Privatization

BC’s expanding network of highways and motorized wilderness access a major threat to bear travels routes, but a new threat bearing down on BC’s embattled grizzlies - private power projects.

by Joe Foy

If approved, the proposed Bute Inlet private hydropower project would be the largest to exist in Canada.

by Joe Foy

I looked at the posters on the wall in disbelief. “There has to be more than this,” I muttered to myself.

Private power companies stake hundreds of streams and rivers across the province, causing destruction of forests and endangering species.

by Joe Foy

In late April a friend and I drove up to the Lillooet Valley, north of Harrison Lake. This is the territory of the St’at’imc (pronounced Stat lee um) First Nation.

On the way we camped for the night beside Lizzie

The BC Liberal govern­ment of Gordon Campbell has teamed up with private power companies to sell us unreliable hydro-power we can’t use, can’t afford, and don’t want.

by Joe Foy

A fellow I knew once told me how he spent a sum­mer

by Art Joyce

In the wake of the worst forest fire season in more than 50 years, BC families are under­standably preoccupied with more immediate concerns than government policy. Yet massive changes by the BC Liberals to forest legislation could devastate BC’s forests far worse than any wildfires.

In the fall sitting of the BC Leg­islature, the Liberal government plans to fast-track the ‘Working Forest’ legislation. All 45 million hectares of public lands and forests outside provincial parks will be legally desig­nated the ‘Working Forest land base,’ with resource extraction the man­dated priority.

During the recent BC ferry strike there was much talk about how BC Ferries has been privatized by the neo-Liberal provincial government. The question which is immediately top of mind is, who bought it? 

After all, we know CN bought BC Rail, we know the names of the companies who offered to buy the Coquihalla Highway. Surely someone would report on who picked up an entire transportation monopoly for a

In South Africa, only the poor have pre-paid water meters — and the poor are fighting back.

Story and photos by Dawn Paley, Johannesburg

Another dusty day in Orange Farm, red earth split in cracks, long dry dirt roads lead to the freeway that leads to the city.

by Jim Cooperman

It has been slightly more than a year since my last Watershed Sentinel update on BC’s forestry issues. Not much has changed, other than the Gordon Campbell Liberal government has now enshrined in law forestry policies that virtually hand over the

A debate is raging on the BC coast about the future of Bute Inlet. It’s about private power versus public power. It’s about the potential NAFTA threat of foreign involvement on our rivers. It is about responses to climate change.

Environmentalists are alarmed at the impact of industrial developments on remote coastal rivers, inlets, and mountains previously the terrain of First