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Later in the day, Premier Christy Clark said a delay much beyond this week would have had a significant impact at the site.

“It was getting a little bit close to the wire because if those permits hadn’t come through soon, we might have had to delay the project and send everybody home,” she told me during an interview on Voice of B.C. on Shaw TV. “It might have cost B.C. Hydro a lot of money because there are penalties in every contract they’ve signed. So we’ve avoided a really big problem.”

She thanked the federal government for “coming through for us,” as she put it.

“I should say a special thank-you to the fisheries minister, Dominic LeBlanc, because he was a real key player in making sure it happened on time, which isn’t something governments naturally are great at.”

The province would appear to have lucked out in having LeBlanc at the helm as the decision came down to the wire. A canny veteran politician and house leader in the Trudeau government, he was appointed fisheries minister after neophyte minister Hunter Tootoo resigned from the cabinet at the end of May to seek addiction treatment.

The premier also underscored the Site C decision as an early sign of the new federal government’s direction on major economic projects. “I think it is the first approval from the new federal government for any major development project in the country,” she told me.

Preliminary federal approval for Site C came under the previous Stephen Harper administration. Opponents were hoping that the new prime minister might see things differently, given his pledges to First Nations.