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.
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