Former Socred cabinet minister and broadcaster Rafe Mair submitted the following letter to the editor to our 70 B.C. newspapers in response to last week's column on the salmon crisis. He asks a number of questions, which I attempt to address here.

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Editor:

Re: Usual suspects in the salmon crisis (B.C. Views, Oct. 28).

Tom Fletcher describes my opposition to salmon farms and run-of-river power projects as "bunk". I realize that he is a right-winger with a right-wing paper but surely that doesn't exempt him from telling the whole truth.

Regarding fish farms, does he not know that the run of pinks that was abundant this year passed fallowed fish farms when they migrated as smolts, and that this return confirms Alexandra Morton's findings? That this was an experiment that proved the point of every private scientist who has examined this issue?

Regarding run-of-river, how can he ignore that fact that the bulk of the private power is to be exported if only because it's produced when BC Hydro doesn't need it? How can BC Hydro give take-or-pay contracts with private power companies at double the amount they can sell it for on the export market?

Regarding his earlier description of the Bute Inlet project hearing in Campbell River at which I spoke, how extraordinary of him to object to the word "shit." Even more extraordinary was his failure to observe that the crowd was angry because they had no opportunity – and indeed had never had – to deal with the "merits" but were confined to the "terms of reference" for an environmental assessment of a project they didn't want.

Does he have no concern for the environmental havoc private power projects wreak?

Rafe Mair

Lions Bay

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My response:

I'm not ignoring the potential export of power, in particular to California. Governor Arnold Schwarzennegger's recent executive order to lift the ban on imports from large B.C. run-of-river projects makes that more likely.

I am concerned about the environmental impact of run-of-river projects. That's why I have visited Sechelt Creek (in operation for 20 years and a net improvement to a lower river habitat once wrecked by a logging chute), Fitzsimmons Creek (next to the bobsled run at Blackcomb, coming online shortly), and of course Toba Inlet, which I toured last spring with Plutonic Power CEO Donald McInnis and Ken Brown, chief of the Klahoose. That visit was just before the hearing Campbell River at which Mair held forth so pithily.

Gwen Barlee of the Wilderness Committee shared her graphs with me at that meeting, the ones showing the Homathko River discharge averaged over 40 years, next to California's electricity consumption for 2002. As one might expect, the peaks from May through October are very similar, our runoff and their air conditioning needs. An interesting business proposition indeed.

The Cloudworks project on the Harrison River system and the Ashlu River project are at or near completion, and I'm hoping to get up there soon to see for myself what these things do, to and for the environment.

Regarding the pinks, the "management" of fish farms includes that fallowing program, which was developed along with the provincial inspection and lice sampling data. Of course all that is now in the hands of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, so we'll see how that goes.

Tom Fletcher is legislative reporter and columnist for Black Press and BCLocalnews.com.

tfletcher@blackpress.ca