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Thursday, 20 September 2007 |
Protesting Hydro's latest dam project - Amy German - hour.ca
Though Hydro-Québec may have already begun work on diverting the Rupert River for its latest multibillion-dollar hydro project in Northern Quebec, geared at creating energy to sell to the United States, many still oppose the project and they made their voices heard last Friday.
 Setting up several tepee-like structures in front of Hydro's headquarters on René-Lévesque, various activists from both the U.S. and Canada hung up garments with messages painted across them to "save the Rupert River," symbolically hanging Hydro's dirty laundry out to dry.
Says event organizer Nicolas Boisclair, spokesman for Rupert Reverence, a local environmental group trying to stop the project, "I don't think it's going to be easy to stop, but we have to continue to denounce the lies Hydro-Québec has made. They said that there was no other alternatives and now we know that they hid a 4.5-billion-dollar wind energy project that would have resulted in less expensive kilowatt hours than the project to divert the Rupert River."
Some of the protest participants who were up from the States were those who had lobbied against the Great Whale Project of the early '90s, which was effectively stopped when they managed to persuade then-governor Cuomo to pull out of the energy purchasing project. Quoting Yogi Berra, American activist Doris Delaney of the group Protect said, "It's like déjà vu all over
again," as she looked back on how she was in the same spot she was 17 years ago fighting Great Whale.
According to the Sierra Club's Daniel Green, the U.S. has been getting the wrong information with respect to hydro - that it is less polluting than the proposed coal-burning plants. Says Green, "Hydro-Québec has been going around the New York and Northern U.S. market saying, 'Buy our hydro, it's clean,' but that is not true. Large hydro is dirty, large hydro is polluting, large hydro destroys fish habitats.
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