bc hydro february 2016 BCBusiness 31
o
n a cold day in late Octo-
ber, protestors came out to
picket at the gates of the big-
gest construction site in the
province: the $9-billion Site C
dam. Downstream, a group of
Treaty 8 First Nations mem-
bers set up camp on a river
at that was set to be clear-cut and sub-
merged in 200 feet of water; as of early
December, the protestors were still
there. "If they try to log that at, they're
going to run into those people," says Ken
Boon, a Peace River Valley homesteader
who, as president of the local landowners
association, helped organize the protest.
In this year's Ipsos/BCBusiness survey
of the province's most inuential brands,
BC Hydro came out on top—thanks in
large part to high scores on questions of
trust and responsibility. To maintain its
top ranking, B.C.'s biggest utility
company goes far beyond the
rubber stamp of government
approval when it embarks on
dam upgrades, new transmis-
sion lines or e¨ciency programs,
and attempts to achieve a social licence
to build. But when Christy Clark's cabinet
green-lit the Site C dam last July, it set up
Hydro for one of its biggest tests of inu-
ence to date.
Boon and many others believe that
Site C is proceeding without proper
review and without social licence. Social
licence, however, is as hard to de¬ine
as it is to achieve. The basic idea is that
project concerns—over dams, mines and
real estate developments—have crept out-
side of environmental assessment and
government approvals, and that tack-
ling those concerns means going above
and beyond. In a 2012 paper for
the Canada West Foundation,
researchers Robert Roach and
Barry Worbets described the
challenge of achieving social
licence in B.C. as "a wide range
of stakeholders, heated rhetoric, com-
peting scienti¬ic claims, incomplete
information and responses that require
broad social change and/or signi—cant
economic costs."
Hydro, because it is owned by the
people of British Columbia, has tried to
set the gold standard for consultation
and community engagement—hiring and
training a local workforce and creating
institutional capacity in communities
across the province. But it's not some-
thing that the crown corporation has
always been good at. In the 1960s and
'70s, Hydro built a series of massive dams
bc hydro ranks no. 1 in our survey of
b.c.'s most influential brands and
remains one of the province's most
loved brands. the controversial site c
dam, however, represents one of the
biggest tests of that influence in over
50 years of operation
b y JAC OB PA R R Y
a RIveR Runs
THROUGH IT
B.C.'s
most
InfluentIal
Brands
power To you
The John Hart
Generating Station is cited
as a case study in positive
community engagement
near Campbell River
