Gordon Campbell's Big Fraser Institute Idea
Who inspired our premier to privatize nature? Michael Walker, maybe?
Chilko River, BC. Wanna buy it?
I was having lunch (on me as usual) with my editor last week and we were wondering aloud how the Campbell government could possibly intentionally destroy our rivers and BC Hydro, a power company that's the envy of North America.
I mentioned to Dave that I believed it was a matter of ideology. Campbell, I said, is joined at the hip with the right-wing think-tank Fraser Institute. I recalled for him an interview I had done some 15 years ago with then Fraser Institute president Dr. Michael Walker.
"Why not do an article on it?" he asked.
Now my deep instinct is to refuse point blank suggestions of editors, program directors and that ilk but since I had made this point many times during the last election, I had to agree that the idea had merit.
The biz of selling rivers
Permit me, for a moment, to lay out the logical consequences of the Campbell rivers policy. Private companies are encouraged by Campbell to desecrate our rivers to produce power, which BC Hydro is forced to buy. Because nearly all this private power can only be produced during the spring run-off when BC Hydro has full reservoirs and plenty of power, and because there is no way of storing this private power, Hydro must export it at half or less what it paid for it.
This is the lunacy I can find only one explanation for: far-right-wing ideology.
Privatize all nature: Walker
Now I must say that I've always liked Dr. Michael Walker, founder and former executive director of the Fraser Institute. I don't really know why I said that except so often critics are accused of having personal grievances and, in fact, I don't. So there.
Back in the early 1990s, the Fraser Institute published an article arguing that rivers and streams ought to all be placed in private hands because, as Dr. Walker later put it, the private owners would take good care of them because they owned them. On my show at Radio Station X, he repeated this theory that private ownership would ensure the best available use of the river or stream.
I said, "But Mike, history shows us that the best available use of a river is as a sewer for industry and/or agriculture."
"No, no," he replied. "It would be in the owner's interest to see that the river was kept pristine so that all the fish and other living creatures could survive and prosper."
To one who has fished rivers and streams all over the world, this literally took my breath away.
"What," I asked, "if I owned Rafe Mair's Fishing Camp downstream from the huge Ajax Pulp Mill that dumped large quantities of black liquor into the river killing all the fish?"
Dr. Walker gave me that triumphant look of the righteous and smiled benignly at my stupidity and said, "No problem, Rafe. You could sue them." Evidently it does not occur to the "far right" that a lawsuit against a huge corporation is not very appealing to a small business owner. (I should add that I remember this interview particularly well because after the show Dr. Walker called me at my home to continue his fruitless efforts to convert me.)
Captured on film
Memories do play tricks, however, and I thought I'd better check and see if Dr. Walker had changed his mind without me knowing it. Lo and behold in a trice I had found a documentary called The Corporation, a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary is critical of the modern-day corporation, which by law is considered to have many of the legal rights of a person. The documentary therefore evaluates corporate behaviour towards society and the world at large as a psychologist might evaluate an ordinary person. Needless to say it's considered "left wing."
However, lo and behold, there in the The Corporation, Dr. Walker is interviewed extolling the virtues of "selling rivers, streams and the air to private interests who would then take care of them because they owned them."
The research took me to Dr. Walter Block who, I believe, wrote the article on privatizing rivers for the Fraser Institute. In any event, Block was a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute at the time. I remember interviewing him and finding that he -- sit down and get a stiff drink for this one -- along with the late libertarian icon Dr. Robert Nozick, was one of the leading defenders of slave contracts, arguing that it "is a bona fide contract," which, if "abrogated, theft occurs"!
Hearing that, I could only think, "The Dred Scott case lives!" That case in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857 held that slaves, even in "free states," remained the property of the "owner and could never have citizenship."
Voluntary slavery?
Now Block and Nozick were arguing that in their libertarian utopia, a person would be able to sell oneself into slavery.
I would have thought that the words "voluntary" and "slavery" were antonyms but not, apparently, to "libertarians." Dr. Block believed that the logical extension of the complete liberty to do as one pleases includes signing oneself into a slavery contract.
I don't know if Dr. Walker shared that opinion, though I very much doubt it. But I tell the story to demonstrate that the Fraser Institute is so ideologically right wing that at least one of its senior fellows would prefer a world where slavery was perfectly legal.
Loony tunes economics
It is no secret that the Fraser Institute advises and has the ear of the Campbell government and Premier Campbell himself. There is nothing wrong, at least nothing illegal, about that. It may, however, give us a clue as to why Premier Campbell is, in effect, turning the rivers of B.C. over to large corporations like General Electric and Ledcor. And it might also explain why he has forced a public company, BC Hydro, to make deals with private power producers that will bankrupt it.
Mr. Campbell in an explanation that would make Pinocchio blush says, "We need the power so we can be energy secure by 2016." This slithers over the fact that any B.C. self-sufficiency can hardly be achieved by making power to sell to the U.S. market and avoids the fact that a modicum of conservation, upgrading present facilities, putting generators on dams just used for flood control and taking back the Columbia River power we're entitled to instead of taking money, are all we need to look after our power needs for as far down the road as we can see.
Dr. Michael Walker's opinions on private ownership of rivers are just loony tunes economic theories; in Premier Campbell's hands they are environmental and economic catastrophes.
Related Tyee stories:
- All About Psychopath, Inc.
Makers of hot doc 'The Corporation' talk about soulless power, 'socially responsible' business, unions, and trying to know what's real anymore. - How an Alberta Economist Counsels Victims of Bernie Madoff
Mark Anielski's guide to 'genuine wealth' gains a new audience. - Naomi Klein's Global Coup
Reviewed: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
off-the-radar
13-07-2009
thanks Rafe
always a thoughful, well-written examination of the issues. Nice to see the Fraser Institute under a critical eye.
blackie
13-07-2009
one trick pony
Rafe, you desperately need to find another windmill to tilt at. The same tired (and inaccurate) rhetoric is trotted out over and over again; and gets refuted over and over again. This is getting very close to the "big lie" theory -- you know, the idea that if you tell whoppers over and over again, pretty soon everyone believes it.
No rivers are being sold. Long term leases, with no renewal guarantees and government confiscation of all improvements at the end of the term, does not constitute a "sale" or privatization. Every resource business in the province works like this; forestry, mining, oil and gas -- the Crown always retains ownership.
I don't have a problem with people who, for whatever reasons, don't like this policy and don't think we should do it. And I'm no fan of the Fraser Institute. But it annoys me no-end when the whole thing is grossly misrepresented like this.
Grumpy
13-07-2009
Well spoken Rafe
One must fear right-wing zealots like Walker and Campbell as much as one fears the loony left. Campbell is slowly destroying this province with his sell everything mantra and our children will condemn not only Campbell, but the weak public response to his evil ways.
Campbell is a dictator who in the last election only garnered 22% of the electorates vote, yet with that majority, continues to sell BC off to political cronies.
How long before civil disobedience storms the streets!
Karen D.
13-07-2009
Just goes to show
Just goes to show that a doctorate, or any education, doesn't make smart.
Skywalker
13-07-2009
Good one Rafe!
I also seem to recall that at about the same time there was a Fraser Institute type advocating the privatization of whales to save them from extinction. The notion that pure capitalism when applied will solve all the problems is just so ridiculous. With the recent meltdown brought on by the failure of the banks and all those who have been giving us their economic advice it does make some of their comments lunacy. At the time there were people who still bought into the myth.
Van Isle
13-07-2009
Blackie,
I would like to comment on your comment. If those Run of the River operations were sold to an American or Mexican company then under NAFTA that river sight and waters are owned by them. And that's not my opinion, that is of international trade hotshots who understand NAFTA.
bider
13-07-2009
Rafes' column of this date.
Well Blackie, corporations can be sued by their shareholders if they fail to pursue all legal means to make profits. With weak environmental laws, such as we now have in BC (see fish farms and sea lice), it doesn't take long to destroy a natural resource - which once gone is gone for good. A resource that I might add is owned in common by all citizens and which government is charged with protecting for future generations. Whether leased or sold doesn't really matter now does it?
blackie
13-07-2009
Van Isle
Whether the company that holds the lease is Canadian, American or Mexican, the same federal/provincial laws apply, as do the provisions of the various contracts signed by governments and the private parties.
If the private company is purchased by an American or Mexican company, of course they own the leases. That's true with or without NAFTA.
All NAFTA does is prevent Canada (BC in this case) from confiscating the rights it has granted to the Mexican or American company without compensation -- as is always the case with the Canadian company. Contrary to what Rafe and others keep trying to say, it doesn't alter the fundamental commitments of both parties in the contract. And failure to renew a lease (another argument put forward by the anti-run of river crowd) does not constitute a NAFTA violation.
And Bider -- "failure to pursue all legal means to make a profit" means exactly what? If the publicly traded run-of-river company signs a contract that includes a lease with a specific term, and no guarantee of a renewal, what "legal" option do the shareholders have if the government decides not to renew the lease? Of course they can sue -- anyone can sue anyone any time for anything -- but they would have no case and their lawyers would tell them that.
All this gets to the fundamental problem I have with the opposition to these projects -- it is based almost entirely on bogus issues parroted by Rafe and his buddies over and over again. There is no opportunity for a dispassionate debate about whether this is good or bad public policy because the debate gets warped beyond belief by all this BS. It is fearmongering.
In this case, Rafe has to reach back to an interview he did with ultra-right-wing Michael Walker and the Fraser Institute to justify his disagreement with Campbell's policies. He was doing OK until he introduced the slavery angle, and then his credibility, already pretty low, nose-dived.