VICTORIA

After delivering a gracious tribute to former premier Bill Bennett in the legislature this week, Opposition leader John Horgan closed with a swipe at the B.C. Liberals for undermining one aspect of the Bennett legacy.

“I want to add to the list that the premier provided of Mr. Bennett’s great accomplishments,” said Horgan. “Creating the B.C. Utilities Commission to protect us from ourselves.”

As shots go, that one needs a bit of historical footnoting.

Bennett did indeed establish the commission as independent regulator of utilities, most pointedly including BC Hydro, the government-owned builder of dams and transmission facilities created by his father, W.A.C. Bennett.

As energy minister Bob McClelland announced in tabling the Utilities Commission Act in the summer of 1980, Hydro was being brought under public regulatory control and scrutiny “for the first time” in its then 16-year history.

By “protecting us from ourselves,” Horgan meant that the commission would provide an independent check on the temptations that can arise for governments of every political stripe.

“Bill Bennett and Bob McClelland were not doctrinaire socialists,” as the NDP leader observed in a recent interview with Tom Fletcher of Black Press. “These were practical people who said we need to protect ratepayers from a public monopoly that is driven by political contingencies.”

Moreover Bennett and McClelland — who died within weeks of each other last fall — weren’t kidding about subjecting BC Hydro to an unprecedented level of public scrutiny of its designs on the province’s rivers and valleys.

One of the first major undertakings of the B.C. Utilities Commission was a full-blown review into Hydro’s proposal to construct a hydroelectric dam at Site C on the Peace River.

After lengthy public hearings, with McClelland himself obliged to testify at one point, the commission found that Hydro had failed to “adequately demonstrate that Site C is the best possible project from a provincial point of view.”

The commissioner recommended that the cabinet, which had the final call, withhold approval until Hydro could make a persuasive case, which advice Bennett and his cabinet promptly took, parking Site C on the shelf.

There it remained — apart from a half-serious reconsideration under the NDP late in the 1990s — until about 10 years ago, when premier Gordon Campbell reactivated the project. Pointedly, one of Campbell’ s first moves was to exempt Site C from further consideration by the B.C. Utilities Commission.

But the project was subjected to environmental review by a joint federal-provincial panel, which in the spring of 2014 found that BC Hydro “has not fully demonstrated the need for the project on the timetable set forth.”

Underscoring the uncanny echo of what the BCUC had found 30 years earlier, the joint review panel recommended that given the apparent lack of urgency, the project should be sent to a review by — you guessed it — the utilities commission.

Though Horgan is not as violently opposed to Site C as some members of his caucus — he’s said it might be the best option for making electricity at some point in the future — he has long called for the project to be subjected to independent scrutiny by the utilities commission.

“Of course, the commissioners are appointed by the government” he conceded in an interview with me on Voice of B.C. on Shaw TV late last year. “But I’d like to believe that they take their jobs seriously. They’re there to protect the ratepayers. They’re there to oversee decisions that BC Hydro is making.