The power is the people's
When B.C. Hydro and a U.S. power company wanted to plunk a plant in downtown Port Alberni, they didn't reckon that, in a democracy, a fired-up populace can make a difference
Stephen Hume
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, December 08, 2001
NEWSLETTERS
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PORT ALBERNI - They say you can't fight city hall, but nobody believes that any longer in this sinewy, tough-as-an-axe-handle town built by loggers and millhands.
Citizens here have just served up a five-star lesson in participatory democracy to their city council and to the executives at B.C. Hydro and Calpine Corporation, a private California-based power company.
They reminded everyone that no matter how inconvenient to corporate strategic planning, the people still have the final say in a democracy. If they are committed, if they get involved, no matter how scant their resources the people can still decide what happens and what doesn't in their communities.
In Port Alberni, those people include Keith and Bernadette Wyton, who run a small furniture factory; Maggie Paquet, a transplanted American biologist; George McKnight, who's over 80 and has a long memory; Barb Flynn, a long-time nurse who knows the price children can pay for air pollution; and Dick Lawson, a retired teacher who's watched generations grow up and leave the valley, as I once did.
These folks formed the nucleus of the Citizens Stewardship Coalition and they and the other ordinary people of Port Alberni took the boardroom bigshots and their own municipal politicians to the mat.
It all goes back to a plan announced last December by B.C. Hydro and Calpine to joint-venture a $300-million gas-fired electrical generating plant that would produce enough power for 250,000 homes. To get the plant, city council would simply have to rezone a parcel of land for industrial purposes.
Apparently mesmerized -- as small- town municipal politicians often are -- by the promise of jobs and a new source of tax revenue, council swiftly voted unanimously to rezone. It said it was prepared to take the flak from a public it deemed uninformed.
Big mistake.
Now, considering the recent uproar on the Lower Mainland over proposals for a massive thermal generating plant at Sumas, you'd think the councillors might have anticipated that the Tebo Avenue site selected by B.C. Hydro would prove contentious with voters.
First, it would put the plant right next to the road to Pacific Rim National Park, not exactly an incentive for passing tourists to stop in Port Alberni for a few extra days. Second, the site where the stacks would belch out fumes was surrounded by the town's largest shopping mall, two elementary schools, two community centres, four residential subdivisions, the museum, the library, North Island Community College and Bob Dailey Stadium with its complex of heavily-used playing fields.
But B.C. Hydro was adamant, some might say arrogant. Of the 15 sites it surveyed, only this one right in the middle of town would meet the needs of the power plant.
Unfortunately for the corporate planners, Port Alberni isn't the place it was 25 years ago when the plywood plants, planer mills, sawmills and the huge pulp and paper complex on the waterfront were going full bore and industry got what it wanted.
In those days, residents sometimes even seemed to take a perverse pride in the sickly sweet, stewed cabbage odour from the mills.
This time, Nurse Flynn, who sits on the local health advisory committee, reminded people how it had been in West Coast General Hospital when temperature inversions trapped mill emissions and pediatric wards filled with babies who couldn't breathe and she couldn't make ice fast enough to fill the croupettes that provided cool steam to ease inflamed respiratory tracts.
"It was frightening," she says. "It was such an emotional thing for parents and nurses alike."
"People in Port Alberni know the consequences of industrial pollution," Bernadette Wyton concurs. "We've seen things improve remarkably in the past 10 years and we don't want to go back. We won't go back."
The citizens' group consulted air quality experts like the University of B.C.'s David Bates to talk about particulate matter and what it means in an urban airshed. They mobilized information sessions. And they challenged B.C. Hydro and its experts every step of the way.
When they were assured there would be no negative air quality impacts, they appeared before city council and stacked up 10-kilogram sacks of flour equivalent to the amount of particulate the plant would emit each day.
They circulated newsletters that asked tough questions about health and environmental issues.
Most important, they urged people to get involved, to take a position, because in a democracy everyone has the obligation to try to make a difference.
After thousands of residents signed a petition, the town council concluded that perhaps a public hearing on the issue was in order after all. The local cable channel broadcast the proceedings.
"People saw it on TV and they were jumping in their cars and rushing down to the meeting to line up and have their say," Maggie Paquet recalls. "It was one of the most wonderful, outrageous, inspiring things I've ever seen."
The meeting, in which resident after resident went to the microphone to oppose the project, lasted 26 hours over three days. Presumably the prospect of all those votes going somewhere else had a galvanizing effect on the politicians. Of those who voted unanimously to rezone the land for a power plant, all but one now suddenly voted to kill the application.
Keith Wyton says that standing up to be counted was a way for townsfolk to reclaim ownership of their community after a decade in which outside forces have brutally restructured the forest industry at the cost of thousands of jobs and incalculable personal suffering.
"It was always possible to intimidate people before, but people have been through so much that you can't intimidate them now," he says. "This was a watershed event for this district."
He's right. Things will never be the same in Port Alberni again. Stopping a mega-project that everyone assumed would go ahead marks a sea change. It serves notice to everyone that there's a different tide running in the valley now. Ain't democracy great? |
