Must the 'Big Smoke' Always Get Its Way?

Karen Anderson, the mayor of Hudson's Hope, thinks that the decision-makers behind the latest push for the Site C Dam haven't fully considered the costs that they are asking the people in her community to bear. "We don't feel that we should be ruining our valley, and our part of the province, in order to sell energy to the United States," she said. "They take our oil, they take our gas, they take our power now, you know? We don't get anything back from it, really." Bruce Lantz, the mayor of Fort St. John, is more pragmatic about the political calculus informing the decision. "If they [Liberals] lost every vote in northeastern B.C. because of Site C, they'd lose 22,000 votes," he said in an interview with The Georgia Straight's Matthew Burroughs last year. "If you put a major project elsewhere in the province, you could lose that many votes in an eight-block radius. So this is kind of an area that is acceptable losses, maybe, in terms of votes. And, of course, the communities are split. And I think that the deep thinkers in Victoria have figured that this is a good way to go."