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dam-l FW: Globe and Mail 12 Jan 2000
Subject: Globe and Mail 12 Jan 2000
Cree group urges boycott of Manitoba Hydro
Targeting Minnesota power buyers, natives
say megaprojects have destroyed environment
MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT
Environment Reporter
Wednesday, January 12, 2000
Some Manitoba Crees are urging U.S. electricity consumers to boycott power
from their province, saying Manitoba's generation of cheap power from hydro
megaprojects has devastated the environment and destroyed their communities.
The natives have enlisted the help of U.S. environmental and native-rights
advocates, and are targeting Minnesota purchases. The state is the main
export market for Manitoba Hydro's lucrative sideline of selling about
$300-million worth of power annually in the United States, about 30 per cent
of its revenue.
U.S. opponents of the sales are convinced that Manitoba electricity is so
morally tainted consumers shouldn't buy it. They are using tactics
successfully employed in the early 1990s to block Hydro Quebec sales in the
United States.
The campaign against Manitoba power "will be successful if we point out
politely to Minnesotans that there is blood on the electricity," asserted
Ann Stewart, an American hired as a U.S. publicist for the Pimicikamak Cree
Nation, the native community that has sought the help of U.S. activists to
fight the utility.
Ms. Stewart says she's trying to make Minnesota consumers and utilities
aware that their purchases "make them complicit in exporting the real costs
of Canadian hydro onto the backs of distant Indians and their environment."
If successful, the effort to block Manitoba Hydro sales could reduce its
profits and lead to higher electricity rates in the province. Manitoba
currently has the lowest electricity rates in Canada and some of the
cheapest in the world, primarily the result of low-cost power from dams and
diversion projects in Cree areas.
U.S. activists have taken helicopter tours of Northern Manitoba, where they
say they have witnessed massive ecological disruption caused by the Crown
corporation's electricity megaprojects in Cree areas, source of 80 per cent
of the province's power.
"As far as you could see you could see eroded islands, trees -- deadwood --
of a magnitude that was just mind boggling," said Brian Elliott, who toured
the area last November for Clean Water Action Alliance, a Minnesota
environmental group.
The claims about Manitoba Hydro are hotly disputed by the utility, which is
negotiating with Crees over compensation for the disruption suffered from
hydroelectric development.
Four of the five native communities affected have recently reached
settlements with the utility, but Crees at the impoverished community of
Cross Lake, which has launched the U.S. campaign, want remediation of
damaged lands, economic development, and employment, along with the
curtailing of future hydro megaprojects.
Manitoba Hydro, a Crown-owned utility that is the country's fourth-largest
electricity generator, says it is the victim of an unjustified effort to
shame it as a corporation.
"This is part of a broad strategy to try to embarrass the utility, the
province, and the federal government," said Manitoba Hydro spokesman Glenn
Schneider.
In a statement to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission late last year,
Kenny Miswaggon, an executive council member of the Pimicikamak Cree Nation,
told the regulator that Manitoba Hydro has flooded, destroyed or made
inaccessible millions of acres of traditional land.
"This has been a disaster for our people and the environment," he said.
Although the utility's biggest foreign customer is Minnesota, accounting for
about 90 per cent of foreign sales, it has orders as far south as Texas.
"If they are successful it will cause the rates for all of our customers in
Manitoba to go up," said Mr. Schneider, the utility spokesman.
Many of the public-relations and legal experts who advised the Quebec
natives in their fight against Hydro Quebec, including Ms. Stewart, are
currently working for Manitoba's Crees.
The hydro megaprojects in Manitoba, developed starting in the 1970s, are
similar to those in Quebec, and involve dramatically altering water flows.
About 70 per cent of the water that once flowed in Manitoba's Churchill
River has been diverted to the Nelson River.
The Crees say about 1.2 million hectares have been affected, leaving them to
deal with flooded land, shorelines of slumping mud, dead and rotting trees,
ice that is unsafe because of changing water levels, and fish contaminated
with methyl mercury.