VICTORIA – An environmental group is condemning plans by the British Columbia government to consider building two new hydropower projects, including a fourth dam on the Peace River, saying the province first needs to “come to grips” with the negative impact of the recently completed Site C dam.
Joe Foy with the Wilderness Committee said damming and diverting big rivers had big negative impacts, which continue far into the future.
He said the John Horgan Dam on the Peace River — as the Site C project is now known — had massive cost overruns leading to public debt, huge losses of farmland and wildlife habitat and unacceptable impacts to Indigenous rights.
Energy Minister Adrian Dix announced on Monday that B.C. was “seriously” looking into plans for dams at another Peace River site known as Site E near the border with Alberta, as well as at Bute Inlet on the central coast.
The Site E project at the confluence of the Peace and Alces rivers would have a capacity of up to 750 megawatts, while the Bute Inlet project would be 900 megawatts.
Dix said B.C. needed the additional power to meet growing demand.
But Foy said building new dams would further diminish wildlife populations and the trust in government decisions.
“B.C. needs to hold its horses on moving forward with more dams on more rivers until it comes to grip with the damages caused by Site C, which are many and varied,” Foy said in an interview on Tuesday.
The province pitched Site C as a clean power source for homes and local businesses, but Foy said evidence now shows the dam, which has a capacity of up to 1,230 megawatts, was built to power liquefied natural gas projects.
BC Hydro has said Site C dam would have been required with or without an LNG sector, but it has also said that new LNG facilities on the coast were expected to accelerate the need for more power-generation.
The proposed project for the Bute Inlet, meanwhile, envisions multiple dams on rivers, including the Homathko River, as it feeds into the inlet.
Julian Axmann, executive director for B.C. Spaces for Nature, said in a statement that government should have never considered damming the Homathko.
He said the Clean Energy Act specifically lists the river as off-limits to dams.
That legislation also currently prohibits dams at Site E, but Dix said Monday that the government would bring forward legislation allowing BC Hydro to assess both sites.
Dix said Monday’s announcement did not mean that the Site E and Bute Inlet projects were going ahead, and the technical work would determine whether they could or should proceed.
He also addressed environmental concerns in an interview, saying “if you want to have clean electricity, you have got to have sources of clean electricity.”
BC Green MLA Jeremy Valeriote said his party generally favours renewable energy and the province should aim for energy independence as electric vehicles and heat-pumps require more power.
“But I really don’t see the value in contemplating more large dams, when we know that distributed renewables are entirely feasible and economical. They don’t flood valuable farmland,” he said, referring to solar and wind projects.
He said it’s also hard to support something if government is not transparent about how the energy would be used.
“There is a really strong chance, that we are building on all of these (projects) to liquefy natural gas or methane gas, and shipping it across the ocean,” he said. “We know it’s not just domestic demand.”
David Tindall, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, said there was a lot of local opposition from farmers and ranchers to Site C, and a Site E dam would likely meet the same.
British Columbians elsewhere might oppose the dams on financial grounds, Tindall said.
“I think the Site C dam was seen, to a certain extent, as a big waste of money,” he said.
The final cost of the dam was $16 billion, nearly double its original budget, and Tindall said the public might expect any future dams to involve similar cost overruns.
He said projects with large environmental and social effects now required a significantly higher level of social licence than previous projects.
“People’s world views about these things have changed very much from the middle part of the 20th century,” he said.
But the last few years have also seen the emergence of other factors, Tindall said.
Tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump and events like the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine have shifted public opinion, he said.
“So, for instance, on things like climate change and (energy infrastructure), there has been a real shift in support of building pipelines, building new infrastructure, partly because of these geopolitical threats,” he said.
While the public has become more aware of environmental issues, many have adopted a pragmatic view of becoming more self-sufficient when it came to energy and economic growth, Tindall said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 16, 2026.
