This is the first anniversary of the famous Pitt Meadows rally which saw 1200 people cram into the gym at the local High School and protest the Pitt River project. It was also the start of my involvement in this issue – I joined the team at Save Our Rivers www.saveourrivers.ca a month later. As I’m sure you know, we didn’t win the Pitt case because the decision to stop it wasn’t made on the obvious demerits of the application but on the grounds that the transmission line went through a provincial park. The application, sadly, is alive and well.

It’s been a long road from then until now but I can tell you that the momentum is very much on the rise. The feeling I get from the meetings and through feedback from you makes it obvious that the issue is getting ‘traction”.

Let me tell you the hard part of my job – the case for the independent power is non existent which means there is no real case to be made and this leads many people to say “well, then, the government must be right! If the government were here tonight why they’d knock Rafe and Damien flat on their backsides”!

I think the answer is becoming clear – they’re not at these meetings because they know that SORS and our comrades-in-arms are right and that they have no answer to the case.
The absence of anything good to say about the private power projects in a bizarre sort of way has been helping the government. That is no longer so.

They know that their claim that we need new energy is false and that the national Energy Board has BC as a very significant exporter of power. They also know another most embarrassing fact – even if we did need power, private river projects would be no help BECAUSE THEY CAN ONLY PRODUCE POWER IN THE SPRING RUN-OFF WHEN BC HYDRO’S RESERVOIRS ARE FULL! (Some may not realize that you can’t store electricity in quantity – what you store is the water behind the generators so the only time private power can produce is when BC Hydro’s reservoirs are filled to overflowing.)

I’m starting a pretty hectic period so my column, The Flow, may be a bit intermittent (pun intended) To give you an idea, last Sunday I spoke at a meeting at the Unitarian Church on 49th, Monday a meeting in Richmond, last night it was Powell River, tonight it’s New Westminster, Friday I’m on Saltspring Island and Sunday in White Rock. Next week I start a tour that begins on the Sea-to-Sky for meetings at Squamish, Whistler and Pemberton. The following day I drive to Merritt, the following night in Penticton, then Kelowna ending in Salmon Arm on the 5th.

Perhaps I’ll meet some of you along the way – I hope so.

In the meantime keep in touch at www.saveourrivers.ca and please give our cause the widest possible circulation.

Sincerely,

Rafe