The Dominion - Chris Scott

Weathering the Storm

dru — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 05:44:08 +0000

Cooperative Quebec sawmill thrives despite forestry crisis

MONTREAL—Quebec's forestry industry has seen regular, predictable slumps (recent downturns happened in 1974, 1982-3, and 1991-4), each accompanied by a round of layoffs in the province’s mill towns and forestry sector. Between the softwood lumber crisis in 2000 and the US housing collapse of 2006, 26,000 millworkers and loggers have lost their livelihoods.

In one corner of Quebec, communities have used a cooperative business model to defy the boom-bust cycles and short-term thinking that characterize much of the forestry sector.

For tourists, as well as for many urban Quebecers, the province’s effective eastern boundary lies at Tadoussac. Beyond here, on the north side of the St. Lawrence, extends a rugged territory where snow squalls in October are frequent, communities are sparse, and the expense of transport can make commerce difficult. Returns on investment are often modest, and in the days before the provincial government re-ordered and centralized the economy in the 1960s, locally-owned cooperatives brought electricity as well as grocery stores to many a North Shore town where private entrepreneurs did not see enough of a profit opportunity to attract their interest.

Sacre-Coeur, with a population of 2000, located fifteen kilometers from Tadoussac, is in most ways a typical North Shore community. The town depended on forestry for several generations, but by 1984, in the wake of one of the cyclical slumps, the local sawmill had undergone its third consecutive bankruptcy in ten years under three separate managements, and seemed set to close for good.

“We had a reputation as the [forestry] plant that had lost the most money in Quebec,” recalls Marc Gilbert, who was an employee at the sawmill at the time. “Nobody wanted to touch us.”

Ultimately the facility, which constituted the town's main industry, was to remain shuttered for two and a half years.

The town’s residents might have given in to fatalism; but instead, after the bank that held the mill's mortgage was unable to find a buyer and offered to sell the plant at liquidation prices, locals decided to undertake a ground-breaking initiative. Banding together to form the Sacre-Coeur Development Corporation [Societe d'Exploitation de Sacre-Coeur], they secured the support of a credit union as well as a provincial government subsidy, and bought the mill for $1.2 million.

According to those who know the local history, the motive in doing this was to forestall the flight of young people to the city and the slow death which is the bane of so many single-resource communities in unfavourable times.

After studying various models, the interested parties decided to constitute themselves as a single company called Boisaco Inc, owned in three equal parts by a loggers' cooperative, (Cofor) a millworkers' cooperative (Unisaco), and a consortium of local businesses.

An advantage of this structure, according to Marc Gilbert, who was one of the project’s founders and until recently served as company president, is that it allows the workers, as majority shareholders, to benefit from the management experience of the members of the business consortium.

Gilbert says that decision-making is rarely adversarial.

"We adopted a shareholder's charter that gave everyone [all three parties] a veto right on all big decisions," says Gilbert. "This forced us [to seek] a working consensus."

The model is superior to what typically prevails on shop floors, says Gilbert, where management squares off with unions and the need to explain (or debate) procedures slows down productivity.

Three months after its reopening in 1985, the combined advantages of a market recovery and the new management allowed the Boisaco sawmill to generate enough revenue to pay off all its debts.

Since then, the company has divided profit according to a formula that would seem out of place in the corporate world. Twenty-seven per cent is shared equally as dividends among the three shareholders; eighteen per cent goes to workers' bonuses, while fifty-five per cent (an unusually high proportion, according to Gilbert) is targeted—once taxes have been paid—to research and development. Part of this fifty-five per cent is also allocated to a rainy-day fund.

Sarah Toulouse, a recent Masters graduate in cooperative management from the University of Sherbrooke, has studied Boisaco. I asked her why the consortium of business shareholders would agree to finance Boisaco when they could have obtained a higher return on their investment elsewhere.

“In Sacre-Coeur the [business] shareholders are mostly...folks from the region,” she says. “Their priority is to keep the region alive.”

Today, Boisaco provides employment to about two hundred workers as members of one of the two founding co-ops.

Moreover, over the last twenty-five years as Boisaco has thrived, it has used part of its profits to acquire shares in diverse companies in the region with which it has then signed supply contracts.

In one such case, Boisaco provides lumber to Sacopan, a one-hundred-worker company founded in 1999 that operates out of the same lot as Boisaco in Sacré-Coeur. Sacopan sells fibrewood doorskins within Canada and to the USA. In the wake of the American subprime crisis, Sacpan's sales have helped keep Boisaco afloat.

“Historically, whenever [home] construction flags, [home] renovation takes up the slack,” says Gilbert, explaining a strong American niche market for the product.

Once the affiliated companies like Sacopan are factored in, Boisaco can be said to secure employment for six hundred forestry sector workers throughout the Upper North Shore.

It is source of pride to the company that it has come through the forestry crisis, now seen to be ending, without a high level of debt, and that it accepted a deficit situation rather than shut temporarily or resort to lay-offs.

And from conversation it is clear that the management sees this decision as rooted both in sound business sense as well as in Boisaco’s original social mandate.

“If we had stopped, we would have lost our best workers,” says Marc Gilbert, in response to my unstated question. “All those folks couldn't have waited four years. They would have lost their equipment. And when we wanted to start up again, how much would it have cost us to recreate all of it, and all that expertise?”

Chris Scott is a Montreal-based writer, researcher and activist who makes regular visits to eastern Quebec.

Boisaco

Dire Prospects

Tim McSorley — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:53:11 +0000

Expanding uranium exploration sparks concern, protests in Quebec

SEPT-ILES, QC—There is a region in northeastern Quebec that is renowned as a moose hunter's paradise: a country of blackflies, where outcroppings of billion-year-old granite poke through the veneer of trees and pristine rivers originating in the Labrador highlands tumble over escarpments to empty into the widening St. Lawrence. In small, blue-collar urban centres such as Port-Cartier and Sept-Iles, it seems locals spend every free moment on the land. Ski-Doo travel is a preferred recreational activity in winter and on the shores of mountain-ringed Lake Kachiwiss, located 15km from downtown Sept-Iles, families on day trips stop to drink hot tea from thermoses.

But despite, or perhaps in light of, this popularity, Lake Kachiwiss has also become known as a point of interest for reasons other than Ski-Doo expeditions.

It is here that Vancouver-based mineral prospecting company Terra Ventures has been drilling the granite bedrock of the Saint Lawrence North Shore for uranium since 2008. The procedure includes boring a 300-metre hole into the ground at a location previously identified by aerial survey as having uranium potential. The contents of each hole are then hauled to the surface and cut laterally into two hemispheres, the way one would slice a carrot. One hemisphere from each core sample—which are typically radioactive—is trucked to a lab, while the other half is left on site for classification.

According to Sept-Iles residents, the prospecting site is not fenced in, the drill holes, as of June last year, were uncapped, and the company has neglected to post signs to warn the population about potential radioactivity. The core samples are stored on open-air racks, exposed to the elements.

Marc Fafard, a logger and local activist, describes the result of leaving such unusual objects unattended, and essentially unmarked, in a frequented area.

“You've got these lovely core samples, soft, beautiful as fossils, nice to touch,” he explains. Samples "were showing up in people's living rooms”.

Fafard, who was a recent mayoral candidate, helped found the citizens' group Sept-Iles sans uranium (Sept-Iles without uranium; SISUR) after reading about the prospecting activity in the news. According to Fafard, this anecdote of souvenir hunting gone badly wrong illustrates the degree to which the initial flurry of uranium prospecting caught Sept-Iles residents by surprise.

“Most folks don't know what radioactivity is,” he says. “We're asking for a moratorium while we inform people.”

Terra Ventures representatives did not respond to interview requests before deadline.

One of SISUR's first goals was to purchase a Geiger counter and visit a majority of the uranium prospecting sites in the North Shore region. But it turned out to be a tall order. Since 2005, a plethora of companies have obtained permits from the Quebec government to drill in approximately 20 locations, and have extracted up to 250 core samples per site along an axis extending 800km from Tadoussac through Sept-Iles to the eastern terminus of Highway 138 at Natashquan.

Over the same period, the number of active permits across the province has jumped from four to 86. Starting in 2005, a buzz of speculation driven by the mining industry and the US government's efforts to promote nuclear reactors as a “carbon neutral” and “clean” energy source propelled uranium prices to record highs. The metal's value rose from around $10US a pound, to peak at close to $140 in 2007, before settling to $42 in February this year.

Saskatchewan is currently the only jurisdiction in Canada to operate commercial uranium mines, supplying 22 per cent of the world market from its underground, seamed deposits. But with prices high, the extraction of far lower-density uranium deposits contained in the granite of the Canadian Shield, which have been known since the 1970s, suddenly appear financially viable. In addition to Quebec, active prospecting is now also underway in Labrador and Nunavut.

This trend can pit a provincial or territorial government, eager for royalties or investment, against remote communities that will have to live with the environmental consequences in their backyard. In January 2009, the Sept-Iles City Council responded to popular pressure and passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on uranium prospecting. But even though the Lake Kachiwiss site is located within Sept-Iles city limits, the resolution carries no legal weight because it is the Ministry of Natural Resources in Quebec City that holds exclusive authority to issue or regulate permits.

Mining industry representatives point out prospecting is not the same as mining, and that typically only a fraction of prospect sites will turn into a commercial venture. But whistleblowers like Fafard counter that the amount of radioactive material extracted from prospect sites across Quebec cumulatively equals the output of a small commercial mine.

Environmental concerns related to the prospecting and potential mining of uranium tend to centre on the dispersal of radioactive residues into the air and water. The Lake Kachiwiss site lies just three kilometres from the banks of one of the North Shore's most important salmon streams. Also, Lake Kachiwiss has been shown to flow into Rapid Lake, which provides drinking water to Sept-Iles. Activists fear the radioactive contaminants will follow these main watercourses and accumulate in the Gulf of St. Lawrence posing unacceptable, long-term, cancer-related health risks to residents of Quebec and the Atlantic provinces.

Moreover, the low density of most deposits in Eastern Canada means commercial mining would likely include an open-pit operation, with vast quantities of granite crystal being ground up to free trace amounts of uranium. The pulverized stone, containing unrecovered uranium and derived substances would remain on site.

Marc Fafard sums up the fears of many. “We're afraid we'll be held hostage to mountains of radioactive residue that we'll have to manage ourselves once the companies are gone,” he says.

Many observers of the mining industry point to the policy of “free entry” as an obstacle to democratic sovereignty in resource-related issues. Devised in the 19th century, and still in force in every Canadian province except Alberta, free entry grants prospectors unlimited access to the minerals beneath the surface in any part of a province or jurisdiction not previously claimed for mining purposes. This means the rights of mining firms trump other interests, including the proprietary rights of individuals or municipalities, which apply only from the ground up. Granting an exploitation permit is also expected to be “non-discretionary,” that is, based only on technical factors, unrelated to issues of social acceptability.

“It becomes more and more difficult to stop [mining companies] as you let the door open,” says activist Ugo Lapointe on the question of whether a company that already has a permit to prospect for uranium could be denied a mining licence. “It may not be impossible, but we know of no case where that has happened.”

Lapointe is a spokesperson for the provincial watchdog group Pour que le Quebec ait meilleure mine (a play on words, but literally, "For a Quebec with Better Mines") which is critical of the cozy relationship said to exist between the Quebec government and the mining industry. Unlike the royalty regime applied to forestry, where a “stump fee” is based directly on the volume of wood extracted, the 12 per cent royalty applied to mining companies is calculated as a percentage of net profit, an amorphous figure which Lapointe says amounts to no more than two to four per cent of real profits due to inventive accounting by the corporations.

One further focus for criticism is the province's much-hyped development strategy, known as the “Plan Nord,” which involves targeting government money at selected infrastructure projects favouring principally the resource extraction sector in northern Quebec. According to research conducted by The Dominion, last year's provincial budget earmarked $130 million for extending Highway 167 by 268km into the Otish Mountains, northeast of the James Bay Cree town of Mistissini. It is in an area without residential communities, but where Vancouver-based Strateco Resources has discovered some of Quebec's most concentrated uranium deposits.

On first impression, the City of Sept-Iles resembles any other medium-sized frontier town. Aluminum refining, forestry and fishing are the mainstays of the economy. A majority of businesses are clustered along the main drag. The houses have a prefab look. There is no vegetarian restaurant and few residents would self-identify as environmentalists.

But facing what many feel to be a clear and present danger, the townsfolk have banded together with a force and an originality of tactics that are startling. Beginning in 2009, SISUR made several inspections of the Lake Kachiwiss prospect site. They found Terra Ventures to be in violation of specific provisions of the environmental code and filmed and posted the evidence on the Internet. As a result, the provincial Environment Ministry temporarily shut down Terra Ventures' operations on several occasions as recurring violations were brought to light. Activists also periodically blockaded the prospect site.

Then, last December, a group of 24 Sept-Iles doctors signed a statement warning they would leave the North Shore if prospecting work was not halted. Though some media outlets criticized the doctors for their tactics, an anti-prospecting demo held in Sept-Iles on December 13 attracted 3,000 people out of a total population of 26,000.

The doctors' letter mentioned their specific concern about radon, a radioactive gas linked to lung cancer which is trapped in the bedrock and is released by prospecting. The issue grabbed headlines and was broached in Quebec's National Assembly.

“There's a whole debate that needs to happen,” says Loraine Richard, the Parti Quebecois Member of the National Assembly [MNA] for Sept-Iles. “When there are almost 20 doctors who want to leave my region, I stand up and take notice.” On February 17, Richard presented a citizens' petition to the National Assembly calling for a province-wide moratorium on uranium exploration, a concept supported by MNAs from the Parti Québécois and Québec Solidaire, but rejected by the majority Liberals.

Many activists now see the Sept-Iles experience as a template for successful organizing because it has mobilized citizens and politicians and made prospecting a public issue in a way it has never previously been in Quebec.

Nevertheless, the ultimate outcome for the Lake Kachiwiss site remains uncertain. For the moment, the provincial Liberals' strategy seems to be to deal with Sept-Iles as an isolated case that can be dealt with without addressing any broader issues of mining policy.

However, speaking in the National Assembly on December 4, Serge Simard, the Liberal minister responsible for mining, promised that a uranium mine at Lake Kachiwiss would not go forward without local endorsement. Also, in recent weeks Terra Ventures has suspended its prospecting in what looks to be a gentleman's agreement with the government.

But as Sept-Iles' MNA Richard points out: “If they [Terra Ventures] wanted to dig tomorrow morning, legally speaking, they could do it.”

And as long as the policy of free-entry mining remains unchallenged, it is difficult to see how either municipal legislators or MNAs like Simard can make promises to their constituents with any degree of conviction.

Chris Scott is a community radio host, activist and writer with experience reporting from northern Quebec.

SISUR demonstration

Quebec uranium exploration map

Death Watch in Haiti's Jails

dru — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 05:01:36 +0000

MONTREAL—Located in downtown Port-au-Prince, Haiti's largest jail looks like a stage piece: a blue and white fortress with high walls and square turrets of the type favoured by operatic drama.

But inside the compound—guarded by UN soldiers and protected by an Armored Personnel Carrier—a tragedy of a more contemporary and mundane sort is playing out.

Constructed in 1918 by US Marines eager to consolidate their occupation of Haiti, the National Penitentiary was designed to hold eight hundred prisoners. With only minor expansions since then, the facility now crams four thousand male inmates into an area of two thousand square meters.

At a density of two detainees per square meter, conditions in the jail are undercut by four times the minimum standard established by the International Red Cross, which calls for an allowance of two square meters per inmate.

Eyewitness accounts paint the picture of a packed environment inside the cell blocks, with prisoners' health further undermined by poor lighting and ventilation, a vitamin-deficient diet, and the prevalence of communicable diseases such as tuberculosis.

Since the overthrow of Haiti's democracy in 2004, the country's prison population has more than doubled, rising from 3,500 shortly before the departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to 8,000 today.

Haitian human rights lawyer Evel Fanfan estimates that six thousand people were arrested in Port-au-Prince because of their political loyalties in March 2004, the month following Aristide's ousting. Although some were released soon afterward, since that time both the Haitian police and the UN peacekeepeing mission MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti) have conducted aggressive operations in poor sectors of the capital, drag-netting youth at a faster rate than the Haitian judicial system can process.

Brian Concannon, a lawyer who directs an Oregon-based Haiti solidarity organization, describes a typical Haitian inmate:

"They are almost all poor," responds Concannon. "Over 80 per cent have not been convicted of anything. Many don't have a lawyer; most have been tortured."

Concannon's group, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, works in association with the Port-au-Prince based Bureau of International Lawyers (BAI), an advocacy group which was financed by Haiti's elected government until its funding was cut following the 2004 coup.

Visiting the BAI office, I met my first case study of the post-coup Haiti incarceration pattern: Michaelle LaFrance, a former TV journalist who says she was arrested for wearing dreadlocks. Seated in the shaded courtyard of the building, LaFrance does her best to convey to me the atmosphere of class tension that gripped Port-au-Prince during the weeks before President Aristide's overthrow.

Because Aristide invested in social spending, and applied protectionist measures to sustain Haiti's economy, he remained popular with the poor. He also drew the ire of neoliberal-minded donor nations, including the US and Canada, which moved to undermine him by channeling money to middle class-based opposition groups. In a repeat of scenes seen in Venezuela and elsewhere, affluent Haitians flooded the streets of the capital, calling the elected government illegitimate, and demanding Aristide's resignation. During this period, telejournalist LaFrance was physically assaulted while covering an opposition demonstration.

Following Aristide's departure on February 29, a posse of former Haitian soldiers aligned with the middle-class opposition occupied the city. The names of wanted persons were read on the radio, and anyone or anything associated with grassroots activism immediately became suspect.

Shortly after February 29, recalls LaFrance, who was 24 at the time, "The police came to my house. They took everything."

She describes the feelings of fear and uncertainty during the three days she spent confined at the local police station. "I wrote on the wall, 'God help me,'" she says."I thought two things: either they'd kill me, or I'd be out in a few years.”

Denounced by a neighbour, LaFrance says her dreadlocks stigmatized her because they were interpreted as a statement of loyalty to the poorer classes. Social profiling stories are common in a context where both the Haitian police and members of the hastily-constructed UN mission—dominated by the same countries that helped undercut Aristide—accept a middle-class narrative portraying Aristide's followers as a violent mob that needs to be controlled by force.

Many of the men and women clogging Haiti's jail system are in fact minor casualties in the campaign of class repression. Arrested during an anti-gang sweep, fingered by a neighbour, or picked up for talking too loudly or angrily, they are warehoused for months to years while awaiting trial on vague or difficult-to-prove charges such as "associating with miscreants." In the case of known political organizers, however, the charges can be more specific.

Ronald Dauphin, now 43 and Haiti's longest-serving prisoner, was arrested by paramilitaries on March 1, 2004, the day after President Aristide was forced from office. A member of Aristide's party and a port official from the city of Saint Marc, Dauphin was accused of participating in a massacre which reportedly occurred when anti-government paramilitaries clashed with police outside Saint Marc on February 11. Through more than five years of incarceration, Dauphin has maintained his innocence. The case has never gone to trial.

Dauphin's 27 co-accused in the case include former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune, pro-Aristide activists, and at least one cabinet member. In a pre-trial indictment handed down in 2005, many details of the Saint Marc incident remain fuzzy. The document cites fifty killed, but identifies only eight casualties from the February 11 events, and furnishes no evidence about the whereabouts of missing bodies. Named witnesses claim that Dauphin was present during the clash, but do not specifically link him to either of the offenses for which he is accused: murder and arson. Writing in French, investigating Judge Cluny-Jules instead argues that Dauphin has been denounced by "la clameur publique," broadly translatable as by rumour.

While most observers do not dispute that some sort of armed conflict arose between members of pro- and anti-government forces on February 11, it has yet to be demonstrated that government agents overstepped the bounds of a legitimate police action, or targeted non-combatants.

I briefly met Dauphin at the National Penitentiary in April 2007, three months after one of his co-defendants in the Saint Marc (also known as the La Scierie) case, Wantales Lormejuste, died from untreated tuberculosis in the same facility. Though there were legitimate concerns about Dauphin's health—he suffers from a prostate condition—in 2007 he looked alert and was standing on two feet.

In the intervening two years Dauphin's well-being has declined dramatically.

Traveling to Haiti in April 2009 as part of a union delegation, California teacher Seth Donnely heard disturbing reports that Dauphin suffered from an acute, untreated illness. Accompanied by other delegates, Donnely arrived at the National Penitentiary on April 16 for a scheduled visit.

Upon arrival, he says, "Dauphin was in fact very ill. He had to be carried out in the courtyard by other prisoners...During our visit, he collapsed. [He] was unconscious with his eyes wide open. He was not responding to pressure that was being applied by the health care professionals [there were two nurses on the delegation] to his sternum."

In spite of complaints about headaches and abdominal pain, Dauphin had not been authorized to leave the jail for medical treatment. The nurses concluded that Dauphin "may have a septic infection that was spreading through his upper body."

Many of Haiti's grassroots activists believe that extending pre-trial detention is a government tactic to neutralize or even kill unwelcome political actors without the worry of having to build a legal case against them.

According to documents released to researcher Anthony Fenton under an access to information request, in March 2004 a Haitian NGO known as the National Coalition for Haitian Rights (NCHR) asked for and received $100,000 from Canada's development agency to prosecute the authors of the alleged massacre of La Scierie. NCHR's membership had previously stated a position which identified it closely with the anti-Aristide camp. In its funding request the NCHR promised to disburse money through a "victims" fund to citizens who had suffered from political violence in Saint Marc.

The incidents that were eligible for compensation were limited to those which had occurred from February 9 to 29, excluding victims of the wave of violence against Aristide supporters that crested after the fall of the government on February 29.

Using Canada's money, the NCHR thus conducted a publicity and legal campaign to push for the incarceration of pro-Aristide actors. But neither the NCHR nor the Canadian government has subsequently pushed for a trial, suggesting that open-ended detention, rather than due legal process, may be what they're after.

Scratch the surface of the debate on how to improve jail conditions in Haiti, and two different tactics emerge: increase the amount of floor space by expanding or constructing jails, or reduce the number of prisoners by releasing those held on vague suspicions or for petty crimes.

While the latter approach is favoured by social justice advocates, Canada and most big donors see "security" and the elimination of crime as the overriding priority for Haiti. This "security" priority requires more state investment in jail-building, and training police and judges. The logic behind this elaborate investment strategy is that foreign investors—especially in the manufacturing sector—will be attracted when they feel safe and to achieve this, Haiti must tackle criminality by disbanding gangs. In the years after the 2004 coup, a series of high-profile kidnappings, sometimes of foreigners, gave Haiti a bad name, and may have scared off investment.

According to many Haitians, the problem of security has been sensationalized to justify class-based repression. Most of those imprisoned are extremely poor and have been the victims of social and political profiling. Many prisoners are being held for petty crimes for which they would not have been targeted if it was not for their low social status.

Patrick Elie, a Port-au-Prince-based activist and former cabinet member, sees the path to economic development in Haitian-based agriculture, rather than investor-based manufacturing. According to Elie, most of Haiti's current crime is poverty-related, and for this reason investing in incarceration as a deterrent is a futile exercise. Jail construction and security measures are expensive, gobbling up scarce resources that could otherwise be invested in schools or agriculture, which would help reduce poverty in the long term.

"When you have 70 per cent unemployment, and you build more jails, you'll be building jails 'til Kingdom come," he says.

With Haiti still occupied by UN soldiers, the made-in-Canada ideology seems dominant for the time being. Under international pressure, the government of President Rene Preval, who succeeded Aristide, has promised to double the number of Haitian police officers, from 7,000 to 14,000 by 2011. Similarly, a quick glance at CIDA's website shows that a high number of big ticket projects funded in Haiti are directed toward "governance measures," including a commitment to build a new police academy at the cost of $18.1 million by 2014.

Chris Scott is a member of the Montreal chapter of the Canada Haiti Action Network.

National Penitentiary

Dammed if You Don't

dru — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 10:30:54 +0000

Hydro-Quebec turns its back on wind power

It takes 90 minutes to drive to Nemaska from the turn-off on the James Bay Highway. Following the gravel track that cuts east through the low-standing forest, you pass trappers’ cabins, veer left onto the access road that is marked with an inukshuk, and come to a compact and tidy Cree community, population 700, tucked onto the north shore of Champion Lake.

For the first-time visitor, strolling along the town’s sandy footpaths or sitting at the base of a wind-shaped cedar tree, it is easy to feel at peace here. Poking your head into the town’s steamy, camp-style diner, you are met by the sound of young voices, mostly speaking Cree.

The name Nemaska derives from a Cree word meaning "plenty of fish," and even today, aside from administrative functions, hunting and fishing remain the economic lifeblood of the community. On the nearby Rupert River, world-class rapids create an oxygen-rich environment that is ideally suited to the growth of sturgeon and giant trout.

A series of traplines, managed by extended families, cluster along the Rupert, which served as a conduit to the early fur trade. Cree settlement here, as evidenced by archaeology, goes back thousands of years.

Still, for a more recent generation of Nemaska Cree, the Rupert has become synonymous not only with tranquility and abundance, but also with upheaval. Originally located at a site 60 kilometres downstream, the town of Nemaska was closed by government order in 1970 to make way for a hydro-electric project that was expected to flood the area. Following protests, the project was suspended, but now, almost four decades later, a new Hydro-Quebec initiative is underway to divert the majority of the Rupert's waters into a set of reservoirs along the La Grande River, in the north of Cree territory.

When it is finished, in late 2009, the diversion will flood 640 square kilometres, reducing the area on 10 out of the 15 traplines belonging to Nemaska families. The once-mighty Rupert, up to a kilometre wide in places, will be reduced to a trickle. The new project will entail the construction of four dams, several dykes and a diversion channel.

The Rupert seems fated to become the latest link in a network of projects that has altered the shape of free-flowing rivers in northwestern Quebec. In 1974, Hydro-Quebec started building the first in a series of dams along the La Grande River, which drains into James Bay. Throughout the 1980s, the diversion of two neighbouring rivers doubled the outflow of the La Grande and flooded an expanded area around the La Grande reservoirs.

The project forced the relocation of the Cree community at Fort George (now Chisasibi), and was associated with a host of setbacks that included restrictions on fishing (due to mercury pollution), a change in weather patterns and a decline in waterfowl populations.

Proponents of the development point to a 1975 compensation package, negotiated with the provincial and federal governments, which helped pay for the construction and maintenance of infrastructure in Cree villages. But many Cree feel that by flooding traplines, the hydro development undermined the prospects for a hunting-based economy, forcing young people away from what is still a nomadic lifestyle and into a sedentary and rootless existence on reservations with few prospects for employment.

* * *

Each day, summer and winter, the Jolly family drinks tea brewed from the water of the Rupert River. A collection of storage jugs stashed beside the samovar in the kitchen attests to the fact that these Nemaska residents prefer the taste of fresh water to the tap variety. Freddy Jolly, a 53-year-old trapper, was my guide in Nemaska. Like many Cree of his generation, Jolly was born at his parents' bushcamp. Bushmeat remains a regular part of his diet and during spring goose season he spends a few weeks in a cabin on his family trapline.

As we drove around the back roads near Nemaska, Jolly kept his gun at the ready. More than once he estimated for me his yearly catch in animals. He described his childhood, explained how to roast bear fat with blueberries, and tried, in halting language, to convey the pain he felt at losing the Rupert, which runs along his trapline and which he feels is part of his very self.

To reach the northern reaches of Jolly's trapline today, you need to drive through a Hydro-Quebec checkpoint. You can have lunch, the way we did, at a workcamp built of prefab houses designed to accomodate 1,800 employees. While we were there, Jolly went to talk to a project manager about the burial sites of two of his older relatives, located near the area to be flooded.

From the workcamp, you can continue for half an hour and park your vehicle at the end of a gravel road, keeping well back from the earth-moving machinery that is busy there.

It will take you at least an hour to pick your way through the clearcut, a kilometre or three down to the isolated bush cabin that stands at the water's edge.

When the area is ready to be flooded, the cabin, according to Jolly, will be dismantled and burned.

Although Jolly opposes the diversion, last summer he accepted a contract from Hydro-Quebec to clear the spruce forest along this part of his trapline in advance of the flooding. I asked him how he felt about that.

"Sometimes, after the work, tears would come out from my eyes," he said. "Seeing the trees being cut, seeing the trees being piled and burned. It was hard."

* * *

The Rupert diversion was first mooted in 2001, when the Quebec government offered to provide funding for services that had been promised but not adequately delivered to the Cree communities. By tabling a "new relationship" agreement that included both the funding and the diversion, the province implicitly made one a condition for the other.

The agreement, known as the Paix des Braves, won the support of Grand Chief Ted Moses, who campaigned in favour of it. Initially, a majority of Cree residents on eight out of nine reserves voted to support the settlement in a referendum.

Nevertheless, for Cree residents in the affected communities of Nemaska, Waskaganish (located at the mouth of the Rupert; population: 2,200) and Chisasibi (population: 4,000), the diversion subsequently became the source of grave misgivings.

Speaking in June 2006, before an environmental review panel, the elected chiefs of these three communities criticized the plebiscite, arguing that since the vote was held three years before Hydro-Quebec issued its impact study, it could not provide a basis for informed consent. They noted that, during the referendum campaign, the Cree were told they were only approving studies on a potential diversion and were not being asked to give the go-ahead to the diversion, as such.

"At the end of the day, the project...is one that creates unacceptable impacts on the natural environment," said the chiefs. "Unacceptable impacts on the species that are most important to the Cree way of life; unacceptable impacts on the material, social and spiritual lives of our communities; and the loss of one of the the most extraordinary free-flowing rivers in North America."

The three chiefs promote the development of wind energy as a compromise that would allow Hydro-Quebec to generate electricity on Cree territory without destroying more of the traplines that sustain Cree culture.

According to Hydro-Quebec, diverting the Rupert will add 893 megawatts (MW), or about 2.5 per cent, to the utility's power-generating capacity.

But this figure represents less power than will be provided by wind energy once a series of new wind farms come online, starting in 2011.

Since 2002, Hydro-Quebec has licensed private wind contractors to generate electricity and sell it to the utility's distribution branch at a pre-negotiated price. In 2005, the utility launched a new phase of its competitive bidding process to invite contracts that would total 2,000 MW.

Regrettably, the proposals that were selected all involve wind farms in the south or southeast of the province.

Among the unsuccessful bids was a proposal by Yudinn Energy, a Cree company based in Chisasibi, to build a wind farm near one of the existing reservoirs on the La Grande River.

In an interview with The Dominion, a Hydro-Quebec spokesperson declined to specify the reason why the Yudinn project was rejected, citing confidentiality.

Nevertheless, a cursory search on the utility's website shows that the projects that were approved were mostly small. Twelve of the 15 sites accepted projects at capacity of 150 MW or less, whereas the Yudinn farm, situated at a favourable location, would have produced 324 MW.

For environmentalists and some Cree, it seems that the corporate culture at Hydro-Quebec remains biased against wind energy. In March 2007, an article by journalist Louis-Gilles Francoeur, writing for Montreal's Le Devoir newspaper, indicates that the province has a policy of not allowing wind power to exceed 10 per cent of the utility's generating capacity.

This attitude is highly frustrating to those who see more hydro development as both socially and environmentally destructive.

In their written submission, the chiefs said:

"We have unfortunately discovered that Hydro-Quebec is not a leader but a follower in this 21st-century industry. For many years, Hydro-Quebec has been discussing the difficulties of wind development, while others have been busy solving them."

"The documents leave little doubt that Hydro-Quebec would simply rather dam another river than take on the challenge of harnessing the wind."

Freddy Under Power Lines

Elder cleaning sturgeon

The Rupert River