First Nations’ consent to the Site C dam should determine the project’s fate, according to Amnesty International Canada’s Craig Benjamin.

“At the end of the day with regard to human rights you can simply ask ‘what are First Nations saying?’ ”

“And if they’re saying no, we have to say no as well,” Benjamin, campaigner for human rights and indigenous peoples from Amnesty International Canada, told an audience gathered in Victoria this week.

Speaking at a public education event with West Moberly First Nations’ Chief Roland Willson, Benjamin said Canada is breaking its own laws when it comes to the rights of First Nations.

The West Moberly First Nation is launching a legal challenge of the B.C. government’s recent approval of the Site C dam, a $9 billion dollar hydroelectric project that will flood over 100 square kilometres of forest and rich agricultural farmland.

Benjamin, who recently traveled to the region, said the project poses a threat to First Nations’ cultural way of life: “It’s a violation of standards that exist in the international community, which Canada has sworn to uphold.”

“These are all fundamental human rights — the right to a healthy environment, to clean water, the right to one’s culture, the right to one’s identity, the right of indigenous peoples to make their own decisions about their lives and their futures.”

“These are all being threatened by the plan to proceed with this dam.”

Benjamin noted the recent Tsilhqot'in Supreme Court victory further protects indigenous rights and self-determination on traditional territory.

“One of the things that court decision did was to set out in the clearest possible language that if the government wants to tread on the rights of indigenous peoples there’s an extremely high standard that it has to meet of justification to show why the project should be allowed to go forward.”

But according to the government’s own standards, no project can “substantially deprive future generations of the benefit of the land,” he said. In addition the government must meet a duty to consult and accommodate and demonstrate the project’s objective meets the needs of general Canadians and indigenous peoples.

“These are requirements that our own Supreme Court set out.”

“And this plan fails every one of those tests and yet two levels of government want to proceed with it. Two levels of government want to fight it in the courts. Two levels of government want to expend all of their resources to pursue it even though the highest court of the land has already set out a test that this project doesn’t meet.”

He also argued that there is an “underside” to the claim of benefits (i.e. jobs) associated with construction of the Site C dam.

“All of the oil and gas development that has taken place up there has created a situation where the ratio of short-term workers to long-term residents in Fort St. John is four to one,” he said. This has caused housing prices to skyrocket and has placed a significant strain on the “social safety net” in the area.

In addition, Benjamin argued, the potential impact on the most vulnerable members of society — especially indigenous women — should not be overlooked.

“The reason why Amnesty International initially wanted to look at this is because of what we’re already seeing in Canada around the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women.”

In Canada indigenous women and girls are more than seven times more likely to experience violence in its most brutal and extreme forms, he said.

The circumstances in the region, which include housing shortages, strained medical services, massive gender wage inequality and a flood of transitory workers create a “perfect storm…to accentuate the injury against the lives of women.”

Image Credit: Chief Roland Willison. Photo by Garth Lenz

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This is a guest post by Seth Godin, originally published on Seth's Blog.

Today would be his 124th birthday. A fine occasion to think about the effects of industrialization, and what happens when short-term profit-taking meets marketing.

Midgley is responsible for millions of deaths. Not directly, of course, but by, "just doing his job," and then pushing hard to market ideas he knew weren't true—so he and his bosses could turn a profit.

His first mistake began when he figured out that adding lead to gasoline appeared to make cars perform better. At the time, two things were widely known by chemists: 1. Adding grain alcohol to gasoline dramatically increases octane and performance, and 2. Ingesting or sniffing lead can lead to serious injury, brain damage and death.

The problem for those that wanted to be in the gasoline business was that grain alcohol wasn't cheap, and the idea couldn't be patented. As a result, the search was on for a process that could be protected, that was cheaper and that could open the door for market dominance. If you own the patent on the cheap and easy way to make cars run quieter (and no one notices the brain damage and the deaths) then you can corner the market in a fast-growing profitable industry…

As soon as the lead started being used, people began dying. Factory workers would drop dead, right there in the plant. Even Thomas himself contracted lead poisoning. Later, at a press conference where he tried to demonstrate the safety of the gasoline, he washed his hands in it and sniffed it… even though he knew it was already killing people. That brief exposure was sufficient to require six months off the job for him to recover his health.

Does this sound familiar? An entrenched industry needs the public and its governments to ignore what they're doing so they can defend their status quo and extract the maximum value from their assets. They sow seeds of doubt, and remind themselves (and us) of the profts made and the money saved.

And we give them a pass. Because it's their job, or because it's our job, or because our culture has created a dividing line between individuals who create negative impacts and organizations that do.

People who just might, in other circumstances, stand up and speak up, decide to quietly stand by, or worse, actively lie as they engage in PR campaigns aimed at belittling or undermining those that are brave enough to point out just how damaging the status quo is.

It took sixty years for leaded gas to be banned in my country, and worse, it's still used in many places that can ill afford to deal with its effects.

After leaded gasoline, Midgeley did it again, this time with CFCs, responsible for a gaping hole in the ozone layer. He probably didn't know the effects in advance this time, but yes, the industry fought hard to maintain the status quo for years once the damage was widely known. It's going to take at least a millenium to clean that up.

We might consider erecting a statue of him in every lobbyist's office, a reminder to all of us that we're ultimately responsible for what we make, that spinning to defend the status quo hurts all of us, and most of all, that we have to balance the undeniable benefits of progress, innovation and industry with the costs to all concerned. Scaling has impact, so let's scale the things that work. No, nothing is perfect, but yes, some things are better than others.

I can't imagine a better person as the symbol for a day that's not about honoring or celebrating, but could be about vigilance, candor and outspokenness instead.

Image Credit: wikipedia

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