Kemano deal draws fire

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The Carrier Sekani Tribal Council is considering legal action that would seek to negate the recent out of court settlement reached between the province and Alcan Aluminium.

The government of British Columbia was facing a $500 million lawsuit after former Premier Mike Harcourt cancelled the Kemano Completion Project in 1995 saying the planned $1.4 billion project would hurt the fish stocks in the Nechako River. The Montreal-based aluminium giant claimed it had already spent close to $500 million when Harcourt killed the project and filed suit to recover its losses. When Premier Glen Clark and Alcan CEO Jacques Bougie signed the deal on Aug 5, the threat of the lawsuit disappeared.

But environmentalists, taxation watchdogs, some legal experts, former fisheries scientists and the First Nations located along the Nechako River say that the province gave Alcan too much and did nothing to protect the salmon stocks in the Nechako which is part of the Fraser River system.

The Carrier Sekani Tribal Council calls the deal a sell-out. They accuse the province of paying its debts with First Nations' money and resources and ignoring their legal obligation to conserve the fish stocks in the Nechako.

The B.C./Alcan Agreement 1997 expires on Dec. 31, 2023. During the life of that agreement Alcan will receive as much as $1.5 billion in subsidies from the province, according to the local chapter of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Robert Pauliszyn, the director of research for the federation wrote a scathing three-part analysis of exactly what Alcan was given by the province. He said that below market prices for electricity supplied to Alcan by B.C. Hydro and reduced tax rates for water rental add up to between $50 and $60 million in annual subsidies for each year of the agreement. He goes on to charge that the originally-planned project would have been cancelled by Alcan anyway, due to changes in the marketplace that made the project too expensive to make a profit.

Carrier Sekani tribal vice-chief Reg Mueller said the latest deal is just another in a long series of assaults against the Cheslatta people. The story began in 1950 when Cheslatta hunters returned home to discover that their villages had been burned. The province had given Alcan permission to flood their lands in the Upper Nechako watershed as the company diverted existing waterways to power turbines that would provide electricity for the company's smelter in Kitimat.

Since then the Cheslatta have been fighting for compensation, running a persistent public relations campaign aimed at forcing the government and the corporation to make good for the loss of their traditional homeland.

The tribal council has received legal advice that they stand a good chance of winning a challenge based on the claim that the province violated its trustee obligation by allowing Alcan to uproot the Cheslatta people in 1950 without their consent. A court, if it finds that the province was in breach of its fiduciary obligation, could set aside the transaction and award damages.