Include all Manitoba Hydro costs

(Letter to the Editor, Winnipeg Free Press)

I am writing in response to Mia Rabson's column "Black gold on tap: There's a fortune to be made in Manitoba's northern waters" (Feb 18, 2007). The notion that Manitoba Hydro could be this province's version of "black gold" alarms us that before we further develop this utility, we are going to have to consider the full costs of such development, including social and environmental costs. These "externalities" are currently excluded from growth economics models that only deal in economic quantities and systematically exclude qualtitative measurements. Has nobody read of the massive ecological devastation caused by the oil sands in Alberta, not to mention the social and housing crises at places like Fort MacMurray, and especially the high incidence of cancer reported at Fort Chipewyan by Dr. John O'Connor? How can we put a cost on such calamity?

If one would argue that these problems are endemic to the dirty oil industry but not our clean Hydro industry, perhaps we are forgetting the ecological devastation wrought upon the homelands of Northern Manitoba's Cree people by Manitoba Hydro's projects of the 60s and 70s, wiping out viable fisheries, silting clear waters, erosion of shorelines and the release of toxic mercury. Perhaps we are also ignoring the fact that suicide rates are higher in communities directly affected by Hydro development. These concerns are not examined by the author but dismissed in a brief general paragraph reading more like Manitoba Hydro's literature than any serious inquiry.

Manitoba Hydro is pushing the idea of more dams as if climate change was the only environmental issue remaining on this planet, and as if Hydro development itself is carbon-neutral. We see it is not if we add up the emissions created by building roads and transmission lines, making and transporting concrete, and the loss of forest as carbon sinks due to flooding and the building of roads and lines. Before we assume these developments are just going to take place without a critical public discussion, we need to consider Aboriginal rights in Treaty 5 (which do not cede rights to waterways), the social and ecological damage done by large dams, and especially the alternatives to the NDP staple mega-project dam. Not all of the communities that formed the Northern Flood Committee in the 1970s have seen the Northern Flood Agreement honoured.

We count on the news media to critically assess these projects and not simply serve as a mouthpiece to the government and Manitoba Hydro. Rabson should consider taking a trip to Cross Lake or South Indian Lake to ask people there about the real impacts of massive Hydro dams.

The alternatives are clear: we must consider massive energy savings through a complete conservation-oriented retrofit of our infrastructure, develop smaller solar and wind projects, and move past the assumption that infinite growth on a finite planet is possible. Without capping our consumption, this generation's elite may bathe in the profits of our "black gold" while further generations of Northern Manitobans find their lands in a much impoverished state.

ALON WEINBERG, Election-Planning Coordinator, Green Party of Manitoba