Harold Catherwood Interview – Negotiations
Produced by Revelstoke Museum and Archives. Filmed by Agathe Bernard.
Harold Catherwood, former Sidmouth resident, discusses the negotiation process with BC Hydro.
Title Screen: Circular logo on a black backdrop. Logo is an image of four waves turning into wheat on the left end. The title “Stories Beneath the Surface” is circled around the image in capital letters.
Interview with Harold Catherwood. Shows Mr. Catherwood; a white man with grey hair, wearing a blue, white, and grey plaid shirt and black vest. He sits in a brown armchair.
Revelstoke Museum and Archives logo in the bottom right hand corner.
Transcript of Narration:
There was no meetings or anything or explanations given to to anybody in the valley.
It was strictly: ‘you’re going to have to move because we’re going to flood the valley’.
Well there was no negotiation, it was just to go in and start telling these people what they – what was going – to they were going to get for whatever property they had.
Now a lot of those properties may not have been very much in the eyes of the world today or even then, [leans forward] but they were homes for those people.
[Leans back] When this man came around he was going to do the uh assessment of the property. Charlie Watson, he was not a bad man, he was one of the better quality people that they had hired.
And actually I felt sorry for him in a way. I mean he had to tell these people what little they were going to get, and he came along and I wanted them to say: ‘I’d like you to give me a price on the buildings and then give me a price on the land.’ ‘Oh no we don’t do that.
We give you an overall price.’
The same price was valued on the whole property and it was including uncleared land and cleared land.
The whole thing made you very bitter because of the way it was handled.
I mean, it wasn’t as if they were negotiating, like, on a proper manner across the table. Uh you were given a price and that was it.
Well that isn’t negotiating, that’s stealing. [Leans forward]
They would allow us to buy it back, but not at the price they paid us.
The price they paid us was about half of what they charged us for, to buy our own property back. That’s the kind of justice.