Dam Deals

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/05/2012 (4873 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In September 1988, Winnipeg Free Press reporter Barbara Robson broke a national news story on the proposed Rafferty and Alameda mega dams in Saskatchewan, which would dam water on the Souris River that flows into North Dakota and Manitoba.

A relatively unknown employee in Environment Canada, who had quit her post three months earlier, told Robson she quit because the Brian Mulroney government had not performed a proper federal environmental review of the Rafferty-Alameda project. Rafferty-Alameda had been her file. She claimed Ottawa granted the project an environmental licence in exchange for some political goodies from Grant Devine’s government in Saskatchewan. The goodies included relinquishing provincial mineral and water rights on the site of the proposed Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan and the translation of Saskatchewan laws into French.

Government officials denied the claim and unloaded on the former Environment Canada employee like hunters in duck hunting season. They tried to destroy her credibility. The employee’s name is well-known today. It is Elizabeth May, current Green party leader.

What really happened? The following is an excerpt from Winnipeg Free Press reporter Bill Redekop’s new book, “Dams of Contention: The Rafferty-Alameda Story and the Birth of Canadian Environmental Law.”

The 1980s were still the Wild West in terms of environmental legislation. Governments paid little more than lip service to environmental concerns. The political and legal fight against the Rafferty-Alameda dams would create the first environmental law in Canada.

This version has been edited.

“Who is she?” Saskatchewan Premier Grant Devine said, responding to former Environment Canada employee Elizabeth May’s allegations. “I mean, who really is she? She drew a long bow and took a cheap shot while betraying the federal minister in an election year. What the heck would she know, or if she knew that, why didn’t she raise it earlier … Why?”

There wasn’t a shred of truth to May’s story, federal and provincial officials said. In Ottawa, Environment Minister Tom McMillan denied May ever told him or anyone else in his department that she was leaving over Rafferty-Alameda. McMillan virtually offered a bounty to any reporter who could find someone to back up May’s story. Saskatchewan deputy premier, Eric Berntson, denied knowing anything about a trade-off.

Critics picked apart her story and found discrepancies. There were demands she produce physical evidence. Conservative politicians were also upset May caused such trouble for McMillan, a genuinely nice guy, with an election coming soon.

McMillan’s people even went so far as to play the “hysterical female” card. Barbara Robson, the Winnipeg Free Press reporter who broke the story on May’s quitting, recalled a phone conversation with an official from the environment minister’s office. Elizabeth had become unglued, the official said, speaking off the record. More publicity might make her condition worse, the official continued. The official was only thinking about Elizabeth, of course. If Robson cared about Elizabeth, she would stop writing her story. Robson was not the only one approached that way.

“They were trying to say Elizabeth is having a tough time, don’t believe her,” Robson recalled in an interview for this book. “Basically, (they were) suggesting she was unbalanced. They were trying to destroy her credibility.”

It was Robson who approached May about the story in the first place, not the other way around. Robson had been assigned by the Free Press to write something about free trade and water,and a contact in the environmental movement recommended Elizabeth May. May was not just an expert but, as more than one official informed, she had quit as senior policy adviser to McMillan. She was free to speak her mind. The only problem was, Robson couldn’t find her.

May had disappeared. After leaving Environment Canada, she took off on an ecotourism cruise of the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia. She couldn’t really afford such a trip now that she was out of work but she’d prepaid for the ticket before the whole Rafferty-Alameda fight went down. So she went. She extended her stay by working as a cook on the boat.

Then she returned to her family’s home on the opposite coast at Margaree Harbour on Cape Breton Island and ended up working in the family restaurant there. She picked up work where she could. For example, Mira Spivak, Conservative senator for Manitoba, began paying May to write her speeches. Many years later, in 2006, Spivak supported May for the leadership of the Green Party of Canada.

Robson finally tracked May down in September 1988, but the former federal employee was reluctant to talk. Robson said May had some earlier talks with the Globe and Mail about doing a story but May didn’t want to speak on the record so the Globe backed off.

“I did talk to loads of people (after leaving) without talking to the media,” May said in an interview for this book. “I didn’t want this to be a media story about how some member of a minister’s office got disgruntled and quit. Because that wouldn’t work. That wouldn’t stop the dams.”

But Robson refused to let her talk off the record and finally put it to May point blank. And May, without planning to, started to talk. “I said, ‘I’ve been told that you resigned over this (Rafferty-Alameda),’ and she took a big gulp and said yes,” recalled Robson. “Elizabeth is always honest, even when it’s to her detriment.”

“After that, she introduced me as the woman who ruined her life, who turned her into a whistleblower. She knew at that point she couldn’t go back into government,” said Robson.

May was policy adviser in the minister’s office and therefore in charge of all the environmental files. “Always. There was nothing that happened that wasn’t part of the work I was doing. It didn’t happen that every decision the minister took was based on what I advised but there was never, in the two years I worked in the minister’s office, a file where things were done behind my back.” That was until Rafferty-Alameda.

The truth, say people in the department at the time, is that most people inside Environment Canada weren’t paying much attention to Rafferty-Alameda. It hadn’t blown up as a big political issue in Ottawa yet. It was also a complicated case and the more pressing issue in McMillan’s office was getting approval for construction of Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island. McMillan was the Progressive Conservative MP for Hillsborough, P.E.I.

“We’d had many conversations around the table about the Rafferty-Alameda dams and I had, with the minister’s permission, kept people like Lorne Scott (Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation) in touch and let him know we weren’t going to do anything until we saw a report from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That was the holding pattern we were in. In Canada, we had the Environmental Assessment Review Process Guidelines Order (EARPGO). There was a sense from our environment assessment people that if we looked at what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said about the environmental impact, that might be enough to take that on board and study that in terms of Canadian implications and that would be enough to satisfy the guidelines order.

“The first week of June 1988, it was Environment Week. It was on the day we had a water conference and McMillan was the speaker. It was very busy. He’d just been there to give a speech and while he was speaking one of the top water guys from the Inland Waters Directorate took me aside and said, ‘Did you know that they’re trying to get permits for Rafferty without waiting for the Army Corps of Engineers?’ I said I didn’t know that. How would they try to do that? And he said, ‘I thought you didn’t know and I thought you ought to know.’”

“So Tom, I remember, we were going down the escalator at Congress Centre, and I said, ‘Tom I just heard … did you know that …’ and he said, ‘That’s ridiculous. That’s crazy.’ I said they’re trying to get a permit for Rafferty, the (Environment Canada) deputy minister Genevieve St. Marie had sent a note down to Inland Waters Directorate to say can they get the permit for Rafferty ready. Tom said he hadn’t heard anything about it. He said, ‘That’s ridiculous. Leave it with me. Don’t worry about it.’ He said, ‘They can’t do that. And besides, we don’t even have Grasslands National Park yet. What are these people thinking?’”

McMillan’s response gave May her first hint that a political deal had been cooked up to give an environmental licence for Rafferty-Alameda, in exchange for Saskatchewan’s approval of the proposed Grasslands National Park.

» Edited excerpt from “Dams of Contention: The Rafferty-Alameda

Story and the Birth of Canadian Environmental Law” by Bill Redekop, published by Heartland Associates.