jobs in the province in 2011. But if the government is aware of the threat it is posing to those jobs through this short-sighted strategy, there’s little sign of it.
     
    Can anything be done about all this?
    Export critics like Parfitt believe that more export disincentives are required and that a higher fee in lieu of manufacture, applied to both provincial Crown lands and federally-regulated private lands, would help rejuvenate local mill activity and provide government with much-needed revenue for investment. 
    Rick Jeffery, on the other hand, believes the solution is to remove regulatory constraints, not add to them: “We’re over-regulated in BC, and we need to have a free market and competitive pricing to create a really healthy sector.” 
    That, of course, won’t necessarily result in new mills, and Jeffery does agree there is an urgent need for infrastructure investment. With sufficient investment, acknowledges Jeffery, there are “huge” opportunities for BC mills to process and develop wood products that will justify paying domestic prices for logs that are competitive with export prices. “That’s the way the wind is blowing,” concurs veneer manufacturer Hans de Visser. “It just makes sense. I’m always bellyaching about having to compete against international buyers able to afford higher prices, but the reality is that sooner or later we are all going to have to compete with global prices. That’s the trend, whether we like it or not, so we’re just going to have to figure out how to do that.” 
    De Visser thinks the government has to step up to the plate on the policy side. “They need to encourage the domestic manufacturing industry to spend the money, whether that’s through favourable taxes or subsidies—most other countries around the world do it, and BC would be remiss to turn a blind eye to that. That may smack of protectionism, but that’s just the reality.” 
    Ben Parfitt says that the government is completely failing to provide regulatory drivers to ensure a viable domestic manufacturing industry across the board, especially with respect to logs taken from provincial Crown lands. “These are public resources and we should be able to dictate the terms on which they are used,” he argues. Parfitt advocates bringing log exports to an end through an escalating tax system that acts as a significant disincentive, and says government policies to encourage more manufacturing are essential: “We should insist on a minimum threshold of investment in local manufacturing, and if that isn’t met, then reallocate the resources to someone who will invest.”
    Last but not least, says Bill Dumont, on top of investments in the manufacturing sector, a gap he agrees needs to be addressed, there’s also a need for investment at ground level. “There’s a complete lack of government and industry interest in investing in the forest before the trees are cut,” says Dumont. “There are a lot of things we can do to manage better for value at the forest level as well as the manufacturing level, to increase prices and margins—fertilizing, pruning, thinning, genetic improvements.” 
    Dumont says one of the issues facing workers in the manufacturing sector is increasingly sophisticated mechanization of production, reducing the need for labour. But the ground-level investment activities he is describing were all high employment activities in BC 30 years ago, and could be again. “Government hasn’t supported forestry work in the field since the 1970s, so we stopped. That was very short-sighted.” 
     
    What is government doing?
    What little government has been doing has been counterproductive, says Dumont. “Governments have successively monkeyed with export policy over time, opening up markets when times are tough and when the going gets better again, closing them down. As things stand, no one is going to build new mills on the coast without certainty about where government policy is going to land on this issue.”
    Both the federal and the provincial government fund product development research, and in July $2.3 million was allotted to the Wood First! Program to promote use of BC value-added wood products. But that’s a drop in the bucket of the estimated $200 million plus required as just a starting point for essential infrastructure upgrades in BC. While the government’s Forest Sector Strategy speaks of “encouraging” investment, there appears to be no hard cash attached to that. 
    In the meantime, as Dumont has pointed out, the government remains all over the map in its stance on log exports. It has publicly stated its preference that “all logs remain in BC to be manufactured into other products.” In an interview for this story, Minister Thomson repeated that is his ideal goal. But Thomson also admitted: “We recognize log exports are a critical component of the industry on Vancouver Island. There will always be log exports on the coast.” 
    Thomson initiated a log export policy review in 2011. The report was expected this spring, but as of August, there was no committed date set for its release other than a vague “sometime this fall.” The behind-the-scenes scuttlebutt is that the draft report contains some nasty thorns that may need pruning out. Thomson would only say that “no decisions have yet been made on adjustments to the policy. The analysis of the impacts of potential adjustments is still a work in progress.” Whether the review will do anything to change the status quo in any significant way seems unlikely. 
    NDP forestry critic Bill Routley is adamant some change is required. “I’m not talking about banning log exports,” he says. “There have always been exports. I’m talking about how we maximize the value-added opportunities here in BC first. The surplus test clearly isn’t working and the fee in lieu isn’t a sufficient disincentive because exports are growing.”
    Routley wants forest policy adjusted so that all sectors of the industry can benefit, but is light on specifics as to how that’s to be achieved, including the issue of stimulating investment in new infrastructure. “I do know we need to have the right policy tools, with incentives built in and strings attached to them, like requiring investment. I believe in a carrot-and- stick approach. We will increase the fee in lieu of manufacturing, but we have to get it right. We want to add jobs, not take them away.”
     
    Where does that leave things?
    With polls suggesting an NDP government will likely to be running the forestry file after May next year, it’s probable that Routley’s carrot-and-stick approach to log exports will win the day. That may not be soon enough to save the last remaining protected old-growth forest in the province, says Ken Wu: “It remains to be seen whether the BC Liberals want to leave behind a legacy as the despoilers of BC or not in the last few months of their term.” 
    Wu is also worried about whether the NDP is really prepared to step up to the plate. “Is the war in the woods simply going to carry on under their tenure?” Unless a new government is prepared to put its money where its mouth is on infrastructure investment, it may simply find itself, like its predecessors, stuck in what is now a decades-old tug-of-war between the manufacturing sector and harvesting companies as they all struggle to stay afloat.
    One thing’s clear: it would be a rare individual who wouldn’t be in favour of seeing all of BC’s logs being used in a thriving manufacturing industry in BC. But unless and until something changes at a more fundamental level than policy tweaks and tax adjustments, we should expect to see newspaper headlines about job losses in the forestry sector and log-laden ships leaving our shores for some time to come.
    Katherine Palmer Gordon is an author and freelance writer based on Gabriola Island. She’s written five books with a sixth to be published by Harbour exploring the connections between culture and self through the stories of young aboriginal Canadians. Her history of land surveying in BC, Made to Measure, won the Haig-Brown prize at the 2007 BC Book Awards.

    David Broadland
    May 2012
    The City low-balled the price tag and is concealing that fact. With so much being hidden and costs likely to top $100 million, is it time for a change of course?
     
    THE WHIFF OF SCANDAL around the Johnson Street Bridge project grows stronger. One wonders what it will take for one of the die-hard City of Victoria councillors—the ones who have clung steadfastly to what appears to be a sinking ship—to jump before they’re sucked down with the wreckage.
    Former councillor Philippe Lucas, a stalwart supporter of the project throughout his three-year term, has jumped. When Lucas learned the new bridge had lost its one unique feature—a walkway that would allow pedestrians passage through the 50-foot wheels while the bridge was being raised or lowered, his response was unequivocal. “That truly sucks!” he wrote on Facebook. “Whatever my feeling may have been at the start of this project, when we lost the rail portion of the bridge due to reluctance from the last council to back multiple motions I put forward to save this key economic link to the rest of the island, I began to realize what an unmitigated disaster this new bridge was going to be. Losing the ability to walk through the bridge is simply the final blow to what could have been an iconic link to a more sustainable future for Victoria, but has now become a short span to budget increases and unacceptable design changes, and an iconic local monument to the short-term thinking that plagues modern politics. What a debacle; what a disappointment.”
    Perplexing questions about the “debacle” continue to float to the surface: Did Mayor Dean Fortin and City Manager Gail Stephens hide a massive redesign and its cost implications before last year’s civic election? Have the costs of that redesign, still unacknowledged by any of the bridge’s promoters, even been included in the latest $93 million estimate? Was the second-to-last cost estimate purposely low-balled? What else has been concealed? Does the City even have a Plan B?
     
    What the mayor won’t talk about
    On April 3, Mayor Fortin wrote a letter to the Times Colonist stating the design change to the walkway had been discussed at a February 7 council meeting. The mayor was making the point that the change had not been hidden from councillors. The next day, Ross Crockford, a director of watchdog JohnsonStreetBridge.org, wrote to Fortin disputing this claim and asking him to make a public correction. Crockford had recorded the meeting and a transcript showed the design change had not been discussed on February 7. 
    Then, during a question period at an April 12 council meeting, Crockford asked Fortin if he intended to correct his statement that the design change had been discussed on February 7. Fortin replied, “I choose not to answer any of your questions, Mr Crockford. You are free to file an FOI request, if you want.”
    “Wait—any questions?” Crockford asked.
    “Any questions,” Fortin replied.
    Why is the question of whether or not the walkway change was discussed with councillors such a sensitive issue for the mayor?
    It’s partly about the walkway. The City had boasted before the referendum in 2010, “The new bridge will be a world-class landmark. Designed by renowned bridge architects Wilkinson Eyre, the replacement design is one of a kind and will allow you to walk through the rolling mechanism while the bridge raises.” That’s no longer true. Shouldn’t councillors have been consulted?
    But there’s more at stake. The burning questions are: Was this change intentionally concealed from councillors and the public? If so, why? And by whom?
    On March 15, when a slim majority of City councillors decided to approve spending $93 million on a new bridge, there had been plenty of opportunities for full disclosure. Joost Meyboom of MMM Group, the City’s prime consultant on the project, the bridge’s architect Sebastien Ricard of Wilkinson Eyre Architects, and the City’s project director Mike Lai all had the perfect opportunity to acknowledge the design changes the bridge had undergone and the effect those would have on its functionality and cost.
    Instead, there was an attempt to hide the design changes. The renderings presented were years old—from the era when it was going to be built in 17 months. Slides of complex construction drawings in which the changes appeared were given little or no explanation and were shown only briefly. There was no mention of the change in status of the walkway “through the rolling mechanism while the bridge raises.” Why were these changes hidden?
    And now the plot thickens. While the mayor says councillors were informed on February 7, Focus has learned the design changes were made in July 2011.
    Architectural drawings produced by Wilkinson Eyre’s office in London on July 27, 2011 show the footprint of the main pier had doubled in size compared with drawings circulated a month before, and the “walk through the rolling mechanism while the bridge raises” had been cut from the plan. The project’s inner circle must have known at that time the bridge’s cost was going to rise dramatically. More on this later.
    Since these substantial changes to the bridge’s functionality and cost occurred last July, is it possible City Manager Stephens was unaware of the changes and their cost implications when she said last October that the project “continues to be within the budget of $77 million”? Is it possible that project director Lai neglected to tell her? Stephens is the chair of the project’s steering committee, and as such she would have been at the centre of any exchange of information. She did not respond to a request for information from Focus.
    Did Mayor Fortin know about these changes and the cost implications before November’s civic elections? Is it possible the City manager didn’t inform the mayor? Fortin, too, failed to respond to a request for information.
    Did Stephens and Fortin withhold the information because it might have changed the outcome of the election? A risk management workshop held by the City in January 2011 had identified a “change of council members” as a definite risk to the successful completion of the project. The suggested mitigation strategy for this risk was “internal communication,” which, I believe, is code for “circle the wagons.”
    Had voters known before the election that the cost of the project had climbed by $16 million, would other pro-replacement councillors have lost their seats? In that election, three pro-replacement councillors, including Lucas, lost their place at the council table. The project now hangs by a political thread; the council is split 5 to 4. One Lucas-like defection from the mayor’s team and a Plan B will need to materialize.
    That this design change took place eight months before Fortin says councillors were alerted has more serious implications than what-if ruminations on last November’s election. It’s now clear that Meyboom, Lai, Stephens and Fortin have been sitting on information that, had it been disclosed eight months ago, might very well have provided both the impetus and the time to develop a Plan B. And the question arises: If they would conceal this, what else has been hidden?
     
    Is the real cost still being hidden?
    Last October, Stephens said the project would cost $77 million. Five months later it was $93 million. The City’s accounting of this price increase is confused. For example, consider construction costs. In one document, the City says the increase in construction costs is $9.7 million. But in another document, released the same week, they say it’s $7.6 million. In both cases, overall costs total “$92.8 million.” How can both be true? Was one of these numbers—or both—pulled from a hat?
    A few weeks before the revelation that costs had climbed by $15.8 million, Fortin announced $16.5 million in Gas Tax funding had been approved by the federal and provincial governments. Was the $15.8 million cost increase simply calibrated to match the increase in available funding? 
    There’s reason to believe that’s exactly what the City has done.
    A planning document for the bridge attached to an email dated July 6, 2011 (obtained through an FOI request) shows the main pier having a footprint of roughly 2000 square feet. But an architectural drawing released recently by the City shows that pier has almost doubled in size. The pier, or more properly, the pier building, is not simply a big, solid block of reinforced concrete, as with the existing bridge. It’s a six-storey-high reinforced concrete structure that would need to be built to exceedingly high construction standards. This would be a much more complex and expensive project than, say, an ordinary 6-storey residential or commercial building.
    For one thing, the pier building would have to support 2700 metric tonnes of steel perched on its “roof,” and it would need to do this without being damaged by the ground waves of a magnitude 8.5 earthquake. And, since the bottom half of the pier building would be submerged, the structure would have to be built to remain perfectly watertight for the next 100 years. Inside, the pier building would be a vast complex of gear beds, stairways, electrical equipment and a yawning open space through which the 840-tonne counterweight fixed to the underside of the bridge deck would swing when the bridge is raised or lowered. The pier building would sit on several rows of three-foot-diameter steel pipes filled with steel-reinforced concrete, the pipes socketed deep into bedrock.
    Because this complex building would have to be built inside waterproof coffer dams, its construction would be complicated, painstakingly slow and expensive. Previous to the redesign, the cost of the pier building had been estimated at about $10 million. Assuming that cost was not underestimated, doubling the size of this very expensive building would reasonably be expected to double the cost to $20 million.
    In spite of these obvious upward pressures on price, Meyboom’s latest estimate has the cost of the bridge’s two piers dropping by $1.6 million. Is that believable?
    The redesign also changed the geometry of the bridge’s moving parts (one of which is over 200 feet long) in such a way that their fabrication would require what bridge engineer Frank Nelson has called “aerospace tolerances.” Nelson says that would introduce the possibility that bids to build the bridge would include “risk pricing,” potentially blowing whatever budget the promoters were hoping for.
    All this suggests that the magnitude of the recent cost increase was simply a reflection of the Gas Tax funding getting official approval from Ottawa, not some careful new determination of costs based on a refinement of the design, as suggested by Meyboom.
    And a close examination of the recently-acknowledged costs doesn’t instill much confidence either.
     
    Was the $77-million estimate faked?
    In explaining to councillors why the cost of the new bridge had risen from $77 million to $93 million, Joost Meyboom identified “project management and engineering” as one of the two main culprits. That cost rose from $7.4 million to $13.6 million.
    Why did the amount engineering companies like Meyboom’s will receive almost double? Meyboom has admitted he underestimated a number of predictable costs, such as the cost of obtaining approvals and permits, but has given no details as to how or why that happened. It is difficult to explain. In the June 2010 estimate of $77 million, which was peer-reviewed by Stantec Consulting, “approvals and permits” are missing altogether. The peer reviewer, Stantec’s Andrew Rushforth, failed to notice this even though, at the time the estimate was done, the cost of approvals and permits for the project had already reached $320,000. And who had received that $320,000? Rushforth’s Stantec Consulting. To add insult to injury, Stantec received close to $50,000 for its “peer review.”
    Of the six categories of work that Meyboom says contributed to the $6.2 million increase in project management and engineering, none had been included in the $77 million estimate.
    What possible motive could there have been to forget whole categories of costs back in 2010? It’s well known that the City strongly favoured building a new bridge; the record is crystal clear on that. But part of the community had expressed a preference to rehabilitate the existing bridge. Perhaps the strongest part of their argument was that rehabilitation would be less expensive than building a signature bridge with an unproven mechanical design. Indeed, in an unpublished survey (obtained through FOI) conducted by Ipsos for the City in April 2010, before the $77 million cost estimate was finalized, the expense of a new bridge was identified as the most important concern Victoria residents had about the replacement option. So the City knew in advance it needed to prove a new bridge would be less expensive than a rehabilitated bridge.
    The bridge promoters were motivated to underestimate the price of a new bridge. The costs they suppressed are now coming to the surface.
    Underestimating costs is just one of the tricks the promoters used to move their project forward. They have been just as effective at using the threat of not meeting timelines to shape the project to meet their desired ends.
     
    Phony deadlines, too?
    Philippe Lucas is not alone in his disappointment over the loss of rail from the project, which he attributes to his fellow councillors not backing his motions. Although Lucas believed councillors were making the big decisions, they were actually just rubber-stamping City staff recommendations.
    Those recommendations, when they involved major turning points in the project, have been in lockstep with Meyboom’s advice. And the paper trail shows it was an arguable piece of advice from Meyboom about the extra time it would take if rail were included in the project that led to the recommendation to take rail off the bridge.
    Let’s go back to February 2011. City council had approved spending up to $700,000 on a parallel design process that would have allowed rail on the bridge should additional funding come through in time. On February 4, an email exchange (obtained through FOI) between Meyboom and Lai took place. Lai, referring to a new schedule Meyboom had produced, asked Meyboom, “Why has the timeline changed for the rail-in option from end 2014/early 2015 to a year later?” Meyboom told Lai that including rail on the bridge would add five months to its construction. As well, he said, “After completion of the bridge an additional seven months is estimated to install track, the new rail station and the parking lot for the rail station.”
    Meyboom’s rail-in schedule would have pushed completion very close to the March 2016 deadline the City had said it needed to meet to receive the full $21 million in Build Canada funding. Lai took that information back to councillors and told them that although nearly half of the funding needed for rail could be available from the CRD, it might take “four to six months” to have it approved. So Lai recommended rail be dropped from the project, partly on the basis that, he wrote, “If timelines are not met, there is a risk of losing the $21 million in federal funding.”
    Terrified of losing that money, councillors  approved Lai’s recommendation and the City ended their search for additional funding. And that was the end of rail.
    But there are two logical disconnects in Meyboom’s advice and Lai’s recommendation. First, Meyboom and Lai are the same crew that insisted in 2009 the entire project, including rail and a longer bascule leaf, could be completed in 17 months. That plan was only halted when the provincial government refused to contribute funding. But at the time that Lai was making his recommendation to council about rail in March 2011, they had 60 months to build the bridge. If the bridge with rail on it could be built in 17 months, why not in 60 months?
    Second, why would “laying track” and building a new train station and parking lot need to be left until the bridge was completed? Why not do this work concurrently with building the bridge?
    Was concern about missing the funding deadline used to get rail off the bridge because there was some other motivation in play?
    Perhaps things weren’t exactly as they seemed to Lucas and his fellow councillors. At exactly the same time as council was voting to take rail off the bridge, Pacific Liaicon and Associates were putting the finishing touches on a report for BC Transit that would go on to recommend building a $950 million LRT using the Douglas Street corridor from Downtown to Uptown, and then west to Langford. An option competing with the LRT option is commuter rail from Downtown to Langford using the existing E&N rail bed via the Johnson Street Bridge. The cost of that project has been ball-parked by the BC Ministry of Transportation at between $69.5 million and $166 million. If a new bridge had included rail, momentum would have developed to utilize that capacity; commuter rail’s stock would rise. With no rail on the bridge, it would fall. And LRT’s stock would rise. 
    Pacific Liaicon is a division of SNC Lavalin, the Quebec-based engineering and construction giant that specializes in building LRT systems. Kevin Mahoney, the chair of BC Transit’s board of directors, is also on the board of Intransit BC, the company that owns and operates Vancouver’s Canada Line. Intransit is owned one-third by SNC Lavalin. SNC Lavalin seems to have at least a couple of important ducks lined up that could give it the inside track on an LRT project in Victoria. But are those the only ducks?
    Meyboom’s company, MMM Group, is currently partnering with SNC Lavalin in two separate bids for LRT projects: the Evergreen Line in Vancouver and the Ottawa LRT Project. And SNC Lavalin and MMM Group are partners in building the $800 million Calgary West LRT. Meyboom himself is playing a prominent role in that project. According to MMM, his responsibilities in Calgary include “management of the [LRT] structural design team, resolution of project specific technical issues, and management of a very constrained design schedule.”
    Putting all this together, it appears Meyboom gave advice about timing that helped take rail off the new bridge. That increased the chances that LRT would be built in Victoria. And, if MMM partners with SNC Lavalin in building an LRT project in Victoria, like they have in Calgary, MMM would obviously benefit. 
    I asked Meyboom if he had divulged to the City of Victoria his company’s working relationship with SNC Lavalin and the apparent conflict of interest that put him in regarding his advice about rail on the new bridge. Meyboom did not respond.
    The threat of “not meeting timelines” and losing funding, which was used so effectively to get rail off the bridge, is now being used by the City to dismiss calls for a time out on the project so other options can be considered. But would the City really lose all—or any—of the funding?
     
    Does the City need a Plan B?
    The latest project schedule from the City calls for a contract to be signed with a builder this fall. They say they have prequalified eight companies. Councillors hope that at least one of those will find a way to build the Wilkinson Eyre design for $93 million. According to councillor Lisa Helps “there’s little appetite” around the table for spending more than $93 million. But if costs have been significantly underestimated, what will happen? I posed that question to Ross Crockford, whose watchdog organization johnsonstreetbridge.org has been monitoring the project closely.
    “The big risk for council,” Crockford said, “is that they’ll have no option but to keep going with the current bridge, regardless of the cost. City staff have already said, repeatedly, that any delay ‘jeopardizes’ federal funding. So if contractors tell the City this summer that they can only build the bridge for $100 million or more, council will be under pressure to approve the increase.”
    Crockford thinks councillors need to act now to ensure there’s a Plan B. “Council will have to spend a little money to create a backup plan. But, without one, the risk is great that there will be ever-increasing costs for the bridge itself.”
    Mayor Fortin has rejected any consideration of a Plan B on the grounds that would somehow put at risk $37.5 million in funding, an echo of Lai’s oft-used “If timelines are not met...” threat. But even if time is tight—which is in some doubt—what would happen if construction went past March, 2016, the deadline for the $21 million Build Canada funding?
    “First of all,” Crockford says, “the federal contribution agreement says the City can ask for a deadline extension. The request goes to a four-person committee—and two of them are City appointees. So the request would likely succeed.” But what happens if the City isn’t given an extension?
    Crockford says the City needs someone besides the project engineers to advise them. “It’s not clear what happens if the City doesn’t get an extension, and is a year or two late. The agreement does say that if the City ‘has not completed the Project on the terms and conditions herein,’ the feds could demand all their money back. But they could also just turn off the financial taps, which would be OK, because the City plans to spend nearly all the federal money by 2015 anyway. Council needs advice about this from its lawyers, not its engineers.”
    The project will also receive $16.5 million from the Gas Tax Fund. Would that be at risk  if council chooses to go to a Plan B?
    Not likely. According to Paul Taylor, a spokesperson for the UBCM, which administers Gas Tax Fund grants in BC, “A completion date is included in each funding agreement based on the recipient’s estimate of the time necessary to complete the project. This date, though, can be amended to provide additional time if there are delays in construction.”
    The City also says that pushing on with Plan A is the only way to ensure “$10 million in sunk costs” won’t be wasted. Crockford disagrees. “A lot of the money that’s already spent has been for acquiring land, geotechnical analysis, permits, moving the Telus duct, and removing the rail span, all of which would happen no matter what bridge gets built. The main thing we’d lose is the architects’ work, which City staff have pegged at $2 million. It may be worth eating that to get a standard design with a proven record of durability. There don’t seem to be any current examples of bridges with the new open-wheels-on-rollers mechanism they created. So it’s impossible to predict how much it will cost, how well it will work, or how long it will last.”
    Crockford thinks there’s just too many unanswered questions about the project for comfort and, along with several councillors, is calling for an “independent audit” of the project: “City staff have repeatedly withheld key information, and council can’t rely on them to provide all the options. An independent audit is the only way council will really find out if the City can build a simpler, cheaper bridge, and still get all the federal funding.”
     
    ON MARCH 14, Stantec’s Andrew Rushforth wrote a letter to the City’s Director of Engineering and Public Works Dwayne Kalynchuk. The letter was handed over to City councillors without explanation a few days later and a copy made it's way into my hands.
    Rushforth’s letter began, “As per your request, this letter outlines the issues relating to possible rehabilitation of the Johnson Street Highway Bascule Bridge.” Yes, that’s correct: r-e-h-a-b-i-l-i-t-a-t-i-o-n. Rushforth went on to reiterate what was already known: The existing bridge can be rehabilitated. Is this the City's Plan B?
    They could do worse. According to bridge engineer Frank Nelson, the new bridge “will likely exceed $100 million by the time it goes to construction. Rehabilitation, even including the engineering costs to date...would be half that and would keep the look and the feel of the harbour that draws many visitors.”
    Unfortunately, Nelson’s “half that” estimate was made before the railway bridge was destroyed. Debacle indeed.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus

    Briony Penn
    April 2012
    Links between election fraud and oil interests are so thick, it appears bitumen itself is lubricating the connections.
     
    OVER TWO DAYS in January, 2010, the Manning Centre for Building Democracy held a campaign school at Delta Ocean Pointe Resort in Victoria in preparation for the 2011 election. Revelations of what went on during those two days has yielded intriguing insight into what might lie behind the current robocall scandal. The Manning Centre is a Conservative think-tank operating out of Calgary, headed by Preston Manning, and board members include Gwyn Morgan, ex-CEO of EnCana Corp and other luminaries of the oil and gas industry.
    Organizers of the campaign school had sent invitations to various Conservative and former Reform party members and campaign teams, encouraging them to attend. One such invitation eventually found its way into the hands of John Fryer, a former Green Party federal council member and campaign manager for Elizabeth May. Fryer is not the kind of politico you might expect to be attending a Manning Centre event, having won the Order of Canada for his work on international labour policy. Fryer’s experiences at the two-day event were described in a letter to the Globe and Mail on March 3, 2012, as the election fraud scandal unfolded.
    Fryer wrote, “Topics covered included voter identification. Discussion ensued about suppression techniques. Instructors explained voter suppression tactics were borrowed from those used by the US Republican Party. Many kinds of suppression calls were canvassed. Another instructor gave detailed explanations of how robocalls worked, techniques for recording messages, plus costs involved. He distributed his business card upon request. Instructors made it clear that robocalling and voter suppression were an acceptable and normal part of winning political campaigns. With election ethics like this, a more compelling case for changing to a system of proportional representation where each and every vote counts is hard to imagine.”
    Vancouver Observer reporter Emma Pullman had also interviewed Fryer. Pullman works for DeSmogBlog, investigating the climate denial industry and its financial backers in the oil industry. In her article, details of the workshop were elaborated upon, including the names of the instructors: Dimitri Pantazopoulos, a former pollster for the federal Conservatives, now the Principal Secretary to Premier Christy Clark; Richard Ciano and Nick Kouvalis of Campaign Research, both long-term Conservative party operatives; and Kory Teneycke, Prime Minister Harper’s former director of communications, and the main booster for Fox North TV. 
    Following the media exposure, both Fryer and the Observer received libel threats. Fryer was asked by a Campaign Research lawyer to publish a letter saying his comments were not intended to suggest that “Mr Couvalis, Mr Ciano or Campaign Research provided, discussed or made suggestions to participants regarding any illegal or unethical campaign or election tactics,” which he did. The Observer was asked to print disclaimers throughout its article, which they did. Fryer declined to speak with me.
    When Manning Centre for Building Democracy was asked for its response to Fryer’s comments, Director of Com-munications Olivier Ballou stated that Fryer’s retraction letter spoke to the issue. But Pullman says, “Focusing on Fryer’s apology letter to the instructors misses the point. As I wrote in the article, it was the attendees who discussed using the methods that were being taught to make misleading phone calls.” The Manning Centre’s Ballou countered that no other attendees seemed to be corroborating Fryer’s story. According to a list of those who attended obtained by Pullman, most attendees were from federal conservative campaign teams in local ridings, such as those for Troy de Souza and Patrick Hunt of Juan de Fuca and Victoria. In an interview, Hunt denied there was any reference to voter suppression during the course. Preston  Manning, in a recent speech, stated: “Any political strategy, tactic, or technology which deliberately employs a lie to misdirect or mislead a voter is deplorable ethically and for the damage it does to the democratic process and public confidence in all parties and politicians.”
    But Hugh Kruzel, an independent municipal candidate from Victoria who attended the Delta Ocean Pointe campaign school says, “By and large I swallowed some of the kool aid about what the potential lessons learned from the US were, but it didn’t have any sticking power for me. If I heard something that I would never be involved in, I got up and had a coffee. Ethically, I would rather get out the vote than work to ensure other voices are snuffed. Can I remember exactly discussions about voter suppression? I believe some of that was discussed, even at the round table level.” 
     
    The Manning Centre and oil
    So what is the Manning Centre for Building Democracy and who funds it? Started in 2005 by Preston Manning, its website says it’s “a national not-for-profit organization supporting research, educational, and communications initiatives designed to achieve a more democratic society in Canada guided by conservative principles.” 
    Manning’s Ballou says “private donations” fund the organization. However, Preston Manning’s own speeches on the website identify some of these “private donors” including Canadian Natural Resources, Shell Canada, Spectra Energy, and TransCanada among others—large publicly-traded oil sector companies. 
    One private donor identified is Gwyn Morgan. Morgan, in addition to his long affiliation with EnCana, is a colleague of and former fundraiser for Harper and the Conservative Party, advisor to Premier Christy Clark, and chair of the board of SNC Lavalin. SNC Lavalin is currently negotiating the purchase of the nationally-owned Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) who make Candu reactors. Nuclear energy has long been proposed as a key future power source for the bitumen extraction process. The Harper Record (published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives) notes that AECL is working with Shell to explore nuclear potential in the tar sands. 
    Other directors of the Manning Centre include Chairman Cliff Fryers (no relation to John Fryer) a tax litigator, general counsel for Mobil Oil Canada Ltd, governor of the Canadian Tax Foundation and a director of the Canadian Petroleum Tax Society; and secretary and treasurer Blair Nixon, tax counsel to a number of natural resources companies.
    The connection between the interests of oil companies and the Manning Centre is clear. The connection between the Manning Centre and activities which would lead to electoral fraud are becoming clear.
    The result of such connections to, and funding from, oil companies for the Manning Centre—and other such organizations—is a skewed democracy in which petrodollars help elect politicians, usually Conservative, that are oil-patch-friendly. This can happen directly or indirectly, with oil revenue funding politicians or institutions that  work to create an oil-friendly culture. The power of big oil to influence public policy in the area of climate change has been well documented by such watchdog groups as DeSmogBlog, who have been tracking the financing of fake science institutes that deny climate change and obfuscate policy. And Morgan himself gave Harper’s old advocacy group, the National Citizen’s Coalition, $20,000 for fighting Stephane Dion’s carbon tax plan prior to the 2008 election. 
    The aim is to get and keep Conservatives in power, preferably with a majority.
     
    The Alberta experience
    Andrew Nikiforuk, an award-winning journalist and author of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent and a long-standing critic of Albertan petrostate politics (where the Conservative party has been in power for over 40 years) says, “A government that has access to the enormous stores of hydrocarbons can use the money to manipulate the process and keep themselves in power, and that means subverting the election process and undermining the electoral institutions.” He goes on to describe the various ways in which oil revenue lubricates the subversion process. “First there is the ability of a government running on oil revenue with no savings plan to cover up mistakes, bribe citizens and institutions, lower taxes and fund expensive infrastructure programs to win votes.”
    He also suggests: “There are no institutional watchdogs in petrostates, they only appoint puppies.” The non-puppies tend to get fired, Nikiforuk says, recounting the case of Alberta’s Chief Electoral Officer Lorne Gibson. In 2007, Winnipeg-born Gibson made his first mistake by recommending charges in nine cases of illegal electoral funding where schools and municipalities had funded the Conservative Party, all of which were curiously dropped. 
    In 2008, Gibson followed up after the provincial election with a scathing report documenting election irregularities. These included a lack of impartiality by the governing Conservative Party in appointing large numbers of electoral returning officers having ties to the Conservatives. Gibson’s report described tactics used to appoint electoral officers, which were sometimes delayed until the day before the election, thus preventing a quarter of Alberta’s voters from getting pre-registered. The ensuing delays, confusion, jammed websites and other voter suppression tactics were well documented in Gibson’s report. 
    He made extensive recommendations for electoral reform and then was promptly fired for his efforts by a legislative committee stacked with Conservatives. 
    Subsequent to Gibson’s firing, Paula Simons, a columnist with the Edmonton Journal, wrote: “The sequence of events sends a terrible message to other independent legislative officers, such as the auditor general, the information and privacy commissioner, the ethics commissioner and the ombudsman. Are they to understand that they too might lose their appointments if they criticize and embarrass the government?” 
    Gibson is currently in court appealing wrongful dismissal. 
    Nikiforuk notes, “That culture of bending the rules has expanded beyond the borders of Alberta now into the rest of Canada with the petrostate party winning its federal majority.”
     
    Ground Zero: Saanich–Gulf Islands
    Locally, Saanich–Gulf Islands’ residents have experienced at least two elections in which irregularities occurred. Viewed as a swing riding in both the 2008 and 2011 federal elections, it was targeted by robocalls apparently trying to suppress the vote for non-Conservative candidates. 
    As the Liberal candidate in the 2008 election, I have personal experience with questionable third-party funding and robocalls.
    Gary Lunn, Harper’s then-Minister of Natural Resources, was the incumbent. The riding’s strategic location at the edge of the Pacific put it at the heart of the national debate on whether bitumen could be safely distributed from our shores via pipelines and tankers. Lunn’s campaign was well supported by the oil patch gang, including Gwyn Morgan, who chose to retire in the area and whose wife headed a third-party advertiser (she also sits on the Council of Advisors for the Manning Centre).
    There were five such third-party organizations registered to support Lunn in that election, four of whom had the same address—a law office under the name of lawyer Bruce Hallsor. Hallsor is a prominent Conservative operative. A former member of the BC Chief Electoral Officer’s Advisory Committee, vice-president of the Conservatives’ Saanich–Gulf Islands Electoral District Association, and former director of Fair Voting BC, he was also named in Election Canada’s investigation of a so-called “in-and-out scheme” in his capacity as co-chair of the Conservative campaigns in BC in 2006. 
    The in-and-out scheme was an illegal mechanism whereby the Conservative Party shifted national advertising money in and out of local riding campaign accounts in order to claim it as local spending. On March 12, 2012 the Conservatives lost their federal court appeal and were found guilty of illegal election financing during the 2006 election. They were fined $52,000 although they exceeded spending limits by $1.3 million.
    In the 2008 election, third-party advertisers—each allowed to spend $3666—flooded the Saanich–Gulf Islands riding with pro-Conservative ads. Under the Canada Elections Act such advertising could only come from third- party groups that were at “arm’s length” from campaign workers. But at a meeting convened by Elections Canada officials prior to the election for all candidates, their managers, agents and riding association presidents, Hallsor was sitting next to his Conservative candidate. It’s also illegal to split one third-party group into multiple organizations to increase funding, yet four third-party advertisers shared Halsor’s law office address.
    Besides the ad expenditures, on the eve of the election a robocall went out to thousands of NDP supporters, purporting to be from Progressive Voters Association of Saanich–Gulf Islands, urging them to vote for the NDP candidate. No mention was made in the call that the candidate had stepped down, or that his withdrawal had been too late to have his name removed from the ballot. In effect, it split the progressive vote enough for Lunn to win the seat.
    Fast forward to the 2011 election. Saanich–Gulf Islands was again viewed as a close race and complaints of robocalls aiming to suppress the vote were again heard. The Green Party’s leader Elizabeth May, who defeated Lunn, has called the robocall scandal “a genuine emergency with regard to the essential integrity of our democratic institutions,” and called (unsuccessfully) for an emergency debate on the matter.
    Local political support for a pipeline from Alberta’s tar sands to the coast, and for tankers to transport bitumen through hazardous narrow passages along BC’s coast, has come solely from the Conservatives. In both recent Saanich–Gulf Islands’ elections, the Northern Gateway pipeline had been a central campaign issue. The very first public demonstration—ever—in Sidney was held to protest the northern Gateway pipeline. It was supported by Liberals, Greens and the NDP—as was the moratorium on tanker traffic on the northern coast. With a Conservative minority government, there was no way the pipeline was ever going to fly. But a majority government would be a game changer. The oil could flow. 
    Jim Harris, writing for Huffington Post, claims, “Harper won his ‘majority’ with 6848 votes. That’s the difference between a Conservative candidate getting elected and the second-place candidate in the 14 closest races that the Conservatives ‘won.’”
     
    Can Elections Canada be trusted?
    Elections Canada is now combing through at least 700 individual complaints (31,000 counting those sent through internet forms organized by advocacy groups) in dozens of ridings stemming from the current robocall scandal.
    The experience in Saanich–Gulf Islands does not inspire confidence that Elections Canada will get to the bottom (or top) of who misled citizens about polling stations in an effort to suppress non-Conservative votes. 
    After the 2008 election, both Liberal and NDP Saanich–Gulf Islands riding associations sent a complaint package to Elections Canada about the irregularities. On March 2, 2009, Elections Canada responded: “Our investigator found no one who had actually been influenced in their vote because of the purported telephone call. Nor was he able to identify the source of the person or persons who actually made the calls. As a result of the foregoing, our investigation has now been concluded.” With regard to the third-party advertisers, they wrote “it is within the discretion of the Political Financing and Audit Directorate to refer the matter to the Commissioner for his consideration.” As far as I know, no follow-up ever took place. 
    After the 2008 experience, it was clear where all this would lead. Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch saw evidence of collusion between  third-party groups. He said, “If they are allowed to get away with this [in Saanich–Gulf Islands] what happens if there’s a case where the candidate is still there? Someone could do bulk calling on behalf of whichever candidate you think will split your candidate’s vote.”
    Conacher had completed an analysis of Election Canada’s enforcement since 2004 “revealing that the main problem is no one can tell whether Elections Canada has been enforcing the law fairly and properly because it has failed to report details of how it has investigated and ruled on 2284 complaints in the past years.”
    In 2009, Will Horter of the Dogwood Initiative, a public-interest non-profit that has been lobbying against oil tankers on the coast, wrote “If someone with subpoena powers doesn’t step up with some investigative muscle, I predict many more Karl-Rove-like black-op operations in future elections.”  
    Given the Saanich experience, and Alberta’s record before that, is there any reason to be confident Stephen Harper’s Conservative government will not interfere with Elections Canada as they try to investigate the robocall scandal? Will the details be made available? Will the scandal be contained by making “Pierre Poutine” the fall guy? Where is the deeper analysis in the corporate media of the structural erosion of the country’s democratic processes? And who is tracking the oil money lubricating the decline?
    These are all question that need to be answered, and soon. Andrew Nikiforuk considers this a political emergency for the country. “Once petrostates seize power, the bar is lowered on everything and it is very difficult to raise it back up.” He cites eroding labour health and safety standards like that which led to two Chinese temporary workers being crushed to death at the Canadian Natural Resources Horizon project. Chinese company Sinopec is appealing to the Supreme Court of Canada to overturn a ruling that would force CNRH to stand trial for the deaths and face 53 safety charges. 
    This November— if Harper doesn’t stop the process prematurely—the Joint Review Panel for the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project will be in Victoria to hear appellants’ comments on the pipeline. Two of the panel are from Calgary and the third is a manager of a mineral exploration company out of Ontario. Given the money at stake and the way petrodollars are subverting democracy, it’s hard to have much confidence that the panel will be free of political interference. Andrew Nikiforuk warns, “Petrostates won’t tolerate any kind of democratic intervention, as they see it as a threat to their power.”
    But as citizens, we have to try, don’t we?
    Briony Penn, PhD, is a fifth-generation Vancouver Islander, artist, journalist, environmental educator and mother who believes the rising petrostate is an emergency for both democracy and the planet.

    Rob Wipond
    March 2012
    Documents suggest BC Solicitors General and the RCMP have been misleading the public for years.
     
    “THERE'S NOTHING, in my view, to be alarmed about,” said Victoria Police Chief Jamie Graham. He was speaking at February’s Reboot Privacy and Security Conference in Victoria, to 200 privacy experts, academics, and government and corporate executives from around North America, including Alberta Privacy Commissioner Jill Clayton and BC Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham.
    Graham was on a panel with Christopher Parsons, a UVic PhD candidate in political science and surveillance studies. Parsons was presenting findings from research done by him, me and tech expert and civil rights advocate Kevin McArthur into Automatic Licence Plate Recognition (findings first revealed in February’s Focus, “Hidden Surveillance”). 
    Automatic Licence Plate Recognition (ALPR) involves equipping police cruisers with cameras and software that can read thousands of licence plates per hour and compare those plates to crime “hot lists.” The program operates as a joint effort between the RCMP, BC government and local BC police forces, ostensibly to primarily catch stolen vehicles, unlicensed drivers, and prohibited drivers. 
    However, in some other countries, ALPR captures data about all cars on the road, which helps create comprehensive intelligence profiles about innocent people’s behaviours. ALPR has then been used, for example, to identify individuals with “suspicious travel tendencies” and intercept citizens headed to protests. And during our research, our team found disturbing evidence that ALPR has already been used here, and is intended in the near future to again be used, for tracking and recording the movements of all citizens. (Retention of ALPR data about most innocent citizens has been temporarily suspended after the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada expressed concerns.) 
    After eight months of digging, our research team had managed to ascertain this and some other facts about the ALPR program—though it only took minutes for Graham, at the conference, to recast or contradict many of them. We have documents indicating that Victoria police have purchased an ALPR system—but Graham said, “We borrow the Mounties’ car.” Sources and documents explained to us that updated hot lists are put into that cruiser daily, whereas Graham said weekly. The BC Privacy Commissioner’s office told us they’d been “briefed a number of times” about the ALPR program, while Graham described that as ongoing discussions with the Commissioner’s office about ALPR data retention: “We’re in the middle of kind of working that out…”
    Graham added that he wanted to see open discussions about ALPR between police and concerned citizens and “be up front, here’s what we want, here’s what we’re doing, let’s work together…” This, even though VicPD refused to provide anyone to talk with Focus about the ALPR program.To top it off, during the Q&A, I pointed to several such inconsistencies and asked a question, and Graham took the opportunity to describe my Focus article as “inaccurate” and engage in some back and forth with me. In reply to my question as to why he wanted to keep the ALPR data, he then said, “If what we’re trying to achieve and what we’re trying to search and locate require judicial authority, not your okay but judicial, we get it. If we don’t, we’ll axe it. Our standard is what the courts say, not by a marginal journalist.” This comment was met with a chorus of disapproving “ooo”s. Graham later said he was being “facetious.”
    For the record, Focus has not been contacted by VicPD or the RCMP with corrections to any supposed inaccuracies in our article about ALPR. But we invite—indeed encourage—any corrections or clarifications that the authorities would like to provide.
    “It’s symptomatic of the trend we’ve been finding, that we get documents and then we have an interview with someone and we hear a different story,” observes Parsons afterwards. “It’s deeply concerning that we can point to a document, and then we’re told the document is inaccurate, misleading or out of date. But a lot of times what people say is not official, either. It’s frustrating. It actually challenges a cornerstone of democracy: your right to know what your government is up to and why.”
    In any case, Graham gave general reassurance to the conference audience. “Right now, there is a big fear that there’s this database where all the non-hit data [records of the movements of cars belonging to innocent people] …is retained by police for some nefarious purpose,” he said. “That is not true.” Nevertheless, Graham then explained, like the RCMP has as well, that such a database is essentially what he wants to build. “I want that non-hit data. I make no bones about it. What would I do with it? I don’t know what I would do with it. But if I need it, I’d like to have it.”
    “Chief Graham professes there is no nefarious purpose,” comments McArthur, “but even the most basic documentation on the program, like the RCMP Privacy Impact Assessment, has been designated as ‘particularly sensitive, Protected B’, and pages were redacted [removed] when it was released to us.”
    And indeed, startling documents newly obtained by Focus show the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) has expressed even more serious concerns than we have, and also reveal that the BC government and RCMP seem to have been misleading the public since day one. 
    It began in November of 2006. A BC government press release announced the ALPR program, and stated “the federal privacy commissioner has reviewed the technology.” Soon, the Richmond Review, Burnaby News Leader, Chilliwack Progress and other news outlets covered the story, reporting that, according to then-Solicitor General John Les, “the system was approved by the federal privacy commissioner.” In mid-2009, when ALPR expanded to more BC police forces and RCMP detachments, the Victoria Times Colonist and Nanaimo Daily News reported that RCMP Sgt Warren Nelson told them, “Both federal and provincial privacy commissioners have approved the system[.]”
    However, the BC Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner has never officially reviewed the ALPR program. And confidential correspondence from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada to the RCMP, obtained through an access to information request, contradicts these government and RCMP claims. 
    The federal Privacy Commissioner first received a copy of a “Preliminary Privacy Impact Assessment” about the RCMP’s ALPR program in 2005. However, the OPC was struggling with staff shortages and never reviewed the document. In 2007, the OPC finally indicated readiness, and asked the RCMP for an up-to-date ALPR privacy impact assessment. But that updated version didn’t arrive until two years later. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada finally conducted and issued its first review of the RCMP’s ALPR program on July 15, 2009. But by that time, the ALPR program had already spread to numerous police forces and areas around BC, and the BC government and RCMP had been telling the public for three years that the federal Privacy Commissioner had both “reviewed” and “approved” the program. And as recently as December of 2011, RCMP officers leading the ALPR program were still making such claims. 
    “Permission was obtained from both the federal and provincial privacy commissioners to use [ALPR] as a pilot project [in 2006],” Sgt Nelson told Focus.
    “Generally, [the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has] been very supportive,” said RCMP Superintendent Mike Diack. 
    Yet in fact, the July 2009 review shows Steven Morgan, Director General of the Audit & Review Branch of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, describing the RCMP’s ALPR program as “a generalized and ubiquitous form of surveillance” with “real and substantial” privacy risks, and he repeatedly questions the entire program’s very legality.
    For example, the RCMP has long claimed licence plate numbers are not personal information, and so they need not abide by most privacy laws when tracking Canadians with ALPR. But Morgan writes, “Licence plate numbers and images of individuals captured by ALPR equipped cruisers would in fact qualify under the [Privacy] Act as personal information.” 
    Morgan further expresses concern that the ALPR program has no clear lines of governance and accountability within the RCMP, and no plan to ensure program changes are legal prior to being implemented. This situation, he states, contravenes directives issued by Treasury Board (Treasury Board is responsible for ensuring federal government programs comply with Canadian privacy laws). “[W]e request that the RCMP explicitly identify those individuals responsible for ensuring compliance with applicable policies and legislation for the ALPR program,” writes Morgan. 
    Morgan also challenges the RCMP’s right to gather so much information about citizens for no clearly defined reasons, adding, “We therefore request that the RCMP provide explicit reference to legal authorities (both federal and provincial) under which the ALPR program is being conducted.”
    Morgan questions how the RCMP will manage ALPR errors. The RCMP’s own studies show 8-10 percent of plates are misread. This could translate into thousands of false records daily from the Victoria area alone identifying people’s cars in places where they haven’t been. Yet these false records would still be stored automatically in RCMP databases. Citing subsection 6(2) of the Privacy Act, Morgan writes, “[W]e ask the RCMP to provide our office with details of the measures in place to ensure that records…are accurate.” 
    Morgan adds that the RCMP has not provided any procedures for people to access or correct information about themselves in the database, even though such access and correction procedures are requirements under privacy law. 
    And notable in light of the difficulties our research team has had obtaining information, Morgan describes “unease” in the Commissioner’s office “over the lack of RCMP communication to the public on this initiative,” and states, “The public has a right to know about the ALPR program and its purpose.”
    If all this isn’t disturbing enough, the most startling comments emerge in relation to an aspect of the ALPR program which has never been publicly revealed before—aspects possibly discussed on the two redacted pages in the Privacy Impact Assessment obtained by Focus.
    Morgan notes with concern that the RCMP’s Privacy Impact Assessment discusses “the collection of a series of additional data elements—race, ethnic origin, gender, blood type, financial transactions etc—which do not clearly fit within the purview of the ALPR program.”
    What does collecting information on our blood types and financial transactions have to do with catching unlicensed drivers? 
    “Wow,” says BC Civil Liberties Association policy director Micheal Vonn, reading and repeating these “data elements” aloud. “That is dazzling in terms of its overbreadth…Shocking on so many different levels, it’s hard to know where to begin.”
    Is this evidence that police are planning to use the ALPR database as a foundation for a much more expansive repository of diverse intelligence information?
    Vonn, a lawyer, is more circumspect: “This is further information to show that the program is not being used for what the public is being told.” 
    Where would they even be getting information about our blood types or financial transactions?
    “What they’re planning to tap into, I can’t tell you,” says Vonn. But she points to the Liberals’ recent privacy legislation changes and notes, “I can tell you the government of British Columbia is actively attempting to create huge data linkages between all kinds of databases that exist within government programs.” 
    Vonn isn’t sure what agendas are driving the ALPR “overbreadth,” but points out that police, somewhat understandably, always want as much information as they can get their hands on. Consequently, she says, it’s government’s responsibility to ensure this “voracious appetite” is properly balanced against the privacy rights of law-abiding citizens. 
    “What the government is not doing in this case, it would appear, is appropriately regulating this, so that we can get the right balance,” says Vonn. “When we allow the police to decide what the balance is, it’s police one hundred, citizens zero. We would have barcodes on our foreheads.”
    I provided the OPC report to federal Conservative Tony Clement, President of the Treasury Board, and Liberal Shirley Bond, BC Minister of Justice, and asked how they’d bring the ALPR program into compliance with the law. The Treasury Board stated their responsibility “does not include an enforcement role.” The BC Justice Ministry issued no reply. 
    The OPC’s Morgan summarizes concerns with an overarching recommendation: “To the extent that ALPR’s program leaders are unfamiliar with the requirements of the [Privacy] Act…we would strongly recommend that the RCMP engage its internal privacy experts and legal counsel in assessing the organization’s obligations for privacy protection.”
    Vonn says that’s as close to declaring a program flatly illegal as the Privacy Commissioner’s office would ever get in such a review. This is because the OPC must adjudicate complaints from the public about government programs, and so cannot appear prejudiced. “The advice of ‘please review’ is as strongly worded as you can get without prejudging the issue,” says Vonn. “Which is why it is very, very important to take the recommendations seriously, because they do indicate serious problems.”
    However, following this rebuke, the RCMP and OPC held a conference call in January, 2010, which Morgan later summarized in a letter. “[W]e note that the RCMP asserts that…” begins Morgan, and what follows is a point-form list of virtually every major concern the OPC had expressed, framed in the form of a dismissal from the RCMP: The ALPR program does indeed have adequate safeguards and controls, asserts the RCMP. Everything is indeed being done “in accordance with applicable laws.” There is indeed proper governance and accountability in place. And so on.
    “This is clearly the RCMP telling the federal Privacy Commissioner that it doesn’t want to do what it’s being requested to do,” interprets Vonn. “[The RCMP] have not implemented the changes. They have not addressed the concerns.”
    Yet with that, the OPC parked its file. Their office has little authority to do anything more unless someone complains about the ALPR program. But how, asks Vonn, do we complain about a surveillance program about which we can learn almost nothing? So Parsons, McArthur and I have decided that precisely that question itself will be the starting point for a letter to our federal and provincial privacy commissioners.
     
    Rob Wipond has been a freelance writer and investigative journalist for over two decades. Last year he was a finalist in the Western Magazine Awards for his Focus column, and previously won for business writing.

    Briony Penn
    October 2011
    Both the Fraser River sockeye and Pacific herring stocks are, by many accounts, on the verge of collapse, just as East Coast cod stocks did in the late 1980s. In the case of the cod, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans ignored early warnings from scientists and threatened some with loss of their jobs if they spoke out. Is that pattern repeating itself on the West Coast?
     
    THE UNFOLDING PRESENTATIONS at the Cohen Commission Inquiry into the 2009 Fraser River sockeye collapse, as well as at a recent symposium on the collapse of the BC herring fishery, suggest that history may be repeating itself. 
    By the time the federal government imposed a moratorium on the eastern cod fishery in 1992, it was too late. Many questioned why the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) didn’t warn the government earlier. 
    The answer was made clear in 1997 with the publication of an article in the Canadian Journal of Fish and Aquatic Science. Entitled “Is Scientific Inquiry Incompatible with Government Information Control?” its authors, scientists Jeffrey Hutchings, Carl Walters and Richard Haedrich—two formerly with DFO—provided evidence of the suppression of and political interference with research by industry-influenced government officials. The article concluded:
    “The present framework for linking science with management can, and has, led to abuses that threaten the ability of scientists to understand fully the causes of fish declines, to identify means of preventing fishery collapses from recurring, to incorporate scientific advice in management decisions, and to communicate research in a timely fashion to as wide an audience as possible. The existing framework of government-sponsored fisheries science needs to be replaced. It has failed to ensure viable fish resources and thereby sustain the fishing people and fishing communities upon which successful fisheries management depends. The economic and societal cost of this failure to Canada has been enormous.”
    Similar issues with government scientists were expressed frequently at the recent and concurrent Cohen Commission and Simon Fraser University symposium on the herring collapse. Sifting through thousands of pages of documents, memos, emails, scientific papers and transcripts, it is hard to find reassurance that DFO has begun to separate research from industry collusion and not interfered in scientific conclusions. Nor has DFO allowed its scientists to communicate publicly about their research, except in controlled situations.
    Independent researchers and representatives of coastal First Nations are showing signs that they will not tolerate a catastrophe of the scale of the eastern cod fishery here on the west coast—but it’s an upstream swim. 
     
    Muzzled Miller
    Much of the attention at the Cohen Commission has centred around the testimony of DFO scientist Dr Kristi Miller. Miller heads a $6-million salmon-genetics project at the federal Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo. She had an article published in the prestigious journal Science this past winter—but was ordered by her superiors not to do media interviews around it. 
    Miller uncovered what she described at the Cohen Commission as potentially the “smoking gun” for the sockeye collapse. In the course of running genomic profiles on sockeye, she discovered the vast majority of them were carrying the signature of a “novel” virus or parvovirus that could weaken the fish and make them vulnerable to a host of symptoms—variously called marine anemia and plasmacytoid leukemia. She stated that there were many elements of the history and timing of these diseases that potentially implicated this parvovirus in declines of other species of salmon—for example, Chinook in fish farms between 1988 and 1991—and that this is what tipped her to look at the possible linkages of this virus to the sockeye collapse. 
    Under questioning at the Commission, it was revealed that Dr Miller had prepared a report in 2009 that included her hypothesis that this virus may be suggestive that hatcheries and aquaculture were playing a role in the decline of the sockeye. But she was asked by her employer to remove this reference from her report. When asked why, Miller stated, “I honestly don’t remember the dialogue that occurred associated with that, but I think that many felt that to be highly speculative and not really well supported.” 
    She was also restricted from presenting at an earlier Simon Fraser think-tank into the sockeye salmon collapse. When asked about that, she stated, “I think that to be precautionary, they [DFO] would limit the exposure of scientists to any meetings that were likely to attract public attention and media.” 
    While she stated that she is not prevented from publishing her research, she added, “What we have been told is that we’re not to speak about our findings until we testify here in the Cohen Inquiry. I don’t know at what point that ban in speaking to the public will be lifted. I don’t believe it is lifted yet.”
    Why didn’t Miller’s smoking gun, when first reported within DFO, trigger the highest red alert and demand the full cooperation of industry? Greg McDade, the lawyer representing biologist Alexandra Morton, only had 15 minutes to determine why some obvious vectors for this mystery virus weren’t explored. He asked Miller why there had been no testing of Atlantic salmon in the fish farms, especially in light of the evidence (eventually released under public pressure) that symptoms of the anemia appeared in sampled farmed fish. Miller responded that she was approached by the BC Salmon Growers Association and told that, “The [fish farm] vets weren’t comfortable with testing for a signature” in their farmed Atlantic salmon, so to-date, none have been tested. 
    It came as a surprise to some that a DFO scientist cannot insist on testing farmed fish when there’s even a small chance that a lethal virus might infect wild stocks.
    Miller’s appearance at the Cohen Commission, besides confirming how government scientists are prohibited from speaking freely, validated what critics have said about the aquaculture industry having too much power. 
    During the week of Miller’s testimony, the fish farms did agree to allow testing to proceed. But Miller may not be able to take advantage of their accommodation. As she stated at the Commission hearings: “Right now, I actually have no departmental money or outside money to work on sockeye salmon from the Fraser River.” That statement confirmed another major public concern: scientists unable to conduct needed research due to lack of funding.
     
    Morton at the Cohen Commission
    On the stand at the Cohen Commission, Alexandra Morton proudly proclaimed her independence: “I don’t work for a university, the government, the industry, or a First Nation—I’m completely independent.”
    Damien Gillis, who observed the Cohen Commission, wrote after Morton’s appearance: “The fact is, throughout the aquaculture and disease hearings of the past several weeks, most of the Commission’s scientific experts either work for or have worked for the industry or government—a point Morton made clear in the final, heated exchange of the day.”
    A biologist, Morton has worked and lived in the Broughton Archipelago for decades, before and during the period when it became home to a good portion of BC’s fish farms. She observed first-hand their practices and impacts—from the disappearance of the whales she had first gone there to study, to the rise of sea lice infestations on salmon. She has become an expert on sea lice—which often occur in the crowded conditions of fish farm pens, and can carry diseases between farmed and wild stocks. Morton has published articles in scientific journals—including Science—on the subject. 
    In the course of her research, she has become both a passionate advocate for wild salmon and an articulate and severe critic of the aquaculture industry and the government.
    As a person with a “substantial and direct interest in the subject matter of the inquiry,” Morton was granted official standing at the Cohen Commission. This allowed her to access the Commission’s databases—but not, much to her dismay, to divulge her findings, even when she discovered information she believed was critical to the health of salmon stocks.
    At the Cohen Commission, she was questioned (some would say challenged) more about her credentials and her “disrespect” of other scientists than the 60-page report she prepared based on her analysis of the 500,000 pages of government documents that Cohen collected on the Fraser sockeye decline since 1992. She says her research led her to a clear understanding of what is happening to the sockeye, an understanding of why stocks declined in 2009 and rebounded in 2010. When she tried to submit her report to the inquiry, she says, “the lawyers for Canada and the Province of BC blocked me, saying it was ‘hearsay.’ They demanded I use my ‘living voice;’ when I tried to do that they blocked me, saying I am not a vet and therefore my opinion was not allowed.” (“Living voice” is a legal term referring to verbal presentation, as opposed to a document.)
    Because of the way the Commission works—insisting that all documents gathered by the Commission be kept confidential unless a legal ruling is made or they become exhibits at the proceedings—Morton’s report is not available to us, fuelling the key public concern about access to information.
    The Commission has not put up transcripts of Morton’s testimony as of press time, but on her blog Morton notes: “Only the sockeye that closely passed salmon farms collapsed. DFO science found evidence of a virus in the ones that were dying. The clinical condition of these fish and genomic evidence pointed to a mystery sickness that began in Chinook salmon farms on the Fraser sockeye route in the early 1990s, exactly when the sockeye began to collapse. The pale gills, swollen kidneys and tumour-like lesions were found in both the farm Chinook salmon and the sockeye. When the Norwegian companies quietly removed the Chinook farms mid-2007, the first sockeye generation that went to sea since 1992 without being exposed returned in historic numbers in 2010. This is what Canada and the Province of BC would not let me talk about. This is the uncomfortable truth that defies the policy that salmon farms do not kill wild salmon. I told the courtroom that when push comes to shove, the government hands it to the industry, not the wild salmon.”
    She says that at the Commission, “The lawyers for Canada and the Province of BC did not want to hear about the emails where DFO scientists were talking about the dying sockeye in the Fraser River. They were trying to figure it out, but had no money. The government lawyers did not want to hear that the provincial vet examining farm salmon is meticulously documenting new lesions. He reports these lesions are similar to the dangerous Norwegian Salmon Alphavirus, Heart and Skeletal Muscle Inflammation (which causes the farm salmon to die of heart attacks as they are being harvested), Pancreatic Disease and Infectious Salmon Anemia virus. They did not want to hear that the province is developing tests for viruses they say are not here. They refused to meet me on the battlefield, opting instead to throw rocks from the bushes. They attacked my education, my Registered Professional Biologist standing, our freedom to move over the ocean freely in a boat, and the right to free speech.”
    With so much at stake, at an inquiry that is perhaps the last chance to prevent the salmon from going the way of the cod, it doesn’t seem a wise way to treat an independent scientist.
    Up the river from the Cohen Commission, another key coastal fishery on the verge of collapse was being discussed, but with no lawyers badgering witnesses. While DFO’s past ineffectiveness was condemned there as well, the fact that some DFO scientists joined in the discussion with independent scientists and First Nations was viewed as a big step forward.
     
    Herring mismanagement causes a cultural genocide
    In late August, academics, First Nations and media joined with several scientists from DFO for Simon Fraser University’s three-day research symposium (brilliantly named The Herring School Workshop) “to digest and discuss the dismal fate of herring in the Pacific Northwest.” 
    Michelle Washington of the Sliammon First Nations set the mood for the days ahead. With tears pouring down her cheeks, she recalled the day when a way of life—one that had endured for thousands of years—ended. She was 14 years old when the commercial fleet of herring boats arrived in front of her village of Teeshoshum (“waters white with herring spawn”) on the Sunshine Coast. “There were so many boats that they blocked our view to the island across the bay.” That was 27 years ago and the herring, which provided both food and livelihoods, have never returned. 
    Throughout the conference, representatives from First Nations for the entire coast stood up for the first time, one after the other, sharing their common experiences, traditional knowledge, grief and frustration. Each pinpointed the year and cause of the loss of the distinct herring populations on which these cultures and ecosystems were built. Barb Wilson, a Haida grandmother and Parks Canada employee, was a little girl when the commercial herring fleet came to fish the spawning herring in her village bay off Skidegate. She remembers the way the boat lights lit up the bay as they fished through the night. That was in the 1950s, and the herring have never returned in numbers since.
    Frank Brown, Heiltsuk First Nation, spoke of the intense frustrations his people had in trying to change the herring management practices in the once-vital spawning grounds of Spiller Channel. “For five years, we went to fisheries and science meetings of DFO with our own herring fishery management plan, as it is a communal aboriginal right affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1996. Then we went out on to the grounds as a nation to try and stop the fishery in 2003, 2004, 2005. Canada sent in the RCMP and a paramilitary force with snipers to enforce the law. Whose law are we talking about enforcing now? The highest law in the land gave us the highest priority access. At the end of the day, the fishing fleet fished through the night and got their quota in Spiller Channel.”
    Cliff Atleo, Nuu-chah-nuulth First Nations, repeated a similar story about the once-rich herring spawning locations in his territory on west Vancouver Island over the last 40 years, and the specific years in which the sac-roe fisheries came and cleaned them out from Barkley to Clayoquot sounds. 
    Arvid Charlie of the Cowichan Tribes recounted how the herring spawns disappeared from Cowichan Bay, Genoa Bay and Gorge Harbour when he was a little boy in the ’40s from the reduction fisheries. “They came and caught the herring by the scowfuls and the herring never came back.” 
    Cliff Atleo argued that the mismanagement of herring is causing a cultural genocide of coastal people. “These are strong words but they are true, as herring are a cultural keystone species upon which all life and cultures depend.” 
    Frank Brown said the fact that scientists from DFO had actually come to participate was an important step in the right direction. He also acknowledged restrictions that scientists might work under because of industry interests, and said: “If we agree that herring is a keystone species, then we have to come together and try to overcome the fear around issues related to people’s employment, whether it is through allocations of herring or their jobs within the civil service.”
     
    Research doesn’t support DFO’s assumptions
    The smoking gun of the herring declines that indigenous representatives at the Herring School pointed to was the commercial fishery. First, the reduction fisheries that were closed in 1967, and then the current sac-roe fishery which kills the spawning fish. 
    The commercial herring fishery and processing operations are now entirely owned by Jimmy Pattison (Canfisco); and Canfisco’s senior director of fishing operations, Chris Cue, sits on advisory boards for the fishery. 
    At the Herring School, Dennis Chalmers, a fisheries manager all his career, first for the federal government and now at the provincial level, outlined past fisheries management, admitting the reduction fisheries were a disaster until their closure in 1967. But he defended current management practices for the sac-roe fishery. “We scientifically estimate pre-roe harvest biomass and only take 20 percent of the total, which is low by fisheries standards.” If biomass drops below a dangerous threshold in a large management section, which it has in four out of five regions, they don’t allow a fishery.
    Coastal First Nations people believe that the management model used by DFO, which treats the herring population as a single, undifferentiated mass that can move around within five large management units, is too simplistic. They have been arguing for decades that herring have behaviourally distinct bay populations, differentiated by geography, migratory behaviour and/or by time of spawn. For example, there are early spawners like the Gorge and Ganges populations, and some are late, like the Cherry Point population across the Strait of Georgia—all of them on the brink of extinction. 
    Not paying attention to this variability in behaviour and numbers has enabled the sac-roe fleet to aggressively target each last substantive bay population to get their quota—which has remained the same percentage, despite a decline in overall biomass.
    The stories from Sliammon to Haida Gwaii point to the fact that once fished out, these local bay populations fail to recover even after decades have passed, and the main cause has been the sac-roe fishery. Local populations have flickered out everywhere, even in Baynes Sound, which is still being fished by Pattison’s fleet. 
    However, DFO claims they haven’t found evidence that local populations are distinct, nor that the 20 percent quota of estimated biomass is a factor in the decline. Jake Schweigert, DFO herring scientist, says herring move, and he points to historical highs of the Strait of Georgia Management Unit at Baynes Sound and the Sliammon population moving around to Savary Island—although there’s been no research or catch in this section since 2000. 
    DFO scientists have been advocating this “moving herring” hypothesis for years, with no real evidence. And now there is new, independent evidence emerging that they’ve been wrong. 
    Dr Dana Lepofsky, who heads up the Herring School of researchers at SFU, has been working on the archaeology of herring for the last five years. Through excavations of village sites like Teeshoshum and Namu on the Central Coast, they have uncovered 7000 years of herring ecology and DNA in herring bones which could confirm what elders have been saying all along—that there is long-term site fidelity if these specific locations are not overfished. Abundance at these sites corresponds well to oral traditions that identify places of high concentrations of herring spawn. 
    Lorenz Hauser of University of Washington, Donga Yang at SFU, and Camilla Speller at University of Calgary have now figured out how to get nuclear DNA from the ancient bones and believe that this research direction might help us to better understand possible genetic differences between herring populations from place to place. 
    If this proves to be the case, DFO would have to accept an alternative hypothesis and embrace traditional practices—which have long been ignored but reflect this diversity. The first task, according to Arvid Charlie, would be to call for a moratorium on the herring fishery to give the last spawning groups a rest. For Karri Humchitt, Heiltsuk First Nation, the only solution is true co-management with the people who live with and understand the fish.
    At the symposium, DFO’s Schweigert defended current management and suggested that declines and failure to recover are linked to many causes. But his first choice of cause was predation by growing numbers of sea lions and humpback whales, as well as climate change. When he presented this argument, there were audible gasps from the audience, one that would have fully remembered a similar argument proffered to explain the cod collapse.
    They would also have recalled the 1995 muzzling of DFO scientist Ransom Myers over the causes of the cod collapse. Myers had found no evidence that predation by seals or environmental conditions were responsible for trends in total mortality of the 1985-87 cod stocks, yet his findings were removed from the pivotal Stock Status Report of 1995 and virtually none of the evidence that fishing was an important cause of the stock declines was included. When Myers spoke to the press directly in 1995 and stated categorically that the collapse of the cod fishery had nothing to do with seals and everything to do with overfishing, he was reprimanded and threatened with the loss of his job. 
    Many of the speakers at the Herring School Workshop knew of the Myers case and had long exposure to the problem of an industry-captured agency. So they weren’t buying Schweigert’s hypothesis. 
    Yet, once again, the fact that DFO scientists were participating was cited as progress. Two points of agreement were reached by the group. First, Steve Martell from DFO affirmed the criticism that there were information gaps in the old modelling and problems in making reliable stock assessments. Second, everyone agreed that in areas where there hasn’t been any fishing for years, the herring aren’t recovering and it isn’t clear why.
    But there are precious few people to answer that question. As Dr Ashleen Benson of SFU noted, Canadian science policy budgets have been cut by 40 percent and a third of the staff cut. Benson pointed out that they have 48 other species—in addition to sockeye and herring—for which stock assessments are required, but there is neither the staff nor budgets to do them. And there appears to be no political will to change the situation. 
    A recent example of what the federal government really cares about was their virtual scuttling—after a decade of work—of the multiple-stakeholder Pacific Northern Coast Integrated Management Area (PNCIMA), because some funding was going to come from the conservation-oriented Moore Foundation. Many believe the federal conservatives feared the agreement could negatively affect Enbridge Inc’s proposed $5.5 billion Northern Gateway pipeline. 
     
    What’s at stake
    At the end of the herring symposium, Heiltsuk representative Frank Brown summed up the events and made a call for collective action. “We are in a crisis—ecological and economic. Climate change is upon us. We are all aware of the games that get played. So we have to look really long and hard in order to build a solid foundation to move forward. We need a call to action. The stocks haven’t come back. Why? Why? The question should be a collective call to action of why?” 
    Summing up his feelings, elder Edwin Newman said, “We have been at war with DFO for decades, but we are all at the end now. Unless we all work towards saving these stocks together, and rebuild the trust, the herring will go extinct and so will everything that depends on them, from the salmon to our cultures.”
    A couple of days after her Cohen Commission appearances, Alex Morton headed out in her boat to Blackfish Sound. As she wrote in her blog, she wondered: “How could government and their lawyers be so blind to such wealth of the natural systems. Without the natural resources, BC would be poor, and yet we are destroying it so fast we will leave only the ruins to the next generation…These lawyers prevented the terrible truth from coming forward—DFO did nothing while millions of sockeye died at their feet. Fisheries were closed, salmon became scarce in some years to the people whose bodies require it. And then when one of their own stumbled on the answer to ‘Why?’ DFO prevented her from attending meetings, speaking to media, and she has no funding to work on sockeye salmon.”
    One might think the devastation of the cod fishery—and the subsequent findings of lack of responsible action—would have had more impact on us and our government.
     
    Briony Penn lives in Fulford Harbour, Salt Spring Island, where the last big spawn was 1983 and, despite local protests, charity and bait fisheries were still allowed. The wildlife have disappeared, and for her too, a way of life as a naturalist.

    Rob Wipond
    February 2011
    Not many people know that local police and the RCMP have already begun building a massive public traffic surveillance system. And no one knows how they’re going to use it.
     
    THE A-NEWS REPORTER and Nanaimo constable interwove: “amazing,” “blown away,” “overwhelming.” “This will revolutionize the way we police,” proclaimed Vancouver police in The Province.
    Both media and police across North America have engaged in such trumpeting about Automatic Licence Plate Recognition (ALPR). The RCMP and BC government piloted ALPR in 2006 and have expanded it rapidly. BC now has 42 police cruisers equipped with the technology, including one with the Victoria Police Department (VicPD), one in Saanich, and two in our regional Integrated Road Safety Unit.  
    Normally, area police manually key in plate numbers to check suspicious cars in the databases of the Canadian Police Information Centre and ICBC. With ALPR, for $27,000, a police cruiser is mounted with two cameras and software that can read licence plates on both passing and stationary cars. According to the vendors, thousands of plates can be read hourly with 95-98 percent accuracy. These plate numbers are automatically compared for “hits” against ICBC and Canadian Police Information Centre “hot lists” of stolen vehicles; prohibited, unlicensed and uninsured drivers; and missing children. When such “hits” occur, plate photos are automatically stamped with time, date, and GPS coordinates, and stored. The officer will investigate details in the above-mentioned databases directly, and may pull over suspect vehicles.
    At least, that’s how the popular story goes, and it sounds wonderful. However, some news stories have quoted academics or civil rights advocates worried about what else this plate recognition technology is, or could be, used for. ALPR was developed by the British government in the 1990s to track movements of the Irish Republican Army. By 2007, the International Association of Police Chiefs was issuing a resolution calling for “all countries” to begin using ALPR and sharing population surveillance data for fighting gangs and terrorism. Today in the UK, ALPR is used for charging tolls, “risk profiling” travellers, and tracking or intercepting people using cars photographed near protests.
    But most Canadians’ concerns have been assuaged with statements like that in a Times Colonist article: “Both federal and provincial privacy commissioners have approved the system, which must comply with federal privacy legislation, said [RCMP Sgt. Warren] Nelson.”
    Yet no one in Canada has actually investigated either police claims or the complaints. 
    That lack motivated me, along with Christopher Parsons, a University of Victoria PhD candidate in privacy and surveillance studies, and Kevin McArthur, a web architecture developer and high-tech civil rights advocate, to form a research team.
    Federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart’s office gave us our first shock of many.
     
    ALPR was never approved
    The federal Privacy Commissioner’s office directed me to statements they’d issued correcting journalists and the RCMP for saying they’d approved ALPR. In fact, the Privacy Commissioner described the ALPR program to parliament as “general and ubiquitous surveillance, without adequate safeguards,” and added, “We also urged [the RCMP] to clearly inform the public about the program and the uses of the information[.]”
    BC’s Privacy Commissioner has discussed but never officially reviewed ALPR.
    Next, I submitted an Access to Information request (the federal version of a BC Freedom of Information request) to the RCMP for a copy of their Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) on ALPR. Federal agencies are legally required by Treasury Board to write such assessments detailing how new programs will work and appropriately handle Canadians’ personal information; they’re what Privacy Commissioners usually review. 
    In August of 2011, we received an eye-opening 77-page Privacy Impact Assessment dated October 17, 2009 and titled “Final Revision.” 
    According to this document, the categories of people that generate alerts or “hits” in the ALPR system, alongside car thieves and child kidnappers, are much broader than has ever been disclosed publicly. And information on these people’s movements is being retained in a database for two or more years. For example, though you may not be stopped, your car is a “hit” and its movements are tracked and recorded if you’re on parole or probation or, in some cases, you’ve simply been accused of breaking a criminal law, federal or provincial statute, or municipal bylaw. You’re also a hit if you ever attended court to establish legal custody of your child, if you’ve ever had an incident due to a mental health problem which police attended, or if you’ve been linked to someone under investigation. The list of hit categories continues through three more pages, and a fourth page that the RCMP completely redacted.
    Meanwhile, according to the Privacy Impact Assessment, the RCMP is also keeping records for three months on the whereabouts of everybody else’s cars, too—this is called “non-hit” data. 
    What, our team asked, did keeping massive databases of records on everyone’s movements have to do with catching stolen vehicles or uninsured drivers? Kevin McArthur suggested: “[ALPR] is not intended to be a police cruiser improvement and efficiency tool, but to be a surveillance tool.” 
    I promptly submitted official information requests to the RCMP and VicPD for “all documents” related to Automated Licence Plate Recognition.
     
    We have nothing, except everything
    Normally, a journalist wouldn’t name or quote information access officers. They don’t publicly speak for the agencies at which they work. However, they’ve played such an important role in this investigation, some conversations merit reporting.
    In August 2011, VicPD Information and Privacy Manager Debra Taylor called me to explain that, even though VicPD had the ALPR system in one of their cruisers, the RCMP ran the system, and I should contact them for any information.
    “We actually don’t have a program,” Taylor said. “We don’t have any documents per se.”
    She also said VicPD didn’t have any photographed Victoria cars, because that data was transmitted via encrypted USB drive to the RCMP’s database daily. Taylor read aloud an email from VicPD Sgt. Glenn Vermette which explained, with capitals and underlines, “to clarify, we (the VicPD) do not retain ANY data whatsoever regarding the ALPR… We retain absolutely NOTHING in the way of data, images, scans, NOTHING.”
    I might have dropped it. But I heard my expert team in my head: VicPD is simultaneously admitting they’re collecting the data, and denying they have the data? And they’ve launched a major program with the RCMP without a single documented security protocol or working agreement?
    So for 20 minutes I struggled with Taylor to explain why VicPD must have some documents.
    “There must be at least some exchanges…Presumably somebody communicated with someone to actually set up this system, and continues to communicate,” I kept saying. “There must be some sort of memorandum of understanding…”
    Taylor kept responding: “We don’t have it… I have nothing to give you…I’m not trying to withhold any information from you, I just, nobody, I can’t locate anything…They probably just have a note saying please follow the RCMP policy, but you’d have to get that policy from the RCMP.”
    Finally, Taylor relented. “I’ll do a little bit more research and hopefully there’s some kind of administration paper trail.”
    A month later, Taylor handed over 600 pages. We discovered that Vermette’s email was actually sent to Taylor herself over a year earlier in response to her questions. And it was just one of 80 pages of emails, of which 40 pages were sent or cc’d to Taylor, or written by Taylor, discussing the ALPR program. 
    Meanwhile, what Vermette meant by “absolutely NOTHING” from ALPR hit records being kept by VicPD was apparently only in reference to digital information. VicPD had kept 500 pages of written, hard- copy logs of every ALPR hit they’d ever seen. 
    VicPD refused interviews. So while my team members McArthur and Parsons pored over their documents, I contacted the RCMP.
     
    It’s personal information, and not
    During frequent emails and calls with two RCMP Access to Information and Privacy analysts, I was repeatedly asked to reduce the scope of my request for “all documents” about ALPR. Whenever I did, though, there were always eyebrow-raising reasons those specific documents couldn’t be produced. In five months, I got nothing. They also hadn’t sent the legally required deadline extension request. 
    But the most remarkable responses emerged in relation to my continuing request for the ALPR database data.
    The RCMP’s Privacy Impact Assessment declares that licence plate photos are not “personal” information—a supposition that helps them skirt privacy laws and deflect public concerns about surveillance. So McArthur had an idea: Put all the data on the web, and watch how long the public agreed with the RCMP’s position, once anyone could punch in a plate number and see where and when the cars belonging to Victoria’s mayor, police chief, the premier, union leaders, journalists, government employees, armoured car companies, romantic obsessions and ex-lovers had been driving or parked for the past three months.
    Access to Information and Privacy analyst Yan Bellisle sent a search fee estimate. “The guy in BC called me and he’s like, ‘If you want everything, it means I’m going to have to pull out all the data from every car that has that system,’” she explained.
    I suggested the data from the Victoria cruiser alone would do. Then, we waited like a bait car.
    Shortly thereafter, Bellisle said the non-hit data didn’t exist. “In the Privacy Impact Assessment you probably read that all the data is kept...But the privacy commissioner came back saying that it was a privacy invasion.” Consequently the RCMP doesn’t store any non-hit data anymore, she said. 
    Could she provide any documentation of that fact? She responded, “It’s not written anywhere.”
    And the hit data? Bellisle said it was personal information, and consequently, “It’s going to be exempted under the Access to Information Act.” So I wouldn’t be getting that, either.
    A second analyst, Christine Richard, also affirmed this. “Licence plates and such would be personal information.”
    I pointed out the RCMP’s Privacy Impact Assessment stated it was not personal information.
    Bellisle later said I’d get the hit data after all, but it would cost a lot because the records could only be extracted one by one. “It takes two to ten minutes to get one [record].” She offered to send a free, printout sample.
    I asked my tech savvy team-mate McArthur if it could possibly take that long to pull the records.
    “If you were to do it in a maximally complicated way on purpose, that could be,” he said. “But it should take seconds. That’s ridiculous, the idea that you couldn’t produce a report with all that data in it, with just the columns you want. Everybody who works with databases or knows databases knows that’s the primary function of a database.”
    The free sample never appeared.
     
    Does ALPR work? To what end?
    McArthur, Parsons and I were relieved to hear the RCMP wasn’t storing non-hit data, but we were disturbed by the implications. Together with the flip-flopping on what qualified as personal information, this meant major policies and procedures around automated plate recognition weren’t coincident with their Privacy Impact Assessment. Was that even legal? And what else was the RCMP doing with ALPR and not documenting?  
    Perplexingly, the federal and provincial privacy commissioners seemed less than forthcoming themselves.
    McArthur added a salient observation: None of the touted benefits of ALPR required any retention of either hit or non-hit data. The system could compare licence plates to hot lists and nab stolen cars and prohibited drivers in real time. There was no normal policing need to store any ALPR data in a centralized database. The RCMP must have other reasons for retaining that data, but would they admit that publicly?
    I was about to find out.
    Superintendent Mike Diack and Sgt. Warren Nelson run the ALPR program out of RCMP “E” Division in Langley, BC. 
    “I know more than anybody probably in Canada about ALPR within the RCMP,” said Diack. He apologized for the document delays from the RCMP’s Access to Information and Privacy analysts in Ottawa. “I said, ‘Hey, give him everything, absolutely everything, because this is the best program and it’s the future of policing.’”
    Diack and Nelson seemed like good-hearted cops, but the future of policing seemed surprisingly underwhelming. Since 2007, about 100-150 stolen vehicles in BC have been recovered thanks to ALPR (in Victoria: zero). By comparison, Vancouver volunteers doing weekend patrols boast an annual stolen car recovery rate ten times that. 
    Primarily, ALPR hits have led to 7,191 charges for no driver’s licence, 2,215 for no insurance, and 1,199 for driving while prohibited or suspended. But Nelson couldn’t show if crime or charge rates have been trending up or down due to ALPR, or are above or below areas in BC not using ALPR. 
    Though commonsensically ALPR could increase some charge rates—hence its popularity with traffic police—a 2011 study in the Journal of Experimental Criminology noted that “the crime prevention effects and cost-effectiveness” of ALPR systems “remain under-evaluated.” Theirs, and the other lone study done, found that ALPR “does not achieve a prevention or deterrent effect” on any types of crime. This is the case with most camera-surveillance operations.
    ALPR is definitely a make-work program for police officers—or one that seems to have little result other than possible citizen intimidation. Police easily get dozens of hit alerts per shift but, typically, less than one in four results in charges. Nelson explained that this is partly because police usually discover the cars of prohibited or suspended drivers are being legally driven by someone else. (Their whereabouts are still recorded and stored, though.)
    “They do cause an awful lot of extra work,” acknowledged Nelson, “unless you’re really dedicated to doing it and don’t have other duties pressing.”
    Last year, VicPD told the RCMP, “We do not anticipate obtaining any more ALPR units as we cannot keep up with the volume of work they produce.”
    Nevertheless, the RCMP is hoping to expand ALPR, so I probed deeper.
    I shouldn’t draw too much from the Privacy Impact Assessment, suggested Superintendent Diack. Between technology or program changes, he said, “Every two or three years there’s a new PIA...But it’s a horrendous amount of work doing those things...We usually contract it out.”
    When asked if the database contains personal information, he and Nelson said absolutely not.
    “All that’s in those hot lists is lists of numbers...and that image of the licence plate or the image of your car are in there, [but] neither are personal,” said Nelson.
    Contradictions emerged, though: They later explained they kept hit data for exactly two years because it was a requirement for police under the Privacy Act—but that requirement applies only to “personal information.”
    I read from the PIA hit list: Why were they tracking, say, people who went to court to get child custody?
    “That can’t be what it says,” responded Diack. 
    “I think perhaps you’re not reading it the way it’s intended,” said Sgt Nelson.
    I wasn’t the only one wondering, though. When I’d read these sections to the federal Privacy Commissioner’s ALPR expert, she’d been surprised and directed me to Diack. Meanwhile, VicPD documents show BC’s assistant privacy commissioner expressing concern in 2010 and requesting “a list of the proposed [hit] alerts.” VicPD officials directed Taylor to ask Nelson, and there the paper trail ends.
    I requested written clarification. Nelson confirmed those four pages I had received described ALPR hits. He provided explanations: if you try to cross a border, police should know if you have legal custody of your child; if you’re seriously mentally ill you could be dangerous, etc.
    As for the non-hit data, Diack confirmed that, at the request of the federal Privacy Commissioner, it was no longer being retained. However, they’re planning to start tracking all of us again. “We’re now working on a new Privacy Impact Assessment in regards to being able to retain our non-hit data for one year,” said Diack. 
    According to my fellow researcher and PhD candidate in surveillance, Christopher Parsons, last October, at a privacy conference, VicPD Chief Jamie Graham also publicly expressed interest in retaining ALPR non-hit data. 
    Diack said he’d take seriously any concerns Federal Privacy Commissioner Stoddart’s office had with their plan; however, he added, “I’m not aware that we need approval of the Privacy Commissioner.”
     
    The real agenda and function creep
    Micheal Vonn, policy director for the BC Civil Liberties Association, has long been expressing concerns about surveillance. 
    When I described our team’s efforts figuring out what was going on with ALPR, she commented, “It’s increasingly difficult to speak about getting information from the police, and I would say in particular the RCMP, without invoking either Lewis Carroll or Kafka...You get the sense that it’s strategic, that it’s tactical, that simply having nothing to have a debate about by moving the targets constantly and not providing transparent information is actually part of the program...If you’re not troubled by the surveillance technologies at issue, you should be deeply concerned about the citizens’ ability to understand what their government is up to.”
    Vonn disagreed with Diack’s lack of concern about the PIA’s differences from the program itself. “As you’ve discovered in your inquiries, it’s like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. Trying to say, ‘What is it exactly that you’re proposing? What exactly is it that you’re doing?’...So the policy documents are incredibly important.”
    And if the RCMP hired an outside contractor to write their PIA, said Vonn, “Then you have to ask yourself, to what degree is it ‘baked into the system’? It just seems to be applied like icing on top. And what you’re discovering is, people don’t even know the content of it.”
    As for Diack and Nelson’s contention that the ALPR system doesn’t collect personal information, Vonn said, “What a pile of hooey. Personal information is any information that has the inherent ability to identify you personally...They’re not stopping the car because they think your neighbour is driving it.”
    The RCMP’s intent to keep all non-hit data for one year drew a silence. Then Vonn said, “Shocking…What essentially you heard from them is, ‘We want a massive surveillance system of all travellers on the highway that we encounter. We want an absolutely massive surveillance system of general population travel patterns.’ It doesn’t mean anything else.”
    She continued, “As an illustration of function creep, you have an absolutely brilliant illustration here...It means we go from instituting a technology that comes in through the back door of a pilot project, never properly debated up front…and the whole rationale is going to be stolen cars. And within how many months of the pilot, we’re already pushing for population-based surveillance...Now that as an illustration of function creep is about as tidy as it gets: ‘How about stolen cars? Oh, hells bells, how about everybody.’”
     
    Distracting police from real work?
    “I think people should be outraged,” commented my fellow researcher McArthur. “The public needs to know what’s going on...The concept that somebody’s going to record where I was, at a point in time, for no reason, with no probable cause, with no warrant, with no anything...And it’s not just me, it’s going to be thousands of people. Every day. It’s too much. It crosses a line...It’s not what I think we need, or is safe to have, in a democratic society.”
    How might BC’s ALPR system be used if the RCMP implement their plan?
    McArthur noted that typical commercial ALPR software boasts built-in tools for movement mapping, data mining, and intelligence analyses. People who live in high-crime areas or who have unusual travel patterns may be targeted with more suspicion, for example. But it could easily go further.
    “This isn’t just as simple as I collected a licence plate and I checked it against a database. It’s a geographic piece of information that says this person and this person were in the same place…And when you start doing social network analysis or group analysis, you can learn associations, you can start to make inferences,” explained McArthur. He added, “There are certain activities that need to be secret from the state. Meeting with a journalist. Organizing a trade union...This could be very dangerous in the wrong hands. Maybe that’s not today’s place, but what about 10 years from now?”
    Vonn agreed, adding that ALPR and other surveillance systems are notorious for drawing police away from traditional policing (following leads after a crime has been committed) towards intelligence operations.
    “So we’re not looking at a situation where we’re investigating a particular wrongdoing. We’re capturing data for a potential for wrongdoing,” Vonn explained. “That’s criminal intelligence...Essentially a mapping of the population with pre-crime in mind. We’re collecting data on you in case you are a criminal. We’re collecting data on you in case we need it later.” 
    Information collected may also be used outside judicial processes, said Vonn, to build no-fly lists, intercept protesters going to protests or, as in Vancouver’s infamous program, prevent certain people from entering pubs.
    “And the reason you need to be worried even if you’re not a ‘bad guy’,” continued Vonn, “is because that’s not the criteria anymore. The criteria is whether or not you’re a risk...And what constitutes being a risk is something that’s a formula, an algorithm, a series of data points...You are a risk when you fly if any of the following gets checked off...It’s a kind of intelligence-generated slander...a prejudice generating machine...And your ability to defend yourself against surmise is extremely difficult.”
    However, the RCMP’s Privacy Impact Assessment states ALPR is “not to be used as an intelligence gathering tool.”
    “It’s not the intended use of this system,” confirmed Diack. “It’s to identify licence plates associated with criminality, people who have committed an offence or suspected of committed offences, so we can interdict them and act appropriately.”
    If RCMP retain the ALPR data on everyone, said Diack, then it could help active criminal investigations. Police could be allowed appropriately regulated access to a potentially rich repository of information about a suspect's prior movements.
    Even if Diack and Nelson have the best intentions, Christopher Parsons, my fellow researcher, commented, those aren’t inscribed in solid policy documents. So what might a future RCMP, other government agencies, secret services, or US Homeland Security do with detailed information on specific Canadians’ daily movements? “The fields, the things they’re looking for now, the things they’re recording now, the current data-sharing framework, that is what we see today. But there’s no reason to suspect or to believe that it will remain static. That isn’t the nature of these programs.”
    A good example is the Canadian Police Information Centre itself, designed as a shared repository of Canadian police records. Who envisioned its newest uses—US border personnel turning back Canadians with mental health incidents in their past (as Ontario’s Psychiatric Patient Advocate Office revealed recently), and local police tracking their movements via ALPR?
    And fluidity is already evident: Sgt Nelson contended, “Our information is our information and we don’t share it.” Yet the ALPR Privacy Impact Assessment states, “Eventually information may be shared, disclosed and retained internationally.”
     
    Who’s protecting us?
    Privacy expert Raymond Wacks writes that attacks on privacy have an “air of injured gentility” and often aren’t taken seriously in comparison to other social problems. Yet privacy, he points out, is the foundation of free speech, free association and equality before the law, and essential for our sense of freedom to be ourselves, for emotional release and sharing confidences and intimacies, and for test-running new ways of being.
    And while ALPR is just one of many surveillance systems encroaching upon us, it’s illustrative of the dearth of mechanisms in place to protect us. 
    For starters, BC Civil Liberties’ Vonn explained, our legal limits on police rights to gather personal information are scant. 
    “The police can collect information without consent for the purposes of law enforcement, or else they couldn’t investigate anybody,” said Vonn. “Does that mean they can film anybody and walk around behind them?...Anything a police officer does is for a law enforcement purpose?...What are the parameters? We don’t have any case law on that...I envision there being a [legal] challenge at some point, an inquiry or otherwise, into this kind of sweeping definition of what constitutes personal information collected for law enforcement.”
    Parsons added that police themselves have traditionally limited and prioritized their investigations, because they simply couldn’t afford to conduct unlimited investigations on everyone. Cheap, modern surveillance technologies remove that limitation.
    “The more you add efficient surveillance mechanisms,” said Parsons, “the easier it is to start hammering at those underlying assumptions, those underlying frictions that guarantee our freedoms.”
    And it’s nearly impossible for the public to hold police to account. Any agency can avoid releasing information for years. According to an Access to Information and Privacy source, federal agencies that repeatedly get annual poor grades from Treasury Board on meeting access-to-information responsibilities may simply be directed to hire more staff. BC’s rules are similarly anemic.
    Who else could help?
    Neither federal nor provincial Privacy Commissioners have enforcement powers. Consequently, a source in the federal office explained, they regard Privacy Impact Assessments as ever-evolving frameworks for discussion, and rely on collegial, consultative, cooperative relationships for any leverage they have. That’s likely why no official representatives from either office would speak to me about this controversial program, instead offering either cryptically crafted letters or “backgrounder” responses from unnameable sources.
    Treasury Board holds ultimate authority federally to ensure PIAs are up to date and programs comply with privacy law. Yet when I bluntly asked whether the RCMP’s PIA must reflect how the program actually works, a Treasury Board source answered that “it is the responsibility of each institution to determine how to develop and maintain these assessments” and directed me back to the RCMP. 
    “I worry to think that we should be relying on the police to decide when and when not to surveil the public,” said McArthur. “It should be that you submit your PIA to the Commissioner for approval, get it approved, ‘Okay, you’re allowed to do that.’ And then when you want to do something else, you go back and say, ‘Here’s the updated one.’” 
    Certainly, our governments must lay legal groundwork, and the 2009 Madrid Privacy Declaration, signed by privacy experts around the world, provides direction: “Noting with alarm the dramatic expansion of secret and unaccountable surveillance” threatening democracies world-wide, they call for “meaningful Privacy Impact Assessments that require compliance” and a moratorium on mass surveillance to allow for public debate.
    Parsons wondered why police aren’t collaborating with people like these. “It seems as though [civil liberties] advocates are seen as a problem, a potential issue that has to be resolved, rather than as collaborators to sit down and work with to safeguard Canadians.”
    Vonn similarly observed that police and politicians use the rhetoric of “Batman and Robin” and “good guys versus bad guys” so often to promote their agendas, that it makes critics seem antipolice, and sidesteps honest, transparent debate.
    “Of course we need policing,” said Vonn. “We need appropriate, responsible policing, and we need transparent policing, with civilian oversight...It’s a very basic democratic model. I think this retrenchment into ‘you’re for us or against us’ is deeply unfortunate.”
    Vonn added, “If we care about a free and democratic country, we’d better not allow an entire infrastructure of unaccountable surveillance to be built up around us as we are placated with Batman and Robin homilies.”
     
    WHEN MY RESEARCH TEAM REGROUPED, Kevin McArthur said, “I can’t say I know what’s going on.”
    Christopher Parsons noted: “The three of us are probably some of the most informed citizens on ALPR in Canada, and we’re still asking these [basic] questions. That’s absurd.”
    Examining it more closely for this article, I found my own best summary right in the RCMP’s Privacy Impact Assessment. In lengthy sections answering legal and policy questions, some pages declared, “No personal information is recorded during the ALPR operation.” But I found other pages declaring the opposite: “The only personal information stored in the ALPR database is the vehicle plate number.” So here we had Canada’s national police force addressing the key issues of privacy protection in the defining document for a massive surveillance program authorized by our federal and provincial governments...but had anybody other than us three even read this thing carefully? 
    Holy lack of accountability, Batman.
    Rob Wipond has posted hundreds of pages from his access to information requests about ALPR.

    David Broadland
    March 2012
    The long-term environmental consequences of a mistake made by Victoria City Hall are uncertain.
     
    WHAT’S THE PURPOSE of federal environmental regulations as they pertain to construction projects like the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline? Are they intended to protect the environment from negative impacts caused by construction? Or are they intended to protect construction projects from the negative impacts caused by public concern and scrutiny?
    These questions floated to the top of my mind recently after I posed a series of questions to Transport Canada about the Telus duct relocation project in Victoria Harbour. It appeared that a key stipulation of a Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (CEAA) environmental assessment had been ignored or misunderstood by the City of Victoria, and the regulatory body that was supposed to be protecting the environment and enforcing the law was instead defending the City.
    Let me give you some context to set this up. My conversation with Transport Canada will follow.
    Work recently done by Ruskin Construction under a contract with the City of Victoria involved dredging a large trench across an area of Victoria Harbour that has been registered with the federal Contaminated Sites Inventory. 
    The trench was dug in order to relocate communication cables belonging to Telus. The relocation project had been subject to a CEAA Environmental Assessment Screening Report carried out by Transport Canada.
    Studies have shown the area that was trenched is badly contaminated, with at least 19 environmental toxins present (see below), each at concentrations that would qualify the site as a “Contaminated Site” under the BC Contaminated Sites Regulation Guidelines.
     
     

     
    The consequences of stirring up those contaminants was laid out in a report prepared by Stantec Consulting for the City of Victoria. Stantec noted, “Both sediments and contaminants have the potential to affect marine biota. Increased turbidity may interfere with fish respiration, feeding activity and result in direct smothering of marine organisms. Resuspended contaminants may be ingested and result in bioaccumulation within the food chain, decreased invertebrate diversity, abundance and growth and physiological and behavioural alterations.”
    The City of Victoria was given permission  last September by Transport Canada to go ahead with dredging the trench through the contaminated site. Transport Canada’s environmental assessment of the project accepted recommendations made on behalf of the City by Stantec that the work could be done without significant harm to the environment if certain precautions were taken. But in addition to the mitigation strategy put forward by Stantec, Transport Canada stipulated “that the proponent installs a sediment curtain around the area to be trenched to ensure suspended sediments are contained within the immediate project area.” (Emphasis added.)
    On reading Transport Canada’s assessment, any reasonable person would, I think, come to the conclusion that a legitimate process to protect the environment was at work. After all, Transport Canada was demanding that a significant action, above and beyond what the City was offering, would have to be included.
    As it turned out though, Ruskin Construction dredged the trench through the contaminated site without deploying the required sediment curtains. Headquartered in Prince George, the company had the lowest of five bids the City received from companies pre-qualified to bid on the Telus relocation project.
    When asked why sediment curtains were not used, a spokesperson for the City of Victoria, Katie Josephson, said an “environmental monitor” had been on the site and any decision not to use a sediment curtain would have been made “under their guidance.”
    Josephson told Focus the environmental monitor’s work was done “in consultation with Transport Canada and according to their regulations.”
    Josephson first identified the “environmental monitor” as an employee of MMM Group, the City’s prime consultant on the relocation project, but two weeks later clarified that Ruskin, the company that did the dredging, had done the environmental monitoring.
    Adding two of Josephson’s pieces of information together, we arrive at the startling conclusion that the company doing the dredging also made the decision not to use sediment curtains. (Ruskin Construction did not respond to a request for information)
    Josephson also said, “A silt fence or sediment curtain is required for work on land as the issue is to prevent runoff with contaminants from entering the harbour... No sediment curtain is required in-water—only mitigation measures.” (Emphasis added.)
    But a spokesperson for Transport Canada, Sau Sau Liu, contradicted the City’s claims about what they were expected to do and what consultation had taken place.
    “Transport Canada,” Liu said, “did not advise the City of Victoria, or any other entity, to not use the sediment curtains.”
    Transport Canada was also at odds with the City’s interpretation of what “sediment curtains” and “mitigation” meant.
    As Liu explained, “A sediment curtain is a fine-mesh fabric suspended from floats and weighted at the bottom to control silt and sediment from entering or spreading in the water, and allows suspended particles to settle in a confined area of water.”
    Liu also said, “The mitigation required was the use of a sediment curtain around the area to minimize the spread of suspended sediments.” Liu clarified that “the immediate project area” stipulated in the environmental assessment “refers to the area adjacent to where the work was done.” In other words, the dredging across the contaminated site should have involved sediment curtains strung from one side of the channel to the other, on either side of the dredged trench. A City employee had, by mistake or neglect, misinterpreted the  intended mitigation.
    Now this sounds like a clear-cut case of the City failing to abide by the terms of a CEAA environmental assessment. Fulfilling the stipulations of that assessment was part and parcel of a federal contribution agreement to provide up to $21 million to fund the new Johnson Street Bridge project. The funding agreement said failure to abide by the terms of the environmental assessment could lead to “default.”
    But the studies and the terms of the funding agreement, so far as they purport to protect the environment, appear to be a farce.
    I suggested to Transport Canada’s Liu that since her agency had stipulated use of a sediment curtain to prevent environmental damage, it followed that, since curtains were not used, environmental damage would occur.
    Liu responded, “No. Transport Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans required the proponent to have an environmental management plan and an approved environmental monitor on site responsible to the environmental management plan. The environmental management plan and use of an environmental monitor mitigate environmental damage.”
    Just how deployment in the field of the “environmental management plan,” or even the “environmental monitor” could physically replace the missing sediment curtains in preventing the spread of contaminant-laden sediments was unclear. 
    Would Transport Canada follow up to determine whether any environmental damage was done? Liu said, “Transport Canada has received environmental monitoring reports for all works conducted to date on this project. We are satisfied with the work to date.”
    Although the City claimed Ruskin was the environmental monitor, Liu said the “environmental monitoring reports” were provided by the City of Victoria. And when we asked Liu what specific actions had been taken by Transport Canada that allowed them to conclude “there has been no environmental impact,” she said, “Transport Canada reviewed the environmental monitoring reports provided by the City of Victoria...” But can simply reading a report prove anything?
    It gets worse. Scrutiny of Transport Canada’s CEAA Environmental Assessment Screening Report for the Telus Duct Project shows that much of the report is simply a word-for-word copying of paragraphs from a report written for the City by Stantec Consulting. Transport Canada provides attribution for some of this copying, but some copied passages are given no attribution. It boils down to this: the Environmental Assessment is largely written by the proponent. Is that how it works for Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline proposal, too?
    It’s not surprising that the City of Victoria bungled the very first shovels-in-the-ground operation in building the new Johnson Street Bridge. The project so far has been a long series of miscalculations dressed up as progress. But it’s harder to understand why Transport Canada would, at considerable taxpayer expense, first produce an environmental assessment that insisted on an action they said would mitigate environmental damage, then willfully look the other way once they learned their instruction had been ignored.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Rob Wipond
    July 2011
    There’s much to learn about BC’s laws and eldercare system from the last years of Kathleen Palamarek’s life in a local nursing home—especially from the battles that were fought in her name between her children, care providers and the Vancouver Island Health Authority.
     
    IT WAS A SMALL BUT IMPORTANT EPITAPH for a much-loved woman. NDP West Kootenay MLA Katrine Conroy spoke in the provincial legislature in June in support of a public inquiry into the recent “suspicious death” of Kathleen Palamarek, an 88-year-old resident of Broadmead Lodge in Saanich.
    During Lois Sampson née Palamarek’s five-year struggle to help get her mother out of the nursing home, Kathleen became an icon to local seniors advocates. That’s why the Saanich Peninsula Health Association, Vancouver Island Association of Family Councils, Old Age Pensioners Organization local, and others have been blitzing politicians, media and public agencies with requests for an inquiry.
    “[T]he suspected abuse was due to overmedication, and the family needs answers,” said Conroy.
    Yet the story involves much more than possible improper medicating; I’ve been following it since 2006. Kathleen’s life, and now death, is a tragic example of how our outdated guardianship laws summarily declare seniors “incapable” and thereby turn them into battle zones over which families, health professionals and others fight for control amidst an increasingly troubled eldercare system. 
     
    Measuring incapability
    In BC, assessments about whether or not people are “incapable” of managing their own affairs are usually conducted by medical doctors. The final declaration occurs before a judge, but unless someone protests (and typically the person in question isn’t notified, so as not to cause him or her undue anxiety), that’s a rubber-stamping.
    Once deemed incapable under the BC Patients Property Act, you have no legal right to make any decisions. Those rights are transferred to a court-appointed representative, usually a relative or the Public Guardian. 
    And here’s the kicker: BC capability assessments, from a scientific point of view, are a joke. 
    The “Guidelines for Issuing a Certificate of Incapability Under the Patients Property Act” issued by the BC Public Guardian and Trustee states, “there is no standard procedure for carrying out an assessment.” In addition, their detailed 2009 report written by UBC expert Deborah O’Connor explains that the science of capability assessment is “under-developed” and there are no established best practices whatsoever. The “Mini Mental Status Examination” (MMSE), she writes, “is unquestionably the most widely used tool,” even though this crude 30-point cognition test involving counting backwards, repeating odd phrases, and drawing geometric shapes “was never intended...as an assessment of capacity.” O’Connor advises that tests like the MMSE are “often inappropriately relied upon” by physicians and courts who don’t recognize there’s “inadequate evidence” linking such tests with “actual behaviour” in the “real world.”
    O’Connor also explains that mid-range MMSE scores are especially unreliable—and that’s where Kathleen Palamarek usually scored. 
     
    Dubious science, unchecked powers
    Kathleen PalamarekAfter being hospitalized with haemorrhaging from an apparent medication error in 2006, Kathleen was declared mentally incapable and eventually moved to Broadmead Lodge, while control of her affairs went to her son Ralph Palamarek, who had her signed Power of Attorney for finances and Representation Agreement for health care decisions. 
    During this time, a history of conflict amongst Kathleen’s children escalated into frequent arguments, physical confrontations, and a prolonged court battle for legal “committeeship” or full guardianship authority over Kathleen under the Patients Property Act, with Lois on one side and her three brothers on the other. 
    It’s clear from court documents that, generally, Lois wanted to care for her mother at her own home and distrusted the quality of life and care at Broadmead Lodge, while her brothers distrusted Lois and felt their mother generally had good care and a good life at the Lodge.
    There were serious differences: When Kathleen was agitated, was it due to a poor quality of life at the Lodge and side effects of medications, or due to Lois visiting too frequently and speaking ill of the Lodge? Was it a conflict of interest when lawyer Heather Fisher sometimes represented Ralph in disputes with Lois, while Fisher doubled as a director on Broadmead Lodge’s board? Was it necessary for Kathleen to be taking antidepressants, antipsychotics and benzodiazepine sedatives, all at the same time? The antipsychotics were of particular concern because Health Canada had warned about a doubling of death rates in elderly people with dementia, mostly from heart attacks (see “Crisis Behind Closed Doors,” Focus, June 2011)—Kathleen had dementia and a history of heart troubles.
    Meanwhile, a diminutive, deferential lady, Kathleen’s own feelings, and degree of ability to express those, also became matters of contention. 
    MMSE results were the primary tests featured in assessments and court documents, although the underlying dubious science sometimes peeked through. Dr Art Prowse wrote, “Her mini mental status score of 27/30 suggests a higher level of function than she actually has.” Dr Dale Nicholl later scored Kathleen at 17/30 and cited that earlier 27/30 score as evidence that Kathleen had suffered “a significant decline in her functioning level” since then. Still later, VIHA psychiatrist Dr Michael Cooper scored Kathleen at 20/30—she lost the 5 points that would’ve graded her as normally functional by not being able to name the exact date. No scoring adjustment was made for the fact that she was living in an institutional environment with no strong reason to keep daily track of dates, nor for the medications known to negatively affect cognition and memory.
    Understandably, then, though everyone agreed Kathleen had poor hearing and some short-term memory problems, the question of the degree of her “incapability” became contentiously polarized and fuelled family conflict, especially when Kathleen began more frequently expressing to various parties her wishes to live with Lois.
    In an affidavit, Dr David Leishman at Broadmead Lodge described Kathleen as having “no understanding or appreciation for what is happening around her.” In her affidavit, retired nurse Carol Pickup, a seniors advocate who visited with Kathleen for years, conversely described Kathleen as having better and worse days, but generally as “well aware,” “coherent,” “quite savvy” and with “a good sense of humour.” A lengthy video of her mom in conversation in 2011 posted by Lois on YouTube certainly gives the impression Pickup had a better read. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrzngkyy6Ds)
    With Lois’ help, in 2007-08 Kathleen met quietly off and on with lawyer John Jordan. He concluded Kathleen was competent enough to give him instruction and consistent in her desire to do a new Representation Agreement naming Lois her health care representative. On October 28, 2008, Lois joyously took her mother home.
    The next morning while Lois, her husband Gil, Kathleen, and nurse and seniors advocate Lyne England were having tea, three police officers, two paramedics, and two emergency mental health response team members showed up at Lois’ door. Broadmead Lodge’s attending physician, Dr Nicholl, had issued an emergency certificate under the Mental Health Act to take Kathleen to the psychiatric hospital. 
    “It was a nightmare!” declared England to me shortly afterwards.
    The Mental Health Act is the ultimate hammer in the doctors’ tool bag of draconian powers in BC, giving them the ability to instantly and indefinitely, without any judicial oversight, incarcerate and forcibly “treat” anyone for the “protection” of that person or others, or to prevent “mental or physical deterioration.” These broad, vague terms aren’t defined anywhere, so essentially they’re a blank cheque for doctors to seize control of virtually anyone’s life. 
    Throughout all these events until today, the health professionals at Broadmead Lodge and VIHA have always portrayed themselves as “neutral” in what they describe as this “family conflict.” But behind-the-scene records revealed in court about the involuntary apprehension of Kathleen show how the health professionals’ powers have sometimes exacerbated and even played deciding roles in those conflicts.
     
    Use or abuse of power?
    VIHA records written by a staff member show Ralph had long been telling staff at Broadmead Lodge and VIHA that Lois was a volatile, physically confrontational and mentally ill person: “[Ralph] has said that sister has gone off her meds for Schizophrenia & has become more erradict [sic]... [Broadmead Lodge Director of Care] Fiona Sudbury has connected [with] their risk management team & consulted [with] legal advice as to this situation...” Ralph apparently described Lois as believing “pills are poisons,” and the notes variously imply Lois likely could not be trusted with Kathleen’s medications.
    According to Lois, her husband of 30 years Gil Sampson, and her family doctor who reviewed her medical records, she has never been diagnosed with schizophrenia and has no blanket dislike for medications. In response to Lois’ recent defamation lawsuit, Ralph has countered that, “in the past, [Lois] told members of her immediate family that she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.”
    Regardless, Lois’ removal of Kathleen from Broadmead Lodge in October 2008 apparently ignited many of the health professionals’ prejudices and fears. Two days later, Giuseppe Scaletta, co-ordinator of VIHA’s Elderly Outreach Services, wrote in an email to senior VIHA doctors and staff, including Dr Michael Cooper and Dr Janet Mak, “The daughter who removed this lady from Broadmead has a history of schizophrenia and does not believe in medications... I believe that this is an abuse/neglect situation that warrants some intervention on our part.”
    Scaletta began the discussions suggesting the doctors do an independent “assessment” of the situation and decide what actions might be “appropriate,” but by the end of the discussions all pretence to objectivity seems to have been lost. 
    “Here is our plan,” concluded outreach nurse Jessica Celeste. “The [Victoria Police Department] will meet Dr Mak and I in front of the building... We will then assess and request for ambulance to transport [Mrs. Palamarek] to [Royal Jubilee Hospital] for psychgeriatric [sic] assessment... She will then be transported back to the Lodge at Broadmead. Her son Ralph is aware. The Lodge of Broadmead’s Director of Care is aware of the same plan and will readily admit her.”
    It looked like an unequivocal plan for VIHA doctors and staff to neither question the portrayal of Lois they’d heard, nor uphold Kathleen’s own right to at least be independently examined for her current mental health status and ability to make decisions. 
    And that’s pretty much what happened.
    On October 31, 2008, VIHA emergency psychiatrist Dr Janet Mak visited Kathleen at Lois’ home. She noted that Kathleen couldn’t name the exact date or the floor and suite number of Lois’ apartment, or say where her medications were. Despite the fact Kathleen had been at Lois’ apartment only about 48 hours, those observations were all Mak wrote to explain her conclusion: “Ms. Palamarek was not oriented to time or place.” Mak then described Lois’ behaviour at length: “Lois was quite involved during the interview. She requested me to leave my folder/portfolio on the table because it’s ‘too official’. She instructed me to speak slowly and loudly. Lois brought out Kathleen’s medications in a blister pack. She also showed me a box of nitro patch and a fentanyl patch. She requested me to note one used fentanyl patch as ‘evidence’ that she has been giving Kathleen her meds. Lois also reported I can speak to the pharmacist to confirm she has been giving Kathleen her meds as instructed.”
    While one might think Lois’ concerns for Kathleen’s anxiety and poor hearing, and Lois’ efforts to show that Kathleen’s medications were in order would reassure the doctor, especially considering the previous day’s email discussions in which Lois’ responsibility with medications was in doubt, the opposite seemed to happen. Mak commented cryptically, “Lois responded with this series of actions after I simply asked Kathleen to show me her meds.” Mak then added, “Collateral history indicates one is uncertain of the level of care Ms Palamarek is currently receiving,” and advised Kathleen be taken to hospital.
    At hospital, psychiatrist Dr Michael Cooper then conducted an MMSE and wrote up a five-page overview of Kathleen’s history and the family conflict. He concluded that Kathleen’s health and wellbeing would be best served on “neutral territory.” So Cooper then ordered that Kathleen be held at Broadmead Lodge, and he added a variety of other provisions to her “treatment plan” as previously requested by the Lodge’s director of care, including curtailing visiting rights of Lois, Gil or anyone connected with them. “I would hope that the Mental Health Act will be only a stopgap measure to ensure Mrs Palamarek’s safety until the guardianship issues are resolved,” he commented.
    Ironically, Cooper concluded that he did not want to see Kathleen be “a pawn in the disagreement between the two family groups.” So instead, he put her back to square one himself. 
     
    A brush with death
    The oft-delayed, prolonged court case over who would have control of Kathleen concluded on February 18, 2011, with judgement pending.
    As of press time, Saanich police were still conducting an investigation into what happened next.
    On February 23, Lois, Gil and Pickup discovered Kathleen in a “semi-conscious state” at Broadmead Lodge, according to records filed with police.
    In her testimony, Pickup wrote that when they arrived, “I observed a dramatic change in [Kathleen’s] general condition since my visit on February 19th. She was almost totally unresponsive, moaning, and her colour was ashen.” A Broadmead nurse came in, wrote Pickup, “with a syringe of medication which he injected into a butterfly pick (sic) which had been inserted into her chest.”
    A butterfly, or intravenous PICC (peripherally inserted central catheter) is often used to directly pump powerful painkillers into a person to alleviate severe, intractable pain or during the final stages of dying. The drugs themselves can sometimes accelerate death. 
    The three returned the next morning and found Kathleen in an even worse state. Panicking, Lois called an ambulance.
    According to the testimony of all three, a number of Broadmead staff tried to prevent the paramedics from seeing Kathleen, and became even more upset when the paramedics decided to take Kathleen to hospital. The ambulance attendants then determined Kathleen had indeed been receiving the powerful opiate hydromorphone. The paramedics began administering an antidote to the narcotic, and by the time Kathleen was at hospital she was awake and responsive. Ralph arrived and, according to Lois, Gil and Pickup, the doctor then said he’d received instructions from Ralph to conduct no further tests and Kathleen would be returned immediately to Broadmead.
    In the ensuing weeks, Kathleen seemed by the accounts of Lois, Gil and Pickup to be fine or even better than normal.
    In a March 17 letter, Lois, Pickup and England asked VIHA Chief Medical Health Officer Dr Richard Stanwick to investigate: “We believe that Kathleen Palamarek’s life has been, and continues to be, in danger.”
    On March 31, citing the history of Lois’ “disruptive behaviour” (the removal of her mother by ambulance, is one example given), Broadmead reduced the visiting hours of Lois and anyone associated with her to four hours per week total, and a security guard began to accompany their visits with Kathleen.
    Then, in an April 27 email to Lois, Ralph wrote, “Mom had a stroke today.” He added that Kathleen would be kept at Broadmead Lodge instead of being sent to hospital. “Mom is not in any life-threatening situation at this time.”
    On May 3, the court judgement granted Ralph full committeeship over Kathleen.
    On May 4, Ralph emailed to Lois that their mom “may have suffered a severe cardiac event sometime this morning.” That evening, Kathleen Palamarek died.
    Along with police, the Regional Coroner is now investigating.
    In an email, Broadmead Lodge CEO David Cheperdak wrote that, “privacy laws and respect for the confidentiality of our residents prevent me from commenting on any specifics related to Mrs. Palamarek.”
    “As this matter is unresolved, and litigation is on-going, neither Mr Ralph Palamarek nor I am prepared to make any comment on this matter at this time,” wrote lawyer Les Jamieson.
     
    Will a fair investigation occur?
    The issues in this long, complex story, many not even mentioned so far, expand far beyond the scope of ordinary police or coroner investigations.
    These include differences over appropriate nursing home staffing levels; mounting stress in our eldercare system; quality of mediation options and complaint processes within care facilities and health authorities; effectiveness of self-regulating health professions; access to appeals for involuntary apprehensions; regular use of drugs for behaviour control which can be fatal; influence of health professionals on police and lawyers; use of “comfort care” medications which may accelerate death; and most importantly, the crudeness of our legal framework which gives inordinate power to care providers.
    These issues also couldn’t be properly explored in the committeeship hearing, as Justice David Harris’ written judgement showed the focus was on simply deciding who was the best person to have authority over Kathleen. In that effort, it was sufficient for him to conclude that Ralph is “suitable” if not “perfect,” Lois is “rude,” “high-handed” and “aggressive”, and Broadmead Lodge “provides a safe setting” where Kathleen is treated by professional staff “in a dignified and respectful manner.” 
    Yet the foundation of Harris’ conclusions was deeply and problematically embedded in that same legal framework and way of thinking that accepts health care professionals having enormous, unaccountable powers. For example, key aspects of the case turned on Harris’ decision that Kathleen had no right to even solicitor-client privilege—a stunning precedent undermining even further BC’s weak rights protections for those declared incapable. Harris also disparaged the main independent medical experts who criticized Kathleen’s medication regimes for not consulting closely enough with her treating physicians. And he criticized Lois for turning to two health professional disciplinary bodies, as if requesting the very independent investigations that do exist to hold our health professionals accountable is by definition harassment. 
    The court case, then, is really just one more reason that a full, independent public inquiry into all these matters could be helpful. 
     
    Improving the laws
    Still, it’s possible none of this would’ve happened if Kathleen Palamarek had been legally able to maintain control over her own life at a level more appropriate for her abilities. The siblings and health professionals, then, would have had much less to fight over.
    In that regard, legislation changes that have been held in limbo for several years could’ve helped.
    On September 1, BC will finally enact new legal tools to help people construct Advance Directives—documents that you can write ahead of time to guide your representatives’ decision-making more explicitly and with greater detail.
    Unfortunately, enactment of other parts of our new guardianship legislation has been postponed indefinitely. Those laws would require more sophisticated, lengthy capability assessments involving interdisciplinary teams working in consultation with relatives, and would allow for grey areas—for example, a person could be deemed incapable of handling their finances or living on their own, but still capable of participating in health care decisions.
    Jay Chalke, Public Guardian and Trustee, is frank about what’s holding up enactment of this important legislation.
    “The difference between the Patients Property Act and a modern guardianship law is akin to the difference between an on-off light switch and a dimmer switch,” says Chalke. To get the greater degree of nuance and personal tailoring in our lighting, he explains, “costs a lot more.”
    The current government doesn’t want to fund such teams or more complex processes of assessing people’s rights, he clarifies.
    So what is the projected cost?
    Four million dollars a year, answers Chalke.
    I gasp. So little to help ensure British Columbians retains the basic rights to control their lives that they deserve, and yet it won’t be done? 
    “I certainly think it’s an expenditure whose time has come,” comments Chalke.
    Yet, another shadow still casts itself across all of this. Even if all these legal changes were implemented, all of your and your family’s wishes could still be trumped at any moment by a doctor using our draconian Mental Health Act.
    Thankfully, more people are beginning to show concern about that. Pointing to a case where antipsychotics were used as chemical restraints against the express wishes of an elder’s family, independent Cariboo North MLA Bob Simpson recently asked the government to investigate, amongst other eldercare issues, the “loophole” that allows health authorities to use the Mental Health Act to override other legislated rights.
    A government investigation is currently underway. Meanwhile, Lois Sampson is appealing aspects of the committeeship judgement. The Ombudsperson’s long-delayed report on seniors care, which will address legal issues, is also scheduled to be released this year. 
    And perhaps the government can be stirred into conducting a public inquiry into the story of Kathleen Palamarek.
     
    (Correction: The print and earlier online version of this story incorrectly named Fiona Hunter as Broadmead Lodge’s Director of Care. Fiona Sudbury is Broadmead Lodge's Director of Care. Fiona Hunter is another lawyer from the law firm Horne Coupar who, along with Heather Fisher, represented Ralph Palamarek from 2007 to 2009.)
     
    Rob Wipond met Kathleen Palamarek and remembers her as warm, thoughtful and witty.

    Rob Wipond
    June 2011
    Data obtained through a Freedom of Information request show nearly half of all seniors in long-term care in BC are being given antipsychotics like Risperdal, Zyprexa and Seroquel. That’s almost twice the average for the rest of Canada and amongst the highest rates found anywhere in the world. And even though Health Canada warns these drugs cause a doubling of death rates in the elderly, care workers admit they’re mainly being used as chemical restraints in the absence of adequate staffing and proper oversight.
     
    “IT WILL RELAX YOU.” That’s the only explanation hospital staff gave when administering the antipsychotic medication to Carl. At least, that’s the only reason he recalls—soon he began experiencing “very strange cognitive feelings.”
    “I’m a reasonably logical person,” he says, but suddenly he was in a “swimmy universe that didn’t make any sense.” 
    Carl (not his real name) became indifferent to his normal interests; inexplicably disengaged when friends visited: “like I was talking to them through a tunnel.” He felt as if he was in a “mind meld” with the Alzheimer’s patient next to him, losing his memory and connection to the world. Though he reportedly looked more docile, inwardly he was intensely disturbed. “I wasn’t relaxed at all.”
    Carl didn’t understand what was happening and assumed the serious physical illness for which he was receiving treatment was the cause. Yet his experiences come straight out of the clinical drug literature. 
    A 2009 study of people’s subjective experiences with taking antipsychotics found many complained about “cognitive impairment” and “emotional flattening,” while few mentioned calmness or relaxation. 
    Antipsychotics are a class of tranquillizing drugs routinely used to help rein in the minds of people diagnosed with intense schizophrenia. In recent years, they’ve been used increasingly (albeit usually in smaller doses) to “calm” elderly people with dementia in hospitals and long-term care facilities.
    Yet they’re hardly benign. Now widely described in medical literature as “chemical restraints,” common effects include foggy somnolence and disorientation, cognitive impairment, akathisia or “inner agitation,” extreme weight gain, diabetes, loss of muscle control, and muscle rigidity. Within a year of use, fully one-third of seniors will have Parkinson’s-like tremors from drug-induced brain damage. Within several months of use, death rates of seniors double—mainly from heart attacks. 
    Fortuitously for Carl, one long-time friend visiting him daily happened to be a nurse. She knew his illness could’ve precipitated some temporary psychological slippage, but nothing like what she was seeing.
    “His personality was changing,” she says. “His cognitive level was changing in a downward spiral.” 
    But hospital staff barely knew Carl except in this irrational, helpless state, so they told her she should prepare for her 65-year-old, recently retired friend to spend the rest of his days in a nursing home.
    After hearing of Carl’s story, I wondered: How many more like him are there?
     
    Half of all residents are given antipsychotics
    For two years, I tried to find out how many seniors in BC long-term care facilities were being given antipsychotics. Freedom of Information deadlines came and went. Not a single report, document, or email appeared.
    It seemed unbelievable that this number wasn’t known. Since 2002, Health Canada has been repeatedly warning doctors against using antipsychotics in seniors with dementia because of the doubling of death rates. Nevertheless, antipsychotic use in Canadian nursing homes has continued rising inexorably, and alarm has been spreading through the medical literature and media. In 2006, BC spent $76 million on antipsychotics, making them our fifth most expensive class of drugs (for comparison, that’s double the arts and sports funding in our provincial budget). Yet no one in BC’s health ministry had the slightest interest? 
    Even my contact at the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner became frustrated with my persistence. “I can’t keep going back just telling them to search again,” he said. Repeatedly.
    And then in March of this year, it magically appeared (see downloadable document below). A provincial-wide analysis using PharmaNet data had been completed months before I’d first asked to see one in 2009.
    So now we know: Nearly half (47.3 percent) of seniors in long term care facilities in BC are taking antipsychotics. That’s close to double the US and Canadian average of 26 percent, and four times the rate of Hong Kong, which is at the low end of the spectrum. 
    “Do we have any answers...as to why BC has a higher use of antipsychotics in LTC [long-term care]?” wrote Darlene Therrien, a health ministry research and policy director who was wondering if a methodological error could be producing such huge BC numbers.
    “I can’t see any issues in the data that would explain it,” emailed analyst Brett Wilmer. “I’m pretty sure it’s a health system phenomena...”
    When I received these documents, I requested interviews. Ministry of Health spokesperson Ryan Jabs emailed back, “I can’t find a person from the program area who is comfortable speaking with media on this topic.”
    So we’re left on our own to figure out what those BC health system “phenomena” are—and how dangerous they might be. 
     
    Shocking lack of shock
    Why such shockingly high numbers in BC? Those statistics, after all, suggest that in the next six months alone, antipsychotics will kill more than one hundred South Island elders. Yet when I investigate, it seems I’m the only one who’s shocked. 
    The Vancouver Island Health Authority lets me interview senior geriatric psychiatrist Dr Michael Cooper, Long Term Care medical director Dr Tom Bailey, and Long Term Care contract manager Norm Peters. VIHA won’t connect me with anyone who actually works in local nursing homes, though. So I dig up various health care assistants (HCA), licenced practical nurses (LPN), and registered nurses (RN) who’ll speak anonymously because they’re concerned about the issue. 
    For outside perspectives, I contact UBC’s Therapeutics Initiative (a renowned independent research group which, as The Tyee has ably reported, the BC Liberals have threatened to gut at the request of pharmaceutical industry reps). The Therapeutics Initiative put me in touch with its pharmacy services director Dr Adil Virani and Vancouver General Hospital’s Dr Thomas Perry. 
    All the physicians assumed from studies elsewhere that BC’s rate would be around 30 to 40 percent.
    “I wish I could say I was shocked,” comments one nurse. “But I’m not. It hurts me. It saddens me.”
    Many long-term care providers, in fact, suspect the number is low, and offer guesstimates for Greater Victoria like 85, 90 and even 100 percent.
    “Antipsychotics are a regular part of the medication routine,” says one LPN. “It’s almost an admission requirement.”
    “Show me the data,” responded a skeptical Dr Bailey to that, nevertheless conceding VIHA hasn’t investigated to find the actual rates. 
    Regardless, even 47.3 percent is far too high, says Virani. “Those aren’t anywhere close to incident rates for diseases that you would typically want to use these drugs for. So it suggests to me that these drugs are often used as a chemical restraint.” And at 90 percent, he adds, “I would want to go into that setting and say, ‘What the hell is going on?’”
     
    The “benefits” of antipsychotics
    Most long-term care staff don’t equivocate on what the antipsychotics are being used for. There are no Norwalk-style epidemics of schizophrenia breaking out in our residential facilities. 
    “It’s all for behaviour management purposes,” says an RN. “We have behaviours that are problematic, there’s no question.”
    VIHA’s Cooper, the geriatric psychiatrist, gives a more refined answer, saying antipsychotics can be “enormously helpful” for dementia patients in efforts “to reduce the fearful emotional state which may be associated with agitation and aggression.”
    In conjunction with that, VIHA’s Long Term Care medical director Bailey suggests our residents tend to be older, more physically dependent and suffering from more problematic dementia and dementia-related behaviours than in the past.
    Long-term care staff describe neck choking, broken bones, thrown objects, constant wailing, incessant wandering, verbal harassment, disorderly insomnia, and all other manner of disruptiveness, and say tranquillizing antipsychotics help prevent and manage such behaviours.
    For those reasons, many working in long-term care feel residents gain a higher “quality of life” from the drugs, and are less likely to have to suffer physical restraints. “They would have tremendous anxiety, agitation and distress if we were to take them off of those,” says one LPN. 
    However, the science does not support most of these assertions about higher quality of life. There are good reasons almost no antipsychotics have ever even been approved by Health Canada for any uses in seniors with dementia.
    A 2010 Therapeutics Initiative report found certain antipsychotics “widely prescribed” as sleep aids “in the absence of evidence for effectiveness or safety.” A landmark 2006 US National Institute of Mental Health study, like a 2008 Cochrane Collaboration meta-review of all studies, found that for the vast majority of seniors with dementia, slight benefits of any kind from any antipsychotics were “offset by intolerability to associated side effects.”
    Besides, apart from being amongst the world leaders in antipsychotic use, Canadian nursing homes also still use physical restraints more than most—over three times as much as in US homes and five times those in Switzerland.
    And there’s been no demonstrable decrease of nursing home violence or injuries in sync with rising antipsychotic use. A 2010 International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry study found preventing violence or helping patients feel better are not the real reasons the drugs are usually prescribed, anyway. “Noisiness/verbal aggression is increasingly associated with the use of regular antipsychotics, rather than physical aggression, agitation or irritability,” the authors stated. 
    That 15-year overview, much like a study examining 485 Ontario nursing homes, found that there were huge variations in prescription rates across facilities, regions and years, and the rates bore no relationship to patients’ levels of dementia, dependency or disruptiveness. The authors concluded that “the use of antipsychotic drugs in nursing homes is greater and less systematic” than ever before. 
    So what the hell is going on? 
     
    Unclear decision-making processes
    Doctors prescribe antipsychotics in two ways. One is for regular daily intake. The other is called a PRN (from the Latin pro re nata) or “as needed” prescription, which is intended to be administered by carers in response to certain conditions or situations.
    VIHA’s Cooper says individual care plans have “specific indications for when a PRN dose would be used.”
    But long-term care staff say there’s enormous leeway, because the instructions they read often simply say general things like, “if agitation intervention is not effective,” “as needed,” or just “PRN.”
    In response to pain, discomfort, aggression, sleeplessness, anxiety or disruptive behaviours, says a nurse, “I have a shopping list of PRN medications I can use.”
    And decisions about how and when to sedate with antipsychotics are often heavily influenced by issues other than the good of residents.
    “I’ve seen nurses whose main goal is to get the person off every single medication they possibly can,” says an RN. “Other people just medicate ad lib and medicate just to have the person quiet, just to have the person out of the way, and if they’re semi-comatose that’s fine, they’re not bothering anybody.”
    A health care assistant describes a typical incident where a resident was “wailing” for no discernible reason, and was about to be given antipsychotics. Then she noticed the resident had bedsores on her back. “So I get her off her back onto her side, put a warm blanket there, brace a pillow behind her...I hold her hand and I talk to her, and she goes to sleep.” However, she continues, for that kind of caregiving, normally, “I don’t have time. In one of the facilities where I worked there were two staff and there were 50 residents [at night].”
    Along with pressures from understaffing, comments an RN about this story, growing legions of casual, rotating care workers (including RNs) rarely get to know residents well enough to make good assessments or effectively intervene in a crisis with such warm, personal familiarity. 
    Indeed, many nurses say resident health records can’t even be maintained well enough in this context to understand residents’ true, often-changing circumstances and make good decisions about proper interventions. “The documentation is extremely crappy,” says one RN, echoing others. “Because there’s no time.”
    Antipsychotics, continues the RN, then often become the quick fix “Timmy Horton’s drive-through” solution to any crisis.
    Meanwhile, the physicians, many of whom only visit weekly or bi-weekly, rely on this same, weakening infrastructure of feedback. Consequently, one nurse explains, earnest doctors who wish to support harried staff are often most strongly influenced by whoever’s working and complaining loudest when they visit the facility. “The psychiatrist sort of is like a little pool ball that goes boing boing boing boing, based on whoever talks to him. They change medications, increase and decrease, and change it waaaaay too fast, before anything’s even evaluated or assessed.”
    Cooper says he hasn’t heard such concerns, but states, “These medications should only be used in a very narrow range of circumstances related to psychosis and management of aggression that has not responded to non-medication approaches. Our geriatric psychiatrists are endeavouring to apply those recommendations consistently.”
    Nevertheless, Cooper concedes his department is similarly too busy to examine if its psychiatrists are in fact collectively meeting those recommendations. “We’re on the ground trying to provide service to an enormously large number of nursing homes and nursing home residents, so we’re kind of run off our feet trying to make sure we provide the best possible clinical care.”
    Evidently, all of this is why the Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry study said that lightening the “burden” on carers while simultaneously developing “clear guidance” for improved drug and non-drug crisis interventions is “a matter of extreme urgency.”
     
    Dangers unknown 
    Perhaps not surprisingly, then, along with disregarding the lack of scientific support for antipsychotics in their rush to solve problems with drugs, many professionals haven’t bothered to keep apprised of their dangers, either.
    For example, even though they were usually self-described to be more concerned and critical of the drugs than most, none of the long-term care staff I spoke to were even aware that Health Canada had issued warnings against seniors taking antipsychotics. 
    Virani regularly gives talks to health professionals, and confirms he’s also seen “mixed” levels of knowledge about their dangers amongst doctors, long-term care staff and pharmacists. “For me that seems like they’re missing something,” he comments, “especially if they’re prescribing or handling these drugs.”
    VIHA’s Bailey is more circumspect. “It’s a very complex environment to be fully apprised of every single possible nuance of everything that you do.”
    Dr Perry of Vancouver General Hospital understands but still worries about such lack of professional knowledge. Particularly with antipsychotics, he says, because they’re notorious for inducing precisely what they’re often used to control: restlessness or agitation. “That one is important to understand for anyone in the field,” he says. “Giving more drug may increase the restlessness.” Worse, he points out, the “paucity” of expressiveness common in people on antipsychotics makes assessments of their well-being almost impossibly challenging. 
    Which raises another pressing issue: What if you don’t want them? 
     
    Offers you can’t refuse
    In these hectic environments, it’s easy to see how the preferences of residents themselves or their loved ones could be disregarded—a complaint that’s been emerging in media stories lately and frequently expressed to me.
    In principle, residents have the right to refuse these drugs or, if they’re not deemed competent (and Bailey says they are not “99 percent of the time”), legal guardians hold that right. 
    However, while all the long-term care staff I spoke with routinely obtained consent from legal guardians for the use of physical restraints, none had ever done so for chemical restraints.
    And if doctors discuss it, claims one LPN, they won’t say they’re chemically restraining your loved one, “They’ll say, ‘It will keep them calm and comfortable, and they’ll settle in more easily.’”
    Bailey, VIHA’s Long Term Care medical director, says those rules are being tightened.
    VIHA has a policy to “use the least restraint possible,” but following a 2010 directive from the BC Ministry of Health, VIHA recently issued more details and a consent form mentioning chemical restraints.
    “The newer rules will ensure that there is more transparency,” says Bailey. “They’re not going to overlook informing family, because it’s required.”
    However, there’s a gaping loophole. The policy defines a chemical restraint as any drug used to tranquillize a person’s behaviour and that “is not needed to treat medical or psychiatric symptoms.” Dementia-related behaviours, of course, are virtually always considered to be both medical and psychiatric symptoms.
    “If [an antipsychotic] was prescribed as part of a regular care plan,” confirms Peters, VIHA’s Long Term Care contract manager, “it may not be considered to be a restraint.”
    And if at that point you try to refuse, you may be perceived to be denying appropriate medical treatment and deemed incompetent to continue as legal guardian.
    “I know from personal experience how abusively RNs and health authority bureaucrats have used antipsychotics, especially with their absolute sense of entitlement to do so,” declares one woman to me, who’s now taken a battle over her mother’s care to the Health Professions Review Board. 
    So essentially we’re forcing seniors and their families to accept this massive drugging campaign, even when the science and our own health regulator are warning it’s dangerous and misguided. Once again we have to ask, what the hell is going on? How did this monstrous fad get started?
    Well, there appear to be billions of explanations.
     
    Billions of reasons
    Most antipsychotics aren’t legally approved for use in dementia patients. Although individual doctors have some discretion to prescribe drugs as they deem suitable, it’s illegal for pharmaceutical companies to promote such “off-label,” unapproved uses.
    Companies do it, though. With seditious creativity. And they’ve made their antipsychotics into multibillion dollar cash cows largely by spending untold sums persuading health professionals they’re safe and effective for dementia patients in nursing homes. Settling the ensuing lawsuits seems to have become just part of the business plan.
    In the US, AstraZeneca has settled innumerable lawsuits worth hundreds of millions of dollars with individuals and governments for hiding the dangers of their antipsychotic and illegally promoting its use for dementia patients. Pfizer and Eli Lilly both settled similar massive lawsuits, while Bristol Myers Squibb was additionally caught giving kickbacks to nurses and physicians for prescribing their antipsychotic. Johnson & Johnson was also caught giving tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks to pharmacies such as Omnicare. 
    All of these companies, including Omnicare, operate in Canada. 
    Queried about it, Health Canada issued this written response: “Health Canada is aware of the litigation involving off-label promotion of antipsychotic drugs in the US. We have no evidence of similar issues in Canada—that is, no systematic promotion of off-label use of antipsychotic drugs has been reported to Health Canada.”
    Yet VIHA allows pharmaceutical reps to visit its facilities, as long as they get an appointment. Dr Cooper admits to meeting with pharmaceutical reps regularly when in long-term care practice in Penticton five years ago. Perry refuses such visits at Vancouver General Hospital, but promptly recounts how just recently two nurses told him about attending free dinners sponsored by AstraZeneca. 
    It seems naive to imagine that pharmaceutical companies simply play nicer here. If anything, Canada’s lack of whistleblower protections, poor record on investigating white collar crime, anaemic RCMP, and close-knit ties between pharmaceutical companies, researchers, health professionals and regulators have likely made us more gullible victims.
     
    Changes ahead? To a degree...
    Everyone I spoke with agrees we need to cut back on antipsychotic use in nursing homes—but with somewhat differing levels of, well, zeal.
    “That’s really the big debate when you do a talk on this,” confirms Virani. “They’ll say, ‘Okay, Adil, I understand we shouldn’t use these drugs. Give me another solution.’ And that’s where it kind of falls down...In lieu of enough staffing, and in lieu of a safe environment, [antipsychotics] seem to be the best choice.”
    VIHA’s Bailey is cautious. “It would be a fair statement to say that we would like to see fewer people on them,” he says. “But when you look at many [situations in which antipsychotics are being given] they may well, at least in the short term, be justifiable. In fact, it is my guess that the majority are.” He suggests, though, there may be some percentage who could be taken off them “as soon as is practical.”
    Dr Perry conversely argues that antipsychotics should strictly be used in emergencies to temporarily subdue a person engaged in physical violence. “The side effects are so potent,” he says, “their use in [anything other than schizophrenia] should be very, very tightly limited.” 
    What about drugging to prevent people from becoming violent?
    “The prevention against that ought to be multidimensional,” Perry responds. He describes a dementia patient who lashed out whenever someone peeled back the privacy screen while he was peeing. Why drug him, he asks, instead of avoiding humiliating him? “In a sensible system, everyone would be looking for hazards and attempting to remove them.” 
    “Every behaviour has a reason behind it,” agrees an LPN. Therefore, care providers need more training in alternative approaches to using chemical restraints, she argues, but “VIHA doesn’t believe in that.”
    Although some changes, apparently, have gotten rolling.
    In VIHA’s new guidelines, there’s a page suggesting various assessment procedures and non-drug interventions before proceeding to chemical or physical restraints. (However, by comparison, Vancouver Coastal Health issued eleven pages on antipsychotic restraints alone, including minimal dosage recommendations, creative alternatives, and warnings about carers’ “poor adherence” to alternative forms of crisis intervention.)
    Peters feels an internationally recognized “residential assessment indicator” tool that’s been newly instituted in BC should help assess patients’ need of an antipsychotic. 
    Bailey says VIHA has begun developing an overarching long-term care medical advisory council. “It will be the first time we’ve had a structure that will enable us to address particularly critical issues and develop standards of care for our facilities.”
    Pharmacy by-laws mandate long-term care patient medication reviews every six months, but currently they’re often done cursorily by mail or fax rather than in multidisciplinary teams, in person, like they ideally should be. Bailey hopes to “develop some better processes to ensure that actually happens.”
    Meanwhile, this April, our provincial government issued a request for proposals to review antipsychotic use in long-term care. 
    “The media has raised concerns about the use of antipsychotics in long term care facilities,” the backgrounder stated. “Their concerns focus on whether appropriate consents are being obtained...and whether these medications are being used as chemical restraints due to insufficient staffing.”
    The review is due at the end of June.
    Most carers, though, feel they know already what’s needed: More staff, more stable staffing, and better trained staff. Plus better environments.
    One RN describes a large Calgary facility with walkways, vegetation, benches and fountains. “The residents walked [a lot], they slept at night, there was almost no use of antipsychotics.”
     
    Carl awakens
    Back in hospital with Carl, though, his nurse-friend was “horrified” to find him one day tied in four-point restraints, and still being pumped up on a “calming” drug that was, evidently to her, making him increasingly confused and agitated. 
    Partly due to her pleading, he was experimentally taken off his antipsychotic prescription after three weeks. 
    “Within days, I was back to normal,” Carl says, even though it would still be weeks more before he’d emerge from his physical illness. “I was laughing and joking with the nurses, I was carrying on normal conversations with my friends...It was like I woke up...I remember wanting to connect, I started to want all the familiar things in my life.”
    After a year back at home on his own, Carl praises the “excellent care” he received in hospital, with this one notable exception.
    “Had I not been fortunate enough to have a friend who was not only an advocate for me but a registered nurse, there’s every possibility I might have continued to receive those drugs and have been placed in a permanent facility out of my mind for the rest of my life.”
    Rob Wipond is a finalist in this June’s Western Magazine Awards for his regular Focus column. He has been a freelance writer of magazine features, news articles, political commentaries, social satires, theatre and performance art for over two decades.

    Katherine Palmer Gordon
    September 2011
    Will the city have what it takes to minimize loss of life and property damage when the Big One hits? Not if expensive, politically driven band-aid measures are the norm rather than comprehensive resilience planning focused on well-considered priorities.
     
    WHEN A CATASTROPHIC EARTHQUAKE struck Christchurch, New Zealand on February 22, 2011, thousands of buildings and homes were destroyed; 181 people died. Christchurch was almost completely unprepared for that level of devastation. The cost of rehabilitation is likely to be around $11 billion (CAD). 
    Six months later, Christchurch’s central business district, where tattered high-rises still cling to their foundations and the rubble from collapsed buildings litters the streets, remains cordoned off from business owners and residents who ran for their lives that day, leaving everything behind. Repairs to the sewer system are incomplete, and thousands of people still have to use chemical toilets and communal Portaloos. Insurance companies are scrambling just to assess the claims pouring in, let alone pay them. Most people won’t see a penny for months, possibly years.
    Immediately following the quake, many roads were impassable. Grocery store shelves were empty, their ruined contents scattered in the aisles. It was very difficult to buy food, water, diapers, or gas—anything that people normally stop for on the way home from work. Few people were able to go to work anyway, as hundreds of businesses lay in ruins. Many will never return. 
     
    Not every earthquake is created equal
    Could Victoria find itself in the same situation? What happened to Christchurch is certainly a scenario that we could face if a major earthquake struck the city tomorrow. But before anyone panics, it’s important to understand what that actually means. 
    There are three types of earthquake that might occur in the vicinity of Victoria. Megathrust or subduction quakes, triggered when two tectonic plates converge and one starts to move over the top of the other, are the most powerful. Subcrustal earthquakes, occurring within the subducting or lower plate, typically occur 50-70 kilometres below the surface. The third kind are shallow crustal quakes, which have the potential to cause the most damage. 
    The last massive subduction earthquake hereabouts took place off Vancouver Island in 1700. In 1946, a large, shallow earthquake, Richter magnitude 7.3 in size, struck northwest of Courtenay. Southern Vancouver Island escaped damage, however, because of its distance from the epicentre. The greatest earthquake in Canadian recorded history was a magnitude 8.1 shake near Haida Gwaii in 1949. Cows were knocked off their feet and some chimneys toppled, but again, the damage was fairly minor.
    In recent times, the nearest Victoria has come to a major earthquake was the Nisqually shake that struck just north of Olympia, Washington in February 2001. No-one was killed, but many older brick-and-mortar buildings near the epicentre, including schools, suffered significant damage. The cost to Seattle of structural repairs surpassed $2 billion US.
     
    The aftershocks of Nisqually
    Not every Victoria resident felt the Seattle quake, but no-one has since escaped the much greater impact it had on their tax bills. The provincial government, fearful of negative political backlash if anything should happen to vulnerable school buildings in British Columbia, committed $1.5 billion in 2005 to an upgrade program. A report that a $250 million seismic upgrade to the Legislature is required has been quietly shelved, at least until the school upgrades are complete, but other one-off measures triggered by the spectre of a potential Nisqually-type earthquake have included a $3.1 million seismic upgrade of Victoria’s City Hall and, of course, the impending multimillion-dollar replacement of the Johnson Street Bridge, final price tag yet to be determined, but likely more than the $77 million budgeted.
     
    Planning and priorities
    Can measures like these be justified based on Victoria’s seismic risks? And where do they fit among the overall priorities for building a more earthquake-resilient region? Why has the Johnson Street Bridge trumped hospital upgrades, say, or shoring up the city’s ancient and vulnerable water and sewer infrastructure, in the overall priority list?
    It may be because Victoria has no priority list for seismic upgrades. The City has the opportunity to apply the accumulated experience of Christchurch, Japan and other recently devastated locales to a cost-effective and comprehensive seismic resilience plan that would significantly reduce the kinds of impacts those places have suffered, and that sets out well-considered, defendable priorities. But there’s little evidence it’s doing that. 
    Both the provincial government and the City of Victoria, like other municipalities in the Capital Regional District, do have extensive emergency management programs in place focusing on post-disaster coordination and recovery efforts. 
    That’s vital, of course. But dropping and rolling exercises and flashlights in earthquake kits won’t help much if buildings are collapsing before people can escape from them, the water is cut off, and the local food supply runs out after three days, as is expected if transportation links to the mainland are unserviceable. 
    That’s the reality that every municipality in the CRD could be facing, emergency plan or not. What about doing more to maximize the region’s resilience to an earthquake and to reduce its impact before it strikes? 
    When it comes to the City of Victoria, detailed geological seismic risk information has been available for a number of years. In 2006, a thorough hazard risk assessment was also undertaken for the City, identifying earthquakes as one of the municipality’s five highest-risk exposures. But it appears there is still no plan in place for how best to allocate limited municipal government resources in dealing with the earthquake hazard, or for the adoption of robust policy initiatives aimed at reducing the risks. 
    Shouldn’t the City of Victoria, for example, be prioritizing upgrades to its water and sewer infrastructure, identified in the draft official community plan (OCP) that is currently under review as needing imminent replacement at significant capital cost? The Sooke Dam, from which Victoria draws its water, has been seismically improved. But shouldn’t the city be trying to establish an earthquake-proof source of drinking water closer to downtown, as Vancouver has done? What about ramping up support for local food production? 
    Prudence would also suggest adopting the highest seismic standards in local building codes, as Vancouver has also done, instead of the minimum levels. The objective of seismic standards in building codes is, after all, to ensure public safety in the event of an earthquake. Shouldn’t every building owner in Victoria be compelled to implement seismic upgrades, not merely be offered tax incentives to do it as currently contemplated in the draft OCP?
    There is nothing to indicate that steps like these are on the radar. But then, the City of Victoria is also keeping its cards very close to its chest. Focus Magazine has requested, through provisions of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, the two seismic risk assessments the City completed in 2010 on Fire Station #1 and the Crystal Pool, and a third, recently completed study for other City-owned buildings. The City has refused to release these completed reports. What is there to hide?
     
    What the City of Victoria says about the Big One
    It is difficult to ascertain whether local authorities have a realistic grip on the likelihood of an earthquake affecting Victoria and its potential impacts. In public documents, City staff state the probability of a major earthquake in the region in highly simplistic terms that are virtually meaningless in the context in which they are used. 
    The current draft OCP states, for example: “There is a 32 percent likelihood of a damaging earthquake event in the city before 2054.” In the publicity that the City generated to justify the expense of replacing the Johnson Street Bridge, it similarly stated that “recent studies have indicated that there is a 30-35 percent probability of a major earthquake occurring in Victoria in the next 50 years,” described as being similar to an earthquake “in the range of Magnitude 7.0-7.9.” But the material doesn’t go on to explain how these estimates were derived, or what they mean. 
    In fact, the probability models from which the City has derived its figures are based on intensity, not magnitude (more on this below). Earthquake probability estimates are also not precise calculations. Dr Garry Rogers, a senior research scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) and an adjunct professor in earth sciences at the University of Victoria, says that such estimates should be given considerable leeway. “It would be better to use a figure like 30 percent, or about one chance in three of the predicted event occurring over 50 years—something that doesn’t suggest that the number is known to the precision of 32 percent, which it simply isn’t.” 
    For the average citizen of Victoria, it’s difficult to place much confidence in the figures quoted by the City, let alone understand what the hazard and risks really are.
     
    An earthquake measurement primer
    Magnitude is a common way to convey size, but is the least useful measurement of actual risk to planners and engineers. It is also the least meaningful term to use to convey to citizens what will happen in different scenarios. Intensity of a shake, and ground level of shaking, says Rogers, are more appropriate terms to use. 
    Magnitude, intensity and level of shaking aren’t interchangeable terms. The Richter scale measures magnitude, which is the amount of energy released at the epicentre of a quake. “Earthquakes only have one magnitude,” explains Rogers. “It doesn’t change depending on your distance away from the epicentre. Think of a 100-watt light bulb, for example. It’s always 100 watts, whether it’s in the lamp next to you or in the room next door. A magnitude 7 earthquake is always a magnitude 7, wherever it is and wherever you are in relation to it.” An earthquake has to have a magnitude of 7 or greater to be considered “major.” Only a tiny portion of shakes fall into that category.
    The Modified Mercalli scale measures intensity by describing the impact of a quake at a specific location. Unlike magnitude, intensity does change depending on proximity to the epicentre, much like the perceived brightness from a light bulb depends on how far away it is. Many other factors also influence the measure of intensity, including the depth of the quake, and the nature of the geology and soil of a particular location. Poor, swampy soil and infill are prime culprits in increasing the impact or felt intensity of a quake; rock is much more stable.
    MM1 on the Mercalli scale is essentially zero impact. MM5 would be felt by most people, but would not have any significant impact. MM7 will see the onset of damage to some weak structures. MM8 is the point where things become much more serious, with more widespread structural damage occurring. At MM12, it’s game over.
    The Mercalli scale is the oldest seismic measurement tool in use. It is still helpful as a descriptor, says Rogers, but since seismographs were invented that could measure shaking in terms of gravity acceleration percentages, it is the latter that is used by seismologists and engineers for determining with greatest precision the potential hazard, at specific sites, from various levels of shaking that might occur at different levels of intensity at those sites. 
    The three different measurements all have their uses in different contexts, says Rogers. “But it’s important not to mix them up.” Using simplistic one-size-fits-all magnitude figures in planning and public communications isn’t advisable, he says: “That’s dangerous. It’s not defensible and doesn’t help people understand the problem.”
     
    The real probability of a major earthquake in Victoria
    Significant historical and geological data are available in BC to seismologists, who can use hazard models based on that data to develop the probability of the three different kinds of earthquakes we have here occurring over different periods of time, at different levels of intensity, and within the vicinity of general areas such as south-western coastal BC. The higher the potential intensity level plugged into the model, the lower the probability it will occur.
    According to the Geological Survey of Canada, the nearest subduction earthquake source zone does not extend beneath Vancouver Island. A subduction quake is the least likely to occur within our lifetimes, with an expected probability of anywhere between 10-15 percent over the next 50 years of a shake impacting Victoria at an intensity level of MM7 or more. The GSC estimates that the likelihood of a level of shaking from a greater crustal or sub-crustal earthquake that will cause damage to weak structures (MM7) over the same time period at about 20 percent. 
    In practical terms, as Rogers has already pointed out, that means a more or less one in three chance in the next five decades, give or take a couple of percentage points either way, of an earthquake that could cause some damage to weak structures somewhere in the vicinity of Victoria. But that doesn’t mean there’s a one in three chance of that earthquake actually occurring in Victoria. 
    Trying to provide specific predictions as to where potential earthquakes will occur, or even what intensity they will be, is risky business. Maiclaire Bolton, a Canadian seismologist working with California-based Risk Management Solutions Inc, is a graduate of UVic’s Earth and Ocean Sciences program and the former head of the seismic program at Emergency Management BC. Bolton says: “We can state the probability of an earthquake occurring, and even its size, with a fairly high degree of accuracy, but stating it will actually occur in Victoria is another matter. That’s simply impossible.” 
     
    What does all this mean in terms of assessing seismic risk?
    “It’s nonsense,” Rogers states bluntly, “to use magnitude when talking about risk, or what a certain piece of infrastructure can handle. A 6.5 magnitude shallow earthquake ten kilometres away can do as much or more damage locally as a 9.0 subduction earthquake 100 kilometres away,” he continues. “Take the Blue Bridge in Victoria, for example. It’s what level of shaking it will be able to withstand in an earthquake that matters, regardless of whether it is a small-magnitude quake close by or a larger one further away.”
    The most useful way to undertake risk assessment is to first understand the level of shaking that will cause the collapse of a structure or similar devastation—the hazard, as Rogers describes it—then base decisions on priorities for remediation on the probability of that level of shaking occurring. 
    “The level of shaking is usually measured as a percentage of the acceleration of gravity caused by ground movement,” explains Rogers. That sounds very technical, but in real terms people can start to feel earthquake shaking at about one-tenth of one percent of gravity. “Structures in the Nisqually quake experienced a maximum level of shaking of about 20 percent of gravity, with corresponding damage. In Christchurch, the shaking was so bad it exceeded the acceleration of gravity. The level of shaking, measured this way, is what engineers and planners should be using in making decisions on risk mitigation. It’s what’s used in the building codes.” 
     
    Is any seismic resilience planning happening in Victoria?
    Southwestern BC is one of the most seismically active regions in the country, and becoming more earthquake resilient is not only appropriate but essential for public safety. 
    But current initiatives in that direction appear haphazard at best. Seismic risk mitigation goals in the City of Victoria’s draft OCP are vaguely worded and high-level, lacking any tough measures behind them. Budget priorities are unclear. 
    By comparison, the City’s 2006 hazard and vulnerability assessment, commissioned on behalf of the Victoria Emergency Management Agency with the goal of using the information as the basis for allocation of resources for priority risk mitigation, is clear about the need for action and contains 18 recommendations for mitigation initiatives. 
    Some of those are questionable, however. The VEMA report recommends upgrading or replacing the Johnson Street Bridge, for example, despite also pointing out that the Point Ellice Bridge, a short distance away, has already been seismically upgraded and that water, gas and telecommunications lines coupled to that bridge are expected to be earthquake-resilient. 
    Other recommendations have made it into the draft OCP, such as encouraging property owners to upgrade through incentive programs. The latter document also identifies the need to focus seismic mitigation measures on areas of vulnerability identified on local hazard maps. The draft OCP even forecasts the need for robust local sources of food, energy and materials to be on hand in the event of an emergency.
    Whether other recommendations arising from the VEMA report have been implemented, including the creation of a building inventory and map of high-risk structures and the conducting of a regional soil study, is difficult to ascertain. VEMA Director Rob Johns did not return phone calls requesting an interview, and the City, as mentioned above, has refused to release any of its completed risk assessments. An urban design discussion paper produced by the City in May 2010 outlined Victoria’s strengths and weaknesses in anticipation of updating the OCP. If the discussion paper takes into account the hazard assessment, it isn’t obvious. There is only one reference to seismic risk management in the 67-page document, and that is a note that the Bay Street Armouries building should be seismically upgraded. 
    In the meantime, the OCP does not identify specific priorities, and does not incorporate an overall comprehensive seismic risk management plan. It does not identify why the Johnson Street Bridge was deemed a priority for upgrade over other critical infrastructures. Nor does it cross-reference seismic risk management in its development and land management sections—or in its infrastructure section, or any other part of the document. 
    It also makes no reference to what seismic standards the City plans to subscribe, either in terms of retrofits or new development. Since 1964, building codes have contained minimum seismic standards, and the national code was updated as recently as 2010. Those standards are all about public safety: it’s impossible to legislate into existence a quake-proof building, but it is possible to build in safety mechanisms aimed at ensuring people can get out of the structures in one piece, without the structure collapsing on them. 
    The provincial building code has been adapted from the national code. While it contains some mandatory seismic standards, they do not apply in all cases. Maiclaire Bolton identifies a significant problem in the code for Victoria in particular, saying that many smaller multi-family apartment buildings (three storeys or less in height and less than 600 square metres) are also exempt from some of the code’s seismic standards. 
    “All you have to do is walk up and down [lower] Cook Street, and that applies to almost every apartment building,” observes Bolton. “They’ve been built to that precise dimension to beat seismic code provisions. Many of them also have open parking underneath. Those buildings are very high vulnerability.” That’s disturbing, especially after reviewing Victoria’s hazard map: the lower part of Cook Street is coloured an uncompromising red due to soil issues.
    Municipalities can choose to adopt higher standards than the code, and Vancouver has done so. Victoria has not followed that path to-date, preferring to encourage building owners to upgrade rather than force them to do so. Nor does it have in place any hard-nosed restrictions on expanding development on vulnerable soil—which, according to the hazard map, is what a great deal of downtown Victoria is built upon (have a look at Map 14 in the draft OCP, for example). 
    Credible resilience assessments require an analysis of not only the soundness of structures on a landscape, but the ground on which they are built. Rock is good; sand, mud and peat are all prone to liquefaction. In a paper entitled Earthquakes Don’t Kill People, Buildings Do, Dr Tark Hamilton of Camosun College’s geosciences department notes that the most vulnerable building sites are on slopes with thick, unconsolidated sediments. He cites Beacon Hill Park, Dallas Road and—again—Cook Street Village as being high-risk in this regard. Recalling that the intersection of Vancouver and View Streets is built on what was a peat bog at the time of settlement, he notes that as the intersection became subject to heavier and heavier traffic, the peat in the centre once bulged as high as 1.3 metres higher than the curb. “Think of sitting on a water bed and watching it bulge up beside you,” he says. “When hydrous, unconsolidated sediments are subjected to long period earthquake waves, they move in standing waves that can have amplitude of a metre or more. Pity anything built on this as bulges move around and horizontal and vertical do not keep constant orientation. It is hard to keep buildings standing as they act like the Leaning Tower of Piza.” Victoria is continuing to build, he says sombrely, in harm’s way.
    Gerry Buydens, a structural engineer and former manager of the provincial government’s seismic mitigation program, was involved in the early stages of BC’s seismic assessment of schools. “Our thinking back then was that if we found a school wasn’t built on good soil, it was just as well to knock it down, because even if you refurbished it, it was still an old school on bad ground,” says Buydens. “If there’s an earthquake, the building will slump and fall.” Upgrading old buildings constructed on poor, swampy soil—the Legislature, say, and much of the rest of downtown—is tough, and costly. “I don’t think it’s really worth it.”
    In addition, says Bolton, governments really need to think more about comprehensive planning instead of knee-jerk reactionary initiatives to individual projects. “You’ve got to step away from one bridge, for example, and move to the big picture. You have to think about moving key assets away from the high risk areas, and prioritizing essential services instead.” 
    That’s exactly what the provincial government has done, relocating its emergency planning office to a safer location at Keating Cross Road. The City has less choice in that regard when it comes to City Hall. All the same, there’s little question that it will be vitally important for there to be a secure headquarters for civic management in an emergency. Victoria’s hazard maps indicate that there are areas within municipal boundaries that are much safer to locate core services and protect them than the downtown core. The location of City Hall itself is on a blurry moderate-to-high-risk section of the map. But whether it really is sitting on poor ground or not, and whether the City has simply thrown good money after bad in upgrading instead of moving locations, we simply don’t know, and won’t until the City’s risk assessment is released publicly. 
    Vancouver engineer Leon Bell, who has undertaken numerous seismic assessments in Victoria, adds that about 90 percent of the damage caused by earthquakes in North America is to non-structural systems within buildings—electrical wiring and plumbing, for example—not the buildings themselves. “Only a small percentage of high-risk buildings actually fail,” observes Bell. “Conversely, low-risk buildings with no seismic mitigation of the non-structural systems can and do suffer significant damage. This is a very serious economic issue.” But again, there is nothing to suggest that the City understands that statistic, either. 
     
    Priority-setting and the fear factor
    Dr Kenneth Elwood, an associate professor in UBC’s civil engineering school, is one of 26 researchers with the Canadian Seismic Risk Network, a group of academics working on lower-cost alternatives to dealing with seismic mitigation. In April this year, Elwood told National Post reporter Tristin Hopper that mitigation is simply too expensive “to jump at renovating every building. If you look at the probability of dying in an earthquake versus all the other things you could die from, it makes you stop and think where you should be spending your resources.”
    The CSRN has numerous ideas for cost-effective measures to shore up buildings that could cut costs by up to 50 percent. Those include state-of-the-art, fibre-reinforced plastic “wallpaper,” ten times stronger than steel, that can be used to wrap quake-susceptible buildings. CSRN’s Perry Adebar pointed out: “By being clever—not just throwing money at it—one can do repairs that will make a significant difference without spending a fortune. More thinking, less bricks and mortar.” In a similar vein, Tark Hamilton says: “The goal is to educate people about what they can do to prepare, reduce risk, improve public procedures, and not to scare them or needlessly destroy real estate value, when ultimately earthquakes are unpredictable.”
    But the fear factor is an effective strategy when governments want to sell a project: witness the Johnson Street Bridge. Fear also drove the very expensive provincial school upgrade program—an easy sell to scared parents. No-one wants to see children die in a collapsed building, says Gerry Buydens, but at the same time, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to be spending so much on buildings that are unoccupied three-quarters of the time. “What about the other places where kids spend all their time—like downtown malls and their own homes?”
    Buydens and Bolton also point out that an immediate and relatively cost-effective way to improve public safety would be to encourage people and businesses to anchor furniture to walls. Buydens points out that there could be as much risk of a child being hurt by a loose vending machine tumbling down a set of stairs as being hit by falling bricks. In Christchurch, one infant died when a heavy television set fell from its stand and landed on top of him. In Japan, video footage showed fully-loaded filing cabinets falling on workers with nothing to protect them. It’s a cheap, straightforward public education program that could begin tomorrow, with a real likelihood of saving lives. 
     
    A once in a lifetime chance
    The plans to rebuild Christchurch are expected to take at least 15 years to be implemented, given limited resources. There is much discussion in that city about how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past—moving key services away from the vulnerable downtown core, for example, preventing further dubious development in unsafe zones, and making rational choices about priorities: the right way to rebuild the city in the best possible way, keeping in mind that another quake could hit at any time, and understanding in very real terms what that means in practice. 
    It would be a very good discussion for every municipality in the CRD to have. For Victoria, a good start would be to publicly release the three seismic risk assessments that have been completed before November’s municipal election, so that citizens have some time to absorb their contents and question candidates on their understanding of the risks and their proposed strategies for dealing with them.
    But whether Victoria’s civic leaders are up to that discussion, before they are forced to confront it, remains to be seen.
    Expat Kiwi Katherine Gordon arrived in New Zealand for a family visit seven hours before the February 22 earthquake struck in Christchurch, and was able to witness the immediate aftermath firsthand. Several months later, she continues to observe from a distance the ongoing pain of a city almost completely unprepared for what hit it that day.

    Katherine Palmer Gordon
    December 2010
    British Columbia’s 32 indigenous languages were almost completely obliterated during the infamous reign of the residential schools. In 2010, they remain close to extinction. In a province where English predominates, does restoring them to active use make any sense? Overwhelming evidence suggests that the answer is yes—not only for the First Nations people from whom they were stolen, but for everyone.
     
    “ALL OUR SOCIAL PROBLEMS STEM FROM the disconnection of our young people to our culture because they don’t know our language,” says Renée Sampson, tears sparkling in her eyes. “Without that sense of cultural identity, they just don’t know who they are.”
    “Language is our birthright,” adds the 27-year-old SENCOTEN language apprentice and teacher from Tsartlip, north of Brentwood Bay. “But it was deliberately taken away from us by the residential schools. People should know that. That’s why our young people don’t know the language and it’s in such danger. We have a right to get it back,” she says, her voice shaking with emotion. “We deserve to be who we are.”
    On April 30 the Report on the Status of BC First Nations Languages 2010 was published by First Peoples’ Heritage, Language and Culture Council (FPHLCC). Subsequent newspaper reports rang alarm bells over the fact that BC’s aboriginal languages are almost extinct. Language workers pleaded for much-needed financial support to save them, but expressions of support were few and far between. Instead, the local newspaper article attracted overwhelmingly negative public commentary—some of it so openly racist that the online version has since been removed from the newspaper’s archive. 
    The gist of the comments was that the death of aboriginal languages doesn’t matter, that tax dollars should not be “wasted” on them, and that “really, they should just get over it.” Five months later, the chill of those sentiments is still palpable in the SENCOTEN language room at the WSANEC (Saanich) Adult Education Centre at Tsartlip, where I am sitting with Sampson and a group of other language apprentices and teachers. 
    Sunlight is streaming through the windows over the colourful posters on the walls, and cheerful preschoolers chattering in SENCOTEN can be heard from next door. But a sombre mood has fallen over the room as the group discusses why First Nations people aren’t about to “get over” wanting to prevent their languages from dying—and why they not only need but deserve support in their efforts. 
    PENÁC (David Underwood) is a fourth year arts student at the University of Victoria. “You could say that our language takes care of our people,” he says. “Our words tell us how to behave through the values associated with them. That’s why it isn’t easy to translate into English—those values get lost. That’s why we need to know it.” SELILIYE (Belinda Claxton), 58, PENÁC’s aunt, nods in agreement. “SENCOTEN is not just a language, it’s a philosophy,” she explains. “So speaking the language is a way of being. It gives back to the young people self-confidence in how they behave and a strong sense of who they are.” 
    Kendra Underwood, 26, works for the WSANEC School Board as an administrator. “I don’t think the people [on the newspaper’s website] who made those comments are typical, fortunately,” she says. “But I also think that most people just don’t get how important our language is in our lives. We deserve to have our language be healthy and whole. We need help for that to happen, because we don’t have the money or resources to do it by ourselves and if we don’t do it now, it will be too late. And it comes down to this,” she adds. “We didn’t let it go. It was taken from us!” Underwood exclaims passionately. “Do people understand that?”
    Indeed, if these articulate, bright, hardworking men and women are anything to go by, it is more than time we understood that First Nations languages do matter—and why paying for language revitalization not only makes sense, but is money well spent.
     
    A state of emergency
    Here’s the problem: the five percent of First Nations people in the province who remain fluent in BC’s 32 indigenous languages are mostly over 65. That tiny pool is dwindling rapidly. 
    Groups like the WSANEC School Board are working hard to document their languages, and intense efforts are being made by First Nations-operated schools to incorporate language lessons into curricula. But in most cases all they can manage, with inadequate budgets and limited numbers of speakers, is an hour or two a week. 
    Dr Lorna Williams, chair of the First Peoples’ Heritage, Language and Culture Council (FPHLCC), based at Tsartlip, is of Lil’wat heritage. Williams also holds the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Knowledge and Learning at the University of Victoria. Williams admits, “A lot more work has to be done to protect BC’s languages before it’s too late.”
    But federal government funding remains woefully inadequate at only $5 million annually split equally between all the provinces and territories, regardless of the number of resident languages. BC has been more generous, contributing between $3.5 and $4.5 million annually to the provincial effort through various agencies, including FPHLCC. But that sum covers all aspects of arts, heritage and culture, not just language, and it is nowhere near enough. FPHLCC estimates that documenting all of BC’s indigenous languages will cost at least $20 million. 
    In the absence of that kind of money, it is difficult to make significant progress. Lorna Williams remarks: “Anyone’s who ever been on a reserve knows that the government dollars provided go nowhere near covering everything that is needed—housing, elder care, education, and so on. People in the communities have very little money to work on their languages. It’s amazing what they achieve despite that.” 
    “How much did the government spend on residential schools to beat the language out of us?” ponders one of the language apprentices. “It would be nice if the government would return what they spent on trying to assimilate us to revive what was taken away.” That kind of gesture, says Tracey Herbert, executive director of FPHLCC, would demonstrate a genuine reconciliation effort by governments: “A strong investment in language and culture would make a huge difference in closing the gaps between non-First Nations and First Nations people.”
    Brand-new Minister of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation Barry Penner is acutely conscious of that point despite his short tenure, noting: “Preserving the languages might also help us all communicate with each other better.” But Penner is hamstrung by the usual suspect: grim-faced finance ministry officials demanding proof of the cost-benefit analysis of throwing money at a cultural issue like language. “All the same,” promises Penner, “I’m willing to have that conversation with them. These languages are part of every British Columbian’s history, after all.” 
     
    What’s the big deal, anyway?
    The story of the abuses that took place at residential schools is now well-known. Less well-known, explains Tracey Herbert, is the fact that the main goal of the schools was to exterminate aboriginal languages by interrupting their transmission from generation to generation—and in the process of doing so, stamp out cultural world views that were in conflict with those of the colonizers. It was an effective strategy, according to Andrea Bear Nicholas, chair of Native Studies at Fredericton’s St Thomas University: “It took only two or three generations before people stopped using their language.” 
    Loss of language was further exacerbated when child welfare services were put in the hands of provincial governments in the 1960s. Under what is now infamously known as the “Sixties Scoop,” aboriginal children were taken in droves (no one knows the exact numbers) from their families and placed into non-aboriginal foster homes far from home. More than half of them were sent to the United States and Europe, never to return. 
    When SELILIYE went to public school in the 1960s, she wasn’t allowed to speak SENCOTEN. “It was a nightmare for me,” she recalls. “We were taught Latin instead. I had no idea what any of it meant. I would get called a dumb Indian. I dreaded going.” Eventually, she simply stopped. “There was no point. I learned nothing at all.”  
    SELILIYE, along with all the other children deprived of their languages, was the victim of a universally accepted truth: remove the language from the child, and the emotional, cultural and academic costs are enormous. They include disproportionately high school dropout rates, unemployment, addictions, crime, and suicide rates—as well as the consequential burden on medical, welfare and correctional systems.
     
    A grim relationship
    In 2007, UVic psychology associate professor Christopher Lalonde co-authored a report starkly entitled: “Aboriginal Language Knowledge and Youth Suicide.” The report described known socio-economic factors contributing to youth suicide rates in aboriginal communities, such as poverty, and then overlaid an additional factor: absence of language. 
    Lalonde and his colleagues researched 150 communities in British Columbia, and discovered that language had more predictive power in anticipating suicide rates than any previously-known indicator. Even more striking: “Rates dropped to zero in communities in which at least half the members reported a conversational knowledge of their language.” By contrast, where there was little or no connection to language, the suicide rate was typically six times higher than the national average.
    “Loss of language is also the canary in the coalmine of cultural distress [generally],” concluded the report’s authors. “The association between cultural collapse and the rise of public health problems is so uniform and so exceptionless as to be beyond serious doubt.” 
     
    Giving language back to kids: the good news
    At Thanksgiving this year, Renée Sampson watched her 16-year-old niece lead her cousins in performing a SENCOTEN drum song. “I was watching her,” recalls Sampson, “and thinking, here are these teenagers—they are at the point where they could be out drinking, dropping out of school, getting pregnant—and they’re not! They’ve embraced the language instead, and they’re proud and they’re healthy.” 
    Sampson’s nieces, unsurprisingly, are excelling in school. It is now well established that children versed in their mother-tongue language as well as English benefit from positive brain development and do well in all areas of education. Tracey Herbert notes the success of Mohawk and Cree immersion schools founded in Ontario in the mid-1980s: “Their kids have higher high school graduation rates than national averages, and some of the highest rates of follow-through into post-secondary education of any First Nations in Canada.” 
    Bear Nicholas applauds Papua New Guinea, which has provided mother-tongue education in indigenous languages since 1993. “The results are striking. Children become literate more quickly and learn English faster than children who went through the old unilingual system, and score higher in all subjects. The drop-out rate has also decreased.”
    The same results are also emerging closer to home. The N’kmaplqs i Snma’mayat’tn klSqilxwet (Okanagan Indian Band Cultural Immersion School) is the region’s first school with Okanagan language and knowledge at its foundation. Dr Bill Cohen, a band councillor and former associate professor of Indigenous Studies at Okanagan University College, helped establish the K-7 school, now in its fifth year. 
    “The community has two fundamental goals it wants to achieve with the school,” says Cohen. “They want the kids to be fluent in their language—to speak, think and dream in it. Equally importantly, they want the children to be successful in the provincial school curriculum and in gaining world knowledge. We’re well on the way to meeting both those goals,” he says with satisfaction.
    Cohen says that most of the children going through the program shine when they enter high school, getting onto honour rolls, principal’s lists, and school sports teams. “There’s a real difference in these kids,” he observes. “They’re more confident in public. They know who they are. They are healthy, happy young people who are succeeding in the public school system with ease.” Kathy Michel, cofounder of the Chief Atahm immersion school in Chase, has had the same experience: “When my children entered the public school system at Grade 11, they opened up their science book and said, ‘Oh, this is easy stuff. We were taught this way back in Grade 5’.”
    Sl,OLTENOT (Madeline Bartleman), 26, is another WSANEC language apprentice. A confident, articulate mother of four studying for her B.Ed at UVic, Sl,OLTENOT is living proof of the benefits of having grown up learning her language at the LÁU,WELNEW Tribal School at Tsartlip. “When I go out in the world,” she says simply, “I know exactly who I am and where I come from, and I’m proud.” Her children are now learning SENCOTEN at the same school. “The teachers say they are very fast learners and doing really well,” she says proudly. 
    Mike Willie, 33, is the Cultural Preservation and Revitalization Coordinator at the Gwa’sala-‘Nakwaxda’xw K-7 School in Port Hardy. Originally from Kingcome Inlet, Willie experienced both sides of the language coin growing up. “Because Kingcome Inlet is so isolated, we were able to retain our language and customs, even when they were banned by the government,” says Willie. “I grew up hearing my language and singing the songs. It was wonderful.” 
    That all changed when it was time for high school, however: after Grade 7, Kingcome Inlet families have to send their children away to complete high school. “I was sent to Victoria,” says Willie. “I really struggled—it was a huge culture shock.” Like SELILIYE, Willie wasn’t taught about his own history: “I learnt all about the Romans and the Vikings, but not about what happened right here in Canada to my people.” 
    What saved Willie was the strong sense of identity that was ingrained in him from his earliest childhood. “I kept up my singing, even though I was far from home.” Indeed, the remarkable teenager was so hungry to stay grounded in his culture, he skipped school regularly to spend time in the BC government archives, transcribing tapes of his language. “The archivist thought I was researching for my degree in University, so he didn’t question me being there!” chuckles Willie.
    More soberly, he reflects: “Having been taught in my language as a young child totally helped me with my self-confidence and getting through school and university. That’s true of many kids from Kingcome—there is a really high success rate in post-secondary education and I attribute it directly to being grounded in the language.” 
    Take that away, and the results speak for themselves. “After all,” concludes Willie, “if you don’t know who you are, you’re just roaming this world, lost. You’re not grounded anywhere.”
     
    The case for support
    The moral case isn’t difficult to make. We took the language away; shouldn’t we give it back? Dr Peter Heap is a retired government official now on the Board of the First Peoples’ Cultural Foundation, which raises funds to support FPHLCC and other language revitalization organizations. “Not supporting revitalization of languages, in one sense, is actually continuing to hammer nails in their coffin—to keep contributing to the oppression that First Nations have suffered for so long,” says Heap. “The impact of all that pain and suffering remains abundantly clear and we owe it to them to help stop that.”
    Environmental scientists have also made a strong case for language preservation, arguing that with the extinction of any indigenous language a wealth of knowledge about animals, plants, mathematics, navigation and medicine is also lost. One First Nations language, for example, has two different names for a salmon which non-aboriginal fisheries scientists insisted for decades was just one species—until DNA testing finally proved them wrong.
    Even if you don’t subscribe to such arguments, consider this business case, put forward by Drs Heap and Bear Nicholas. Heap, who lives in Victoria, read the online complaints about “misspent” tax dollars last May. He dismisses them summarily: “It’s a brutal assessment, but if you really want to look at it that way, then consider it a case of ‘pay me now or pay me later.’ The evidence is blindingly strong that a healthy language contributes to a healthy community. An unhealthy one puts a disproportionate burden on the social welfare system. Ultimately, the taxpayer is going to pick up a much bigger tab for that.”
    Bear Nicholas is equally blunt: “Providing mother-tongue education for First Nations children would avoid the expense involved in addressing high dropout rates, including social and financial costs associated with welfare, addictions, suicide, incarceration and poor health.” She cites this compelling example: the cost of a private tutor in a mother-tongue language for nine years is significantly less than keeping someone in prison for just one year. The cultural and emotional saving is immeasurable.
     
    Efforts at the front lines
    There is good news, and it lies in the work being done by people like Bill Cohen and Kathy Michel, Saanich language guru STOLCEL (John Elliott), FPHLCC and UVic. The latter institution is supporting young teachers like Sampson and Williams by providing SENCOTEN teaching certification programs that are compatible with provincial school standards. The LÁU,WELNEW Tribal School, under STOLCEL’s direction, supports 185 K-9 students from the four Saanich First Nations communities with an extensive language curriculum. Pilot pre-school “language nest” immersion programs around the province have proved highly successful.
    FPHLCC also administers a highly sophisticated web-based language archiving program called FirstVoices, in wide use by First Nations across BC. The program was created ten years ago by STOLCEL, working with Peter Brand, then a teacher at the LÁU,WELNEW Tribal School (and now the coordinator of the FirstVoices program). STOLCEL’s father, Dave Elliott, had created a SENCOTEN alphabet a few years previously. Brand stumbled across inexpensive software that enabled the creation of a simple dictionary using Elliott’s alphabet, and FirstVoices was born. 
    As of October 2010, says Brand, a full audio-visual dictionary of SENCOTEN words and phrases is now downloadable from iTunes, free of charge, as is the Halq’emeylem language. The possibilities, he adds, are endless. 
     
    A promising future
    In the meantime, Renée Sampson will graduate this year with a B.Ed and her provincial teaching certification in SENCOTEN. Likewise, PENÁC will graduate with an arts degree and a passionate ambition to see his infant daughter speaking her language fluently with her peers. Sl,OLTENOT is avidly studying her SENCOTEN dictionary on her iPod in between working on her degree. 
    All of them hear stories from the parents of the children they are teaching that fill them with happiness: a small child asking her mother in SENCOTEN if she is feeling all right; teenagers leaving giggly phone messages for each other in their language to foil their non- SENCOTEN-speaking parents, who smile indulgently and proudly behind their children’s backs—then head quietly over to the WSANEC Adult Education Centre to enrol for adult language starter classes.
    SELILIYE is looking forward to graduating from Grade 12 at LÁU,WELNEW Tribal School, to which she returned this year at the age of 58. It is a quiet ambition, but a meaningful one: no longer does she feel like a “dumb Indian,” but a proud and healthy WSANEC woman speaking her language. She is also looking forward, with a heart full of tears and joy, to sitting at the kitchen table as she once did as a small child listening to her grandmother, but this time it is her grandchildren who will be speaking SENCOTEN. 
    “My achievements in life are totally attributable to knowing my language and my origins,” says Mike Willie, the cultural revitalization coordinator in Port Hardy. “Without that, I would be completely lost. Where do people go when they’re lost?”
     
    Katherine Gordon is an author and freelance writer based on Gabriola Island and is on the board of the First Peoples’ Cultural Foundation. Her sixth book, We Are Born With Our Songs Inside Us, explores the links between identity and wellbeing through the stories of 21 young and inspiring aboriginal British Columbians.

    David Broadland
    November 2010
    The numbers the City presented for the cost of a new bridge and the cost to rehabilitate the current bridge were based on estimates done by Advicas Group. Those estimates were peer-reviewed by Stantec's Andrew Rushforth, but analysis suggests the numbers have been tweaked so the City’s high-end rehabilitation appears to be more expensive. We un-tweak the numbers.
     
    VICTORIA CITY HALL SAYS IT WILL COST $77 million for a new bridge without rail on it and $80 million for what is now known as the “gold-plated” rehab.
    I’ve been asking myself 3 question about these two numbers:
    • Where did they come from?
    • Can they be trusted?
    • Do they represent the only options the City could have considered when deciding what to put to a referendum.
    I think these are important questions and I’m going to try to provide answers.
     
    The “peer-reviewed” Advicas cost estimates
    First of all, the City’s numbers derive from the Class ‘C’ estimates done by Advicas Group Consultants in June of this year. 
    The Advicas estimates were peer reviewed by Andrew Rushforth of Stantec Consulting Ltd. When something has been peer-reviewed, we tend to believe that it can be trusted. Right?
    In the preface to Rushforth’s review he stated “the key finding will be to identify aspects that may not have been explored fully and to ensure that adequate funding to account for these is included in any estimate.”
    But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and when it came to the details of the cost estimates, I believe Rushforth, or his subcontractor, may have taken a shortcut.
    In his study, Rushforth admitted “This review utilized data supplied by the project team and assumed that these quantities are a reasonable representation of the work that will be required.”
    But Rushforth’s assumption seems to me to be ill-advised. The Advicas cost estimates for both the replacement bridge and the rehabilitation contain obvious errors of omission, calculation and substance.
    Let’s start with the figures the Advicas estimates produced and then update them to what is currently being considered. I’ll then examine these estimates—perhaps more closely than Rushforth’s $50,000 study did—and keep a scorecard of the changes that ought to be made.
    By the way, I should point out that MMM Group, the engineering company managing the bridge project, repackaged the Advicas numbers and added an amount for taxes and financing that Advicas did not include. So the numbers I start with may seem a few million dollars lower than what the City has been using. MMM provided no breakdown of the additional amounts they added, so for the purpose of comparing apples to apples, I am starting with the peer-reviewed Advicas estimates. I will put financing and taxes back at the end of this exercise.
    For the replacement option, Advicas estimated a cost of $84,989,000.
    For the rehabilitation option, which included a new pedestrian/cyclist bascule bridge, Advicas estimated $97,666,000.
    When council took rail off the new bridge, that lowered its cost by $12 million. Using the Advicas figures, the new bridge then becomes $73 million. With rail no longer on the existing bridge, the Advicas estimate for the combination of refurbishment work that would need to be done to match the replacement option becomes $74.5 million.
    So at the outset of this exercise, the two options are separated by only $1.5 million.
     
    The $7 million typo
    Now here’s where Andrew Rushforth’s assumptions about the “reasonable representation” of costs comes into play. We’ll start with something that Rushforth ought to have caught. It amounts to a $7 million dollar typo. Here’s how it goes.
    Advicas estimated $6,197,095 for “Roads and civil works” for the new bridge.
    Do you remember the pedestrian/cyclist bridge that was originally included as part of the refurbishment estimate? Remarkably, Advicas also estimated $6,197,095 for “Roads and civil works” for this bridge.
    Is it really possible two completely different bridges, one designed for automobiles, a rail line, bicycle lanes and pedestrian walkways would have the same civil works as a much smaller one for pedestrians and bicyclists?
    The individual breakdowns of costs that Advicas estimated for roads and civil works for both the new bridge and the pedestrian/cyclist bridge are exactly the same.
    Does it make any sense that two completely different bridges would entail  exactly the same work for roads and civil works? No.
    It seems to me someone copied and pasted the wrong information into one of these estimates. Rushforth’s $50,000 peer review falied to catch this simple mistake. One is wrong, but which one? For the answer to that, we need to go back to April 2009. 
    Delcan did a “Class C” estimate for a new bridge back in 2009 that set the price for a new bridge at $63 million and the City insisted for many months that was a firm and reliable price. So let’s compare it with Advicas. Conveniently, Delcan detailed their estimate for roads and civil works almost exactly the way Advicas did. But Delcan estimated those costs to be $11.5 million.
    In light of that, I would suggest the error in this case is in the amount assigned to the replacement bridge and that figure should be at least as high as Delcan’s $11.5 million. Didn’t the mayor say everything has increased since then?
    So when the engineering, contingency and escalation costs are added to the difference, the cost of the new bridge goes up by $7.4 million. That’s the seven million dollar typo.
    So here’s how the costs for the two bridges stands now: New bridge $80.4 million, refurbished bridge $74.5 million.
     
    The missing paint
    Let’s now look at something Advicas seems to have lost.  
    Advicas allowed $3 million for painting the refurbished bridge, which, when engineering, contingency and escalation costs are included, compounds to $5 million.
    And for the new bridge—which its architect, Sebastian Ricard, recently confirmed would be painted—how much does Advicas allow?
    Zero dollars.
    Think about that: Five million for painting the existing bridge. Nothing for painting the new bridge. If we’re comparing apples to apples, then shouldn’t both estimates include paint?
    Let’s assume—a dangerous thing to do, I admit—that painting the new bridge will cost half as much as painting the old bridge. That means we should add $2.5 million to the Advicas estimate for the new bridge.
    So with paint accounted for, the numbers are now: New bridge $82.9 million. Refurbished bridge $74.5 million.
     
    The ignored peer review
    I now want to talk about something that was ignored.
    Rushforth’s $50,000 peer review didn’t make many recommendations, but it did recommend the contingency allowance for the new bridge be raised from 15 percent to 20 percent. But MMM Group and the City ignored their consultant’s recommendation. 
    Claiming that an estimate has been peer reviewed and then ignoring the reviewer’s recommendation seems to me to be hypocritical. And it also seems imprudent.
    When Delcan produced their $63 million Class C estimate for a new bridge, they included a contingency of 30 percent. If  MMM and the City had listened to the peer reviewer, they would have increased the estimate for the new bridge, compounded by the escalation factor, by $3.3 million. So let’s do that.
    So here are the new numbers: New bridge $86.2 million. Refurbished bridge $74.5 million.
     
    The inflated engineering costs
    What I want to look at next is engineering costs and whether they have been applied consistently in the estimates.
    In Delcan’s Class C estimates for refurbishment and replacement, they based engineering costs on a percentage of predicted construction costs.
    Advicas used that formula for engineering costs for the replacement bridge, but not for any of the work associated with refurbishment.
    Instead, for the refurbished bridge, the engineering cost was calculated on the SUM of construction costs plus contingency. This had the affect of unnecessarily inflating the cost of refurbishment by $2.5 million. Since we’re trying to compare apples with apples, let’s adjust the estimate for refurbishment downward by that amount.
    The score is now: New bridge $86.2 million. Refurbished bridge $71.9 million.
     
    Financing and taxes
    So let’s now put back the amounts we took off at the top for “financing and taxes” that MMM Group had inequitably added to the Advicas estimates. Let’s make the adjustment equitable, and add 4.5 percent to each.
    So here’s the final score in the price game: New bridge $90 million. Gold-plated refurbished bridge $75 million.
     
    What this all means
    So, can the numbers the City has presented be trusted?
    I believe those numbers have been fudged to show a replacement bridge would cost less than a rehabilitated bridge.
    And what about the numbers I’ve shown with all the adjustments? Do those numbers reflect any objective truth about what a new bridge will cost or what a rehabilitated bridge should cost? I have my doubts.
    I think the design of a new bridge is in its infancy, far too early for cost certainty. I believe the numbers presented by Advicas have more to do with political agendas and personal aspiration than engineering.
    In the days following the successful counter-petition, pro-replacement councillors were faced with either forging ahead with replacement or backing down and losing face. And whether they knew it or not, the price they thought was firm wasn’t. But they chose to forge ahead anyway.
    I want to show you an excerpt from a document from January 2010, recently obtained from the City through an FOI request. It’s part of a memo sent to the City’s bridge project manager, Mike Lai, from Joost Meyboom, MMM Group’s chief consultant on the project.
    At the time, it was clear the counter-petition challenging the City’s decision to replace the bridge was going to be successful and, perhaps worried that a referendum debate would expose the flimsiness of previous cost estimates, Lai posed a series of questions to Meyboom. 
    The replacement option was then estimated at $63 million, and one of the questions Lai asked Meyboom was, “Do we have a firmer budget estimate for the project? Are there scope items that we may need to scale back on or eliminate to maintain the budget?”
    Meyboom responded, saying, in part, “The current estimate is based on limited engineering and a preliminary geotechnical investigation.” (He recently admitted than no additioal design work has been done on the bridge since the time he made this statement)
    The excerpt shows the reductions in scope Mr Meyboom suggested to keep costs from rising:

    Excerpt from a memo sent by MMM Group's Joost Meyboom to the City's Mike Lai, January 6, 2010
     
    Several of the scope reductions that Meyboom suggested were possible—and his rationalizations of those points—call into question the arguments the City has made for replacing the bridge. Had Meyboom’s suggestions been implemented, the City would have appeared to have lost control of the project. Refurbishment would have looked like a no-brainer.
    So the pro-replacement councillors and staff needed a strategy that would inflate the cost of refurbishment, and councillor Madoff’’s apples to apples doctrine accomplished that nicely. She insisted a refurbished bridge must have the same seismic performance as a new bridge and the same amenities as a new bridge. Somewhere along the line, the idea that it should also have the same life expectancy came into play. Effectively, the pro-replacement councillors and staff wanted to compare two new bridges, one of which just happened to look like the old bridge.
    Once new costs for replacement and refurbishment were obtained, they appear to have been pushed, prodded and tweaked to produce the desired result: that refurbishment would be more expensive than replacement.
    So here we are, on the eve of the referendum, and I would hazard the City and their consultants have no firm idea of what a new bridge will cost.
    And what about a common-sense refurbishment? One that has not been captured by the politcal agendas of the pro-replacement councillors or the personal aspirations of City Hall staff?
    Delcan’s 2009 Class C estimate of $23.6 million took many months to develop and prices have changed little since then. There’s good reason to believe it would still hold—or at least could be made to hold if we had a city council with the will to keep costs down.
    If the referendum produces a “No,” the next step must be to revisit the common sense, least-cost option developed by Mr Meyboom two years ago and expanded upon by those who followed him at Delcan.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

    Rob Wipond
    Out of sight from parents and the general public, school teachers and administrators are waging an increasingly tense battle over children with special needs—and the outcome could influence the future of public education.
     
    IT'S DISCOURAGING. It’s depressing,” says Julia Christianson, a special education teacher at Cedar Hill Middle School. “I have many parents cry on my shoulder. And many times I ask myself, ‘What else can I do?’”
    Now, like many teachers, Christianson is protesting publicly. And it’s not about pay, benefits, or holidays; it’s about “class size and composition.” Just a fuzzy phrase to outsiders, it’s gradually become a flashpoint for public education.
    In 1987, BC held a Royal Commission into class size and composition. In the 1998 collective agreement between the British Columbia Teacher’s Federation (BCTF) and NDP government, no salary increases were included, but class size concessions were. (Kindergarten classes were limited to 20 students, and Grades 1-3 to 22 students.) In 2001, the Liberals ripped that agreement up. Then in 2006 they created Bill 33 to deal with class size and composition. Many say that “solution” is creating a crisis.
    Bill 33 establishes recommended class size limits for all grades. The Greater Victoria School District (GVSD) has very few classes that surpass those limits, and most aren’t controversial. However, Bill 33 includes a related, more controversial provision: If more than three students with “special needs” and an Individual Education Plan (IEP) are enrolled in a class, the school principal and district superintendent must agree the class is still “appropriate for student learning.” And they must at least “consult” with, but not necessarily obtain the consent of, the teacher involved. 
    This is the “composition” component of the class size issue. Special needs students can vary from a child with poor hearing to a severely learning-disabled child with chronically disruptive behaviour. When a child is tested and officially “designated” with specific special needs, the teacher develops an IEP. Then, that child may or may not be eligible for some extra support from some kind of teaching assistant. 
    Obviously, many children with special needs don’t require a lot of extra help or cause problems in class; nevertheless, the numbers and types of special needs can often make a significant difference in how challenging a class is to manage, depending on how much extra support the teacher gets.
    Tara Ehrcke, President of Victoria’s BCTF local, illustrates: “Imagine a class with one student three years behind in reading comprehension, two more one grade level below in numeracy skills, a gifted student, two students with English as a second language, a child with a learning disability, and one diagnosed on the Autism spectrum... Each child requires materials, lessons, strategies and assessments tailored to their unique learning needs.”
    Christianson describes one of seven Cedar Hill classes for which she was the only secondary support last year: Ten students requiring no extra interventions, eight requiring moderate amounts of learning or behaviour intervention, and nine requiring serious, ongoing learning or behaviour interventions.
    “That teacher was just unbelievable; I bow to him,” says Christianson. “And this is Cedar Hill; this is not inner city. We are not considered a high needs school.”
    According to 2009 BC Ministry of Education statistics, in grades 4 through 12 in Greater Victoria, there were 318 classes with four or more students with an IEP—meaning about 21 percent of all classes were breaking Bill 33’s recommended class composition limit.
    That’s slightly worse than the provincial average, but no one thinks this problem is unique to Victoria; it’s epidemic.
     
    Funding Squeeze
    Although the BC Liberals have made “highest funding ever” their buzzword for education, that fact disguises the truth. 
    The provincial education budget remained fairly steady from the 1980s to 2000 as a percentage of BC’s gross domestic product (GDP) and overall tax base, at around 4.8 percent of GDP. Since the Liberals came to power, the education budget has dropped to 3.7 percent of GDP, while GDP growth itself has slowed. So the overall dollar amounts have indeed gone up but, between rollbacks, inflation and commitments to teacher salary increases the Liberals made, the net negative impact on school boards’ operational budgets has been dramatic. And since special education staff are technically classified “non-essential,” like librarians and counsellors, they’ve borne the brunt of cutbacks.
    Simultaneously, the province has largely eliminated targeted special needs funding, and instead expects school districts and principals to figure out ways to help special needs students from their main operational funding stream. 
    In that context, funding for special needs students has become impenetrably complicated. Although individual teachers can see how much support specific students are getting, there’s no clear way to calculate how much funding is going into special education across the district, in individual schools, or to disability subgroups.
    Currently, for example, autism designations automatically kick in some extra funding and assistance; learning disabilities do not. So one school may put an autistic child with two learning disabled children, expecting the autistic child’s educational assistant to help the learning disabled children in her downtime.
    Christianson broke down the numbers for the classes she served last year: apart from their normal classroom teacher, students identified with special needs were receiving on average a miniscule 18.6 minutes per week of extra support. 
    Many local teachers report that’s not atypical. “It’s hard,” says Christianson. “It’s hard working with the parents who’re saying, ‘Please, how can you help my kid?’ And I’m saying, I don’t have any [educational assistant] help for your kid. I don’t have anything else I can give your kid. Children with special needs are not getting the education they’re entitled to.”
    Compounding all this, there’s another 10-15 percent of students considered “grey area”—they’re stuck on expanding waitlists for testing or don’t have one specific, identifiable special need, but in practice, they’re still having, or causing, problems in classes.
    Consequently, many teachers feel overwhelmed and spread too thin. “When the needs of special needs children are not being met,” explains Christianson, “it has an effect on the entire classroom.”
     
    What’s “appropriate”?
    Twice yearly, all this comes to a head when Greater Victoria School District superintendent John Gaiptman reports on class sizes and composition to our elected school trustees for their stamp of approval. 
    By that time, Gaiptman will have consulted with teachers and principals as Bill 33 requires him to, and personally permitted as “appropriate for student learning” every class with four or more students with IEPs. 
    How is it done?
    “We don’t discriminate,” Gaiptman emphasizes, aware that Bill 33 runs uncomfortably close to legislating prejudice against children with special needs—a reason many parents dislike it. “We don’t turn away students from a class just because they have an IEP.”
    Victoria has a Bill 33-exempted, segregated school for children with special needs, but most parents and educators prefer integration. That, though, puts pressure on schools to provide extra supports throughout their programs. So Gaiptman, the principal, and the teacher involved pore over the class list, and the question becomes, “Does a specific class with certain students with certain needs require any extra teaching support?”
    “We work very, very hard to do, within our budget, the best job possible. This isn’t one side versus the other. What everybody in our school district wants is the best possible education for all students,” explains Gaiptman. “I want to make sure that each class is a good learning environment. And I know it is subjective.”
    “Subjective” may be a diplomatic way of summarizing the differences.
    Last October, special ed teacher Christianson gave an impassioned speech to the trustees ahead of Gaiptman’s report.
    “Not one of my classrooms in my opinion was appropriate for learning,” says Christianson. “Every single one of them in my mind had too many kids that had some really, really important needs in order to get a fair education, and no extra assistance except for their teacher.”
    And Christianson’s only the tip of the iceberg. Gaiptman concedes “the vast, vast majority” of teachers he consults with disagree when he concludes they don’t need extra support.
    Victoria’s BCTF president Ehrcke highlights teachers’ frustrations: “I am not aware of a single principal in this District ever saying a class was not suitable for student learning. Yet hundreds of teachers do... In four years of this process, I am only aware of a single example where an extra class was added in response to a consultation meeting.”
    The BC School Act provides for the Education Minister to appoint a special administrator if a school district is apparently not complying with the class size provisions. Last year, against a backdrop of litigation and political tussling, appointed arbitrator James Dorsey reviewed 1,622 class size and composition grievances from teachers around the province. Significantly, when grappling with his mandate, Dorsey cited the union’s criticism that Bill 33 didn’t define what “appropriate for student learning” even meant. However, Dorsey generally sided with the employers’ argument that this ambiguity was deliberately intended to allow principals and superintendents to effectively decide whatever they wanted “without any restrictions or criteria.” (Consequently, Dorsey focused strictly on issues of legal process in a small, representative sampling, and found that in about 25 percent of cases principals and superintendents did not even conduct reasonable consultations with teachers.)
    Small wonder, then, the situation is polarizing.
    So Christianson gave her presentation hoping the trustees would reject Gaiptman’s report, and instruct him to revisit problems. She also hoped the trustees would follow the Vancouver board of education.
    Vancouver trustees recently submitted a budget to the province that illegally ran a deficit, telling the Liberals they simply could not provide passable education services with the money they were being given. In the highly publicized struggle, a “special advisor” was parachuted in, the elected board was nearly replaced by government appointees, and a tug of war began about how to make up the shortfall.
    Of Victoria’s nine trustees, though, only stalwart Catherine Alpha (who’s also a teacher in Sooke) took the political risk and voted against accepting Gaiptman’s report.
    “I would like to have seen all the trustees vote against it, but then refuse to send the superintendent back to make it work,” explains Alpha, clarifying that her intent was to take the fight straight to Minister of Education Margaret McDiarmid. Describing the situation for special needs kids in her own class, her voice breaks; but then Alpha gathers herself: “Our programs are so tooth and bone that it’s beyond what is educationally sound.”
    Christianson gives a blunt assessment of most of the rest of the board: “I don’t think they care. I think they care about the bottom dollar.” 
     
    Are we being told the truth?
    For his part, Gaiptman reveals skepticism about the teachers’ and union’s positions. “I think that it’s important to know that there’s also a feeling out there [amongst teachers] that says, ‘If we agree [that our students don’t need more support], then we’re never going to get more money for education,” he remarks. “So there’s strategy behind it, too.”
    Dorsey similarly noted some school boards felt the BCTF was deliberately jamming “the true spirit of consultation” to put pressure on the government. But Dorsey concluded he saw “no evidentiary basis” for asserting teachers weren’t speaking their own minds.
    And Gaiptman does acknowledge he sees a real problem. “I’m not going to be honest with you if I don’t say, if I had more money, would I use it on class size? Yes.”
    Still, parents, and the general public, aren’t hearing this message very strongly, or very often. Why?
    According to Ehrcke, one local teacher recently tried to publicly protest his class composition, and “the board threatened to discipline him.”
    The union won’t breach confidentiality, and Gaiptman bristles about the topic, but it doesn’t take much investigating to see the outlines of what apparently happened. 
    Last year, the BC Teachers Federation drafted a template letter for teachers to send to parents if, after the usual “consultation,” the teacher still had concerns about the class size and composition. The letter informed parents that, despite the opinions of the principal and superintendent, the teacher felt his or her class was “not suitable for student learning.” It advised parents they could raise concerns with the principal, superintendent or trustees. 
    The British Columbia Public School Employers’ Association (BCPSEA) representing school boards countered with a template letter for principals and superintendents to give to union reps and teachers.
    The BCPSEA’s letter explained that publicly challenging the opinions of the principal and superintendent would “constitute a breach of the teacher’s legal duty of loyalty towards the district as his/her employer” and inappropriately “undermine public confidence in the public education system.” The BCPSEA letter continued threateningly, “I trust that you will rescind or amend your intended correspondence... to ensure that you do not unnecessarily put your members at risk with respect to their employment...”
    Reasonable or not, it throws the taxpaying public into the dark. And it’s particularly concerning when its intent is to conceal the truth. The minutes of that October meeting, for example, couldn’t be clearer about what the GVSD board actually feels about class size and composition: “Trustees thanked teachers, principals and the Superintendent for doing the best that they can within the guidelines of the Bill 33 legislation. There was overall agreement that the provincial government is failing the public education system by not providing adequate funding...”
    In this light, the perspective of BCTF’s Ehrcke takes on heightened import: “We feel very betrayed by principals, trustees and superintendents for not speaking out and acknowledging that many of these classes are not appropriate for student learning.”
    “The information has to get out and we have to save public education,” says Alpha. “Because when you don’t have equal access to quality education, then you don’t have equal access to your democracy.”
    So how much are our most vulnerable children actually being harmed? No one knows. Gaiptman concedes there’s no statistical tracking of education outcomes for special needs children going on.
    Christianson, the special education teacher, sees this as part of the mounting problems in our education system. “It’s come to the point that nobody wants anybody to know what the truth is,” she says.
    Rob Wipond has been a freelance writer of magazine features, news articles, political commentaries, social satires, theatre and performance art for over two decades.
     

    David Broadland
    August 2010
    The number of six-figure salaries has increased dramatically at City Hall. But are taxpayers getting good value for their money?
    THAT VICTORIA CITY HALL exists in a kind of economic bubble floating well above the reality of the ordinary people that pay City Hall’s bills was confirmed in July with the publication of the City’s 2009 Public Bodies Report. Municipalities are required by law to list all positions (excepting police) for which remuneration is greater than $75,000. The City’s 2009 report showed the number of City Hall staffers making more than $100,000 a year jumped from 15 in 2008 to 50 in 2009. According to Statistics Canada (2006) only 4 percent of Canadians have annual income greater than $100,000.
    City Manager Gail Stephens topped the list with remuneration of $186,418.09 and expenses of $168,443.94. The City’s Director of Communications, Katie Josephson ($115,369.52) said Stephen’s high expenses “included transition costs for moving to Victoria [from Calgary] that included losses on [her] house sale” as well as “moving expenses, travel and professional dues.”
    Second-highest paid City staffer is Director of Parks, Recreation and Culture Kate Friars, whose remuneration of $166,503.58 was an athletic jump of 25 percent from her remuneration in 2008. Other notable leapers were Peter Sparanese ($161,051.27), who spent 2009 as Director of Engineering, and Mike Lai ($128,347.14), who spent 2009 as the Johnson Street Bridge project manager and Assistant Director of Transportation and Parking Services. Both Lai’s and Sparanese’s remuneration increased by roughly 20 percent in 2009.
    The report also shows that remuneration to the mayor and councillors rose dramatically after councillors (excepting Geoff Young and Chris Coleman) voted soon after the November 2008 civic election to hike their pay. In 2008, then-Mayor Lowe’s remuneration and expenses totalled $63,139.04. The Public Bodies Report shows Mayor Fortin received $106,305.60 in remuneration and expenses in 2009. Councillor’s remuneration jumped from approximately $19,000 in 2008 to $40,000 in 2009.
    This might, in part, explain the difference in perception between Mayor Fortin’s take on the local economy and, say, Greg Baynton’s. As you might recall, after the City announced in mid June that the cost to either fix or replace the Johnson Street Bridge had risen to roughly $100 million, Mayor Fortin appeared on CHEK TV attributing the increase over the year before to “extremely escalating” construction costs. But Greg Baynton, President of the Vancouver Island Construction Association demurred, saying construction costs had actually dropped in that time.
    Perhaps Mayor Fortin was projecting the economic escalation in his own life to the world in general. Meanwhile, most business owners in Victoria were characterizing the change in the local economy as lying somewhere between “brutal” and “murder.”
    Not long after the release of the Public Bodies Report, council was warned by City Finance Director Brenda Warner ($138,836.61) that a 4.7 percent increase in taxes in 2011 would be necessary to make up for a projected $4.7 million budget shortfall. This would come on top of a 4.3 percent tax hike for this year. Just so you know, many of the City’s highest-paid managers won’t be personally affected by these tax increases.  General Manager of Corporate Services, Mike McCliggott ($153,899.56), Warner, Stephens, Sparanese and Lai all live in suburban Saanich.
    The link between level of compensation and the quality of decisions made by the City’s public servants and elected decision makers ought to be obvious to everyone, at least theoretically. The more taxpayers pay for help, the more talented and skilled that help will be, right?
    Although much of what’s done by the City is routine maintenance, every once in a while some great crisis appears and the pool of high-paid talent is there for the intense problem solving that’s going to get the City out of trouble. Like the sudden discovery that a piece of infrastructure vital to the proper functioning of the city hasn’t been properly maintained. With highly-paid talent on hand to guide elected decision makers through a rigorous examination of all possible options, residents can go to sleep at night confident that when they wake up, the crisis will be resolved.
    So how are they doing, the City’s talented, well-paid team of problem solvers? 
    There probably isn’t a better example of a difficult problem that needs solving than the Johnson Street Bridge. It’s been the talk of the town for over a year, and you either know what its problems are or you’re living under the bridge. A referendum is scheduled for November and the City is going through a complex process of deciding what question to put to electors. Many people think the mayor and councillors have already decided what that question is going to be (Can we borrow the money to replace the bridge?), but they’re putting on a show of asking the public’s opinion to get brownie points for process.
    Genuine or not, the City’s “public engagement” process includes sending a full colour eight-page publication called The Future of the Johnson Street Bridge to 30,000 city households. The Future includes a two-page photograph of the bridge taken from the west side that highlights the remarkable lack of maintenance on the bridge over the past five years. That photo forms the backdrop for a number of  statements about the bridge issue including one about “Public Safety” that I explored with the mayor, councillors, City staff, an MMM Engineering representative and seismic experts from the provincial government and Natural Resources Canada. What better way to find out if the high-paid talent is earning their keep?
    As you probably know, the bridge issue arose because an engineering consultant’s report—the Delcan report—claimed the bridge had seismic issues. The bridge has, in fact, survived several earthquakes without any damage, including the 1946 magnitude 7.2 crustal earthquake whose epicentre was just west of Campbell River, and the 2002 magnitude 6.8 Nisqually earthquake near Olympia.
    An economical decision about how to solve the problem Delcan found would require that City staff and councillors have a solid grasp on the likelihood an earthquake strong enough would occur close enough to the bridge to actually damage it. If the chance was very small, it would be an uneconomical over-reaction to immediately move to replace the bridge without considering other options first. And worse, it would be a signal, like a fly struggling in a spider’s web, to any big engineering company lurking nearby that there was a quick kill to be made in Victoria. It’s awfully easy for a big engineering company to sell “public safety” to public servants. Nobody will fault the company for trying—they’ll claim they’re just looking out for the public good. But they don’t have to balance the City’s books or worry about other priorities.
    So did the well-paid staff and councillors ever get that solid grasp on seismic reality?
    Here’s what The Future of the Johnson Street Bridge says about the seismic risk: “Public safety comes first when it comes to earthquake preparedness. Victoria is located in the most active seismic zone in Canada and recent studies have indicated that there is a 30-35 percent probability of a major earthquake (magnitude 7.0 - 7.9) occurring in Victoria within the next 50 years.” The City is implying Richter Scale magnitude and cites no source for this statement. Previously they’ve credited Delcan and/or Natural Resources Canada, but Delcan never said this and Dr John Cassidy of Natural Resources Canada has said the City would be right only if it was referring to “intensity VII shaking level. Intensity being the Mercalli Scale.” A Mercalli Scale intensity VII earthquake is roughly equivalent to a magnitude 6.0 earthquake on the Richter Scale.
    What’s the difference between that and the City’s “7.0 - 7.9”? A magnitude 7.0 earthquake releases about 32 times more energy than a magnitude 6.0 quake. A magnitude 7.9 earthquake would release close to 1000 times as much energy as a magnitude 6.0 earthquake. So the City’s claim is a significant overstatement of the size of earthquake likely to occur close enough to the Johnson Street Bridge in the next 50 years to damage it. How could a mistake like that be made with all the high-paid help at the City’s disposal?
    I questioned the mayor and councillors about the lack of attribution for this statement and asked if they were committed to providing residents with the best possible information about the seismic risk to the Johnson Street Bridge. A couple of the councillors questioned whether seismology could accurately predict earthquakes. Lynn Hunter said, “As to Dr. John Cassidy’s statement, my work with scientists over the years has taught me there are divergent opinions on most things in the scientific realm.” Pam Madoff said “I expect that the one constant that your personal research may have revealed is the unpredictability of earthquakes and the imperfection of the science of seismology...”
    John Luton offered a lengthy treatise on earthquakes and added, “I’m sure individual scientists are free, as Dr. Cassidy would be, to offer their opinions on the interpretation of information, but we will continue to rely on the comprehensive professional advice provided by our engineers and consultants.”
    Mayor Fortin said he too stood behind the information provided by City staff and consultants and cited a Natural Resources Canada study as proof of the City’s claim. But the study he cited—which uses the Mercalli Scale—confirms what NRC’s Dr John Cassidy has said, that there is a 30-35 percent chance of a Mercalli Scale intensity VII earthquake in the next 50 years. That would be a magnitude 6.0-ish quake on the Richter scale. It doesn’t, of course, say how close it will be to the Johnson Street Bridge. As Dr Cassidy pointed out in last month’s Focus, “depending on how far from the earthquake you are...10 km, 50 km, 100 km...the strength of shaking drops off quickly.”
    So what about the City’s consultant whose advice Mayor Fortin and other councillors say they have relied on? MMM Engineering Group’s Joost Meyboom offered exactly the same information to the mayor, council and public on June 14 as appears in the City’s brochure: A “35 percent probability of [a] major quake (M7.0 to M7.9) in next 50 years.” When asked recently where this information came from, Meyboom said “This information was developed by Dr Goldfinger at the Oregon State University and not by MMM. It is publicly available.” Dr Goldfinger’s research, which the City has never cited,  was only released on May 31. And when it was pointed out to Meyboom that Dr Goldfinger’s research only applied to the southern end of the Cascadia subduction zone, not the BC coast, he suggested there were other studies but didn’t name them. 
    But wait. There was one person who seemed to be paying attention to what the consultants were saying. Referring to the $50,000 peer review study done by Stantec Consulting’s Andrew Rushforth, Geoff Young said “Rushforth appears to be saying that the probability of occurrence of the event for which the bridge is being designed or repaired is not 30 percent over 50 years, but less than three percent. If correct, this is a significant difference that should be explained in the material [the City is sending to residents], in my view, since the increase in the cost of repair to this standard is far greater than the increase in the cost of new construction.” Bingo.
    Rushforth’s peer review made an unusual concession for the sake of comprehension. He listed magnitudes of earthquakes alongside the probability they would occur at the Johnson Street Bridge site. He gave a “478 year event (approximate magnitude 6.5)” a “10 percent chance of occurring in 50 years” and a “1 in 2500 year event (approximate magnitude 8.5)” a “3 percent chance of occurring in 75 years.” For those few zany people who want to know, interpolating between Rushforth’s figures for a 1 in 1000 year event (approximate magnitude 7.5), you get a 5 percent chance of occurring in 50 years. The City staffer who authored the high-probability major quake claim, Johnson Street Bridge project manager Mike Lai ($128,347.14), didn’t respond to a request for an explanation by press time. And also no word on whether councillors Madoff, Hunter and Luton are questioning the science behind Rushforth’s peer review.
    David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine

    Briony Penn

    The Big Burn

    By Briony Penn, in Investigations,

    July 2010
    The combination of a gutted Forest Service, vast areas of not sufficiently restocked forestlands, a quirky loophole in the Kyoto Protocol and a provincial government ideologically driven to sell off public assets has created the perfect opportunity for forest industrialists to burn down the last barriers to privatization of BC’s Crown forests.
     
    ON AUGUST 20, 1910, a strong wind blew down off the Cascades and whipped hundreds of forest blazes into an inferno that extinguished towns and three million hectares of forests from Washington to Montana. 
    The fires came at a critical time in United States history, when the timber barons, including Weyerhaeuser, were swaying public opinion towards privatizing the country’s public forests. The timber barons had attacked Teddy Roosevelt’s new forest service and its backbone—the forest rangers. The mandate Roosevelt gave the US Forest Service, that “the forest reserves should be set apart forever for the use and benefit of our people as a whole and not sacrificed to the short-sighted greed of a few,” was undermined by claims that Roosevelt’s “green rangers” (led by chief forester Gifford Pinchot) were “google-eyed, bandy-legged dudes, sad-eyed, absent-minded professors and bugologists.” 
    But when the big fires came, Teddy’s forest rangers fought against all odds, saved thousands of lives, and turned the tide of public sentiment against privatization. That led to the strengthening of the US Forest Service and its duty of stewardship. 
    It was called the year of the Big Burn, and out of its ashes came the creation of the British Columbia Forest Service, with a similar mission and structure. 
    A century later, history seems to be in a kind of rhythmic regression in BC. The Forest Service has suffered through a decade of cuts, rendering it unable to do its job. And now the pressure for privatization is coming—from some of the same companies that Roosevelt beat back 100 years ago, like Weyerhaeuser—to meet 21st century demands for cheap, so-called “green” biofuel. And this time round, the champions for keeping our forests public—the latest generation of “green rangers”—are a cohort of influential and well-respected professional foresters from the Forest Service (hardly “absent-minded professors”) led by Anthony Britneff, who recently retired after 39 years as a senior professional in the forest inventory, silviculture and forest health programs of the service. These green rangers are blowing the whistle on an overly industry-friendly government and are poised to put out what threatens to become BC’s own Big Burn. 
    In June, after the latest in a long series of drastic cuts to the Forest Service, Britneff wrote in an op ed in Victoria’s Times Colonist: “This government might think that by rendering the Forest Service dysfunctional and by not investing in the renewal of forestlands, it will eventually rationalize the privatization of provincial forests at fire-sale prices. Enclose the commons? Wake up BC!”
    Besides the emasculating cutbacks, there’s another threat that our green rangers are battling: “tenure reform” that puts “investor security” before the public interest. Some argue it amounts to de facto privatization of public lands. And not just any public lands, but the most abundant valley bottoms that will meet the needs of a growing international demand for biofuel.
    All this is playing out against a backdrop of unprecedented forest-health impacts due to climate change and a growing international call to conserve standing forests as carbon sinks for both mitigation of, and adaptation to, global warming. 
     
    Massive cuts to the Forest Service
    How deeply is the provincial government cutting the Forest Service? From the 42 district offices that used to exist before the Liberals took office in 2001, only 22 remain. According to the BC Government Employees Union, 1004 employees have been cut since 2002—well over half of these among the district staff that were providing on-the-ground stewardship, forest management, recreation, monitoring, enforcement and compliance services. The ministry has been unable to provide the total number of staff remaining. Insiders speculate that staffing levels are now at record lows, possibly below half the staffing level in 1981 at the bottom of the last major recession in BC. 
    Each district office, with only a handful of field staff, is now responsible for over two million hectares—1000 times more forest per forester than in Sweden. As Roosevelt observed, without a corps of rangers, the land goes unprotected and the laws that set the land aside become meaningless. 
    Since 2002, in addition to staff cuts, most forest management programs have had budgets slashed by over 50 percent. The Forest Stewardship Division has been gutted and, in a sign of the times, its remnants have been absorbed by the new Competitiveness and Innovation Division, which is being led by an assistant deputy minister with no previous experience in forestry matters—a political appointment made directly by the Premier’s office.
    Harry Drage, a green ranger with 32 years in the forest service in the Southern Interior as district manager, provincial recreation officer and certification inspector, observes, “If you take it one step further and look at the staffing in both the ministries that are charged with stewardship—forest and environment—it is down by well over a half of what it was. This creates a lack of public oversight and so the checks and balances are not there anymore. We aren’t protecting the public interest. Is the public comfortable with that?”
    This question was put to the Minister of Forests and Range, Pat Bell, an ex-salvage logger from Prince George. He makes no apologies for the cuts or change in institutional culture. With a 35 percent reduction in harvest levels and dropping government revenues from forestry, he feels a nine percent reduction in staff (referring to only the June round of cuts) is not unreasonable. “The public expects us to manage our fiscal resources, and that is what we are doing.” He points to the Forests for Tomorrow program at $40 million dollars for 2010-2011 as making a significant contribution “by any measure” to reforestation. 
    Anthony Britneff argues that government cannot justify these cuts by the need for fiscal restraint alone because the bulk of the budget cuts were made in 2002, before the recession. He thinks the Forests for Tomorrow program is a tiny drop in a dangerously empty bucket. The amount of public spending on reforestation dropped by 93 percent in 2002 and has only recovered to about 40 percent of what was being budgeted in the ’90s. Meanwhile the amount of land that needs reforestation has increased more than 50-fold. 
    Minister Bell finds these kind of comments “disappointing,” and he maintains that core services to the ministry have been protected and that it’s easy for critics to manipulate numbers. 
    Fact-checking the numbers is challenging. The political decision to strip out a requirement for resource analysis reporting from the Ministry of Forests and Range Act has left the public with limited and confusing facts. After 2002, the ministry’s annual reports shrink to half their previous length, and reporting on forest management activities takes a downward dive. John Betts, head of the Western Silvicultural Contractors’ Association, observes that the last time there was such a  slim annual report was when the forest rangers were fighting on the Western Front during World War II. 
    Anthony Britneff argues that it is precisely such lack of reporting that prevents even a coherent discussion about the numbers because they aren’t available. “How can you reliably determine timber supply for annual allowable A clearcut on Vancouver Island awaiting replantingcuts if you don’t have a good inventory of what is there and what isn’t?” he asks. He points out that no one knows anymore how much land is not stocked or requires replanting. Britneff estimates that nine million hectares, an area three times the size of Vancouver Island, is not stocked adequately with trees—lands that are outside of licensee responsibilities and therefore the responsibility of the province. 
    The critics are not confined to internal Forest Service “bugologists.” In Williams Lake, forest contractor Jane Perry, past president of the Association of BC Forest Professionals, describes the impact of the recent cutbacks on beetle-affected areas as a huge loss to the much-needed research and expertise required to deal with the immense problem. “Morale in Williams Lake,” she sighs, “couldn’t be lower.”
    John Betts confirms Perry’s portrayal of what’s happening. “People come up to me and say, ‘Boy, you guys must be really busy with all the burned lands and mountain pine beetle.’ Well, actually, we aren’t. We have lost 30 percent of our work and guys are losing their jobs. The lumber market has collapsed so there is no work with the companies. But the point is we should be busier than ever from government because we have a major restoration project that is being neglected.” 
     
    Change of mission
    Our publicly-owned forests are a provincial icon and the envy of the world. Since the passing of the Forest Act in 1912, a public role in managing our forests has been enshrined in legislation to defend against what was then characterized as “destructive lumbering.” Some might argue that record is blemished, but British Columbians still enjoy a public asset that is unequalled in the world. Native forests with a tremendous diversity of ecosystems, large, still-intact watersheds, and a public freedom to enjoy them are a part of every British Columbian’s identity. This is very different than the experience of Europe, Australia and New Zealand, where native forests have long been converted to plantations of commercial exotic species with a corresponding loss of biodiversity and a limiting of public access.
    Since 1978, the Forest Service’s mission statement has stressed integrated management of the many values we ascribe to our forests, with a commitment “to manage, conserve and protect the province’s forest, range and outdoor recreation resources to ensure their sustainable use for the economic, cultural, physical and spiritual well-being of British Columbians, who hold those same resources in trust for future generations. In respecting and caring for public forest and range lands, the ministry is guided by the ethics of stewardship and public service.”
    Apparently, that’s now all history. 
    A recent internal Ministry of Forests and Range document titled “Response to the Changing Business Environment” lays out the new mission for the ministry as “To provide a superior service to resource stakeholders by supporting competitive business conditions” and gives priority to “Enhancing industry competitiveness” and “Identifying clear outcomes for investors.” An earlier internal memo dated June 9, 2009 from Jim Gowriluk, regional executive director, to his district managers, titled “Re: Advocating for the Forest Industry in the Coast Forest Region,” clearly articulates the new single-function mandate of the Forest Service of “fulfilling our role as advocates for the forest industry.” 
    Protecting the public interest has disappeared. 
    In Smithers, another retired green ranger, forest ecologist Jim Pojar, an internationally-regarded specialist on BC’s ecosystems with 25 years in the Forest Service under his belt, refuses to become a “stooge of industry.” He believes the Liberal government wants to deregulate and effectively privatize our public forests, presenting “hard times” with forest die-off and declining revenue from forestry as a convenient rationale to impose their ideology. “Their vision seems to be to maximize the net present value of forest resources, liquidate as much wood as quickly as possible, manage only for fibre or biomass, sell off forest land to industry and let them deal with the hassle—and maybe make some extra money in real estate. If that is your vision, you don’t need a Forest Service and you don’t need a regulatory and management regime.”
    Del Meidinger was the chief provincial forest ecologist for 30 years. His work with forest classification systems led the world as a management tool and won him the Premier’s Legacy Award. Meidinger points to the axing of the field ecologists who implement this tool. “Why are they de-emphasizing forest stewardship? The forests support so many ecosystem services. Really what is at stake is the protection of the public interest in our forests.” 
    Alan Vyse, adjunct professor of forestry with an Emeritus position in the Forest Service, speaking from his office at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, affirms the concerns of the green rangers: “The facts stand for themselves. There are lots of concerns out there about the change in culture surrounding our public forests and I share them. What we need now with all the challenges of increased pests, fire and other climate change issues is an informed and proactive Forest Service to identify and solve the problems.” 
    The problems are as big as all outdoors. While the political winds were changing at the turn of the millennium, the climatic winds were blowing in profound effects on our forests. Interior forests have experienced huge hits from record wildfires, mountain pine beetle, other large-scale insect infestations like western spruce budworm, and diseases like Dothistroma. The mountain pine beetle alone damaged 15 million hectares, 30 to 60 percent of which staff estimate is not satisfactorily restocked (referred to as NSR lands). Fires burned over a million hectares. A third of a million hectares have been left unstocked from small-scale salvage logging carried out without any obligation to reforest.
    As Vyse asks, “How do you meet these challenges when you reduce your staff and researchers? In the various cuts, including the latest one, they have eliminated 1500 years of accumulated expertise in technical issues. How can you be proactive…?”
    Jim Pojar, in his recent peer-reviewed scientific report, New Climate for Conservation, highlights the challenges facing our forests: “Climate change is already significantly impacting healthy ecosystems in British Columbia and will likely cause more dire consequences for fragmented or degraded ecosystems.” He notes that future projections for forest health and supply of timber require analysis by people who are arms-length to industry. 
    This is not the direction the BC government seems headed.
     
    Biofuels and tenure reform
    BC’s forest industry is in the process of diversifying from producing softwood pulp and paper and dimensional lumber for the United States housing market to a new range of products—most notably feedstock for the bioenergy sector. The main requirement of the bioenergy industry is secure, long-term tenures on productive lands close to markets, ostensibly to provide assurance to investors that there will be a long-term return on capital. 
    To provide that security, BC’s Forests and Range Minister Pat Bell has called for a new form of tenure called “commercial forest reserves.” Bell maintains there are no plans to privatize Crown forests, but it’s no secret that A hybrid poplar plantation in Oregon that supplies feedstock for production of cellulosic ethanol.the commercial forest reserve concept involves setting aside certain areas, likely the most productive ones, for a single use: intensive silviculture aimed at producing biofuels. Britneff and other green rangers argue that the granting of long term leases that preclude any other uses amounts to at least de facto privatization. The public would lose control of those lands.
    What would Bell’s commercial forest reserves look like? “That is difficult to answer at the moment,” Bell says. “We are in discussion with various stakeholders, industry, ENGOs and First Nations. We envision them as smaller geographical areas where you don’t have complications of species at risk, traditional-use areas, and other values.” That the most productive forestlands are valley bottoms where, in fact, all those “complications” are present is not addressed, nor is the process by which these areas are to be selected.
    Industry is definitely pushing for tenure reform. Last October, headlines in the Vancouver Sun—“Get government out of forests”—accompanied the release of the Woodbridge Report that was presented in a BC Business Council of BC 2020 Summit co-chaired by David Emerson and past finance minister for the Liberal government, Carole Taylor. Written by Peter Woodbridge, the central recommendation is to reform tenure and put investment interests as the top priority. 
    The recommendations of the Woodbridge Report echo exactly those of the Working Roundtable on Forestry, set up by Bell, which published its report the year before. These recommendations are a reflection of the membership of the Roundtable, which, as one of their press releases states, is “not intended to represent forest sector interest groups [or the public] because it would be impossible to have a Working Roundtable of a reasonable size and at the same time represent all forest sector interests.” Of the 15 members, 12 were industry representatives, two were First Nations and there was a lone academic, Derek Thompson. 
    Thompson, also a long-time civil servant and a former deputy minister of Water, Land and Air Protection, was candid: “Tenure reform dominated the discussions, but we couldn’t even get consensus with just industry folk at the table.” He also notes, “There was a great deal of trepidation from government about taking the discourse into the public realm because of the potential for uncontrollable controversy.”
    Fear of “uncontrollable controversy” seems to be at the heart of why the provincial Liberals have steered away from open talk about privatization. For very good reasons, British Columbians aren’t comfortable with changes to Crown lands without a full public debate.
    Liberal MLA for Nechako Lakes, John Rustad, is parliamentary secretary to the provincial Committee on Silviculture. He runs a consulting firm for the forest industry and, like Bell, was also born and raised in Prince George. Rustad acknowledges that “Engaging in all those topics with a broad sector of society would elicit a broad response and is a good idea.” But his more immediate concerns are creating opportunities for the industry’s recovery, and he believes the province needs to move in a new direction: “What I have been asked to do is figure out how to maximize and support the fibre needs of industry today and tomorrow, including for bioenergy and biofuels. I need to find the next regime for silviculture to look at the province differently.”
    And what would that recovery look like on the ground? Rustad sketches out a model that would utilize one-third of the province’s land base as intensive commercial forests. “We are not trying to do something on every square inch of the land base. Even if we have intensive silviculture values, that doesn’t restrict other values. Having said that, you would have it on a subset of the land base and it would happen over a 10- or 20-year period and the rest of the land base would be managed as it is today.”  
    He identifies new intensive silviculture technologies as playing a central role because they increase fibre yield by 20 percent on productive sites, and points to pilot projects, such as the hybrid poplar plantations in the Fraser Valley area by Kruger (Scott Paper), on private lands as the future direction of the forest industry.
    There are other examples of this shift in focus among forestry companies. Woodbridge highlights the recent Weyerhauser-Chevron venture company called Catchlight Energy. Catchlight is “combining Weyerhaeuser’s expertise in innovative land stewardship, resource management and capacity to deliver sustainable cellulose-based feedstocks at scale with Chevron’s technology capabilities in molecular conversion, product engineering, advanced fuel manufacturing and fuels distribution.”
    Clark Binkley, the ex-Dean of the Faculty of Forests at UBC who proselytized privatization of Crown forests before returning to the USA and setting up his own investment company, is touting GreenWood Resources, a Portland-based company that develops intensively-managed hybrid poplar plantations for biofuels.
    Industry forest geneticist Dr Jean Brouard labels the land management strategy that partitions the land base into thirds, “Triad.” “Investors are most interested in concentrating on the most productive growing sites, typically about a third of any land base, that are close to mills with high existing roading density and low emissions on haulage. On these productive growing sites—with more intensive site preparation and genetics—you can meet the 20 percent increase in yield. On the average growing sites, you might have a business-as-usual or with more focus on ecosystems-based management, and then the least productive third is left for conservation. Triad is currently being used on a pilot basis in Quebec by the government as forestry was almost at a standstill.”
    Does this kind of land management strategy take into account climate change, forest health, biodiversity and other public interests? Brouard doesn’t seem to think that’s possible: “Essentially these go on in the less-intensively managed areas. But you can only grow trees like poplars profitably in moist bottom valley lands and that might coincide with species at risk or fish habitat values. There are also big concerns with pathogens [diseases like Septoria musiva] in hybrid poplar plantations that could jump to native cottonwoods and create a problem for our native forests. Conservation needs to be in all ecosystems and at all scales and that might not coincide with industry’s needs for the most productive lands.”
    Woodbridge admits, “Plantations are a dirty word for some Canadians.” But he argues there is no alternative; BC has to follow the more competitive suppliers of fibre and biofuel feedstock—the intensive plantations in the United States, Europe, New Zealand and Australia. “To remain competitive, BC has to lower wood costs and this is not done through selling indigenous timber cheaper. Because our labour and transport costs are going up, we have to farm fibre and feedstock for biofuels more intensively. We need to find a secure tenure system to do this.” 
     
    The delusion of biofuels
    To fully understand where the pressure for tenure reform is coming from, you have to follow the money. Bell and Rustad are clearly putting their money on biofuels, which are being promoted as one of the next great alternative energy sources, a cure for what ails the planet’s warming atmosphere. 
    You might wonder how burning forests—a fuel high in carbon—can possibly be good for the atmosphere. And that’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask. In fact, promoting the use of biofuels as part of the solution to global warming seems a bit delusional.
    The biofuel idea goes back to a strange loophole in the Kyoto Protocol rules that enables a tree to be cut down, turned into wood pellets, shipped overseas and then burned as fuel without having to account for any of the carbon that is released through all these activities. 
    If that loophole is plugged, BC would be forced to account for emissions from logging and burning, which, according to the 2007 BC Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report, creates the single largest source of emissions in the province, larger even than the energy sector. If the loophole disappears, the dream of rescuing BC’s forest industry by developing the biofuels sector would go up in a puff of wood smoke. 
    But right now, that loophole remains and is proving to be a powerful impetus for revamping the forest industry.
    Ontario is already taking the lead on exploiting this loophole with its proposals to revitalize ailing pulp mills and send wood pellets to its coal-fired power plants, which have been legislated to stop using coal by 2014. It’s one way to keep traditional forestry jobs in economically-depressed forestry-dependent towns. But it’s risky, and it’s exacerbating climate change. 
    Growing biofuels in an intensive way would degrade the health of the air, water and soil quality. Biodiversity would be severely compromised. Recreation and public access would be denied. The use of forests as needed carbon sinks and repositories of cultural values would go out the window. These rich, valley-bottom lands are what everyone wants—from wildlife to the international real estate companies, as witnessed in the sell-off in the last decade of Crown parcels along eastern Vancouver Island. 
    Conversion of these lands to intensive plantations would increase our emissions and decrease our ability to adapt to climate change. And, ironically, it would be done under the guise of mitigating climate change.
    If the province does go forward with tenure reform to support the biofuel industry and the Kyoto loophole is closed, what then? That would depend on exactly what the new form of tenure was. Bell has likened it to being something like the Agricultural Land Reserve. But the ALR has proven itself susceptible to the predations of the real estate industry and one can easily imagine the Kyoto loophole closing and real estate developments moving into the failed plantations.
     
    Public interest and consultation 
    With potentially a third of the province being considered for a form of tenure that might well be seen as de facto privatization, “uncontrollable controversy” seems inevitable—but only if the public becomes fully informed. So far, though, the government has managed to keep a pretty tight lid on its plans.
    Minister Bell says his focus is the decline of revenue in forest communities like Prince George, and the need for the ministry to take a “new direction.” “We are changing the way we are doing business. It is in the public’s interest to have a strong forest industry, and I’ve been very clear in the direction we need to go: better utilization of the resource, including bioenergy; intensive silviculture; growing the Chinese market; and promoting wood first.” In response to suggestions by his critics that the public expects government to manage not just fiscal resources but the physical values of a forest as well, Bell simply says: “With workforce adjustments, it is always difficult.”
    Bell’s counterpart sitting on the other side of the legislature disagrees with him on how to regain economic health in forest communities and what kind of Forest Service is needed to get there. Norm Macdonald, NDP MLA for Columbia River/Revelstoke and Opposition Forest Critic says, “This is the most valuable asset that the people of BC have—just the timber value of the forest alone is a third of a trillion dollars—and, if we don’t maintain that investment with regard to reforestation and research, matters will become progressively worse. [Our Forest Service] has been gutted to the point that the work that is needed to be done isn’t getting done.” 
    Macdonald sees the change in direction as the thin end of the wedge toward privatization of public forests. “This is cronyism at its worst. The memorandum sent out to all the forest managers to only focus on industry interests has had no public discussion. Has the public interest been considered? Is access going to be denied? To have that agenda without public discussion is deeply disturbing. After nine years on this file, you would think there would be a public plan. At best it is incompetence; at worst there is something more nefarious, like a privatization agenda for our public lands.”
    It seems obvious that the public does need to be consulted about the shift in direction and about what could be lost by converting natural forests to intensive plantations and potentially to real estate.
    Forest geneticist Brouard says the real lesson from Quebec is that for the Triad process to succeed, it must take place with public consultation. Short-circuiting public consultation leads to more wars in the woods or to industry negotiating their own agreements with ENGOS and First Nations “leaving government [and therefore the public] to play catchup.” The public, like industry, won’t invest in something it has no say over. Brouard also notes another “must have” before the Triad system can work: “The first thing you need, of course, is good inventory of all your lands.” Precisely what we don’t have because of all the cutbacks.
    Even investors are nervous about the lack of consultation and oversight. Peter Woodbridge notes, “I am recommending that government also beef up the Forest Service oversight. Let companies have their own sand box and manage their fibre as they see fit, but they have to stay within the confines and rules set by government. I am an advocate for good planning and strong government oversight, and in this regard I have some criticisms of government.” 
    Bell’s ministry seems to be ignoring the potential for conservation-type carbon offsets. Some First Nations are developing these through reduced harvesting, hoping to sell the offsets on international carbon markets—exactly the opposite of industry’s drift to intensification. These types of carbon offsets do have climatic and biodiversity benefits, unlike the biofuel offsets proposed by Bell in his vision. In order to sell these credits and meet international standards, there have to be tenures that guarantee the conservation of carbon in these forest sinks for 100 years. That means tenure reform, and First Nations are pioneering some of the ideas for how this could be done. 
    Unfortunately, no one in the ministry is talking about it. Derek Thompson, who is now negotiating carbon conservation projects in the tropics for World Wildlife Fund and indigenous groups, says that what amazes him about the government is the sheer lack of public discussion about the potentially huge revenue source of conservation carbon projects for rural communities.
     
    Last words
    With no legislated commitment to planning, no budget to do so, and a new mandate to respond to only industry demands, the government has left the public out of the discussion. Only “the google eyed, bandy-legged dudes” once on the inside, seem to know what’s happening. What they are saying is that we can anticipate losing control over our choicest Crown lands—sacrificing them to single, intensive industrial uses with an accompanying loss of access, watershed and biodiversity protection. 
    Regardless of the type of future business interests—from biofuels to ecosystem services—all roads lead back to the basic message of the green rangers. Says Alan Vyse, “Sure these market forces might build into them some public interest, but where is the discussion about what those public interests are? It is way past time for some fairly significant discussions on the future of our public forests.” Will it create an “uncontrollable controversy”? It is hard to imagine anything more controversial than not consulting with the people. 
    A good place for the government to start that consultation would be with the green rangers and their 1500 years of experience. To manage healthy forests, Britneff’s first step would be to get forest rangers back into the bush and decentralize services away from city offices to forest-dependent communities. 
    His second step would be to restore adequate funding for forest management and for research, including exploring international market opportunities that build on environmental stewardship, resiliency and sustainability. 
    Finally, his third step would be to grant the province’s chief forester independent statutory powers for auditing forest management in 100 local Forest Service offices by the holders of community forest tenures and First Nations tenures, thereby restoring a stewardship ethic to local forest models.
    Without such measures, a Big Burn of BC’s public forests seems imminent.
    Briony Penn, PhD is a naturalist, journalist, artist and award-winning environmental educator. She is the author of The Kids Book of Geography (Kids Can Press) and A Year on the Wild Side.



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