When I read the news release announcing that Premier David Eby had decided to name the Site C hydroelectric dam after his predecessor, the late John Horgan, I posted an old photo I saved from Horgan’s early Twitter feed to my X and Facebook pages.
It was taken in the Hudson’s Hope region back when Gordon Campbell was premier and Horgan toiled in obscurity on the NDP Opposition bench as energy critic. Horgan stood proudly next to a sign that proclaimed: “SITE C SUCKS. HAY FOR SALE.”
It wasn’t the only one he posed for. His job was to cultivate resistance to the project, in line with leader Carole James’ policy positions. Site C sucks, axe the carbon tax, etc.
Response to the news about the Horgan dam was quick.
Renaming is ‘disrespectful of the truth’
Former Kootenay East MLA Bill Bennett sent me a note: “I was energy minister when our government chose to build Site C. I liked John Horgan personally but he was a rapid, uncontrolled critic of the project. Naming the project after him is disrespectful of the truth.”
Kootenay Bill was referring to the final investment decision, taken by Christy Clark’s cabinet in December 2014. The cost estimate was $8.3 billion, with a $440 million contingency fund. Campbell had made the original announcement on April 19, 2010 at the site near Hudson’s Hope, with one of his validators being an obscure mathematics professor named Andrew Weaver. More on that in a bit.
A Campbell-era premier’s office staffer was even more annoyed.
“I don’t think Site C should bear any politician’s name, and I have a lot of respect for John Horgan,” he told me. “But the truth is that this was Gordon Campbell’s vision and it was he and his colleagues who built it. Horgan would never have built it. This is disgraceful politics by David Eby, who only announced this to distract from the fact he’s been forced to negotiate an oil pipeline with Mark Carney.”
Another BC Liberal staffer from that era provided a bit of humour from his native England: “I’m holding out hope that Trans Mountain will be renamed the David Eby Pipeline. A fitting tribute!”
NDP saw Site C as blight on the land
After Horgan and then-BC Greens leader Weaver toppled Clark’s government in the summer of 2017, Horgan instructed the BC Utilities Commission to investigate the cost of halting construction before the critical river diversion phase. Not surprisingly, the expert panel found this would be expensive, partly because other power sources would have to be developed instead.
When Horgan announced in late 2017 that Site C would be completed, the look on his face suggested he was speaking of a mine disaster with casualties. Beside him was his unlikely energy minister, Nelson-Creston MLA Michelle Mungall, who had previously taken part in a “Paddle for the Peace” protest canoe trip to oppose a third dam.
Mungall and other NDPers had been convinced that hydro dams in the Kootenays and Peace were a blight on the environment. The BC Hydro office union financed a media campaign featuring an SFU professor who insisted that B.C. didn’t need more electricity.
This was back when Horgan and Weaver were preparing to impose the world’s most impractical deadline to ban gasoline and diesel vehicles and make everyone go electric. Weaver had turned against Site C, leading a party that branded it a “fracking dam” built entirely to subsidize LNG production.
Christy Clark vowed to complete Site C for Bennett
We all have more facts to go with our opinions now. We know the cost of Site C doubled to $16 billion by completion, disrupted by a pandemic and some difficult geology on one of the river banks. We know that even with Site C, sorry, the John Horgan Dam, B.C. has imported electricity for the past few years from Alberta, which still burns natural gas for power, and from U.S. states where gas and even thermal coal fire some of the boilers.
Adrian Dix, the current energy minister, recently told the Globe and Mail that BC Hydro is now studying the possibility of a fourth Peace dam. Not Site D, one of the original engineering locations from the 1950s, but Site E, which may be preferable. It is even finally dawning on the “mud hut” wing of the NDP that clean, dependable hydro is a good thing.
Premier Eby acknowledged that Horgan would probably not been a fan of renaming the dam. “I think all of us know that if John were here today, he would not have allowed us to name the dam or anything after him.” But he said the decision to name it after Horgan came from a “desire to reflect the complexity and the challenge of governing that John engaged in.”
But this naming move also smacks of vengeful politics by Eby. It was his nemesis Christy Clark who spoke at the memorial service for the late Kelowna Bill Bennett, who has since had the Okanagan Lake floating bridge named for him. She vowed then that she would get Site C across the goal line, in tribute to Bennett and his legendary father, Cecil, whose name adorns the first Peace dam.
Horgan’s name is already memorialized on the Langford campus of Royal Roads University. Having known and mostly gotten along well with Horgan for many years, I’ll venture to say that if he were around to discuss it, he would say the campus is sufficient to mark the legacy of “Langford John,” as he liked to be called.