The union leader who represents some BC Hydro workers is speaking out against proposed job cuts at the utility.

On Thursday, a government review called for $800 million in spending cuts over the next three years and recommended cutting up to 1,000 jobs.

Michelle Laurie, who speaks for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 258, said the layoffs don't make sense.

"Our economy is going to pay the price. Those are a thousand good-paying jobs, people who can afford to contribute back into this economy," she said.

"People who live here, work here and pay into our tax base. So the economy is going to hurt. Those people obviously are going to hurt and ultimately, the reliability of our system for electricity is going to be affected and that means the rate payer is going to pay for it too."

Laurie said those workers are necessary to providing quality service to customers.

"The work needs to be done, particularly infrastructure — upgrading infrastructure maintenance — and you can't do that without people so if you start to cut jobs, you have to talk about how that impacts the level of reliability, the level of service, what you can actually provide."

Costly private power

BC Hydro CEO Dave Cobb said Thursday the Crown corporation could get by with cutting just 350 jobs — not the 1,000 the government review recommended.

Union officials say they plan to meet with BC Hydro once they finish looking over the review.

However, former BC Hydro board member and SFU political scientist Marjorie Griffin-Cohen said the review — which also called for the utility to cut its proposed rate hikes by half — distracts from the utility's real problem.

Griffin-Cohen said the real burden of cost is the government's policy on private power.

"Basically, what they have required to happen in B.C. is for new power generation to be in the private sector, BC Hydro to buy that and their hope was that this could spur exports of electricity to the United States," said

"It was a very serious miscalculation of what was going on. So what we have now is a lot of private power that is extremely costly."

Griffin-Cohen said private power projects produce 16 per cent of domestic power, but account for 49 per cent of energy costs.