The Dominion - Manitoba

Hogtown, Manitoba

stephlaw — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:03:13 +0000

An investigation into one factory's radical impact on labour and the environment in a prairie town

SASKATOON—The meatpacking industry once provided thousands of Canadian workers with a decent living wage. Thanks in part to globalization the industry now employs far fewer people at wages that have essentially been frozen since the mid-1980s. These days, many meatpacking employees are temporary foreign workers who must sign restrictive contracts with their employer for a chance at attaining Canadian citizenship.

Maple Leaf Consumer Foods’ hog processing plant in Brandon, MB, is the largest such plant in Canada. Employing over 2,200 people, it is the primary economic driver for the booming “Wheat City.” By all accounts, Maple Leaf's facility, opened in 1999, is a modern, world-class processing plant. The facility expanded in 2008 increasing its processing capacity to over 85,000 hogs a week, totaling over 4 million annually. Yet despite its impressive size and modernity, the facility has struggled with retaining workers as the work is hard, repetitive and undesirable for many.

In 2003, the annual turnover rate at Maple Leaf was well over 100 per cent. To satisfy its need for labourers and to reduce turnover, the plant began recruiting workers from abroad. Maple Leaf’s Brandon facility now employs over 2,200 hourly, unionized workers, the majority of whom are either temporary foreign workers or new residents who have passed through the foreign worker program.

“When the turnover was really high, my understanding is that it was in the early stages of the plant, and there’s a lot of growing pains that happen with that,” explains Blake Caruthers, Communications Officer with UFCW Local 832, representing the workers at Maple Leaf. “Once they started using the temporary foreign worker program, people were staying and making Brandon their home.”

The annual turnover rate has been reduced to below 100 per cent, due in part to the hiring contracts that temporary foreign workers and many immigrant workers are required to sign. In order to qualify for fast-tracked landed immigrant status, temporary foreign workers must agree to extend their six month contracts for another two years at Maple Leaf.

“You have a more or less captive labour force, based on immigration,” says Joe Dolecki, Professor of environment and economics at Brandon University. “It [is] much the same as the old indentured servitude model.” Many of the jobs at Maple Leaf in Brandon are unskilled positions, with starting wages hovering around a dollar or two above the provincial minimum of $10 per hour, totalling approximately $19,000 a year. According to Caruthers, skilled labourers at the plant can earn as much as $18 to start, not including shift premiums offered to employees.

In addition to the relatively low wages, the work conditions are far from ideal. “The work is not only hard,” says Dolecki, “it’s physically debilitating for people.”

“It was pretty shitty work conditions,” says Geoff Mann, a former line worker at Maple Leaf in Brandon. “I would stand in one spot, literally, for two hours, then get a coffee break, then stand in the same spot again for two hours, and so forth. A pig leg, a loin, would come down the line, and I would turn it,” he explains. “Turn, turn, turn. It was coming lengthwise, so I would turn it the other way, and it would move on to the next person, who had to do a specific cut.” Mann, who is now 32, kept the job for three months in 2002 before finally quitting to attend Brandon University. “Your feet would just freeze,” Mann recalls as the factory is temperature-controlled to prevent meat from spoiling. “It didn’t matter what kind of socks I wore, my feet would freeze, standing in one spot all the time. You couldn’t walk around to warm them up, you could rock or maybe take one step to the side and back.”

Mann remembers shift premiums being used at the plant as incentives to combat absenteeism. If a worker showed up on time every day for an entire month, they would receive an extra dollar per hour worked. Shift premiums still exist but Mann sees the terms for getting this financial bonus as unrealistic for most workers, especially those with young families or those who are single parents. “Say if you missed one day or [were late for] 15 minutes one day because your kid had a doctor’s appointment, then you’re losing out on that one dollar an hour for 80 hours a pay-cheque, for a whole month,” he said.

Martyn Conrad, who worked at the plant between 2002 and 2003 as a wash bay attendant, recalls a lack of employees and workers not showing up on time or at all. “It was my job to clean and return large, bloodied metal bins that once contained various pig parts, back to the production line,” Conrad explained via email. Conrad kept the job, working from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., Monday to Friday, for almost a year before finally quitting.

In the early 1980s, managers of many Albertan meatpacking plants aimed to drastically increase profits on the backs of unionized workers. Plant owners followed the lead of their US counterparts, who—through reorganization, hostile takeovers and other extreme tactics—reduced or eliminated many of the gains made by workers since the Second World War. Albertan meatpackers responded with a series of strikes which lec to job cuts, lowered wages and reduced benefits.

In 1986, Peter Pocklington, former owner of Gainers meatpacking and the Edmonton Oilers, told Alberta Report, “The unions are very self-serving.” At a time when union workers were paid around $1800 a month he said, “In Taiwan, workers get $300 a month for the same job. And Taiwan isn’t that far away by air. [Unions] need to find out what the new realities of business are.”

The “new realities” of globalized business are clear to unions in Canada today, as wages and benefits have been scaled back dramatically since the 1980s. The strike-breaking tactics used by Peter Pocklington and the management at Gainers forced the UFCW to accept major concessions at the bargaining table for years to come.

In 1986, hourly wages were between $8 and $12 for meatpackers. Today, at Maple Leaf, hourly wages start at $12 and go to a maximum of $18 for skilled positions. Taking inflation into account, wages are lower now than they were in 1986.

The meatpacking industry itself, like many other industries in Canada, has turned to globalization to fill demand for workers. Since the introduction of the “temporary foreign worker program,” Maple Leaf has successfully recruited workers abroad by offering “fast-tracked” immigrant status to temporary workers who complete their initial contract with the company, and who agree to sign on to a contract extension as landed immigrants.

To accommodate these new workers, UFCW Local 832 has pushed to have the collective bargaining agreement and workplace information available to workers in four languages: English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Ukrainian. “It was the first of its kind in Canada,” Caruthers says of the collective agreement. “You’ve got to give Maple Leaf credit for that, because it was not a hard bargaining issue with them. They understand the value of keeping their employees, our members, informed of their rights, and they realized that the better everybody understands the collective agreement, the better the workforce.”

While the UFCW has been successful — and groundbreaking — in securing rights for its foreign members, temporary foreign workers at other work places in Canada are still without the rights and protections of Maple Leaf employees. Apart from rights to translators, temporary foreign workers only recently secured the right to an expedited arbitration process in cases where they have been terminated, allowing them to remain in Manitoba until the issue is resolved. Agricultural foreign workers in southern Ontario and foreign workers in northern Alberta’s oil patch are often lacking information about worker's rights and without many of the benefits included in the collective bargaining agreement between Maple Leaf and the UFCW.

For the first time in years, Brandon's schools are filling up, houses are being built and new businesses are opening their doors. It is clear that Maple Leaf Commercial Foods’ Brandon plant has positively increased population growth in the community, which has in turn spurred the economy forward at a rate unseen for decades. The vacancy rate in Brandon is now less than 0.5 per cent and the unemployment rate sits at about 2.8 per cent.

Growth comes at a cost that is more difficult to quantify. The success of Intensive Livestock Operations (ILOs) — often disparagingly referred to as “factory farms” — that feed the processing plant in Brandon comes on the backs of small, rural communities already struggling with demographic change and losses of basic services.

Of the 85,000 hogs processed weekly in Brandon, over 60,000 are sourced from hog producers in Manitoba, while the rest come from eastern Saskatchewan. Only Quebec produces more hogs annually than Manitoba. Today, only 10 to 15 per cent of hogs produced in Manitoba are by small-scale “traditional” livestock operators producing less than 1,000 hogs. A transition from small-scale hog production to ILOs began in the 1990s, and has continued to the point where over 50 per cent of hogs in the province come from massive ILOs that house 5,000 or more hogs.

Critics of ILOs charge that such large-scale operations have negative social and environmental impacts on rural communities. Farmers and rural residents in south western Manitoba were concerned about the shift towards ILOs that taking place as early as 1999, presenting arguments before the Citizen’s Hearing on Hog Production and the Environment. Residents had organized the hearing in anticipation of the opening of Brandon’s Maple Leaf plant, the results being presented to the province in early 2000.

“Often you’ll find in rural Manitoba, when ILOs are proposed, a great deal of hype about contributing to the growth of small communities that have experienced population declines,” explains Dolecki, who has written repeatedly on the subject of ILOs. “Almost none of that stuff pans out, almost none of those spin-off benefits pan out.”

Dolecki argues that large-scale operations tend to replace smaller independent operators. This puts further negative pressure on rural communities, which are already struggling to survive. Before the policy landscape shifted to favour ILOs in the 1990s, there were upwards of 4,000 hog producers in the province. Today there are fewer than 800. “Large barns can be run be with only a few people,” says Dolecki, “because they’re so heavily mechanized and computerized. This does not enhance the possibilities of using that as a catalyst for the restoration of rural populations.”

Maple Leaf isn’t the only large-scale hog processing plant in Manitoba. Hytek’s plant in Neepawa processes over 900,000 hogs annually, the bulk of which are Manitoba-raised. In order to process such high numbers of hogs, large meatpacking plants require a constant and reliable supply of animals. By dealing with large-scale producers, hog processors like Maple Leaf are able to guarantee their production goals. However, ILOs, along with other intensive agricultural practices, have been blamed for much of Lake Winnipeg’s current pollution problems, as well as pollution in southern Manitoba and the Interlake region, where intensive hog operations are common.

Since the early 1990s, Lake Winnipeg — Canada’s eighth largest freshwater lake — has faced increasing problems with algal blooms. Algal blooms are fueled by high availability of nitrogen and phosphorus in the aquatic environment. These substances can be introduced into the waters through the addition of sewage and fertilizers in a process known as eutrophication. At the height of summer, many beaches at the south end of the lake are closed due to health concerns related to the algal blooms. Further to the north, fisheries are negatively impacted when eutrophication runs rampant, as it has been in Lake Winnipeg for the past twenty years.

Degradation of the environment as a result of industrial agricultural practices is difficult, if not impossible, to put a price tag on. While the full cost of remediation at this point is unknown, it will undoubtedly be borne by tax payers for years to come.

Currently, the Manitoba government offers up to $26 million annually directly to hog farmers to improve manure management, and to reduce the risk of contaminating water with excess phosphorus and other pollutants, explained Manitoba Agriculture, Food, and Rural Initiatives in an email. This is provided through the Manure Management Financial Assistance Program.

“I did an estimate for the Clean Environment Commission on the environmental subsidy that was involved in hog production as of 2005,” recalls Dolecki, who totaled the estimated cost of clean-up and site reclamation required to deal with the pollution caused by ILOs in Manitoba. “In 2004, I estimated it to be between $125 and $140 million dollars a year, while the net income for the hog production side was about $100 million a year. So, if you made the hog industry pay the full cost of clean up and waste disposal, the industry would have imploded.”

Although The Dominion contacted the senior Human Resources manager at Maple Leaf’s Brandon plant to comment, Maple Leaf refused to participate in an interview.

Sheldon Birnie is a writer, editor, and song & dance man living in Winnipeg, MB.

Questions? Comments? Drop us a line: info@mediacoop.ca.

Maple Leaf Flag

Freezing Feet

Bye, Bye, Wheat Board?

Tim McSorley — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 05:27:59 +0000

Small farmers raise concern as Conservatives prepare to cut board's monopoly

WINNIPEG—Stephen Harper’s Conservative government is preparing to pass legislation to end the Canadian Wheat Board’s monopoly on exports and milling of prairie-grown wheat and barley.

“The Wheat Board was brought into place, basically, so that grain buyers wouldn’t take advantage of farmers,” explained Jo-Lene Gardiner of Manitoba Agriculture, Food, and Rural Initiatives, which is based out of Pilot Mound, MB.

From it's offices in Winnipeg, the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) markets Canadian grain to world markets and for domestic consumption.

Opinions among grain farmers are divided on the issue. As it stands, grain farmers in western Canada can only sell wheat and barley to the CWB. The Wheat Board therefore decides which varieties of wheat and barley farmers can grow, buys grain from farmers and markets it to buyers domestically and around the world.

One benefit to farmers under the current system is that payment of grain is meted out over a year period, and the CWB attempts to provide farmers with the best price possible for their grain by paying them the average price of grain on the world market over the year.

“If when you sell your wheat, [the] price is five dollars a bushel, and by the time the end of the year came along the price was nine dollars a bushel, under the new system you’re stuck with five dollars, end of story,” said Jan McIntyre, a mixed cattle and grain farmer near Cartwright, MB. “Under the Wheat Board, you would get the average price, which would be the difference between your five dollars and whatever the final average was.”

Currently, the CWB provides all grain farmers with the same price for their grain, "no matter if you have 100 bushels or 100,000,” said Gardiner. “If you have No. 1 wheat at 14 per cent protein, you would get the same price [per bushel] as the next guy. Everybody is treated equally under the system.”

“[The Wheat Board] takes a certain percentage [of wheat] right off the combine right to their elevator,” Derek Marvin told The Dominion. Marvin is a 31-year-old elementary school teacher in Winnipeg, but during the summer months leading up to harvest, he returns to his family’s farm in the rural municipality of Elton, MB, to help his father run their 2,300-acre operation.

“Without it, farmers are going to have to bring it back home in their own storage bins on the farm, and so you’re going to have to buy new bins and find more storage and find more space for it all," he said. "A grain bin holds 40,000 bushels, and that’ll cost you $100,000. That’s like buying a house!”

Opponents of the CWB’s monopoly argue that farmers ought to have the right to market their own grain, and decide which varieties to grow and when.

“An open market will increase the number of buyers bidding on our wheat and barley,” federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz said told reporters in October, according to the Globe & Mail. “Unlike what some people may claim, the sky will not fall in an open market. Instead, the sky will be the limit.”

“I think it’s going to be a positive change,” said Barry Critcher, who has been farming grain for 28 years. Critcher farms 3,200 acres between Dawson Creek and Fort St. John, BC, one of British Columbia’s most productive grain growing regions. “I think it’s going to be positive to my farm, because I can sell my grain to who I want, when I want, and I can do the things I want to do on my farm without having to worry about letting somebody else do the marketing for me."

The prairie provinces have been experiencing a rural demographic shift since at least the 1970s, which kicked into high gear since the 1980s. Rural populations are diminishing, small towns are dying, and economic control over food systems is held by an increasingly smaller number of players, with money flowing out of small communities and into corporate headquarters, such as those of agribusiness giants Vittera and Cargill, in urban centers.

How will the changes to the CWB affect this demographic and economic transition?

“I think it will perpetuate the problem,” said Marvin, whose family has been farming grain in Elton, MB area for three generations. “It’s already to the point where rarely can a small family farm exist on its own. It needs other income. When I think of all the farms around my community, all the farmers who were farming smaller acreages than us have dropped off. They’ve sold a few acres to us, a few to the Hutterites, a few to some other neighbors, because it’s just too tough to keep up.”

While it is impossible at this juncture to confidently predict what effects the changes to the Canadian Wheat Board will have on farmers and rural communities, there is no doubt that grain farmers and farming communities in western Canada will have to adapt to the new economic reality—and fast.

Most expect that the proposed legislation will go through; if it does, as of August 1, 2012, the Canadian Wheat Board as we know it today will be gone.

Sheldon Birnie is a writer, editor, and musician living in Winnipeg.

Golden Wheat

A Town Without Poverty?

Martin Lukacs — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 10:08:24 +0000

Canada's only experiment in guaranteed income finally gets reckoning

WHITEHORSE, YK—Try to imagine a town where the government paid each of the residents a living income, regardless of who they were and what they did, and a Soviet hamlet in the early 1980s may come to mind.

But this experiment happened much closer to home. For a four-year period in the '70s, the poorest families in Dauphin, Manitoba, were granted a guaranteed minimum income by the federal and provincial governments. Thirty-five years later all that remains of the experiment are 2,000 boxes of documents that have gathered dust in the Canadian archives building in Winnipeg.

Until now little has been known about what unfolded over those four years in the small rural town, since the government locked away the data that had been collected and prevented it from being analyzed.

But after a five year struggle, Evelyn Forget, a professor of health sciences at the University of Manitoba, secured access to those boxes in 2009. Until the data is computerized, any systematic analysis is impossible. Undeterred, Forget has begun to piece together the story by using the census, health records, and the testimony of the program's participants. What is now emerging reveals that the program could have counted many successes.

Beginning in 1974, Pierre Trudeau's Liberals and Manitoba's first elected New Democratic Party government gave money to every person and family in Dauphin who fell below the poverty line. Under the program—called “Mincome”—about 1,000 families received monthly cheques.

Unlike welfare, which only certain individuals qualified for, the guaranteed minimum income project was open to everyone. It was the first—and to this day, only—time that Canada has ever experimented with such an open-door social assistance program.

In today’s conservative political climate, with constant government and media rhetoric about the inefficiency and wastefulness of the welfare state, the Mincome project sounds like nothing short of a fairy tale.

For four years Dauphin was a place where anyone living below the poverty line could receive monthly cheques to boost their income, no questions asked. Single mothers could afford to put their kids through school and low-income families weren't scrambling to pay the rent each month.

For Amy Richardson, it meant she could afford to buy her children books for school. Richardson joined the program in 1977, just after her husband had gone on disability leave from his job. At the time, she was struggling to raise her three youngest children on $1.50 haircuts she gave in her living room beauty parlour.

The $1,200 per year she received in monthly increments was a welcome supplement, in a time when the poverty line was $2,100 a year.

“The extra money meant that I was also able to give my kids something I wouldn't ordinarily be able to, like taking them to a show or some small luxury like that,” said Richardson, now 84, who spoke to The Dominion by phone from Dauphin.

As part of the experiment, an army of researchers were sent to Dauphin to interview the Mincome families. Residents in nearby rural towns who didn't receive Mincome were also surveyed so their statistics could be compared against those from Dauphin. But after the government cut the program in 1978, they simply warehoused the data and never bothered to analyze it.

“When the government introduced the program they really thought it would be a pilot project and that by the end of the decade they would roll this out and everybody would participate,” said Forget. “They thought it would become a universal program. But of course, the idea eventually just died off.”

During the Mincome program, the federal and provincial governments collectively spent $17 million, though it was initially supposed to have cost only a few million.

Meant to last several more years, the program came to a quick halt in 1978 when an economic recession hit Canada. The recession had caused prices to increase 10 per cent each year, so payouts to families under Mincome had increased accordingly.

Trudeau's Liberals, already on the defensive for an overhaul of Canada's employment insurance system, killed the program and withheld any additional money to analyze the data that had been amassed.

“It's hugely unfortunate and typical of the strange ways in which government works that the data was never analyzed,” says Ron Hikel who coordinated the Mincome program. Hikel now works in the United States to promote universal healthcare reform.

“Government officials opposed [to Mincome] didn't want to spend more money to analyze the data and show what they already thought: that it didn't work,” says Hikel, who remains a strong proponent of guaranteed income programs.

“And the people who were in favour of Mincome were worried because if the analysis was done and the data wasn't favourable then they would have just spent another million dollars on analysis and be even more embarrassed.”

But Forget has culled some useful info from Manitoba labour data. Her research confirms numerous positive consequences of the program.

Initially, the Mincome program was conceived as a labour market experiment. The government wanted to know what would happen if everybody in town received a guaranteed income, and specifically, they wanted to know whether people would still work.

It turns out they did.

Only two segments of Dauphin's labour force worked less as a result of Mincome—new mothers and teenagers. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies. And teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families.

The end result was that they spent more time at school and more teenagers graduated. Those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did.

“People didn't have to take the first job that came along,” says Hikel. “They could wait for something better that suited them.”

For some, it meant the opportunity to land a job to help them get by.

When Doreen and Hugh Henderson arrived in Dauphin in 1970 with their two young children they were broke. Doreen suggested moving from Vancouver to her hometown because she thought her husband would have an easier time finding work there. But when they arrived, things weren't any better.

“My husband didn't have a very good job and I couldn't find work,” she told The Dominion by phone from Dauphin.

It wasn't until 1978, after receiving Mincome payments for two years, that her husband finally landed janitorial work at the local school, a job he kept for 28 years.

“I don't know how we would have lived without [Mincome],” said Doreen.“I don't know if we would have stayed in Dauphin.”

Although the Mincome experiment was intended to provide a body of information to study labour market trends, Forget discovered that Mincome had a significant effect on people's well being. Two years ago, the professor started studying the health records of Dauphin residents to assess the impacts of the program.

In the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 per cent. Fewer people went to the hospital with work-related injuries and there were fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic abuse. There were also far fewer mental health visits.

It's not hard to see why, says Forget.

“When you walk around a hospital, it's pretty clear that a lot of the time what we're treating are the consequences of poverty,” she says.

Give people financial independence and control over their lives and these accidents and illnesses tend to dissipate, says Forget. In today's terms, an 8.5 per cent decrease in hospital visits across Canada would save the government $4 billion annually, by her calculations. And $4 billion is the amount that the federal government is currently trying to save by slashing social programming and arts funding.

Having analyzed the health data, Forget is now working on a cost-benefit analysis to see what a guaranteed income program might save the federal government if it were implemented today. She’s already worked with a Senate committee investigating a guaranteed income program for all low-income Canadians.

The Canadian government's sudden interest in guaranteed income programs doesn't surprise Forget.

Every 10 or 15 years there seems to be a renewed interest in getting Guaranteed Income (GI) programs off the ground, according to Saskatchewan social work professor James Mulvale. He's researched and written extensively about guaranteed income programs and is also part the Canadian chapter of the Basic Income Earth Network, a worldwide organization that advocates for guaranteed income.

GI programs exist in countries like Brazil, Mexico, France and even the state of Alaska.

Although people may not recognize it, subtle forms of guaranteed income already exist in Canada, says Mulvale, pointing to the child benefit tax, guaranteed income for seniors and the modest GST/HST rebate program for low-income earners.

However, a wider-reaching guaranteed income program would go a long way in decreasing poverty, he says.

Mulvale is in favour of a “demo-grant” model of GI that would give automatic cash transfers to everybody in Canada. This kind of plan would also provide the option of taxing higher-income earners at the end of the year so poorer people receive benefits.

A model such as this has a higher chance of broad support because it goes out to everybody, according to Mulvale. GI can also be administered as a negative income tax to the poor, meaning they'd receive an amount of money back directly in proportion to what they make each year.

“GI by itself wouldn't eliminate poverty but it would go a heck of a long way to decrease the extent of poverty in this country,” says Mulvale.

Conservative senator Hugh Segal has been the biggest supporter of this kind of GI, claiming it would eliminate the social assistance programs now administered by the provinces and territories. Rather than having a separate office to administer child tax benefits, welfare, unemployment insurance and income supplement for seniors, they could all be rolled into one GI scheme.

It would also mean that anybody could apply for support. Many people fall through the cracks under the current welfare system, says Forget. Not everybody can access welfare and those who can are penalized for going to school or for working a job since the money they receive from welfare is then clawed back.

If a guaranteed income program can target more people and is more efficient than other social assistance programs, then why doesn't Canada have such a program in place already? Perhaps the biggest barrier is the prevalence of negative stereotypes about poor people.

“There's very strong feelings out there that we shouldn't give people money for nothing,” Mulvale says.

Guaranteed income proponents aren't holding their breaths that they'll see such a program here anytime soon, but they are hopeful that one day Canada will consider the merits of guaranteed income.

The cost would be "not nearly as prohibitive to do as people imagine it is," says Forget. “A guaranteed minimum income program is a superior way of delivering social assistance. The only thing is that it's of course politically difficult to implement.”

Vivian Belik is a freelance journalist based in the frozen northlands of Whitehorse, Yukon. She was, however, raised in Manitoba where she has spotted many of the provinces small-town statues including the giant beaver in Dauphin.

Mincome

Water is All of Us

dawn — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 09:35:52 +0000

Report from the fifth annual Keepers of the Water gathering

LAC BROCHET, MANITOBA—Words flowed like water from Indigenous Elders gathered at the fifth annual Keepers of the Water gathering in Lac Brochet, Manitoba, this August.

The gathering of the Keepers—an organization made up of of First Nations, environmentalists, and concerned people who want to protect the Arctic Ocean drainage basin—was hosted by the Northlands Denesuline First Nation. It stressed the importance of unity and action to protect waters from being polluted and poisoned.

With a population of fewer than a thousand people, Lac Brochet can be reached only by airplane or by water, and a delegation from Hatchet Lake, SK, took four days to canoe to the gathering. There were also various scholars, representatives, and leaders, including MLA Gerard Jennissen, who said “Water is a horrible enemy but a great friend.” Throughout the gathering, participants shared their thoughts and knowledge about the preciousness of water and how it might be better protected from human destructiveness.

Sam Gargan, who is Grand Chief of the Dehcho in the Northwest Territories and a co-founder of the first Keepers of the Water gathering in 2006, explained how De means river, and Ne means land, together making the word Dene, which signifies how the Dene people are defined by their reciprocal relationship with land and water.

Gargan also described how “western” concepts of democracy are historically derived from Indigenous cultures, and discussed how a holistic relationship with the earth can lead to the protection of both the land’s surface and subsurface. At a time when mining threatens the long-term well-being of future generations in many places, Nahanni Park stands as an example to emulate. Part of the Dehcho people's traditional lands, Nahanni Park began as 4766 square kilometers in 1972, and has since expanded to roughly 28,000 square kilometers through the efforts of the Dehcho people in the NWT. The park draws its name from the South Nahanni River, which feeds Canada's longest river, called the Deh Cho by the Dene and also known as the Mackenzie River.

The defining question for the gathering was centred around asking what this generation wants to pass on to future generations.

The history of industrial mining has shown over and over again—from Uranium City in northern Saskatchewan to Navajo homelands in the US—that mining jobs are temporary but that pollution remains long after the mines have closed.

For this reason, sustainable economic models are urgently needed. These may range from solar and wind projects to the protection of caribou habitat, which is crucial for the survival of Indigenous communities. Caribou are a traditional and essential food source for these communities. The well-being of the caribou depends on clean, healthy watersheds and lands.

It is challenging to think of water not merely as an external object in need of protection, but as that which literally constitutes our bodies and also lives, as it constantly moves within and through us, linking us to the watersheds that we are part of. This kind of thinking is key to water stewardship. It is demonstrated by Cree Elder D’Arcy Linklater's comment that when he refers to the water, he does not merely mean rivers and lakes, but women themselves.

The passionate words of First Nations elders were complemented by visitors like Dr. Radha D’Souza, who drew connections between Indigenous peoples in Canada and the struggles of India’s 67 million Indigenous people. D'Souza gave an overview of shifts that have been happening at the United Nations, and asked a critical question: are we serving the economy or is the economy serving us?

She also noted that there is a serious tension between the language that exists in declarations and the way they are actually implemented, which can undermine or even nullify the goals and values of the declarations.

Robert Patrick from the University of Saskatchewan noted the inequities that continue for First Nations communities. For instance, they have a boil water advisory rate that is two-and-a-half times higher than in non-First Nations communities. Patrick observed that a number of reserves have the wrong technologies for the water issues they face, such as infrastructure that is often too high-energy or high-maintenance for the community’s needs.

Patrick noted that building small can lead to better living. He suggested that considering a community's proper scale in conjunction with a long-term view that anticipates the effects of climate change (such as drastic weather extremes, and more unpredictability in the amount and timing of rains) will more deeply connect human societies to mindful watershed protection.

When the Keepers first met in 2006, they drafted a declaration that continues to resonate strongly. It reads:

“Water is a sacred gift, an essential element that sustains and connects all life. It is not a commodity to be bought or sold. All people share an obligation to cooperate to ensure that water in all of its forms is protected and conserved with regard to the needs of all living things today and for future generations tomorrow.”

It was heartening to witness that the Keepers are staying on track, guided by the waterways themselves, navigating the many dangers that face us today.

Rita Wong is a poet who lives on the unceded Coast Salish lands also known as Vancouver.

Canoes on the Lake

Dene Drummers

Dam Locally, Warm Globally

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 22:40:54 +0000

Boreal forest, aboriginal peoples threatened by new push for exploitation

Canada's boreal forest is among the largest intact forest ecosystems in the world. Photo: Natural Resources Defence Council

Around 400 kilometers north of Winnipeg lies Asatiwisipe Aki (Poplar River First Nation), an Ojibway people. The remote community is comprised of roughly 1,200 members, of which over 900 are on reserve. The traditional Asatiwisipe Aki territory, delineated by the registered trapline district of Poplar, lies between 50 and 55 degrees north latitude and extends far east from Lake Winnipeg, almost reaching the Ontario border.

As set out in Treaty 5, the Asatiwisipe Aki Reserve #16 is located at the mouth of the Asatiwisipe (Poplar River). The area is host to a number of rivers that flow west through a pristine landscape (the boreal forest), which plays a critical role in the global and local ecosystems. The trees and peatlands of the vast northern boreal forest comprise one of the planet's largest carbon reservoirs. Boreal forests retain carbon that, if released, would accelerate global warming. Its wetlands filter millions of gallons of water each day.

In 1998, the Manitoba government, the Manitoba Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, and the Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak (MKO - Cree consortium for northern Manitoba) signed an Memorandum of Understanding in which it was stipulated that "Protected areas will not infringe upon any existing aboriginal or Treaty rights of First Nations peoples."

In spring 2000, protected area designation was sought for the remaining traditional territory in a proposal to the Manitoba government.

There are historical grounds for Asatiwisipe Aki to pursue protection for the surrounding environment, and there has always been external interest in exploitation of the area's resources. Logging interests offered to open up the area with an all-weather road, but the offer was refused by the Cree Elders. They also refused the promises of jobs, economic prosperity, and the modern life.

In the philosophy of the Asatiwisipe Aki elders: "The Creator has given us life, he has given us land to live from, without that land our people will die." Stewardship of the land for future generations is inculcated, as preservation of the intact boreal forest region is key to the Asatiwisipe Aki world vision.

Logging is not the only concern for First Nations in the boreal forest. Environmental NGO Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) issued an alert on 19 October 2004 that the government of Manitoba had given the "green light to yet another dam that could have far-reaching consequences for the wildlife and indigenous people of Canada's boreal forest."

NRDC noted that many First Nations communities are largely dependent on the boreal forest for survival. Previous hydropower developments had already wreaked havoc on First Nations people: flooding the forest, ruining ancestral waterways, clogging lakes and rivers with sediment, and destroying aquatic life.

Fluctuations in water levels still pose a danger of erosion to sacred burial sites. According to NRDC, promises from Manitoba Hydro and the governments of Manitoba and Canada to alleviate this terrible damage have not been fulfilled.

Now Manitoba Hydro wants to build the Wuskwatim dam. This is to be the first in a series of hydroelectric projects, further threatening the boreal forest by cutting roads and transmission lines through some of North America's last unspoiled wilderness. The plans to construct hydroelectric projects in Manitoba's boreal forest are in large part to supply US consumers.

NRDC has joined with other environmental groups and First Nations in a campaign to save this pristine forest region. There is an ambitious proposal to create a United Nations World Heritage Site out of 4.3 million hectares in Manitoba and Ontario. The site would include two provincial parks in addition to the traditional territories of involved First Nations. The proposal has federal government backing, but the governments of Manitoba and Ontario have yet to publicly support it.

Most of the world's original forests have already been cut. However, about 80 percent of the Canadian boreal forest is still undefiled. Most of the 1.3 billion acre Canadian Boreal is predominantly owned by the government and inhabited by First Nation peoples. They live in and rely on the forests for their food, their livelihoods, and their spiritual connection to the world.

Don Sullivan, executive director of the environmental group Boreal Forest Network (BFN), asks, "If diversity is the key to life then why are we globally moving toward homogeneous economy - one based on the need to consume at all costs? Protecting and preserving a 4.3 million hectare intact boreal landscape will in its own little way affirm the need to both protect a fully functioning intact boreal ecosystem and a culture and by doing so, all of humanity will be richer for it."

"The BFN support the five First Nation communities who are seeking to have their traditional territories nominated as part of a World Heritage Site, as we see it as a way for these communities to move forward with their aspiration to manage, plan, control and protect the natural resources in their traditional territories and a step forward towards protecting the foundation of their culture - the natural resources. For us the most endangered species on the planet are the indigenous peoples and cultures who still practice their traditional ways. A culture that still hunts, fish, trap and use the plants (a culture that is not yet alienated from nature) requires, no demands, a healthy fully functioning ecosystem. A culture that seek balance with nature rather then domination of nature is worth learning from and certainly worthy of respected."

The two lead First Nations working on the World Heritage Site proposal and sustainable development on their own traditional territories are Asatiwisipe Aki and Pikangikum First Nation in Ontario. Paungassi First Nation and Little Grand Rapids First Nation in Manitoba are also part of the World Heritage Site proposal. Bloodvein First Nation of Manitoba is the unofficial fifth community.

Louis Young is a former Chief of Bloodvein First Nation who supports World Heritage Site designation. "We are working to ensure that your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have air to breathe."

At the 2004 World Conservation Congress in Bangkok, Thailand, Canada, and Russia were urged to "recognize, preserve and, protect ecological processes through which the overall health of boreal forest regions" and "acknowledge and respect the role of indigenous peoples in achieving conservation goals while respecting their traditional land management regimes and knowledge, in all conservation efforts."

Congress delegate Susan Casey-Lefkowitz of NRDC said, "This recommendation clearly signals the international importance of the ecological and cultural values of the Boreal." Casey-Lefkowitz emphasized the "innovative ways" in which, especially First Nations, are protecting the Boreal.

Elder Edward Valiquette speaks of the importance of traditional values: "We need to protect our land, to tell people what to do and not to do. The Elders did that. When they spoke everyone listened."

Relatively untouched, Canada's vast boreal forest is once again being threatened. Kim Petersen finds a small Ojibway community on the front lines of its defence.