In 2011, I was determined to spend my holidays in Quebec, Canada. I had heard what was happening to the rivers and I wanted to be there and to see for myself. By March I had found people who were involved in saving the rivers of Quebec: the Alliance Romaine and the Fondation Rivières. After making contact, I was welcomed to Montreal in August and was invited by these organizations to go on a trip to visit the Romaine River, which I gladly did. It was a long trip, but so worth it. It was amazing to see this great province in all her beauty. Nature is wonderful here and still in so many ways pure.
The Romaine River is 500 kilometers long and still flows freely, whereas most of the rivers I passed on the way to the Romaine have already been dammed. Now Hydro Quebec is damming this great river, and is building roads along the St. Lawrence to get their equipment to the dams, with hundreds of trucks a day making deliveries. I made contact with many people along the way and all of them asked me to get the word out about the consequences of Hydro-Quebec’s activities. Native peoples there still depend on hunting and fishing for part of their subsistence and will lose their traplines when the land is flooded. Rare woodland caribou will be threatened by habitat fragmentation. The Atlantic salmon will no longer breed beneath the Grandes Chutes when these falls are destroyed by a dam. Brook trout will be completely eliminated along a 200-km stretch of the river. The Romaine carries oxygen and nutrients into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and this will be reduced by the dams, and the food chain in the Gulf will suffer.
And the question is why? Will the energy be used by the people in Quebec?? No, not from what I’ve learned. The energy produced on the Romaine will go to industrial projects, not to everyday consumers. Quebec’s aluminum sector plans to double its production by expanding smelters in Baie-Comeau and Sept-Îles as well as other places. This industry uses huge amounts of energy which it buys from Quebec at a subsidized price (4.2 cents a kilowatt-hour). Other mines are expanding and will require lots more energy, including an iron mine at Mont-Wright (near Fermont), and a diamond mine that will soon open in the Otish Mountains, north of Chibougamau. It is not the people who will benefit from the damming of the Romaine, but these industries.
The movie “Chercher le Courant,” which I saw in Montreal, shows how spectacular the Romaine River is and how cruel and unnecessary it is to destroy it. I very much hope the people of this province will unite against Hydro-Quebec to save this river and the nature it is home to. It could be the first step in a campaign to save the natural heritage of this province.
A concerned tourist
Etty Kloosterman
Alliance Romaine is a proud member of GRIP-UQÀM – the Public Interest Research Group, a university collective based at the University of Québec in Montreal.
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