National Post (National Edition)
Pipeline paralysis
ENERGY EAST PROVED JUST HOW DIFFICULT INDIGENOUS CONSULTATIONS CAN BE
Energy East showed why Indigenous consultations are so difficult.
When a court ruling cancelled approval for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion last month, in part over inadequate First Nations consultations, some called it the end of pipelines in Canada. In his new book Pipe Dreams: The Fight for Canada’s Energy Future, Jacques Poitras digs below the surface of some of the Aboriginal opposition to a previously doomed attempt at building a pipeline: Energy East.
Along the highway in Manitoba, a CP train chugged down the tracks and oil derricks pecked the soil near Virden. The landscape began to change. The topography, though still flat, became greener. There were more trees and rivers. A dank feeling signalled that the arid west was mostly behind me. Route 1 rolled past Brandon and Portage la Prairie and down Portage Avenue into the heart of Winnipeg. Once the great metropolis of the West, it was still the prairie capital of protest politics — the first city on the Energy East route where the pipeline faced real resistance.
Louis Riel first rebelled here, and the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 was a milestone in the history of organized labour. The city’s universities fostered a progressive constituency willing to charge into the latest struggle. “Winnipeggers aren’t actually looking for a fight,” said Mary Robinson, an anti-pipeline activist with the local chapter of the Council of Canadians, “but when they finally get pushed, they will fight back pretty strongly.” Now the fight was about oil: the TransCanada line that was converted to Keystone sent its oil to the U.S. from a pump station south of Winnipeg; Energy East would carry bitumen east of the city, crossing paths with the municipal aqueduct. “Manitoba has a very agricultural identity, so people really get arguments based on protecting water and soil,” said Alex Paterson, another activist. “Everyone has someone in their family who farms and knows the food system would be messed up by a big pipeline spill.”
In January 2014, Phil Fontaine, an Ojibway from Manitoba and a former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, was confronted by the latest iteration of that activism when he was scheduled to deliver a lecture at the University of Winnipeg. Fontaine was widely respected in mainstream politics for his career as an Indigenous leader. He helped put the issue of residential schools on the agenda in 1990 when he revealed that he and other former students were abused at the Fort Alexander Residential School north of Winnipeg. In 2013 Fontaine took a job with TransCanada as a liaison with First Nations communities. Younger Indigenous people, radicalized by the Harper government’s pro-pipeline stance, saw it as a betrayal. “We call it co-optation, being co-opted,” one of them, Kevin Settee, told me.
The lecture never happened. A small number of activists opposed to Energy East unfurled banners as Fontaine began. One banner, held in front of the podium, showed a bloody arrow piercing a snake labelled “TransCanada.” Other protesters began drumming. When Fontaine pressed on, he was shouted down. “How dare you, Phil!” one woman yelled. “On your own people? Anishinaabe people? How dare you sell us out to work for the enemy that’s destroying this earth?” The scene turned chaotic as supporters of Fontaine shouted back, and the lecture was cancelled. Derek Nepinak, the grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs — though he opposed Energy East — tweeted that Fontaine had been “drowned out by anger and misunderstanding,” and asked, “Which wolf did we feed today?”
Fontaine argued that his TransCanada job was to be an advocate for First Nations. “Have I been satisfied with everything that I’ve learned? Absolutely not,” he said later. “Have I expressed those views with industry? Absolutely.” But, he told The Globe and Mail, Indigenous communities“live in resource-rich parts of the country that offer very little alternate opportunity.” That meant working with oil companies to share in their wealth. “We cannot make decisions that doom First Nations to a life of perpetual poverty,” he said.
For many Indigenous people, including Settee, there was no compromising on pipelines like Energy East. Sitting at Stella’s, a café packed with students near the University of Winnipeg’s main downtown campus, Settee told me he’d grown up associating pipelines with snakes. “That’s what really caught my attention, this idea of the snakes, the prophecies of snakes coming to our territories,” he said matter-of-factly. “They’re not myths; they’re not fantasies.”
Settee had dark eyes and a wispy goatee, and wore his hair in a ponytail. His mother was Anishinaabe, like Fontaine. In 2016 he was elected the first Indigenous president of the University of Winnipeg’s student association. He was enrolled in the school’s urban and innercity studies program, which is based at the satellite campus in Winnipeg’s north end, an area known for its poverty and symbolically cut off from the rest of the city by the CPR tracks. “Student unions and student politics have always been very white,” Settee noted. “A lot of the issues Indigenous students are working on have to do with survival.” As president, he travelled six hours to the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota in 2016 to join protests against the Dakota Access pipeline. “The idea of having all these pipelines through our territory is unhealthy for our water,” he said. In Winnipeg, the city’s water supply is fed by the aqueduct that crosses TransCanada’s lines east of the city. “If that becomes contaminated, our water is affected for quite a long time.”
Pipeline politics in Winnipeg were more acute because of the large Indigenous population. The student body Settee represented was 13 per cent Indigenous; Aboriginal people made up 11 per cent of the metropolitan population. It was a constituency that couldn’t be ignored and was becoming increasingly vocal. But Indigenous opinion wasn’t monolithic: in 2016 the Fort McKay First Nation, near Fort McMurray, bought a onethird stake in a nearby Suncor oil tank farm and looked at launching its own extraction project. At a conference the same year organized by the Indian Resource Council, a pro-oil Aboriginal group, some chiefs complained that anti-pipeline activism was endangering the economies of their reserves. And Perry Bellegarde, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, observed that “there’s a stigma that somehow you’re not a First Nations person if you support a pipeline ... Some of those chiefs are quiet and yet I know they support (them). It’s about who’s the loudest sometimes.”
To finish the story of Winnipeg’s pipeline activism, to complete the exploration of the city’s political backyard, I had to cross into Ontario. The Trans-Canada Highway, just two lanes, cut through deep rock as it entered the province 90 minutes east of the Manitoba capital. The turnoff for Route 673 came up soon, and the road went south, crossing the TransCanada gas line right-of-way again. The land was green and wet.
The road led to a ramshackle toll booth operated by the Iskatewizaagegan No. 39 First Nation. A brightly coloured road permit cost $25. The streets had no names, but the kid who took the money said the cell tower would be a reference point for the small ferry dock. There I drove onto a rusty barge for three or four cars. The boat’s noisy motor coughed. The sun was out and the leaves were turning colour as it crossed a narrow channel of water. Shorn of what it represented, the voyage could not have been more idyllic. A sign taped to the barge advertised an upcoming public meeting to discuss the Freedom Road.
This was how you got to the Shoal Lake No. 40 First Nation in the summer of 2016. The reserve, separated by water and by the federal Indian Act from its cross-channel neighbour, No. 39, was isolated because it was poor, and poor because it was isolated: located on a peninsula jutting out into the lake and over the Ontario line, it had only one land connection — its most natural link — to the west, to Manitoba, but there was no road that way. A visitor had to come by ferry in summer and by ice road across the frozen channelin winter.
The reserve’s dirt roads were winding and had no road signs. The houses were small and weather-worn. “Shoal Lake is my home,” said Preston Redsky, part of a crew tearing down the old band council office, which had been condemned because its floors were sagging. “I don’t want to live in any other place in the world.”
On the spectrum of injustices imposed on Indigenous communities in Canada, Shoal Lake No. 40 was a particularly vivid and tragic example of a broken colonial relationship that had yet to be mended. Winnipeg’s clean drinking water — the same water that activists said was threatened by Energy East — was drawn from Shoal Lake, and the engineering that made that possible had also doomed the reserve to live under a boilwater order that would soon enter its third decade.
A century ago, Winnipeg needed a modern water supply, so it built an aqueduct from the edge of Shoal Lake to the city, a distance of more than 135 kilometres. The city also built a dike to divert murkier water entering the lake away from the aqueduct intake; this sent it toward the reserve. “The majority of the natural spring water is taken out,” said Daryl Redsky, the band’s consultation officer. “But at the same time it’s getting mixed up with the water that’s being drawn in from Lake of the Woods.” When cryptosporidium was detected in Shoal Lake in 1997, the city began treating its water, but the reserve couldn’t afford to build a treatment plant of its own: the lack of road access made the project too expensive. “Until about 15 or 20 years ago, you could walk down the hill from here, stick your head in the lake, and drink right out of the water,” Redsky said. “That’s how clean and fresh it was. That doesn’t happen anymore. You go down there, you’ll get sick.” Children were getting rashes when they took showers and baths, he added.
The source of the contamination is disputed. Shoal Lake is part of Lake of the Woods, and Redsky told me that industrial and cottage waste flows from that direction; a University of Manitoba report said Indigenous fishermen “perceive” that inflow from both Lake of the Woods and Falcon Lake was “degrading” the water. In Winnipeg, Alex Paterson also blamed sewage from the cottages on Falcon Lake flowing down the Falcon River into Shoal Lake. But Gary Turnbull, a cottageowner on Falcon Lake, told me that everyone there either has a septic field or a connection to a sewage system, or pays to have their tanks pumped out. “No cottage owners or businesses are allowed to put waste water into the lake,” he declared. The entire area was a provincial park, and the authorities were “quite strict” about it, he insisted. The city of Winnipeg’s website said that “darker river water” from Falcon Lake was getting into Shoal Lake, but asserted that it “would flow to the First Nations communities with or without the diversion.”
Regardless of the source, Shoal Lake No. 40’s water was contaminated while Winnipeg enjoyed clean water from the same lake. Perversely, in the ‘80s the city had blocked the band from building a cottage development on its territory — a chance to generate some economic activity — because of the supposed risk it represented to the municipal water supply. In 2014, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, a modern and monumental $350-million project spearheaded by the Asper family, opened in the city. It catalogued just about every human rights struggle in the world, large or small — with one notable omission. In the Indigenous Perspectives gallery, a large circular theatre made of wood played a 360-degree film of Aboriginal women speaking about their rights. “Everything we do is interrelated and has an impact on the world,” one of the women said. “We are all in this together. We are connected.” But there was no mention of the connection to Shoal Lake No. 40 — no mention that the clear water flowing abundantly through the museum’s shimmering reflecting pools was drawn from a reserve without clean drinking water.
But 2014 was also the year Shoal Lake became a cause célèbre for activists.
Winnipeg’s Council of Canadians chapter brought its national president, Maude Barlow, to the community. The organization saw links between the pipeline, the aqueduct, and the reserve: the threat from Energy East was “tied into the oppression and colonization that happened to the Shoal Lake community,” Mary Robinson told me. “So it’s a double whammy.” Activists from nearby Kenora joined the effort, and the pressure paid off in December 2015, when the Canadian, Manitoba, and Winnipeg governments announced funding to build the Freedom Road, a 24-kilometre link between the reserve and the TransCanada Highway. This, in turn, would make the construction of a water treatment plant more feasible. “The fix is the road,” Daryl Redsky said. “Once the road is built, the possibilities are endless.” Four months after the announcement, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited the people of the reserve, another sign of recognition.
The chief and council were doing fewer media interviews now, because the attention — though it had galvanized governments into action — was a timeconsuming distraction. “It helped to create that awareness,” Redsky said as he sat in the temporary band office in the reserve’s arena. “But at the same time it’s put our community in a place where they’ve had to reflect on all the negative things that have happened in our lives,” like seeing family members die when their cars went through the ice crossing the channel. “But if it’s part of a process where you’re trying to create a better future, trying to deal with these issues, reconcile and move forward, that’s a good thing, I believe. Now we want to talk about what lies ahead of us.”
And that included Energy East. After struggling so long over water, Redsky did not want to see the lake further endangered by a potential bitumen leak. TransCanada had posted a “Myths Debunked” article on its website pointing out that the Energy East route was 12 kilometres north of Shoal Lake, and that oil would have to travel 25 kilometres or more “through still lakes and slow moving rivers that act as natural barriers to contain an unlikely release” before reaching the lake. But Redsky, a cousin of the Shoal Lake chief, said that no safety assurances from TransCanada would persuade him. “I’ve told our leadership that I’m not in favour of this,” Redsky said. “That’s my position and that’s the position of a lot of people in the community: that we can’t compromise the water.”