It's time to give a damn, not build a dam

Yesterday I had a great privilege and honour to fly to the JENPEG dam and join the people of Pimicikamak Cree Nation (of Cross Lake) in their "March of Power" as part of their month long encampment near the JENPEG dam (see cbc story). The people of PCN are calling for the Northern Flood Agreement, signed in 1977, to be implemented. The Green Party of Manitoba stands by the people of the north and have offered help in any way possible.

They are protesting thirty years of the governments of Manitoba and Canada, and Manitoba Hydro dragging their feet, offering scant piecemeal solutions, and failing to live up to their end of the agreement. Let's not forget this agreement was signed after major flooding occurred and was signed with the four other communities making up the Northern Flood Committee, Norway House, Nelson House (now Nisichiwayasihk Cree Nation), Split Lake (Tataskweyak CN) and York Factory. Since legal advice holds that the NFA is a treaty, it is both constitutionally guaranteed and also a responsibility of all of us citizens of the south, who are by virtue of the Crown, responsible for one end of the treaties. Not to mention the beneficiaries of cheap Hydropower.

The people of Cross Lake do not have clean drinking water. Their water comes in bottles, or it makes the people sick. Some buy water filters at Canadian Tire.

The people of Cross Lake cannot predict ice conditions any longer. Children holding white wooden crosses marked all the people who have fallen through the ice on their snowmobiles and been killed, as Hydro's controlled water levels fluctuate. Jenpeg is the Southernmost control structure on the Nelson R. system, effectively the stop that makes Lake Winnipeg one giant reservoir. More on the Hydro-Lake Winnipeg connections in another email; as of yet I have not heard much said about Hydro's altering of the natural drainage of Lake Winnipeg. Should be investigated further.

The people of Cross Lake - Pimicikamak Cree Nation - have experienced thirty plus years of intense struggle, hard times in the truest sense. AND YET, what I experienced was still a joyful, proud, strong, inspiring people, people who lit their sacred fire and said we will stand up to the bullying treatment of a government and its utility based in the south, whose votes come not from them but from us who love our cheap Hydro. And yet still the New Dam Projects (NDP) roll on, unconscious of justice, unconscious of the soft path of energy that calls for demand side management - ie. conservation, and putting a limit on our total consumption.

Who is the conscience politically right now for energy justice in Manitoba? Reading Dan Lett's Free Press article you might think I could say the Green Party of Manitoba, but we are but a sole committee and ally in the struggle. It is actually the state Legislature of Minnesota who, thank to years of relationships built between Minnesotan activists and northern Cree, who thanks to the Minnesota-made film Green Green Water, who thanks to an awakening consciousness amongst citizens of Minnesota's ethical responsibilities as a large energy purchaser (customer of 40% of MB Hydro's exports), passed a state law this week calling for MB Hydro to report annually to the state legislature on the ecological and socio-economic impacts of Hydro on the north and on Hydro's implementation (or lack thereof) of the NFA.

It is a shame that the Minnesotan government has to be the conscience of Manitoban business-as-usual politics. We Canadians always claim gloriously to be "not the Americans" but really we could look to the south to see what ethical politics looks like now and then, and move beyond our wasteful consumption and ethical apathy patterned on our "lowest Hydro rates in the world."

The people of Pimicikamak Cree Nation reminded me that Manitoba is a water-based province, and when water has been so greatly mucked up, shorelines eroded, and a water-based lifestyle damaged, then how can a society experience health? We in the south had better look to the damage of the North to understand how our decisions in the south are both affecting them, but also what the impacts will eventually be for us too, who also depend on water. Water is life, and access to clean water is a basic human right. We, by virtue of our government and our exuberant use of Hydro power in Winnipeg, have denied the people of Pimicikamak their basic human rights. And yet their struggle through all this inspires us to wake up and start to hold our government accountable.

It's time to give a damn, not build a dam.

Photos to follow in next post on Sunday, once I hook some cables up and press a few more buttons.