Abstract
This article analyzes debates over the Site C Dam on the Saaghii Naachii/Peace River in northeastern British Columbia (BC), Canada. After heated debate over the past several decades, construction on the CN$10 billion hydroelectric project—the largest in the province’s history—recently commenced. The article focuses on debates over the analysis and adjudication of cumulative effects, and concomitant treaty rights infringement, within the environmental review process. The shortcomings of the regulatory review process used to assess cumulative effects are analyzed in two ways: first, by a conventional academic assessment, and second, by a Dunne-Za teaching of the interrelationships between land, water, and animals in the dam-affected region. Through juxtaposing these two modes of analysis, the article engages with scholarship in political ecology and Indigenous political theory.
Highlights
This article analyzes debates over the Site C Dam on the Saaghii Naachii/Peace River in northeastern British Columbia (BC), Canada
The federal minister of environment and the provincial minister of environment authorized a three-person joint review panel (JRP), which operated under tight time and resource constraints: the panel was required to complete its hearings within thirty days and to complete the entire review process within eight calendar months
We have used our combined expertise to document the limitations of the Western environmental assessment review process from multiple perspectives: the deliberately constrained methodological approach used to assess cumulative effects and the exclusion of place-based understandings of cumulative effects presented by Treaty 8 communities opposed to the dam
Summary
The northeastern region of BC, in which Site C is located, was opened for settlement after the 1899 signing of Treaty 8 (one of a series of numbered treaties between the British Crown and Indigenous peoples, designed by the British to facilitate westward expansion of colonial settlement in what is the country of Canada). The federal minister of environment and the provincial minister of environment authorized a three-person joint review panel (JRP), which operated under tight time and resource constraints: the panel was required to complete its hearings within thirty days and to complete the entire review process (which included reviewing twenty-seven thousand pages of documents) within eight calendar months. This time frame, it should be noted, was much shorter than other reviews of large-scale hydroelectric projects in Canada. The government’s approach was criticized by a wide range of stakeholders, including affected Indigenous communities, a previous CEO of BC Hydro, the chair of the JRP, Parks Canada (a federal government department), and a range of environmental nongovernmental organizations (Eliesen 2017; Parks Canada 2013; Prophet River and West Moberly First Nations 2017).
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