Public unfairly kept in dark on Site C's 'gory' details

VICTORIA — The B.C. Utilities Commission moved quickly Wednesday to block public access to the uncensored version of an independent review it commissioned into Site C.

At 8 a.m., the communications director for the commission, Erica Hamilton, called Robert McCullough, the Portland, Ore.-based energy expert who’d posted an unredacted copy of the report by Deloitte LLP on his website.

She asked him to take down the offending version of the report and he obliged.

With that, the public was again denied access to the full details of Deloitte’s findings about Site C, including delays and overruns on the main construction contract for excavating the site, diverting the river and building the dam itself.

The main civil works contract was $136 million over budget and two months behind schedule from the outset. Already it has eaten three-quarters of its share of the contingency budget, with only one-quarter of the work done. All noted here Wednesday in a column based on the unredacted version of the Deloitte report.

I’d summarized a dozen or so highlights from the report on Twitter, when I got an urgent call from Hamilton, the same BCUC official who contacted McCullough this week.

She advised that the commission had taken down the report because it had mistakenly been posted without fully blacking out material that should have been kept confidential. She also asked that I destroy my copy of the unredacted version.

I had not actually downloaded a copy, for which I am still kicking myself. By the time the report was reposted that evening, the most telling passages about the civil works contract were obscured.

Then this week I discovered McCullough had somehow obtained a copy of the version that was briefly available earlier this month.

I don’t fault him for taking it down at the request of the commission. He’s been appearing before the Site C review as a consultant to the anti-Site C Peace Valley Landowners Association. He’d not be serving the interests of his clients by defying a request from the BCUC. They may apply for some of the public funding that is available to participants in commission proceedings.

But upon hearing that BCUC was again trying to suppress parts of the Deloitte report, I called Hamilton to ask why the commission was withholding critical information from the public.

She replied that it was a decision by the four commissioners on the Site C review panel. Yes, but why?

“We don’t feel it is appropriate for it to be publicly available.”

Later, I received a followup statement from the commission:

“Access to the confidential version of the report is a matter between a requesting party and B.C. Hydro. Thus, the BCUC considers posting of the confidential report to be inappropriate, and as such requested Mr. McCullough promptly remove the report from his website.”

So as I get that, if you want to know the details of a report that is critical of Hydro, you have to apply to Hydro for permission to read it. I leave you to guess how likely permission would be granted and under what conditions.

I also learned that the confidentiality issue was addressed on a statement on Page 1 of the Deloitte report itself.

Quote: “The information in this document contains commercially sensitive information and is confidential and proprietary to Deloitte. No information from this document can be released in whole or in part without the expressed written consent of an authorized officer of Deloitte LLP.”

So no spreading it around without the permission of the consulting firm that prepared it.

But at this point the narrative enters the realm of catch-22 or, perhaps, a scenario worked up by Franz Kafka.

For the only reason I know about the statement quoted above is because I read it in the uncensored version, the one posted on McCullough’s website until the commission stepped in Wednesday morning. In the approved-by-the commission version, the passage was blacked out.

Yes.

The only way one would know about the confidentiality restrictions on the report would be if one were reading the unrestricted version that one was not supposed to see in the first place.

You can’t make this stuff up, but fortunately there is no need to do so.

The day before releasing the Deloitte report, the commission underscored that the text posted on the website would include “redactions to all information provided confidentially from B.C. Hydro.”

Then the reminder that if one wanted to see the unredacted version, one would have to seek permission from Hydro. Appropriate, in the eyes of the commission, “because the confidential information pertains to B.C. Hydro.”

The information pertains to Hydro yes, but it pertains to the public interest even more.

The censored parts of the Deloitte report detail how Hydro underestimated the cost of the main civil works contract from the outset and only kept the work on schedule by draining the contingency fund.

The findings, as Deloitte itself notes, call into doubt “Hydro’s ability to estimate large contracts” and “reduces our confidence in the accuracy of the other main contract packages that have yet to be awarded.”

No question why Hydro wanted the gory details suppressed. No way should the independent regulator cooperate in keeping the public in the dark.