Top-level scientists and academics from across Canada are calling on the federal government to put the brakes on construction of the Site C dam and, in an unusual move, the call is being supported by the Royal Society of Canada.

A stinging criticism of the assessment process, lack of consideration for First Nations concerns and the B.C. government’s decision to start construction despite ongoing court cases, was released at an Ottawa news conference Tuesday with a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a statement asking that the federal government not issue any more permits for the hydroelectric mega-project until there have been additional reviews and the courts have decided on First Nations court cases.

A “Statement of Concern” signed by 250 scientists and academics, amounting to a Who’s-Who of Canadian academia, asks that the B.C. government submit the project for review by the B.C. Utilities Commission, something suggested by Joint Review Panel, but rejected by the provincial government.

There should also be a review by the Department of Justice to analyze whether the project infringes on aboriginal and treaty rights, the statement says.

“Based on evidence raised across our many disciplines, the undersigned scholars have concluded that there were significant gaps and inadequacies in the regulatory review and environmental assessment process for the Site C Project,” says the statement.

Royal Society of Canada to @JustinTrudeau: #SiteC not subject to rigorous scrutiny & fails First Nations #cdnpoli https://t.co/ty9sZ0a1ZJ

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) May 25, 2016

“Our assessment is that this process did not accord with the commitments of both the federal and provincial government to reconciliation with, and legal obligations to First Nations, protection of the environment and evidence-based decision making with scientific integrity.”

Work — including clearing of old-growth forest in the surrounding area, construction of a work camp and letting of contracts, which the B.C. government says are worth billions of dollars — has already started on the dam that will flood the Peace River valley to create an 83-kilometre reservoir at a cost of almost $9-billion.

Karen Bakker, Canada research chair in water governance at the University of British Columbia, said Site C is a test of the federal government’s commitment to reconciliation with First Nations and science-based decision making.

“We truly believe this is a bellwether,” Bakker said.

“Will they actually live up to the commitments they have made to evidence-based decision-making with scientific integrity and also to reconciliation with First Nations?” she asked.

Gordon Christie, a UBC law professor specializing in indigenous legal studies, said at the news conference that the lawsuits might take months or years to wend their way through the courts and yet, in the meantime, the province is forging ahead with construction.

“Courts have asked the federal and provincial governments of Canada to act honourably and to demonstrate something known as the honour of the Crown and, no matter what your notion of honour might be, this is clearly dishonourable conduct,” he said

The decision to go ahead appears to be at odds with the federal government’s recent support of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People that requires informed consent from aboriginal people before projects on their land are approved, said the academics.

The significant environmental effects of the dam are unprecedented in the history of environmental assessment in Canada, Bakker said.

“Site C has 40 per cent of the total adverse environmental effects ever identified [in Canadian environmental assessments] since 1992, “ she said.

“We are calling on the government to explain why the unprecedented imposition of these very severe environmental effects would be justified by Site C — a project whose electricity output is currently unnecessary and for which less damaging alternatives exist.”

The Joint Review Panel concluded that the power will probably not be needed for decades and, with no demand within B.C. for the power, lately the province has been looking at selling Site C power to Alberta.

Federal fisheries and transportation permits have not yet been issued and Bakker said in an interview with DeSmog Canada that representatives of the group have approached ministries dealing with aboriginal affairs, fisheries, environment and justice and are hoping to meet with at least two ministers in the near future.

The group is also planning to release another paper, dealing with provincial Site C issues, she said.

It is rare for the Royal Society to speak out and it is the first time in several decades that the society has become involved in such a specific issue, Bakker said.

In a letter to Trudeau, Royal Society president Maryse Lassonde questioned why a project of such scope was not assessed by the B.C. Utilities Commission.

“That should have been a priority. Why did the B.C. legislature pass an act to prevent this essential review?” Lassonde asked.

“This failure to subject the project to rigorous scrutiny raises serious questions about whether the project should proceed until such time as a more thorough review is undertaken,” she wrote.

The academic and scientific support delighted Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs president and an outspoken critic of Site C.

“This is great news. It’s very encouraging,” he said in an interview.

Site C can still be stopped, despite the provincial rush to get the project underway, Phillip said.

“It can be stopped if enough people speak out against this ill-conceived, unwanted and absolutely unnecessary project,” he said.

In February Site C was condemned by a group of non-profit agencies including Amnesty International Canada, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Ecojustice and Greenpeace Canada.

The Union of B.C. Municipalities has also called for Site C to be reviewed by the B.C. Utilities Commission.

The provincial Ministry of Energy and Mines did not respond to questions in time for publication.

You can click here to read more about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and climate change.

Image: Construction for the Site C dam in the Peace River valley. Photo: Garth Lenz

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Marilyn Baptiste of the Xeni Gwet’in First Nation in British Columbia has won the prestigious $175,000 Goldman Prize  for her five-year effort to prevent construction of the Prosperity gold and copper mine 600 kilometres north of Vancouver.

“I hope the Goldman award will bring world recognition to help us protect our land,” Baptiste told DeSmog Canada.  “We’d like to improve our lives, but our land and water comes first."

That simple statement echoes the words of millions of indigenous peoples in Canada and around the world facing governments and industries intent on extracting minerals, oil, coal, gas and timber from their lands.

“It’s the same story everywhere,” she said.

However, the beginnings of a new story may be in the works in Canada. Baptiste is a member of the Tsilhqot’in people who won a landmark Supreme Court of Canada decision in 2014 that granted aboriginal title to more than a 1,750-square-kilometre area in the Cariboo-Chilcotin area.

For more than 20 years, the 3,000-member Tsilhqot’in opposed clear-cut logging on its unceded territory in and around the Nemaiah Valley. The Tsilhqot'in have no treaties with governments, but the B.C. government approved the logging regardless. The Supreme Court ruled that B.C. had infringed on the rights of the Tsilhqot’in.

Most of B.C. is unceded territory, so the implications of the Supreme Court decision are potentially far-reaching for the rest of the province.

“Our land, our water, our future generations are not for sale," Baptiste said.

Vancouver’s Taseko Mines Ltd, the proponent of the renamed “New” Prosperity Mine, says it will proceed with its project because it is outside of the 1,750 square kilometre Tsilhqot’in territory.

Taseko has spent 20 years trying to get the open pit mine built beside Teztan Biny (Fish Lake). Although the project was approved by B.C., a federal environmental review panel rejected the project in 2010 for its serious potential environmental and cultural impacts. In a rare statement, then minister of environment Jim Prentice said the project would destroy Fish Lake and surrounding streams and wetlands.

A Taseko animation of the New Prosperity Mine plans for Fish Lake via Youtube.

Taseko made some changes, called it "New" Prosperity and re-submitted it to the federal review panel soon after with the blessing of the B.C. government. Taseko started to work on the mine in 2011 without getting federal approval.

That’s when Baptiste stood up and started a one-woman blockade preventing construction crews from reaching the proposed mine site. Alone and in a very remote location, Baptiste drew her courage from the mountains around her.

Baptiste stands over a map of Tsilhqo'tin Territory. Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize

“We’re part of the mountains and lakes. They’re our source of health and sustenance….It is just my duty and responsibility to protect our lands, water, wildlife, wild plants for our future generations,” she said.

Baptiste was soon joined by members of her community and the Tsilhqot’in Nation in blocking the road.

The federal government rejected Taseko again in 2013, saying it would cause irreversible environmental damage. Taseko’s response was to sue the federal government. And then again when it lost.

In January 2015, the B.C. government granted Taseko a new extension to build the mine.

“It’s been five years but it feels like ten,” said Baptiste.

“We’re definitely going to continue to oppose the project.”

The open pit mine would be up to 1.6 kilometres wide and more than 500 metres deep. The contaminated tailings will be dumped into a tailings pond near the lake — the specifications of which are based on those of the Mount Polley tailings pond, Baptiste said.

The Mount Polley tailings pond, about four square kilometres in size, failed in August 2014, releasing millions of cubic metres of contaminated water. It was considered one of Canada’s biggest environmental disasters.

Indigenous peoples appreciate modern technology and want to enjoy the benefits, but not if that means the destruction of their land and waters, Baptiste repeated.

“We can’t continue the way we are going. Mother Earth is telling us we are going the wrong way.”

Laws and regulations for mining and the extractive industries need major reforms, something First Nations in the Mount Polley area are actively engaged in pursuing. Governments need to work with local people, not ignore or disrespect them as the B.C. government has, Baptiste said.

Image Credit: Goldman Environmental Prize

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In their recently published book Your Right to Know, journalists Jim Bronskill and David McKie have done yeomans' work explaining how Canadians can use freedom of information requests to get government secrets. But, at the federal level, it's work they shouldn't have needed to do – pointing to another problem with Canada's broken access to information laws.

Introduced in 1980 by Pierre Trudeau's Liberals, the Access to Information Act gave Canadians a limited right to request government records. The bureaucracy's filing cabinets could now metaphorically be opened by anyone – unless the records in them included 75 different kinds of information that would still be considered secret.

But, even with those limits, the Trudeau administration seemed to have little interest in telling voters about their newfound rights or how to exercise them.

Just before the act came into force, the Globe and Mail told readers the government would be "placing posters in post offices and public libraries" to advertise the new program. But "it plans nothing else in the way of public information," a deficiency noted by information commissioner Inger Hansen in her first annual report.

At a news conference announcing the fees for access to information requests, then-Liberal cabinet minister Herb Gray seemed unconcerned about that lack of advertising, smiling when he told reporters, "That's why we invited you here."

Nor did the government give the information commissioner the power to aid journalists in the job of educating the public about their information rights, with Hansen writing her office had no mandate or funding to do so.

As a result, Hansen stated "the public appears unaware of the meaning of the act and the role of the information commissioner to mediate complaints and take proceedings to the Federal Court. Indeed, many who have tried to use the act soon gave up because they found procedures too complicated or too slow."

More than 30 years later, Hansen's successors still don't have that mandate, despite repeatedly requesting it. A spokesperson for the Treasury Board Secretariat, which administers the Access to Information Act, didn't provide a direct answer when asked why those requests hadn't been acted on.

Little promotion of your rights

By comparison, our country's privacy commissioner can "foster public understanding" about the collection, use and disclosure of personal information by organizations outside government.

Spending on that mandate totalled more than $3 million in the past fiscal year, with past expenditures resulting in the publication of a graphic novel and cartoons about privacy issues, as well as presentation packages for teachers and a youth video contest.

The government doesn't currently publish anything comparable about Canadians' access rights.

The Treasury Board Secretariat spokesperson stated in an email that individual departments do have instructions on their websites about how to file an access request, as well as a legal requirement to assist applicants.

But the manual that bureaucrats use to interpret and often restrict Canadians' right to know dwarfs those brief instructions. The secretariat's access advice, for example, weighs in at just 389 words. But 57 of the manual's 133 pages are devoted to what kinds of information must or can be kept secret.

Moreover, the government currently doesn't spend any money advertising Canadians' information rights, instead relying on news releases, speeches and tweets to do that job.

Americans are beating us

As a result, responsibility for popularizing that right continues to be principally shouldered by journalists such as Bronskill and McKie, as well as the handful of non-governmental groups concerned with freedom of information issues.

So it's near miraculous that, according to government statistics, 59,947 access requests were filed in the past fiscal year. But that still means just 169 requests were filed per 100,000 persons in Canada.

By comparison, during 2012/13, 222 requests were filed per 100,000 persons in the United States. That means Americans, who have considerably greater access to government records without using freedom of information requests, are using their right to know law 31 per cent more than we are.

And that's probably just the way Canada's paternalistic public officials want it. After all, for them, the fewer Canadians who understand how to file freedom of information requests, the better.

At their best, the responses to those requests tell us what's really happening behind the closed doors and drawn curtains of government. And, at their worst, they remind us just how little the government cares about our right to know — a secret parties of all stripes have been trying and failing to cover up for years. 

This article originally appeared on The Tyee.

Image Credit: Leo Hidalgo via Flickr

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This is a guest post by David Suzuki.

As an elder, I’ve watched Canada and the world change in many ways, for better and worse. Thanks in part to cheap energy and technological growth, the human population has more than tripled, from 2.2 billion in 1936 when I was born to about seven billion today. As a boy, I could drink from streams and lakes without worrying about getting sick. My father took me fishing for halibut, sturgeon and salmon on the Vancouver waterfront. Pretty much all food was organic.

Although my parents were born and raised in Canada, our family was incarcerated in the B.C. Interior during the Second World War. Like other people of colour, my parents didn’t have the right to vote until 1948. First Nations people living on reserves didn’t have voting rights until 1960. And, until 1969, homosexuality was a criminal offence, often leading to prison (now same-sex couples in Canada can marry). Without a health-care system, my parents had to worry far more about illness than Canadians today.

Although we’ve degraded our natural environment since my childhood, we’ve made great strides in human rights and social programs. But those advances didn’t come without struggle. It’s important to protect and improve the hard-won rights and social safety net that make Canada one of the best countries for citizens and visitors alike — but it’s crucial to protect the natural systems that make it all possible.

We’re too often asked to choose between a healthy environment and a healthy economy, between health care and environmental protection. But these are false choices. Long-term prosperity and good health absolutely depend on conserving and using our resources wisely and on ensuring our air is pure enough to breathe, our water clean enough to drink and our food nutritious and plentiful enough to keep us healthy and alive. Protecting the environment is good for human and economic health!

Consider water. We can’t survive without it. Most Canadians take our abundant fresh water for granted. But according to the recent Ecojustice report Waterproof: Standards, “Canada’s drinking water standards continue to lag behind international benchmarks and are at risk of falling even farther behind.” At any time, more than 1,000 drinking water advisories are in effect across the country, many in First Nations communities. Canada doesn’t even have a national water policy. Nor do we have legally binding national air quality standards.

People died in Walkerton, Ontario, because of E. coli in the water. Grassy Narrows residents are being poisoned by waterborne mercury. Toxins in the air and water are affecting people’s health in Sarnia’s Chemical Valley, as are a deadly mix of oilsands chemicals in Fort Chipewyan, Alberta.

This is clearly unacceptable in prosperous, resource-rich Canada. So how do we ensure that all Canadians have the right to enjoy clean air and water and healthy food? We could follow the lead of more than half the world’s nations and enshrine the right to a healthy environment in our Constitution’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

That’s one of the goals of the Blue Dot Tour I’ve embarked on with the David Suzuki Foundation and friends, supporters and, I hope, you. It’s a testament to the importance of this tour and the movement it intends to spark that so many musicians, artists and thinkers have volunteered their time to get the word out, including Shane Koyczan, Neil Young, Tanya Tagaq, Feist, Blue Rodeo members, Margaret Atwood, Hey Ocean, Bruce Cockburn, Joel Plaskett, Roy Henry Vickers, Whitehorse, Barenaked Ladies, Danny Michel, Kinnie Starr, Stephen Lewis, Ovide Mercredi and many more.

The events in 20 cities across Canada promise to be fun and entertaining, but there’s a serious purpose: To start a national conversation and movement to make sure we all look after this land that gives us so much.

History shows that informed individuals who come together to build a groundswell of opinion and pressure are a powerful force for positive change. We hope this tour will inspire Canadians to take action in their communities, that those communities will in turn inspire provinces to get on board and that ultimately, our right to a healthy environment will be recognized at the national level.

It’s a long road, but together, we can get there. Are you in?

Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.

Learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org

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