Issues

Mineral Tenure Act

B.C.’s Mineral Tenure Act was created in 1859 during the gold rush. It was designed to encourage settlement in remote areas by offering easy and potentially lucrative opportunities to stake mining claims. The world has changed significantly in the past 150 years, but the act has not. Other provinces, like Ontario, Quebec and Alberta, have updated their Mineral Tenure Acts to reflect modern realities.

B.C.’s Mineral Tenure Act is based on the “free entry” system that has been abandoned by other provinces. Free entry allows miners to pay a minimal fee to stake a claim virtually anywhere in B.C., without first consulting or obtaining approval from the B.C. government or First Nations, and without taking into account the ecological importance of the land in question. Once a mining claim is made, it creates a legal entitlement that overrides other land uses. Mining claims in B.C. can be made on-line, with the click of a mouse and a credit card. Learn more.

Fracking

Hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, is the controversial practice of blasting water, sand and toxic chemicals into deep, underground shale formations to release natural gas. Despite rising public concern over health, fresh water and environmental impacts, the use of fracking in natural gas production is speeding ahead in the Horne River Basin (north of Fort Nelson) and Monteney Shale Basin (around Hudson Hope, Fort St.John, and Dawson Creek areas, and the traditional territories of Treaty 8 First Nations).

Fracking is refered to by some as the “Tar Sands of Natural Gas” because of the enormous water and energy resources needed to extract the hard-to-reach shale gas deposits. Close to 600 Olympic swimming pools worth of water is pressure-pumped underground at a single fracking site. That water returns to the surface heavily contaminated with a range of toxins that can include minerals, heavy metals and radiological compounds.

The expansion of fracking spans B.C., with plans for one of the largest gas plants in North America to be built here, exports of fracked B.C. gas to fuel Alberta’s dirty Tar Sands, a natural gas pipeline all the way from the Peace Region to Kitimat, and seven liquid natural gas (LNG) terminals to be built off the coast to export the gas to markets in Asia. Learn more about the global warming impacts of fracking.

Power Projects

Site C Dam

In April 2010, the government announced that it will proceed with the highly controversial Site C dam mega-project in the Peace River Valley.  The Site C dam would flood almost 20 percent of class one to three farmland in the Peace River Valley, according to a study by the West Moberly First Nations and the Peace Valley Environmental Association. The dam’s destruction of wildlife values is also cause for alarm, given the critical role of the Peace River’s islands and wetlands in wildlife breeding and wintering cycles.

Site C fails to meet minimim international standards for large dam construction. Although the BC government is presenting the $6.5 billion hydro project as a "clean energy project", Site C would increase annual greenhouse gas emissions in British Columbia by almost 150,000 tonnes. The project's carbon footprint derives from construction emissions, as well as emissions created by the flooded boreal forest as it decays. Much of the power from Site C will go to environmentally destructive fracking developments in B.C.’s northeast. Natural gas from fracking in turn will power the extraction of oil from Alberta’s tar sands. The dam would also be a blow for B.C.'s food security, drowning one of the province's most fertile agricultural valleys.

Private Power Projects

In 2002, the B.C. government released its controversial “Energy Plan.” The plan decreed that "the private sector will develop new electricity generation, with BC Hydro restricted to improvements at existing plants." It led to a gold rush on B.C.’s rivers and creeks. More than 800 B.C. water bodies, from the Kootenays to the Sunshine Coast, were staked for “run of river” power development by private companies, some financed by global energy giants like General Electric. Most proposed “run of river” developments are exempt from environmental assessment. B.C.’s  lack of an endangered species law means that projects are often inappropriately sited in relation to species at risk. The new focus on private "run of river" projects indicated a significant change of direction for B.C. energy policy, towards production of energy for export to the U.S.

To date, the provincial government has granted more than 130 water-for-power licences to private companies, in accordance with the Energy Plan’s mandate that new electricity generation will be developed by the private sector. Close to 600 more applications are pending — primarily placeholders for corporations laying claim to B.C.’s public rivers for future development. Numerous environmental problems have arisen in the rush to privatize B.C.’s waterways, including in Bute Inlet.

Learn more about private power projects.