CREDIT: RICHARD ARLESS JR. THE GAZETTE As Abraham Rupert, a Cree elder from the village Chisasibi, addresses the crowd, a clothesline of T-shirts bearing environmental slogans is strung outside Hydro-Québec headquarters ye

Hydro-Québec's $5-billion Eastmain project has already received provincial and federal environmental-impact approvals. Construction began in January. Completion is scheduled for 2012.

Separate actions will be taken - one under the federal Fisheries Act, the other under the federal Endangered Species Act - to try to kill the project through the Federal Court of Canada, said Daniel Green, scientific director of the Quebec section of the Sierra Club of Canada.

The Eastmain project will divert about 70 per cent of the annual water flow along 350 kilometres of the Rupert River in northern Quebec, the province's largest remaining unaltered river, to new reservoirs that are to flood 350 square kilometres.

Fisheries law prohibits acts that make fish unfit for human consumption - and that legal test will be met because the Eastmain project will severely raise mercury levels, Green predicted.

The basis for the second court action is that the project endangers the survival of the unique giant Rupert River brook trout, he explained.

On a website promoting Eastmain, Hydro calls the power it will yield - enough to supply 425,000 typical Quebec residential power customers - "clean and green."

"We are proceeding with the project and we are taking all environmental considerations into account," Hydro spokesperson Sylvain Théberge said yesterday after a lunch-hour anti-Eastmain rally that drew more than 150 people to the front steps of Hydro's headquarters on René Lévesque Blvd. W. downtown.

A clothesline temporarily strung along the front of the public utility's office tower, hung with slogan-emblazoned T-shirts, symbolized energy conservation and wind power.

A group of 18 international environmental groups - including the United States-based Natural Resources Defence Council, the Citizens Environmental Coalition, Project Laundry List and Friends of the Earth U.S. - has established a coalition to halt Eastmain, billing yesterday's protest as "the first of a series of international awareness activities."

On the Web: www.hydroquebec.com/rupert/en

The coalition's website is www.savetherupert.org

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