British Columbians have been hearing a lot lately about BC Hydro's shocking debt situation - which is far worse than it's being described. Newly-minted BC Liberal Energy Minister Bill Bennett is supposedly on the warpath, looking for ways to trim the fat from the crown corporation's bulging belly. The Liberal Government was "surprised" by last-minute cost revisions to a few Hydro projects, skewing its budget calculations, we're told.
Bollocks.
There is no "surprise" here - any suggestion thereof is political theatre. Strike that. Let me call it what it is: LYING.
The ballooning cost of the Northwest Transmission Line, cited as the key cause of this budgetary hiccup, represents but one tiny fraction of Hydro's real financial mess - and the BC Liberal Government knows it.
Why? Because they caused these problems themselves.
The mainstream media, as is to be expected, is largely parroting the government's cover story and ignoring the real problem: BC Hydro and its ratepayers are in a world of hurt because of 12 years of very deliberate and disastrous BC Liberal Government policies, pushed on the public utility.
First and foremost of these was the forcing of BC Hydro to purchase $55 BILLION worth of sweetheart, long-term contracts with private power companies, which we didn't need. As our resident, independent economist Erik Andersen - supported by figures and confirmation from the Auditor General - has demonstrated through a series of investigative pieces over the past 3 years, BC Hydro has chronically overestimated domestic demand for power. Historical estimates by Hydro have projected our current use at well over 60,000 Gigawatt hours (GWhrs) of electricity per year, when, instead, we've been flat-lined at around 50,000 for several years and show no real sign of growing beyond that (unless, of course, we build massive new capacity to subsidize mines and gas projects - more on that in a moment).
Con't @ [
link to thecanadian.org]
Follow me on Twitter: @RussellScott202
Canada
