“Environmental blah blah” is how retiring NDP MLA Corky Evans describes the privatization of B.C.’s waterways under the guise of addressing climate change. So-called “green” run of river hydro projects, also known as independent power projects or IPPs, divert water into a pipe several kilometres long and then into a turbine before returning it to the same watercourse downstream.

Among the over 500 streams and rivers staked by private companies so far, the Plutonic Power and General Electric Bute Inlet Project plans to divert and dam 17 streams and rivers, while constructing 445 kilometres of transmission lines, 314 kilometres of roads, and 104 bridges. Across the inlet from me, the Sea-to-Sky corridor has stakes for 110 streams and rivers.

How did this happen? The 2002 B.C. Energy Plan forbade our formerly very profitable Crown corporation B.C. Hydro from producing new sources of hydroelectricity. Further, BC Hydro will now be forced to buy energy from the new private producers at $120 megawatts per hour for which they will receive $60 in the market. Well, you know Gordo and privatization: BC Rail, BC Ferries, healthcare.

What about local opposition? Silenced in June 2006 when Campbell passed Bill 30 to retroactively abolish local zoning authority over them.

Who supports the run of river projects? You mean apart from speculators and Liberal-led astroturf orgs like BC Citizens For Green Energy? Well, there’s David Suzuki, economist Mark Jaccard, and environmental activist Tzeporah Berman who started the foundation PowerUp Canada just to promote them.

And why are we doing this again? To sell our “green” energy to the US. says Berman, through what Gordo referred to at the last PNWER summit as “electric transmission corridors.”

Coincidentally, Suzuki, Jaccard, and Berman all made media headlines in the last few days criticizing the NDP for not supporting Gordo’s “gas tax.” Not that they support Gordo, they say, just “his environmental leadership.” That would be the Gordo who gutted the BC Environment ministry and supports fish farms, the Gordo of Gateway Pacific and twin Enbridge pipelines from the Alberta tar sands to Kitimat, the Gordo of expanding the oil and gas industry in the north and building more roads and bridges instead of light rail and public transit, the Gordo of offshore drilling and renewed tanker routes . . . that Gordo.

Once upon a time the NAFTA Superhighway/Trade Corridor was just a conspiracy theory.

Then it was a gleam in Manitoba Premier Gary Doer’s eye. From his 2007 Speech from the Throne :

“Manitoba is also taking a major role in the development of a Mid-Continent Trade Corridor, connecting our northern Port of Churchill with trade markets throughout the central United States and Mexico. To advance the concept, an alliance has been built with business leaders and state and city governments spanning the entire length of the Corridor.”

That alliance was the Ports-to-Plains Trade Corridor, a lobby group comprised of US and Canadian elected officials and business leaders, and SPP luminaries like Ron Covais, chair of the US end of the North American Competitiveness Council.

Later it showed up as a useful map on an Alberta government website — see illustration.

Now, according to the Government of Canada website, it’s “a new job-creating investment contained in the Harper Government’s Economic Action Plan” :

“The CentrePort Canada initiative involves using the James Armstrong Richardson International Airport and surrounding land as a hub to import goods from Asia and Europe and then distributing those goods throughout North America by air, rail and road. The governments of Canada and Manitoba are jointly funding the next phase of this project, which involves building a high-speed transportation corridor.

It serves as a natural connection point between Atlantic shipping lanes and the Asia Pacific Gateway and as the northern terminus of the fast-growing mid-continent trade corridor, with the potential to expand to take advantage of trade opportunities in Canada’s North.”

Sigh. They just don’t make conspiracy theories like they used to.

Hmmmnn.

If memory serves, many Canadian emergency response personnel from as far away as Calgary rushed to the aid of Americans during 9/11, and Canada sent substantial assistance during Hurricane Katrina. No military agreement was necessary.

So what’s this about? Is there another agenda? The agreement, referred to as a “civil assistance plan,” is supposedly meant to facilitate the military-to-military support of civil authorities once government authorities have agreed on an appropriate response. The plan formally recognizes the role of each nation to lead the response. But how can that be, given that neither nation’s democratically elected politicians have been given an opportunity to review and approve the plan itself?

It was not submitted to the American Congress for approval, nor did Congress pass any law or treaty specifically authorizing it. And the Canadian government did not even announce the plan, despite the fact that it empowers itself to call in the behemoth of the US military in event of “civil unrest.” This is where I get nervous. Canada has a long and shameful history of attacking its citizens.

So now I wonder what this government thinks we’re going to get so upset about that we might take to the streets. US purchase of the Canadian economy? The diminishment of Canadian sovereignty by NAFTA and the WTO? Our new international reputation as a leading contributor to global warming? The fact that Quebec police actively incited civil unrest?

If Canadians ever wake up and get cranky enough to engage in large-scale civil disobedience, our government can call in not just our troops, but also American troops, to crack your head.

But surely our government wouldn’t sell our oil, our right to preserve water systems, or our political sovereignty. Harper is an open and above board kind of guy.

Sure he is.

After it became clear that the main result of the Security and Prosperity Partnership meet-up in Montebello was to alert Canadians to the fact that their country’s sovereignty was in deep shit, deep integration’s best friends were unanimous in their tough love advice to the ailing SPP’s enablers.

Tom d’Aquino of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, Harper’s eminence grease Tom Flanagan, the Hudson Institute, the Fraser Institute, John Ibbitson and Neil Reynolds of The Globe and Mail, the usual gang all proposed the same thing. Don’t hide your blight under a Bushel, they all said — explains it to da peeps.

The Natty Post has stepped up magnificently to this cheerleading task with three-count ‘em-three editorials on how absolutely vital it is to Canada’s economic health to sell out to the plummeting rogue plutocracy to the south.

Michael Hart from Carleton U., a NAFTA negotiator, a former official at Foreign Affairs and Int. Trade, and a sometime “deep integration” teacher at the North American University, writes: Canada blew it.

“The crisis of Sept. 11, 2001, provided a perfect opportunity to seize the moment to re-imagine the border, but Canada blew it.”

According to Hart, we foolishly we squandered this unique opportunity to implement “the structural and institutional changes of deep integration” because of “nationalist phobias”.
Silly us.

Hart laid the deal out rather more clearly when he testified at the Int. Trade Committee on SPP in May last year –you know, the one that Con Chairman Benoit huffed out of in a hissy fit. “We have made a political choice that we wanted a more deeply integrated North American economy,” Hart said. “That means a willingness on our part to, for example, strengthen the perimeter around North America in order to deal with security issues that are uppermost in American minds.”

Uppermost in my mind at the moment, Mike, is the peculiar way you’ve turned being on the wrong end of Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism into “a perfect opportunity.”

Onward to the second Natty Post SPP-plumping editorial . . . from another Carleton U. guy who happens to be the editor of the Financial Post: U.S. border is killing free trade. Integration just isn’t happening fast enough for Terrence Corcoran: Harper’s Tories are “complacent” while Stockwell Day’s record is “dismal.”

Probably because they’re hoping to be re-elected, Terry.

And thirdly . . . Natty Post excerpts from a Woodrow Wilson paper, Economic Integration in North America :

“Canada’s monetary independence acts as a major barrier to economic integration.
Until Canada decides to adopt the U.S. dollar, formally or informally, and hitch its business cycle more closely to the American rhythm, further integration will confront natural limits.”

“Further integration will confront natural limits.”

That, of course, will be us.