Photo retrieved from: www.thecoast.ca.com
“About 100 members of an aboriginal group rallied outside provincial government offices in Happy Valley — Goose Bay, Labrador today to protest against plans to build a hydro-electric dam on the Lower Churchill River. Some of the protesters, members of NunatuKavut, formerly known as the Labrador Métis Nation, drove several hundred kilometres to protest in temperatures that dipped to -18 C with the wind chill. They were expressing their opposition to a deal under which Labradorians would lose a large section of one of the world’s most beautiful, sacred and historic rivers while the power generated at the Muskrat Falls dam would be shipped to Newfoundland,Nova Scotia and possibly the US.
“We find it quite upsetting that everybody is celebrating green energy but in order to make green energy, they’re flooding Labrador,” Chris Montague, president of NunatuKavut told the Coast in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “It’s been the same story with the Upper Churchill,” he added. “They flooded an area nearly the size of the Avalon Peninsula to bring green energy down into North America, so nobody seems to care about Labrador. Nobody seems to care about us.”
Montague is especially angry that the $6.2 billion power deal was announced with no notice to the 4,000 members of NunatuKavut. “We only heard about this Muskrat Falls deal the day before on the news,” he says. “No one in government called us about it until after the news release.”
Read more: The Coast
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