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Search results for: “site/Pat Armstrong”

  • Photo: BC Hydro

    Site C’s radical makeover: What the ‘L’ is going on at problem-plagued dam construction project where costs keep piling up and completion remains years away?

    BC Hydro knew 30 years before it started building the Site C dam that its chosen location for the most expensive publicly funded infrastructure project in British Columbia’s history had big problems.  In fact, by the 1980s, BC Hydro had done tests showing that the ground at Site C had…

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    A Big Fracking Mess: As Site C dam construction bogs down in geotechnical problems, thousands of earthquakes triggered by fracking operations occur nearby

    Earthquakes triggered by natural gas industry fracking operations near BC Hydro’s troubled Site C dam construction project are far greater in number than previously thought, raising troubling questions about whether they are adding to the already formidable geotechnical challenges at the site. Not only are more earthquakes occurring in proximity…

  • Site C in early October, shortly after the Peace River was diverted so that construction could begin of the massive earth-filled dam that will permanently block the river.

    Who’s minding the shop at Site C?

    Appointment of engineer with long-term ties to BC Hydro to be government’s “independent” advisor on dam’s construction raises vexing questions In 2011, his last year as a salaried employee at BC Hydro, Tim Little earned just under $210,000 as the Crown corporation’s chief engineer. The next year, after decades of…

  • April 2008: Medicare and Gender

    In looking forward, we need to make health care the objective rather than the problem. And instead of seeing expenditures on health care as the primary issue, we should look at the contributions health care makes, not only to the overall economy and corporations, but also to employment and communities.…

  • Charting a path in uncertain times

    We live in increasingly unsettling times. Two world orders are chafing against each other: the rules-based international order, however imperfect, and the emerging strong man, power brokerage order. These approaches are in friction, and we don’t yet know what the outcome will be. Countries are rapidly trying to forge new…

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    To break housing gridlock, we need to democratize unrepresentative public hearings

    Housing policy has a democracy problem. Amid a housing crisis, highly unrepresentative public hearing processes contribute to land-use decisions that fail to reflect the perspectives and interests of all affected residents. But the right reforms can help deepen democracy and break housing gridlock. At the municipal level, decisions about providing…

  • BC Hydro

    Losing sight at Site C

    Court documents and FOI materials show BC Hydro knew shale would move at troubled construction project, yet Hydro proceeded with river diversion BC Hydro approved the pouring of massive amounts of concrete to build a buttress at its problem-plagued Site C dam project months before a critical drainage tunnel was…

  • Alberta’s social studies curriculum pushes religious exceptionalism

    The authors of the curriculum made choices that favour Christianity over other religions, and minimize the historical impact of non-Christians in Alberta.

    The authors of the curriculum made choices that favour Christianity over other religions, and minimize the historical impact of non-Christians in Alberta.

  • Leave the patchwork for the quilts: The case for national pharmacare

    FEBRUARY 2, 2015 The Canadian Health Coalition (CHC) was founded in 1979 as a public advocacy organization dedicated to the preservation and improvement of medicare. It brings together organizations representing nurses, health care workers, seniors, churches, trade unions, anti-poverty groups and women, as well as affiliated coalitions in nine provinces…

  • An island in the Peace River and in West Moberly First Nations territory that will be lost forever if the Site C dam is completed and its reservoir is filled. Photo: Garth Lenz.

    Reconciliation in action?

    Far from it, says chief of holdout First Nation over deal with province on Site C In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was tasked with informing all Canadians about what happened to Indigenous Peoples in residential schools, defined the word reconciliation as a process of “establishing and maintaining…

  • Patrick Falconer

    Labour, Training

  • The WAC Bennett dam impounds the world’s seventh-largest reservoir. In 2012 a BC Hydro employee speculated a fracking operation may have caused a sudden change in the reservoir’s water levels. Photo: Jayce Hawkins.

    Peace River Frack-Up

    Part 1 of a report on how fracking poses risks to BC Hydro’s Peace River dams Read Part 2 of the report View timeline BC Hydro has known for well over a decade that its Peace Canyon dam is built on weak, unstable rock and that an earthquake triggered by…