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Privately saving Ryan?

Regional Power holds up its Sechelt Creek project as something good it can bring to the Ryan River
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David Carter doesn't make things easy on himself.

The vice-president of Regional Power Inc. faces a gargantuan task trying to develop run-of-river electricity in British Columbia. On top of provincial approvals and environmental assessments he has to contend with a swarm of opposition as he looks to develop a 145 MW hydro plant on the Ryan River near Pemberton.

Scores of protesters flooded the gym at the old Pemberton Community Centre for a public meeting on the project last December. They held pictures of fish and grizzlies, species they fear the project threatens, and scoffed as Carter made impassioned appeals to the community.

"We want to demonstrate to you that we can bring fish back in large numbers," he told a buzzing audience of about 200. "We look at the Ryan River, we see high quality water, we see good nutrients, we see an impacted watershed. With the fish, you bring back the grizzlies; with the grizzlies, you bring back the eagles."

He had more to say before an audience member with a videocamera cut him off.

Despite the opposition that persists against the Ryan project, Carter is determined to convince people it's a good thing for the heavily-logged watershed.

It's for this reason that Carter has invited Pique 's Pemberton correspondent to check out Regional Power's generating station on Sechelt Creek. He's bringing me here on company expense to see a project that won a 2005 UNESCO/IHA Blue Planet Prize for building a spawning channel that brought fish back to the area. It's an amenity they hope to bring to the Ryan project, if it ever gets built.

Carter and I meet at a dock on Porpoise Bay, just outside the District of Sechelt. I've come alongside Nigel Protter, a Pemberton-based consultant who's working with Regional Power to develop the Ryan project. Sid Quinn, resource manager of the Sechelt First Nation, joins us for the trip, as do the two operators of the power facility.

Getting to the station requires a 45-minute boat trip up Salmon Inlet, passing a hatchery and both oyster and fish farms along the way. At the start of the trip I wonder what the difference is between fish farms and a spawning channel, as do some who have concerns about the Ryan project.

Regional Power has chosen the Sechelt Creek location for its project because it's a heavily industrialized area. The project is sited near a former logging camp run by the Canfor Corporation and the impact is clear, though probably not nearly as much as it was in the past.

A crumbling old schoolhouse sits right on the water. It's slated for demolition, likely within the week. Old piles of timber lie on the ground on the trail leading up to the project and a Ministry of Forests crew cleans up the area of debris as we speak.

The only remaining evidence of logging in the area is a single clear cut on the mountain across the water. The rest is second-growth forest, covering up the scars of a now-stagnant forest industry.

More eager to show the project than the rest is Sid Quinn of the Sechelt First Nation, whose people have partnered with Regional Power in the development of the spawning channel that flows outside the hydro plant. A huge smile on his face, Quinn stops me in the middle of a rickety bridge and points to the creek below.

Sure enough, there they are, fish abundant in a natural stream. Some are young, some old, and yet two more swim close to a bank, their skin rotting away as they take their last breaths of life.

I'm told this is a common thing, and that dead fish can actually be good for the stream. Their bodies release nutrients into the stream and the young can feed on their remains, according to Carter.

I'm hurried up the trail toward the project and we mount a berm next to the facility's tailrace - specifically where water diverted from Sechelt Creek comes out the other side. The water feeds into a man-made spawning channel that we find flush with Pinks.

To an untrained eye that hasn't touched science since Chemistry 11, there's a lot of fish in this stream. Within 20 metres Quinn counts almost 100 of them. Further down there's about five times that. There are so many fish in parts of the channel that you can't see the bedflow.

"This is Disneyland for fish," Protter says.

The stream itself is a man-made structure. It was dug out of the ground adjacent to the hydro plant, the excavated dirt piled up alongside it to create the berm and multiple viewpoints, as Quinn explains it.

"It's spawning and rearing primarily for Coho, Pinks and Chum salmon," he says. "This is controlled flow and we have actually brought the gravel in here and lined the channel and also created these alcoves with the habitat, so you can see the fry have a place and also the adults have a place to get away from the predators."

The original stock in the channel came from Sechelt Creek. They were then transferred to a First Nation-run hatchery at McLean Bay because the creek was "decimated of fish," according to Carter: "There was virtually no fish."

Once the channel was built, the stock at McLean Bay were flown back to the creek by helicopter and dropped in their new spawning grounds. There were also 12 pairs of Coho flown to the channel and from there the fish paired up naturally, as the proponents tell it.

"We want to enhance the values of the area and by no means do we want to replace what's over there with here," Quinn says. "We want a balance."

The sight of hundreds of fish in a B.C. stream is no doubt a hopeful one for those worried about the impacts that fish farms could be having on salmon populations. Reports have emerged recently that over 9 million fish are missing from their regular salmon run through the Fraser. Sea lice from fish farms are often fingered for blame.

Alexandra Morton, an environmental activist and fish biologist who's raised alarms around B.C. about the drawbacks of fish farms, said spawning channels can be a good thing, but like farms they have their drawbacks.

She said salmon adapt to wild rivers and become perfectly genetically suited to the streams they swim through. When you use a spawning channel, she said, they don't adapt the same way. Instead you end up with fish completely identical in a river, rather than suited to the streams they swim through.

"Spawning channels are a good idea but they're expensive and you have to maintain them because they don't clean themselves," she says. "I definitely concede the advantage to it to some degree but the wild salmon are our cheapest fish out there, they're the most viable."

So if fish are populating this creek en masse, why not have the government do the same in more streams? It's expensive, for one thing, just as Morton said. Carter says the channel at Sechelt cost about $500,000 to put together.

But even though the channel has impressed UNESCO, it's not selling all run-of-river critics on situating a project near Pemberton.

Lisa Richardson, a resident of the Pemberton Meadows, visited the Sechelt project in 2007 and said it was "incredible" but she's still not sold on the Ryan project.

"It's a much smaller project than the one that's being proposed here," she said. "It has struck me always that Regional Power has made a huge and genuine effort to work with the community, to communicate with the community.

"My personal feeling about whether these are good guys or not doesn't actually matter... We're all getting played because of policy decisions that the government has made to open this up to the private sector and step back and not really provide some of the key oversights that I think need to be in place."

Like Sechelt, the Ryan project is planned for an area that's been logged down to its stumps, according to its proponents, with fish populations in the river decimated by nearby industrial activity and dyking along its banks.

Carter and Regional Power hope to do for the Ryan what they've done for Sechelt Creek, but even that remains up in the air at the moment. A decision by the B.C. Utilities Commission has rejected the province's 2008 Long-Term Acquisition Plan, saying it wasn't in the public interest.

Carter says that decision remains a hurdle but it hasn't destroyed his optimism about developing renewable power.

"It's always a concern when the right signal's on and the regulators turn left," he says. "Over the last 25 years that I've been in this business, there's been many times that I've been disappointed, but never have I lost my focus on the business and what we ultimately want to do.

However that decision might not prove as much a hurdle as he thinks. B.C. Energy Minister Blair Lekstrom told Pique in a Wednesday interview that the province can continue with the Clean Power Call and a move towards renewable energy projects.

"We think that whether it be run of river, wind, geothermal, all of our new electricity generation ideas in B.C. are on solid ground," he says. "We're going to continue down that road."