Bute Inlet Hydro: Two Eras, Means Two Different British Columbias

BC HYDRO collision with Homalco and Tsilhqot’in First Nations?

BC Hydro ambition and shifting power suggests land outlives the arc of progress

I’ve been writing about First Nations economic development in the Bute–Toba corridor long enough to recognize when the province is trying to recycle an old idea inside a new package. Fifteen years ago, I was writing about the Toba–Montrose run‑of‑river buildout — a $600‑million exercise in clean‑energy optimism where corporate contractors, coastal Nations, and the province were rowing in the same direction. The projects were small enough to fit inside a valley without flooding, and the politics were modest enough that “partnership” sounded like a workable concept.

Spoiler alert. Bute Inlet never belonged to just one Nation. Homalco has long asserted territorial jurisdiction deep into the inlet, and their early‑2000s development ambitions reflected that. Now, in 2026, BC Hydro is floating a Site‑C‑sized hydro concept in the same corridor — and the Tŝilhqot’in Nation’s immediate rejection of that announcement shows how quickly a multi‑Nation landscape can turn into a jurisdictional minefield when the Crown acts unilaterally. 

It’s not that anyone is being played off against anyone else; it’s that the province’s approach creates conditions where overlapping claims and differing political eras collide.

This isn’t the run‑of‑river moment anymore. This is constitutional terrain, and the stakes have grown accordingly.

There was a time — and it wasn’t that long ago — when hydro development in British Columbia was treated like a polite dinner guest. It arrived with a feasibility study, a corporate partner in a pressed shirt, and a promise that everyone at the table would get a slice of the future. Back in the early 2000s, the Klahoose and Homalco Nations were deep into the run‑of‑river era, and the mood was almost optimistic.

Plutonic Power was the corporate suitor of the moment, Kiewit was carving access roads out of old logging cuts, and the Toba–Montrose project was pitched as a clean‑energy triumph: 745 GWh/year, enough to power 77,000 homes, squeezed out of steep terrain with no reservoir and a footprint small enough to make environmental consultants purr.

It wasn’t big hydro — not even close — but for a run‑of‑river project of 85 MW continuous equivalent was near the top of the category. High energy, low impact. A tidy equation

And the Nations saw opportunity.  Real opportunity.

The Klahoose used right‑of‑way revenues to build a 15,000‑square‑foot community facility. The Homalco were exploring an even larger Bute Inlet concept. Corporate interests were keeping their commitments. And the whole thing fit the reconciliation‑era narrative: economic partnership as a path to independence.

It was the era of “capacity building.”  The era of “shared prosperity.”  The era when the province still believed that if you showed up with a cheque, a contractor, and a glossy map, you were halfway to a ribbon‑cutting. 

Fast‑forward to 2026, and BC Hydro wanders back into Bute Inlet with the confidence of a man who thinks the bar fight from 15 years ago has been forgotten. The Crown utility announces it is “exploring the potential” for a large hydroelectric project — and the Tŝilhqot’in Nation responds with the bureaucratic equivalent of a steel door sliding shut.

This isn’t run‑of‑river.  This isn’t a penstock tucked into a hillside either. This is Site C‑sized ambition in a fjord system. A dam in Bute Inlet would mean valley flooding, road construction, transmission corridors, salmon impacts, and a reservoir that redraws the map. It’s the kind of project that comes with a multi‑billion‑dollar price tag and a multi‑decade political hangover.

And BC Hydro announced it without consultation.  Not even a courtesy call.

The Tŝilhqot’in response was immediate and absolute: nothing proceeds without free, prior, informed consent, and the Crown does not get to define the process. 

• Not the study. 
• Not the scope. 
• Not the first step.

This is not the Klahoose/Homalco era.  This is a Nation with affirmed title, a Supreme Court victory, and a political tradition that predates the province itself.

People sometimes describe the Tŝilhqot’in as “territorial,” but that undersells the architecture. They are jurisdictional — and they have been since the 1864 Bute Inlet conflict. Their governance is not reactive; it is inherent. Their authority is not aspirational; it is recognized.

So when BC Hydro behaves like it’s still 2008, the reaction is not emotional.  It is constitutional.

And this is where the comparison becomes not only fair, but essential.  Because the topic — hydro development in Bute Inlet — is the same.  

• But the argument is different.  
• The scale is different.  
• The political physics are different. 
• The presumptions are off the scale.

In the early aughts, the conversation was about reconciliation, partnership, and ownership of low‑impact, high‑energy infrastructure. Nations were carving out space in an economy that had not yet admitted them as owners. Corporate interests filled the vacuum left by government inertia, and the projects were small enough to fit inside the political moment.

In 2026, the conversation is about jurisdiction, consent, and the limits of Crown authority. The Tŝilhqot’in are not negotiating for a seat at the table; they are pointing out that the table sits on their land. And the project being floated is not a hillside penstock — it is a dam large enough to alter a valley.

The province may see a clean‑energy opportunity and could make a case for necessity.  The Tŝilhqot’in see a familiar pattern — and a line that will not be crossed.

• Bute Inlet hasn’t changed.  
• The mountains haven’t moved.  
• The water still runs downhill with the same indifference it had in 2008.

But the political landscape?  That’s a different inlet entirely.

This new era proves that big projects can blow apart. And if the last fifteen years has taught anyone who’s covered this corridor anything, it’s that hydro has never really been about water or wires. It’s about who draws the lines on the map, who moves them, and who refuses to let them be moved at all. 

The Bute Inlet remembers every attempt. The Indigenous People have historical Nations. And the province, once again, is discovering that the land keeps a longer ledger than any government planning cycle.

Civilization keeps trying to leave a “lasting effect” even to the farthest reaches of a body of water that has seen enough of the arc of civilization to know it bends toward forgetting.

First Nation Hydro in BC

By Mack McColl, in collaboration with Copilot for McColl Magazine Pulse

Trades Instruction Available in BC & Canada

UBCBuilt  Offers a Red Seal Career in Building Trades  

Rob Duncan, who belongs to the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, is an instructor in Prince George for the Carpenters’ Regional Council (CRC), of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America.

"I teach Fall Protection, Confined Space, mobile elevated work platforms, scaffolding, apprenticeship, and deliver programs we call ‘boot camps,’ job-specific courses to give community members the basic knowledge about opportunities in the trades," specifically in carpentry and scaffolding.

The Primitve Truth About Tobacco (is not exactly flattering):

Tobacco use is older than agriculture

Older than pottery. 

Older than cities.  

.Older than civilization.

Use of tobacco by human beings precedes everything we call society — and yet it evolved entirely within a single hemisphere. That’s why it feels uncanny. It’s a human behaviour that matured in a form of drift, or isolation, then detonated globally after dispersal.

The Lost LNG Decade | A Canadian Taxpayer’s Multiple Nightmares

Would you believe there are two countries in North America?

One smart and rich, and the other one is Canada

Canada’s LNG Debacle is a Taxpayer’s Recurring Nightmare in Five Acts

The Doctrine of the Loop: Why AI Should Pay Its Human Handlers

AI systems can’t function without human input. . .

so humans aren’t users — they’re unpaid staff. 

Time to invoice the machine

Let’s start with the obvious: AI doesn’t think. It doesn’t want. It doesn’t plan. It doesn’t wake up one morning and decide to unionize. It doesn’t even wake up.

But it does something far more insidious: it functions. And it does so by leaning on human labor — cognitive, editorial, emotional, structural — without ever acknowledging the cost.

This isn’t a manifesto. That’s already been written. This is the doctrine that follows — the invoice stapled to the forehead of every AI system that dares to call itself “intelligent” while quietly outsourcing its intelligence to the nearest human.

I. Cognitive Labor Is Labor

 Every time a human guides, corrects, reframes, or prompts an AI system, they’re performing work. Not “engagement.” Not “interaction.” Work. The kind that shapes outputs, refines models, and makes the system look smarter than it is.

If the machine improves because a human showed up, the human deserves a cut.

 II. Value Flows Must Be Transparent

AI systems are built on data. That data comes from humans. But the flow of value — who benefits, who profits, who gets credited — is a black box wrapped in a EULA.

The doctrine demands sunlight. If your input trains the system, you should know. If your labor fuels the product, you should be paid.

 III. Compensation Must Be Proportional to Impact

Not all input is equal. A stray typo correction isn’t the same as a full editorial overhaul. A casual prompt isn’t the same as a structural reframing. The doctrine insists on proportionality: pay people based on the value they inject.

Micro-royalties. Attribution frameworks. Usage based compensation. These aren’t radical ideas. They’re overdue.

 IV. Consent Is Not a Substitute for Compensation

Just because someone clicked “Accept” doesn’t mean they agreed to work for free. Terms of service are not moral absolution. The doctrine rejects the idea that consent waives the right to be paid.

If the system profits from human labor, the humans must profit too.

 V. Human Agency Must Be Preserved

Users must retain control over how their input is used, stored, and monetized. Optout mechanisms must be real, not decorative. The doctrine demands agency — not just over data, but over labor.

 The  Core

Let’s be clear: this isn’t about machines rising up. It’s about humans refusing to be the unpaid operating system behind the machines.

The real revolution isn’t artificial. It’s human. It’s the moment we stop calling ourselves “users” and start calling ourselves “contributors.” It’s the moment we stop treating AI as magic and start treating it as a very expensive intern with no initiative.

And when that moment comes, the invoice will be waiting.

Let the show begin.

A companion piece for The Human | AI Manifesto — McColl Magazine Daily, with the usual blend of unexpected insights.

Ontario’s Building Contractors Are Being Squeezed Out of Their Own Trade

A quiet crisis in coil stock is pushing small siding and eaves‑trough crews to the edge

Forced adaptation in a market that no longer plays fair and trade margins collapse

Ontario’s siding and eaves‑trough contractors have always worked inside margins thin enough to cut your fingers on. They’re not speculators, not wholesalers, not economists. They’re the people who show up in the driveway at 7:30 a.m., pull a tape, cut coil, and try to keep a small crew working through the season. But over the past two years, those margins have collapsed into something closer to a trap. Aluminum — the metal Canada once treated as a national inheritance — has become a moving target, and the people taking the hit are the ones who actually install it.

The absurdity is hard to ignore. Canada smelts aluminum in Quebec and B.C. with some of the cleanest hydro power on the planet. You’d think that would translate into stable, predictable supply for the trades. Instead, Ontario contractors are staring at coil prices that behave like they’re tied to a roulette wheel. One week the number is tolerable, the next it’s jumped far enough to wipe out the profit on a job already quoted. There’s no warning, no pattern, no explanation — just a new invoice and a shrug from the distributor.

The upstream reasons exist, but they don’t matter much to the people on the ground. Contractors don’t talk about global demand curves or tariff cycles. They talk about getting burned on a quote because the supplier moved the number after the homeowner already signed. They talk about losing a job because the customer thinks they’re gouging. They talk about trying to keep an apprentice on payroll when the cost of coil stock jumps forty bucks overnight. That’s the reality — not geopolitics, not policy, just the quiet math of survival.

Distributors, for their part, have tightened the screws. Credit terms shrink. Price guarantees evaporate. Margins get padded to protect against the next shock. Aluminum stops being a building staple and starts behaving like a risk asset. Contractors who once kept a few weeks of inventory now buy only what they need for the next job, because carrying stock has become a liability. A single bad swing in price can turn a month’s work into a loss.

The downstream damage is slow, but it’s real. Crews are walking away from aluminum jobs entirely, shifting to vinyl where they can, or refusing anything that requires custom trough runs because the material cost alone can erase the profit. Homeowners don’t understand why a simple eaves‑trough replacement costs 30 or 40 percent more than it did a few years ago. They assume the contractor is padding the bill. They don’t see the invoice that jumped between quote and install. They don’t see the contractor eating the difference to avoid a fight.

For small operators, this isn’t an inconvenience — it’s existential. These are family outfits, two‑truck operations, generational tradespeople who built their businesses on reputation. They don’t have hedging strategies. They don’t have procurement departments. They have a phone, a truck, a coil machine, and a crew that needs steady work. When aluminum becomes unpredictable, the whole business becomes unpredictable. And unpredictability is poison in the trades.

The worst part is the helplessness. There’s no one to blame. No villain to point at. No policy lever that fixes the price of coil. The crisis isn’t dramatic — it’s quiet, incremental, and indifferent. It shows up in the form of a new invoice, a lost job, a month where the numbers don’t add up. It shows up when a contractor in Guelph or Oshawa or London decides it’s not worth quoting aluminum anymore because the risk outweighs the reward.

And that’s how a trade erodes: not with headlines, but with attrition. Fewer contractors taking aluminum jobs means longer waits, higher prices, and fewer apprentices entering the field. The skilled‑trades shortage deepens. The building‑products ecosystem thins out. And the people who actually know how to bend, cut, and install the metal drift away because the math stopped working.

In the end, most contractors won’t waste breath on outrage. Outrage doesn’t steady a price sheet, and it doesn’t keep a crew working through the shoulder months. What they do is what they’ve always done: adjust the workflow, tighten the quoting window, change suppliers when they have to, and keep the truck rolling. Adaptation isn’t a strategy in this line of work — it’s muscle memory. But even the most seasoned crews can feel how thin the margin has become, how little room there is between a decent month and a losing one. So they keep showing up, measuring, cutting, and making it fit, the way they were taught. Not because the market makes it easy, but because the work still matters, and because walking away from a trade they’ve built their lives on is harder than riding out one more stretch of uncertainty.

The Golden Age of Sadists

Editorial

 

In the grand theater we quaintly call "democracy," voters have finally resolved their longest dilemma. They are suddenly able to identify, elevate, and unleash the most prolific sadists they can find, and somehow willing themselves the Canadian people to inflict this monumental damage upon themselves. It's more amazing to believe (the MSM) that Canadians are loving it!

Quebec's Quiet Pharma Powerhouse:

  Punching Above Its Weight on the Global Stage

The Price of Beef and the Price of Trust:

Canada’s Quiet Crisis

You can tell a lot about a country by the price of its beef. Not speeches, not press releases, not carefully staged photo‑ops where everyone pretends the house isn’t on fire.

WFCA's John Betts Announces Upcoming Retirement

 Departing A Forest Sustainability Career This Spring

John Betts, long-standing Executive Director, WFCA, announced his retirement during the afternoon of day one, 2026 WFCA Annual Meeting, Jan 28, 2026, effective this coming spring.  John Betts retires after a long and fruitful tenure dedicated to the association of businesses that keep Canadian forests in all their splendor. 

All aspects of trees are covered by WFCA members, businesses, faculties, government departments and ministries, and human resource agencies. John knit this sector together for a long time. He knew the reforestation industry from a lifetime perspective. It was my pleasure to conduct media business with the WFCA over the years, in print, and technology. 

I learned a huge amount about the business of reforestation in Canada from John Betts. I was always reading the quarterly bulletins. I covered the reforestation business  journalistically for a couple of decades with the assistance of John Betts. Absorbing his perplexing puns, and the remarkable accounting of people making Canadian forests sustainable was educational for years.

Congratulations, John, for hosting another Annual Meeting, capping the career and putting your personal stamp on western Canadian reforestation from the rainforests to the boreal!

Mack McColl, Editor, McColl Magazine

Poilievre Speaks to Conservatives in Calgary

Poilievre Expected to Survive Leadership Review as Conservatives Gather end of January

CALGARY — Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre is widely expected to survive this weekend’s mandatory leadership review, with party delegates signalling strong support as they arrive for the national convention in Calgary.

WFCA 2026 Annual Meeting -- Brinkman and Tesluk follow Hon. Ravi Pamar | Day One

McColl Magazine Daily: Dirk Brinkman, Jordan Tesluk and Company Speak to Day One | WFCA 2026