Power Grab: Quebec vs. the Innu Nation
Power Grab: Quebec vs. the Innu Nation
Behind the scenes, Quebec has fought for years to weaken Indigenous authority over their own land. Now that battle is spilling out into the public.
It’s not every day that Quebec’s most powerful cabinet minister comes to town.
And it’s an even rarer occurrence for someone of Pierre Fitzgibbon’s stature to visit a tiny reserve like Unamen Shipu. The Innu community is so far east along the Gulf of St-Lawrence that you can only access it by boat, airplane or a snowmobile ride through the bush.
So when Fitzgibbon set foot in Unamen Shipu this week, it begged the question: what is Quebec’s Minister of the Economy, Innovation and Energy doing in a fishing village at the edge of the province?
“It’s pretty clear he’s setting the table for development on our lands and rivers,” said Ghislain Picard, Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations — Quebec and Labrador (AFNQL). “To me, this is the beginning of a PR exercise to offer these communities jobs and economic development in exchange for rights to dam their rivers for electricity and clear their lands for resource extraction.”
A representative from the minister’s office would not elaborate on the nature of Fitzgibbon’s visit except to say “he wasn’t (there) to discuss dams.” Unamen Shipu chief Bryan Mark described the visit as “a dinner meeting (with) limited discussion about major development on our territory.
“I was insistent on the question of social acceptability in my community since we’ve never faced the kind of development that directly impacts us,” Mark wrote, in a message to The Rover.
Officially, Fitzgibbon joined Quebec Minister of Indigenous Affairs Ian Lafrenière to attend a hockey tournament that brought together players from across the Innu territory. Unofficially, sources in the government and the Innu nation tell The Rover the visit was part of a larger campaign to develop Quebec’s northern frontier.
The Innu territory is a sprawling landmass home to a rapidly declining herd of caribou, some of the best salmon fishing in North America and a people who’ve thrived there since time immemorial. It also happens to have vast deposits or rare metals and rivers wide enough to power our cities for generations.
Like the Liberals before them, the Coalition Avenir Québec government sees the future of Quebec’s economy when they look north.
But unlike the Liberals, critics say the CAQ is circumventing larger, more powerful political bodies like the AFNQL and the confederation of Innu Nation chiefs — which represent the 18,000 Innu living in Quebec and Labrador. Instead, they’re building relationships with individual communities plagued by underfunded schools, limited access to healthcare and local economies badly in need of capital investment.
“These communities have needs, people want to work, they want an economy, it’s logical. But at what cost?” said Picard, who hails from the Innu community of Pessamit. “Do we have to betray our fundamental principles to participate in the economy? Do we have to sacrifice our stewardship of the land and water? Do we turn our back on generations of knowledge?
“These chiefs are capable, they’re smart and they have a better understanding of their territory than any outsider. But they’re vulnerable and Quebec knows that. When the Quebec government shows up at your door, you’re not dealing with them as equals. Even if they say ‘nation to nation’ they don’t accept the argument that we should have a final say over our own land. It’s theirs, in their mind, it’s theirs.”
Picard says it’s an open secret that the CAQ is looking to build a series of dams along the Magpie River, or, much closer to Unamen Shipu, in Petit Mécantina, with or without the approval of First Nations.
If that sounds alarmist, consider the CAQ’s track record.
For years, the CAQ government has worked behind the scenes to undermine the authority of Indigenous peoples over their own territory. In at least two separate court cases, government lawyers have argued that Quebec isn’t bound to respect the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). This is despite the federal government signing UNDRIP into law two years ago.
The Quebec government is the only jurisdiction in Canada fighting to block the transfer of youth protection services from the provinces to First Nations themselves, arguing that Indigenous communities don’t have the competence or authority to care for their own children. Quebec is also in a court battle to limit Indigenous communities’ control of their own police forces.
Neither case is directly related to development but Picard sees Quebec’s legal arguments against Indigenous self-government as its way of bulldozing local resistance to its authority. Because among all its clauses, the biggest obstacle UNDRIP poses for Quebec is the requirement that it obtains “free, prior and informed consent” of Indigenous communities before developing their land.
“The difference between what they’re telling the chiefs and what their lawyers are arguing in court is night and day,” Picard said. “We can read the courtroom transcripts and summary judgements, we’re not that easily fooled. They don’t truly see us as having the right to say no on our own territory.”
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It was clear long before Fitzgibbon’s northern tour that the CAQ had designs on Innu territory.
Though they’d limited their campaign to court battles and backroom politics for years, things spilled out into public two months ago when Hydro-Québec CEO Sophie Brochu announced she’d be leaving the job midway through her five-year mandate.
Sources in the CAQ and Hydro-Québec said Brochu’s plan of creating efficiencies and better partnerships with First Nations was at odds with the government’s mission to ramp up production and exports of electricity.
Two sources inside the crown corporation say there had been pressure on Brochu to resign for months. A government source said Brochu began butting heads with the CAQ almost immediately after her appointment in 2020. Inside Hydro-Québec, rumours of Brochu’s departure got so intense that, late last year, she wrote an internal memo insisting she would stay on until 2025.
She announced her resignation the following month.
“Brochu was an ally to Indigenous people,” Picard said. “She was the first head of a major corporation who said, ‘I don’t know enough about Indigenous peoples, I need to learn more, to listen more and to make sure we’re partners moving forward.’ We had never heard that from a Hydro-Québec CEO. So naturally, when you hear that she may have been pressured into leaving, you worry about what comes next.”
Even though the CEO of Hydro-Québec is appointed by the provincial government, the degree of alleged political interference is way outside of how the corporation is meant to be run.
Brochu’s departure was also decried by the Mohawk community of Kahnawake, which signed a memorandum of understanding with Hydro-Québec in 2021 to use Mohawk land for a transmission line linking Quebec to New York State.
“Sophie Brochu showed a real interest in our community and our concerns and she was a huge reason behind our decision to sign that deal,” said Joe Delaronde, a spokesperson for the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake. “It wasn't just about money, she took a great interest in sponsoring our theatre program and making sure we had a real seat at the table. We had a relationship based on respect and a willingness on her part to listen and learn. We’re worried about her departure and what it means for the future of that partnership.”
Brochu’s successor won’t be chosen based on recommendations from Hydro-Québec’s board of directors, as is usually the case. The new CEO will be handpicked by Fitzgibbon and Premier François Legault — two men whose vision of Quebec is to make it richer and more attractive to foreign investment.
It may seem like Fitzgibbon has the upper hand in negotiations with the Innu. After all, the minister is behind the wheel of a $380 billion economy that produces roughly a third of Canada’s electricity. Last year alone, Hydro-Québec generated $4.5 billion in profit. But successive provincial governments have painted Quebec’s cash cow into a corner.
Quebec’s abundance of cheap electricity has long made it a destination for power-intensive industries like aluminum production. That’s why heavy industry consumes a whopping 40 per cent of Quebec’s installed capacity. But a “climate of uncertainty” in the availability and price of power is causing some of the industry’s biggest players to reconsider doing business in the province, according to investigative reporting by Les Affaires magazine.
Adding more stress to the equation, Hydro-Québec predicts that by 2026, it will no longer have electricity surpluses. And while the province could invest in wind and solar to beef up the grid, hydro is the only power source that gives Quebec competitive advantage over its neighbours in Ontario and the U.S.
Simply put, there’s no financial incentive for Hydro-Québec to invest in green energy.
The province has also committed its hydro power in the fight to decarbonize Canada’s economy. With so many industries shifting away from fossil fuels, the demand for “clean” low-emission energy like dams will ramp up dramatically as Canada tries to meet its goal of producing “net zero” greenhouse gasses by 2050.
There’s also the matter of the lopsided Churchill Falls contract set to expire by 2041. The contract allows Quebec to buy power off Newfoundland and Labrador for 0.2 cents per kilowatt hour, transmit the electricity south to American markets, and resell it at a huge markup.
“Churchill Falls is essentially what makes Hydro-Québec such a profitable utility,” said Moshe Lander, an economics professor at Concordia University. “They buy power off Newfoundland for fractions of a penny, control the transmission lines across its territory and resell it to New England at a massive profit. I don’t see that deal fundamentally changing when it expires because Newfoundland can’t exactly circumvent Quebec’s transmission lines. But if negotiations fall apart, Quebec can just dam up more rivers.”
All of this is taking place on Innu territory, without input from the communities whose rivers are making Quebec rich. When Legault met with Newfoundland-Labrador Premier Andrew Furey last month to begin discussing a new Churchill Falls contract, the absence of any Innu leaders at the meeting did not go unnoticed.
“(These governments) never obtained the consent of the Innu communities to exploit our land and cause irreparable damage to our ancestral territory, our way of life and our cultural identity,” wrote Mike Mckenzie, in an open letter co-signed by eight fellow Innu chiefs. “It is inconceivable that these two provinces would continue such a project without so much as speaking to the Innu communities.”
Even so, the CAQ has committed to increasing the province’s electrical output by 50 per cent over the next 27 years. In other words, Quebec would need to build the equivalent of four LG-2 dams — by far the largest power station in North America — to meet its goal of producing 300 terawatt hours every year by 2050.
Even the most optimistic scenario would require a marathon of consultations, negotiations and court battles that could go on for a decade before a single bulldozer enters Innu territory.
And while the Premier Legault announced his intention to dam more rivers during last year’s election, he made that promise without so much as a courtesy call to the Innu, Cree and other nations that will be affected by such massive development.
“There’s no great way of saying this in English but if Legault insists on trying to force his way through this process, il va se casser la gueule,” said Romeo Saganash, a Cree constitutional lawyer who negotiated La Paix des Braves with the Parti Québécois government in 2002. Saganash went toe-to-toe with the PQ over the damming of rivers in Cree territory and he said the CAQ would do well to consider its approach.
“Over the last 20 years, case law has accumulated and Indigenous rights have been enshrined in decision after decision. You can’t turn the clock back on that because you don’t agree with the Constitution,” he said. “The Quebec government has always used the most extravagant arguments before the Quebec Superior Court, the Quebec Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court. They’ve argued that the constitution doesn’t apply to them but the Supreme Court had to reaffirm that yes, it does.
“It’ll be the same thing with the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People. It applies. There’s no getting around that.”
Of course, it would be wrong to assume the Innu are against all development on their land. The province and communities have worked together in the past and, shortly after the CAQ first assumed power in 2018, Chief Picard and his colleagues presented the National Assembly with a motion to collaborate on a project that would implement the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous people in Quebec.
“That was years ago and the file hasn’t advanced at all,” Picard said. “We are an afterthought to this government.”
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The Innu have long carried the burden of economic development in Quebec and Canada.
During the World War II construction boom of the 1940s, the discovery of iron deposits in the Côte-Nord effectively ended thousands of years of independent nomadic life. To make way for mine shafts and railroads, the federal government enlisted the church in a plot to kick the Innu off their land and into 14 reserves across Quebec and Labrador.
Elders in Sept-Îles often speak about how the priests told Innu parishioners they wouldn’t baptise their children or bury their dead until they cleared out of the port city and settled into the newly created reserve of Mani Utanem. After the initial development began, children were taken from their parents and sent to residential school where they had their native language beaten out of them.
“I am a man without a country,” one residential school survivor told The Rover. “My home is hundreds of kilometres away because they forced us onto these reserves. I never knew a home life, I only knew residential school. I was a kid, barely older than a baby, and they abused me. When I came home I became an abuser. It’s a hell of a thing to know the inside of a prison cell more than you know your own land.
“To me, that is the legacy of development on Innu territory.”
None of this changes the fact that Quebec is locked into a series of agreements to produce more electricity for national and international markets. And there would be financial incentives for Innu to sign damming agreements for the rivers on their traditional territory.
But damming rivers will also flood thousands of square kilometres of land used for traplines, hunting and fishing — which still form the basis of the economy in Innu territory. And the access roads, transmission lines and massive construction sites that come with damming will only worsen the “catastrophic” decline of caribou populations in the region.
“I spoke recently spoke to Chief Daisy House of the Cree nation and she told me it was my duty to resist,” Picard said. “She said, ‘Even 50 years after they put up dams on our territory, we’re still feeling the environmental impact.’ When you talk about dams, you’re also talking about high levels of mercury in our water, countless animals wiped out and an ecosystem thrown into disarray.”
Of course, Pierre Fitzgibbon’s trip north wasn’t just for show. The minister listened to chiefs, elders and community members who are all more or less opposed to any form of damming on the Magpie or other major waterways. And Indigenous Affairs Minister Ian Lafrenière’s reputation among the Innu is far better than that of his predecessor Sylvie d’Amours — who was forced to resign in disgrace before finishing her first mandate.
Fitzgibbon undoubtably sees a scenario where Quebec and the Innu communities can benefit from more development on their land. He’s also conceded that Quebecers consume far too much electricity and that any plan for the future of Hydro-Québec will have to include significant energy conservation efforts.
But until the Innu have a seat at the table, any consultations or visits from the minister feel ceremonial. Even the Hydro-Québec consultant who resigned after criticizing the CAQ’s political interference admits the province will need to build more dams on Indigenous territory. He told The Rover that cannot happen if nations like the Innu aren’t treated like partners.
“You will always have people who fight to stop development, saying we cannot build as we did in the past,” the consultant wrote, in his resignation letter. “And that’s absolutely true. Every project has an impact. But let us be innovative and show some leadership. Let us show the world how a real, winning partnership (with First Nations) looks like. And let us develop new technologies of producing hydro electricity that can address the social and environmental concerns of our era.
“I believe in that. Or at least, I used to. This crown corporation has everything it needs to be an example for the world, an agent of change and create an image of Quebec that illustrates our past knowledge and integrates it with new values (of environmental stewardship). Instead we prefer to act in isolation of our future generations. I will no longer be complicit.”
This reporting is tremendously informative, important and, at least to this reader, comes as something of a revelation. Mr Curtis appears to have important sources other can't or can't be bothered to tap. More than justifies the subscription. Keep up the good work!
Great article !