Harry Swain has my sympathy for his little outburst at the hearings into the notion of building another dam on the Peace River.
He’s the chair of the joint review panel going over all the evidence about the Site C dam proposal. And he’s suffocating.
He was looking for some specific answers to technical questions earlier this month and expressed frustration over how difficult it was to get it in the mountains of documents that are cascading upon him.
Anyone who glances at some of the other big B.C. projects undergoing the joint review process — the Northern Gateway and the Trans Mountain pipeline proposals — has to wonder if he’s got a point.
There is an astonishing level of documentation that goes into these applications to build major projects, to the point where you wonder if the piles of evidence aren’t obfuscating as much as illuminating.
Does it really take 15,000 pages of documentation to apply for permission to twin an existing pipeline from Alberta through B.C. to Burnaby? That’s how much Trans Mountain submitted when it filed last month. The picture of the actual application shows a row of binders several metres in length covering a table.
The answer is: Yes, it does. And when the joint review panel does make a decision, as it did on the Northern Gateway line last month, it takes another 470 pages to outline the call and explain it.
The tendency to cover all the bases — and then cover them again, then find new bases and cover them as well — results in vast piles of evidence. Not to argue against accumulating facts, but they’re accumulating at a rate that starts to obscure the essential points.
And with the vast majority of it posted online, it results in gigabytes of data sitting in monolithic files. Does anyone read this stuff?
Lawyers immerse themselves in the details. Scores of them make tidy livings combing through the evidence. But do the taxpayers paying for all this ever cast their eyes on these files? Or do they just sit there, as proof that process was respected and another box can be checked off on the progress chart?
Swain’s outburst was surprising, since he’s an old hand at this. He did 22 years in the federal government and served in two deputy-minister posts. And he has chaired inquiries and panels previously. If he’s frustrated about the difficulty of finding answers, you can imagine how a regular citizen feels.
What set him off was the volume of material passing through the panel’s hands.
“I can’t stand it,” he said at a hearing this month.
The environmental impact statement is “many times longer than the Bible. And the plot is not as good, nor is the language.”
The panel had a number of technical questions for B.C. Hydro regarding the case for the dam. But Swain said the cumbersome arrangement of the process means “we have to kind of write down our questions and then throw them over the barrier to Hydro, and a few weeks later they throw us back 200 pages of stuff answering it.”
The impact statement he referred to really is many times longer than the Bible. The executive summary alone runs to 84 pages. It’s got its own table of concordance, to help with navigating.
One of the appendices is entirely devoted to “Butterflies and Dragonflies.” It’s 128 pages long.
Today’s process is quite the contrast to the first dam on the Peace River. It changed the history of B.C., displaced an Indian band and flooded hundreds of thousands of hectares of land, and was built more or less by decree of the premier. (Taxpayers are still paying for the shortcomings of that approach.)
Similarly, the first Trans Mountain pipeline was simply built under a federal act of Parliament.
Somewhere between bulldozing projects through with minimal study, and cutting and pasting huge gobs of information into various expensive processes, there’s a happy medium.
