How do you privatize BC Hydro without privatizing it?

I suppose the first question is why would you want to and you have to be a Gordon Campbell or a Gordon Campbell acolyte to answer that. He and they aren’t talking so we have to make an educated guess. The only possibility that makes sense – if privatizing a money generating public utility ever makes sense - is philosophy - you simply don’t like public utilities because you don’t like public utilities. They’re sort of communist and, of course, like all publicly owned corporations, are badly run by bloated bureaucracies.

The three principal BC Publicly owned companies were that because of W.A.C. Bennett who purchased the Pacific Great Eastern Railway and rebranded it BC Rail; bought out Blackball Ferries and made it BC Ferries; and took over the BC Electric Railway Company, which became BC Hydro and also contained within it what was BC Gas which is now Terrasen Energy of Texas, pardner. Bennett, seen by the “left” as public enemy #1 for the 20 years he was in power is now their beloved icon whose revered name is mentioned in hushed whispers of near rapture.

Gordon Campbell wasn’t going to privatize BC Rail of course but he did and pretended that he had only given it a lease – a lease which if you went back as far as it does forward would take you back to the reign of Ethelred the Unready.

BC Ferries is a public company that has been privatized without ever leaving government control except that the government is now able to pretend that the bad things that happen, such as n ever-ending fare increases, are somehow not its fault.

So, back to the question – how to you privatize BC Hydro after you’ve promised cross your heart and hope to die that you won’t?

Simple – you bankrupt it by forcing it to pay unbelievably extravagant prices to private river rapists for power, thus adjust the bottom line so that pay-outs for electricity exceed revenues. Those who hold the bonds on BC Hydro then call their loans, take over the assets, run the existing dams at a nice profit leaving the company a shell through which those private power producers make extravagant profits while raping the environment.

Nonsense? Will never happen?

Just wait and see.